8

Garreth always liked going home with Harry. The house had the same atmosphere Marti had given their apartment, a sense of sanctuary. The job ended at the door. Inside, he and Harry became ordinary men. Where Marti had urged him to talk, however, Lien bled away tensions with diversion and serenity. A judicious scattering of Oriental objects among the house's contemporary furnishings reflected the culture of her Taiwanese childhood and Harry's Japanese grandparents. The paintings on the walls, mostly Lien's and including examples of her commercial artwork, reflected Oriental tradition and moods.

Lien stared at them in disbelief. "Home before dark? How did you do it?"

Harry lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. "We went over the wall. If someone calls, you haven't seen us." He kissed her with a great show of passion. "What's for supper? I'm starved."

"Not lately." She patted his stomach fondly. "Both of you sit down; I'll bring tea."

Strong and well laced with rum . . . an example of what Garreth considered a happy blend of West and East. Between sips of tea, he pulled off his shoes and tie. One by one his nerves loosened. These days, he reflected, Harry's house felt more like home than his own apartment did.

During dinner Lien monopolized the conversation, heading off any threat of shop talk with anecdotes from her own day. She brushed by the frustrations of finishing drawings for a fashion spread in the Sunday paper to talk about the art appreciation classes she taught at various grade schools in the afternoons. Garreth listened, bemused. Her kids carne from a different world than the one he saw everyday. They never took drugs or shoplifted. They were well fed and well dressed, bright-eyed with promise. Sometimes he wondered if she deliberately told only cheerful stories, but he never objected; he liked hearing about a pleasant world populated by happy, friendly people.

Not that he regretted becoming a cop, but sometimes he wondered what he would be doing now, what kind of world he would live in, if he had finished college . . . if he had been good enough to win a football scholarship like his older brother Shane, if he and Judith had not married so young, if she had not gotten pregnant his sophomore year and had to stop working, leaving them with no money to continue school.

Or would things have been any different? He had always worshipped his father and wanted to be just like him. He loved going down to the station and watching the parade of people and officers. While Shane had been starring in backyard scrimmages and Little League football, Garreth played cops and robbers. Police work had seemed a natural choice when he had to go to work.

After dinner, helping Lien with the dishes, he asked, "Do you believe people really have free choice, or are they pushed in inevitable directions by social conditioning?"

She smiled at him. "Of course they have choices. Background may limit or influence, but the choices are still there."

He considered that. "Consulting I Ching isn't a contradiction of that?"

"Certainly not. If anything, the sage supports the idea that people have control over their futures. He merely advises of the possibilities."

She looked up in concern. "What's the matter? Are the dreadful broody what-if's chewing at you?"

He smiled at her understanding. "Sort of."

Or maybe what really chewed was the thought that tonight one man no longer had any choices at all. Someone else had taken them away from him.

The body in the bay with its peculiar bruise haunted him, lurking in the back of his mind the rest of the evening, even through the excitement of watching the Giants win a 1-0 squeaker. He stared at the TV screen with Harry and asked himself who would stick two needles into someone's jugular and drain out all his blood. Why? It seemed too bizarre to be real. And why did his memory refuse to give up the information he wanted on that other case like it?

Garreth had no particular desire to go home to his empty apartment, so after leaving Harry and Lien, he headed his car—a bright Prussian red Datsun ZX he and Marti had given each other on their last anniversary—back to Bryant Street. He sat in the near-empty squad room doodling on a blank sheet of paper and letting his mind wander. Bruise . . . punctures . . . blood loss. He recalled a photograph of a man in a bathtub, arm trailing down over the side to the floor. A voice said, "Homicide isn't like Burglary, Mikaelian. This is the kind of thing you'll be dealing with now."

He sat bolt upright. Earl Faye's voice! It had been Faye and Centrello's case. Faye had told Garreth—new to the section, unpartnered as yet, and stuck with paperwork—all about it in elaborate, gory detail.

Garreth scrambled for the file drawers. Everything came back to him now. The date was late October last year, just about Halloween, one of the factors which had fascinated Faye, he remembered.

"Maybe it was a cult of some kind. They needed the blood for their rituals."

Methodically, Garreth searched. The file should still be here. The case remained open, unsolved. And there it was . . . in a bottom drawer, of course, clear at the back.

Seated cross-legged on the floor, Garreth opened the file. Cleveland Morris Adair, an Atlanta businessman, had been found dead, wrists slashed, in the bathtub of his suite at the Mark Hopkins on October 29, 1982. The death seemed like suicide until the autopsy revealed two puncture wounds in the middle of a bruise on the neck, and although Adair had bled to death, his wrists had been slashed postmortem by someone applying a great deal of pressure. That someone had also broken Adair's neck. Stomach contents showed a high concentration of alcohol. The red coloring of the bathwater proved to be nothing more than grenadine from the bar in his suite.

Statements from cabdrivers and hotel personnel established that Adair had left the hotel alone on the evening of October 28 and gone to North Beach. He had returned at 2:15 A.M., again alone. A maid coming in to clean Sunday morning found his body.

Hotel staff in the lobby remembered most of the people entering the hotel around the time Adair had. By the time registered and known persons were sorted out, only three possible suspects remained, and two of them were eventually traced and ruled out. That left the third, who came through the lobby just five minutes after Adair. A bellboy described her in detail: about twenty, five ten, good figure, dark red hair, green eyes, wearing a green dress plunging to the waistline in front and slit to the hip on the side, carrying a large shoulder bag. The bellboy had seen her on occasion before, but never alone. She usually came in with a man . . . not hooking, the bellboy thought, just a very easy lady. He did not know her name.

What interested Faye and Centrello about her was that no one saw her leave. Their efforts to locate her failed, however.

Nor did they find any wild-eyed crazies who might have made Adair their sacrifice in some kinky ritual.

The Crime Lab turned up no useful physical evidence, and robbery was apparently no motive; Adair's valuables had not been touched.

Garreth reread the autopsy report several times. Wounds inflicted by someone applying a great deal of pressure. Someone stronger than usual? The deaths had striking similarities and differences, but a crawling down his spine told him that his gut reaction believed more in the similarities than in the differences. Two out-of-towners staying at nice hotels whose blood had been drained through needles in their jugulars, then the bodies doctored to make it seem that they had bled other ways. It had a ritual sound about it. No wonder Faye and Centrello had hunted cultists.

After a jaw-cracking yawn, Garreth glanced down at his watch and was shocked to find it almost three o'clock. At least he would not notice the emptiness of the apartment now. He would be lucky to reach the bedroom before he collapsed.