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

  Skobold's watery eyes went back to his subject, and he tapped his chopstick on one of a pair of bones shaped like fragments of a ceramic bowl that had fallen and broken into two mirrorimage pieces. "The innominates—the pelvic bones—show many interesting characteristics which I'll need to study more closely . . . The spine, fairly normal except for the coccyx. Normally, the end of the tailbone consists of three fused vertebrae. But this fellow's aren't fused, and he has three extras at the end—supernumeraries, not common, but not unheard of . . . Moving up, multiple deformities in the scapulae, shoulder joint, and rib cage suggest that the arms would be better suited to projecting somewhat forward from the torso as opposed to depending downward from the shoulder in the normal way"

  There wasn't really a rib "cage" at the moment; the individual ribs were laid out in a series of arcs, flat on the table. Several had been broken, their curves reassembled from two or three pieces.

  Cree followed Skobold when he shuffled up toward the head of the table, but Uncle Bert's cell phone buzzed and he stepped away to talk. Something to do with trace evidence analysis, Bert apparently pulling a favor with the Crime Lab. As a veteran inspector with SFPD's Homicide Detail, thirty-five years in and retirement approaching, he was no doubt eager to clear his remaining cases.

  Cree looked down at the splayed hand bones, stubby rows of knots and carbuncles. "Are you sure all these bones belong to the same person? Couldn't they be from several people of different ages, or have some . . . animal bones mixed in?"

  "Actually, that was my first thought, too. We often receive remains of several commingled individuals, and it can be hard to sort them out. And you're right that there's a superficial resemblance to the features of certain animals. I am frequently asked to look at skeletal remains that prove to be of nonhuman origin. People bring in dog or deer bones, thinking they've found a murder victim or prehistoric remains in their backyard. But, no, this fellow is human and all these bones are his. Every bone accounted for, no redundancies. And the geometry of the aricular surfaces . . . the heads of the bones . . . shows they belong together."

  Cree nodded.

  Skobold glanced at Uncle Bert, still on his phone, then made a mournful face and rubbed his hands together with a gesture that conveyed both excitement and reluctance. "Well. On to the piece de resistance. The skull."

  Skobold took a position at the head of the table and picked up the cranium, a smooth orb intact but for an irregular, egg-size hole on its upper left side. Again he used his chopstick to point out each feature.

  "The most obvious deviation is the unusual development of his maxillary bone and dentition—particularly the extraordinary length of the canine teeth. And, as you can see from the side view, the whole nasal and maxillary region is protruded by two inches or more."

  He paused to pick up the jawbone, a long, narrow horseshoe with lower teeth that stuck up menacingly. With the expression of a parent regarding a troubled child, he fitted the jaw to the cranium and began levering it up and down in a biting motion.

  "Striking, isn't it? Over the years, I've encountered a good number of deformed individuals. Hospitals and medical schools sometimes ask me to do morphometric analysis of fatal congenital deformities, mostly stillbirths or neonates, a few young children. I don't think I have ever seen this degree of elongation of the nasal, maxillary, and mandibular structures. Certainly never in an adult. Such extreme deformities are almost invariably accompanied by other problems that result in early mortality. The extent of his deviations from norms and the absence of a precedent will make analysis and reconstruction quite a challenge."

  The chopstick hovered at the ragged nose hole and then went into it for most of its length.

  "Note also the descended and enlarged sinus cavity. We'll be able to see it better when we get his X-rays, but even a cursory inspection shows that this fellow's nasal aperture has moved toward the end of the maxilar bone. He has a fully elaborated sinus cavity arrayed along a more horizontal axis than you would see in a normal human or one of the great apes, and suggests he had a superb sense of smell. Furthermore, the foramen magnum—the point at which the spinal cord enters the cranium—is located more posteriorly. The plane of the foramen magnum and the occipital plane converge in an acute angle, suggesting his head was carried somewhat forward from the neck and shoulders, rather than set atop the spine as we are used to. Among paleoanthropologists, such an angle typically implies a preference for quadrepedal locomotion."

