Blood Walk.

by Lee Killough.

Original story t.i.tles:

Blood Hunt

Bloodlinks

1

Where do they begin, the roads that lead a man to h.e.l.l?

. . . With a ritual . . .

Lien Takananda sits at the kitchen table wearing her bathrobe, her short helmet of gray-touched black hair still rumpled from sleep. She holds three Chinese coins in her hand and concentrates, only subconsciously aware of her husband, Harry, in the bathroom, singing a lascivious parody of a saccharine popular song as he shaves. Almond eyes on the copy ofI Ching before her, she asks the same question of the sage that she has asked every morning for over fifteen years, since Harry joined the San Francisco police: "Will my husband be safe today?" And she throws the coins.

The hexagram produced by the six throws is number 10,Treading. Treading upon the tail of the tiger the text reads.It does not bite the man. Success.

She sighs in relief, then smiles, listening to Harry sing. After a minute, she gathers the coins again, and as she has done for most of the past year, asks on behalf of Harry's partner, "Will Garreth Mikaelian be safe today?"

This time the coins produce hexagram number 36,Darkening of the Light, with two moving lines. She bites her lip. The text of both the hexagram and the individual lines is cautionary. However, the moving lines produce a second hexagram, 46,Pushing Upward, which reads:Pushing upward has supreme success. One must see the great man. Fear not.

She reads the interpretation of the text just to be certain of its meaning. Rea.s.sured, Lien Takananda rewraps the coins and book in black silk and returns them to their shelf, then begins preparing Harry's breakfast.

. . . with nagging grief. . .

Garreth Mikaelian still feels the void in his life and in the apartment around him. Through the open bathroom door he can see the most visible evidence: the bed, empty, slightly depressed on one side but otherwise neat. Marti's sprawling, twisting sleep used to turn their nights into a wrestle for blankets that left the bed in a tangled knot every morning.

He looks away quickly and concentrates on his reflection in the mirror. A square face with sandy hair and smoky gray eyes looks back at him. Burly, he fills the mirror . . . a bit more so than he would like, admittedly, but the width does give the illusion of a big man, larger than his actual five foot eight.

And makes you look like a cop even stark naked, my man,he silently tells the reflection.

He leans closer to the mirror, frowning as he works the humming razor across his upper lip. He looks older than he would like, too. Barely twenty-eight and already he can see lines etching down his forehead between his eyes and around the corners of his mouth . . . lines not visible six months ago.

Don't I ever stop missing her?He had not cared this way when Judith walked out. There had been more relief than anything, in fact, though he had missed his son. But, then, Marti was different from Judith. He could talk to her. After what she saw as a nurse in the trauma unit at San Francisco General every day, he had not been afraid of shocking or frightening her by talking about what happened to him at work, or of the examples he witnessed of man's unrelenting and fiendishly imaginative inhumanity to man.

He could even cry in front of her and still feel like a man. They were two halves of the same soul.

His fingers tighten around the razor, dragging it under his chin. His vision blurs.Fate is a b.i.t.c.h! Why else give him such a woman and then put her in an intersection when an impatient driver tried to beat the light . . .When does the pain stop? When does the emptiness fill?

At least he has the department. He can bridge the void with his work .

. . . With a corpse . . .

The body floats facedown in the bay, held on the surface by air trapped under its shirt and red suit coat. Carried on the tide, supported by its chance water wings, it drifts into the watery span between Fisherman's Wharf and the forbidding silhouette of Alcatraz Island. Bobbing, it awaits discovery.

2

"Lien says you need to be careful today, Mik-san." From where he stood pouring himself a cup of coffee, Harry Takananda's voice carried to Garreth above the homicide squad room's background noise of murmuring voices, ringing telephones, and tapping typewriters.

Squatted on his heels pawing through the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, Garreth nodded. "Right," he said around the pencil in his mouth.

Harry added two lumps of sugar to the coffee. "But she says there is goodfortune in acting according to duty."

"Devoted to duty, that's me, Harry-san." Now, where the h.e.l.l was that d.a.m.ned file?

