Nocturnal

Murder Was the Case

Sleeping until noon had a way of making anything more palatable. So Bryan Clauser was a fleshy-headed mutant. So what? He was still Pookie’s best friend. He had saved Pookie’s life. Getting all worked up about this wasn’t going to fix anything. Pookie would find a way to get his boy through this. Hell, it wasn’t like Bryan was a Yankees fan or anything really unforgivable.

Emma danced around his feet. Pookie was supposed to just give one treat at a time, but he grabed a big handful and dropped them on the kitchen floor. Life is short; treats are good.

He poured a cup of coffee from Robin’s coffeemaker. Nice machine. Everything the girl had was nice. Medical examiners, it seemed, earned a bit more income than homicide inspectors.

He heard footsteps behind him, then a woman’s voice. “Did you make coffee?”

He turned with mug in hand. A sleepy-faced, yawning Robin shuffled into the dining room. She wore only a black T-shirt that was too big for her — one of Bryan’s, most likely. She sat at the table. Pookie poured a mug for her, then sat as well.

She took a sip. “I made a bunch of calls after you turned in, then I ran out of steam. My friend Dana just called from the hospital, woke me up. Erickson is stabilized.”

“He’s better?”

“Not even close,” she said. “He’s still in intensive care. He hasn’t woken up yet.”

A knife in the belly was worse than a bullet in the shoulder, but Bryan’s wound had healed up within hours. “Erickson has the Zed. Why hasn’t he healed?”

“Beats me,” Robin said. “All I have is a hypothesis. I don’t know anything about these people. You heard from Bryan?”

Pookie hadn’t. But he had received a voice mail from Bryan’s dad. Poor Mike was a mess. Maybe that was the price you paid for lying to your child your whole life, but Pookie wasn’t about to judge.

“No word from Bri-Bri yet,” Pookie said. “I think he’s okay, so don’t worry.”

She crossed her arms and slowly rubbed her own shoulders. “He’s not okay. Pookie, please, just tell me what’s really going on.”

She was hurting bad for Bryan. She wanted to share Bryan’s pain, help him through anything, but it wasn’t Pookie’s place to tell her the truth. If Bryan didn’t want her to know, that was his choice and Pookie had to back up.

“Bo-Bobbin, you know what? As you’ve pointed out repeatedly, you’re not his girlfriend anymore. It’s not your business.”

She laughed at him. “Right. Now you’re going to pretend he doesn’t belong with me? You’ve spent six months trying to get us back together.”

She leaned forward and put her hand on his wrist. “Pookie, I made a mistake pushing Bryan away. I love him. I also know him. Maybe not as well as you do, but I know him, and I think he’s real close to doing something bad. If you don’t let me help and something happens to him, you won’t be able to live with yourself.”

He didn’t have a one-liner this time. She was right, but that didn’t change anything — telling Robin, or anyone else, was Bryan’s decision alone.

“I can’t,” Pookie said.

Her eyes narrowed. He had a sudden feeling that she was looking right into his brain with that magic chick-power that women have. She turned and looked at the RapScan machine sitting on the table. Her eyes widened. She covered her mouth. “Oh my God. That second sample, it was from Bryan.”

What had he said? Was it that obvious, or had he done something to tip her off? He had to cover, and cover fast. “Uh … come on now, why would you say that?”

She turned angry eyes on him. “That’s why he went to see Mike. The second sample was X-Y-Zed, so Mike can’t be his real father.”

“Robin, the second sample wasn’t Bryan’s, it was—”

She slapped the table. “Stop it! We both know I’m right, so stop insulting my intelligence.” She pointed her finger in his face. “Don’t you lie to me one more minute, you understand me?”

Pookie leaned back. He nodded. “Okay. You’re right.”

Her anger broke. Tears welled up in her eyes.

Oh Jesus, now he had to deal with a crying woman? “Take it easy. We’ll figure something out. Bryan is my boy — that’s not going to change.”

“This isn’t about being boys,” she said. “I can’t imagine what he’s going through. Oh my God … he went to confront Mike and you let him go by himself?”

Huh — when she said it like that, it did sound kind of stupid.

She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I have to find him. He’s all alone.”

“If he’s alone, it’s because that’s what he wants.”

She stood. “This isn’t about what he wants, it’s about what he needs. You should have known that.”

As soon as she said it, he knew she was right. That Detroit-sized nuke had dropped in Bryan’s life, and Pookie had thought the man could handle it solo.

“He’s still the Bryan we know,” Pookie said. “He won’t do anything stupid.”

She wiped her eyes again as she let out another derisive laugh. “You mean he won’t do anything stupid like go into the house of a killer without a warrant or backup?”

Pookie’s eyebrows rose. Touché, Bo-Bobbin, touché.

His cell chimed the theme from The Simpsons.

Robin walked to her bedroom. Emma padded along behind her. Pookie knew she was going to get dressed, then try to find Bryan. There was no point trying to stop her.

So instead, Pookie answered his phone.

“Black Mister Burns. My day is already about as tasty as a St. Bernard turd rolled in rancid salmon poon. Whatever you have to tell me now is going to make my emotional boo-boos all better, right?”

