Neddie found the Embarcadero, that superwide avenue running along the bay, exhilarating. There was so much traffic here, both car and pedestrian, that no one noticed him.
Several months ago he had made a perfect kill beside the Waterside Restaurant. The Beige Woman. But before he’d been able to see and really feel the thrill of her death, something unimaginable had overshadowed his own sweet success.
He’d been cheated.
Tonight he would take back what had been so rudely stolen from him. Tonight belonged to Neddie Lambo.
CHAPTER 59
NEDDIE CROSSED THE Embarcadero at Broadway and proceeded to a small patio with potted trees and benches next to the Waterside Restaurant, where customers had a smoke or waited for their rides.
As he stepped onto the patio, his fading memories of the Beige Woman flooded over him in HD and living color. He could see her now, wearing a beige-colored knit skirt and jacket. She had been deeply engrossed in her phone and was reading out directions to herself.
She hadn’t noticed the slight man with sandy hair and deformed arms, so he had said, “Hey, I’m Neddie.”
She had turned away, both showing her disgust and giving him a full view of the target.
He hadn’t hesitated. He had pulled his fully loaded sharp from his pocket and had stuck her hard in her meaty haunch, pushing the plunger at the same time. She had grabbed at her rear end and swiveled to stare at him.
Neddie had had her attention then.
He had stared back into her gray-blue eyes for one long moment. Then she had wheezed, before stepping off the curb into oncoming traffic. A taxicab had just brushed her, but she had been off balance and had fallen. She had still been alive. She had been flapping and flailing in the gutter when there had been a boom, like a jet breaking the sound barrier directly overhead.
Neddie had seen the sky change from sunset to a blackout, smothering gray. He had known that he had to run and he had done so, camouflaged by the chaos, disappearing below the surface for long tunnel runs, reappearing on empty streets as if from nowhere.
But the loss of his big moment stayed with him.
He hadn’t seen the Beige Woman die.
Tonight he would try to claw that moment back. There was no rush, no need to panic.
Before him ranged the whole panorama of promenade and restaurant and patio and sky. He relived the way the Beige Woman had looked at him and actually seen him just before she was hit by the taxi.
Neddie was filling in the missing details, going in for a close-up of her last breath—when he was interrupted again.
A police car cruising in a northbound lane pulled up only yards away from where he was standing. Two Cops, a man and a woman, got out of the cruiser and headed toward him.
Neddie froze as they approached, blinding him with their flashlights. Why had they stopped for him?
“Any problem here?” asked the tall woman cop.
“No problem,” said Neddie in his pitchy Nutty Neddie voice. “No problem at all, Officer. I was just looking at the water. Just looking at the water.”
The flashlight beam flicked up and down his body. What were they looking for? What did they see? Had someone witnessed his killing right here? Had that witness reported him to the police? Were cops watching this place to see if the killer returned?
Neddie shielded his eyes with a crooked forearm.
“Just looking at the water,” he said again.
The male cop said, “All right, then. Have a good night.”
“Thanks, Officers. I’m going now. Going now. Bye.”
By the time he’d crossed back over the Embarcadero, his rosy and beautiful mood had changed to a menacing gray cloud, just as the sky had changed after he’d made his kill.
He’d been cheated again.
“This isn’t fair,” he said to himself. “Not fair at all.”
CHAPTER 60
NEDDIE WAS WALKING west on Broadway, agitated, muttering, mad at himself for returning to the crime scene. It had been a rookie mistake and he’d gotten exactly nothing for it.
Now he had to take a different route home, throw off anyone who might be looking for him. Using the Transamerica Pyramid, directly to the left, as his guiding star, he walked at a normal pace, skirting the tourist magnet of North Beach.
Passing the Green Tortoise Hostel, he approached the intersection of Broadway and Columbus Avenue, all of the neon-blazing North Beach spread out to his right.
Cars sped past him. Crowds of so-called normal people laughed and joked and touched and teased. It was a world he wasn’t part of, but—here was a gift—he could move through it unseen.
