The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  “YOU CAN TAKE off the scarf now,” she said.

  He sat up, tried to answer, and realized he’d missed what she’d said.

  “Sorry?”

  “The blindfold. You can take it off.”

  He let go of her hand and reached behind his head to loosen the knot. The scarf fell around his neck. It was still dark. The headlights lit an empty section of Judah Street as they moved east, up the hill toward the hospital. He folded the scarf and handed it to her.

  She took it and put it on her lap, then caught his hand and kissed it.

  “Almost there,” she said.

  “When will I see you again?” he asked.

  “Soon.”

  They crested the hill, and now the medical center was on both sides of the street. She turned to the sidewalk alongside a fire hydrant, put the car in neutral, and pulled the parking brake.

  “Come here, Caleb.”

  They came together in the middle of the car, his hand moving inside her coat to hold her naked hip as they kissed.

  “Sooner than you think,” she said. She kissed the corner of his mouth as she pulled away from him, then smoothed her coat back into place after he’d withdrawn his hand.

  Caleb took his coat and his briefcase, opened the door, and stepped out. When he closed the door, she leaned across the seat and put her palm on the inside of the window glass. He’d seen this image before, with his mind if not with his eyes. But this wasn’t a child’s hand, and he saw as much desire as desperation in the way her palm pressed against the pane. He leaned down and met her eyes. She took her hand from the window glass, touched her fingers to her lips, and then put the car in gear. He stood next to the hydrant with his coat over his arm and watched as she steered back into the lane. He watched until the taillights were just a red stab in the darkness, and then he put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, and walked the rest of the way to his lab.

  There was a locker room in the back of the facility, and he went to it while the coffee was brewing. The shower didn’t get used very often, but it was good to have on the premises. Necessary, even, considering the sort of things that came and went from his lab. Poisons and nerve agents, slices from cadavers. Three and a half vials of batrachotoxin in the refrigerated safe.

  He went to his locker and opened it. He always kept a change of clean clothes in here, just in case he spilled something that could absorb through skin. He stripped, then took his towel from its hook at the back of the locker and went into the shower.

  After that, it didn’t take long.

  As the mass spectrometer powered up, he cleared a workbench and took out his wallet. Inside it, tucked between the bills, there was an old ATM receipt, wound up tightly and twisted at its ends like a hand-rolled cigarette. He unrolled it and used a pair of tweezers to remove a pea-size wad of tissue paper. It was stained golden-amber, because he’d dipped it into the vial in Emmeline’s bathroom.

  Holding it with the tweezers, he smelled it again. It was aromatic and volatile, like a bitter mint. Like a blend of menthol and sagebrush. He prepared the sample chamber and loaded it, then sat at the workbench and programmed the cycle so it would run on all three Cray clusters. When it was finished, the results would just go to the printer and nowhere else. Paper could be shredded or incinerated. Electronic files were harder to find, impossible to kill. He went into the break room and poured a cup of coffee into someone else’s mug, touched it up with Andrea’s half-and-half from the refrigerator, then leaned against the drab gray wall and drank it with his eyes closed.

  He’d meant everything he’d said to Emmeline. And then he’d found the vial.

  He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the break room floor. From this angle, he could see an old bottle cap and a dead cockroach under the refrigerator. From one of the air vents, he caught a few seconds of music, something that had drifted across from one of the clinics in another part of the building. Probably a church group, singing Christmas carols.

  If he found something, it didn’t have to change anything. He could just ignore it. And maybe there’d be nothing. Or he could go out into the lab now, while there was still time, and pull the plug on the spectrometer. Take the sample and throw all of it into the incinerator, so he’d never know.

  He sat on the floor and went through the options until he heard the printer whine into action, the pages spitting out like dealt cards, upside down. If he turned them over, he’d know. He could drop them in the shredder. Instead, he took them off the tray and carried them to the nearest workstation. There was a halogen reading lamp here on a swiveling arm. He flicked it on, then turned the pages over. It wasn’t necessary to sort one line out of many, to follow it with his fingertip and read its percentage value off the y-axis.

  There was only one line.

  However Emmeline had done it, whether with her glass retort or some other equipment, she had made pure thujone.

  And she had at least ten vials of it on the shelf behind her sink. Enough for thirty more—

  “Caleb?”

  He jumped back, slamming the lamp’s jointed arm with his elbow. When it hit the desktop, its bulb shattered with a sharp pop, the shards of hot glass fanning across his printouts.

  “Jesus Christ, Joanne.”

  When their eyes met, Joanne Tremont took a step back.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “I thought I was alone.”

  “This early on Christmas morning?” she said. “I thought I was alone.”

  “You should go home.”

  “There’s too much to do,” she said. She was shifting her weight from foot to foot and talking fast, as if she’d been up all night with nothing but coffee and worry to keep her going. “And I get stuff done when it’s quiet. Usually. You working on the data sets?”

  “I’ll have them.”

  “Okay. I’ll be here. You saw there’s a new one?”

  “No.”

  “Another box from the VA hospital. Must have come yesterday. I don’t know how they keep showing up in the fridge, but it’s good, right?”

