Altar of Bones (21 page)

A siren cut through the night. Red and blue lights flashed.

The suddenness of it stopped Zoe for a split second, just long enough for the ponytailed man to turn and hobble away.

She started after him, screaming, “You bastard! Why did you kill her? What do you want?”

Tires squealed. Feet pounded behind her. A man’s voice bellowed, “Police! Both of you, stop right now!”

Zoe—not sure how clear the cops were on who had been assaulting whom—stopped. But the ponytailed man kept going, still half-crouched over, but picking up speed.

Zoe pointed and yelled, “He’s the one. Stop
him
.”

The ponytailed man was running full out now. Zoe started after him again, but one of the cops grabbed her arm. “Oh, no, you don’t, lady. You stay right here until we can get this sorted out.”

Zoe watched as the cop’s partner took off after the ponytailed man. But he was at least fifty pounds overweight and he ran like a Teletubby, and she thought he had a better chance of having a heart attack than of catching the perp.

A
COMPUTER SALESMAN
had called 911 on his cell to report a woman being mugged beneath the overpass, and the patrol car had been idling at a stoplight only a block away over on Ninth Street.

Zoe let the beat cops go on thinking it was a mugging, and she gave a statement saying she hadn’t gotten a good look at her attacker.

After the cops left, she got in her car and looked up Inspector Sean Mackey’s cell number on her PDA. He answered halfway through the first ring.

“It’s me. Zoe. Zoe Dmitroff. I—”

“Where in hell are you? Never mind. I’m parked outside your loft. Get over here—we need to talk.”

She opened her mouth to tell him what he could do with his attitude, then suddenly she was back under the overpass, a chain digging into her throat, cutting off her air.

“Zoe?”

She closed her eyes, drew in a deep breath. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She lived six blocks away, off South Park, in a turn-of-the-century brick bakery that had been converted into lofts and apartments during the dot-com boom. In the nineties the neighborhood had bustled with purple-haired programmers and venture-capital highfliers, but they’d disappeared with the bust. At least now, Zoe thought as she pulled the Babe into a space behind Mackey’s silver Taurus, it was easy to find a place to park.

He had his butt hitched up on the hood, his arms crossed over his chest, a frown on his face.

When she opened her car door, he unfolded his arms and straightened. The frown stayed. “I really ought to slap your ass in jail for interfering with a homicide investigation—” He cut himself off when she walked up to him and he got a good look at her face. “What happened?”

Her throat closed again, the smell of oily metal chain filled her nostrils. She wanted to gag. She started to reach up and touch the raw bruises on her neck, but stopped when she saw how badly her hand shook.

“What?” Mackey said.

“I just met my grandmother’s killer, Mack. Up close and personal.” Then she started laughing a little hysterically because it sounded so crazy. “He tried to strangle me with a bicycle chain.”

Mackey gave her a long, hard look, then reached out and tilted her chin up and to the side to get a better look at the marks on her neck. “You really did meet up with him.”

She nodded, swallowed around the tightness in her throat.

“Tell me.”

She told him, feeling stupid that she’d been distracted and allowed
herself to be taken by surprise. She gave him as many specifics as she could remember, such as the man’s breath had smelled of wine and garlic, and that he spoke English with a Russian accent.

“And his shoes looked Eastern European. You know—thin leather and pointed toes, with the heels kind of built up to make him look taller.”

Mackey nodded, writing it down in his notebook. When she was done, he called in to have an all-points bulletin put out on the suspect, then he took her through it again, and then a third time.

He said, “What’s this altar-of-bones thing he wants so bad that he’s willing to kill and torture an old woman and her granddaughter to get his hands on it?”

“I have no idea. None, Mack. I swear.”

“You sure? No clue?”

She shook her head. “Wait, I just remembered something else. He was wearing this thick brown sweater and there was a rip—no, a cut on the sleeve, and I could see a bloody bandage through it. I hope my grandmother did that. I hope it hurt.”

“Yeah, she did slice him up some,” Mack said. “The ME found a cut on her palm, and blood that wasn’t hers on the front of her coat and on a piece of broken bottle at the scene. We’ll run the DNA through CODIS, but that always takes time.” He thrust his fingers through his hair. “Do you think this could have anything to do with your family business? That this guy is one of your mother’s Russian goons … what’re they called?”

“
Vors
. You don’t seriously think she up and decided yesterday to start whacking her nearest and dearest one at a time? Why would she do that?”

Mackey shrugged. “You tell me. I mean, we’re talking about the woman who had the head of her brother-in-law’s top enforcer delivered to him in a ten-gallon bucket of butter pecan.”

“It was her cousin-in-law. And the head belonged to a guy who’d killed more people than Ted Bundy, but I get your point. I know she can be ruthless, but this afternoon when I showed her the crime-scene photo and told her who it was, she was shocked, Mack. I really think she believed her mother was already dead all these years.”

