Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

  "She's taking a fucking shower."

  "So much the better. Now, I'm going to explain why we're doing this. Your attitude completely pissed me off. Maybe it gets you by with used-up alkies and cons, or with kindly animal lovers who are easily impressed with a tough guy act. But it doesn't cut it with me. I don't like being insulted, and I want more than your standard song and dance. I want you to dig a lot deeper, Judd. I want all you've got."

  "You're on drugs, right?" LeGrand grated. "But you don't have to be a victim here. Even right now, you have the power to choose not to do this."

  "Tell me about Moeris. I've gotten information on two dozen wolf advocacy groups, but the only one named after a werewolf is yours. Why?"

  "You need help, man. Trust me, I can help you. I've seen a hundred guys like you."

  "No, you have not!" Ray jerked the arm up until LeGrand wheezed. "Treat me like an individual, Judd. Treat me like I matter. Imagine for a moment that we have something in common. Did you kill people in Vietnam? Is that what fucked you up?"

  Another grunt of pain. "What do you think?"

  "What else? Seeing people get killed? Seeing people killing each other?"

  "All that shit. You got it right, Sherlock."

  "Okay. And you came back and were a junkie and a drunk for fifteen years, in and out of jail, arrested twice for assault. Why?"

  "I was fucked up. Like you are now"

  Ray sighed and rolled his shoulder to relax the cramp that was starting there. He was getting tired of sitting like this. LeGrand's neck was twisted hard and the gravel had to be hurting his cheek. Ray didn't like seeing a man in that position.

  "Tell me why the name Moeris. Moeris, he used herbal potions to turn himself into a wolf—is that what you did? Drugs made a monster out of you?"

  "Yeah. That's right." LeGrand labored to breathe. "What's your point?"

  "Can't you tell? Me coming here like this, isn't it something you might have done? To sort things out?"

  When LeGrand didn't say anything, Ray thought that maybe he'd gotten through.

  "So we have a lot to talk about. But I don't want to do it like this, and I don't want you to diss me again. So I've got a proposition." Ray took his left hand off LeGrand's head, reached around and found the check he'd put into his pocket earlier. He started to put it into LeGrand's back pocket, then felt something metallic and hard in there. A switchblade knife, his fingers told him, definitely an item to be kept out of the picture during an encounter like this. He zipped it into his jacket pocket before tucking the check into LeGrand's jeans.

  "That's a check for five thousand dollars. My gift to Moeris Foundation. I want to let you up. If you try to run to the house and call the police or get your gun, you probably won't make it before I stop you. But even if you do, you'll never know why I'm here. I'll also put a stop on the check—what a waste of an easy five grand, right? So will you talk with me like a nice guy, or are you going to continue giving me a hard time?"

  "Have to take a chance, dickhead."

  Ray was getting accustomed to LeGrand's style. More than ever, he hoped they could talk. He released the arm and took his weight off the knee.

  LeGrand bolted the moment he got his arm back. He beetled toward the edge of the light, and Ray had to move fast to stop him. He landed hard on LeGrand's back and bent to put his throat in a forearm choke-hold. He worked him back into the shadowed nook and lay almost entirely on his body, their faces close. Inside the barn, the wolves were moaning again. Ray heard the quick scrape of claws as they skittered.

  "What is the matter with you?" Ray hissed. "Why can't we have a meaningful conversation?" His anger flared and he was tempted to say something hurtful: You think those scabrous, neurotic things are real wolves? All you know is caged animals.You don't know about freedom. Your life is a lie. But it was bad enough to humiliate LeGrand physically.

  "Judd, listen, you're a strong guy. I admire you, I really do. I think you're strong because you broke once and you healed stronger than you were before you broke. Tell me about that." He adjusted his hold so LeGrand could speak.

  "You don't get stuff like that this way."

  "You're not giving me any other way. Give it a try."

  LeGrand strained uselessly against the chokehold, but at last Ray felt a softening in the back and then a hiccup like a suppressed sob.

  "I wasn't sure what people were anymore. What I was." A throttled, half-whispered rasp.

  "I understand exactly! Why the werewolf motif?"

