Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

  "Hey! Cree! Fantastic!"

  Ray stood at the top of the facade wall, forty feet almost directly above her, shirtless against the bright sky.

  "We have to talk, Ray," she called.

  "Sure! But I'm in the middle of a tricky job. Can you wait for like an hour, or—"

  "No."

  "Then you'll have to come up."

  He disappeared before she could answer. Out of view, he made a short, sharp whistle, and the dogs went silent.

  When he opened the door, Ray was wearing beat-up fatigues, rubber boots, and work gloves. His pants and bare chest were smeared with black smudges. Now that he was closer, she could see that he was superbly muscled, the hard, squared-off build of a triathalon competitor.

  "I'm in the middle of resurfacing my roof," he explained. He grinned broadly and made no attempt to avert the scarred side of his face.

  Cree didn't return the smile. "I was foolish enough to hope you'd quit harassing Uncle Bert. But now he's got werewolves popping up on his computer."

  Ray stepped back and turned. "We'll have to talk while I work, Cree. Sorry. I have to finish it while there's still daylight. The stuff sets up if you leave it too long, it's a big mess."

  She tried not to show any reluctance as she strode past him and into the warehouse. It was huge, empty and echoing, a rubble-strewn, brick and concrete cavern without any sign of any domestic presence. But Ray led her to a subsection cut into the rectangle, and when he opened the door Cree was surprised to enter a nice kitchen with hardwood cabinets and glistening appliances. The living room was tastefully decorated with yellow oak floors, white-painted exposed brick, a good dhurrie rug, a white leather couch.

  Ray continued ahead of her up a flight of stairs against the far wall of the living room. "There's a ladder up through my roof. You have a problem with heights?"

  "Not that I know of."

  They came out into a big open room as high as it was wide, lit by tall, narrow windows. Near the top of the stairs, a couch, coffee table, bookshelf, and some potted lemon trees made a little island of domestic comfort, but the rest of the room was all bare brick and functionality: computers and photo equipment on long work tables, huge abstract paintings on the walls, racks of empty frames, rolls of canvas. Ray's studio, she realized, where he'd created his morphs.

  A metal ladder was anchored on the bay-side wall, rising thirty feet to a platform like a fire escape landing just below the ceiling. From the platform a shorter ladder angled up to a little square of open sky. Ray went right to the main ladder and began climbing.

  "I sent those pop-ups along with the first three," he called back. "Like two weeks ago. They're basically just adware, with a sneaky little activation delay."

  "They've really pissed him off."

  "They don't do any system damage. And they're easy to get rid of, all he has to do is—"

  "He's not getting rid of them. He's saving them in case they end up having evidentiary value."

  Ray stopped, hanging easily halfway between roof and floor as he frowned down at her. " 'Evidentiary'? Of what?"

  "That's what we better talk about."

  "Huh. Yeah, sounds like we better." He continued up.

  Cree watched him from below, legs and rear and the foreshortened rippling wedge of back. She couldn't help but think he'd thrown her some kind of a challenge, a test of her motivation or mettle. Or maybe not. Whichever, this was some kind of turning point, because she either said to herself, I don't trust him, I don't want to talk to him that badly, and I don't trust myself to climb up there. Or she said, I trust him enough, this is important, and I can handle it.

  Ray reached the platform, clambered over to the other ladder, and disappeared through the hole into the sky. Cree considered the ladder for another moment, then put her hands on the flaking iron of the first wrung and began to climb.

  When she emerged from the trapdoor, Ray was thirty feet away on a vast expanse of flat roof, shoving a push broom through a thick tarry puddle. Ten or twelve metal cans of asphalt sealer, some empty, were ranged along the edge, where a knee-wall rose above the roof surface. Ray had sketched out a square in fresh black, about forty feet on a side, and was working his way back toward the hatch. The muscles of his shoulders and arms striated as he worked, his belly divided into sharp squares now sheened with sweat. She pondered the tar buckets and the nearly superhuman effort it must have required to get them to the roof.

  "Nice up here, isn't it?" he said, not looking up.

  "Very nice."

