Chapter One

Tuesday, May 6th

Inspector Clemson Yao gazed up at the huge branches twelve feet overhead. Even in the morning, the grove of hoary oaks seemed full of age-old menace, their canopies faded into fog as if the trunks had uncoiled from heaven and gripped the earth. He half expected to see a dozen hooded Druids up to some sort of Druidic no good.

Every homicide crime scene had some of that, the sinister “someone was slaughtered here” frisson he got from half a hundred San Francisco venues by now. He even enjoyed it sometimes in that flesh-crawly way Londoners got off on Jack the Ripper tours. But a bunch of spooky trees would perfectly complement the denizens that skittered nightly through his brief snatches of sleep: millipedes with the girth of pythons, roaches like beady-eyed, sixlegged footballs. A year ago he’d winched a vaguely human decomp glob by glob from a sewer pipe. Now, one night or so a month, the pipe became home to centipedes like hundred-limbed fire hoses that just kind of smirked at a hollow point.

Tonight they’d be in the trees.

Grady Moore, chief of police of Gilroy, spoke as he doffed the mirror shades he wore heedless of hour or weather. His irises were the color of burnished pewter. The mist muffled his voice, as if the place itself insisted on a funereal hush. “I wouldn’t drag you down here, Clem, but it’s been three months and not one suspect. I’m like that spider being dangled over the fire in that famous sermon.”

Clem nodded sagely. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Always uplifting.”

A grimace twisted Grady’s leathery features. He’d seen a lot in thirty years in the Salinas Valley, from grisly migrant honor killings to labor rabblerousers made gruesome examples by feudal lettuce lords, but nothing like this. “Anyway, see the borings in the branches, where he screwed in the pulleys?” He pointed them out, two holes each sunk in two foot-thick branches extending from the yard-wide trunk. “The killer threaded ropes through the four pulleys to a leather belt hitched under the vic’s shoulders. Hanging on the other end of the ropes were four huge steel washtubs. Another rope hitched tight round his waist and secured here at the foot of the tree.”

Clem looked down. Two steel eyebolts were set in concrete stained an ominous brown. He frowned. “You going to leave this thing in the ground? Put up a visitors’ center?”

Grady shook his head. “It’s a real old tree, some enviro-gnome has to sign off before we can dig out the concrete. We get two or three gawkers a day.”

Clem rolled his eyes. “So when it started raining, the tubs filled with water and hoisted the vic into the tree under his shoulders. Except he was tied to the ground by his waist.”

“Right,” agreed Grady. “Tubs could each hold five cubic feet of water.”

“So total twenty at sixty-six pounds each, that’s, umm—”

“Like fourteen hundred pounds hoisting him up. So eventually one of his vertebrae gave up the ghost and he tore in half at the waist. When we found him next day, his northern half was suspended by the tubs up yonder feeding the crows. Feral pigs were chowing down on his southern reaches on the ground there. Nothing in between but his small intestine, strung tight as a bass fiddle string.”

Clem shook his head grimly. “And here I thought the little porkers were kinda cute.”

“Pig’s gotta do. Coroner about shat himself though. And premeditated? Concrete was cured. Means he poured it months before. The vic’s William Rohde. Nickname Sneezy.”

“You’ve ruled out suicide I take it.”