Everyone Pays (18 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

MICHAEL

Julia Steele asked, “What did he do?”

“Do you want to tell her?” I caught Steele by his elbow, kept him in the room. “Tell her.”

“This guy’s crazy,” he said. “Look at him. Are you going to trust some maniac who breaks into our house or me?”

She eyed me again, still afraid, but she didn’t trust him, had her questions.

“Tell her.” I brought my knife to his chest, pushed his loosened tie to the side, cut into his shirt. “Think carefully about the next thing you say.”

“No!” she cried, but that was all she said. She dropped onto the bed.

“I’m here from God. To punish you. Because of
her
”—I pointed at his wife—“you will live. But I’ll leave it to you two to sort out how.” I pushed him out of the room, into the hall.

I had his wife’s cell phone in my pocket, but I didn’t care anymore if she called the police. If He wanted them to stop me, then His will would be done. I shoved Dan Steele into the bathroom.

“I can cut your shirt off, or you can take it off,” I said. “Either way you’re going to get cut.”

He screamed, and I punched him in the face again. At that he sat down on the toilet lid. He called his wife’s name.

“She won’t want to see this.”

“Those guys. We don’t talk anymore. Not since that night.” He shook his head, blood and tears dripping from his nose. “It was—I won’t see them again.”

“Tell me how it happened. Who caused it?”

He squeezed his face with a hand. “I still can’t believe it. Wasn’t my idea, that’s for sure.”

“But you took part. You helped them do this.”

“Not me. Eric. It was Eric.”

I slapped his face with the back of my hand. “To allow is to do.” I punched him again; his head snapped back and then lolled forward.
“Bystander. Sinner.”

“But she was—”

“On meth. An addict. Druggie. What else did you want to say?”

“A whore. That and a whore. She
liked
it.”

I slapped his face. Seethed, wondering why I had let him speak. “She is God’s child under heaven. Was and is, then and now. You
don’t
do that.”

I grabbed his face with my left hand, squeezed his jaw open, and brought the knife in close. He squirmed, but I held tight.

“Please don’t,” the wife said behind me. She leaned in through the door, meeting my eyes in the mirror.

“You would save this man?” I asked her. “Do you know what he’s done?”

“I don’t care. He’s a good man. I believe that. He’s my husband.” She touched her stomach. “Please.”

I hadn’t hurt her and wouldn’t. In my hands, he whined his plea.

I wanted God to speak then, to say how I should mete out the pain that He desired. Again I was alone in my volition.

“Flesh,” I said. I pushed his head back, let go of his face. “I want an inch of your flesh. You can choose where it comes from.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Choose, or in a minute, I will choose.”

The husband and wife exchanged a look. They knew I was telling the truth.

CHAPTER SIXTY

DONNER

“Don’t worry, Meaders. You’ll be safe.” I said it with a straight face, had gotten used to acting the part. Hendricks stared at me hard, maybe not liking the plan, that we hadn’t discussed it first, or that I was saying this without his approval. I didn’t care.

“Our man is in contact. We can tell him where you are.
I’ll
tell him. Then we watch you, keep you safe, catch him when he comes.” I touched his hand with the least malice I could manage. “Don’t worry about it.”

His eyes, his face showed he believed every word.

Hendricks was another matter. “Yeah, Donner. He’ll listen to you
because
?” Then he stood up, told Meaders we’d be just a minute.

Hendricks led me toward the back of the pub. When we were out of Meaders’s earshot, he leaned down and spoke. “Are you crazy? What are you thinking about right now? What’s the plan?”

“Just that,” I said, showing him my hands. “Nothing up my sleeve. Based on the email, Father Michael thinks I’m some kind of parallel religious beacon who hears from God, and maybe we work that to our advantage. We put Meaders out like a goat on a leash and wait for him to come.”

“A goat on a leash? How’d that work out for the goat?”

“When? In
Jurassic Park
?”

I thought of the bloody chain the T. rex left behind.

“This isn’t a T. rex, Daniel. And otherwise, what are our choices? We keep chasing him? Wait and hope our thin manpower can be in the right place at the right time? No. We lost our shot at surprise with St. Boniface.”

Hendricks stared hard. If thoughts were gears, I’d have heard them turning. I didn’t want to give him a chance to argue, to put words to the problems with my plan. I just wanted him to come along.

That’s when I slapped him.

