Bones of the Barbary Coast (8 page)

"At this point, can you tell anything about his nutritional history? Did he eat well?"

Skobold hefted the long bone as if he could gauge such things by feel. "The ridges and crests are pronounced, suggesting robust musculature and adequate nourishment. Again, I can't be certain without spending more time with him. However, I can tell you some other interesting facts."

"Oh?"

He hovered briefly, then selected a rib bone. He turned it on the table so that it arced into a little bridge, then wrestled the magnifying lamp into position above it. "Take a look."

Through the lens, the ivory-brown bone looked huge; Skobold's chopstick appeared in the brightly lit circle and traced the length of rib's curve. "Here we see healthy bone—smooth, uniform in thickness, a nice sweep through its natural geometry But here . . . you see the thickening, the uneven surface?"

"An injury?"

"Exactly. You see, bones are ordinarily
elegant.
Each has grown to accomplish its function with maximum efficiency yet utmost economy, so they are generally smooth and graceful. But when a bone breaks, the body hurriedly sends materials of repair to the injury site, and growth then is more haphazard. An injured bone quickly adds a layer of what we call woven bone that functions like a miniature cast. It bridges and immobilizes the fracture as the bone ends knit. After a time the new bone smooths over, but there will always be a thickening, what we call a callus, at the point of fracture."

Cree pondered the slight bulge. "So . . . what sort of injury caused this?"

"Not a severe one. There's been no angulation or displacement. Just a small crack or compression . . . a bone bruise." In the viewer, the bone vanished and another rib appeared, again marked by a telltale swelling. "There are quite a few of these on this fellow's ribs. Most are on the posterior curve—his back. Also on the scapulae and the bones of the arms and hands."

Cree picked up the longer rib and put her thumb and forefinger on either side. When she stroked the curve, the swelling was more obvious to her hands than to her eyes, a girdle of thickening about half an inch long. Tactile contact with the wolfman made him all the more real: Astonishingly, she was touching what had been the inside of someone's body, the bone just above what had once been a beating heart.

"What do these callus formations imply?"

"A rough life. Of course, we often see bone injuries and self-repair. Most are caused by accidents or result from repetitive use—for example, a stonemason's fingers will show indication they were repeatedly crushed, from being hit by the mallet or having stones dropped on them. But Wolfman's injuries were inflicted by others, I'm sorry to say. He was beaten with a stick or club. The location of the injuries suggests they occurred when he was on the ground, or bent over, perhaps trying to protect himself."

"Defensive injuries."

"In the technical sense, yes. But remember, the term can mean different things. He could certainly have gotten them while fending off blows from an attacker. He could also have gotten them from someone he was attacking, who was fighting back."

Cree nodded, swarmed by questions. "How long before death? In a single beating or repeatedly over time?"

"Can't say. But given the degree of healing, I'd hazard that none of these injuries occurred within, oh, the ten to fifteen years preceding his death."

The wolfman lay in his many pieces. Knowing about the pain he must have suffered, Cree saw his bones, his unintentional autobiography, as looking sad and defeated.

"You're feeling it, aren't you?" Skobold said softly. "You want to know who he was. You feel an unaccountable loyalty to him. A determination to find out who he was, to give him his due."

"I always get that for the underdog. No pun intended." She realized he'd read her mind, and she cocked her head at him. "How'd you know?"

"I share the sentiment." His fingers stroked the arm bone comfortingly. "They look so crushed down by time and gravity. But then I remind myself they're defiant, too. They say,
We will persist. We will tell the story."

"I like that."

A thousand other questions occurred to Cree, but Skobold's assistant had appeared at the door. She knocked on the glass, made a throat-cutting gesture, and spun away.

"Okay," Cree said quickly, "I know we're out of time. But one thing I should know . . . not to put pressure on you, but when do you think you can get to him? I mean, I'm down from Seattle and—"

"I was planning to start tonight, after hours. I really shouldn't, but of course I can't resist. But it's going to have to be a spare time job for me, Ms. Black. Meaning it could take weeks to complete reconstruction. Unless," he finished with a prim smile, "you'd like to help me."

