Garreth peeled out of his trench coat. "I hope it's about Chiarelli."

He called after the squad meeting. It was about Chiarelli. A Sergeant Woodhue said, "It's arranged for you to meet him. Join us in the garage at twelve-thirty."

Garreth hung up. "Let's hope Chiarelli can help us."

"Maybe. But my hexagram this morning said, 'In adversity, it furthers one to be persevering,' and yours read, 'Success in small matters. At the beginning good fortune; at the end, disorder.'"

Garreth grimaced. "Thanks. I really needed to hear that."

He thought about his conversation with the landlady on the Barber girl's age. A strange lady, this redhead. He ran her name through R and I. It came back negative for local and state, even negative NCIC-the FBI had nothing on her. She did not even have a traffic ticket. In fact, he discovered that she had no driver's license. That brought a frown. She had said something about driving when they talked to her. Had she been only joking?

"Do you think she can be thirty-three years old?" he asked Harry. "She looks much younger."

"In the lighting of that bar, Methuselah would look like an adolescent; it's designed that way. How else could some of those hookers snag a john?" Harry raised his brows at Garreth. "Why so concerned about her age? Isn't that part of the mystique?" "Maybe there's such a thing as too much mystique." The first chance he had, Garreth decided, he would ask the lady a few pointed questions and dispel some of it.

7

A voice over Sergeant Woodhue's walkie-talkie said softly, "It's going down now."

Suddenly the old warehouse filled with narcotics officers. Garreth hung on Woodhue's heels, the sergeant's words at the briefing echoing in his head:This is the drill. We're busting a buy. Chiarelli, who's going by the name Demesta, will be there.

You're a hot-dog cop along for the fun. When Chiarelli bolts, you go after him.

The men involved in the buy scattered like c.o.c.kroaches before a light. Garreth searched among them hurriedly, looking for someone who matched the description Woodhue had given him-a lean runt in an over-size old army jacket-but he could not see Chiarelli. In the melee and half dark, he had trouble distinguishing any particular individual.

Then Woodhue pointed and barked, "Get Demesta!"

Garreth saw the army jacket then, faded to pale green, with dark patches where the insignia had been removed. It dwarfed the man inside it, a man who bowled over an officer and was vanishing into the junk littering the building. Garreth took after it.

Chiarelli went out of a broken window in a shower of flying gla.s.s from remaining shards in the frame. Trying to avoid cutting his hands as he followed, Garreth swore.See the stupid cop jump out the window, he thought sardonically.See him break his leg.

But somehow he landed outside without crippling himself and looked up in time to see his quarry scramble across a set of railroad tracks and disappear into a pa.s.sage between two more warehouses. Garreth pounded after him. At the beginning, good fortune? The h.e.l.l. It looked more like disorder all day.

A hand reached out of a narrow doorway to grab Garreth's coat and jerk him inside the building. "Let's make this fast, man,"

Chiarelli said. "You're interested in cults?"

Garreth nodded, panting slightly. "I have two men who've been bled to death through needles stuck in their necks. We think maybe a cult did it."

"Like the Zebra murders? Christ!" Chiarelli shuddered and crossed himself. "So you want the names of people or groups who might use blood in their rituals."

"Right. Can you help me?"

Chiarelli sighed. "I'm not really next to that scene, you know, not unless some group also uses drugs, but . . . I guess I've heard a few things. Give me paper and a pen."

Garreth handed him his pen and notebook.

Chiarelli printed with the speed of a teletype and talked almost as fast as he wrote, pa.s.sing on more information than he had time to write. "Some is just addresses, not names. There have been weird stories about this house on Geary. Screaming and smells like burning meat." He had similar comments on every person or address he wrote down. When finished, he handed the notebook back. "Will that help?"

Garreth glanced over the pages, amazingly legible for the speed at which they had been written. "I hope so. Thanks." He started to turn away.

"Wait a minute," Chiarelli said. "We have to make it look good for me or I'm blown."

"I'll just say you outran me."

He shook his head. "Not good enough. You don't look like you've been chasing me all this time."

