Wednesday 9/24
“THIS PRIEST IS THE MOTHER LODE,” PAUL TOLD NINA THAT AFTERNOON, calling on the phone from San Francisco, leaning against his newly repaired car, which he had just retrieved from the nearest garage for the princely sum of sixteen hundred fifty dollars. “I’ve told you what he said, now let me tell you what he didn’t say. What he didn’t say is that Alex Zhukovsky spilled his guts to him, and both he and Zhukovsky know something Krilov wants to know. I get the impression that Krilov is going to pick one or the other to go after. And he didn’t follow Alex.”
“He drove off?” Nina asked.
“Yeah. But maybe only around the block.”
“I’ll send Wish over to Alex Zhukovsky’s place. He lives in Carmel Highlands on Fern Canyon Road. If Wish sees Krilov hanging around, he can call the police.”
“What are they gonna arrest him for? Loitering? If he sees Krilov he should tail him, and if Krilov tries a break-in or anything, then he can call.”
“I should call Alex Zhukovsky,” Nina said.
“And say what? We don’t know diddly-squat. It’s a feeling. They’re all such liars. The priest-what’s he up to? He should be ashamed.”
“Let’s subpoena him, just in case,” Nina said. “Do you have a spare subpoena in your car?”
“Sure do. Issued and signed. So what do I do now? Serve his ass and come home? Or stick around?”
“I need you up there. One more night, okay?”
“I’ll get a decent hotel room tonight, then. Last night’s Travelodge was more like a mosh pit,” Paul said. “Hear the bells? He’s conducting some kind of service as we speak, so I can get away for a few minutes. Nina. How long should I stay?” A wind had kicked around the corner and he thought longingly about his leather jacket, which of course he had left at the condo.
“We’ll decide in the morning. I’m frustrated, Paul.”
“Of course you are. You miss my warm body.”
Nina let out a laugh, then said, “I mean about the case. Jaime’s just as frustrated. He’s running this prosecution without two pieces of information that would help it make sense: why bury Christina in her father’s grave? And what motive did Stefan Wyatt have to kill her?”
“Alex and his father-confessor know,” Paul said. “Driving up here, following him, I couldn’t make up my mind. I made Zhukovsky as the killer of his sister, but it’s a deep situation, and Krilov could be a professional.”
“Because he broke your window?”
“Because of how he broke it. Quickly and without a second thought. Leaving me a note, for Pete’s sake.”
“Be careful, Paul,” Nina said. “I-I’m thinking of you.”
“I’m always careful, honey.” He closed the phone and walked back, thinking, Man, are we ever tiptoeing around our situation. He and Nina seemed to have arrived at an implicit understanding not to deal with their relationship right now, but Paul was damn lonely these days and sick of it. They needed to clear the air somehow soon.
Across the street from the cathedral he spied a bakery with signs in Cyrillic. Inside, he bought himself a roll and coffee and sat at a small table watching the golden doors while babushkas came in and went out with bread in their shopping bags, as if he had just been transported via magic carpet to Novgorod.
The bells rang again and the people came out of the cathedral, older people mostly, Father Giorgi doing his thing with the bowing and the chatting and the hand holding. The big doors closed. Traffic roared up and down Geary, and the wind blew litter down the wide avenue.
“Got a paper?” Paul asked the bored woman at the counter. She produced one that said “Npabga,” or so it seemed to Paul. “Pravda,” she said. “Truth. You read Russian?”
He passed on the news, although a little truth wouldn’t have gone amiss. It was going to be a long afternoon.
At five, another church service inspired what appeared to be the same people going in and out, and a different priest. Paul entered, inhaling the incense, standing with them for a few minutes as the prayers went on. He saw no sign of Father Giorgi. He felt jumpy. You needed two to stake out a tango for more than a few hours. He needed exercise, a chase, something.
Otherwise, left with only a heavily thumbed real-estate throwaway and his own thoughts to amuse himself, he would brood about Nina, which he didn’t want to do. She would never believe he could give her the room she needed to be herself, and in truth, he wondered himself sometimes. He did fight a wolf urge to gobble her up. He wanted to protect her, which she hated. He had done awful things for her, which he did not regret, but which had left permanent, unfortunate stains on his soul. How many times had he asked her to marry him now, three? More?
She had the ring. He had worked the script. But Nina didn’t answer. Time barreled along, and still she did not answer.
And maybe he didn’t have the heart to hear her excuses anymore.
