Shadow Man

  My doctor’s voice is calm, and I wish I could smack his stupid silly bald head. “Okay, Smoky, the baby’s crowning! Just a few more pushes and she’ll be out. Come on, hang in there.”

  “Fuck you!” I yell, and then push. Dr. Chalmers doesn’t even look up at me at this. He’s been delivering children for a good long time.

  “You’re doing great, honey,” Matt says. He’s got his hand in mine, and a part of me registers a perverse hope that I’m grinding his bones into powder.

  “How would you know?” I snarl. My head snaps back at the force of the contraction, and I am cursing like I have never cursed before, blasphemous, horrible words to make a biker blush. There is the smell of blood and of the farts that have been escaping as I’ve been pushing. I think, there is no beauty here, and I want to kill all of you. Then the pain and pressure increases, something I would not have thought possible. I feel like my head should be rotating around, I am cursing with such terrible abandon.

  “One more time, Smoky,” Dr. Chalmers says from between my legs, still calm in this maelstrom.

  There is a gushing, sucking sound, and pain, and pressure, and then—she is out. My daughter has emerged into the world; the first sounds she hears are words of profanity. There is a silence, some snipping sounds, and then something that pushes all the pain and anger and blood away. That stops time. I hear my daughter crying. She sounds as pissed off as I had been moments ago, and it is the most wonderful thing I have ever heard, the most beautiful music, a miracle beyond my capacity to imagine. I am overwhelmed, I feel like my heart should stop beating. I hear that sound, and look at my husband, and I begin to bawl.

  “Healthy baby girl,” Dr. Chalmers says, leaning back as the nurses clean Alexa and wrap her up. He looks sweaty, and tired, and happy. I love this man that I wanted to swat just seconds ago. He has been a part of this, and I am thankful, though I can’t stop crying or find the words.

  Alexa was born just after midnight amid the blood and pain and profanity, and that was something you get only a few times in life—a moment of perfection.

  She died after midnight as well, taken back into a womb of darkness from which she would never be reborn.

  I come to, gasping, shaking, and weeping. I am still in the hospital room. Jenny is standing over me. She looks stricken.

  “Smoky! Are you okay?”

  My mouth feels gummy. My cheeks are cracking with the salt of my tears. I am mortified. I shoot a look toward the hospital door. Jenny shakes her head.

  “No one else has been in here. Though I would have called someone if you hadn’t woken up soon.”

  I gulp in air. They are the deep, gulping breaths of post–panic attack. “Thank you.” I sit up, there on the floor, put my head in my hands. “I’m sorry, Jenny. I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

  She is silent. Her tough exterior has faded for a moment, and she looks sad without pity. “Don’t worry about it.”

  These are the only words she says. I sit there gulping air, my breathing getting calmer. And then I notice something. Just as in the dream, the pain of the moment is rushed away.

  Bonnie has turned her head, and she is looking at me. A single tear rolls down her cheek. I stand up, move to her bed, take her hand in mine.

  “Hi, honey,” I whisper.

  She doesn’t speak, and I say nothing more. We just stare at each other, letting the tears roll down our cheeks. That’s what tears are for, after all. A way for the soul to bleed.

  12

  SAN FRANCISCANS DRIVE a lot like New Yorkers: They take no prisoners. Traffic is medium-heavy at the moment, and Jenny is intent on ferocious negotiations with the other vehicles as we drive back toward SFPD. A symphony of honks and curses fills the air. I have a finger stuck in one ear so I can hear Callie as I talk to her on the cell phone.

  “How’s it going at CSU?”

  “They’re good, honey-love. Very good. I’m going over everything with a fine-tooth comb, but I think they covered every base, from a forensic standpoint.”

  “And I take it that they didn’t find anything.”

  “He was careful.”

  “Yeah.” I feel depression knocking, push it away. “Have you checked in with the others? Any word from Damien?”

  “I haven’t had time yet.”

  “We’re almost back at the station anyway. Keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll check in with everyone else.”