"How do you want to handle it, then?" He saw Chiarelli's fist double and stepped back, shaking his head. "Hey, not that-"

But the fist was already in motion. It sank into Garreth's stomach. He went down onto hands and knees in a wheeling galaxy of pain and light. His gut rebelled at the treatment by rejecting what remained of his lunch and he huddled retching on the dusty floor.

A wiry arm slipped under his and helped him to his feet as the paroxysm subsided. Chiarelli's face floated beyond a blue haze.

"Take it easy. You'll be all right in a couple of minutes," he said cheerfully.

Garreth would have gone for Chiarelli's throat, but he could only lean against the wall and concentrate on breathing. He could not even swear at Chiarelli, just gasp and groan.

"Sorry, man, but it has to look real."

Chiarelli did not have to worry about that, Garreth reflected bitterly.

"See you around, man." Chiarelli slipped out the door.

Garreth continued to lean against the wall for several more minutes, then made his way slowly back to the site of the bust.

Seeing him coming, Harry exclaimed, "Garreth!" and rushed to catch his arm. "What happened? Are you all right?"

Garreth leaned against a handy car, holding his stomach. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d ambushed me. I thought I was never going to make it up off that d.a.m.ned floor.""So you let him get away, hot dog?" Woodhue said.

Several prisoners snickered. Garreth glared at them. "Next time I won't bother chasing him. I'll hobble the son of a b.i.t.c.h with a piece of lead . . . permanently."

Harry helped him to a car. "Nice acting," he whispered.

Garreth climbed into the car, remembering Chiarelli's smirk. "Who the h.e.l.l is acting?"

He sat silent all the way back downtown. Not until they had left the Narco officers and returned to Homicide did he give the notebook to Harry. "We'd better run these names through R and I, then find out who owns or lives in these houses."

Harry regarded him with concern. "Are you sure you're all right? Maybe you ought to go home and take it easy the rest of the day."

"I'm fine. We have work to do." He started to take off his coat and winced as the motion stretched bruised muscles.

Harry hustled him toward the door. "Go home. I'll tell Serruto what happened."

"I don't want to go home. I'll be fine," Garreth protested.

"No one who refuses time off can possibly be fine. I'm a sergeant, but you're just an inspector, so I'm pulling rank and ordering you out, hear? Or do I have to have someone take you in handcuffs?"

Garreth sighed. "I'll go quietly, papa-san."

He left Chiarelli's pages of his notebook with Harry and headed for his car. He slipped the key into the ignition but did not start the engine immediately. As much as he hurt, he hated the thought of going home. He ought to give up the apartment with all of its sweet and painful memories and find another. Perhaps one of those places around Telegraph Hill that Mrs. Armour had mentioned.

The thought of them told him what he really wanted to do. He wanted to see Lane Barber again, to talk to her by daylight and find answers for the increasing number of questions she raised about herself. Then he started the engine.

8

She did not come to the door until Garreth had rung the bell five times. He realized that she must be sleeping and would find his visit inconsiderate and inconvenient, but he remained where he stood, leaning on the bell. She finally opened the door, wrapped in a robe, squinting against the light, and he discovered that even by daylight, she looked nothing like a woman in her thirties. If anything, she seemed younger than ever, a sleepy child with the print of a sheet wrinkle across one pale, scrubbed cheek.

She scowled down at him. "You're that mick detective. What-" Then, as though her mind woke belatedly, her face smoothed.

He watched her annoyance disappear behind a facade of politeness. "How may I help you, Inspector?"

Why did she bother to swallow justifiable irritation? Did police make her that nervous? Perhaps it was to observe this very reaction, to see what she might tolerate to avoid ha.s.sles, that he had persisted on the bell.

"I'm sorry to wake you," he lied. "I have a couple of important questions to ask."

She squinted at him from under the sunshade of her hand, then stepped back. "Come in."

Moving with the heavy slowness of someone fighting a body reluctant to wake up, she led the way to the living room. Heavy drapes shut out the afternoon light, leaving the room in artificial night. She switched on one lamp and waved him into its pool of light. She herself, however, sat in shadow in a suspended basket chair across from the chair by the lamp. A deliberate maneuver on her part?

"This couldn't wait until I got to the club?" Weariness leaked through the careful modulation of her voice.