Man, he was tired of being a good boy all the time. He had tried and tried with this woman, and all he got was yanked, mostly not in a good way. In his younger days, he might have stopped into a bar looking for a healthy, all-out brawl, just to remind himself who he really was. He was in that frame of mind.
Disgusted at his lack of progress on every front, he went back outside, crossed the street again, walked down to Anza to check on his car, and found a ticket.
Now he needed a bathroom. The street grates didn’t look too inviting. He walked rapidly back to Geary and down the block found a sushi place where he ordered ebi to go and took care of his human needs. Bearing his white paper sack of sushi, he headed back toward his observation post.
The bakery closed and the bar next door opened, and Paul found a place by the street window. Traffic increased, then died away as dusk came and the streetlights came on. By now Paul could have drawn the cathedral by heart. It was inordinately beautiful, sublime, and a saint had lived there. How comforting to have all the rules divinely received, so you didn’t have to question and test and doubt ever again.
He began to ponder his own upbringing as he drank his Coors. His parents still lived nearby, and so did his sister. He should give them a call, go see them while he was in town, but he knew he wouldn’t. No time, on a job, all the old reasons. Excuses.
He had been raised in the Mission District, just down Geary and a few miles south. His parents had insisted he attend Sunday school. The dusty room reserved for children of the faith contained a blackboard, some frayed books and missionary magazines, a stack of Bibles, and a map of missionary activities, which Paul studied with the obsessive interest of one confined in a place one does not want to be. Sunday after Sunday he puzzled out the names: Celebes, shaped like an octopus; Sumatra; Burma; Cebu; fabulous jungly places he would go to someday.
It had been a long time since he had thought about those youthful stirrings of travel fever, and longer still since he had been a believer. He considered the stops along the way, and thought on the whole he could never go back.
A black Infiniti cruised by. Krilov! Paul ducked, then took a cautious look out the door. Nothing new; parked cars, the restaurants spilling out customers, the cathedral domes gleaming in the streetlights.
He gave Krilov a couple of minutes, which he was later to regret, before venturing across the street and up the stairs to the main door, which was locked again. Hastening his steps, he went around the corner on the right, but the subsidiary doors looked locked, too.
Again Paul gave it time. He didn’t want to be standing in the open if Krilov was still parking half a mile away.
From far away, Celebes maybe, he thought he heard a shout. No, it was from inside the church. He made a sudden decision and started trying the side doors, but they were all locked.
Then he saw a floor-level window, the rusty grillwork pulled aside, glass shattered along the asphalt beneath. Krilov was unbelievably decisive and fast. Paul pulled off his sweater and wrapped his hand and probed around the dark hole, decided it felt big enough and safe enough, and snaked his way in.
Blackness, some sort of small room. He smelled the pungent church incense, bumped into a hard cot, and found the light by the door.
He was in a tiny cell-like space containing a cot, a plastic-topped desk, and a wooden chair. On the wall above the bed he saw a double silver cross with the same curious slanting line at the bottom, the cross of the eastern orthodox churches. Some black robes hung on a hook. On the table two lit candles illuminated tin cans full of flowers. Incense burned. Propped on the table was a large photograph of a heavily bearded man wearing thick glasses, and a gold-rimmed black ikon of the Virgin Mary.
“Sorry,” he muttered to the dead saint in the picture. He pulled on the sweater-the room was deathly cold-patted his shoulder holster, and listened.
Sobbing, coming from deeper within.
He turned the doorknob and found himself in a long dark hall with shabby carpeting, some sort of light at the end where another door came in. The sobbing sounds came from there.
Paul edged down the hall, thanking whomever for the carpeting that muffled his footsteps. At the edge of the open door at the end he hesitated briefly, then stooped and very swiftly looked in and back out again.
Father Giorgi was doing the sobbing, a quiet, resigned kind of crying. Kneeling, he faced the door, eyes closed, beard sticking out, head pulled way back by Krilov, who held a long wicked knife to his throat. Krilov spoke in a low insistent voice, the voice of one who is extorting information, but the language was Russian and Paul had to stop that knife. He pulled out his Glock, stepped in, and said, “Drop it!,” holding the gun in both hands, in position, ready to blow Krilov away if the knife moved.
Krilov’s lips parted and his eyes widened. Father Giorgi’s eyes popped open and he flung himself back convulsively, knocking Krilov off balance. The priest leaped up and flung open a small door on the other side of the room and ran for his life, Krilov only steps behind him, and Paul tearing along behind Krilov.