  Skobold rotated the skull and used his chopstick to demonstrate the likely angle. The head and neck would have been thrust aggressively forward.

  Uncle Bert ceased pacing and put his phone away, but he still didn't join them. He stood, drumming his fingers on the counter and staring into the distance. He made a bulky silhouette, one big plug of a man, and looked to Cree like someone with a lot on his mind.

  "Do you know what caused his death?" Cree asked.

  "Well, the head injury is a presumptive candidate," Skobold said. "The sharp edges of the cranial hole and its crisp fracture lines tell me the injury occurred to living bone. But determining cause and manner of death isn't my job—the medical examiner's office does that, and they've already signed off on this as accidental death. No one's bothered with a post mortem."

  "Why not?"

  "Age of the remains. The general condition of the bones gives us some indication—their coloration and friability, the amount of rodent nibbling, and so on. Put that together with where the skeleton was found and the artifacts recovered from the site, we can safely presume this fellow died in the Great Earthquake of 1906."

  "Yes, Bert told me. But to find bones that old . . . that's pretty amazing, isn't it?

  "Actually, in San Francisco, it's by no means unheard of. Bertie—how many Great Quake victims would you say you've handled?"

  Bert looked up at the ceiling as he made an effort to recall. "Personally? This is my second. In the department, maybe six, seven in my time."

  "You have to remember what a cataclysm that was," Skobold said. "A major city, turned to rubble and ash. Utter chaos, a quarter of a million people rendered homeless. Besides the known casualties, around eight hundred people were lost—presumed dead but unaccounted for. But bones are durable. So they turn up every few years during road or sewer-line work, or when some handyman is fixing up his basement, as with this fellow. Remains this old are deemed 'historical.' Which means establishing cause and manner of death isn't a pressing matter for Bert and his boys."

  "So . . . will you be doing a facial reconstruction?"

  "Oh, I wouldn't miss it for the world! But I really shouldn't begin until we're done with Norma Jean there." Skobold tipped his head toward the woman in the lab smock, who was applying a small white cylinder to the plaster skull in front of her.

  Cree gave him a questioning look. The woman was Chinese, ebony haired, barrel shaped, hardly Norma Jean.

  Skobold smiled with doleful amusement. "Not my assistant—that's Karen Chang. I'm speaking of her subject. We tend to give them names. You have to remember, they're almost all John and Jane Does when they come in here. We've tagged those remains as 3019. Our chap here is 3024. But the numbers are depersonalizing. Having a name helps you give your reconstruction more of a real . . . personality."

  Cree smiled. "What's your name for this one?"

  Skobold started to answer, then checked himself; the big eyes behind their lenses grew concerned. "Bertram did talk to you about our concerns? You're not going to . . . publicize this in any way, are you?"

  Uncle Bert shifted, an unspoken signal of discomfort. He turned and came toward them, meeting Cree's eyes briefly. Clearly, he'd rather she didn't go into the details of her profession.

  "I'm just here as a friend of Uncle Bert's," she said. That sounded stupid, so she clarified: "I call him Uncle Bert because I've known him since I was a kid. He was a good friend of my father's."

  "I grew up in the same neighborhood as her pop," Bert explained. "Ben and I
were in the Navy together, back in the old days. Cree was coming down to visit and it occurred to me that she'd be interested in our guy here. In fact, Horace, I thought she could help me look into him—she's a . . . private investigator, historical research is her specialty, so I thought I could kind of kill two birds with one stone. We'd get in a visit, she could do some legwork for me. I can't give him too much time, I could use the help. I figured she might find something that'd be useful to you, too, medical history or photos or something. If you're up for working with her."

  Cree had assumed Bert would've worked this out with Skobold earlier, and she wondered how he liked having the arrangement sprung on him.

  The proposition seemed to make Skobold uneasy, but he said somberly, "Of course, Bertie."