Nutty Neddie, a.k.a. Special Ed, continued on Broadway and hooked a left onto Powell, following it up to the top of Nob Hill, until one of his favorite flight paths was in view.
The cable car tracks turned from Jackson onto Powell, and Neddie waited for the car to rattle to a stop. He grabbed the bar and swung himself up, handed his Muni pass to the conductor.
The conductor looked at Neddie’s pass, not his face. He was working, and this was one of six hundred tickets and passes he would check that night. Neddie was onboard, ready for takeoff. He worked his way to the front of the car and mentally urged the car to the crest of the hill—and then the car dropped over the top.
He loved this gliding feeling as the car plunged downward. Union Square was on the left, the Macy’s sign was across the way, and the monument to Admiral Dewey stood centered in the square.
Moments later, too soon, the car squealed to a halt, and Neddie jumped off and headed east. His feelings of shame and loss at the cop stop near the patio were abating.
He had made his greatest strides from his biggest mistakes.
Notably, there was the “crime” that had turned his life into this.
Blazing light poured through the entrance of the Admiral Dewey Hotel. A taxi pulled up, and a doorman opened the taxi door for a couple dressed for a gala. The doorman walked them to the glass doors and opened them. As Neddie passed the hotel, he was struck by the sight of a woman standing alone forty feet away from the front of the hotel.
She looked to be in her late thirties, with light-brown hair in a long braid. She had a bland face that reminded him of the Beige Woman.
He would give her a test.
He walked toward her and heard himself say, “Hi, I’m Neddie.”
Her gaze passed over him as she turned away without speaking.
Her disrespect, her disgust, sent a shiver through Neddie, and he saw that this was how he would rectify his earlier mistake. He turned toward the wall and loaded his sharp.
The woman with the braid was staring off into the distance when Neddie jabbed her in the buttock, delivered the payload, pulled out the syringe, and sidestepped out into the street.
He heard a short bark and turned to see the dead woman walking, her arms reaching out as she silently mouthed, “HELP.”
“Sorry, no,” Neddie said, passing her. “Good-bye,” he said. “Almost nice knowing you.”
A crowd of people piled out of the hotel, and immediately someone noticed the woman lying in the street. He heard a panicky male voice saying, “Hang on. I’m getting help.” Then, “Oh my God. She’s gone.”
As the crowd dispersed, Neddie glimpsed the dead woman and sighed with pleasure. Job well done. And now, he had to go.
He walked at a normal pace up Stockton Street, crossed Union Square, nondescript in his hoodie and jeans in the dark. He ditched out onto Post Street, only dimly lit at this hour, and then Saint Vartan’s loomed. He walked fast but not rushed, and ten minutes later the brick walls of the Hyde and Seek Loony Bin were in view.
The Admin block was dark. There was an even darker void between the walls of the North Tower and the Walgreens, and Neddie slipped inside that shaft of blackness. He was as good as invisible. But inside his body Neddie was glowing like a neon-lit night.
Mission accomplished.
Neddie was Safe. And Neddie was
Good. Very, Very Good.
CHAPTER 61
I WAS WITH Claire in the autopsy suite, staring down at a human heart in a stainless steel surgical bowl.
The victim, Sarah Summers Nugent, was lying nearby on a table, chest opened from her clavicle down, her face in repose.
Claire was saying, “This heart could run a marathon by itself.”
“I’ll take your word for it. What do you know about the circumstances?”
“Last night around ten she was waiting outside the Admiral Dewey Hotel for her husband to check out. They had a plane to catch. Going to Chicago. Husband came outside with their bags, saw a crowd in the street and his wife on the ground in the middle of it. First responders arrived within five minutes and found her nonresponsive. Mr. Nugent went with Sarah in the bus.
“Emergency room at Metro made it official. Mrs. Nugent was DOA, looked like cardiac arrest. The husband told the attending physician that his wife was only forty-one. That she had just aced a full checkup. As far as he or she knew, she did not have any indications of heart disease.”
