Less than twenty minutes later a squad car arrived. SFPD Officers Dean Gershon and Maria Lopez. Gershon was tall and blond, with a look of heavy softness to his limbs and a profile that evoked Winnie-the-Pooh. Lopez couldn’t have been more than five seven, with a small, hard-pretty face and liquid black eyes. Her dark hair was scraped back into a short ponytail. For Vincent their presence brought Elsa’s death back, those first hours and days in which the police had stopped being something on TV and started being something in his real life. To him the smell of their uniforms and gear was one of the odors of grief. The arrival of the police gave you the brutal truth: that you were never safe from random evil. No one, anywhere, was safe from that.
“Well,” Officer Gershon said, coming back into the hall from his sweep of the grounds, “there’s no one out there now. We’ll notify the neighbors, but at the moment there’s not much more we can do.”
“Everything’s secure,” Officer Lopez said. She’d been round the interior with Lucas, checking doors and windows. Redundantly, she knew, since like all the homes in Pacific Heights, this one was intruder alarmed up the wazoo, and the alarm, clearly, had not been tripped.
“Looks like your yard adjoins your neighbor’s at the back there, right?” Gershon said.
“More or less,” Lucas said. “There’s a stupid little overgrown alley between them that comes out between the two front yards. We put a padlocked iron gate in there a couple of years back, but it’s easy enough to climb over, I guess.”
“He’s most likely gone,” Lopez said. “The lights coming on will have spooked him. I’m guessing we’re not dealing with a genius here. Break-ins in this part of town would need to be a lot higher-tech.” She turned to Vincent. “You see any gear on him? A bag or a rucksack or anything?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Okay, well, we have your statement. Best thing we can do right now is check with your neighbors. If I were you I’d just reset the alarm codes when we’re out of here, then go back to bed and get some sleep. We’ll write you an incident reference in case you need to get back in touch. But for now—”
Her walkie clicked and a female voice came through: “Unit Twelve, Code One. Unit Twelve, Code One.”
Some instinct or protocol, Vincent assumed, made Lopez leave the room as she responded: “Unit Twelve. Go ahead, Dispatch…”
Vincent expected a shift in Gershon’s demeanor (though he had no idea what “Code One” might mean) but the officer remained where he was, leaning against the wall with his left hand in his pocket. To Vincent the posture was deflating: It was simply human. The police were human beings. Not omniscient. Not omnipotent. Only occasionally the dispensers of inadequate justice. When something happened to you—when crime happened to you—that wasn’t what you wanted. You wanted deadly infallible machines who suffered neither fatigue nor ambivalence. That, and the power to raise victims from the dead, to reverse the math that had subtracted the meaning from your life.
Lopez rejoined them in the hall. Her alertness had been dialed up. Now Gershon did straighten. His hand left its pocket.
“We’ve got a two-four-five and possible one-eight-seven,” Lopez said to her partner, heading toward the door. “Right now.”
“Where?” Gershon said.
“What’s going on?” Vincent said.
“Stay inside and lock up,” Lopez called over her shoulder. “Don’t let anyone in except us. We’ll be back.”
“What the hell?” Vincent said—but the officers were gone and the door slammed shut behind them.