Brian Freeman - The Crooked Street

Cyril had two takeaway cups of coffee in his hands. He handed one to Frost with a smile that was more like a glare. His face had a skeletal look that showed off his cheekbones and jaw.

“I heard you were coming in, Inspector,” Cyril said. “I thought it would be easier for us to talk outside.”

“Any particular reason?”

Cyril shrugged. “You know how it is. Cops are a nosy bunch.”

Frost tasted the coffee, which was as black as road tar and hot enough to scorch his lips. Some men showed off their testosterone with the grip of their handshake, and others with their Sumatran dark roast.

“Good coffee,” Frost told him casually.

They strolled along China Basin past upscale condominiums mostly inhabited by the coders of Silicon Valley. Beyond the residential buildings, he saw the construction site for the headquarters of a Chicago tech company that the mayor had spent two years and millions of tax dollars luring to the city. So much bandwidth hummed through this neighborhood that Frost was surprised the buildings didn’t glow.

Cyril, in his uniform, walked with his back as rigid and straight as a pencil. “Any news for the captain?”

Frost choked down another swig of coffee. “I searched Denny’s boat, but someone got there before me. There wasn’t much left to find.”

“Oh?”

“His computer was missing, and I didn’t find any paper files. I’m getting copies of his phone and bank statements sent to me, so that may tell us more about who he’s been dealing with.”

“What about drugs?” Cyril asked. “The captain thought this smelled like a drug hit. Did you find any evidence to back that up?”

“I found a brick of cocaine in Denny’s desk,” Frost acknowledged.

“Well, that tells us a lot.”

“Maybe.”

Cyril stopped at the street corner across from the building project, where two cranes swung I beams fourteen stories in the air. The smaller cop’s dark eyes studied the work with fascination. “You don’t think so? Why not?”

“If someone beat me to the boat, they would have found the cocaine and grabbed it. They didn’t. That makes me wonder if they left it behind deliberately to send us down the wrong road.”

Cyril rubbed his nose with his fist. “Did you find anything else?”

“I met a Chinese boy who sneaked onto the boat. Probably about fourteen years old. He said his father worked with Denny but was missing.”

“Who was this boy?”

“He told me his name was Fox, but that’s all. It’s probably a nickname. I haven’t been able to find anything more about him or his father. But if his father is missing, I’d like to know if there’s a connection to Denny’s death.”

“Do you want help? I can look into the boy myself and see what I can find out.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’m sure the captain keeps you plenty busy.”

“He does, but he also said to put myself at your disposal.”

“I’ll let you know.”

Cyril nodded. “So? Is that all?”

Frost thought about Dick Coyle and his snakes. And about Lombard. “That’s all for now,” he said.

Cyril sipped his coffee. The boom of the construction project rumbled under the sidewalk like an earthquake. “The captain tells me you knew Clark,” he said finally. “You two were friends?”

“Years ago.”

“Are you too personally involved with the victim? Maybe someone else should handle the investigation.”

“I hadn’t spoken to Denny Clark in a decade,” Frost replied. “There’s no conflict.”

Cyril nodded. His fingers twitched, and he put down his coffee on the sidewalk and grabbed his e-cigarette from a pocket. The first inhalation of vapor made his whole body relax. “Keep me posted, Inspector. I’ll relay everything directly to the captain. This one is very important to him.”

“I’d like to know why the captain is so interested in this case,” Frost told him.

“He’ll tell you himself at the right time,” Cyril replied. “In the meantime, don’t make any significant moves without talking to me first. And keep this arrangement between us, okay?”

Frost had the feeling that he’d been dismissed by the younger cop. The interrogation was over. He finished his coffee and turned around and headed back down China Basin toward headquarters. Behind him, Cyril didn’t move. When he’d gone half a block, Frost glanced over his shoulder and saw the captain’s aide still sucking on his vapor cigarette and watching the pieces of the skyscraper come together.

At his desk in the Mission Bay headquarters building, Frost took a close look at the two people who were with Denny Clark in the photo that Coyle had found on Facebook.

The first was Greg Howell, dead millionaire, whose real estate holdings and development projects had made him one of the prime beneficiaries of San Francisco’s gentrification over the past decade. The second was a woman with sandy-blond hair who wore a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt and black capris hugging her slim legs. Frost wanted to know who she was.

Her sunglasses covered up much of her face, but what he could see was attractive. He’d originally guessed that she was in her thirties, but when he enlarged the photo to study her skin tone, he suspected that he’d underestimated by a few years. Although her clothes and glasses tried to hide her age, she was probably on the north side of forty. Her red lips were pressed together in a thin, enigmatic line that was neither smile nor frown. Her hair was straight and long enough to wrap around her neck as the wind blew. Each of the men had an arm around her shoulders, but she didn’t return the gesture. Her arms hung stiffly at her sides. Her body had a tenseness that said she wasn’t happy to be photographed.

Frost studied the picture for clues about the event. Greg Howell had a lowball cocktail in his other hand, which suggested some kind of party cruise, but most of Denny’s charters probably fell into that category. The Roughing It was out on the bay, because he could see the crown of Mount Tamalpais in the background. The deepening blue of twilight and the lengthy shadows told him it was a late-summer evening. Coyle had found the photo posted on Howell’s Facebook page in early August.

The caption on the post was strange: If I’m lost at sea, here’s proof of life.

Frost called up newspaper reports about Greg Howell and found a lot. Coyle was right. The man had his fingers in everything around the city. He breezed through the Chronicle headlines from the summer and fall:

And then in October:

Frost read the article. Howell’s body was found near North Lake in a wooded section of Golden Gate Park. He’d been out on an early morning run, and another jogger had found him facedown on the trail at six o’clock. The autopsy gave no indication of foul play, and as a result, there had been no criminal investigation by the police.

There was nothing odd about Howell’s death that Frost could see. Except a red snake. When he looked at the photo Coyle had taken of the snake spray-painted onto a boulder in the park, he could see North Lake through the trees and the exact section of the jogging trail where Howell had been found.

Coyle had texted him other snake photos that he’d found around the city. Frost clicked on each picture, and one by one by one they filled his screen, until his monitor was crowded with eleven snakes. Twelve, when he added the snake he’d found himself in Coolbrith Park. All were identical, all blood red, hissing at him from behind empty eyes and taunting him with their secret.