San Francisco Night

by Stephen Leather

  A seventeen year old boy from Santa Clara hadn’t been seen for five days. Morton Steele, a straight-A student, though something of a loner, hadn’t come home from school that day. He was a regular church-goer, and an altar server at St Anthony’s. The photo showed a pale, chubby face, ginger hair and round metal-framed glasses with thick lenses.

  A church organist had gone missing in Oakland, Caroline Shaw, described as a “devout Christian” had failed to show up to play at a service six months before, and had apparently not been seen since.

  An unmarried woman of seventy from Nob Hill had been reported missing by neighbors. Shirley Davenport, had last been seen after she’d been to St Michael’s church to arrange flowers on a Friday night, and her car had not been found. The accompanying photo showed a thin-faced old woman with round glasses and thinning gray hair. Probably a lovely personality though, thought Nightingale, but he did have the good grace to feel guilty about it afterward.

  One more seemed to fit. A monk had gone missing from Our Lady Of Spring Bank Cistercian Monastery out near Santa Teresa. Brother Gregory West had last been seen working in the monastery vineyards nine months ago, but had not come in for evening service. The monastery grounds had been searched extensively, but no trace of him had ever been found. Police had appealed for witnesses, especially anyone who might have been driving along the main road that passed the bottom end of the vineyard, but there had been no sightings.

  Nightingale printed out the details of the four new cases along with all the information he had on Speckman and Carr, collected the sheets from the desk, paid and left.

  Back in the SUV, he tapped in Kent Speckman’s address and followed the Satnav’s directions for twenty minutes to a large modern house, the type often disparagingly called a McMansion, churned out to order like cheeseburgers. He climbed out and lit a Marlboro as he stared through the twelve-feet high wrought iron gates. The mansion was set back from the road, red brick with a brown slate roof, and a triple garage to the left. The high wall that ran around the boundary was free of spikes or barbed wire but well covered with CCTV cameras and two more cameras covered the gate. There were signs on the wall saying that the house was under the armed protection of a local security company. As he turned back to his SUV an SFPD cruiser pulled up and a female officer climbed out, short and dumpy with hair so uniformly chestnut that it could only have been dyed.

  “Good afternoon, sir. Is this your car?”

  “It’s a rental,” said Nightingale.

  “License and registration, please?”

  Nightingale went back to the car, opened the glove compartment and gave her the rental agreement before fishing his driver’s license out of his wallet.

  She checked the documents and handed them back. “Thank you, sir. Why are you waiting here?”

  Nightingale had learned over many years that cops never responded well to sarcasm so he played it straight. “My wife’s thinking of moving up here officer, so I was looking at houses, trying to get a feel for the area. I needed a cigarette, and I don’t like smoking when I’m driving.”

  “You’re Australian?”

  “British.”

  “But you have a US license?”

  “I’ve lived here for a while.”

  “Green card?”

  Nightingale nodded. “My wife’s American.”

  The officer nodded. “This is a residential area, sir, and people get a little nervous if they see strange cars parked here. Maybe you could find a mall car park to smoke in. That’s generally what I do.”

  “I’ll do that, thank you.”

  “No problem, sir. Enjoy your day.”

  She went back to the cruiser, but was obviously waiting for him to leave first. He reset the Satnav with the location of the Rite Aid on Hillsdale Boulevard where Mitchell had left his Porsche and drove away while she watched. He had no idea whether the cruiser had been on patrol, or whether someone had noticed a strange car and called it in. Either way, a surveillance job outside Speckman’s house wasn’t going to be possible. The officer would have logged his license and the car registration. He checked his mirror, just in time to watch a white Humvee drive out of Speckman´s gates and head in the opposite direction.

  He followed the ice blonde’s curt instructions but even with light traffic it took more than forty minutes to get to the Rite Aid. That ruled out the Speckman mansion as being the place where the nun was killed, but Nightingale had expected that. Finding the mansion where the killings were taking place was going to require more detective work. And probably a decent helping of luck.