“Only if you like your salmon-poon turd served with a side of tainted clams,” John said. “I finished that murder-rate analysis.”

Pookie sighed. “Screw it. Go ahead.”

“First some perspective. San Francisco’s population peaked in the 1950s at 775,000. Right now it’s about 767,000. Not much variation in the past fifty years, so the population is a constant against which we can evaluate murders on a basic one-to-one, year-to-year basis.”

“Do you always talk like a band nerd that played the French horn?”

“What?”

“For example, when you fuck, do you say shit like I’m going to insert my penis now, then move it back and forth in a rapid motion until one or both of us achieve an orgasm.”

“Yes, but only when I’m banging your mom.”

For the second time that afternoon, Pookie’s eyebrows rose in respect. “Point taken, Mister Burns. Continue.”

“The highest murder rate in recent memory was 1993, with 133 murders. Things have been down lately. We haven’t had over 100 since 1995. Twenty-seven years ago, however, there were 241 murders. That’s the highest the city has ever officially recorded. What that doesn’t take into account is the fact that in that same year, from January to June, there were 187 murders for an average of 31 a month. In July, it dropped to nineteen. After that, the murders dropped off to 7 a month, which is about the normal murder rate. Now, guess when Jebediah Erickson was released from detention in the California Medical Facility?”

The coffee felt funny in Pookie’s stomach. He felt like he was going to throw up. “I don’t want to guess.”

“I’ll tell you anyway. He got out that same July. Erickson gets locked in the loony bin, and a few months later the murder rate skyrockets. He gets out, things almost immediately come back down to normal.”

Yes, he was definitely going to puke. Vigilantism was one thing, but to have that kind of impact on a murder rate?

“There’s more,” John said. “The crime spike wasn’t just for homicides. Missing persons cases tripled in the same time frame. And serial killings were up 500 percent. Records indicate the Bay Area may have had seven serial killers in action at the same time. That shit never got released to the press, because Mayor Moscone sat on it like an ugly fat girl riding a willing drunk.”

“See, when you talk like that, it makes all this death and despair so much more fun.”

“I’m doing my best to make it more palatable.”

The jokes were automatic for Pookie, but he felt none of the humor. “You said the murder rate didn’t spike when Erickson first went in?”

“It didn’t. Things were normal for several months, then slowly ramped up to the levels I told you about.”

Pookie thought of a stuffed little girl holding a fork and a knife. Erickson probably hadn’t killed her on a whim. Would people like that girl run wild if Erickson was out? More important, were there more creatures out there like the four-eyed bear-thing?

Chief Zou’s words rang through his head. She’d asked for his trust. She’d told him there was more going on than he could know. If only she’d just come out and explain this. But even then, would Pookie have gone along with it? Zou had known he and Bryan might push too far, possibly get Erickson committed again, leave the city open to mass murder. But they hadn’t put him away — instead, they’d put him in the ICU.

“One more thing,” John said. “I have a hypothesis about Erickson and why the killings didn’t go up right away.”

Pookie made a mental note to write that down — two friends using the word hypothesis in the same day? Maybe he was moving up in the world. “Hit me, BMB.”

“Do you know what a keystone predator is?”

“Is it a Pennsylvania pedophile?”

“No, but that was clever,” John said. “It’s a predator that keeps a population in check. Like hawks that hunt lemmings, or sea stars that feed on sea urchins that would eat the kelp roots and therefore kill the kelp, throwing the whole ecosystem into crisis and—”

“Get to the point, Bro.”

“Sorry,” John said. “A keystone predator keeps a prey population in check. Remove that predator, you get a population explosion of the prey species. Let’s say Marie’s Children were responsible for that murder spike. Maybe Erickson is their keystone predator. Take him out, the killers go crazy. Put him back in the ecosystem, he kills them or sends them back into hiding, maybe both. Think about the things you said you saw in Erickson’s basement.”

The bear-thing, the blue bug, the shark-mouthed man. Had those once been lurking around the city, killing people? “You think that seventy-year-old Jebediah Erickson is the keystone predator of goddamn monsters?”

“Yeah,” John said. “We fucked up, Pooks. If Erickson doesn’t get out of that hospital, things could get real bad.”

Could get bad? Like they weren’t bad enough already.

“John, thanks. It’s a shitty picture, but now we know.”

“Computers are my business and business is good.”

“Not just that,” Pookie said. “You really stepped up last night. If you hadn’t come out, Erickson would have come in after us. It could have been Bryan in the hospital, or in the morgue. I’m proud of you, man.”

John was silent for a few minutes. “Thanks,” he said finally. “You got no idea what that means to me coming from you.”

Pookie heard the apartment’s front door open and slam shut. Emma came treading into the kitchen. Ears up, she stared at him with a face that said it’s just you and me, kid.

“Burns, I gotta go. Do me a favor and call the Terminator. He won’t answer, so just data-dump all that goodness in his voice mail. If you reach him, though, you call me.”

“Will do.”

Pookie hung up. He walked to the kitchen and grabbed the half-empty box of dog treats. He was about to drop another handful, but instead just up-ended the box. Emma started eating them like they might suddenly grow legs and run away.

Pookie headed out of the apartment to find his partner.