I’d never slapped a man before, certainly not my partner or another good cop, never outside a bedroom, anyway, and I wasn’t sure who was more surprised: him or me. We both froze.

Then I checked Meaders. He hadn’t seen.

“We do this,” I said. “That’s it. Come back to the table, we convince goat boy, and then we go ahead. We’ll be with him the whole time.”

“What was
that
?”

“What?”

“You kidding?”

I offered to shake Hendricks’s hand, held mine out in an offer of truce or friendship. I wanted to make a deal.

Hendricks smiled. He didn’t accept my hand. Instead, he reached up and gently laid his palm against my cheek, not a caress and definitely not a slap. Just a touch. Then a second later, a light slap. I deserved worse, I knew.

“So we do this?”

“Yeah,” he said, “we can try it. But Donner, we got to get you some rest.”

Inside ten minutes, we had Meaders in our car and confused to the point where he was ready to go along with what we suggested. Hendricks kept on talking, while I checked my phone and thought about how I’d reply to what Father Michael had said. Sure, answer a nut with another nut. Fast and sweet, that was what we needed.

“Who lives with you?”

Meaders shook his wrist, loosing a gold Rolex down onto his hand. “I live alone,” he said. “A condo on—”

“Elsie Street,” I finished. “Come on, we’re the police, Eric. Don’t think we don’t already know.”

Hendricks said, “How’s the rest of your Thursday night looking? I hope you didn’t already have plans.”

Meaders shook his head. His eyes were full Bambi.

“Where do we go? You’re not thinking we let him come to my place, right?”

In the car, Hendricks explained the bulk of our problem: too little funding in the department, our balls being cut off by budgetary constrictions and bad management, and, specifically, not enough manpower, too many possible targets on this case for us to effectively watch where our guy would strike next. We needed to narrow the odds, and that’s where Meaders came in. Hendricks was on board, driving us to Bernal Heights, talking Meaders blind.

I sat in the back, still figuring out the last parts of my email. So far, it went like this:

Dear Father,

Forgive me for I have sinned. I took the girl away from your protection and now she is at the mercy of the state. We both know she was better off before. This will be rectified soon.

First, I know there is a small number whom you still pursue. I want to help you achieve God’s plan. He has spoken to me. I am delivering Eric Meaders to his home at 323 Elsie within the next hour. Once there, he is yours.

I hope you take him, make him pay.

I didn’t know if he’d believe me and act on this or how long it would take for him to come if he did. All I knew was that this was our play. That was my email. I read it over one last time and hit “Send.”

That’s when Hendricks’s phone rang, and he picked it up.

“Hendricks.”

He listened as dispatch spoke on the other end. I could tell it was them from the official tones. Dispatch didn’t talk long.

“Got it,” Hendricks said. “Thanks for the update.”

“What’s up?”

“Unit just got to the Steeles’ place. Father Michael has already been there. He took a hunk of Steele’s flesh out of his side. They’re pretty distraught.”

Meaders’s head went on swivel; he looked around like the bait he was. “Dan Steele? This guy’s already been to see him? What happened to him? And what do you mean by
a hunk
?”

“A lot of questions,” I said. “And for a guy you don’t know.”

Meaders grimaced, unhappy that I’d brought back his lie and was basically rubbing his nose in it.

I leaned forward, between the front seats, so he could see how serious I was. “He was part of your poker night, asshole. He was there when you beat up Emily, Silver.”

“Easy, partner,” Hendricks whispered.

“This guy we’re after? He’s into some real medieval pain, Meaders. You better hope he doesn’t get to you without us around.”

I relaxed back into the rear of the car.

Hendricks said, “Guy was bleeding pretty bad, wasn’t going to a hospital. If you can believe that. Now we’ve got him on the way there.”

I shrugged in agreement, and just then my phone buzzed. I checked it to find a text from Alan:
Everything all right?

I nodded to myself. Here he was, breaking the standard Laws of Cool by following up on his own message in a day’s time. I liked that. In truth, I wasn’t cool and knew it, so I liked that he wasn’t. He didn’t apologize or act uncertain either; he just came out, got in touch, asked after me. It was enough to make a girl smile.

I texted back quickly as Hendricks drove:
Mess of a case. Will call when I come up for air. Am okay.

Hendricks saw what I was doing. “What’s that?”

