Nocturnal

Coal for the Engine

Pookie and Bryan usually worked the wee hours of the morning, when most restaurants had closed for the night. Pinecrest Diner was open twenty-four hours a day. The place had become their go-to spot when they needed to sit and talk through a case. Pinecrest was a little touristy during the day, but at two or three in the morning you could avoid the dozen people wearing I ♥ SAN FRANCISCO or ALCATRAZ PSYCHO WARD OUTPATIENT shirts.

Pookie hoped Black Mr. Burns had good info. They needed a break in this case something awful. Ball-Puller Boyd hadn’t been able to track down Alex Panos or Issac Moses — both were still missing. Those boys were either already dead, their bodies waiting to be found, or they were in hiding. Pookie guessed the latter.

And Bryan … a couple of hours of downtime with his old man would do wonders. Mike Clauser had a way of making you forget about everything but Mike Clauser. Bottom line: Bryan hadn’t killed those boys. Now that Pookie believed in his partner’s innocence, he needed Bryan to stop moping and get back on his A-game.

Pookie walked into the diner and saw Black Mr. Burns sitting at a booth, a tablet computer in front of him. John’s shoulders were up, his head was down — even coming to a public place like this was hard for him. Once upon a time John Smith had been a standout cop. Now he was afraid of his own shadow, and that was a genuine tragedy. The man had unwittingly provided his own comic relief, though: he wore a dark-purple motorcycle jacket.

A few other patrons were in the place. Three working-class guys sat in a booth, getting a carb-loaded head start on the day. A trio of hipsters sat on the diner’s round stools, leaning on the black stone counter. The latest trendy after-hours spot — that you probably haven’t heard about, because it’s so obscure — must have finally shut down, and these fellas wanted to finish off the night with a stack of pancakes.

Pookie slid into the seat across from his old partner. “What’s up, Purple Rain?”

“Huh?”

“The jacket,” Pookie said. “You rode your hog here and you’re wearing purple? Hello?”

John sighed. “So a black man in a purple jacket has to look like Prince?”

Pookie nodded. “Exactly. How’s Apollonia and those crazy kids in the New Power Generation?”

“Your minority-on-minority hate is a sad thing,” John said. “You’re letting the white man pull your strings. Listen, I have some serious business to talk about. I found some odd stuff.”

“Odd stuff? You know, you can swear around me. I’m not going to tell the teacher.”

“I’m family friendly.”

“Some things never change. So what couldn’t you tell me over the phone? I have to admit, in fifteen years of police work, this is the first time someone has called me for a sneaky-spy meeting. Except for your mom, of course.”

“Yeah, she told me about that,” John said. “She said you had a small penis.”

Pookie shook his head. John tried to partake in witty repartee, but the guy was just such a flaming nerd. “Try it with a little more slang next time, BMB. You can’t put humor on a spreadsheet.”

John shrugged. “Yeah, well, whatever. I got the info on that New York City case. Not much there. The killer targeted women in their twenties. He got four that they know of. Maybe more, because he targeted working girls, usually ones that operated solo. That triangle-circle symbol was at each crime scene. Seems he liked to eat their fingers.”

“Delightful,” Pookie said. “What was his name?”

“They never found out who he was,” John said. “Media called him the Ladyfinger Killer.”

“Cute.”

“Very. Anyway, when they found the fourth body, they also found the killer. He was just as dead as his victim.”

“How did he die?”

“Asphyxiated. His fingers had been cut off, and he choked on them.”

Poetic justice. “So we have the symbols clearly associated with a serial killer in New York. Anywhere else?”

“That’s it,” John said. “No other cases before or since. Now, here’s the sneaky-spy part.” He leaned closer. “Remember how I told you it looked like the files that included those symbols had been accidentally erased from the SFPD system?”

Pookie nodded.

“They weren’t. Accidentally, I mean.”

“Someone deleted info on purpose? You’re sure?”

“Yeah. It was really methodical.”

That was a game-changer. The symbols had been intentionally removed from the system. It seemed Bryan’s strange dreams were a part of something much bigger.

“Impressive, BMB,” Pookie said. “But I’m guessing you don’t know who did the deleting, or you would have told me already.”

John nodded. “Unfortunately, you’re right. I can’t tell who did it. What little info I have came from old indexes, and those didn’t log user names.”

“What’s an index?”

“It’s like a computer map that points to different locations on storage drives. Sometimes if you delete the files, the pointers to those files remain, and those pointers have certain information.”

“Okay, so why didn’t they also delete the pointers?”

John smiled and raised his eyebrows. “Because they didn’t know the pointers were there. Whoever deleted the files has high-level access, but they don’t know shit about computers. The fact that the index files remain means they didn’t even talk to the IT guys about it, and they sure as hell didn’t hire some hacker. A hacker would have wiped out everything.”

“So it’s not a programmer,” Pookie said. “A cop did this?”

