Black Angel Read online

  Pacific Heights, 5/8/88: the Yee family home on Vallejo was broken into approximately 3 a.m. when a sledgehammer was used to break down the front door. Mr. Kim Yee, 51, and his wife Mrs. Sheila Yee, 46, were stripped, gagged, and then bound face-down to their kitchen counter. Their two sons Kingman, 20, and Hsu, 17, were tied back to back in the jacuzzi, and then their wrists were cut and they were left to bleed to death. Mr. and Mrs. Yee had their forearms chopped off at the elbow with a heavyweight cleaver, and after approximately twenty minutes both were killed by having six-inch nails hammered into the backs of their heads. Nine goldfish were nailed to the kitchen counter, too.

  Glen Park, 6/19/88: the secluded McGuire family home in College Terrace between Mission and Bosworth was broken into shortly after 9:30 p.m. by the removal of the entire living-room window by a steel hawser attached to the rear bumper of a 4x4 vehicle. Mr. Grant McGuire, 35, and his sister Mrs. Blare Furst, 29, were stripped and tied together. Apparently threatened with the death of Mrs. Furst’s 6-year-old daughter Gardenia, Mrs. Furst cut off her brother’s ears, (an act substantiated by the blood on her hands) and Mr. McGuire then cut off Mrs. Furst’s ears. After this, Gardenia Furst was drowned in a plastic washbasin of water in front of Mr. McGuire and Mrs. Furst; and then Mr. McGuire and Mrs. Furst were both killed by a shot in the left ear with a nail-gun usually used by construction workers for erecting plywood paneling. The family cat had been nailed by its ears to the garden fence.

  Bernal Heights, 7/6/88: the Ramirez family home on Moultrie was broken into at 5 a.m. when a huge French window was smashed in with slabs of concrete. Mr. Hector Ramirez, 45, and his wife Isabella Ramirez, 33, were stripped, gagged, and partially bound, lying on their backs on the living-room floor. Their two children Juan, 11, and Nadia, 9, were tied back-to-back close by. Concentrated sulphuric acid was then dripped on to the top of the children’s heads until (presumably) Mrs. Ramirez agreed to blind her husband by dropping concentrated sulphuric acid into his eyes. Afterwards the entire family was killed by having their throats cut. No known pets.

  When he had finished writing. Larry dropped his felt-tip pen and stood up. It was dark outside now. Linda would be home in five or ten minutes, bringing the boys. He knew that he should have walked around the house, switching on lights, making the place more welcoming. But somehow the horror of Arne’s reports on the Fog City Satan had numbed him. He kept on asking himself what he would have done, if he had been asked to drop sulphuric acid into Linda’s eyes? He tried to imagine what it must have been like, to have to do it. To be so terrified, to be so desperate, that you didn’t feel you had any choice.

  He pressed his forehead to the cold window. It was so dark and foggy now that all he could see was his own reflection; the ghost of Larry Foggia. He tried to imagine what kind of man could have asked those people to mutilate themselves. He tried to think what it must have been like, standing beside them, watching them sacrifice themselves. But for the first time in years and years, he couldn’t even begin to think what kind of man this could have been.

  He had witnessed torture and cruelty before. Most times, however, the purpose had been obvious. Men and women had been tortured for information; for sex; or out of sheer bloody-minded revenge. He had never seen people tortured in such a variety of terrible ways, just for the sake of torturing them.

  The Fog City Satan seemed to have no purpose. Some of the killings had involved sexual assault, but not all of them. Some of the killings had involved theft, but not all of them.

  In some cases, the family’s pets had been tortured in ways that reflected what had happened to their owners, but Arne had been unable to decide what the significance of these particular acts of cruelty might have been.

  In every case, people had been tied (or in the Berrys’ case, nailed down) and then mutilated—but never in the same way twice. Larry had thought fleetingly of Jack the Ripper, and the way that he had dabbled and played with his victim’s organs after slashing them open. But Jack the Ripper – although he had been sickening – had been consistent.