  She is silent for a moment. “How’s the child, Smoky?”

  How is the child? I wish I had an answer to that. I don’t, and I don’t want to talk about it right now. “She’s in bad shape.”

  I click off the phone before she can reply, and stare out the window as we travel through the city. San Francisco is a maze of steep hills and one-way streets, aggressive drivers, and trolley cars. It has a certain foggy beauty I’ve always admired, a singularity all its own. It is a mix of the cultured and the decadent, moving fast toward either death or success. At this moment, it doesn’t seem so unique to me. Just another place where murder happens. That’s the thing about murder. It can happen at the North Pole or on the equator. It can be committed by men or women, youths or adults. Its victims can be sinners or saints. Murder is everywhere, and its children are legion. I am filled with darkness right now. No whites or grays, just solid coal pitch-blacks.

  We arrive at the station, and Jenny moves us out of the still-busy river of the street into the more peaceful parking lot belonging to SFPD. Parking is hard to come by in San Francisco—God help anyone stupid enough to try and pirate these spaces.

  We head in through a side door and make our way down a hallway. Alan is in Jenny’s office with Charlie. Both are engrossed in the file in front of them.

  “Hey,” Alan says. I can feel his eyes examining me, taking stock. I don’t acknowledge it.

  “Any word from the others yet?”

  “No one’s talked to me.”

  “You come up with anything?”

  He shakes his head. “Not so far. I wish I could say that the cops here are fuckups, but they aren’t. Detective Chang runs a tight ship.” He snaps his fingers, smiles at Charlie. “Oh yeah—sorry. And her faithful sidekick too, of course.”

  “Blow me,” Charlie replies without looking up from the file.

  “Keep at it. I’m going to call James and Leo.”

  He gives me a thumbs-up, goes back to reading.

  My cell phone rings. “Barrett.”

  I hear James’s sour voice. “Where the hell is Detective Chang?” he snarls.

  “What’s up, James?”

  “The ME won’t start cutting until your little friend shows up. She needs to get her ass over here now.”

  He hangs up on me before I can reply. Asshole.

  “James needs you at the morgue,” I tell Jenny. “They won’t start without you.”

  She smiles a little smile. “I take it the dick is pissed off?”

  “Very.”

  She grins. “Good. I’ll head over there right now.”

  She leaves. Time to call Leo, our rookie. A disconnected musing as I dial: What kind of jewelry does he wear in his ear when he’s not on the job? It rings five or six times before he answers, and when he does, the sound of his voice puts me on alert. It is hollow and terrified. His teeth are chattering.

  “C-C-C-Carnes…”

  “It’s Smoky, Leo.”

  “V-v-v-video…”

  “Slow down, Leo. Catch your breath and tell me what’s happening.”

  When he speaks next, his voice comes out as a whisper. What he says fills my head with white noise.

  “V-v-video of the m-m-m-m-murder. Terrible…”

  Alan is looking at me, concern in his eyes. He can tell that something’s happened.

  I manage to find my voice. “Stay there, Leo. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be there as fast as we can.”

  13

  I REMEMBER THIS area from when I came to visit Annie after her father died. She lived in a to
wering apartment building—again, à la New York state of mind, where the apartments are more like condos, replete with dining rooms and sunken baths. We pull up to the front of the building.

  “Nice place, nice area,” Alan remarks, looking up at it through the windshield.

  “Her dad did okay,” I say. “He left her everything in his will.”

  I look around at this clean, safe area. While no area of San Francisco can truly be called suburban, it definitely has its “nice neighborhoods.” They take you away from the noise of the city, the good ones taking you up high so that you can look out across the bay. There are the old neighborhoods, with their Victorian-style homes, and then there are the areas of new development. Like this one.

  It strikes me now as it did before: No place is safe from the possibility of murder. No place. The fact that it is less expected here than in a slum will make you no less dead in the end.