They ended up in an alley between the school yard and the church, but by the time Paul found the two other men again, Krilov had slammed Giorgi against a wall. Without pausing he leaned down and reached a muscular arm around the priest’s neck and pulled him tightly to him. The knife was back in place before Giorgi could let out more than a surprised grunt and before Paul could get a clear shot.
Krilov dragged the priest to his feet, Giorgi’s bulky body covering all but four inches of his round head, white-blond hair, one eye, a glimpse of a once-broken nose. He began edging the priest toward Paul. Paul didn’t move, but Giorgi jerked again, resisting, and the knife sliced smoothly across the priest’s throat.
The priest’s eyes widened. Then they closed and he sagged. Blood flowed from the long slice, down the neck and onto the black cassock. That was good, it wasn’t spurting, maybe he hadn’t hit an artery. “Back off!” Krilov yelled from behind the priest. The light was bad and Paul couldn’t take the chance. He lowered the gun. Krilov pushed Giorgi at Paul. Paul caught him, and Krilov ran for the street, disappearing around a corner, fast and low.
Where the hell was help? Paul let out an enraged yell, realizing he couldn’t follow. He let Giorgi down gently and took off his sweater. He pushed the two flaps of neck skin together first, then wrapped the sweater around Giorgi’s wound. Pushing against it with what he hoped was enough pressure to keep Giorgi alive, but not enough to strangle him accidentally, he called for an ambulance on his cell phone.
Giorgi was coming around. “Hang on, Father,” Paul said. Paul got him up, propping his head against the wall, thinking a better position, gravity, hell, what did he know about all this blood except that neck wounds could bleed profusely, and he had an idea that Sergey might not have nicked the priest if he hadn’t startled him. As the sirens got loud, Giorgi opened dry lips and said, “Am I going to die?”
“Relax. The ambulance is here.” From somewhere in the cassock the priest’s hands produced some beads and he began mumbling prayers. Finally, another priest came rushing out of the church. Wailing at what he saw, he pushed Paul away to attend to Giorgi. Giorgi was now fully conscious and Paul saw to his relief that the bloody sweater didn’t seem to be getting any more catastrophically soaked.
Paul and the other priest stayed at Giorgi’s side as the paramedics slid him into the ambulance, the one thing that whole day that Paul did absolutely right, because just before they shut the doors, Giorgi pulled off his oxygen mask. “Warn her,” he said, voice gurgling on his own blood.
“Who?”
“The woman with the bones.”
“Who? What do you mean?”
“She kept samples, Alex told me. I had to tell…”
“I’ll take care of it, buddy.”
But Giorgi didn’t hear. His eyes closed and the doors closed, too.
Dr. Ginger Hirabayashi returned from her eight P.M. appointment two hundred dollars poorer, with her newly rhubarb-red waif hair a quarter inch shorter than it had been, soft around the face, with stiff spikes that radiated like sunbursts from her skull. She admired it in the reflective glass doors leading into the boring building in North Sacramento where she ran her forensics lab.
“Hey, Doc,” the security guard at the desk said, checking her out. “I like it, although my wife might feel moved to give you a word of motherly advice about that color.” A retired cop, he still had the brush mustache he had worn in younger days, only the originally firm brown jaw had a fleshier edge, and the once-dark hair was a spongy white. He pushed a clipboard toward her to sign.
“Hi, Phil. Tell her my mother does that for her.” She signed, then kissed her palm and flipped it toward the video camera screwed into a high corner near the elevators that faced the doors. “You awake up there, Dick?”
A long pause. The image of a young man with tousled black hair and whisker-bruised cheeks appeared on the monitor on Phil’s desk. “Of course I’m awake,” said the tinny speaker. His slow words echoed off the marble walls in the darkened atrium.
Phil and Ginger rolled eyes at each other. “Finish that paper on Milton yet, Dick?”
“Turned it in this morning.”
“Ever consider studying a real subject, the kind of thing that might get you a real job someday, like, say, pathology?”
“The smells coming out of your lab say it’s not for me.” The video clicked off.
“They ought to fire that guy,” Phil muttered as she pushed the clipboard back toward him.
“Helps to be the landlord’s son. Anyway, we’ve got you, Phil. He’s just dressing.” She didn’t care if Dick was listening. He hated the job, and didn’t mind saying so.
“What you doing in so late, anyway?”
“What do you think?”
“Hard to imagine what’s so goldang urgent about dead people,” he said, “that it should keep you up at night.”