  There was no hint of obsessive behavior in what the Fog City Satan was doing—apart from the way in which he seemed to pick on contented families, and subject them to fear and pain beyond any kind of sanity. There was no geographical pattern. The excessive force used to gain entry to the victims’ houses was noteworthy—but not especially helpful. All it confirmed was what they knew already—that the same man had perpetrated each of the killings.

  There was a wealth of forensic evidence. There were closely comparable bruise-marks on the necks and arms of those victims who had been strangled or manhandled. There were closely comparable footprints on tiled kitchen floors and shagpile rugs. There were smears of reddish grease which the FBI laboratory had identified as a home-made mixture of STP gasoline additive and Revlon lipstick.

  There were no fingerprints, but there was semen, and stray pubic hair. These had been the most useful evidence of all. They had enabled Arne to establish that the Fog City Satan was Caucasian, blood-type AB, with a darkish complexion. From his shoe-size, the span of his hands and his obvious physical strength, Arne had been able to build up a picture of a man in his mid-forties, approximately 6ft tall, weighing 180–185lbs.

  If they ever caught him, they would be able to use genetic fingerprinting to identify him beyond any shadow of a doubt.

  After each killing, a man purporting to be the killer had called the radio station KGO, and issued warnings that anybody who identified him would be punished. Arne had given Larry copies of his recorded voice (as well as voiceprints), and although it was muffled and obviously disguised, it certainly sounded like a Caucasian male of about forty-five or forty-six.

  Arne had guessed that the Fog City Satan was a native of San Francisco, or that he had lived in the city long enough to know where and when he could attack his victims openly, and quite noisily, but with very little chance of discovery.

  Unless, of course, he didn’t care about being discovered.

  *

  Larry heard the key in the front door. That was Linda coming home. He was still standing in the dark when she came into the study and switched on his Anglepoise lamp.

  “Larry?” she said. “You gave me such a fright. I didn’t think there was anybody in.”

  He turned away from the window. “I’m sorry. I was miles away.”

  “I called you just after five. How come you didn’t answer?”

  “I didn’t answer after five. I had too much reading.”

  “You look terrible. Did you eat anything?”

  He shook his head. “I guess I forgot.”

  “I was going to make messicani di vitello. I bought some beautiful scallopine at Parma’s.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he told her.

  She approached his desk, and looked at the medical reports and the computer printouts and the maps. She picked up a photograph of six-year-old Gardenia Furst, drowned in a blue plastic washbasin in front of her mother.

  Larry said, in a thick voice, “You don’t want to look at that stuff.”

  Linda lowered the picture with a trembling hand. “Is it really bad?”

  “It’s worse than you want to know. We haven’t been telling the Press even half of it.”

  “Why does it have to be you?” Linda wanted to know.

  Larry shrugged. “If it isn’t me, it has to be somebody else.”

  “You know better than that.”

  Larry could hear the boys fighting in the hallway, and suddenly he didn’t want to think about the Fog City Satan any longer. He put his arm around Linda’s shoulder, and led her out into the living-room, and closed the study door tightly behind him.

  “I guess Dan wants me to do it because he thinks I can understand what this lunatic is all about. Like, it takes a lunatic to know one, if you follow what I mean.”

  “Larry…”said Linda, and her eyes were dark with worry.

  “It’s okay,” he reassured her, squeezing her close and ki
ssing her forehead. She smelled of Chanel No. 19 and fog. “When it comes down to it, he’s just a man. Men can be found out. Men can be caught.”

  Frankie and Mikey came running up to him, and caught hold of his hands. “Daddy! Benny’s dad says he’s going to take us to the Marina for frisbee and football tomorrow!”

  “Benny’s dad said that? He actually volunteered?”

  “Oh, daddy, can we go, daddy? Please can we go?”

  Larry lifted up Mikey in his arms and gave him a pretend punch under the jaw. He saw Linda looking at him and he knew what she was thinking. How come you never take your kids to the Marina for frisbee and football? How come it’s always somebody else’s dad?

  He set Mikey back on the floor. “Okay,” he said. “You can go with Benny’s dad if Benny’s dad genuinely volunteered. But Sunday we’re going to Muir Woods. The four of us. Muir Woods, and then lunch at Basta Pasta.”

