I walked back over to The Coffee, where Gavin made me a San Francisco Fog, and I asked him to join me at a table. Nat had gone out somewhere, and I was the only customer, so we headed over to a table in the window. I remembered the pizza restaurant waitress who used her window table to advertise, and I thought we should do the same for The Coffee. Besides, I wanted to be where we could be seen. Not that there were many people on the street these days.
“Where’s Nat?” I said, picking off the cover and blowing on my tea. It was too hot to drink.
He smiled. He really was a sweet, good-looking guy, with his dark eyes and multi-shades of blonde hair. “He’ll be back soon. I should really stay behind the counter while he’s not here.”
“I’ve been thinking about everything we talked about the other day, and I have a couple of questions you can help me with,” I said. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. It must be tough being on your feet all day.”
“Sure. What do you want to know?”
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? I felt about as certain as I could be that he wasn’t the innocent he appeared, but was he just an embezzler or was he a murderer, too? Katrina had been shot late at night, and it would only have taken a few minutes to shoot her, rifle her briefcase, and then dodge fifty yards to get off Polk Street and into the alley to make his escape. Say five minutes total. Sergei, however, had been stabbed after a struggle, and his hands mutilated, which took time and privacy. It hadn’t happened in the vacant building where he was found, or in Katrina’s apartment.
I took my time taking the cover off my drink, setting it on the table, and picking up a couple of napkins to wipe up the resulting spot of tea as if it were my life’s work. “You heard the news about Matthew?”
“Father Martin told me. I know you were fond of him.” His expression was suitably grave, but I caught an unpleasant, malicious gleam in his eyes. It was the first break in his good-guy persona, and now I knew what to ask.
“Did Katrina have a wine cellar built in her garage?”
He frowned slightly and then chuckled. “Wow, that came out of left field. Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered where she was storing all her wine.”
“Oh”—he huffed out a breath—“it went to an expert for valuation and sale. I don’t know anything about wine.”
I took a sip of my drink. Still too hot. “Like you don’t know anything about computers,” I said pleasantly. “Did you know that Olivetan nuns wear white habits?”
He looked puzzled. “No, I’m sorry. I told you I don’t know anything about Catholic nuns.”
“What do you know about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” I said playfully, “you don’t know anything about wine, computers, or Catholic nuns.”
“I guess I do sound like an idiot,” he said ruefully. “But in some circles I’m considered quite intelligent.” He chuckled again. “I’m writing an article now about San Francisco’s coffee culture. See? I’ve learned a lot working here, and a writer uses every one of life’s opportunities. I have you to thank for that idea, by the way.”
I waved my coffee cup at him. “Consider it a freebie. I suppose there really is a coffee culture here; I never thought of it that way.” I fiddled with my cup. “Even the homeless fellows on the street are particular about their coffee. Did I ever tell you about the first cup of coffee I gave Matthew?”
He leaned forward, his eyes bright, almost too attentive. “What happened?”
“It had cream and sugar in it, and he turned it down! That was the first time I heard him say—what was his little catch phrase? Oh, right—black, no sugar.”
He smiled and took the kitchen cloth off his shoulder. “I should get back to the counter. Nat likes the mugs to be stacked when they come out of the dishwasher. Your drink seems too hot to enjoy. Let me add a splash of cold milk.”
He took my cup behind the counter while I stared out over the café curtains Nat had agonized over. I wished he were here; for some reason this conversation felt as if it could go off the rails any minute. When he slid my cup over to me, I tried it again, feeling like Goldilocks, and then drank half of it down. I was thirsty, I needed the caffeine, and I hadn’t eaten all day. “It’s just right now. You’re a good barista.”
He walked back behind the counter and began stacking the mugs. “Nat likes to use these unless the customer wants a go-cup.”
He took his time, building his mug pyramid slowly, aligning them carefully before adding the next layer. I watched him, a little cynically, recalling how clumsy and shy he had seemed when he first walked into Aromas, and wondered if that had been just another piece of theater.
He was taking too long. I stood up to go, and then sat down again heavily. I was much more tired than I realized. “One more thing, though.” I tried to get up again and somehow couldn’t. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask him.
He sat down and took a set of keys from his pocket, held one of them up, and laid them on the table. “This is the key to the garage, if you want to check it out.” He got up and walked over to the front door, turned the dead bolt, and flipped the door sign to Closed, then went to the espresso machine and poured milk into a metal jug. “We have a regular customer who comes in around this time and likes his drink to be ready,” he said.