“At least someone working in the department, yeah.”

Pookie thought back to the meeting in Zou’s office, to the way Zou, Robertson and Sharrow had stared at the symbol pictures.

“You mentioned high-level access,” Pookie said. “How many people in the department have that kind of access?”

John thought about that for a second. “I’m not sure. I know a lot about the system, but I’m just a mid-level user. People like me wouldn’t have the access privileges. We can count out the IT guys, they would have done it right. So between administrators, their support staff … I’d guess thirty or forty.”

A waitress brought menus. Pookie ordered coffee. John just asked for water.

The waitress walked away. Pookie grabbed a handful of sugar packets from a little bin at the back of the table and started stacking them into little piles. He couldn’t exactly investigate thirty or forty cops. John’s work gave him some great info, but nothing he could act on.

“What about the Oscar Woody crime-scene photos?” Pookie said. “Sammy Berzon took about a hundred shots of those symbols. Those are still in the system, right?”

John shook his head. “Not anymore. They were deleted shortly after they were entered. I saw links to them in the index files, but the actual images are gone.”

Pookie flashed back to that blue tarp at the Father Paul Maloney scene, to Verde being in such a hurry to get Pookie and Bryan off that roof. Had that tarp been covering another blood symbol? Baldwin Metz had been there, the first time anyone had seen him outside of the morgue in going on five years. Then Metz had a heart attack. He wasn’t available when Oscar died. Maybe that was the connection — Metz hadn’t been there to run things, to stop Sammy and Jimmy from processing the Oscar Woody scene. Sammy and Jimmy had followed protocol and entered the photos of the symbols into the system. Then someone found out about the photos and deleted them.

But Zou had seen those photos. So had Sean Robertson and Captain Sharrow. Zou would have also seen the photos from the Maloney murder. If there had been a blood symbol under that tarp, than Zou knew the two cases were related.

She’d have known there was a possible serial killer out there. Known, and taken her two best guys off the case. She should have already formed a task force and moved on to assigning more resources. Instead, she’d given it all to Rich Verde.

“Don’t look so glum, chum,” John said. “I also brought you some good news.”

“You can make my penis grow two inches in a week or less?”

John laughed, a soundless thing that made his bony shoulders bob up and down. “Stop believing your spam emails. Remember that local request for information on the symbols, the one that was twenty-nine years old? In the archives I found these old database printouts. They were all in binders, the kind of thing that’s been sitting around forgotten long enough that no one knows if they should throw them out or not, you know? I spent about twelve hours in a truly Herculean effort of page-by-page data hunting, and I found the name and address of the guy who made that request. He’s still alive, working out of the same place he was then. He’s a fortune-teller in North Beach.”

A name and an address. Goddamn. An actual lead.

“John, that’s amazing,” Pookie said. “You still got it, brother.”

John’s smile faded. He looked out the window onto Mason Street. “Still got it? I can barely leave my apartment, Pooks. I almost had a panic attack coming here to see you. I mean … it’s still dark out, you know?”

Pookie didn’t know. He could only imagine what it felt like to go from being a cop on the streets to — for lack of a better word — to cowering behind a desk and not being able to do anything to change it.

“You do what you can,” Pookie said. He instantly felt like a dick for trying to put any kind of positive spin on it.

John kept staring out the window. No amount of words was going to help.

“Let’s eat,” Pookie said. “Had the chocolate-chip pancakes here? I swear they are made of crack dipped in gold.”

“Aren’t you and the Terminator going to go talk to the fortune-teller?”

“Priorities,” Pookie said. “Without coal, the choo-choo train just sits on the tracks. And I doubt a fortune-teller is up at six A.M. What’s this guy’s name, anyway?”

“The name on the FOI was Thomas Reed, but he goes by a different name for his fortune-telling crap.”

“Which is?”

“Mister Biz-Nass.”

“Interesting,” Pookie said. “Come on, order something. Hey, is it racist if I suggest you get the fried chicken and waffles?”

“Incredibly racist,” John said. “And it sounds delicious. I’ll get that.”

They ordered. Pookie tore open one of his sugar-packet piles and dumped the contents into his coffee.

“One more thing, Mister Burns. Considering the deleted files, I think it goes without saying, but—”

“Keep this to myself?”

Pookie nodded. “I think things could get dangerous.”

John shrank in on himself a little, his head again lowering as his shoulders again rose up. “I’m not stupid. We’re digging up what someone wants to keep buried. If they find out, they might try to bury us, too. I know the risks. I might not be your partner anymore, but I still have your back.”

Pookie wished he could go back in time, to six years ago, to that night in the Tenderloin when he’d had the drop on Blake Johansson. Pookie could have taken Johansson out, but he’d hesitated. Because of that hesitation, John Smith wound up with a bullet in his belly, a bullet that took a great cop off the streets.

“Order up, BMB,” Pookie said. “Breakfast is on me.”