I lied, told him I’d just emailed the priest.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

MICHAEL

I walked north on Van Ness. Crossing Market, I dropped a bloody cloth with Steele’s flesh inside into the gutter. I had held it for long enough, this man’s flesh.

In the end, he couldn’t decide where it should come from, so I chose. If I had given him longer, he might have settled on a place that seemed less painful, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Anywhere on his body, I’d have made it hurt.

I took it from his side, fat along his stomach. People call them love handles, go to the gym and work out to lose them. He lost a bit of his left one; it was smaller now. His flesh and a lot of blood. That—the blood—was for her.

“Press this towel into it,” I had told them. “Do this to make the bleeding stop, and you will heal. But hope that you never see me or do anything to any woman again.”

The wife cried. The husband sniveled and dripped snot from his nose.

“Don’t go to the hospital,” I said. “If you call the police, I’ll be back. You don’t want that.”

They didn’t. Steele would go on living, maybe raise a son or daughter as best he could. As God’s will.

And my cut would leave a mark, a scar to remind them.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

DONNER

Eric Meaders’s apartment was actually a small one-story house on a narrow street in Bernal Heights. We parked in the drive, left the back end of our sedan blocking the sidewalk, and took Meaders up the steps. There weren’t many places on the block someone could have been watching from, but we checked around to be sure just the same. As for leaving our car in the driveway, it was about as inconspicuous as an unmarked police car could get and finding another place to park would’ve been near impossible in this neighborhood at night.

Before going in, Hendricks and I pulled our guns.

“You two stay out here,” Hendricks said. He took Meaders’s keys, opened the door, and slipped inside to case the interior.

“Watch out for my dog,” Meaders said.

I heard yipping from inside, the unmistakable call of a small canine.

Meaders checked all around us, his forehead wrinkling to the top of his bald dome. It was cold outside, a strong wind blowing cold fog up the block, and he hunched his shoulders up to his ears, rubbed his hands.

After a little while, Hendricks came back, told us the place was safe. “It’s empty. The priest’s not here.”

“Little girl,” Meaders said, rushing in with his hands at his knees to greet the small dog. He made kissing sounds to her, and they went through some kind of an embrace. Guys and little dogs—not a turn-on for me.

“Come on, girl, let’s go get your dinner.”

Once the dog got calmer, Meaders seemed to relax as well. “I’m making coffee,” he said, then stormed off toward the back.

We holstered our weapons and watched him go, dog following. We stood in an open central hallway that served as a living room, foyer, and, after another ten feet, dining room.

“Some place,” Hendricks said. “A fancy fourteen hundred square feet.”

“Welcome to the city.”

Hendricks lived south of San Francisco in Daly City; he had a place with a yard and a patch of lawn for his kid when she came over. Sure, it was foggier than most of San Francisco, but he maintained that the extra space gave him a peace of mind he’d never be able to afford in the city. That and easy parking in his driveway. Maybe he was right, but I didn’t need much more than my simple one-bedroom in Potrero Hill: I had a deck with a view, an attic apartment that was plenty tall, as long as I stayed in the middle of the floors, with room for chairs and a couch on the sides, and that was all the air or space I needed.

I was not a girl who would move to the suburbs; I rode my bicycle to the gym and the grocery store, caught the occasional Lyft ride if I needed it—despite the stupid pink mustache on their cars—and took BART as often as I could. Sure, running on concrete sidewalks wasn’t my favorite and definitely played hell on my shins, but I could live with that. I rarely got to run outside anymore since making homicide, anyway, given the hours I worked.

“Probably cost a lot too, this place,” Hendricks said.

“Yep. It definitely did.” Such was our San Francisco. I wasn’t there to sugarcoat.

“So how long do we wait?”

I checked my watch. “How long do you think? I hope he makes good coffee.”

“We’re ordering dinner in. Check your email to see if we heard from the priest.”

I checked my phone, but there was nothing new from Father Michael. It didn’t surprise me. Actually, I’d have been
more
surprised if he’d written back so fast. I didn’t exactly expect to start up a correspondence. I did think he’d be coming for Meaders on his own soon enough though. At the rate he was chopping through his victims, Meaders didn’t have long. I hoped we’d be able to wait him out.

There was an email from Dr. Matal with the subject line “Need for Beds.”

I swore, then tapped on the screen and started to read. The short and quick was that things were getting crazy over at SFGH, and Dr. Matal wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to hold on to Emily.

When I told Hendricks, he swore. “How long’s she been in?”

