Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers) Read online

  BONES of the

  BARBARY COAST

  The Cree Black Series

  City of Masks

  Land of Echoes

  Also by Daniel Hecht

  Skull Session

  The Babel Effect

  Puppets

  BONES of the

  BARBARY COAST

  A CREE BLACK NOVEL

  DANIEL HECHT

  BLOOMSBURY

  Copyright © 2006 by Daniel Hecht and Christine Klaine

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hecht, Daniel.

  Bones of the Barbary Coast : a Cree Black novel / Daniel Hecht.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59691-801-6

  1. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. San Francisco Earthquake, Calif, 1906—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.E284B66 2006

  813'.54—dc22

  2005037130

  First U.S. Edition 2006

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Westchester Book Group

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.

  Then fly. What, from myself?

  —William Shakespeare, Richard III

  Contents

  Foreword

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part II

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Ill

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Part IV

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Part V

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Part VI

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Part VII

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Acknowledgments

  A Note On The Author

  FOREWORD

  Introduction to

  Stranger, Mirror: Crisis and Constructive Development

  by Lucretia Black, Ph.D.

  Fourth Annual Horizons in Psychology Conference

  University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

  December 8, 2005

  I SHOULD STATE AT the outset that my experiences in San Francisco did not involve a supernatural entity or paranormal occurrence. My investigation into that unusual skeleton—the remains of a victim of the Great Earthquake of 1906, found in a lovely hilltop Victorian—ended as it began: an attempt to identify a particular human being and to learn more about his life, entirely through historical research and the study of his bones.

  I was neither surprised nor disappointed. In fact, the majority of incidents I investigate do not involve actual paranormal phenomena. Most often, the reason is simply that there are none to be encountered: Reports of ghosts can derive from hoaxes, from mistaken interpretation of normal-world phenomena, or from psychological disturbances on the part of witnesses. Sometimes, too, my own sensitivities prove insufficient to determine whether a revenant is or is not present.

  This should not be taken to mean that such efforts aren't instructive or don't carry risks for the investigator; my work on the San Francisco skeleton proved to be among the most meaningful and dangerous research projects I have ever undertaken.

  I don't regard the absence of paranormal phenomena as "failure," because for me the real subject of any investigation is the human mind and the art of living. Most reports of hauntings, real or imagined, come from individuals in the process of some important life passage, some crucial psychological upheaval that derives from past experience and has profound implications for their lives henceforth. The paranormal crisis is nothing less than a paradigm collapse, which forces people to reassess their beliefs about the nature of the world and of human consciousness. These are often dangerous passages, but they are also full of positive potentials. The breakdown of habitual ways of viewing the self and coping with the world offers an unequaled opportunity for constructive personal development; properly managed, it can become a liberating and empowering turning point. For the observing psychologist, it constitutes a unique opportunity to understand what it is to be human, how our minds work, and what forces are operating below the horizon of our conscious thoughts and intentional actions.

  Of course, paranormal phenomena are by no means the only catalysts for such a process. The discovery of the San Francisco skeleton proved a highly effective trigger, provoking both catastrophic and constructive development for all involved, myself included. In particular, my association with Cameron Raymond demanded a rigorous inspection of habitual assumptions and posed many questions that continue to challenge me. Likewise, the astonishing journal of Lydia Jackson Schweitzer provided a catalyst for what has proved to be an ongoing personal development process. I take comfort in knowing Lydia confronted similar issues, and came to similar conclusions, a century before me. As was common in her era, she was a skilled diarist; for me, to read about her joys and struggles was to discover a sister-spirit and was abundant recompense for the other frustrations of the case.

  I am aware that my theory of psychology has been described variously by my peers as unusual, radical, renegade, or ridiculous. Though my graduate and postgraduate studies at Harvard were conventional, my experiences after the death of my husband proved to me that prevailing paradigms of human consciousness and behavior were insufficient to explain certain phenomena. I now believe that no theory of psychology can be complete unless it accommodates the reality that we are shaped to a considerable degree by relationships, in many forms, from the past and from beyond the grave. It must accept that fact that dying is a crucial developmental act for which
we prepare, consciously or unconsciously, throughout our lives, and for which we are equipped by nature to "manage" as personalities. (Freud's latter year emphasis upon thanatos, the death wish, as a primary engine of human behavior demonstrates his emerging awareness of the important role of death in personality formation.)