“She said your grandmother had a husband.” He took his notebook
out of his pocket again and flipped it open. “A Mike O’Malley. You know anything about this stepfather of hers? Your mother claimed not to remember much.”

Zoe shook her head. “Until today I never even knew he existed. But the ponytailed man can’t be him. He’s much too young. Late thirties at the most.”

Mackey said nothing more, only looked at her, and his face softened. “Look, I know you’re beat. But if you could come back down to Homicide and give a description to our sketch artist, maybe go through some mug books?”

Zoe brought her hand up to her neck. She kept thinking she could still feel the chain there. “Can I at least take a shower first? I feel filthy.”

“Yeah, okay. I got a shitload to do back at my desk, anyway. You go on up, shower, have a cup of tea. Or better yet a stiff drink. We can hook up later on the mug book.”

Zoe tried to smile, but her face felt tight. So she nodded instead and started for the door to the bakery. Then she stopped and turned back. “You asked me about the altar of bones earlier, when you first told me about my grandmother. How did you know it was what the killer was after?”

“I didn’t. It was something else …” He hesitated.

“Come on, Mack. I know you guys like to hold things back, but he was going to cut out my eye.”

“Your grandmother lived for a few minutes after she was stabbed. Long enough to talk to the guy who found her. The guy thought she told him, ‘They didn’t have to kill him. He never drank from the altar of bones. I got it back.’ “

“
Kill
him? But that sounds like somebody else was murdered, too. Oh, God, Mack, do you think it’s …?”

“Somebody connected to you? Another long-lost relative, maybe? I don’t know.”

Zoe tried to think what it all meant, but she couldn’t. She was too shaken, too scared. “And how do you drink from an altar of bones? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Nothing about this case makes sense.”

T
HE DOOR TO
the first-floor rear apartment opened as soon as Zoe entered the bakery. A tall Hispanic woman with blue-black hair and a priest’s eyes stepped out into the foyer.

“Hey, Maria,” Zoe said. “How’s it going?”

Maria Sanchez was hardly recognizable from the woman Zoe had saved from a murder rap five years ago. Zoe had been fresh out of law school then, working for the public defender’s office and getting all the dregs cases, the sure losers, when the night-court judge had assigned her Maria’s case: an immigrant woman from Nicaragua, who had put a shotgun to her husband’s sleeping head and blown it off.

Zoe would never forget the first time she’d seen Maria, sitting on the narrow cot in a city jail cell. A woman whose soul seemed more battered than her face. A woman whose eyes were dead. But as they spoke, Zoe realized that what she thought were dead eyes, what she thought was a loss of hope, was in fact its exact opposite. Deep inside her Maria Sanchez had a human dignity so pure and strong, Zoe had never encountered its like before. In spite of all the evidence against her client—fingerprints, gunshot residue, even a well-Mirandized confession—Zoe had never wanted to win a case so badly.

To this day, she wasn’t sure how she pulled it off. She thought that in the end Maria Sanchez herself had most swayed the jury, simply by taking the stand and telling her story. And when Zoe walked out of the courtroom that day with a free Maria by her side, she’d known what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

For years Maria had sold hot tamales and burritos from a handcart on Mission Street during the day and waitressed tables at night, but just last month she’d finally opened up her own taqueria down by the Giants’ baseball park. Usually Zoe wanted to talk and let her hair down with Maria, but not tonight. Not when she felt so battered herself.

“Did that policeman find you?” Maria asked. “He wasn’t after one of your
chicas
, was he?” Maria always called the women Zoe rescued
chicas
no matter what their age.

“No, it’s not that. I was sort of a witness to a case…. Listen, I’m going to go on up. I’m not feeling so hot tonight and—”

“
Sí, sí
, you go on up…. Wait a minute, though. The mailman left something with me for you. He said he found it stuck in the bin beneath the mailbox, where he leaves all the catalogs and magazines. But it never went through the postal system. See—no stamps and no postmark.”

Maria handed her a brown padded envelope the size of a paperback. Zoe’s name and address were printed on the envelope in block letters. There was no return address.

“That’s odd.” Then she thought,
Grandmother
. She hefted the package in her hand. It was light. “Thanks. I gotta go, but I’ll call you later.”

She walked past the elevator—a creaky, old metal cage a person would have to be insane to get into—and headed up the stairs. Her loft was at the top of six flights and usually she liked to see how fast she could run up them before she became winded, but not tonight.

Tonight, she walked slowly, holding the envelope tight, as if it were a magic talisman.

S
HE COULDN’T BELIEVE
it, simply couldn’t believe it. Her front door was wide-open. The lights were on.

She ran into her loft without stopping to think the intruder could still be in there. The place was a shambles, but—

My cats
.

God, oh, God. They were indoor cats, they’d spent their whole lives in this one big room. If they’d gotten out, if someone had hurt them …

She dropped her satchel and the envelope on the floor. She ran to the bed, flung up the quilt that was now dragging on the floor. Two sets of yellow eyes peered at her from deep in the corner. Her own eyes blurred with tears of relief.