Harry stared into the coffee, then added two more lumps of sugar before carrying the cup back to his desk. He sat down at the typewriter. The chair grunted in protest, bearing witness to how many times Harry had added those extra lumps over the years.

Rob Cohen, whose desk sat just around a pillar from Harry's, asked, "Do you really believe in that stuff?"

"My wife does." Harry sipped his coffee, then hunched over the typewriter. "I went through the book once and found that of the sixty-four hexagrams, only half a dozen are outright downers. The odds are she'll throw a positive hexagram most mornings, so, Inspector-san"-he steepled his fingers and bowed toward Cohen, voice rising into a singsong-"if it give honorable wife peace of mind, this superior man should not object, you agree?"

Cohen pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Maybe I should introduce my wife toI Ching, too."

At the filing cabinet, Garreth grinned.

The door of the lieutenant's office opened. Lucas Serruto stepped out waving a memo-pad sheet. His dark, dapper good looks always made Garreth think of an actor cast to play the detective lieutenant in a movie where the cop was the hero. Garreth envied the way Serruto could make anything he wore appear expensive and custom-tailored. "Any volunteers to go look at a floater?"

Around the squad room, heads bent industriously over papers and typewriters.

Serruto surveyed the room for a minute, then shrugged. "Eenie, meenie, minie-Sergeant Takananda, the Cicione killing is in the hands of the D.A., isn't it? That leaves you with just the Mission Street liquor store shooting."

Harry looked up. "Yes, but that's so-"

"Good. You and Mikaelian take the floater." He handed Harry the memo sheet. "The Coast Guard is waiting for you bayside."

With a sigh, Harry gulped his coffee. Garreth shoved the file drawer closed and stood up. They left, pulling on coats.

Driving out of the parking lot, Harry headed toward the Embarcadero. The city flowed past the car, muted by fog, swathed in it. The radio crackled and murmured, dispatching officers across the city. Foghorns hooted.

"Let's try to get out before midnight tonight, shall we?" Harry suggested. "Lien wants to feed us supper before it mummifies keeping warm."

"Us?You're asking me over again?" Garreth shook his head. "Harry, I can't keep eating your groceries. If nothing else, Lien's cooking is changing my name to Girth Mikaelian." He ruefully ran a thumb inside his snug belt.

"She'll have my hide if Idon't bring you. Lacking a houseful of kids"-Harry's smile did not hide an old regret in his voice-"she has only you and her art cla.s.s kids to mother. Don't fight it."

There had been several weeks after Marti's death when Lien's mothering was all that saved him from becoming a basket case.

Garreth owed her a great deal. "I'll come."

The car swung onto the Embarcadero. Harry hugged the wheel, as though leaning forward would help him see through the fog better. "Sometimes I wonder what it would be like living somewhere that has a real summer, and maybe even sunshine in August."

"Come along the next time I go to Davis to visit my kid and find out."

They turned in at the pier number on the memo sheet and drove down to a barrier of vehicles. There they climbed out. Fog enveloped them, cold and damp. Garreth shoved his hands in his trench coat pockets and huddled deeper into the collar as he and Harry walked the rest of the way.

Out near the end of the pier the usual post-violent-death circus had set up: uniformed officers, Crime Lab, Photo Lab, an ambulance crew from the medical examiner's office along with an a.s.sistant M.E., and this time, Coast Guard, too.

"Hi, Jim," Harry said to one of the Coast Guard officers.

Jim Birkinshaw smiled. "h.e.l.l of a way to start a morning, Harry."

Garreth moved as close to the body as possible without interfering with the photographer. The victim had been stretched out on his back, but he still looked less than funeral-parlor neat. His rumpled coat had twisted up around his neck, and a spreading stain of salt water surrounded him.

Strange how you could always tell the dead ones, Garreth reflected. They looked different from living people, even different from someone unconscious. They lay awkwardly, slack, collapsed into postures no vital body would a.s.sume.

He pulled out his notebook and began taking down a description of the corpse. White male, brown hair of medium length, 160 to 180 pounds. Five ten? Garreth found estimation difficult in a horizontal position. Red suit coat with black velvet collar and lapels, black trousers, black boots with inseam zippers. Evening wear. Garreth moved around the outside of the group at work to look at the face for an age determination.

