The Crooked Street

7

Frost arrived at police headquarters to find Captain Hayden’s aide, Cyril Timko, waiting for him outside. The newly constructed headquarters building was located in the Mission Bay neighborhood, close enough to the Giants stadium to hear the shout of the crowds. But it was March, and the team was still basking in the Scottsdale sun for spring training.

Cyril had two takeaway cups of coffee in his hands. He handed one to Frost with a smile that was more like a glare. His face had a skeletal look that showed off his cheekbones and jaw.

“I heard you were coming in, Inspector,” Cyril said. “I thought it would be easier for us to talk outside.”

“Any particular reason?”

Cyril shrugged. “You know how it is. Cops are a nosy bunch.”

Frost tasted the coffee, which was as black as road tar and hot enough to scorch his lips. Some men showed off their testosterone with the grip of their handshake, and others with their Sumatran dark roast.

“Good coffee,” Frost told him casually.

They strolled along China Basin past upscale condominiums mostly inhabited by the coders of Silicon Valley. Beyond the residential buildings, he saw the construction site for the headquarters of a Chicago tech company that the mayor had spent two years and millions of tax dollars luring to the city. So much bandwidth hummed through this neighborhood that Frost was surprised the buildings didn’t glow.

Cyril, in his uniform, walked with his back as rigid and straight as a pencil. “Any news for the captain?”

Frost choked down another swig of coffee. “I searched Denny’s boat, but someone got there before me. There wasn’t much left to find.”

“Oh?”

“His computer was missing, and I didn’t find any paper files. I’m getting copies of his phone and bank statements sent to me, so that may tell us more about who he’s been dealing with.”

“What about drugs?” Cyril asked. “The captain thought this smelled like a drug hit. Did you find any evidence to back that up?”

“I found a brick of cocaine in Denny’s desk,” Frost acknowledged.

“Well, that tells us a lot.”

“Maybe.”

Cyril stopped at the street corner across from the building project, where two cranes swung I beams fourteen stories in the air. The smaller cop’s dark eyes studied the work with fascination. “You don’t think so? Why not?”

“If someone beat me to the boat, they would have found the cocaine and grabbed it. They didn’t. That makes me wonder if they left it behind deliberately to send us down the wrong road.”

Cyril rubbed his nose with his fist. “Did you find anything else?”

“I met a Chinese boy who sneaked onto the boat. Probably about fourteen years old. He said his father worked with Denny but was missing.”

“Who was this boy?”

“He told me his name was Fox, but that’s all. It’s probably a nickname. I haven’t been able to find anything more about him or his father. But if his father is missing, I’d like to know if there’s a connection to Denny’s death.”

“Do you want help? I can look into the boy myself and see what I can find out.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’m sure the captain keeps you plenty busy.”

“He does, but he also said to put myself at your disposal.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Cyril nodded. “So? Is that all?”

Frost thought about Dick Coyle and his snakes. And about Lombard. “That’s all for now,” he said.

Cyril sipped his coffee. The boom of the construction project rumbled under the sidewalk like an earthquake. “The captain tells me you knew Clark,” he said finally. “You two were friends?”

“Years ago.”

“Are you too personally involved with the victim? Maybe someone else should handle the investigation.”

“I hadn’t spoken to Denny Clark in a decade,” Frost replied. “There’s no conflict.”

Cyril nodded. His fingers twitched, and he put down his coffee on the sidewalk and grabbed his e-cigarette from a pocket. The first inhalation of vapor made his whole body relax. “Keep me posted, Inspector. I’ll relay everything directly to the captain. This one is very important to him.”

“I’d like to know why the captain is so interested in this case,” Frost told him.

“He’ll tell you himself at the right time,” Cyril replied. “In the meantime, don’t make any significant moves without talking to me first. And keep this arrangement between us, okay?”

Frost had the feeling that he’d been dismissed by the younger cop. The interrogation was over. He finished his coffee and turned around and headed back down China Basin toward headquarters. Behind him, Cyril didn’t move. When he’d gone half a block, Frost glanced over his shoulder and saw the captain’s aide still sucking on his vapor cigarette and watching the pieces of the skyscraper come together.