I was listening to Claire, looking at the victim’s heart, but my mind was roaming over the other so-called heart attack victims whose deaths we had investigated.
There were the first two victims that had aroused Claire’s suspicions. Lois Sprague, the female tourist who had been brought in with the Sci-Tron fatalities. Claire had connected Sprague’s death to that of a male cabdriver who actually did have heart disease—as well as a needle mark in his left buttock.
Conklin and I had checked into the third known victim, the homeless addict discovered by the landscaper. The landscaper had no information about the attacker, and the victim had no known relatives, which left us with no motive for his murder.
Last week a real estate broker named Robert Riccardo, thirty-six, had left his office for a breath of air when, without warning, he’d dropped dead on the sidewalk. His death would have been chalked up to cardiac arrest if Claire hadn’t gotten the word out to the pathologists in all the hospitals in the city. I was thinking of him as victim number four.
Homicide Central Station would be working the Riccardo case, but the lead investigator, Marty Freeman, had called to tell me that he had no idea what happened to the victim. The tox report was normal. The man’s heart was normal. The victim had no enemies, no nothing.
“Boxer, this man should not be dead,” he told me.
Claire had ruled the manner of death undetermined, knowing full well that she was looking at a murder victim and couldn’t prove it.
I was mired in what-the-hell, same as Claire, same as Marty Freeman. There was a pattern that didn’t form a picture. What could possibly be the motive for the deaths of these people who had nothing in common?
Cops like to say, “If you know the why, you can figure out the who.” The why was a mystery. But the killer—whoever, however, and for whatever reason—was stepping up his schedule.
The first four victims had been killed within several months. Now, with the death of Sarah Nugent, two victims had been murdered in the last week.
I shared these thoughts with Claire and asked her, “What’s your report going to say?”
“Manner of death: ‘Homicide.’ Cause: ‘Unknown substance injected into the right buttock.’ Mrs. Nugent’s blood just went to the lab,” she said. “Let’s hope for a clue.”
She wrote the husband’s contact information on her notepad, ripped off the top sheet, and handed it to me.
Carl Nugent, room 982, Admiral Dewey Hotel
“For whatever it’s worth,” she said.
Actually, Mrs. Nugent’s death was our first fresh lead into the needle sticker’s case. And that was priceless.
“I’ll call you later,” I said. I showed myself out.
CHAPTER 62
IT WAS JUST before ten in the morning when Conklin and I entered the open arms of the Admiral Dewey and found Carl Nugent in the nearly empty bar. He was white, mid-fifties, average height and weight, and looked as though he’d been wadded up and thrown against the back of the circular booth.
I introduced my partner and myself to Mr. Nugent and asked if we could join him, then we slid onto the leather seat, flanking him on both sides.
Conklin told Nugent that we were sorry for his loss.
Nugent’s words slurred together when he said, “Yeah, well, nowhere as sorry as I am … useless without Sarry … total mess without my Sarry.”
Then he folded his arms on the table, knocking over a largish glass of liquor without noticing, put his head down, and sobbed.
Conklin reached an arm across the man’s back and patted him. A waiter appeared with a dishcloth. He sopped up the alcohol and left a stack of paper napkins. Nugent blotted his face and made an attempt to collect himself, but it was clear that he was grieving his heart out. Finally I said, “Mr. Nugent, can you tell us what happened last night?”
“I wish to God I knew.”
The waiter returned with a refill for Nugent, asked if we would like anything. After we said no, we asked the widower to talk about the reasons for his trip to San Francisco.
Nugent told us that he and his wife were inventors and had come here to meet with department store buyers. He pulled a golf-ball-size globe with electric prongs out of his pocket, saying it was a night-light they called Smartlight. He explained briefly that Smartlight detected motion, was interactive, and had a wireless hookup to neighbors, the fire department, and the police.