  Alan calls Leo as we climb out of the car. “We’re in front, son, hang on. We’ll be up in a sec.”

  We head through the front doors and into the lobby. The man at reception watches us as we pour into the elevator, but says nothing. We ride in silence to the fourth floor.

  Alan and I were quiet on the way over, and we are quiet still. This is the worst part of the job for anyone who does it. Seeing the actuality of the act. It is one thing to process evidence in a lab, to peer into a killer’s mind as an exercise. It is another to see a dead body. To smell the blood in a room. As Alan once said, “It’s the difference between thinking about shit and eating it.”

  Charlie is silent and grim-looking. Perhaps remembering last night, turning that knob and seeing Bonnie.

  We arrive at the floor and exit, walk down the hallway and turn. Leo is outside. He’s sitting down, back against the wall, his head in his hands.

  “Let me handle this,” Alan murmurs.

  I nod and we watch as he moves to Leo. He kneels down in front of him and places a huge hand on the young man’s shoulder. I know from experience that as big as that hand is, the touch is gentle.

  “How’re you doing, kid?”

  Leo looks up at him. His face is white and pale. It shines with a greasy sweat. He doesn’t even try to smile. “I’m sorry, Alan. I lost it. I saw it, and then I puked, and I couldn’t stay in there…” His words taper off, listless.

  “Listen up, son.” The big man’s voice is quiet, but it demands attention. Charlie and I wait. As much as we want to get inside and move forward in our jobs, we both have compassion for what Leo is going through. This is a crucial moment for those in our profession. It is the blooding. The point where you peer into the abyss for the first time, where you find out that the boogeyman really does exist and really has been hiding under the bed all those years. Where you come face-to-face with real evil. We know this is where Leo will either recover or find a new line of work. “You think there’s something wrong with you because you got freaked out by what you saw?”

  Leo nods and looks ashamed.

  “Well, you’re mistaken. See, the problem is, you’ve seen too many movies, read too many books. They give you this crazy-ass idea about what being tough means. How a cop is supposed to act when he sees dead bodies or violence, stuff like that. You think you’re supposed to have some smart one-liners on the tip of your tongue, a ham sandwich in your hand, and be all unmoved and shit. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “And if you don’t, then you must be a pansy, and you have to be embarrassed in front of the old-timers. Shit, maybe you’re thinking because you puked you’re not cut out for this line of work.” Alan swivels, looking back at us. “How many scenes did you see before you stopped barfing, Charlie?”

  “Three. No, four.”

  Leo’s head pops up at this.

  “How about you, Smoky?”

  “More than one, that’s for sure.”

  Alan turns back to Leo.

  “Me, it was about four. Even Callie’s puked, though she won’t admit it, since she’s the queen and all.” He squints at Leo. “Son, there’s nothing in life that prepares you for seeing that kind of thing for the first time. Not a damn thing. Doesn’t matter how many pictures you’ve looked at, or case files you’ve examined. Real dead is a whole different game.”

  Leo looks at Alan, and I recognize the look. It’s the look of respect, bordering on worship, that a student gives a mentor. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” They both stand up.

  “You ready to brief me, Agent Carnes?” I make my voice a little stern. He needs it.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He has some color in his cheeks again and looks a little more determined. To me, he just looks young. Leo Carnes is a baby, introduced to murder, now destined to get old before he should. Welcome to the club.

  “Well, go ahead, then.”

  His voice is calm as he talks. “I came over and ran through the initial checks, verifying that there were no booby traps or viruses present. I then did the first thing you always do—I checked to see what file was last modified. It turned out to be a text file named readmefeds.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I opened it up. It contained a single sentence: Check the pocket of the blue jacket. There was no blue jacket I could see, but then I looked in the closet. Inside the left pocket of a woman’s blue jacket, I found a CD.”

  “So you decided to take a look. It’s okay. I would have done the same thing.”

  He continues, encouraged. “When you make a CD, you can give it a title. When I saw the title of this one, I got very interested.” He swallows. “It was named The Death of Annie.”

