Hank Zahn in; naturally he's bound
to do everything he can to carry out his client's wishes. So what I'm
going to propose is this.- I will sign
a
document renouncing
all claim to this inheritance, in perpetuity."
It was a gesture I hadn't
expected—and one that was totally unnecessary. Now I began to suspect
that—despite his outwardly cool manner—Tom Grant had known Perry
Hilderly and was afraid I'd find out the nature of the relationship. I
said, "Are you sure you want to do that?"
"Yes. Will you ask Mr. Zahn to
draw up the paperwork?"
"Certainly. I'll call
for an appointment when
it's ready." I closed the file and replaced it in my briefcase.
Grant stood. "When you do, ask
Angela to schedule it for late in the day; I'd like to show you my
studio." Involuntarily I glanced over at the shelf beside the
fireplace, where the mockingbird
feathers spread about the dry, taut piece of skin. My feeling of
distaste was even stronger now.
"Since you seem so interested in
my hobby," Grant added.
On my way through the pristine
front courtyard, I suddenly recalled the source of the odd phrase that
had popped into my head earlier: it was from the last stanza of a song
by the seventeenth-century English playwright John Webster that I'd
been required to memorize in one of my high-school literature classes.
I could still remember the entire quatrain, more or less accurately.
Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead
things
To
leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch
the wind.
Four
As it turned out, Greg was
forced to cancel our lunch—a fact about which I had mixed emotions.
When I arrived at Homicide, one of the inspectors—a man named Wallace,
whom I knew slightly— handed me an armful of files and showed me to
Greg's cubicle. "The lieutenant said to leave them on the desk when
you're finished," he told me.
So I spent what should have been
my lunch hour reading through the case files on the random shootings.
Four of them, dating back to April, the latest being Hilderly's on July
6. The first was a restaurant employee, returning late to his rooming
house in the Outer Mission. Next was a nurse, leaving for her
four-to-midnight shift at Children's Hospital in Laurel Heights. The
third victim, a veteran on disability, had been unable to sleep and
gone outside his home in the Outer Sunset to get some air minutes
before he was killed. And then there was Hilderly. The weapon used was
a
.357
Magnum,
and the bullets recovered from the bodies matched
ballistically. All the shootings had occurred after ten P.M. and on
relatively quiet streets; even Hilderly's had been no exception, since
normally busy Geary Boulevard is almost deserted at one-fifty A.M., the
hour he'd alighted from an empty Muni bus at the corner of Third Avenue.
There had been no eyewitnesses to
any of the killings; the Muni bus, in Hilderly's case, had already
driven away. Family, friends, and co-workers of the victims had been
interviewed, and the investigators were unable to turn up an enemy or
anyone else with a motive for murder. The information in the files
showed that the victims had been more or less upright citizens,
ordinary people going about their ordinary business. Ordinary people
who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As is customary in such cases,
the mayor's office had offered a reward for information leading to the
apprehension of the murderer. The usual false leads, extortion
attempts, and crackpot calls (including one in which the caller claimed
the shootings were the work of her husband, who had then flown off in a
UFO) had been phoned in to the police hot line. Unlike killers such as
Zodiac, the perpetrator did not contact either the press or the police.
If the snipings continued, the public outcry would become louder, and
panic would ensue; political pressure on the department, already heavy,
would increase.
I skimmed the files devoted to
each individual, then turned to Hilderly's,