  Beyond Ray's building, a paved yard the size of a football field ended at a narrow canal on the south and the open water of the bay to the east. In the sunset light, the distant buildings of Oakland seemed to smolder, pink-orange and heat rippled. Far out in the bay, a cargo ship burdened with containers in faded rainbow colors pushed a rim of froth through the metallic waves; along the near shore, a ragged line of gantries dwindled away south into smog-muted distance. Cree went to the knee-wall, looked down at the littered field where the dogs roamed, then stepped quickly back, amazed that Ray had stood so casually on such a precipice.

  "I just do the part over my quarters," he called. "If I had to do the whole thing I'd go bankrupt as well as crazy. Anyway, the rest, I don't care if it leaks."

  "Ray, we—"

  "A little preface here," Ray said. "I don't think the way other people do. I never have. I don't see the world or people or my own actions in a very conventional way"

  "The fact hasn't escaped my notice."

  "It's just what you said, the dissonance between self and the rest of humanity, the inner and outer? For me, the way it comes across is, the harder I try to be clear and straightforward, the more I sound like I'm trying to be scary or mysterious. If it bugs you, give me a kick in the pants or whatever, but don't hold it against me. Okay?"

  "I'll remember that. So here's my preface. This isn't a social occasion, Ray I'm just trying to prevent something stupid from happening. I came to convince you of the seriousness of the situation you've created."

  He tipped another dollop of tar from a barrel, then began spreading and smoothing the glistening black spill. She couldn't help but admire the good lines of limb, the forceful grace of movement, his genuine pleasure in the day and the work. But in the angled sunlight she could see that his whole torso was etched with a skein of innumerable fine scars, paler lines just visible against the tan, and she felt a prickle of wariness on her skin.

  "Bert knows it's you who sent the e-mails."

  Ray glanced up, shrugged, went back to work. "So I spammed him. So sue me."

  "It's more complicated than that. He still hates you for getting him in trouble back then. He blames you for his divorce. And he's considering you a suspect for some . . . for another crime from around fourteen years ago."

  "What?!" He stopped, straightened, rested his broom.

  Cree had watched his response carefully, looking for the microsecond of calculation or concealment in the eyes. His incredulity seemed perfectly genuine.

  "Back when I was at UC Berkeley, a woman I had dated knew somebody who was murdered. They questioned me about it. Is that what he's talking about?"

  "That, and some others. Including several unsolved dog-attack deaths."

  For a moment Ray seemed struck speechless. "The guy's really gone nuts," he muttered at last.

  "Yes, that's about what he thinks of you."

  "And what do you think?"

  "I must be hoping he's wrong."

  He searched her face, a penetrating pale blue gaze. The sun glistened on the tight surface of his facial scars.

  "Right," he said. "Jesus. You're a brave lady. Coming out to see a guy who's a scar-faced weirdo at best and who just might be a violent psycho. Up on the roof, too."

  He continued his inspection of her eyes as if looking for something specific inside her head, then grunted softly and smiled.

  "Thanks," he said.

  31

  THE SUN'S DISK rested
briefly on the rooftops to the west, then started to slip behind them. Ray worked his way back toward the trapdoor, drawing the ring of tar closer. Between gusts of wind, the oily stink of it surrounded Cree, not unpleasant. Ray looked happy—no, joyous, she thought—as if the hard work and height and company suited him. Cree could feel it herself: the cleansing sunlight, blinding at such a low angle, the big sky overhead, the enormous but muted energy of the city all around.

  "You mentioned me to Bert, right?" Ray asked. "That's what got him thinking about me?"

  "I didn't know you two had . . . any previous contact. I was just chatting about my day."

  "So now what? My sending him those e-mails proves I'm a killer. Got any ideas about how to defuse his interest?"

  "Not at the moment."

  "Terrific. Fucking terrific." Ray frowned as he worked. Cree crossed her arms and took a turn around the shrinking square of untarred roof, getting chilly. Neither said anything for a few minutes. The low beams had turned Ray into a half orange-gilded, half blue-shadowed man, and he was hurrying now, working against time.

  "Can I ask you a question?" he called. "On a somewhat different topic?"