  Charlie grimaces. “Son of a bitch. Jenny’s going to be pissed that we missed this.”

  “Go on,” I say to Leo.

  “I looked to see what files were on the CD. There was just one. It’s a high-quality, high-resolution video file. It essentially fills the entire CD.” He swallows again. Some of the paleness is coming back. “I clicked on the file, which launched a player, which then played the video. It was…” He shakes his head, tries to get a grip on himself. “Sorry. The killer encoded and created this video. It’s not a complete start-to-finish timeline—that would probably be too big for a CD, in terms of the size of the video—it’s more of a…montage.”

  “Of Annie’s murder.” I say it for him; I know he doesn’t want to have to say it himself.

  “Yeah. It’s—indescribable. I didn’t want to keep watching, but I couldn’t help myself. Then I started puking, and then you called. I left the apartment and I waited outside until you came.”

  “You didn’t puke in the bedroom, did you?” Charlie asks.

  “I made it to the bathroom.”

  Alan claps him on the back with one of those catcher’s-mitt-size hands. If Leo had dentures, they would have gone flying out of his mouth. “See? You do have the stuff, Leo—you kept your head about losing your stomach. That’s good.”

  Leo gives him a sheepish half smile.

  “Let’s go see this,” I say. “Leo, you don’t need to be there if you don’t want to be. I mean it.”

  He gives me a very direct look. It is a surprising mixture of maturity and contemplation. I realize in a flash of insight that I know what he is thinking. He is thinking that Annie was my friend. That if I’m going to go and watch her die, anybody should be able to. I can almost hear his thoughts. His eyes confirm it; they get hard and he gives a determined shake of his head. “No, ma’am. The computer end of things is my job. I’ll do my job.”

  I acknowledge his strength the way we acknowledge things like that—by making nothing of it. “Fair enough. Take us inside.”

  Leo opens up the door to the apartment and we enter. It hasn’t changed much from how I remember it. It’s a three-bedroom layout, with two bathrooms, a large living room, and a great kitchen. Most striking is the fact that Annie is everywhere. She lives through the decor, the essence of the place. Blue was her favorite color, and I see blue in the drapes, a blue vase
, a photograph containing a broad blue sky. The place is classy, it has a kind of effortless quality, without gilt edges or gold leaf. Everything matches, but not in that irritating obsessive-compulsive way, that “keep up with the Joneses” way. It is a study in muted beauty. It is serene.

  Annie always had that gift. The ability to accessorize without having to think about it. Everything, from the clothes she wore to the watch on her wrist, was always stylish, without being arrogant or frumpy. Elegant without being ostentatious. It was instinctive for her, and I always viewed it as evidence of her inner beauty. She did not choose things because of how others would see them on her. She chose them because they called to her. Because they were right. Because they fit. The apartment is a reflection of this. It is covered in the ghostly dust of Annie’s soul.

  But there is another presence here as well.

  “You smell that?” Alan asks. “What is it?”

  “Perfume and blood,” I murmur.

  “The computer is this way,” Leo says. He leads us into the bedroom.

  Harmony dies in here. This is where he did his work. It is a conscious opposite of Annie’s unconscious beauty. Here someone strove for dissonance. To break the serenity. To destroy something exquisite.

  The carpet is stained with blood, and my nose picks up the strong, rotten odor of decay, mixed with the smell of Annie’s perfume. They are two opposites: one the smell of life, the other the stench of death. An end table is overturned, a lamp smashed. The walls have been scratched, and the whole room feels jagged and wrong. The killer raped this room with his presence.

  Leo sits down at the computer. I think of Annie.

  “Go ahead,” I tell him.

  Leo pales. Then he moves the mouse and positions the arrow over a file, double-clicking it. A video player fills the screen, and the video begins. My heart almost stops as I see Annie.

  She’s nude from head to toe and handcuffed to the bed. Bile rises in my throat as I think of myself with Joseph Sands. I force it back.