Birkinshaw said, "I don't think he'd been in the water long. The pilot of the Alcatraz excursion boat spotted the coat on his first run out this morning."

"A wonderful treat for the tourists," Harry said, sighing.

Garreth jotted down the discovery details, then wrote a dollar sign. Even wet, the clothes retained a quiet elegance. That kind of understatement came with a high price tag. The carefully manicured nails on the outflung gray hands matched the clothing.

The photographer stepped back and was replaced by the a.s.sistant M.E., a wiry Oriental woman. In the course of examining the dead man, she pulled loose the twisted coat. Garreth caught his breath, a gasp echoed by others around him. The action rolled the dead man's head into an unnatural position and exposed a gaping wound in the throat, a slash stretching from ear to ear and so deep that spine showed.

Deadpan, Birkinshaw said, "Almost took his head clear off. Looks like his neck's broken, too."

Garreth grimaced. Birkinshaw had known . . . had been waiting gleefully for the moment when the rest of them discovered it.

Garreth knelt down beside the corpse and studied the face with its half-open eyes.Age, midthirties, he wrote.Eyes, blue. The face showed care, too . . . closely shaven, sideburns and mustache trimmed.

He stopped writing, staring at the dead man's neck . . . not at the puckered gray edges of the wound, but at a mark below it to one side of the Adam's apple, almost black on the pale skin and about the size of a half dollar. A feeling of deja vu touched him.

The mark caught the attention of others, too. Birkinshaw nudged Harry. "Maybe he was on his way home from a heavy date when he was attacked. That's the biggest hickey I've ever seen."

Garreth did not think it could be a hickey. He had made a few as an adolescent and they never looked like this. It reminded him more of the marks he had seen on people's arms from hemorrhage into the soft tissues from a poor lab tech's venous stick. "What can you tell us?" he asked the a.s.sistant M.E.

She stood up. "I'd say he died between six and nine hours ago. Cause of death seems obvious. It probably happened without warning. The wound is a single continuous incision with no accompanying nicks to indicate that the killer started to cut and was knocked away. No defense wounds on the hands or arms. From the depth of the wound, someone of considerable strength inflicted it. Do you want us to call you when we're ready to start the autopsy?"

"Please," Harry said. "All right, Mik-san, let's see what he can tell us about himself."

Kneeling beside the body, Harry and Garreth searched it. The hands were bare, but pale skin on the left third finger and right wrist indicated the removal of a ring and watch. Probably married, Garreth thought. Left-handed.

In the coat they found a handkerchief, not monogrammed, and a half-empty pack of sodden cigarettes along with a disposable butane lighter. Nothing helpful, like matchbooks that might tell them where he had been.

The items went into a property envelope.

No billfold in the trousers. Nothing in the left front pocket, either.

"Looks like robbery," Birkinshaw said. "Dressed like he is, he'd be a good target. Junkies, maybe?"

"Why break his neck on top of cutting his throat?" Garreth dug into the last trouser pocket. His fingers touched something.

"Cross your fingers and hope we're lucky, Harry."

He turned the pocket inside out to remove the object without touching it, on the off chance that the killer might have touched it, too, and left a fingerprint. A key with a plastic tag attached fell into the clear plastic envelope a Crime Lab man held out.

Harry took the envelope. "Jack Tar Hotel. Overlooked by our killer, do you think?"

"Maybe he was interrupted before he could finish searching the pockets," Garreth said.

Harry murmured noncommittally then looked up at the Coast Guard officer. "Jim, will you check the bay charts and see if you can give us an idea where our boy here went into the water?"

"Right. We'll call you on it."

The ambulance attendants zipped the dead man into a plastic bag and loaded him on a stretcher. Thinking about the bruise, Garreth watched them lift the stretcher into the ambulance. Where had he seen a mark like that before?

He asked Harry about it on the way back to the car.Harry frowned. "I don't remember a case of ours like that."

"It wasn't our case, I'm sure." But he had still seen that mark, and heard someone else making a snide remark about a super- hickey. He wished he could remember more.