  CHAPTER 11

  The little middle-aged woman was talking. Her voice was soft but persistent, like a teacher twittering away at her young pupils, filling every moment of potential silence with inconsequential noise. “Ah, you’re awake, Mr. Mitchell,” she said. “I am sorry about the inconvenience. I’ll try not to keep you too long, I’m sure you have a thousand things to do. You’ve probably got quite the headache and aren’t feeling at your best. It’s a nasty little drug that, but very quick acting, you probably didn’t even feel the little prick.”

  Mitchell shook his head, and instantly regretted the decision - the left side of his face was on fire. He tried to raise his hand to it, but couldn’t move it. He dropped his gaze and saw the duct tape that held his wrists firmly to the arms of the chair. His ankles were bound to the chair legs. Something had been stuffed in his mouth and he couldn’t speak. He was naked. All his clothes lay, neatly folded, in a pile on the floor in front of him. The woman stood in front of him, her green tweed jacket on the sofa, her crisply-starched white blouse with the loose black bow at the throat reinforcing the image of the schoolmistress. Her graying brown hair was wrapped in a tight bun, and she wore black leather gloves.

  He moved his eyes, rather than his head, to look around. It was a large garage, though there was no car, just the sofa, a teak sideboard and the chair on which he was sitting. The chair was bolted to metal brackets, which were firmly fastened to the floor. Plastic sheeting covered the floor. In one corner stood a mop and bucket. The woman twittered on. “As I said, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but I do have some questions for you.”

  Mitchell struggled to speak, but she put a cautioning finger to his lips.

  “Not yet, Mr. Mitchell. There’ll be time enough for you to speak later.”

  She walked across to the teak sideboard, picked up a small brass plate and held it in front of him. There was a blood-stained piece of flesh, placed exactly in the middle. Mitchell gazed at it in horror, and strained against the duct tape. Neither his wrists nor his ankles moved an inch.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s a bit of a cliché this business of tying you to a chair, isn’t it. I do hope you won’t chide me for it. If I were on...er...home territory, so to speak, I’m sure I could have come up with something more imaginative which you might have appreciated a little more, but I’ve just borrowed this place for an hour or two. Now, let me show you these.”

  She held up a large pair of shears.

  “Quite beautiful these. Cost much more than you might imagine. Fabric shears. For cutting cloth you know. Chrome vanadium steel, apparently, and ever so sharp. Though it does depend on the strength of one’s hand, you see. Now my grip is a lot stronger than you might imagine, and I have managed to cut off a finger or two from time to time. No, no, keep still now. If I were at home, I’d much prefer to use bolt cutters for that, but a lady can hardly carry bolt cutters through the streets, can she. Whereas these, a roll of tape and one or two other useful little things fit nicely into my large reticule. I suppose if anyone asked, I could say I used them for dressmaking. Still, I’m hardly likely to be stopped by the police.”

  Mitchell continued to strain against the tape, with no success. The woman’s voice was gentle, kind, almost reassuring, like a mother trying to soothe her child to sleep. But the words, the words were the seeds of nightmare.

  “I don’t really like to use it to
cut bone, it seems a little crude, like using an artist’s paintbrush on the outside wall of a house. Besides, there are so many soft parts to the human body. I like to start on the unimportant ones. Do you recognize this, Mr. Mitchell?”

  She raised the brass plate with its grizzly contents into his line of sight. He strained upwards and grunted.

  “Yes, that’s right, it’s your earlobe, the left one. Now, shall we even things up on the right-hand side?”

  Mitchell shook his head violently and desperately strained to speak.

  “No? I’m sure it would look much more symmetrical. Still, it’s entirely your choice, at the moment.”

  She dropped her voice to a whisper, and gave him a conspiratorial wink.

