Now they were both thirty-five years old. Frost was a cop. Denny was dead.
Dr. Finder looked up and read the emotion on Frost’s face. “I don’t mean to make light of losing someone you were close to.”
“We weren’t close,” Frost replied, too sharply. Then he went on, as much to himself as to the medical examiner. “I’m just saying it was a long time ago. Denny and I used to drink beer, steam crab, and listen to Nickelback, I’m ashamed to say. Every kid in his twenties should live like that for a while. We didn’t make a dime, but we didn’t care about money.”
“Well, Mr. Clark is doing considerably better now,” Dr. Finder replied. “Present circumstances excepted, of course.”
“What do you mean?”
Finder tapped the body’s leg. “He has cash in a money clip in his front right pocket. Looks like several thousand dollars.”
Frost’s lips pressed into a frown. Money and Denny Clark had never gone hand in hand, at least not for long. He found it hard to believe that his old friend had changed that much, even after ten years apart.
“I’m going to check on the investigation outside,” he told the pathologist. “Do you have everything you need?”
“I do. Although since I’m here, I was hoping to meet the famous Shack.”
Frost grinned. Everyone associated with the San Francisco police knew about Frost’s cat. They were an unlikely team, and on most days, Frost wasn’t entirely sure which one of them was in charge. “I had to put Shack in an upstairs bedroom, or he probably would have started the autopsy without you. I’ll introduce you before you go.”
“Be sure you do,” Dr. Finder replied.
Frost stepped around the body to the open front door and walked down the porch steps to Green Street. The road was crowded with police vehicles lighting up the cul-de-sac at the top of the hill. He saw plastic numbers on the sidewalk, marking evidence. In this case, it was Denny’s blood. He walked to the concrete railing that overlooked the rocky tree-lined slope and imagined the effort it had taken for Denny to climb the stairs with his last breaths.
All to give Frost a message that made no sense at all.
Lombard.
To San Franciscans, Lombard was simply an east — west street heading across the city into the Presidio. Tourists knew the name Lombard because of its zigzag route down one of the sharp peaks of Russian Hill. City guides called it the crookedest street in the world.
Frost shoved his hands in the pockets of his black jeans and blinked away his tiredness. He wore yesterday’s blue-checked button-down shirt, untucked. The wind riffled through his swept-back hair, which was a mixture of gold and brown and cut short on the sides. He had a high forehead, small ears, and a nose that made a sharp V on his face. His eyes were dark blue. His neatly trimmed beard hid his chin. He was almost six feet tall but a little skinny for his height.
He turned around and leaned against the railing. The March night was cold and clear. Using his phone, he did a quick Google search for the name Denny Clark. The search led him to Denny’s website, which advertised custom charter excursions on the bay. Frost hadn’t kept up with Denny over the years — in fact, he’d deliberately made sure he didn’t know what Denny was doing — but he could see that his former partner had upgraded the business. Denny had exchanged their rusted forty-foot fishing boat at the wharf for a luxury one-hundred-foot party yacht docked in the marina. He catered to the San Francisco elite. Based on the cash in his pocket, it paid well.
The name of Denny’s yacht was the Roughing It. Frost couldn’t help smiling. There was more to the name than just its sly irony for an upscale yacht. Frost had named their original fishing boat the Jumping Frog, which he’d taken from a Mark Twain story. Apparently, Denny had done the same thing with his new yacht, even though Denny’s knowledge of anyone named Twain probably began and ended with Shania. It made Frost wonder whether Denny had quietly been sending him an apology that he’d never received.
“Inspector?”
Frost looked up to find a uniformed police officer standing in front of him. “Yes, what is it?”
“Captain Hayden wants to talk to you.”
Frost nodded. “I’ll give him a call.”
The police officer shook his head. “No, the captain is here.”
“Here? At the crime scene?”
“Yes, he just arrived.”
Surprised, Frost checked his watch and saw that it was nearly two in the morning. He didn’t understand why the top cop in the major crimes unit — a man who was on track to be the next San Francisco police chief — would be visiting an ordinary homicide scene in the middle of the night.
Then he remembered what Dr. Finder had told him: There’s nothing ordinary here.
Frost spotted Hayden’s unmarked black town car beyond the crime scene tape. He marched toward the car and saw Hayden’s right-hand man vaping mist into the air from an e-cigarette as he stood on the sidewalk. The younger cop’s name was Cyril Timko. Hayden had plucked him from the officer ranks several months earlier and turned the twenty-nine-year-old into his assistant, enforcer, and chauffeur. Cyril had the tough, wiry look of a runner, all muscle and bone. In the police gym, he made up for his small stature with a reputation as a dirty fighter. He wore his black hair in a buzz cut that made a sharp point on his forehead. He had thick eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow. His blue uniform fit tightly, and his skin was pale white, as if the button of his shirt collar were cutting off the blood through his neck.
“This is a surprise,” Frost said as he approached Cyril. “Why the late-night visit? I would have given the captain a report in the morning.”
Cyril shrugged. “It’s Russian Hill. Lots of rich voters and rich politicians around here. They get nervous about murder. The captain wants to make sure we’re all over this one.”
“Fair enough,” Frost said, but he didn’t think that was the real explanation.
“What do you know so far?” Cyril asked him in a voice that had the raspiness of someone who used to smoke real cigarettes instead of the fake ones.
“The victim came up the hillside stairs on foot. We’re still trying to trace his movements before that.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Not yet, but we’ll canvass the area in the morning.” Frost nodded at the town car. “The captain’s in the back?”
“He is.” Cyril exhaled a cloud of vapor and secured the device in his pocket. He went to the rear door of the town car and swung it open. The interior lights were on, and Frost climbed inside.
Captain Pruitt Hayden took up fully half of the back seat. He was huge, like the former Stanford linebacker that he was. His bald black head had patches of off-color skin like dark and milk chocolate mixed together. He wore Franklin reading glasses that looked oddly tiny on his face, and he perused the screen of his laptop with his lips pursed. His fingers tapped along to a piano concerto playing on the car’s speakers. Like his aide, he wore dress blues.
A minute passed, and finally, the captain turned to stare at Frost over the rims of his glasses.
“Easton,” he murmured in a voice that sounded like distant thunder. He said Frost’s name with the expression of someone who had stepped in something unpleasant. Frost and Hayden had never been friends.