  Finally, just as psychology has had to adapt to the influence of the "harder" sciences of evolutionary biology and neuroscience, it will ultimately have to accommodate physics—including the bizarre domains of quantum mechanics and chaos theory.

  From the start, I have relied on deep, empathic identification with others; in most cases I do not "see" ghosts or fragmentary personality residuals so much as "become" them. Similarly, I identify powerfully with my (living) clients and others met during an investigation; I absorb their characteristics, I feel for them and with them, I lose myself in them. I suddenly notice myself—or, worse, don't notice—speaking with another person's accent, feeling his or her arthritic joints, taking on a stranger's worldview, using gestures that are not mine. This is essential to understanding my clients' experiences, but it is a dangerous tendency. I have been able to maintain a clear sense of myself as a separate personality only through a great deal of discipline, assisted by the vigilance of my colleagues at Psi Research Associates, Joyce Wu and Edgar Mayfield.

  Whatever its neurological mechanisms, this extreme counter-transference has been among the most difficult aspects of my process to explain or to defend as a therapeutic practice. In part, I blame this difficulty on the fact that we lack a vocabulary for such experiences, that our terminology is limited by the reductively mechanistic bias that currently dominates Western scientific thought.

  Ultimately, however, I can't speak objectively of these experiences because objectivity is an inadequate tool. Human consciousness is not inherently objective. We experience our lives as vast, elusive, unending, and hugely variable subjectivities; life is knowable, explicable, or communicable only by the sharing of subjectivity.

  We do have a word for such sharing or merging: communion. In Latin, the term means simply "mutual participation"; yet for us it also conveys, appropriately, profound spiritual and moral connotations. My communion with the subjective lives of others is therefore not readily susceptible to the scalpel of analysis; nor, arguably, ought it to be.

  It is certainly true that my approach has led to unusual experiences, but I can honestly say it has never been my desire to seek out the bizarre or anomalous manifestations of the paranormal world for their own sake. The normal world is frightening, unpredictable, and dangerous enough to satisfy any such urge, if I had one, as the San Francisco investigation amply demonstrates. On either side of the dimensional mirror, my only goal has been to understand the truth; to better know what it means to be human—what we are, at bottom, what we are capable of, what moves us. What the mind really is, how it really works; what abides inside us in the places we cannot observe. What matters most about being, for our brief allotment of days, alive and aware.

  And, yes, whether we are worthy beings or not; or, as Lydia Schweitzer so well distilled the question, how we choose to be worthy beings, or do not.

  It is in this context that I present my case study of the psychosociodynamics surrounding the person known, officially, only as "UCSF Unknown Human Remains 3024." I proceed knowing that many of you will remain skeptical of my approach and conclusions; but I also know that others are willing to accompany me on this foray into distant and exotic territory. I take comfort that you, too, understand that the world is a far more mysterious place than we often assume, and that we live among what is, in many ways, a society of strangers.

  Yes: Look to your left and to your right, right now, and you will see a stranger. Who is she? What motivates him? What past shaped her, what future awaits him? You cannot know.

  If you find this an uncomfortable proposition, please remember—again, as Lydia pointed out—that stranger is also more familiar, more intimately understood by each of us, than we are typically willing to admit.

  From this, I think, we can derive some measure of hope and solace.

  I

  AN UNINTENTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  1

  THE BONES HAD BEEN assembled in roughly their former working order, a symmetrical array of odd, ivory-brown shapes that took up virtually the whole length of an eight-foot stainless-steel table. Cree stood at the foot of the pallet with Uncle Bert and Dr. Horace Skobold, head of the University of California Forensic Anthropology lab, as Skobold introduced her to the skeleton.

  "First, some generalities. From a cursory look at bone development, I'd say our subject was male, about five-foot eight in stature, and between twenty and forty years old. Race uncertain, given the, um, obvious developmental abnormalities."

  Horace Skobold was a tall, apple-cheeked man in his midsixties, dressed in khakis, a white shirt, and a bow tie. He paused to appraise Cree with watery blue eyes that were owlish behind thick-lensed glasses. "Do you have much background in anatomy, Ms. Black?"

  "Unfortunately, no. More in psychology."