  "I had seen guys turn into predators. I had been a predator. It was hard to stop. I had to think about that. When I got into taking care of wolves, it was like a metaphor. I was a damaged wolf myself. Then I started working on rehab stuff and I had to deal with all this prejudice and misinformation. It goes way back, a million years. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the wild. Fear of what's inside you. Superstitious fear. I read up on werewolves because that's where the ideas came together. About what v/as human and what was animal. It was like a catalyst for me. Moeris, it seemed like a good symbol for all that. That's it. So let me the fuck up."

  Ray decided to chance it. He slid his arm out from under the throat and lifted himself away. He squatted as LeGrand pulled himself onto all fours, then sat upright and backed himself against the side of the barn. Even in the deep shadow, Ray could see him wince as he rolled his neck side to side. A wolf snout emerged from the doorway to his left, scented, withdrew. The wolves were calmer now.

  "What do you feed them? The rabbits you raise?"

  "Scrap meat donations from Safeway Dog food. And rabbits, yeah."

  "Alive or dead? You kill the rabbit yourself first, or—"

  "Why the fuck do—?"

  Ray leaned suddenly forward and LeGrand twitched back. "Or do you just toss the live rabbit in?"

  "For the wolves going into release programs, alive, yes."

  "Why?"

  "So they remember how to kill. So that part of their instinct doesn't atrophy."

  Now they were getting somewhere. Ray's excitement rose and he crabbed closer, trying to formulate the right questions. "Judd, this is very important. Do you think a person needs to kill, too? To keep the instinctive thing alive? To make contact with that primal stuff, come to grips with it? Feed it? Does breaking the taboo make you stronger?"

  "You and Charlie Manson, huh?"

  "What?"

  LeGrand shook his head. His confidence was returning, or maybe he just didn't give a shit how this turned out. " 'Come to grips?' I killed, I saw a lot of guys kill, and nobody ever came to grips with it. Too easy to do and too hard to get over. I didn't see anybody come off wiser. And it's not all that taboo, not half enough. That's another fucking superstition. Too bad."

  "More. Dig deeper on that."

  "There were two kinds of guys. One kind went to pieces the first time they killed or had to lie in a shell crater with chunks of their dead buddies all around. The other kind got proud and cocky. Bragged about their kills, kept ears or scalps on their belts. Got high on it."

  "Which were you?"

  "But you open yourself up to it, something gets inside and starts eating you. Making you hollow. The ones who thought they were the toughest, they're the ones that had the hardest time after. They had that thing inside."

  Ray thought about that. "When you killed people, when you saw people die, up close—how did that change you? I mean, the way you think your own death? More afraid? More . . . accepting?"

  "More nothing. More fucking nothing except screwed up. Me, I was very fucked up. Believe it. I had to work very, very hard to get back even this far."

  "Maybe you should have kept going the other way," Ray muttered darkly.

  LeGrand snorted, spat, shook his head. "You're a fucking kid. Lot of abstract ideas. You don't know what any of it means."

  The preaching, superior tone infuriated Ray. He leaned into the light from the porch and turned his face so that all LeGrand would see were the scars. "You," he said very
quietly, very deliberately, "don't know anything about what I am. And you have no fucking idea what I am capable of."

  LeGrand didn't react, didn't seem to care. They were quiet for a long time like that, stalemated, and Ray heard some music start up in the house, a radio changing channels. The wife must have come out of the shower. Ray crabbed closer to LeGrand, ready for a sudden move, beaming his urgency at the dark silhouette.

  At last LeGrand rasped, "You're trying to figure if killing can make you free or natural or . . . what, complete? If that makes it okay? You're trying to figure out if you're a werewolf?"

  "Something like that," Ray said breathlessly. He didn't know the exact questions, but they were getting close to it now.

  LeGrand's dark shape didn't move. "That's something you'll have to answer for yourself. That's what it's all about, man. Trying to answer that."

  Ray had to admit that was a safe assessment. He'd known it all along, but disappointment flooded him. He'd had irrationally high hopes for what LeGrand might be able to tell him.

  He had just decided it was time to go when the aluminum door scraped and LeGrand's wife called from the house: "Judd! The hell're you doing out there?"