I frowned, trying to understand why the door was locked if a customer was expected. Had he locked the door or not? I listened to the milk hissing and bubbling and wondered how hot steamed milk was—as I said, science wasn’t my best subject in school. I had to walk past him to leave, and I wanted to leave. I moved slowly, feeling as if I suddenly weighed a thousand pounds, fussing with the lid of my drink, and then dropping it, counting the seven steps I still had to walk before I got to the door.
As I drew abreast, he turned and threw the boiling milk at my head. I flinched instinctively and threw up a protective arm. Most of it missed of my face, but the milk soaked into my sleeve and hot, stinging burns traveled down my arm and neck. I screamed and struggled out of my T-shirt, and threw it in a soggy heap on the floor, then my feet got tangled in it and I clutched the edge of the counter to stay upright.
“How clumsy of me,” he said, in a parody of concern. “I should get something to put on that for you. Here, let me help you.”
He came around the counter and put an arm like steel around my waist. I needed to run, but I couldn’t remember why. I slumped against him and closed my eyes.
The next time I opened them I was sitting on a hard chair, and I could hear the trickle of water somewhere nearby. My hands seemed to be stuck to my legs, which was uncomfortable, and I couldn’t move. The chair rocked when I tried and nearly tipped over. My feet were wet. I had a bad headache, and one of my arms was stinging, as if it had been burned. I couldn’t make sense of anything and I didn’t remember much of anything, either. I thought backward, but the last thing I remembered clearly was sitting in my office. I’d had an Earl Grey latte; or was that earlier? I had no idea.
“Feeling better?” Gavin’s quiet voice reached me out of the gloom.
“Not really, to be honest. Where are we? Are we prisoners?” I was slurring my words, and even as I said it, I realized it didn’t make sense, but nothing did.
“Well, you are, anyway,” he said, sounding amused. “But don’t worry; it won’t be for long. I just need some of the roofie to leave your system. The autopsy will find it, but you take it to help you sleep, so it won’t be unexpected.” He splashed through the water and bent over me. I tried to focus on him, but I couldn’t really make out the details of his face. It sounded like Gavin, but I couldn’t be sure. He tugged on whatever was holding me to the chair, apparently satisfied.
“I don’t take anything to help me sleep.” I frowned. “Autopsy?”
“You have insomnia, so you take it to help you sleep. You can get it in England for that.”
“I can?” I thought about it. I wasn’t sleeping well, but I didn’t remember taking anything, so I shook my head, which might have been a mistake since it made me very dizzy. “I don’t take anything.” I thought for another minute. “Autopsy?”
“It’s too bad, but the city’s a dangerous place at night. I have to get back to The Coffee to finish my shift. But I’ll be back later.”
“M’okay.” I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.
He was there again when I woke up. My head was a little clearer, but not much, and the headache was a lot worse. I had no idea how much time had passed. I was still tied to the chair, but not with cord. I was wrapped heavily from neck to ankles, like a mummy. It felt hot and unpleasant, and my arm was hurting. It stung, like burns. I stared at it and then lifted my head. He was standing a few feet in front of me.
“Where are we?”
“The wine racks didn’t give you a clue?” He still sounded amused, and as gentle and pleasant as ever, but his face was sharp and tight with tension.
I turned my head, painfully. LED lights glowed from the edges of tall wine racks full of bottles.
I looked down at myself. “Is this—am I wrapped in bubble wrap?” It seemed all of a piece with the surreal nature of my evening. I assumed it was evening.
He chuckled. “I had plenty of it from packing up Katrina’s things. Bubble wrap and duct tape. It’s true what they say—duct tape is good for everything. Couldn’t risk rope burns and bruises being found at the—”
“Autopsy,” I said hollowly.
“Exactly. Smart girl.”
I squinted at the wall next to me. “Is that blood?”
“This is where I killed the priest and cut off his fingers. Pretty gross, right?” He actually wrinkled his nose, as if it was distasteful. “Lucky he wanted to see Katrina’s wine collection.”
I closed my eyes and felt my head pounding. “What time is it?”
“It’s about two in the morning. Nat was pissed you weren’t answering your phone earlier. I explained you’d come in for your usual afternoon tea and then left.” He bent over and fished around near his feet. He picked up my dripping phone, then held it out to me. “Oops.” He made a mock regretful face. “He’ll start to worry tomorrow probably, but by then you’ll have met with an unfortunate accident, or possibly a mugging gone wrong. I’ll think of something.”
