Half an hour passed and they hadn’t heard anything, and by then Cain knew they wouldn’t. The officers in the backyard followed the blood over the garden fence, and then through a series of yards. They called out each find over the radio, and Cain and Fischer leaned close to Nagata’s handheld unit on the dining table.
Dark blood dribbled along a neighbor’s steppingstone path. In the white beams of the officers’ flashlights, the icy petals of chamomile flowers were spattered. Red streaks and shoeprints ran up the face of a mossy redwood fence and into the next yard. They hopped that fence and found more of the same, and they followed the trail until it brought them out between two houses on Cabrillo. They crossed the sidewalk, following blood between two parked cars at the curb. And then, in the middle of the street, as if their quarry had simply evaporated, there was nothing.
Cain looked up from the radio. The tall kid had a car, and he was gone.
28
Karen Fischer’s people came in a line of three unmarked SUVs that picked their way through the parked patrol cars and stopped directly in front of the house. Cain carried Lucy’s suitcase down the steps as she walked alongside him. Including their trip to the courthouse for her testimony in the Ashbury Heights trial, it was only the second time they’d been outside the house together. They climbed into the back of the middle vehicle. Fischer took the front seat, next to the driver. When they were moving, going up the hill and through the SFPD roadblock at the top of Twenty-Second Avenue, she turned around.
“The apartments are secure—nothing safer in the city, unless we stayed in Alcatraz,” she said. She waited until Lucy was looking at her. “You’re going to be just fine.”
“What about Gavin? The man was looking for him, not me. The apartment’s safe, but he’s not going to be there the whole time, is he?”
“We’ll be careful,” Fischer said. “We’ll work together, Gavin and me. Like partners. We’ll have each other’s backs.”
Lucy reached over and took Cain’s hand but didn’t look at him. Her head was turned to the left. She was watching the helicopter carve a grid pattern through the sky north of Fulton. Its searchlight probed downward, lighting the tiny drops of windblown rain.
It wasn’t until they made the last turn to the safe house that Cain understood where they were going. They’d taken the bridge out of the city to the U.S. Coast Guard station on Yerba Buena Island.
The apartments, which must really have been barracks, were in a low building that faced a small, puddle-strewn parading ground. Past that, and a jumble of rocks dumped long ago in a protective seawall, was the bay. He put Lucy’s suitcase on the bed and then stood next to her by the little window. The curtains had faded to the color of sand but might once have been orange. Lucy pushed them back, and they looked out together. The grounds below were dark, and no one was outside. They hadn’t seen anyone at all except the guards at the gate. There were no boats tied up along the quay, though there seemed to be enough docking space for several. Rain pooled on the empty concrete piers. Maybe all the guardsmen were on patrol.
Across the bay, the port of Oakland blinked in and out of the fog. Four-legged cranes with their long necks, ships tied up underneath them as they gave up their loads of Chinese cargo.
“I brought a couple of books,” Lucy said. “Thick ones.”
“That was a good idea.”
“You’ll be careful?”
“I promise.”
“Are you going back to the house?”
“I’ll probably have to.”
He might have to go for the investigation; he might have to go because he hadn’t thought to pack anything for himself. Not even a toothbrush.
“The back of my calendar has a list of all my students. Their parents’ phone numbers.”
“I’ll call them.”
“But don’t say what happened,” Lucy said. “Or they’ll never come back.”
He nodded and reminded himself to call Frank Lee. He’d seen the calendar on the music room floor, with blood on it. It probably wasn’t in the house anymore. But Frank could pull it from the evidence boxes and make the calls.
The bed was just wide enough for the two of them if they slept on their sides, spooned together. That would be okay. There was a little desk, built into the wall. Next to it was a chest of drawers with a small TV on top of it, the kind with a bunny-ear antenna set on top. He wasn’t sure if it would work or not, but it didn’t matter. They wouldn’t turn it on.
The sink in the bathroom was bolted straight to the wall, the pipes hanging down underneath. Rust showed in scratches at the bottom of the shallow bath. The walls were made of dark-paneled pressboard; the light came from a bare sixty-watt incandescent bulb.
He came back and sat on the end of the little bed, next to Lucy.
“What do you have to do now?” she asked.
“Find him.”