Tell No Lies (16 page)

*   *   *

The pack of frozen corn retrieved from Kyle Lane’s freezer numbed the swollen bulge of flesh on Daniel’s brow, but what he really needed was something to take the edge off his frustration. The Tearmaker had vanished in the maze of interlacing yards and alleys connecting the surrounding residences. Daniel’s left eye was badly bloodshot, a wispy red claw cupping the iris from below; the sight of it in the powder-room mirror had made him clench the lip of the vessel sink. Now he sat on the chenille couch, Dooley and a trio of plainclothes officers staring at him as if waiting for his head to do an
Exorcist
spin.

Snatches of sentences made their way through the murk.

“—what happens when you have probies clear a house—”

“—were in a rush, Dooley, responding to a potential
murder in progress
—”

“—kick in the front door but don’t think to look behind a fucking—”

“—besides which, Brasher shouldn’t even
be
here. He can sue the city—”

“If I sued the city,” Daniel said, “they’d probably take the money out of my own damn department.”

Dooley perked up. “It speaks.”

“Barely.” He shifted, and another fork of lightning speared his brain.

“Okay,” Dooley said. “Take me through it. Step by step. You should be good at this by now.”

Daniel rose to literally walk her through what happened. The house crawled with crime-scene investigators, dusting and tweezing. Camera flashes made the hall and bedroom strobe like a nightclub. Threading through the ordered commotion, he gave her every detail he could recall, interrupted at intervals by cops sailing in to deliver updates or receive instruction, which Dooley handed out in efficient bursts: “Move the checkpoints out to Dolores and up to Twenty-eighth.” “Clear the rec center and roust the bums in Billy Goat Hill Park, see who saw what.” “Start running the prints through AFIS now, wheat from the chaff.”

Daniel watched the men watching her and nodding compliantly, and he realized that all of them were half in love with her. And that that was extremely useful to her in the midst of a manhunt.

He resumed his account to Dooley as they continued their walk-through, winding up before the shattered bedroom window.

Dooley leaned out, peering up the narrow passage between houses. “You said you heard his clothes rip when he went over the gate, right?”

“Yes,” Daniel said. “Right before he kicked in my face.” He studied her thoughtful expression. “You’re hoping for a piece of fabric?”

“I’m hoping for better than that,” she said. “I’m hoping he tore a pocket.”

He still hadn’t caught up.

“Shit spills outta pockets, Brasher. Especially when you tear them. Let’s have a look-see.”

Rather than climb through the broken window, they circled out the front door toward the alley. A few news vans had turned up, and a CHP helicopter chopped thunderously a few blocks away, the powerful searchlight beaming down like something out of science fiction.

“Guess he’ll figure out now I’m getting his mail,” Daniel said.

“He’ll know you’re on his case for
something,
” Dooley said. “Which isn’t bound to make him happy.” She slipped into the alley, her slender shoulders, even squared up, clearing either side.

The lane between the houses caught light only from sparse windows, so their shadows sprang up fast and sharp. The gate loomed ahead. On the far side, an investigator stood atop a ladder, ducked precariously beneath the arch to peer at the spikes, one ghost-white gloved hand gripping a flashlight.

Daniel recalled how effortlessly the intruder had scaled the bars. The bulk of his muscles beneath the loose-fitting black sweats. The sole of that boot, hammering down toward Daniel’s face. The memory made him wince into a fresh burst of pain.

He said, “I wish I’d grabbed his legs and impaled him on the spikes.”

Dooley paused. “Aren’t you supposed to be a therapist?”

“I’m not on the clock.”

They approached the gate, Dooley looking up at the man perched atop the ladder. “How you doing up there, Roscoe?”

“Oh, ya know. One thousand thirty-nine more days till I retire with full pension. Got me a iPhone app counting that shit down for me.” The flashlight beam picked across the tops of the bars. “Not finding anything up here. No blood, threads, nothing.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Dooley tugged the Maglite from her belt and crouched by the base of the gate, scanning the concrete with the beam.

Daniel flattened to the wall to give himself a vantage past her. Dooley moved the shaft of light along the bottom of the fence, illuminating a few weeds sprouting from the cracks in the concrete, pebbles, flecks of rust.