I shifted to ease some of the pressure on my arm and looked up at him. He really was a sweet, good-looking guy if you ignored the fact that he was a stone-cold killer. “You’ve done pretty well so far.”
He looked delighted. “I know, right? It’s all been improvisation and so far, so good.” He held up his hand with crossed fingers and grinned at me, his eyes glittering. I shivered, even though I was sweating in my plastic cocoon. How could I not have noticed that he was completely insane?
“You fooled everyone,” I croaked.
“Not you though, right?” He hitched his own chair closer and he looked … excited. “So what was it? What gave you your first clue?”
If he wanted to talk, I was willing to indulge him. At least while we were talking, he wasn’t killing me.
“I think it was when I found Matthew so badly injured and he said, ‘coffee, black.’ That’s what he said to you that morning you brought him his coffee, remember?”
His face was screwed up in concentration. He started to shake his head, then stopped, his eyes wide. “Oh, I remember. But how did that help you?” He looked annoyed. “Don’t lie to me.”
“It was just the first tiny thing,” I said hastily. “To everyone else, he always said ‘black, no sugar.’ It probably doesn’t sound like much, but—”
“No, no, it’s your story, and that was really smart.” He beamed at me. “What else?”
Oh god, he looked like a kid waiting for the next chapter in a bedtime story. “Well, there were the nuns’ habits.” I decided to keep Father Martin out of it; God knew if he’d be in danger, too. “I don’t know much about nuns, but I heard somewhere that they were Olivetans. I was curious, so I looked them up online, and it said they wore white habits, not black.”
He tipped his head to one side and inspected me through narrowed eyes. “That’s not true. You saw the photos plenty of times, and they were wearing black. Who told you?”
He grabbed hold of my chair and shook it fiercely back and forth, leaning into me, his face inches from mine, his breath hot and his expression enraged. My head flopped from side to side. I was afraid my neck would break. Then he suddenly stopped, stepped back, and resumed his friendly, conversational tone. He sat down again and looked reflectively up at the ceiling. “Never mind; we’ll come back to that. What else?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m thirsty; can I have a drink of water?”
He unscrewed the cap of a bottle of water from the shelf next to my head. “You should have said something sooner. Here.” He tipped it slowly into my mouth, and I took several large gulps. “There. Better?” he said kindly. I nodded. “Now, what else?”
My stomach lurched. I wasn’t sure I could keep the water down and talk to that weirdly pleasant face at the same time. “Can you tell me your part of the story? I’m really interested.”
He preened slightly, which was terrifying to watch. “I’ll tell you my part, and then you can tell me more, okay?” I nodded. “Where shall I start?”
“Tell me about Katrina.”
“Good. Good. That’s the start, I guess. She asked me to set up the kids’ home for her. I made sure I was the go-between with the diocese over there. It was pretty simple to tell them she was still considering the project, and telling Katrina it was all moving ahead. It took organization, but I’m careful, and you can get just about anything done in Kiev if you know the right people and you have a little money to spend. She was always telling me I was wasting my education, so I decided to show her.” He giggled. “She paid quarterly into an account I set up, and the money came out gradually over the course of the year, apparently for things to maintain the house, feed and clothe the poor little orphans. Photos were simple—just some local kids and women who dressed up and posed for photos for the equivalent of twenty bucks. It was easy. Katrina left all the details to me, and I gave her copies of the same reports I was supposedly sending to the diocese—with spreadsheets and everything.” He giggled again, which was just—unsettling.
“What went wrong?”
“That stupid new assistant sent a report about St. Olga’s to the archdiocese for real; used her initiative, Katrina said. Some priest read it and left a message for Katrina that there was no St. Olga’s. I always kept track of everything going in and out of Katrina’s e-mail accounts, so I had his name and I was able to find him and kill him. Hit-and-run that time. After that, I figured it was best to make them all different, you know? So it would take anyone who was looking longer to put everything together.” His gentle face looked almost dreamy.
“When I got back from Kiev, Katrina was suspicious because the priest hadn’t followed up, and then she found out he’d died. She made some phone calls and whatever she found out, she realized things weren’t right. She was a smart cookie, you know? She should have trusted me.” He shook a gentle, admonishing finger in my face. “I got in the car so she could scream at me, but it didn’t last long. She hated leaving that car on the street—God, she was so pissed when her contractor broke through into some buried creek or something, and the wine cellar flooded.” He giggled again. It was chilling.
“What happened with the priest who came here?”