"Are you kidding? I'd love it! I'm flattered you'd ask!"

"It will go faster with extra hands. Just the routine processing will be time consuming, but what with the gossip factor, I can't let any of my students help. And our working together will allow us to compare notes on what we've found. But are you up for working in the evening?"

Cree had to grin. "Absolutely! I'm . . . something of a night owl, actually."

Skobold nodded thoughtfully. "Let's say eight tonight, then. I'll tell Security to expect you—you'll want to pick up a key from their office."

9

C
REE GOT TO the house at three. Nobody answered the doorbell, and when she let herself in the racket of power tools explained why.

In the dining room, a man was working with a floor sander that rasped and thundered and seemed to drag him after it; in the front parlor, a carpenter was using a table-mounted saw that he dropped to cut precision angles on a strip of decorative molding. A couple of men were bent over another table saw where they'd spread some papers. They looked up when she came in, and the older of them came toward her with an inquiring expression. He was dressed in a leather apron over brown work pants and shirt, and his air of authority told her he was head of this crew.

"Mr. Hernandez," she said. "I'm Cree Black and I'm assisting Inspector Marchetti with the identification effort for the skeleton you found. If you can spare a few minutes, I have some questions for you."

Hernandez shook her hand, feigning consternation. "I swear I didn't do it. I have an alibi for all of 1906."

She shared a laugh with the men and clarified that it was regarding the house—its structure and renovation history. Hernandez gave his crew some instructions and went with her to the back parlor, where a short alcove extended to a doorway opening to the porch and terrace.

"Okay," she began. "My questions have to do with the difference between what this house is now and what it was when it was first built."

"Got it."

"Originally, there was another house where the terrace is now." She showed him her photocopy of the Sanborn map. "You can see it's built very close to this house—what, five or six feet?"

"Sounds about right. The gangway would have been just wide enough to walk through. On these steep hills the lots ran long and thin, you had to build close."

"So all these windows, the protruding bays, the front porch—those would have been added after the other house came down?"

"Oh, there'd have been windows. But you're right, not the bays or the porch, sticking out so far. With the other house gone, this side would have become a more important exposure, so they articulated this facade to make it look and function more like the 'front.' They'd have broken out walls and reframed to accommodate the additions. First, they'd've built foundation extensions for the bays and the porch."

She tried to visualize the reconfiguration. "Can you see any sign of wall repair or renovation from what you've been doing?"

"Nope. We haven't had to open up any walls on this side. Sorry."

A fifth man arrived with a box of doughnuts and a cardboard tray loaded with Styrofoam coffee cups. The men shut down their tools and sat on the floor or leaned against the walls to stuff their faces. Cree declined Hernandez's offer of a doughnut.

"How about the floor boards?" she asked. "I'm particularly interested in the area directly over the room in the basement."

"I can tell you about that," one of the men said helpfully. He was young, muscular, his copper skin covered in dust except where a mask had sat over his mouth and nose: the floor sander.

"Why don't you show us, Ricky?" Hernandez suggested.

In the front parlor, Ricky tugged back a tarp and used a push broom to clear sawdust from the floor nearest the terrace-side wall. He squatted and swiped the area with his hands until he found the right place.

"The varnish is colored all the same, probably been sanded clean and revarnished a couple times since then, so it's all yellowed the same. The floor is white oak, right? No big difference in color. But you can see all these boards got a finer grain, more rays. Better wood, older trees like they had. The boards on this side, it's different. You see that? It goes back, oh, about to there." Ricky gestured in an arc that took in about a quarter of the room.

It was subtle, but Cree could see what he meant. The floorboards nearest the outside wall had been replaced with lumber from a different lot. Like the ceiling boards in the basement, they had been interlaced with the older boards so that the difference was almost imperceptible. It seemed to confirm the theory that the masonry that had buried the wolfman had fallen through both the outer wall and the floor, requiring substantial repairs.