“Just over forty-eight hours now. Looks like we’ll be hard-pressed to get our seventy-two.”

“Beds,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t bring her here. See what the doctor sounds like, whether she can hang in another day. If not, we’ll have to move her to the Hall.”

“Definitely not letting her back into the population.”

“Like I said. How long we going to sit on Meaders here?”

“We could call in Coggins and Bennett, get them to go babysit fair Emily. What about that?”

He grimaced like he wanted to spit on Meaders’s wood floors, actually turned around and hawked something into a potted plant. “I’d rather have them sit on this tool. Call the doctor. See what she says.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” I moved to a white leather couch and dialed the doctor—this was not something to take standing up.

I got the mental health nurses’ station first, asked for the doctor, and was put on hold. Somehow the doctors at General still wore old Blackberry flip-open pagers. It was a miracle of outdated technology, but that was our civic system in all its glory.

They’d be paging her on it now, telling her she had an urgent call from the police—all basic standard operations. Meaders came out of the kitchen, offering us cups of black coffee. I thanked him as he set them down on a wooden coffee table next to an artful array of design magazines.
Who was this guy?

Finally, Dr. Matal came on the line. “Investigator Donner. I’m afraid we’re going to need this bed. Can we release this woman, or do you want to come get her?”

“You’re kidding me. We can’t have her back out on the streets. Doesn’t she need more treatment?”

“Frankly, we’ve done all we can for her. The tongue is going to heal on its own, she’s through the worst of her withdrawal symptoms, and she doesn’t want to be here. Without her consent, you know as well as I do we can’t keep her indefinitely.”

“Can you give us another twenty-four hours? It’s still very dangerous for her out on the street.”

“I’m sorry. Under normal conditions, in a perfect situation, I could give you seventy-two hours. The way things are now, and with this officer outside her room intimidating the other patients, I’ve done all I can.”

Doctors: they were either throwing the whole book at you or they had no answers at all.

“He’s intimidating the patients? How?”

Hendricks rolled his eyes. Meaders watched me with great interest, as if observing the workings of some great machine.

“Frankly, it’s just the uniform. Most of our wards don’t have a lot of good experiences with that, and it freaks them out.”

“Freaks them out? We’ll put a plainclothesman in. No one will know.”

Hendricks stifled a laugh with his fist.

“We need her to leave. Can I release her to the care of the officer on duty, or do you want to take her into your own care?”

“So where, then? Where does she go next?”

“I imagine a drug treatment center might be helpful. We have several in the city where—”

“Where she’ll walk right out on her own and disappear. We need to keep her under watch. She’s our main lead in a highly unstable case.”

Dr. Matal made me wait before she made her next comment. I’d just broken another rule: Don’t interrupt the doctor.

“Well, Investigator, you’ll have to arrest her then. Otherwise, we’re letting her go. You have an hour. I’m sorry, but I have patients to tend to.” Without another word, she hung up.

“Ouch.” I moved the phone to see its screen. The call had in fact ended. “An hour or our girl goes into the wind.”

“We can’t have that.”

“No. Not at all.” I got up, tried the coffee, and found it wasn’t bad.
Strong
, but this guy knew what he was brewing. “Call in Coggins and Bennett?”

Hendricks nodded, thought it over. He paced over to Meaders’s television and back. The little dog came out of the kitchen licking its chops.

“Did you have a good dinner?” Meaders went back to the crouched hugging and rubbing.

“I can let the duty officer take her back to the Hall, keep her in an interrogation room for a while.”

“No, no.” Hendricks walked closer. “I want to ingratiate ourselves to her. If she’s got things to say, I want her saying them to us.”

“Ingratiate? Really?”

“You like that. I know you do.”

I ignored him. “Maybe we watch her. Let her go and follow. See if she takes us to him.”

“No. Not now. She’s not going into the night. We—” He stopped himself. “He can’t be back there, can he? At the church?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“She gonna go somewhere else for shelter?”

“Where? A drug treatment center? That’s where Doc Matal said she’d send her.”

He looked at Meaders with skepticism, thinking he’d rather we go with the closer lead to our killer: Emily. Waiting with Meaders was just that—waiting. Emily was a world of unknowns: what she might say, what we might get, where she might go.

“Yeah,” he said. “We call Coggins and Bennett, set them up here with boy wonder, and we pick up the girl.”

“That works for me.”