  LeGrand didn't move for several more seconds. Then he lifted his head and called, "I'll be in in two shakes, baby. I'm just seeing to one of the animals."

  16

  CREE RETURNED TO the motel at four thirty, glad to have some time to regroup before meeting Uncle Bert for dinner. She ran the tub to its deepest and lowered herself cautiously into the scalding water until just her nostrils were above the surface: heavenly. Even on a bright day like this, San Francisco was brisk in November; after sitting for so long in the park, she felt deeply chilled. Plus, tubs were a great place to think.

  Ray Raymond was insightful and even attractive in an odd way. But that icy gaze continued to trouble her. He had X-rayed the wolfman's skull and recognized its canine characteristics—was he the one sending the morphing e-mails? Then there was Uncle Bert's theory. Could Cameron Raymond be a murderer, too?

  A new shiver went down her spine and legs despite the parboiling embrace of the water. Yes, it was easy to imagine that slow gaze and blink stemming from some deep hatred and resentment, possibly one requiring vehement expression.

  But of course it was unwise to trust impressions like that, as she'd learned many years ago in an undergraduate class on forensic psychology. The instructor had begun the first session by showing slides, starting with a mugshot of an unsmiling, middle-aged businessman type, white shirt, tie, dark hair with receding hairline.

  "This man is a convicted serial child molester," Dr. Danforth explained. "His victims were six girls, ages five through nine, each of whom he systematically befriended, entrapped, sodomized, and tortured. Let's take a close look at his face."

  The students dutifully studied the screen, and they easily found the sadism in that rather ordinary face: lowered lids that failed to conceal the calculating glint of the eyes, a tidy tuck of the lips that controlled their expression, the smug bulk of those cheeks. Knowing what he'd done, Cree could see it all right there: the pathology, the secret savor of his awful acts.

  After a long moment, Dr. Danforth turned to the screen and did a double-take. "Oops!" he said, "Wrong slide!" He fingered the controls and this time checked to see that he had the right picture. "Sorry about that. We'll get back to that gentleman in a moment. This is the real child molester."

  The new photo showed a very different face. This was a young man, a surfer-dude type with white-blond hair, a band of freckles across his cheeks, a scruffy beard on a weak chin. He had a negligent, / don't give a shit look in his eyes and wore a little self-satisfied, sharklike smile. Cree could readily imagine him befriending a child, then turning into a thrill-seeking persecutor.

  Then, whoops, another apology and a third slide. This one was a classic dirty old man with a lecherous face, gaps in his teeth, narrowed eyes that told of a lifetime of evil thoughts and sick deeds. By now the class had clicked to the ruse, but to drive the point home Dr. Danforth showed four more slides, letting the class read evil into every man's features.

  In fact, Dr. Danforth told them, none of the men were child molesters: The businessman type was a past president of Harvard, and the surfer dude was himself, twenty years ago.

  His point was that appearance could never serve as a basis for either law-enforcement action or psychological assessment. Anyone could appear to have sinister, criminal, or psychopathological characteristics if seen with the proper mental prejudice; scrutinized with a bias, any life story or life style could suggest a criminal history or antisocial tendency.

  After class, Cree and some of the other students joked about it: "Hey, but maybe they all really were child molesters, even Danforth!" They went out for drinks and experimented by studying the other patrons at the bar, easily finding indications that every person present was in fact a sadistic pedophile. They laughed their heads off, but Cree remained unsettled by what she'd found in herself.

  Later, with more context under her belt, she'd learned that appearance did sometimes play a role in the psychology of violence; people with disturbing congenital abnormalities or facial disfigurements resulting from injury did sometimes become psychopaths or sociopaths. Perhaps as outcasts they felt entitled to revenge upon the society that rejected them; or maybe the absence of rewarding human contact impaired development of the sense of empathy that normally suppressed antisocial impulses. In some cases, the original cause of the deformity, whether congenital or injury related, was accompanied by neurological impairments that precipitated violent behaviors.

  Still, it would be completely inappropriate to read anything into Ray Raymond's facial appearance or expressions. Besides, aside from his scars and the defensive stuff around that, he struck her as interesting, appealing—even, in his stranger status and perceptiveness, something of a kindred spirit.