And a folded white square to the side, just beneath the bottom hinge.

Dooley leaned forward and used her pen to flick the small piece of paper out into the open. It landed up on its edge, an open V with the mouth pointed at them. She squatted over it, and Daniel saw her shoulders settle as if under a great weight.

“What?” he asked.

She pressed her shoulder blades to the wall so he could see past to the little rectangle at her feet.

A business card.

His.

As he stared at the crisp font announcing his name, his heartbeat found the bruise at his temple, breathing pain back into it. At once he struggled to find air here in this cramped alley, the walls closing in on him. The cell-phone number on the card was crossed out.

He lifted the pen gently from Dooley’s grasp and used it to tap the card over to the flip side. Written across the back in his own hand was his new cell-phone number.

There were only six of these business cards he’d written his new number on.

The six he’d handed out to his group members.

Chapter 23

Despite the chill on Kyle Lane’s roof, he was sweating beneath the mask, his humid breath rebounding into his pores. He sat patiently, arms folded across his knees, watching the helicopter, now a half mile away, continue its futile outward spiral. From the beginning, the cops had focused elsewhere, on the surrounding blocks through which he’d presumably fled. His black clothes had served him well for the one quick sweep the searchlight had taken over the house itself. He’d simply tucked himself against the base of the chimney, camouflaged in its umbra.

The eyeholes constricted his vision only slightly, his pupils jerking alertly to track Daniel Brasher as he crossed the front lawn, heading back to that stupid car. Brasher paused for a moment with his hand on the roof, head bent as if to catch his breath. He looked shaken.

After Brasher puttered off, he lay on his back and took in the few stars penetrating the night gloom. The sound of the helicopter continued to fade, and below, on the street, engines turned over and cars drifted away in twos and threes. When it was safe, he lunge-stepped silently across onto the neighbor’s roof, then lowered himself onto the lid of a built-in barbecue in the backyard. Through slats in the fence, he could see the crime-scene investigators packing up their gear under the watchful eye of the black lady cop.

He removed the mask, drawing in a lungful of cool air, then tucked it into his waistband along with his gloves. The sweatshirt came off next, revealing beneath a fitted red thermal sporting the 49ers logo. He stuffed the sweatshirt into a trash bin in the side yard, burying it beneath mounds of ketchup-stained paper plates. Tugging down the long sleeves of the thermal, he let himself out onto the sidewalk. As he strolled, he whistled, his fingertips trickling along the hedge of juniper and stirring up the delightfully bitter scent. Turning the corner, he came face-to-face with a beat cop hauling several flexible traffic cylinders.

“Excuse me, Officer,” he said, approaching. “Have you seen my cat? She’s a tabby named Lady, and—”

“Sorry,” the cop said. “No luck finding anything tonight.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. No, I haven’t seen your cat.”

The cop never slowed, the rubber bases of the traffic cylinders dragging across the asphalt.

He watched the cop go, then continued on his way, picking up the whistled song where he’d left off.

Chapter 24

The sun broke across the horizon, fanning a sheet of gold through the iconic skyline. Daniel was weary, half asleep behind the wheel, the early-morning haze of the city a match for the early-morning haze muffling the steady throb in his head.

If that neoprene motorcycle mask were peeled back, whose face would be revealed? A-Dre’s? Big Mac’s? Fang’s? Martin’s?

Or had one of the group members given Daniel’s card to someone else? Was the killer an associate? A brother or a boyfriend?

The hooded woman in the rain—Lil or Xochitl?

No matter the explanation, one thing seemed clear: Someone in the group was involved in the Tearmaker murders. Someone who’d shared intimate shortfalls and sins. Someone he’d fretted over and pried at and fought for and against, usually at the same time. He’d pledged to help these people reconstruct themselves. He’d cared for them, bent his own shoulder to their burdens so they could stand straighter.

He’d thought he knew these people. He’d thought he entered the worlds they lived in, dipped beneath the surface, swam in the undercurrents. But maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he’d understood nothing. Maybe no matter his focus and perspective, he was still just a rich asshole from Pacific Heights.