  She passed through the back end of the lab on her way to the break room. When she was gone, he used the side of his hand to sweep the broken glass into a trash can. Then he grabbed the papers off the desktop and went to his office. On the way, he stopped and opened the sample refrigerator. The box was on the middle shelf, sealed with orange tape. The patient charts were in a plastic bag, taped to the front. He picked up the box and looked at the chart, reading through the plastic about the injuries this anonymous thirty-seven-year-old woman had suffered, the pain she’d endured.

  He slid the box to the back of the refrigerator and shut the door.

  It was three o’clock when he stepped out of the lab and checked to be sure the doors had properly locked behind him. He looked across Parnassus at the hospital’s main entrance. There was an ambulance parked in the turnout where Emmeline had waited the night before. He felt sick, as if the coffee he’d drunk had been laced with something. And his mind was a flood. He’d woken from a dream to find that he was making love to Emmeline a second time, the backwards-running clock marking the moments over her left shoulder. It had been like slipping from one dream to another. He remembered the shape of her nipple in his mouth, the way she paused and waited for him, so that they would stay together.

  There had been so many vials.

  “Caleb!”

  He looked up. There was no one on the sidewalk, but there was a car parked at the curb in front of him, its passenger window rolled down. Behind the wet windshield, he saw a hand waving him on. He walked up and leaned to look through the open window.

  “Get in,” Henry said. “And do it quick.”

  “Whose car is this?”

  “Vicki’s. You’ve been in it about eight times.”

  “Shouldn’t you be with her?”

  “Stop fucking around and just get in.”

  “Fine.”r />
  Caleb opened the door. When he was in, Henry hit a button on his armrest and raised Caleb’s window.

  “What’s this about?” Caleb asked. “And why does everybody always know where I am?”

  “Who’s everybody?”

  “You. Kennon.”

  “Unless you’re on a bar crawl, you only go two places. Your house, and your lab. I came here first.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “You don’t know?” Henry asked. “It’s been in the papers since yesterday. TV, radio, everything.”

  “I haven’t been paying attention to anything.”

  Henry took his foot off the brake and pulled onto Parnassus.

  “There’s been another one,” Henry said.

  “Same as the others?”

  “Not entirely. This one never went in the water. But there are cutaneous current marks—”

  “Stun gun marks.”

  “That’s right. And needle marks in the neck. Other signs of torture.”

  They were going down the hill, into the Inner Sunset. Parnassus turned on to Judah Street, and at Ninth Avenue they fell in beside a Muni tram on the midstreet tracks.

  “If the body didn’t come out of the bay, what was the cause of death?”

  “I’m working on it. But right now, if I had to guess, I’d say cardiac arrest.”

  “From shock, or from drugs?” Caleb asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hasn’t Marcie done the toxicology?”

  “That’s the thing,” Henry said. “She can’t.”

  He stopped at the intersection of Judah and Tenth, and the Muni tram rattled to a stop beside them. Henry took a manila envelope from his lap and put it on Caleb’s.

  “What’s this?”

  “The autopsy report I did this morning. Marcie’s autopsy report.”

  “Oh shit, Henry—Marcie? It was Marcie?”

  Henry nodded, and Caleb closed his eyes, squeezing the handgrip on the door’s armrest. The autopsy report on his lap was thick and heavy, and that was no surprise. Henry was thorough, even when he was cutting apart his friends and colleagues. He felt himself opening the envelope, pulling out the stack of paper. The first page detailed Henry’s external surface examination.

  The body is that of an unembalmed Caucasian female adult who appears to have the stated age of thirty-seven years. Identification was made by this Medical Examiner, who knew the decedent personally. Captain Gladstone of the Oakland Coroner’s Bureau assisted in the examination to ensure this Medical Examiner remains objective . . . Fresh blood is present in the external auditory canals and oronasal passages, consistent with repeated nonlethal electrocution. Needle marks on the neck and face appear unrelated to therapeutic procedures. Significant welting is present at the injection sites. Livor mortis is discernible and well developed, distributed dorsally and not blanching with firm pressure. Cutaneous current burn marks are distributed heavily on the face and chest . . .

  The rest of it would only be worse. Coldly worded, rankly physical descriptions of wounds and their locations. He thought of the things she would have suffered before she died, the hours of it, with drugs in her blood to spike the agony.

  “Time of death was sometime between eleven and three,” Henry said. “So it was either late on the night of the twenty-third, or early morning on Christmas Eve.”

  “Where was she?” Caleb asked. “Where’d they find her?”

  His fingers were shaking as he slid the photographs from the envelope into his right hand.

  “Some old house up in Pacific Heights. Not her house. I didn’t go to the scene, so I don’t know the address.”

  “Who found her?”

  “A caretaker.”

  Caleb turned the stack over and saw the first black-and-white photograph. It was taken by the overhead camera in Henry’s autopsy room, and showed Marcie on the cadaver table. Henry had already made the Y-incision, had cracked her breastbone with the hedge trimmers, so that the sides of her rib cage and her organs were exposed. Her face was sliced up and badly bruised, and her dead eyes stared up into the camera. Henry had a name for this shot, for morgue photographs taken from this particular angle. The Give-Me-Justice pose.

