Bones of the Barbary Coast (35 page)

"I'm going to make something very clear to you. You will not do any more illegal or violent things to Ray. If you've got a case, you make it by rules of procedure and law. You—"

"Or what? You'll walk away from the wolfman research? Go ahead. We're into something else now."

"I won't be party to anything illegal. I won't sit back and let it happen, either. You're going to figure out legitimate ways to implicate Ray, or you're going to get off his ass. Or so help me, I'll testify against you if something goes bad. You back off this whole thing, starting today. This minute."

"Comes a time when things take on a life of their own, Cree. A momentum."

"You heard me, right?" She glared at him and stalked to the door, then caught the overtone and had to turn back one more time. "Like what, momentum?"

Bert's mood had veered again. He had gone distant and secret and sad. When he answered, his voice was resigned. "Cree. Voice of experience talking here. This kind of thing, it can go from complex to simple real fast. At that point, and I think we're there right now, you don't have the luxury of indecision or weighing two sides or trying to reconcile them. You just have to choose which side you're on."

45

T
HE ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLE, Ray had decided, was that you had to look straight at things—most especially, the things you feared most or found most awful, distressing, or ugly. Then you had to find the courage and strength to celebrate them. That was what reverence meant. You observed and you said,
there is no part of the world I do not revere and honor; I will not turn
my eye from one thing in it.
It was the impulse of all real spirituality and real art: to frame anything at all within a larger scheme of truth and beauty.

Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes it seemed impossible.

He was pleased with the X-ray compositions that sought to look inside and look at the scary things, the human mechanism people generally didn't want to acknowledge carted them around every day. The MRIs were proving to be something of an artistic challenge, still beyond him, and he didn't plan to work on them again. But he thought the visual light photos, though very difficult, were worth another try.

Saturday night was always busy in the emergency room, but down in the basement the morgue and path sections were usually quiet. The UCSF Medical Center was familiar turf for Ray, and he had the keys for the pathology suite. Plenty of patients died on Saturday nights, but they were mostly iced upstairs until daytime, when the path staff were on the job to process them, or just waited on stretchers until the overworked staff could wheel them down.

The Medical Center was a massive hospital complex on Parnassus Street, just below the eastern end of Golden Gate Park. From the street it looked like three blocks of uninterrupted walls and windows, but in fact it included innumerable wings and connectors and tunnels to other buildings. After all these years, Ray could find his way inside blindfolded.

He let himself in through a twenty-four-hour staff door. You couldn't be truly inconspicuous with a face like his, but he had already changed into scrubs and once he was inside he put his ID around his neck. Walk with a brisk, purposeful stride, and no one would bother you.

Down in the basement, he followed the corridor to the T, took the left hallway, then a right. He stopped at the morgue doors, set down his backpack, sorted through his collection of keys, found the right card. The electronic lock snicked and he pushed his way inside.

The room was dark. He found the bank of switches with his left hand, but before he turned on any lights, he stood motionless for a long time.

Always study the dark,
Ray reminded himself.
What do you feel? What do
you sense? What's inside you and what's in this place?
Darkness answered better than bright places. What he felt on his skin was air turned very cool and dry by a heavy-duty climate-control system. What he saw was spacious darkness punctured by a scattered constellation of red and green lights: equipment switches, surge protectors, telephones, intercoms. Silence but for the hum of refrigeration and ventilation equipment, almost below hearing. It felt clinical and sterile and at the ready, an ambience he liked.

Inside, it was different. A sullen throb of pain had started deep in his head, and his thoughts were strange things that seemed to spring out unexpectedly from different places, startling him. The lights of the room were ringed with oily rainbows. His affect seemed irrationally out of synch: He should be tense, worried about what was happening in his head, about being discovered here, about whether he could find the strength to find beauty in the dead, about Bert Marchetti. But instead a paradoxical ebullience bloomed in him, joyously defiant and inappropriate.
Pathology
or inspiration?
Ray wondered.
Wisdom?
Only time would tell.