He shifted forward in his seat and said, as if to reassure me, “He wasn’t suspicious of me. He was just looking for answers, and my name was in Katrina’s obituary, as her survivor. We met at some pizza place in North Beach and I invited him to come up to Katrina’s place for a drink. He told me how his priest friend in Kiev had told him the odd story of the nonexistent orphanage. Then when he was run over and killed, I guess this priest got suspicious. I played it puzzled and then outraged, and said we needed to get to the bottom of it. And then I asked if he wanted to see Katrina’s wine collection.” He gave another of those little giggles.
“For an old guy he was pretty tough, but with the roofie and him not being in the best shape, I snatched his key ring, and it had this handy little point, so I jammed it in his neck. Then I chopped off his fingers, too.” He actually shuddered. “He said he was from South America, and I read once about these South American gangs who did that, and I thought it might point the cops away from the reason he was here.”
I was having real difficulty keeping my eyes open. I drifted off then jerked awake, terrified he’d killed me. I tried to think of something to keep him talking. “Why didn’t you leave him down here? Why did you take him over to the vacant building?”
He explained, patiently, as if I should have thought of it myself. “He’d started to smell, and with it being Katrina’s building, I mean, nobody knew this place was here except me, and I had all her keys, and with the blood and everything it would point the finger right at me. Point the finger!” He giggled again. “That’s funny. Anyway, I left him down here for a couple of days, while I figured something out. Then I remembered the empty buildings. There was an old shopping cart across the street, and I grabbed it. That guy, Matthew, saw me returning it, and he got upset, kept mumbling and muttering, ‘thief, thief, thief.’ You know how he was. I got him settled down. I told him I’d found it down the block and I was bringing it back to him. You know the funny part?”
He looked at me brightly, waiting for a response, so I forced out, “No, what was funny?”
“That guy, the guy everyone calls Matthew? His name is Pavel Matthew. He was her son, can you believe it?” He burst into loud, genuine laughter. “I know, right? You look so shocked! He was in line to inherit everything. She had the trust set up and everything, so her estate didn’t have to go through probate. She made me swear not to tell anyone. Her will said if he died first everything went to St. Olga’s, so that was a no-brainer. Easy to find his dump of a place and push one of those piles of crap onto him. All I have to do now is wait for him to die because he’s kind of sickly anyway, or help him along if he gets out of the hospital. I’ll produce a DNA sample to prove the relationship, get everything transferred over to St. Olga’s. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy. Okay, your turn.”
My mind was no clearer; the nausea was getting worse. Matthew, Pavel—living in the gutter where his mother parked her $100,000 automobile. Gavin’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you crying? Stop crying! Stop it! Stop it!”
My head rolled forward, and I tried to think of something, anything, that would turn me back into an appreciative audience. He snatched at my hair and pulled back my head. I blurted out, “Did you break into Katrina’s office?”
He drew in a breath and said admiringly, “That was you? Oh, wow, you really had me going. I had to see if there was anything to point the finger at me. Get it? So come on, your turn now. What else gave me away?”
“You said you didn’t know anything about computers, and for a while I thought it would stop you from doing all the sophisticated financial setup for the orphanage. But then I found out you went to a Swiss university which is the equivalent of MIT, where you earned a degree in computer science.”
He sat back. “That’s amazing. And that was all?”
“Basically, yes,” I said. Added to the nuns’ outfits and Matthew’s—Pavel’s—coffee habits, I guess it wasn’t much, and I’d had little more than suspicion when I’d gone to talk to him. He’d confirmed everything else.
“Well, I’m impressed.” He sat back in his chair and inspected me shrewdly. “The way I see it, you only figured it out while we were talking today. I mean, that’s why I roofie’d you, so I don’t guess you shared this with anyone. I’m sorry, but I have to leave you again. I’ll be back later, and then we’ll see. Do you want another drink of water before I go?”
My mouth and throat felt parched. “Yes, please.”
He picked up the bottle again and held it to my mouth while I took two gulps. “There’s a little sleeping magic in that one,” he said. “You rest. I have to go now. I have some arrangements to make,” he said apologetically, as if I were going to miss his company. “I may be a while, but I’ll see you later,” he added, before he climbed up the stairs, opened a trapdoor on some sort of hydraulic lift, and disappeared.
I tried to wriggle out of my bubble wrap and duct tape shroud, but it was hideously effective, and I was in real danger of knocking the chair over. With me completely immobilized, the six inches of water on the ground was probably enough to drown in. I shook my head every few minutes for a while to stave off sleep, but I could feel my eyes getting heavy and I finally closed them, thankful for the oblivion that awaited.