  Skobold's expression stayed worried as he began to draw a dust cloth over the skeleton. He paused when only the savage-looking skull remained above the cover, and like a man putting his son to bed seemed to speak to it as he went on: "We consider confidentiality very important in this instance." He glanced at Bert and continued when Bert gave a nod of assent. "There are administrative, ah, sensitivities involved. This fellow is a most interesting specimen, but his remains have no medicolegal significance. Historical, accidental death, you see. Neither Bert's bosses nor mine would be happy we're spending taxpayers' money to take the time to identify him."

  Bert waved that concern away. "I'm three months to retirement—what're they going to do, fire me? And you've got tenure."

  "In any case," Skobold continued, "I'm sure the owners of the house where the remains were found would prefer not to see their name in sensational news reports or have their home become the object of interest of curiosity seekers or . . . oddballs. Of which, I'm afraid, San Francisco has rather more than its share. And I can't spend my days fending off tabloid reporters or curious faculty members. Or students, God forbid! This isn't a circus sideshow. We have work to do. We take our work seriously."

  "Of course."

  Bert clapped Skobold's shoulder, but Skobold didn't look reassured as he drew the sheet up the rest of the way, over the long, jagged grin and fractured cranium.

  "Wolfman, of course." Skobold looked embarrassed and unhappy at the admission. "How could we resist? We call him Wolfman."

  2

  PUT US IN a pot, Cree mused, boil everything else away, and what do you get?

  Of the psyche or soul, the residuum could be enormously varied and was usually very subtle stuff; for most people, it could never be as convincing as the hard, stubborn stuff of bones. Bones were unique, biology intersecting geology, concretions of minerals made by living things. Of the physical person, bones alone remained to tell the story—provided someone could figure out what they were saying.

  She was following Bert's car into San Francisco to look at the house, the bones' resting place for a hundred years. Bert had written the address on a scrap of envelope in case they got separated, but so far caravanning was no problem. The rush hour traffic, bottled up on the 1-80 on-ramp, moved so slowly she never got far from his bumper. All she had to do was keep sight of the hump of the bubble light on Bert's dashboard.

  A classic man of few words, Uncle Bert. In the airport, his conversation had been limited to Hey, let me get that and You need something, cup of coffee, slice of pizza? Like Pop, he'd grown up in lower-middle class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and still retained the accent after all these years on the West Coast. She got the sense he was a man who didn't spend much time in the company of women. Definitely a career cop, cop to the core.

  Cree's investigations rarely involved contact with police. In six years, Psi Research Associates had been consulted on police business only three times. The main reason was that they were seldom asked; police tended to be skeptics, and even open-minded cops were reluctant to call in parapsychology types to help solve a murder case. One homicide detective had explained that it was a great way to get your balls busted by your brothers in blue, and it invited sensationalistic press attention that didn't inspire citizens' confidence in their law enforcement agencies. Asking for help from somebody like Cree was functionally making a public admission that there were no other working lines of inquiry

  The other reason was that murder made for bad ghosts—the persever-ating experiential echoes of a murder victim were often grotesque and tormented. After seeing what the first couple of cases did to Cree, Joyce and Edgar had insisted that she avoid investigations involving recent homicides.

  Fortunately, Cree rationalized, that concern didn't apply here. These bones might be unusual, but they were old, and they didn't belong to a murder victim. And anyway, this wasn't actually a PRA job, this was just a personal favor for Uncle Bert, a pro bono investigation for an old friend on what struck Cree as an intriguing mystery. It had all come up quickly—the call from Bert that coincided with a gap in their work schedule. Edgar was off on vacation in Flawaii, which precluded his participation; Joyce had flown back to New York to be with her mother, who was recovering from a minor stroke.

  Anyway, for all she knew, there were no ghosts involved, and this was simply a historical research job. Uncle Bert had bristled with skepticism when she'd asked him about supernatural elements.

  Uncle Bert. One odd bird, Cree thought.