He flipped several light switches. The fluorescent tubes blinked, then glazed the tile floors and steel tables with a chilly light. He experimented with the switches, killing all the overheads he didn't need and leaving on only those at the far wall. When he'd gotten it right, he crossed over, turned on the lights inside the cold room, and opened the heavily insulated door. He looked over the rows of tables, about half of which held the plastic pods of zippered body bags. He picked a bag at random, set his backpack on the pallet next to it, and slid down the zipper.

He looked at the old man there and his skin contracted. Not a good death, not one he could look at. He pulled the zipper quickly shut. When the bag was sealed again, he felt a little dizzy and for a moment the ceiling lights went eerily chromatic.

The next bag held a middle-aged black woman. She was plump and serene and had not yet received the Y-incision. Her skin was relatively taut and her native pigmentation hid some of the lividity and blanching. He felt bad for her and wondered what had happened to end her. She had short, stylish hair, long earlobes pierced by holes for multiple earrings. Her eyelids were parted enough for a sliver of sclera to appear, like a person catnapping. Even with cheeks sunken in death, she had a pleasant face, lines that suggested she had smiled a lot, had lived a good life. The tag said her name had been Millicent. A lovely name. She scared him.

He wondered what she would say to him if they could have met, and abruptly the words came into his head as if she really had spoken:
Ray, you
fool,
she'd say,
what you doin' looking at my old meat self? You go out and get
movin' while you still got the spark, like I'd damn sure be doin' if I could.

He almost laughed out loud.
Lovely, wise Millicent,
he thought.
Magnificent
Millicent. I'm going nuts, but you're absolutely right.
He gently patted her springy hair, zipped her up again, and picked up his camera bag.

Half an hour later, he turned the van into the picnic area access road, cut the lights, and pulled up just past the closed gates. To avoid police suspicion or a ticket, he rolled his orange disabled vehicle tag into the top of the window, then got out, locked up, and sprinted across the parkway. Deep darkness, no cars in either direction, a clean break from civilization. Tonight the wind was relentless, blowing a hard, cold fog that shook the eucalyptus leaves and tossed the heads of smaller trees. Ordinarily, he'd strip to run, but tonight he didn't feel up for a battle against the cold and left his clothes on. San Bruno wasn't his favorite run, but it was nearby and there were some wonderful places in the little island of wild. When the wind was right the air could be the sweetest in the world, intoxicating, something about the particular mix of vegetation on the slopes.

At first he ran on the Radio Road, but after a couple hundred yards he cut southeast, straight up the steep hill and into the dense, clutching chaparral scrub. He vaulted over waist-high buckbrush and tore through manzanita thickets, sucking in the wet sweet air like a ramjet. One thornbush ripped a gash just above his wrist and it hurt like hell and bled copiously and he was glad for it. In the past he had run this gauntlet all the way to Oyster Cove and back and he was tempted to try it tonight. Run fast enough to leave his face behind, flung away like litter in the wind. Burn it all out, empty out all fear and sadness, hope that wisdom would rush in to fill the vacuum. Maybe tonight the air would relieve the pressure in his head.

But after ten minutes of hard uphill work, he knew he didn't have the juice for it tonight. The admission came with a stab of panic, which he fought down by reminding himself it wasn't unexpected, it was bound to happen, it was hardly the first time. He would not take it as a bad sign or let it dismay him on this beautiful night of insight. You needed resolve and certainty. If you veered and vacillated, you could easily get lost. He had been lost and knew what it felt like: an unending deranged screaming inside. He wasn't going to go there, ever again.

With a last surge he burst out of a thick patch of scrub and came to a stop in a more open area where the long grass had won out against the chaparral vegetation. Softer, here. The lights of the radio tower were blurs of sullen red, a dying dragon's eyes hovering over the invisible crest of the hill. Below, the streets of Brisbane smeared in a barely differentiated dull glow. A few miles straight past that, he knew, somewhere in the dimensionless murk, was his own house, his little earthly haven and shelter. He stopped and caught his breath and stood looking out that way as if he might see himself there, see Ray coming and going and living the life he lived, as if from this safe distance he could put it into perspective.