  “I tell you what we’ll do...why don’t I take that nasty gag out of your mouth and then you can tell me one or two things I’d like to know. Just a few easy little questions, and then you can be running along. But no noise now, and no fibs. We’re all alone here, nobody about to hear you scream, and there’s some awfully good soundproofing too. I can easily put the gag back in if you get tiresome, and after that it might not be up to you to decide which little bits you stay attached to.”

  She gave his groin a gentle pat and Mitchell practically had a seizure. He nodded his head frantically.

  “Oh good. I’m sure we won’t have any misunderstandings. Remember now, no noise, and no fibs.”

  Again he nodded, and the woman gently removed the gag.

  “Now then, Mr. Mitchell. I’d like you to tell me what you did this morning.”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’d been sleeping on the streets and was heading for the Amtrak station.”

  The woman gave him a disapproving look and shook her head.

  “Tut, tut. I do believe that’s a fib,” she said

  She hummed a little tune to herself and lifted the shears to his right ear. She gave him a kindly smile, then snipped off the lobe. Mitchell screamed and strained against the tightly wound duct-tape. Blood poured down his cheek and onto his shoulder.

  “OK, OK,” he shouted. “I went to Alcatraz and met someone. He was going to help me.”

  “And the name of this obliging gentleman?” she asked

  “Jack.”

  She tilted her head to one side, pushed her lips out and frowned.

  “I think I’d prefer his full name, if you’d be so kind.”

  She placed the shears over his left nipple and squeezed the handle gently.

  “No, no. That’s the name he gave me. I don’t know any more than that. Jack. That’s all he said. I swear.”

  Again he roared in pain as the blades closed. She moved over to the right nipple. He babbled at her.

  “I swear, no please, I swear, that’s all he said, he was going to get me out, he wanted me to go with him but I said no.”

  “Go where?”

  “His motel. La Luna Inn. It’s on 101.”

  “Do you have a telephone number for this Jack?”

  “In my phone.”

  The phone lay on the pile of clothes, she picked it up and checked the contacts log. “That’s a good boy,” she said. She put the phone down again and walked to stand in front of him. She stroked his cheek. “Now I want you to tell me everything that you told this Jack. Everything. Don’t leave anything out.”

  “Then you’ll let me go?”

  She patted his cheek gently. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, shall we?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Nightingale grabbed a croissant and a coffee from a Starbucks and ate as he drove to the school where Sister Rosa Lopez had taught until a month ago. The school was in a less than exclusive district. The houses were in poor repair, the cars generally old and rusty and most of the shops seemed to sell liquor or fast food. There was a car park at one side of the school building and he found a space for his SUV and walked into reception. A dark-haired woman of forty or so squinted over the top of her glasses at him. “Good morning, sir. How can we help you?”

  “My name’s Jack Keeley, I’m a reporter, working on a story about the disappearance of Sister Rosa Lopez,” he said. “I was wondering if there might be someone who could help me with a few questions.”

  “One moment please, sir,” she said. “I’ll see if our Administrative Officer is available.” She made a quick phone call and then directed him down a corridor to see a Mrs. Dalton. 'Susan J Dalton. Administrative Officer’ was the sign on the door. Nightingale knocked and was told to come in. Mrs. Dalton was in her fifties, her brown hair worn short, just to the bottom of her ears. She stood up, came round from behind her desk and gave Nightingale what felt like a practiced, firm business handshake. She was wearing a dark green tweed jacket and skirt over a white blouse. “You’re a reporter?”

  “I’m a freelance,” said Nightingale.

  “You’re English?” She waved him to a chair.

  Nightingale nodded. “My accent gave me away?”

  “I’m a huge fan of Downton Abbey,” she said, sitting back behind her desk. “I love the accent. But why is an English journalist interested in a missing member of our staff?”

  “I’m writing a general article about missing people and how different police forces approach their cases.”

  “And why are you interested in Sister Rosa?”

  “Because she’s not the normal missing person. Nuns don’t usually go AWOL.”