  Or maybe that was just her empathic thing again. Sometimes too much sight could make you blind.

  Cree felt she'd simmered long enough to macerate. She got out of the tub with muscles so relaxed she half expected to sit up right out of her softened flesh.

  "The other night," Bert said, "I don't know what I was thinking. Ben Black's daughter comes to town, I should take her someplace nice."

  "This is pretty seriously nice, Uncle Bert."

  The restaurant he'd chosen was an Italian place in North Beach, just off Washington Square. The waiters wore short-waisted tuxedos; the tables were covered in white linen and each place was set with three wineglasses of different sizes and shapes. Cree was glad she'd dressed up a bit: dark tights, heels, a conservative black skirt, a short embroidered jacket over a silk blouse. Bert looked almost distinguished in a navy blue, double-breasted suit, a red tie actually knotted at his throat, his gray hair combed. The maître d' seated them in a corner table at the end of a gorgeous mural of Venice. Pavarotti sang quietly from hidden speakers, and the deep red-brown woodwork gave off a burnished glow as if it had been polished with hundred-dollar bills.

  "Only thing is, I can't smoke," he lamented. "Most places I go, I say, screw no-smoking regs, I'm a cop, after a while they know me and don't hassle me. But here, for all I know the person I'm offending at the next table is the mayor or the police commissioner, it isn't going to wash."

  Cree chuckled. A waiter appeared with the wine list; Bert looked at it, selected a bottle.

  "So you saw Horace last night," Bert prompted.

  "Yes. No big revelations, but we got the bones washed. What a sweet man! He sure thinks highly of you, Bert. And I learned a lot."

  "Guy definitely knows his field."

  "He pointed out a lot of old injury sites. Bone callus. Some are clearly defensive, but Horace said that the wolfman could have received them while attacking someone."

  "Yeah. Jeffrey Dahmer probably got 'defensive' injuries."

  They nodded. In the silence that followed, Cree felt their conversation stall and st
art to lose cruising altitude. At least this time she had some idea of why it always did so.

  "Listen, Uncle Bert. At some point, we're going to have to talk about personal things. Otherwise it's hanging over us and neither of us can figure out how to talk around it."

  "Around what?"

  "Your daughter, for example," she said gently. "Horace told me about her."

  The waiter returned with the wine, pulled the cork and offered it. Bert waved it away, then impatiently signaled his approval as the waiter tipped a half inch into one of the tulip glasses. Getting the message, the waiter withdrew and let Bert pour.

  "I told your father. He must have not talked about it with your mother, or they didn't tell you, can't blame them. It was no secret, trust me. After a few years it wouldn't go away, so I tried not ever talking about it. That's all."

  "Did that work?"

  His mouth kind of smeared on his face. He tasted his wine.

  "What was her name?"

  "Megan."

  Cree gave him an encouraging smile. "Pretty! Not what I'd think a Guinea from Brooklyn would name his daughter, though. Was your wife Irish?"

  "Chinese. Big extended family here in town. Good people. We just liked the name."

  Cree sipped from her wine, too, the glass blearing Bert's face. "So, do you stay in touch with your ex?"

  "No. Fran remarried, to a Chinese guy. I guess being married to me got her over Big-Nose Devils." He was trying to be funny, but his face looked like death itself as he picked at the tablecloth and then lifted his glass and tossed off his wine. "Could we talk about something else? This was a long time ago. We're supposed to be having a good time here."

  "Of course." She gave it a beat and then miscalculated by prompting, "I just thought—"

  "You want to know what it was like?" His eyes seared at her. "At first it was like I could feel her, I knew she was out there somewhere but I couldn't find her. And what really hurt was, I knew I'd let her down. When she was little and she'd cry in the night, we'd say, 'Don't worry, Daddy's here, Mommy's here, we'll never let anything bad happen to you.' And she'd stop crying, she'd believe us. But we lied, because it turns out we couldn't protect her. I knew, I knew, when whoever it was grabbed her, she was thinking, No, this can't happen, my daddy said there's no such thing as monsters. My daddy is a policeman, my daddy said he'd protect me. But I couldn't. Couldn't find her. Couldn't do anything. I let her down. / lied about the monsters!"