At his desk in the Mission Bay headquarters building, Frost took a close look at the two people who were with Denny Clark in the photo that Coyle had found on Facebook.

The first was Greg Howell, dead millionaire, whose real estate holdings and development projects had made him one of the prime beneficiaries of San Francisco’s gentrification over the past decade. The second was a woman with sandy-blond hair who wore a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt and black capris hugging her slim legs. Frost wanted to know who she was.

Her sunglasses covered up much of her face, but what he could see was attractive. He’d originally guessed that she was in her thirties, but when he enlarged the photo to study her skin tone, he suspected that he’d underestimated by a few years. Although her clothes and glasses tried to hide her age, she was probably on the north side of forty. Her red lips were pressed together in a thin, enigmatic line that was neither smile nor frown. Her hair was straight and long enough to wrap around her neck as the wind blew. Each of the men had an arm around her shoulders, but she didn’t return the gesture. Her arms hung stiffly at her sides. Her body had a tenseness that said she wasn’t happy to be photographed.

Frost studied the picture for clues about the event. Greg Howell had a lowball cocktail in his other hand, which suggested some kind of party cruise, but most of Denny’s charters probably fell into that category. The Roughing It was out on the bay, because he could see the crown of Mount Tamalpais in the background. The deepening blue of twilight and the lengthy shadows told him it was a late-summer evening. Coyle had found the photo posted on Howell’s Facebook page in early August.

The caption on the post was strange: If I’m lost at sea, here’s proof of life.

Frost called up newspaper reports about Greg Howell and found a lot. Coyle was right. The man had his fingers in everything around the city. He breezed through the Chronicle headlines from the summer and fall:

And then in October:

Frost read the article. Howell’s body was found near North Lake in a wooded section of Golden Gate Park. He’d been out on an early morning run, and another jogger had found him facedown on the trail at six o’clock. The autopsy gave no indication of foul play, and as a result, there had been no criminal investigation by the police.

There was nothing odd about Howell’s death that Frost could see. Except a red snake. When he looked at the photo Coyle had taken of the snake spray-painted onto a boulder in the park, he could see North Lake through the trees and the exact section of the jogging trail where Howell had been found.

Coyle had texted him other snake photos that he’d found around the city. Frost clicked on each picture, and one by one by one they filled his screen, until his monitor was crowded with eleven snakes. Twelve, when he added the snake he’d found himself in Coolbrith Park. All were identical, all blood red, hissing at him from behind empty eyes and taunting him with their secret.

Seven of the deaths that Coyle had identified near the graffiti snakes were homicides. Frost called up the police reports for each case, looking for details that would connect the victims to each other or to Denny. Nothing leaped out at him. The locations were all over the city. The cause of death varied. Two shootings. Two knifings. One bludgeoning. One hit-and-run. One suffocation. None involved poison, as Denny’s murder had. The victims ranged in age and occupation.

All remained unsolved.

Frost spent two hours examining the case files until the words and photos began to blur on the screen. There was no pattern, nothing to suggest that one murder had anything to do with another. They looked like the kind of random violent acts that happened dozens of times in the city in any given year.

And then, finally, he saw it.

He’d been so focused on the minutiae that he almost missed an obvious coincidence staring him in the face. The cases were all completely different, but not the homicide inspector investigating them. After the Alan Detlowe case, the primary detective on every one of the subsequent homicides was the same.

Trent Gorham.

Gorham, who’d written off Coyle’s snake obsession as a crazy conspiracy.

Frost reached over to his monitor and clicked off the screen so that it went black. He eased back in his chair. A strange sensation of unease pricked up the hair on his neck. Casually, he looked across the warren of messy desks crowded together for the police detectives.

Trent Gorham sat halfway across the room.

And Gorham was staring right at him.

When Frost caught his eye, Gorham stood up from his desk. He stretched the kinks out of his back, then strolled across the office and slumped into a chair next to Frost. The detective wore cream-colored dress pants that emphasized his long legs, black leather shoes, and a burgundy knit sweater. He made a show of idly twirling a pen in his big hands, as if coming over here were no big deal, even though Frost couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had talked.