  Mrs. Dalton nodded. “We’re all baffled by her disappearance,” she said. “But I’m not sure what I can tell you that hasn’t already appeared in the Chronicle. There was a lot of interest when she first went missing and they wrote several articles, but now…” She shrugged. “People have such short attention spans these days.”

  “It’s the internet,” said Nightingale. “What did Sister Rosa do here?”

  “She taught Spanish and some French.”

  “Had she always been a nun?” asked Nightingale.

  “Well, I’m not actually sure what age people start, but I think she went into the convent straight from college. I never asked.”

  “She lived in a convent?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Convent of the Holy Virgin. She’d drive back there after school each day.”

  Nightingale hadn’t known that nuns could drive, but then he hadn’t known much about nuns in general. The photo on the Missing Persons report showed a middle-aged woman wearing black-framed glasses and a blue headscarf which covered her hair. Nightingale had no idea what a nun’s headscarf was called. She looked a little older than her fifty-three years, probably since she didn’t have the opportunity to enhance her looks with the usual array of help that the modern woman had at her disposal. Nightingale supposed that nuns didn’t do Botox, collagen, fillers and facelifts.

  Mrs. Dalton appeared to be waiting for his next question so he nodded encouragingly. “Can you talk me through the day of her disappearance?” he said.

  “She taught her classes as normal, left here at four according to John Wheeler, one of our history teachers, who walked out with her. It’s about a thirty-minute drive to Holy Virgin, but she never arrived. She drove a white Chrysler, and the police haven’t found a trace of it, or her. It’s awful.” Her eyes were full of tears now, and she fumbled for a handkerchief in her purse. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Nightingale leaned forward. “There’s no need for apologies,” he said. “It’s perfectly natural. You obviously think a lot of her.”

  The woman dabbed her eyes and put the handkerchief back in her purse.

  “Everyone does. She’s such a good, kind person. Always so understanding with the students. She was a natural teacher.”

  “Who took the missing person’s report?” he asked.

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “When you contacted the missing persons unit. Who did you talk to?”

  “An Inspector Chan. Or Chen. Do you think the police will find her?”

  Nightingale knew that Sister Rosa was dead and had died horribly
, but there was no way he could tell Mrs. Dalton that so he forced a smile. “I hope so,” he said.

  CHAPTER 13

  The little dumpy woman took out a small and simple cellphone in a tartan case and tapped out a number. “It’s Judas,” she said. “All done. I have information for you, so perhaps we should meet.”

  “Soon. Meanwhile tell me whom he talked to.”

  “A man named Jack, apparently an agent of someone called Wainwright.”

  “I have heard of Wainwright. This could be problematic. Was it messy?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “I shall send Matthew around to help clean up.”

  “That would be most helpful, thank you. And I have something that belongs to this Jack. A credit card. He gave it to Mr. Mitchell.”

  “Excellent. Bring it with you.”

  She ended the call and sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap. Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang and she went to the front door and opened it. Matthew was a tall, dark-haired man in a pair of blue overalls bearing the name of a cable company.

  She took him through to the garage. It wasn’t the first time that Matthew had seen the results of her handiwork, and he wasn’t a squeamish man, but he felt himself start to retch as he looked at what was left in the chair. He forced the bile back down and set to work with the wrench and knife. He cut the duct tape, unbolted the chair and dumped the contents onto the plastic sheet. He rolled it up, being careful not to allow any parts to escape, then wrapped the package with more duct tape. He brought in a large black nylon bag and with the woman’s help maneuvered Mitchell’s remains inside. The woman looked around the garage.

  “Another hour’s cleaning for me, I think,” she said.

  “Thaddeus has brought the van round,” said Matthew. “He’ll help me, then we’ll go straight down to the boat.”

  “Good. But find somewhere quiet, and close to the shore. Abaddon wants this one found and quite soon. To send a message, it seems. You should have no trouble, arrangements have been made to ensure no interruptions.”