Bill Pronzini: Labyrinth

The dead girl lay in a twisted sprawl, like something broken and carelessly discarded, among the reeds and bushes that grew along the edge of Lake Merced.

I could see her from where I stood alone on the embankment thirty feet above, and I could watch the movements of the half-dozen Homicide cops and forensic people who were down there with her. One of the cops was Eberhardt. He knew I was waiting up here, but he had not paid any attention to me since my arrival a couple of minutes ago; he wasn’t ready yet to tell me why I had been summoned out of a sound sleep at seven A.M. to the place where a young girl had died.

It was a cold gray Wednesday morning in November, and the wind blowing in across Skyline carried the heavy smells of salt and rain. Pockets of mist clung to the reeds and trees and underbrush around the lake shore, giving the concrete pedestrian causeway at the south end an oddly insubstantial look, like an optical illusion. The whole area seemed desolate at this hour, but that was illusion too: Lake Merced sits in the southwestern corner of San Francisco, not far from the ocean, and is surrounded by public and private golf courses, upper-and middle-class residential areas, San Francisco State College, and the Fleishhacker Zoo.

It had been awhile since my last trip out here. But when I was on the cops a number of years ago I had come to the lake at least once a month, sometimes with Eberhardt, because the police pistol range was nearby to the west. Another inspector had had a small sailboat in those days, moored over at the Harding Boat House, and if the weather was good the three of us would take it out on Saturdays or Sundays. Lake Merced is bigger than you would expect an in-city body of water to be, and because of its location, removed from the tourist areas downtown and along the Bay, it’s a recreation area pretty much reserved for the natives.

Behind me I heard another vehicle come wheeling in off Lake Merced Boulevard. I turned, saw that it was a city ambulance, and watched it maneuver to a stop among the blue-and-whites and unmarked police sedans-and my car-that were strewn across the wide dirt parking area opposite Brotherhood Way. Two attendants in white uniforms got out and opened up the rear doors. While they were doing that, a coroner’s car swung in and joined the pack; the guy who stepped out of it, carrying a medical bag, came over and stopped beside me.

“Where is it?” he said, as if he were asking about a tree stump or a piece of machinery. He seemed to think I was one of the Homicide inspectors. “Down there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Down there.”

“Sorry I’m late.” But he did not sound sorry; he only sounded aggrieved. “Goddamn car wouldn’t start.”

I had nothing to say to that. He shrugged, pulled a face, gave me a short nod, and began to make his way down to where the dead girl was.

I looked away again. The knots of people along the bicycle paths that flanked the parking area-college kids from S.F. State, residents of the lakeview townhouses down the way, reporters and TV-remote crews-seemed to be getting larger; cars crawled along Lake Merced Boulevard, filled wih eager gawking faces. Ghouls, all of them. There were half a dozen uniformed patrolmen working crowd control in the area, but the cops knew and I knew that the crowds would not be dispersed until after the body was taken away.

The cold bite of the wind was making my eyes water. I rubbed at them with the back of one hand, reburied the hand in my topcoat pocket, and bunched the material tight around me. Filaments of black, like veins, had started to form in the overcast sky; we were going to have rain pretty soon. I considered waiting inside my car, where I could use the heater to chase some of the morning chill-but before I could make up my mind to do that, Eberhardt’s voice called my name from below.

I stepped back to the edge of the embankment and saw him peering up at me, beckoning. “Okay,” he said, “you can come on down.”

So I let out a breath and picked my way along the slope, using the vegetation there to keep my balance on the wet grass. When I got to where Eberhardt was, he turned without saying anything and led me to the girl’s body.

“Take a look,” he said then, “tell me if you recognize her.”

She was lying on her stomach, but her head was canted around so that most of her face was visible toward the lake. There was one hole on the left side of her forehead, black-edged and caked with dried blood, and a second just below the collarbone. Shot twice, with what was probably a small caliber weapon judging from the size of the entry wounds and because there did not seem to be any exit wounds. She had been young, maybe still in her teens, and she had been attractive; you could tell that even with her features blanked and frozen in death. Long dark hair, pug nose, sprinkling of freckles across her cheekbones. Wearing a suede coat, tennis shoes, jeans, and one of those football-type jerseys, red and white, with the number forty-nine on it.

I had never seen her before.

My stomach coiled up as I looked at her. After a couple of seconds I swung around and stood staring out over the wind-wrinkled surface of the lake. I had seen death before-too much death, too many bodies torn and ravaged by violence-but each time was like the first: a hollow feeling under the breastbone, the taste of bile, a sense of sadness and awe. I had never learned to inure myself to it, never become jaded or detached enough, the way some cops did, to treat it as an abstract.

But this time I felt something else, too-a kind of dull empty rage. A young girl like that, robbed of life before she had much of a chance to live it. Why? Where was the sense in such a brutal act? No matter what she might have done to someone, no matter what she might have been, she could not have deserved to die this way.

Beside me Eberhardt said, “Well?” His voice was sharp and gruff, and I knew him well enough after thirty years to understand that the girl’s death had touched him too.

I shook my head. “I don’t know her, Eb.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“All right. We’ll talk up top. I’m finished here.”

He asked the assistant coroner if he could release the body, got an affirmative nod, and the two of us climbed back up to the parking area. I watched him gesture to the ambulance attendants and then take out one of his flame-blackened briar pipes and clamp it between his teeth. He was my age, fifty-two, and an odd contrast of sharp angles and smooth blunt planes: square forehead, sharp nose and chin, thick and blocky upper body, long legs and angular hands. His usual expression was one of sourness and cynicism-a false reflection of what he was like inside-but now his face had a dark, brooding cast. I wondered if he were thinking about his niece, the one who was not much older than the dead girl by the lake.

When the ambulance attendants came past us with the stretcher and disappeared below, Eberhardt said to me, “Her name was Christine Webster. Mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“We found her purse in one of those bushes on the slope,” he said. “Address on her driver’s license is Edgewood Avenue, up by the U.C. Med Center. She was twenty years old and a student at S.F. State; student I.D. card in her wallet, along with the license.”

“None of that rings any bells,” I said.

“You working on anything connected with the college?”

“No. I’m not working on anything at all right now.”

“You know anybody up around the Med Center?”

“I don’t think so, no. Look, Eb-”

“Not much else in her purse. Except one thing.”

“What thing?”