  "Well, for an adult human male of his age and size, the phalanges—toe bones—have very unusual proportions. The distal and medial sections are extremely short and stubby. If I had seen them alone, I might have said they indicated brachydactylia, type BHA1. The typical foreshortening is readily apparent in the fingers as well."

  Cree bent to look more closely as Dr. Skobold used a chopstick to point out each feature. The bones of both feet had been arranged in two fans at the end of the table: raying longer shafts ending in a series of short, knuckly knobs. They had been dry-brushed but not yet washed, Skobold explained, so as to preserve any instructive chemical traces or DNA sources. He hadn't had time to do much with the skeleton since Bert had brought it over from the San Francisco Medical Examiner's office.

  The array on the table gave off a chalky, earthy scent that Cree was a little reluctant to inhale. Even to her inexperienced eyes, these bones didn't look right.

  "But brachydactylia is contraindicated by other features," Skobold went on. "Such as the metatarsals, the bones of the foot, which are unusually long and rather delicate. Highly unusual. Factoring in aspects of the heel, I would guess that this man had a hard time walking on the soles of his feet. It's likely he would have felt more comfortable with his heel raised." The chopstick traced the various foot bones.

  Skobold's style reminded Cree less of a distinguished scholar than of a small-town funeral home director—a sober air, blandly pious, resigned. Either he had faced some deep sorrow in his life, she thought, or it was something he affected because it seemed the appropriate tone around the dead. Whichever, it couldn't hide his enthusiasm for his work. He was clearly enjoying his presentation and like a good showman was saving the best for last. She dutifully studied the metatarsals as he talked about them, but she couldn't resist a quick glance at the skull. Though bones had never bothered her, she shivered at the thought of the living face those angles and protrusions had once supported.

  As if feeling the same thing, Uncle Bert stood well back from the table. Or, more likely, he'd seen enough of the skeleton earlier, or enough bones and bodies in his lifetime, and was giving this show to Cree.

  She and Bert hadn't had time to catch up at all, having come straight from the Oakland airport in separate cars. Given that they were already on the East Bay side, not that far from the University of California and the lab, Cree thought it made sense to begin by looking at the bones. Bert had called ahead to let Dr. Skobold know they were coming.

  After so many years, she hadn't recognized Bert right away. She'd scanned the crowd around the baggage carrousel for several minutes before spotting something familiar in the tired, top-heavy-looking man in the rumpled gray suit. Their eyes met a couple of times before it clicked for both of them, and then Bert bulled through the crowd to give her a brief, clumsy embrace. Definitely a gentleman of his generation: He'd insisted on carrying her bags, even though it made openi
ng doors for her awkward. He'd driven her to the rental lot where she'd picked up a little red Honda SUV, then she'd followed his Crown Victoria to Berkeley.

  The lab was in the Life Sciences Building, a neo-Romanesque, gray monolith at the center of campus. Its big basement room and side offices were pleasant in a clinical way, well lit by overhead fluorescent tubes and a row of windows opening to a view of a narrow concrete light well and a slice of sky and treetops. The space was largely occupied by cranio-facial reconstruction projects and the tools the science required: Stainless-steel lab benches supported bones, computer terminals, microscopes, X-ray film viewers, equipment for making molds and casts, a variety of specialized measuring devices. The only disturbing element was a faint smell of rotting meat.

  Most interesting were the clay busts, eight or ten reconstruction projects in various stages of completion. The finished ones were fully fleshed likenesses, but most were only partially covered by straps and pads of brown clay. A few were still naked plaster skulls, marked with index points and bristling with cylindrical spacers, indication of the painstaking effort required to build a recognizable face from anonymous bones. The completed busts were very lifelike; clearly, Skobold was a superb sculptor.

  "Moving up," Skobold continued, "to the lower leg. Where we immediately spot a significant disproportion between tibia and fibula. This fellow has an extremely robust tibia—shinbone—with pronounced thickening at the proximal end, at the knee. By comparison, the fibula is unusually delicate. And the femur, the bone of the thigh . . . it's ordinarily about the same length as the lower leg bones, and is a reliable rough guide to the height of the individual. But as you can see, it's substantially shorter than the lower leg assembly. Remarkable, isn't it?"

  "I'll have to take your word for it," Cree apologized.

  The door at the far end of the lab opened and a middle-aged woman entered, wearing a lab smock and carrying several files. She nodded to them, then sat on a stool in front of one of the reconstructions and immersed herself in her work.