Altar of Bones (17 page)

San Francisco, California
Back in the present

Z
OE D
MITROFF
looked out the window of her Mission Street law office for any sign of the Impala. Puke brown with a dented front fender, it had been circling the block for over an hour now, slowing down every time it passed her door. It was too misty and rainy for her to see the face of the man behind the wheel, but she knew who it was. Manuel Moreno.

She knew what he wanted, too. He wanted his wife. His obsession. His punching bag.

“Yeah, well, those days are over for you, chump,” Zoe said out loud, feeling a little silly, but also more than a little creeped out by the circling Impala. By now the anonymous white SUV carrying Inez Moreno and her three-month-old daughter would be well on its way to a safe house out of state. Something Manuel shouldn’t have figured out until five hours from now, when his wife didn’t come home after the end of her nursing shift at San Francisco General. Yet here he was, and this was way more than a little creepy.

“It’s like he’s living inside my head and all I gotta do is even
think
about leaving him, and somehow he knows,” Inez had told her once. “He just knows.”

Outside, a tire squealed. Zoe tensed, then relaxed once she got a good look at the car that whisked past her window, spraying water. Not the Impala.

Normally the Latino neighborhood bustled with activity, but on this
wet and chilly February afternoon few people were out and about. Paco G., who sold fake-leather handbags from a stand on the corner, was already packing it in for the day. Even Tía Juanita, who usually lived in the alley in back of the bodega next door, had given up picking through the trash for cans and bottles and set off to find a shelter.

A Muni bus pulled up to the stoplight, wipers flapping, exhaust belching out a cloud of smoke. Zoe craned her head to look around it. Still no Impala. Maybe he’d given up, too.

Except that men such as Manuel Moreno never gave up.

She turned away from the window and finished clearing off her desk of the case files she’d been studying. When she was done, she put on her black leather bomber jacket and slung the oversize Tumi satchel she used as a combination purse and briefcase over her shoulder. She turned out the lights and headed for the door.

Zoe’s office was in a small Victorian-style storefront, sandwiched between the bodega and a T-shirt shop. She got as far as the second step of the front stoop, then the Impala whipped around the corner, nearly knocking down a bike-messenger boy, and screeched to a stop at the fire hydrant.

Manuel Moreno flung open the car door and got out. He was a weedy man, with a scraggly goatee and small, tight eyes.

“Where’s Inez?” he shouted, coming right at her, getting up into her face. “Where’s my wife?”

“I don’t know where she is,” Zoe said, and that was no lie. She’d set the system up that way herself because you couldn’t be ordered by a court by tell what you didn’t know.

Manuel’s mouth curled, and he leaned into her, so close she could have counted the individual hairs on his pathetic chin. “Inez is a scared little rabbit. She’d never do this on her own. You know where she’s at, lady, and before I’m done with you, you’re gonna be beggin’ me to let you tell me.”

Out the corner of her eye, Zoe saw a silver Ford Taurus pull up, the kind of car that in this neighborhood shouted
la policía
so loudly it might as well have been painted black-and-white. It double-parked alongside the Impala, and two plainclothes cops—a man and an Asian woman—got out.

Zoe knew the man, Inspector Sean Mackey of Homicide, and he never brought her anything but bad news. But right now she wanted to throw him a ticker-tape parade.

“You might want to cool it,” she said to Manuel. “‘Cause there’s a big, badass cop standing right behind you.”

The man snorted. “Yeah, right. What do I got—
stupid
written all over my forehead?”

“Well, since you asked …”

Inspector Mackey slammed the flat of his big hand down hard on the Impala’s hood. Moreno whirled, almost tripping over his own feet.

“Hey, what the—”

“Better watch it, tough guy,” Mackey said. “The lady’s got a black belt in tae kwan do. She can kick your ass so bad you’ll be pissing blood for a week.”

“She can
kiss
my ass, is what she can do.”

Mackey stepped into Moreno’s space. His voice, though, was soft and smooth as whipped cream. “You might want to go on home now. Take a nice long shower, then pour yourself a brewski and chill for a bit.”