After another minute he sat down in the rough grass, staring out at the distant glow as he held himself against the cold. He put his mouth over the cut on his wrist and tasted the blood. After a while, one hand strayed to the scars on his face. The familiar, hated topography felt different. Like it had changed in some minuscule way in his thoughts.

Cree, he decided. Touching him there.

That explained tonight's strange emotional tenor. All his anger at Bert had vanished instantly, vaporized by that slight warmth of palm against his cheek. What an amazing person. Really, she was an astonishing gift, serendipitous, just as the wolfman was, as the deer had been, Judd LeGrand, the rest of it. It proved that wisdom was magically provided when you most needed it—if you could recognize it when it came. In another era of his life, he would have wanted to court her and make love with her and live with her forever. But of course now everything was so different.

He tasted the blood on his arm again. He knew that he should stay away from her, that she'd throw him wildly off balance, confuse him. But to run away would be cowardice, would be turning his eye from the world.

Ray laughed out loud at himself, feeling the reckless joy of surrender.
Whatever, Pilgrim,
he told himself.
As if you could resist!
He could not stop himself from loving her, seizing every moment and atom of Cree Black, even though the loss of her would be a terrible thing to endure.

46

S
HE ARRIVED AT the Life Sciences parking lot after sunset to find that, sure enough, the shadows were again full of shifting, waiting things. On her way to the elevator, the building yawned empty all around: a weekend evening, everybody was gone. The long basement corridor and its many doorways seemed to flicker with stealthy movements.

She was glad Skobold was in the lab when she came in. He had already wheeled the wolfman's pallet out into the big room and was working on the cranium.

"We're approaching my absolute favorite phase of reconstruction," he told her.

Yet he looked anything but enthusiastic as he set himself up with a metal mixing bowl and an electric eggbeater. He explained that earlier he had painted a layer of separating compound onto the skull and was now about to coat it with alginate, a seaweed-derived compound that would dry quickly to a flexible mold. He opened a box of powder and measured it into the bowl, then filled a pitcher with water and poured some onto the mound. He turned on the mixer and stirred thoroughly, adding water occasionally, turning the alginate into a pale, creamy mass. When the consistency was right, he began painting and puddling it onto the skull. For all the obvious skill in his hands, his movements seemed tentative, indecisive.

"Horace?" Cree asked finally. "You okay?"

His hands jerked as if she'd jarred his elbow. "Odd that you should ask. I was about to ask you the same question."

"Well, there have been some developments that—"

"Yes, I know. I know because I received very troubling phone calls from both Bertram and Ray Ray called at three thirty in the morning, very upset, to tell me what he found when you and he returned to his house last night. Then this afternoon Bertram called me. He feels I have betrayed him by associating on friendly terms with Ray all these years, not telling him. He was in a towering rage. Truly apoplectic."

"If he called this afternoon, he must have been pretty drunk, too."

"Yes, that, too. And I have learned to be wary of his heavier drinking phases."

"So what are we going to do about this?"

Skolbold's eyes drifted, either admitting he had no idea, or, it occurred to her, as if he had more to tell her but was reluctant to do so. Cree let him think it through as he finished applying the alginate and then moved quickly to the sink. She helped him rinse the mixers and brushes.

"Next we must support the alginate," he told her. "It is too flexible to stand on its own as a mold, so we must reinforce it with plaster. When that has hardened, we can separate the skull from the alginate with confidence the alginate will retain the correct shape. We'll pour a solid support mold for the shell, and when that dries we'll be ready to cast the skull."

"So many steps."

"Yes. It is painstaking, and some say it's outmoded." He went to the skull and lightly touched its uneven rubbery coating, which apparently had not yet cured to his satisfaction. He frowned and turned to Cree with a disconcerting gaze. She got the sense he was working his way around to something. "So, while we're waiting, perhaps I should tell you a bit about the virtual modeling process. Personally, I prefer the old-fashioned methods, but digital reconstruction can be useful, and it will help me explain some important issues."