Ginger walked past his desk, hit the elevator button, and waited, listening to the elevator moving through space without giving a hint of its whereabouts. A clunk, and the doors opened abruptly. She got in. More mirrors inside gave her a chance to adjust her blue denim miniskirt. She liked it riding low. Although she worked in a lab, she had never owned a white lab coat. Most of the consultants who shared facilities on her floor, all forensics experts who had formed a consortium a few years ago, did wear a uniform, however: jeans and T-shirts, jeans and dress shirts, jeans and blouses, jeans and tank tops.
Her concession to pragmatism was to wear a red faux-leather apron, the better to keep herself clean as she went about her messy business.
She didn’t like working late but her new girlfriend kept strange hours, and hadn’t been home when she called. She could give Nina’s case some extra time. She touched her new gold ear cuff, which hurt more than her other piercings, and reminded herself to douse it in alcohol when she finally did get home. She knew only too well what an infection looked like when it got to tearing through a body’s system.
She might be here for hours. She stepped out of the elevator into the hall, where she had hung a jolly painting by an artist named Hans Bellmer who liked to mix up female body parts.
Ginger was a forensic pathologist, not a priest or a detective, but it was human to seek explanations, and curiosity had kept her awake a few nights since that meeting with Nina, when her lover hadn’t. If Nina’s client had in fact committed the murder, the crime scene made sense. If he hadn’t, the evidence was somehow misleading them. With the certainty of a person who relied on science and reason for explanations, she felt illumination lurked inside those bits of DNA in the blood from the victim’s apartment, but after two weeks of looking she still had no answer to her questions.
She was supposed to testify for the defense within the next few days, and she had nothing for them yet.
Unlocking the door to her lab with a key, she decided that was exactly why she liked Nina’s jobs. When Nina worked a case, she took the dross nobody else found interesting and, with the fire of a fanatic, made it fascinating, whether you believed or not. So she wasn’t going to let the little matter of an old man’s dry bones stop her from figuring out whatever there was to figure out.
Her lab was large, about eight hundred square feet, which she couldn’t have afforded if she was on her own. She shared it with several other people: Jimmy, the HPLC wizard; Carol, the toxicologist, who did chromatography on suspect drugs and used tissue samples to find traces of poison or drugs; and Kevan, their resident blood-man. He did ELISA’s and radio-immuno assays to determine blood types and find useful proteins that might be present in a sample. She flipped on the banks of color-corrected overhead lights, illuminating slab benches made of black epoxy with a matte finish in varying states of disarray.
Jimmy had her beat in sheer weight of shiny chrome machinery, but only by a little. Ginger’s bench held a clutter of equipment including the thermocycler, which looked like a hot plate or waffle iron, and sat on a toaster-sized computer. A matrix of little holes in the top held bullet tubes that replicated the molecules of DNA. Over one whole wall a narrow strip of windows, black now, looked out into the night. The other walls were an assortment of glass-closed cupboards and open shelving with lips to prevent the chemicals stored in brown glass bottles from jumping off the shelves in an earthquake.
From the wall hung a blue Calder mobile, kept turning by the awesome air conditioning, and on the back wall by the bathroom she had hung another painting, this one by a visionary named Alex Grey who painted human bodies sans skin. Like the Bellmer, it combined technical virtuosity with art, which was exactly what Ginger saw as her goal in her work.
She replaced a bottle of ethidium bromide on the shelf, pushed the thermocycler back, and tidied other miscellaneous things away, making room. On her bench, the two Zhukovsky bones lay neatly on white paper, like museum relics. She flipped on the radio and pulled up a stool and began to work.
She heard a key in the lock, and wondered who else had decided to work late. It could be any one of them. All four were night owls. “Jimmy?” she said, but there was no answer. He probably was wearing his headphones, which the group had insisted upon once they heard the maniacal screeching he called brain candy. She turned back to her notes. What was she missing? Somewhere in this sheaf of material, was there a message that would direct them to an understanding of what occurred on that April night?
Nina believed her client. Ginger believed her evidence. The blood of Stefan Wyatt matched the blood found on the glass fragments. Her tests confirmed it.
As for the bones, the DNA profile of the old man held no unusual medical facts or mysterious anomalies. He was normal, and he was dead of natural causes.
What else was there to find out about him? She put the two sheets side by side, staring at the black-and-white grids until her eyes pulled them together into one stereo image.
Somebody was behind her. Ginger, tuned to danger through countless classes in self-defense and a violence-speckled childhood only another Japanese-American girl who preferred girls to boys could fully imagine, felt her undefended neck prickle. She whipped around, bending a leg back at the same moment, didn’t like what she saw, and kicked with boots on.