Moreno clenched his fists, but he brushed past Mackey and went to his car. He jerked open the door, got inside, and revved up the engine. Then he poked a finger out the window at Zoe. “You tell Inez we ain’t finished. Not by a long shot.”

“Whoever this Inez is,” said the female cop, as they watched the Impala pull out into traffic, “she better not get within a mile of that guy. At least not until he settles down a bit.”

Zoe didn’t comment. Sometimes the police sympathized with her cases. Sometimes they didn’t.

“You okay, Zoe?” Mackey said.

“I’m fine, Mack. Thanks for showing up when you did, though.”

“Aw, you’d have taken him.”

Zoe shrugged. “Maybe. He was pumped.” She held out her hand to the female cop. “I’m Zoe Dmitroff.”

“Wendy Lee,” the woman said, laughter and curiosity bright in her eyes. “Mack was filling me in about you on the way over here.”

“Really?” Zoe looked at Mackey, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She
wondered what he’d said about her. He was a good-looking guy, square-jawed and nicely ripped, and there’d always been this little frisson of attraction between them. But it was never going to go anywhere because he flat out couldn’t handle what her mother did for a living.

“And I saw that report Channel 4 news did on you a couple of days ago,” Wendy Lee was saying. “About how you’ve set up an underground-railroad-type service to help get women and kids get away from the assholes in their lives.”

“Sometimes she helps them get away,” Mackey put in, a little edge to his voice. He didn’t always approve of what she did for a living either. “Sometimes they pump a shotgun round into the asshole’s chest instead or bury a meat cleaver in his head, and then she helps them walk on the murder rap.”

“Sometimes,” Zoe said, “when the system fails you, a meat cleaver might seem like your only recourse.”

“And who gets to decide when that line’s been crossed? Who gets to decide when killing the guy becomes a … How did you put it? Oh, yeah. An
only recourse
.”

Wendy Lee grinned at her partner. “I think the reporter did mention something about that, too, Mack. Only the way he put it, Ms. Dmitroff not only specializes in battered-wife and partner syndrome as a defense, she works pro bono to free those poor women already convicted and shipped off to prison for murdering their abusers during previous, less enlightened times.”

Mackey snorted. “There you go.”

“So moving right along,” Zoe said. “What brought you guys out here anyway?”

Mackey reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of photographs. “You know this woman?”

Zoe was a criminal-defense attorney; she’d seen crime-scene photos before. And Mackey had only given her headshots so there weren’t any visible wounds, just some blood around the old woman’s sunken mouth. But something about her, something so vulnerable in those opaque, staring eyes, pulled hard at Zoe’s heart. She knew—without quite knowing how she knew—that this poor old woman had died alone and afraid.

“No, I don’t think I know her…. Should I? What happened to her?”

“She’s a homeless woman who was stabbed late last night in Golden Gate Park. On Kennedy Drive near the Conservatory of Flowers. The murder weapon was left in her—some weird kind of knife I’ve never seen before. This guy and his friend were tooling along in his new Jag when they interrupted the killer in the act. Literally. She died on him before the ambulance could get there, and I know that had to’ve been tough on him, but now he’s got a rant going with the media about poor old homeless women getting shivved on our city streets. There’s a real shit storm going on down at the Hall.”

Zoe looked at the crime-scene photo again, drawn by those dead, staring eyes, and she felt almost swamped by feelings of sadness and loss. It didn’t make any sense. She didn’t know this woman, but it felt as if she
ought
to know her. It was her eyes. Something about her eyes …

“Do you—” Zoe’s voice cracked, and she had to start over. “Do you know who she is yet?”

“Not exactly,” Mackey said. “We canvassed the park and found a trannyho called Buttercup who cruises the Panhandle, and who claims they were both part of a colony camping out in the woods behind the Conservatory. He … she … said the old woman’s name was Rosie something.”

Zoe tore her gaze away from the eyes in the photograph. She looked up to catch Mackey studying her, concern on his face, but also with a cop’s wariness.