  The Black family had mostly lost touch with Bert Marchetti after he'd moved out west. She remembered him only from early childhood: Ben Black's handsome Navy buddy, who used to greet her by kissing her on the lips as if she were a grown woman—his Italian showing, as Pop said. The men would sit at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking grappa, telling tales about Navy misadventures. Pop was naturally a more reserved person, but Bert's visits gave him a chance to let his hair down. They'd get too loud, laughing, and Mom would shush them, You'll wake the kids! and Bert would flatter her into submission and make her drink grappa, too, even though she said it tasted like garbage juice. In summertime, the men wore sleeveless undershirts. Cree and Deirdre liked Bert because he could always make Mom laugh—maybe because if Bert was a little unrefined, he was "romantic" in a way Pop usually was not.

  Pop had admired him for moving to San Francisco, because not too many guys from the neighborhood ever managed to break loose. After a few years they had fallen out of touch, and Cree knew only the barest outline of Bert's life since he'd gone west: becoming a policeman, getting married, a long-ago divorce. He'd flown east for Pop's funeral, fifteen years ago, but since then they'd heard even less from him—just the rare late-night call to Mom, who would complain afterward that Bert was drinking too much.

  Cree had been surprised to answer the phone and hear this voice from the past, the blunt consonants and gramma tic ellipses so much like Pop's, the theme music of her early childhood. At this point, Bert was less a family friend than a semilegendary figure from the early years, the Brooklyn period of their lives.

  The old man it had taken her so long to recognize at the airport had short silvering hair and a beefy chest and shoulders with a hard paunch to match. His gray suit bore the wrinkles of too much sitting, but his shirt was so white and crisp that Cree suspected he'd just put it on, straight from the package. As he'd bent to hoist her bags, his jacket had parted over the broad seat of his trousers and she'd glimpsed the gun he carried in a belt holster high on one side. He was about Mom's age, sixty-three, but he looked much older: weary, unsurprisable, pouched eyes, a downward tug at the corners of his mouth, doubling chins and jowling cheeks. His quick clumsy hug smelled of cigarettes and aftershave. His smile looked wary, as if it didn't know his face very well.

  After the toll booth, the bridge rose and the view expanded: the bright water of the Bay, a tight cluster of tall downtown buildings with the pastel city spread on the hills around it. Emerging from the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island, she could see beyond the skyscrapers to the orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and the arcs of cable that swept to the hills of Marin. With the sun lowering over the Pacific, the crag of Alcatraz was stretched by its own shadow. An exhi
larating vista.

  The first time she'd come to San Francisco was during a vacation with Pop and Mom and Dee, when Cree was nine or ten. That was a decade after the golden era of the sixties, but forever afterward she'd thought of the city as a magical place, full of color and celebration and people who wore gypsy clothes and danced in the streets. She had found a part of herself then, a sense of who she would become. She felt it still, a thrill of expectation, an echo of a young girl's yearning for the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the other world-birthing dreams of those Haight-Ashbury years of legend.

  Wolfman—Skobold's nickname harkened to a very different legendary tradition. Cree had to admit her curiosity had been aroused: lots of questions surrounding those bones. Not the least of them was Bert. His aura was opaque, dark hued, but she sensed there were energies working beneath his impassive surface. She had to wonder why a weary cop three months from retirement would put in all this extra work on the hundred-year-old skeleton of a John Doe and call for assistance from a dead friend's daughter he hadn't even talked to in ten years.

  They got off just below Market Street, then began working their way north toward Pacific Heights. Uncle Bert drove like a man who knew his town, leading her on a zigzag course through smaller streets. Cree loved seeing the neighborhoods again, whites and beiges and rainbow pastels, streets rising in a series of steps lined with San Francisco's famously tall, narrow Victorians. On the dizzyingly steep final slope of Divisadero, Bert's car disappeared and the gap between buildings showed only sky. Cree brought her car to a stop with its nose in the air, checked cross traffic, then bucked back hard as the Honda breasted the top of the hill. She crossed the flat and slowed when it seemed there was nothing but air beyond the hood; in another instant she pitched forward and the drop from Pacific Fleights to the Marina opened beneath: houses clinging to the slope, streets stretching away into miniature far below and ending abruptly at the broad waters of the bay The distant hills of Sausalito were bright with ocean sun, shadows in their folds. Directly below, Bert's car waited at the first intersection, turn signal flashing.