  “Muir Woods? What a drag!” said Frankie, pulling a face.

  “Muir Woods is awesome and natural and beautiful,” Larry retorted.

  “Who cares?” Frankie retorted.

  “I hate Basta Pasta,” put in Mikey.

  Larry said to Linda, “I need a drink. How about you?”

  “I brought back some Verdicchio.”

  They went through to the kitchen. Larry opened the wine while Linda unpacked her marketing, and rinsed the veal scallops.

  “You can talk to me if you like,” she told him.

  “I’m not sure there’s very much that I can say,” he replied, pouring out the wine.

  “You can ask me what kind of a day you had, darling? How was your class? What did you have for lunch? Did Mr. Chabner make any more passes at you? Did Mr. Kotch’s toupee fall off again? And I don’t want to go to Muir Woods, either.”

  “All right, for Christ’s sake,” said Larry. “We won’t go to Muir Woods. God, I only wanted to give this family some environmental uplift.”

  Linda came up to him and kissed him. “I’m sorry. I know this has hit you real hard. I could kill Dan for giving you this assignment.”

  “You and me and Arne—all three of us.”

  There was a long pause between them; a long moment of relaxation. One of those moments in a good marriage when you don’t have to talk because talk isn’t necessary to say what you mean.

  But the moment was interrupted by the phone ringing. Larry lifted the receiver out of its wall-bracket and said, “Foggia.”

  “Larry, it’s Houston. KGO just called us. They’ve had a call from our boy.”

  “Another warning?” Larry asked him.

  “I don’t know. Kind of. But not like the others. This time, he said—hold on here, I can’t read my notes—‘He’s coming from the other side. He’s coming.’”

  “Who’s coming? Did he say who?”

  “No names,” said Houston. “But apparently he sounded really pleased with himself. Almost like he was celebrating.”

  “Was that all he said?” asked Larry. He kept thinking of Caroline and Joe Junior, their flesh burned to a dark maroon, twisted and gnarled like incinerated wood, nailed to the wall.

  Houston cleared his throat. “No. There was quite a lot more. He said something about ‘bringing him back.’ Then he said, ‘They gave their lives willingly. Just like a sacrifice. Just the way it was always meant. And now’s the time. The steps are almost complete.’ Something, something—the next bit was indistinct. Then, ‘He’s coming from the other side. All he needs is feeding. You won’t know when he’s coming. You won’t know where. Be warned if you must. Be dust if you don’t.’”

  Larry had scribbled everything that Houston had told him down the left-hand margin of Linda’s Sunset magazine. “That was it?” he wanted to know.

  “That was it. Apart from a few background noises. We never had background noises before.”

  “What kind of background noises?”

  “Hard to say. I’ve sent them down to Norm Dandia, for analysis. Sounds like rustling, and some sort of music.”

  “Okay, Houston. You did good. I’ll get down to headquarters in maybe an hour.”

  He hung up. He said, “Shit.”

  “Larry sweetheart?” asked Linda.

  “I don’t know,” said Larry. There was something about these killings that upset and irritated him beyond all reason. Be warned if you must. Be dust if you don’t. What the hell was that supposed to mean? It was senseless, illogical. Yet it was frightening, too. And in a strange lateral off-the-wall way he understood its meaning, like one of those double-Dutch songs they used to sing at school.

  “See the little babies cry.

  Eat the meat and hope to die.”

  Linda watched him as he read and re-read what the killer had said to KGO The other side, He’s coming from the other side.

  The other side of what?

  Linda came up to him and laid her head on his shoulder. “The other side?” she asked him.

  He had doodled the words in capital letters, and circled around and around them. THE OTHER SIDE.

  “Nothing,” he told her. “It was just something that Houston said.”

  “You don’t want to tell me?”

  “It’s nothing, okay? It’s just—nothing.”

  “Oh, come on, Larry. Don’t act weird. Tell me what it means.”

  “Jesus, Linda. I don’t know what it means.”

  “See the little babies burn,

  See the way they twist and turn.”