  "Maybe."

  "You're . . . normal, Cree. You look it, anyway. What you said in the plaza, one thing on the outside, one on the inside—I work on that stuff all the time. You can see why. But why should an attractive, smart, agreeable person feel that way?"

  "Everybody has some dissonance there," she hedged.

  Ray nodded, accepting the point, accepting that she wasn't ready to confide in him.

  She found a screwdriver and levered open the last remaining bucket, then decided the best help she could offer would be to get out of the way. She climbed back through the trapdoor to the platform and down the narrow ladder to the floor.

  She turned on a few lights and wandered in Ray's studio. What she'd taken for abstract paintings turned out to be hugely enlarged X-rays, all of the head and neck. In some, she could still make out the faint ghosts of fleshly features: lips, a nose, an ear. But Ray's focus was obviously the bones, cropping the images until they became abstract patterns of graduated light against the deep-space emptiness of the dark film. She'd learned enough anatomy from Horace to name some of the features: an orbit, with just enough of the nasal aperture to reveal what it was, became a portal to a vast and mysterious interior. The zygomatic arch, that delicate bridge of bone just behind the eye, enlarged so it became a cathedral's flying buttress, a lovely soaring arc. A left lateral cranial view, cropped horizontally so that the segments of cervical spine became a short, vertical band along the far right that created a rhythmic counterpoint to the horizontal palisades of the teeth. There were a few MRIs among the larger pieces, computer-generated whole-head images in overbright colors, not as successful.

  Another piece of the Ray puzzle, certainly, but what did it imply? The subject matter could be seen as morbid, but back east she'd known artists who painted nothing but dead babies or women wrapped in barbed wire, and got big write-ups in the Globe or the Times for it. And the compositions were really quite wonderful, reverently turning the arcs and planes and articulations of the skull into architectural forms. Having worked with the wolfman's bones, she could understand the fascination.

  Wliat's inside, she decided. That was the central motivation she sensed in all her encounters with Ray: He was compelled to look through exteriors, celebrating the secret world of unseen forms. In fact, the X-rays seemed to probe even further than the bones, turning them into partial transparencies that revealed infinite space just beyond.

  What's inside? What's beyond inside? She came at it from a very different angle, but her own motivations were very much the same.

  The windows had gone gray by the time the hatch cap thumped into place and Ray started down the ladder. He crossed the room and she thought to ask him about his work, but when she looked over at him, she was startled to see him changed. His exuberance was gone, replaced by a strained weariness. His face was red and tar streaked, eyes bulging, the weals on his face purpling.

  "Sorry you had to wait. I appreciate it."

  "Are you okay?"

  "Ah, just a headache. The sun in my eyes, my head's full of spots. The fumes. I'll be fine. Listen, I know we've still got stuff to talk about, but I have to go get this shit off of me and take a shower. I am also starving. Are you up for talking over dinner somewhere? I know this isn't a social occasion, but if I don't eat something I'm going to keel over."

  Cree thought about it briefly. "Don't keel over," she told him.

  They took her car, Ray giving directions. He still looked tired, but a shower and clean clothes revived him considerably, and by the time they made it to the restaurant he had mostly rebounded. They ordered a bottle of wine and plates of exotic noodles that combined food traditions from three continents. It was a pleasant little place on a side street in Noe Valley, only a few minutes drive from Ray's.

  "I had an idea for you about the paradoxical aging indicators," Ray said. "Did Horace explain them?"

  "The teeth and palate? He mentioned them yesterday."

  "Fascinating, isn't it? That this guy's most 'wolfish' characteristics, the lengthening of the maxillary bones, nasals and mandible, and the growth of his big canines, occurred in a rather sudden, rather late, developmental phase."

  "Suggesting to you that he was a bona fide werewolf?"

  "No." Ray chuckled. "I was thinking of how to narrow your search parameters. His birth date was probably around 1866, but you're most likely to find records of him when his more extreme features developed. That's when he would really have become an oddball—would really have been noticed. Probably late eighties, early nineties."

  "Good point."