  Caleb looked at it, this corpse of a woman he’d known since Stanford. He thought about the scent of bitter mint. About the smell of nightshade. Deadly blossoms collecting dew in the shadows at dusk. Somehow he kept the coffee down, but his stomach was riding an ocean storm and his inner ears were telling him that he was falling.

  “Why?” he asked Henry. “Why are you telling me? You wanted me to stay out of your way. Because of Kennon.”

  “I wanted to see you before Kennon did.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Yesterday morning, after I left your place, I got around to checking my voicemail. I had two messages. One of them was Kennon, telling me to come down to Bryant Street because they’d found another body. That one was only five minutes old.”

  “So?”

  “So, the other was from earlier. Evening of the twenty-third. And it was from Marcie.”

  Caleb held on to the autopsy report with both hands. The Muni tram beside them picked up speed through the intersection, and as it pulled ahead, its pantograph arm bounced against the overhead contact wire, lighting the graying afternoon with electric-blue flashes. He’d been standing across the street from the Haas-Lilienthal House, leaning against a lamppost, when the same electric-blue flash lit all the second-floor windows. He’d seen a high-voltage discharge.

  Caleb closed his eyes and put his head down.

  “She must’ve left the message an hour, maybe two hours before it started,” Henry said. “The killing, I mean.”

  “What’d she say?” Caleb asked, though he was sure he didn’t want to know.

  “She was pissed off—about the virus. And she wanted to talk to the one person she trusted when it came to spectrometer software. So she called asking me for your phone number, because she was going to come see you. She wanted to call you before she showed up.”

  “Pull over a second.”

  “What?”

  “Just pull the fuck over.”

  Henry veered to the curb and came to a stop. He checked his rearview mirror and then looked at Caleb, waiting. Caleb put his hand over his mouth and scrabbled at the door handle. He got out of the car and fell to his knees on the sidewalk in front of St. Anne’s Catholic Church. He retched coffee and half-and-half in a muddy arc, splashing the concrete in front of the church steps. He pitched forward and skinned his palms as he caught himself on the pavement. For half a minute, he stayed that way, on his hands and knees. Panting for breath, his vision blurred from the tears of vomiting. Finally he stood, wiping his mouth on his forearm. When he looked up, there was a woman leading a small child down the sidewalk toward him. She changed her mind and went back the way she’d come, her hand tight on the child’s wrist.

  Caleb got in the car again, and shut the door.

  “She didn’t call me,” he said. He could hardly recognize the sound of his own whisper. “Never came to see me—I haven’t seen her since last July.”

  “Where were you that night?”

  “I had a late brunch at Park Chow. Spent some time in the lab, working. I talked to Kennon. Drove around, talking to you. Then I went to the grocery store on Stanyan, came back to the house, and cooked dinner.”

  Henry checked his mirror again, then pulled into the lane and started rolling west. The street ahead of them was empty except for the tram, two blocks ahead now.

  “When I came over the next morning,” Henry said, “you told me you’d been working on something. But it wasn’t anything to do with the lab. So what the hell was it?”

  “What, are you Kennon now?”

  “Goddammit, Caleb! If you can’t tell me, what’re you gonna tell him? You think he won’t ask?”

  “I was drinking absinthe and drawing pictures.”

  “Drawing pictur
es?”

  “Yeah. I draw.”

  “You learn that from your father?”

  “Jesus, Henry. When does it end with you?” Caleb said. “I taught myself. And I learned more from Bridget.”

  “You go anywhere else that night?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Caleb said. His throat was too raw to shout, but he was shouting anyway. “I’m sure I didn’t go anywhere. I’m sure I didn’t talk to Marcie. And I’m fucking positive I didn’t kill her. Okay?”

  “How drunk were you?”

  “Fuck you, Henry.”

  Caleb shoved the autopsy report back into the envelope and put it on Henry’s lap. If he’d felt bad for lying to Henry, it didn’t matter now.

  “Did you give Kennon that voicemail?”

  “Not yet, but I’m going to.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What do you expect? That he won’t check her phone records, find out who she called that night? That he’s not going to know she called me and left a message? You think he couldn’t get it with a subpoena to Verizon if I didn’t just hand it over? You think I’m stupid enough to believe you can ever really delete anything?”

  Caleb shrugged.

  “That safe you’ve got,” Henry said. “Why don’t you give me the combo? I’ll clean it out for you.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That maybe you shouldn’t be holding on to that stuff right now. Maybe I should hold it for you.”

  “Kennon put you up to this, didn’t he?” Caleb said. “Because he knows he can’t just walk in and take things from me, but he can look at whatever I give you.”

  “It’s not—”

  “And you were going along with that? Even after what you said?” Caleb asked. “He doesn’t care what’s true or not—it’s just what he can make stick.”

  “Caleb, you don’t—”

  “Is he listening in on this?” Caleb asked. “He is, isn’t he?”

  Henry looked in his rearview mirror again, then signaled a right turn. As they made the turn onto Sixteenth, Caleb looked in the side mirror and saw a black Suburban trailing a block behind them. He looked away.