“I’m sorry, Mack, but I just don’t know her. What made you think I would?”

He reached in his pocket and this time pulled out a clear plastic evidence envelope. “The ME found this caught way in the back of her throat. Like maybe she’d tried to eat it to keep her killer from getting hold of it. It was pretty badly chewed up, but those guys in the lab can do wonders these days.”

The envelope held a shredded scrap of paper, scribbled on in pencil. The writing had been chemically enhanced, but even then only part of it was still legible. Zoe could read enough of it, though, and a chill settled over her.

“It’s my home address. Not my office. My home.”

She looked up at Mackey, who exchanged cop looks with Wendy Lee, then cleared his throat. “You ever hear of something called the altar of bones?”

“No, but it sounds weird. What is it?”

In typical cop fashion he didn’t answer. Instead, he produced another plastic evidence envelope and handed it to her. “This photograph was in the pocket of the old lady’s coat. We figure it was taken back in the late fifties to go by the clothes and hairstyles. Are either of the two people in it familiar to you?”

Zoe looked down and felt the spit dry in her mouth. It couldn’t be, simply couldn’t be.

It was an old black-and-white snapshot of a pretty blond woman in her twenties standing with her arm around the shoulders of a little girl of about six. The little girl wore pigtails and a parochial-school uniform and smiled widely for the camera. They stood in front of the entrance to Twentieth Century–Fox studios. Zoe knew it was Twentieth Century– Fox studios because her mother had this same photograph, or rather a larger version of it, in an ornate silver frame on the desk in her library.

“But I don’t … It doesn’t make any sense. How did she get this?”

“So you’ve seen it before?” Mackey asked. “Or the people? You’ve seen them before?”

But Zoe didn’t really hear him, she was staring at the photograph’s crimped corners, at how badly it had faded over the years. Something had been spilled on it at one time—coffee? blood?—staining the sky above the studio sign. But then it had been lived with and loved by an old homeless woman who had been murdered, not carefully preserved in a silver frame.

It began to rain again, fat drops splattering the plastic envelope, as Wendy Lee came up to look over Zoe’s shoulder. “Our vic’s had a rough go of it and a lot of time has passed since this photograph was taken, but the ME thinks it’s the same woman. They’re going to run a photo analysis program later to get a more definitive answer.”

“But they can’t be the same,” Zoe said. “The woman in this picture is my grandmother. And her name wasn’t Rosie. It was Katya. Katya Orlova. Only she’s been dead for almost fifty years.”

Z
OE GUNNED
the Babe.

She snagged a yellow light, zipped across Market, hooking a left first chance she got, then right onto Franklin. No way would she stay on Van Ness with its traffic lights turning red at every cross street. She went up, up, through the wind-whipped rain, eyes peeled for cops. A lot of them knew the Babe, and those who didn’t would still just love to ticket a vintage baby blue Mustang.

She broke a good-size law, not allowing a pedestrian to waltz out in front of her, drenching him instead, but she had to get to her mother ahead of the cops. She had to find out how an old homeless woman who came to be murdered in Golden Gate Park turned out to be the same grandmother who’d died in an automobile accident years and years ago.

But the only way you ever had a hope of getting the truth out of Anna Larina Dmitroff was to catch her by surprise. If Zoe could get to her mother first, if she could to look into her mother’s face, into her eyes, maybe
something
would bleed through that cold, hard mask she wore.

Almost there. Her wipers drug across the windshield, fog piled up inside. The Babe had good rain traction—she cut off a yellow cab, swerved around a big honker Lexus, curses and middle fingers flying in her wake, nearly ended up in the yard of a tall, skinny Victorian. She cut a hard left on Washington, spraying water like a rooster tail, nearly skidded into a parked Toyota, rolled through the stop signs at Gough and Octavia, and two blocks later swung into the driveway of her mother’s mansion on the crest of Pacific Heights, the Babe’s tires squealing. It was twelve minutes exactly since she’d left Mackey and his
partner, Wendy Lee, telling them she was due in court. She’d watched them drive away, then ran around to the alley behind the bodega where she parked her car.