  Linda shrugged. “Okay, if that’s the way you feel. Messicani di vitello coming up.”

  She began to mash bread into a bowl of milk, while Larry stood beside her, silent, with his glass of wine.

  “You’re upset,” she said, after a while.

  “I’m fine. I’m not upset.”

  “Larry, I know when you’re upset. And right now, you’re upset.”

  “Of course I’m upset!” Larry burst back at her. “I’ve been spending the whole goddamned day looking at pictures of dead families! Jesus, you’d be upset! Any one of them could have been us!”

  Linda set the bowl aside and began to chop ham and pork for the filling. Although she was Anglo-Saxon (Danish, from way back) she had acquired that calmness that characterized Neapolitan women, no matter how volatile their menfolk were. When the ceiling’s coming in, don’t panic—cook.

  “So what’s this ‘other side’?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know. I don’t have any idea. It’s something the killer said to the radio station.”

  “Your momma’s always saying that, isn’t she? Least, she used to.”

  Larry frowned at her. “My momma was always saying what?”

  ‘“The other side.’ Like, ‘when your poppa went to the other side.’”

  “What do you mean?” he demanded.

  “It’s what she says instead of ‘died’. Haven’t you ever noticed? She never says, ‘when your poppa died’. Not once. She always says, ‘when your poppa went to the other side.’”

  Larry thought for a while, and then his eyes slowly narrowed.

  “You’re right,” he told her. “It was something to do with that spiritualist stuff she used to be into.”

  “You mean that spiritualist stuff she’s still into,” put in Linda, quickly, as if she had accidentally-on-purpose let it slip out.

  “She still does it?” asked Larry, surprised. “How do you know?”

  “Well… I shouldn’t really tell you—”

  “Tell me,” he insisted. He didn’t have to insist very hard.

  He listened while she told him what his mother had said. Then he finished his glass of wine, and poured himself another one.

  Linda said, quietly, “What are you going to do?”

  Larry swallowed wine. “What does any good Italian boy do? He talks to his momma.”

  3

  His mother still lived in the same Edwardian house in Ashbury Heights where Larry had been brought up, 144 Belvedere. When Larry’s father was alive, t
he Foggia family had occupied the whole five-bedroomed house; but now Eleonora Foggia lived in the ground-floor apartment, and rented off the rest of the house to two earnest young executive couples, one violently avant-garde painter and a former dancer from the Joffrey Ballet with a bad ankle and a Valium habit.

  The fog refused to lift. It was beginning to give Larry a headache. Everywhere he drove, he could see transparent tadpole shapes swimming in front of his eyes. His mother’s cream-painted house looked like a half-developed photograph – three stories of pale brick and carved lintels and complicated balconies – fashioned from what his father used to call “overwrought iron”.

  He climbed the steps and rang his mother’s doorbell, and she answered so quickly that he knew that Linda must have called her in advance. She was sixty-nine now, two months away from seventy, and she was going through a phase of quite remarkable handsomeness, when her age really suited her. Her hair was very white, cut in a simple bob. But her face was sharp and elegant and sculptured; her eyes were big and gray and bright; and although she was always dressed in black, she looked both cultured and vivacious…

  “Ciao, momma,” he told her, and hugged her close. He was always amazed how thin and birdlike she felt.

  “Hallo, stranger,” she greeted him. He hadn’t called by for over a week and a half. “The coffee’s ready.”

  He followed her along the lilac-wallpapered hallway to the front parlor which was now her principal living-room. It was huge and gloomy, with an impossibly high ceiling and heavy brown drapes. When he was a boy, it had seemed like church, with a darkly polished hardwood floor and massive pieces of austere and hideous furniture. But now that his mother had been reduced to living in an “owner’s unit”, the room was crammed with all of her favorite pictures and ornaments and rugs. A tatty parrot scratched and muttered to itself in a domed cage; and everywhere he looked there were mirrors, so that the parlor seemed like one of a hundred gloomy overfilled rooms, occupied by one of a hundred black-dressed Eleonora Foggias and one of a hundred tatty parrots.