“How’s it going, Easton?” Gorham asked him.

“Just another day in paradise,” Frost replied.

“Yeah. I hear you.” Gorham tapped the clicky top of his pen against his jutting jaw. “That’s really crazy about the guy who dropped dead in your house. Everybody around here is talking about it.”

“Oh? Are they?”

“Well, it doesn’t happen every day, right?”

“I guess not,” Frost said.

“You got all the help you need?” Gorham asked. “My desk’s not too busy right now. I could lend a hand.”

Frost had never felt so popular. First Cyril Timko, now Trent Gorham.

“I’ll let you know,” he said.

He took a sip of coffee and used the interruption to study Gorham. They were about the same age. Gorham was a large man, almost six foot three, with the powerful build of an athlete. He had blond hair that sprouted from his head like a bristle brush and eyebrows so pale they were nearly translucent. His skin was white, with pink traces of rosacea on his forehead and cheeks, and his eyes were a washed-out shade of blue. His nose was slightly too large for his face, but his overall appearance was handsome. He wore a gullible expression on his face, as if he wanted the world to think he was a dumb jock, but Frost didn’t think Gorham was dumb at all.

He decided to poke the hive and see what flew out.

“I could use your help with one thing,” Frost added. “I don’t know if it means anything.”

“Sure, what’s that?”

Frost zoomed in on the photograph he’d taken of the red snake near Coolbrith Park. He turned his phone around. “Have you ever seen graffiti like this at a crime scene? I found it not far from where the victim was shot.”

He watched Gorham’s eyes. The man was cool, and his expression didn’t change at all. “Let me guess. Dick Coyle’s been talking to you?”

“You’re right. He has.”

“The Red Snake Serial Killer strikes again?” Gorham asked with a sarcastic twitch of his pale eyebrows.

“Something like that.”

Gorham chuckled and shook his head. “That guy never gives up.”

“He told me about several other homicides where he found a snake like this,” Frost said. Then he added after a pause, “Mostly your cases, I think.”

Gorham shrugged. “Lucky me. I guess I catch all the freaky ones.”

“You don’t think it’s a weird coincidence? All these snakes showing up near the bodies?”

“Come on, Easton. Really? This thing should have its own Snopes page. Yeah, it started with a couple unrelated homicides, but then Coyle had to start counting ODs and heart attacks to keep it going. It’s crap.”

“You’re probably right,” Frost said.

“You bet I am. Frankly, this whole snake thing pisses me off. Alan Detlowe was a friend of mine. We worked together when I was in vice. Him getting murdered was personal to me. This had nothing to do with a serial killer. It was a drug scumbag getting back at Alan for his busts. I don’t appreciate Coyle turning his death into some kind of kooky Internet meme.”

“Did you ever track down the origin of the graffiti?” Frost asked.

“I didn’t bother. I’m sure you’ll find it all over the city. It’s probably the logo for some underground band. Or a Japanese anime character. Who knows?”

Frost smiled. “Well, thanks for setting me straight. You saved me some time.”

“Happy to do it. No point chasing a dead end, right?” Gorham stood up from the chair. “Seriously, if you need any help on this case, count me in.”

“I will.”

“And watch out for Coyle. He’s nuts, man.”

Frost didn’t say anything more. He waited as the other detective headed back to his desk, and then he turned on his monitor again.

Twelve red snakes stared back at him.

At the same moment, he felt a vibrating buzz on his phone. He retrieved it and saw that he had a new text message and a photograph waiting for him.

It was from Coyle.

Frost studied the photograph that came with the text and saw a red snake spray-painted onto the sidewalk in front of a bridge that led into a wooded community park. The paint looked vivid and fresh. This was new, not old.

Thirteen snakes.

He knew that meant thirteen bodies. Somewhere close by was another victim.

Frost didn’t have any of the answers to this puzzle yet, but he didn’t think the young private detective was nuts.