The shock and dread and the mule kick to his temple had left him in an altered state, washed up on the shore of a landscape at once familiar and alien, a dream version of the streets he was driving through. He cut past the Castro, where Latina drag queens in fishnets and feathers paraded the sidewalks, strutting past bars with inventively uninventive names—the Lonely Bull, the Missouri Mule, Dirty Dick’s. He kept on, skirting the edge of the Haight, where painted VW buses and druggie runaways littered the curbs, in search of a lost decade. During the Summer of Love, Janis Joplin strummed her Gibson in a one-room flop pad here, a tambourine’s throw from where the Grateful Dead commune tuned in and dropped out. Relics of each era endured, layered like geological strata in storefronts, charting the evolution from beatniks to hippies to yuppies to fauxhemians.

Forging his way north, Daniel sliced through Alamo Square, its picket row of pastel Victorians basking in the first pink-tinged rays of the new day. Beyond their fanciful gingerbread gables rose the green copper dome of City Hall, where ousted Catholic and local sandlotter-made-good Joe DiMaggio said
I do
to Marilyn and where, a couple of decades later, five hollow-point bullets cut down Harvey Milk in the corridors of power. So much glory and shame. So much beauty and horror. A city that burned to the ground six times before its first decade flamed out yet rose from the ashes again and again, a boxer who wouldn’t stay down.

He let his imagination soar across the rooftops to the Tenderloin, where dealers in saggy pants palmed Baggies into skeletal hands and tranny hookers batted improbable eyelashes and held cigarettes to their smeared lips, smoking off the night’s work. Mere blocks to yet another ecosystem—capitalism-clean Union Square on perennial high polish, ornate Christmas displays already gleaming in the vast picture windows, Neiman and Chanel, Saks and the ghost of I. Magnin. Coppola shot the conversation in
The Conversation
here, but even his surveillance camera couldn’t capture the dead-end alley where Miles Archer met his fictional demise or the Palace Hotel, where President Harding was felled by an enlarged heart or a poisonous wife.

A Peter Pan drift took Daniel to Russian Hill with its manic slalom descents, its vertiginous tumble over the brink of Filbert, its manicured floral gardens cupping the curves of Lombard, the second-crookedest street in the city. Steve McQueen’s Mustang scorched these slopes in the world’s greatest car chase, the fleeing Charger losing an unlikely six hubcaps in the process.

Then on to North Beach in all its gaudy Italian glory. There perched City Lights Bookstore, where Ginsberg howled, the wedged façade gazing nobly across the intersection at the world’s first topless bar, if the historical plaque is to be believed. Carol Doda bared her double-D Twin Peaks here at the Condor Club, a skip from Green Street where Philo T. Farnsworth lived up to his madcap inventor’s name and conjured into existence the world’s first TV. And overseeing all this squalid, soaring history, the fluted column of Coit Tower, the candle stuck in the cupcake of Telegraph Hill.

All those tales of the city. All those separate lives. Misfits and dreamers, transplants and immigrants, victims and outlaws, packed full of hidden fears and sordid impulses, inflated fantasies and rageful desires. They’d come heeding the siren’s call, seeking haven, to this sanctuary city thrust into a swirl of ever-shifting tides and mist. A peninsula draped over seven hills, twinkling and glorious, with jutting heights and precipitous drops, a labyrinthine fog-veiled confusion of one-ways and narrow alleys, shadow and light. A microcosm of the human psyche in all its splendor and horror, its seething, brilliant, hideous capabilities.

So many places to hide. So many ways to disappear. All those masks, imagined and real.

And, beneath one of them, a killer.

Chapter 25

As Daniel neared home, the morning light was still thin, the streets suffused with a straw-colored glow. Any reasonable human would be in bed. This category, of course, excluded Ted and Danika Shea, who were on yoga mats on their front porch, doing sun salutations. Ted glanced up from Downward Dog and beamed a wholesome smile in Daniel’s direction. Daniel summoned a weak grin and turned into his driveway.

The alarm chirped quietly when Daniel entered the house, and he punched in the code, then rearmed it. In a stupor, he kicked off his shoes and moved quietly upstairs. The sight of the man sitting at the kitchen island, facing away, brought him up short. The stocky form and broad, bowed shoulders, the smooth dome of the skull glistening beneath the muted overhead lights. Motionless.

Daniel froze with one foot above the floorboards until recognition clicked.