“Sarry’s brainchild,” he said sadly. “It could save lives.”
I asked, “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt your wife?”
“Over our … gadget? Whoaaaa. What’re you …? Sarry had … a heart attack … didn’t she?”
“The medical examiner is doing a full workup. She hasn’t determined the cause of death.” That was pretty much true.
I asked Nugent questions about his travel plans, the state of his marriage, and if either he or his wife had been harassed in person, on the phone, or on the internet.
The bereaved man had no answers, and after he put down his empty glass, he had zero ability to focus. The manager had a bellman take him to his room, and Rich and I talked about the work we had in front of us: checking Nugent’s financials, his insurance policies, his internet life. But I didn’t see anything in this man that would lead me to think he had killed his wife.
We interviewed the day manager and the door and lobby staff, including the doorman who had been on the scene when Mrs. Nugent went down. He was earnest and professional, and he had called 911—but his back had been to the street when the shouting started.
We headed back to the Hall with plans to return in three hours and interview the night staff.
I said to my partner, “We’ve got male victims, female victims. Local folks and out-of-towners. Some that were well off and some that were street sleepers. Were they all victims of opportunity? Does the perp just kill at random?”
Rich turned down the radio. I realized I’d been shouting.
I said it again. “Let’s run Nugent’s name through the computer.”
“Copy that, Captain Obvious.”
Conklin was laughing when Brady called.
“Boxer, you got Conklin with you?”
“He’s right here.”
“Good. Our favorite science teacher was beaten up pretty good last night. He’s conscious and talking. Why don’t you head on over to San Francisco General.”
CHAPTER 63
CONNOR GRANT WAS lying in a hospital bed, snoring loudly. His eyes were blackened, his nose was taped, and every part of him that I could see was bruised, contused, or abraded. Looked like after he’d been beaten all to hell, he’d been dragged behind a pickup for a couple of miles.
Conklin said, “Shit.”
I grunted my agreement.
Despite my revulsion for Connor Grant, I felt bad for the guy.
But my mind had its own agenda. I flashed on the moment when I saw Joe bei
ng evacuated from Sci-Tron on a stretcher. He’d been almost unrecognizable. I remembered his comatose days, when he’d been straddling a wobbly line between life and death. Even now he was in pain because of this man.
I said, “Mr. Grant?”
I touched his arm and he jolted awake, pulling back as though I was going to hit him.
“Mr. Grant, it’s Sergeant Boxer.”
“Right. I didn’t do it,” he said. “Hand me my glasses?”
They were mangled, and one lens was cracked across the middle, and when he couldn’t lift his left arm, I helped him put them on. Jesus Christ.
Grant asked me for the remote that controlled the bed. I grabbed it, saying, “Tell me when to stop.”
When Grant was in a semi-sitting position, I pulled up a chair and Conklin did the same.
I asked the usual first question: “Can you tell us what happened?”
“I had a hot date with a cement mixer,” Grant said.
The painkiller in his IV bag was giving him quite the funny bone. I played along.
I said, “Can you describe the cement mixer?”
Grant cracked a giddy oxy grin.
“I think I’m starting to like you.”
The feeling was not mutual. I took out my notepad and let Conklin run the interview. Even doped up, Mr. Grant was a blithe fast-talker.
“Last night. I opened the back door and went for a walk. I don’t know how they saw me, but a bag went over my head. Made of cloth. A hood, I guess you’d call it. Then I was punched. Thrown down. Kicked everywhere. I screamed. Pretty sure I must have screamed very damned loud,” said Grant. “I must have passed out. I woke up a couple blocks up on Hollister Avenue behind some garbage cans. I still had my phone. I called the cops. And here I am.”
The jerk had slipped away from the cops assigned for his protection.
I pictured Grant’s neighborhood, the featureless buildings, dim lighting, the entire area on the fringe of the vibrant city of San Francisco. This was how and where the science teacher wanted to live—isolated, so that his neighbors wouldn’t object to things that went kaboom in the night.