"I'll be off duty by that time. I try not to work nights if I can help it; the police budget can't stand too much overtime."

"I see. Well, then, ask away, Inspector."

With her face only a pale blur beyond the reach of the light, Garreth found himself listening closely to her voice, to read her through it, and discovered with surprise that she did not sound like he felt she should. Inexplicably, the voice discorded with the rest of her.

"Can you remember what you and Mossman talked about Tuesday night?"

She paused before answering. "Not really. We flirted and made small talk. I'm afraid I paid little attention to most of it even while we were talking. Surely it isn't important."

"We're hoping that something he said can give us a clue to where he went after leaving the Barbary Now. Did he happen to mention any friends in the city?"

"He was far too busy arguing why we should become friends."

Suddenly Garreth realized why her voice seemed at odds with the rest of her. She did not talk like someone in her twenties.

Where was the slang everyone else used? Just listening to her, she sounded more like his mother. What was that she had called him at the door? A mick. Who called Irishmen micks these days?

Garreth looked around, trying to learn more about her from the apartment, but could see little beyond the circle of lamplight. The illumination reached only to a Danish-style couch which matched his chair and a small desk with a letter lying on it.

He said, "He told you he was married, didn't he?"

"He wore a wedding ring. I could see that even in the Barbary Now's light."

"Of course." Garreth stood up and moved toward the door. "Well, it was a slim chance he'd say anything useful, I suppose. I'm sorry to have bothered you." On the way, he detoured by the desk to read the address on the letter. Knowing someone she wrote to might be useful.

"It's a price I pay for my unusual working hours." She stood and crossed to the lamp. "I'm sorry I couldn't help."

Garreth had just time enough to read the ornately written address before the light went out, leaving the room in darkness.

On the steps outside, after her door closed behind him, he reread the address in memory. The letter had to be incoming; it had this address. However, it had been addressed not to Lane Barber, but to Madelaine Bieber. The similarity of the two names struck him. Lane Barber could well be a stage name, "prettied up" from Madelaine Bieber.

He eyed the garage under the house as he came down the steps to the sidewalk. Did she drive or did she not?

He tried the door. Locked. However, by shining a flashlight from his car through the windows, he made out the shape of a car inside and illuminated the license plate. He wrote down the number.

Motion above him brought his attention up in time to see the drape fall back into place in the window over the garage. Lane, of course, watching him, but . . . out of curiosity or fear? Maybe the license number would help provide an answer to that.

Back at Bryant Street, he ran Madelaine Bieber through R and I, and asked for a registration check on the license number.

"The car is registered to a Miss Alexandra Pfeifer," the clerk told him. The address was Lane's.

"Give me a license check on that name."

The picture from DMV in Sacramento looked exactly like Lane Barber. Miss Pfeifer was described as five ten, 135 pounds, red hair, green eyes, born July 10, 1956. Which would now make her twenty-seven.

Then R and I came back with a make on Madelaine Bieber. "One prior, an arrest for a.s.sault and battery. No conviction. The charges were dropped. Nothing since. She's probably mellowed with age."

Garreth raised a brow. "Mellowed with age?"

"Yeah," the records clerk said. "The arrest was in 1941."

Garreth had the case file pulled for him.

Madelaine Bieber, he read, had been singing in a club in North Beach called the Red Onion. A fight started with a female patron over a man, and when the woman nearly had her ear bitten off, she preferred charges against the singer. Miss Bieber, aka Mala Babra, was described as five ten, 140 pounds, red hair, green eyes. Birth date July 10, 1916. The picture in the file looked exactly like Lane Barber in a forties hairstyle.

Garreth stared at the file. If Lane were born in 1916, she was now sixty-seven years old. No amount of face-lifting would ever make her look twenty-one. This Bieber must be a relative, perhaps Lane's mother, which would explain the likeness and similar choice in professions. But why was Lane receiving her mother's mail? Perhaps the mother was a patient in a nursing home and the mail went to her daughter. It was something to check out. But another question remained: Why have a false driver's license and a car registered to that false license name?

Mystique? Lane generated nothing but, it seemed. The lady definitely deserved further attention.