He led her to a computer on one of the central tables and turned it on.

"We can now scan photos and X-rays into one of several facial modeling programs. From those, the computer builds a 3-D image of the naked skull. We then input the likely tissue depths that the computer uses to create a 3-D surface image of a head and face. We can sculpt by hand from that image, or we can employ a CAD-based carving process and create a bust out of plastic foam."

When the computer booted up, he clicked through several screens to an example, a hollow skull seemingly made out of a mesh of glowing blue wire, with a scattering of red dots burning on its virtual surface. At Skobold's command, it rotated or tipped forward and back.

"That was the first stage of our 3001, a female in her midtwenties whom we call Remedios. Next we added our tissue depths, using the thirty-four index points of the Helmer method."

The new screen showed the skull clothed in light brown virtual flesh with lifelike eyes and dark hair. Skobold rotated the image to the profile and back.

"Does it look like anyone you know? We're still searching for 3001."

"I'm sorry, Horace, it seems sort of . . . generic. It could be almost anyone."

"Precisely! Because tissue metrics are based on averaged measurements from thousands of individuals. But no real person is ever average! If you create a likeness using only those averages and avoiding any intuitive guesses, you end up with this. The appearance may be
consistent
with a specific person, but one can't claim it
is
that person."

"Right."

"On the other hand, if you imagine or intuit too many particulars, you end up with a very lifelike model, very much someone specific. But you might have guessed wrong, and have a very real-looking face that resembles no actual person who ever lived."

"So how do you get around that?"

"For forensic cases, where too much personality in the model might cause a living person to misidentify, we often stay a little on the generic side. For archeological ones, where the goal is to give vitality and personality to historic or prehistoric persons, we use more license. We tend to the artistic side."

Cree studied at the bland face of Remedios 3001. "Average tissue depths won't help you with the wolfman at all, will they?"

"No." Skobold opened a ring binder and paged through until he found some tables in which he had pencilled in the wolfman's numbers. He drew a finger across the many erasures and question marks that suggested ambivalence about his calculations. "I will have to apply more of a 'Russian school' approach—I'll rely less on tissue metrics and more on basic skeletal and muscular engineering. One starts with the major muscles of the neck, then builds the face out from the bone by adding each muscle and tendon. Only when they're in place does one finish with the fatty tissues and skin. I generally use a combination of both approaches, but for the wolfman, I will have to rely almost entirely on the fundamental engineering." He brought his vast eyes to meet hers. "And I will rely upon
you."

"Me."

"Yes. It has become all the more important that we corroborate our informed guesswork with historical photos or drawings of him, or written descriptions. Period likenesses or written history often play a pivotal role in creating historical reconstructions—Wilhelm His's reconstruction of Johann Sebastian Bach is a famous example, as is Prag and Neave's work on the skull of King Philip II of Macedon. Or the recent reconstruction of King Tut. Portraits, legends, poems, the subject's clothing, likenesses on coins or pottery—all can provide important clues."

Horace started a computer file for 3024, opened the blank index grid, and showed her where to enter the values he'd listed, then busied himself with other chores. Cree pecked in some numbers as he drifted back to the wolfman's coated skull. For a few moments he just caressed its lumpy surface with his fingertips, like a blind man reading Braille.

"I have another point to make, but it requires I tell you a personal story. May I?"

"Of course!"

He worked his lips, hands fretting among his tools. "Twenty-six years ago. After my son's death. As I told you, I went through a difficult period. I didn't react the way Bert did, but I became . . . unhinged in my own ways. For several years. I divorced and never spoke to my wife again. I became something of a lost soul, Ms. Black. I was drowning in sorrow and loss and confusion of every sort. And the terrible thing was, beneath all that was anger. I was a volcano inside. Not just at the person who ran over my son. At the world at large. At mankind. At fate. At God. At whatever, whoever. At the peak of the angry phase, I did some awful things. Yes, Horace Skobold, idealist, humanist, optimist—yes, I did."