Ricky stood up again, pleased with himself. "This like
CSI,
man! Looking for the clues? You gonna put my name in the newspaper?"

The men in the other room laughed and berated him.

They chatted as Hernandez took her on a quick tour of the house to show off the fine work his crew had done, then headed for the basement. In the back room, they turned on some lights and Hernandez brought another with them into the wolfman's burial chamber. The deep, subterranean smell was the same, but in the harsh light the room seemed far smaller than it had in darkness.

"Mr. Hernandez," Cree said, "what I'm trying to figure out is, after the stuff fell and killed that poor guy, somebody did all this work, right? And they left him in there. If I can determine what they did and how they did it, that might help me figure out
why
they did it. Did they not know about the dead guy? Or did they deliberately leave him there?"

Hernandez nodded. "I see your point."

"So, your crew opens this up, and it's knee deep in rubble, right?"

"Deeper. In the middle, more like shoulder high."

"What kind of rubble?"

"Bricks, mortar, slabs of granite that were probably windowsills or lintels. Lots of broken boards, too, broken floor joists, clapboards, pieces of crown molding. We figured a chimney or part of a brick wall fell through the walls and floor upstairs. Makes sense it was from the other house, falling this way"

"Can you tell if this room was here already, and the stuff just happened to fall into it, or did somebody build it around the rubble pile?"

Hernandez inspected the wall, pondering that. "Hm. Well, we've got a four-wythe brick wall on three sides. Four wythe means four layers of brick, which is way overbuilt for a dividing wall. If it was built after the stuff fell in, I'd expect to see poor-quality mortar work, an extruded joint, on these inner surfaces. Somebody trying to work while standing on a pile of debris, or working from the outside, it would be hard to clean up the mortar that bulges out when the brick is set. But looking at the inner face, I'm seeing skillful workmanship, a smooth V bead. I'd hire this guy in a heartbeat! I'd definitely say this room was here before the quake."

"But after the quake, somebody patched the ceiling—removed the damaged boards, carefully put new ones in. That would have to be done from this side, wouldn't it?"

"No question. Had to be done from in here."

"So . . . how does someone do all this from the inside and get themselves out?"

Hernandez frowned as he looked around, shining his light on each of the walls in turn, then looked closely at the outer wall. He shrugged, at a loss. "Only thing I can think of is there was a filled-in door right where we happened to break through. We didn't look that close, we just determined it wasn't a bearing wall and started in with the sledges. If somebody had built that section from the outer side, working the bricks in skillfully, we wouldn't have noticed. And we'd've wrecked any indication of sloppy interior mortar joint as we knocked our way through."

"When you started taking away the debris, how'd that go?"

"We had three men running wheelbarrows out through the gardening room stairs, two of us inside moving rubble. I was the one who saw the first bone."

"How far in were you?"

"We started at the doorway we made, working our way in and down. The first bone was a long bone, like an arm bone, sticking up from under maybe four feet of rubble. About in the middle here."

She pictured the situation. "Must have been something of a showstopper, huh?"

He grinned. "Well, we pulled it out and looked at it. It looked like it might be human, but we didn't know for sure. Then right away we found another long bone and some little bones I thought could be a hand or a foot. I was uncomfortable doing any more, so I pulled the guys off and called SFPD. Inspector Marchetti and the crime scene people kicked us out for couple of days and did the rest of the excavation."

The coffee break upstairs must have ended, because the racket started up again, the whine of the chop saw and some hammering. A deeper rumble told Cree that the floor sanding had resumed at the other end of the house. Hernandez was getting the look of a man with other things on his mind: three thirty, quitting time on the horizon, work to be done.

They turned off the lights and headed back upstairs.

The Schweitzer family history was becoming very important, Cree decided. Clearly, the owners of this house had not only known about the wolfman but had taken some pains to leave him in there.