  "And I had another idea that might help you locate records." Ray's brightness was returning fast, and he seemed pleased with himself as he sipped some wine, gazed through it at the candle, tasted it again. "It has to do with who would have noticed him or cared about him enough to leave a record of him."

  "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "Well, he was a freak, a monster. Think about it—the average person on the street would have reacted to him with, what . . . avoidance, revulsion, fear, derision. But some kinds of people would have had other responses, dependent on their outlook. Hucksters, sleazy showmen, they'd have wanted to exploit him to make a buck. Doctors and scientists would have had a clinical interest, would've wanted to study him—or help him. He would've been a natural object of suspicion and accusation, so the police might have paid attention to him. He'd have elicited compassion in those inclined to be compassionate, and spiritual and moral concern from religious people."

  "Pretty astute social psychology."

  "But then I was thinking, you have to think about the era—how the Victorians would have reacted to him. It was a different time, beliefs were different, ideas were in flux. If he did look like a wolfman, there'd be the werewolf mythology to deal with."

  Cree's cell phone went off in her purse, and seeing it was Bert, she apologized to Ray and took the call. He was just checking in, he said. He sounded distracted, fumbling for what to say, and she wondered how much he'd had to drink. Conscious of Ray's presence, she arranged to meet with him tomorrow and hung up as quickly as she could.

  "Bert?"

  "Bert."

  "How would Uncle Bert like it if he knew you were consorting with the enemy?"

  "Nobody's the enemy! I don't know. I don't know how to fix this, but I'll damned well figure it out."

  Their food came, and Ray tucked into his noodles with enthusiasm. Cree found the flavors agreeable, but she had no appetite. Bert's call had brought the whole problem back. The look in his eyes as they'd walked on Bryant Street had spooked her—for all his gritty charm and offhand moments of grace, Bert had an opaque place inside him, a walled-off core that she could not see into.

  "Keep going," she prompted. "You were talking about how people thought of werewolves in the 1880s."
br />   After seeing the wolfman's bones, Ray had bought a couple of books on lycanthropy, and Cree had read up on the subject after her visit to the Southwest, trying to learn more about the tradition of Navajo Wolves. They spent the next half hour comparing notes, listing kinds of werewolf. There was the Hollywood variety, a make-believe of sudden transformation, Jack Nicholson suddenly sprouting hair and fangs and overwhelming sex appeal. But that was just a celluloid update of old folktales, widespread for thousands of years, which in turn were based on the really ancient tradition of shamans and priests seeking animal forms to gain animal powers. It was a resonant symbolic idea, but not only that. Modern anthropological research into therianthropy, animal-man combinations or transformations, showed that present-day shamans took herbs and animal glandular extracts containing powerful psychoactive chemicals that did indeed radically change their thinking and behavior.

  The 1600s and 1700s saw a rash of trials of admitted, self-proclaimed werewolves, such as the Gandillon family, Gilles Gamier, and Peter Stump. Today they'd have been called serial killers, but the era lacked a scientific or psychological perspective to describe psychopaths who murdered and mutilated multiple victims. It would have been too distressing, anyway; people preferred to externalize the cause of such gruesome acts, blame them on a supernatural process and an animal shape.

  With advances in science and psychology, perspectives changed. In the 1700s and 1800s came the psychiatric lycanthropes, people believing themselves to be werewolves and acting out wolfish behaviors. It was practically a fad diagnosis among medical professionals during the wolfman's lifetime, and didn't fully fade from medical literature until the 1960s. Now it was just diagnosed as schizophrenia, with a lupine delusional focus.

  Cree drank the last of her wine and poured another half inch. The restaurant was tastefully New Agey, with soft lighting, candles, a string quartet playing over the speakers, impressionistic floral paintings on the walls. The dozen or so other customers were mostly couples, chatting quietly, laughing, holding hands. Ray talked with enthusiasm, as if completely unaware of how strange and dark their subject was in this context. Comparing notes on werewolves. And yet he was right, she needed to consider this. In the 1880s, scientific perspectives were just starting to take hold and were usually wildly inaccurate. The average person would probably have seen the wolfman through the lens of the old superstitions and would have felt an instinctive, visceral fear of his strangeness.