"Like what, Horace?" she asked gently.

"Oh, all sorts of nasty things. I gutted the career of a colleague at another university. It was sheer malice. I did it by poisoning people's minds about his qualifications and integrity and private life, and I rather enjoyed the process. It was only one of several pointlessly cruel things I did." He stopped, gulped air, eyes alarmed. "This is very difficult to relate, Ms. Black."

"Please go on. That was a long time ago. I'm grateful that you're telling me."

"One evening, here at the lab—on the other side—I was alone, working on a new subject. And my hand slipped and I made an unnecessary incision. And then I began . . . making more wounds. I began punishing the corpse of an unidentified middle-aged man for the death of my son and for my own suffering and for this being a rotten world. You cannot imagine the things I did." He stopped, appalled at himself.

"But you got yourself out of that state of mind. How?"

"I did
nothing!
I had no solution, Ms. Black. Who knows, perhaps I would have begun . . . inflicting such punishment upon the living. But a few days later, I met Patrick. He was a new employee at the print shop, not much more than half my age. I was picking up some materials and he said something, accidental no doubt, that affected me. I was so moved that I touched his arm. He took my hand briefly, a . . . a compassionate gesture. A few days later, we met for lunch. Then for dinner. I had never slept with a man, never once felt that inclination. When he suggested it, I was shocked and told him so. And yet two days later I was knocking at his apartment door in the middle of the night. I was crying and shouting, I was desperate and out of control and didn't know why I was there. I must have sounded like a madman, yet
Patrick opened his door,
Ms. Black. You see? I did
nothing
to heal myself. The world turned its kinder face to me once again. All I did was . . . accept its kindness."

He had calmed a bit, soothed by the memory. "Patrick healed me by letting me out of my loneliness. His affection showed me that life goes on and there is, after all, some reason for living it. Witnessing his humanity brought me back to my own."

Cree had long since stopped entering numbers into the computer. She sat on her stool as Horace's colossal agony and his subsequent rescue from it resonated in her. She could almost
see
his emotion, a shimmer of painfully contrasting colors.

"I never again felt a desire to injure anyone," he said, more composed. "And I came to believe that
loneliness
is the ultimate root of the pain we inflict upon each other. And that to remedy the pain, all we must do is address its root."

Cree nodded slowly, giving that its due. "I tend to think along similar lines," she said carefully. "And I'd like to believe it. The problem is . . . it might work for you and me, but I'm not sure it's something we can apply to the rest of mankind. What about greed, lust for power, racism, all the other awful motivations? It would be hard to argue that the Holocaust happened because Hitler and his collaborators were
lonelyl"

His certainty did not waver. "Oh, yes. Absolutely. Imagine how alone such a person is—one who feels so very, very removed from his own kind that it is possible, even enjoyable, to torment or kill them? To be so removed, to know so little of the humanity of those you hurt, to have so little faith they might know you or care about you? To have so completely abandoned hope of knowing or caring about another? Oh yes. What more exact definition of loneliness could one conceive? That is the absolute distillation of the state."

An elegant summary, Cree had to admit. It was very close to her own basic principle, the truth or theory or hope at the basis of her methodology and her survival. Hearing this old man say it made it a little less tentative.

When Horace spoke again, he had gained back every bit of his professorial assurance. "To the point of my long soliloquy, Ms. Black. Your relationship with Bert and new friendship with Ray means that—aside from myself, with whom both are incensed right now—you are the only person with a connection to both men. With any investment in both or any leverage with them. With any chance of helping them avoid—"

" 'Unintended consequences?' " It came out with more irony than she'd intended.

"Yes, those." Skobold remained unruffled. "It appears to be up to you to open the door."

"Um, Horace, I don't—"

"I have utmost confidence in you, Ms. Black," he said sternly.