Claire and I cracked up.
“What a pain. See, people think it’s actually an advantage that I know you guys,” Cindy said, sighing dramatically.
“The hearing to suppress Junie Moon’s confession? It went great,” Yuki told us. “Since Junie had been Mirandized when she confessed, the judge says it’s admissible.”
“Excellent,” I said, letting out my breath. “A break for the good guys.”
“Yuki, you’re trying her for a murder and you don’t have a body?” Claire asked.
“It’s a circumstantial case, but circumstantial cases are won all the time,” Yuki said. “Look, I’d be happier with physical evidence. I’d be happier if Ricky Malcolm made any kind of a corroborating statement.
“But the powers that be are piling on the pressure. Plus, we can win.”
Yuki stopped to gulp down some beer, then carried on.
“The jury is going to believe Junie’s confession. They’re going to believe her, and they’re going to hold her responsible for Michael Campion’s death.”
Chapter 16
I WAS AT MY DESK in the squad room the next day when Rich came in after lunch smelling of garbage.
“Tough morning in Jackson?”
“Yeah, but I think the sheriff’s digging for his fifteen minutes of fame before the Feds take over the search. He’s got it under control.”
I pinched my nose as Rich pulled out his chair, folded his long legs under his side of the desk, and opened his container of coffee.
“Phone records show that yes, Junie did call Malcolm at 11:21 on the night Michael went missing. And she called him every night at about that time.”
“Girl stays in touch with her boyfriend.”
“And Clapper called,” I told my partner. “The prints on the knife are Malcolm’s.”
“Yeah? That’s excellent!”
“But the blood is bovine,” I said.
“It’s a steak knife. He ate a steak.”
“Yep. It gets worse.”
“Hang on.” Rich dumped a couple of sugars into his coffee, stirred, slugged it down. “Okay. Hit me.”
“There’s no blood or tissue in the bathtub, and the hair we sent out came back with no match. Furthermore, there’s no sign that anyone tried to cover up the blood. No bleach.”
“Great,” my partner said, scowling. “What is this? The perfect crime?”
“There’s more and worse. There’s no trace of blood in or on Malcolm’s vehicle, no hairs consistent with Michael’s.”
“So I was wrong about the truck. You should have bet me, Lindsay. We’d be having dinner tonight – on me.”
I grinned and said, “You would have showered first, I suppose.”
But my mood could hardly be lower. I was going to have to call the Campions and tell them that we still had no physical evidence, and that Junie Moon had recanted her confession and we’d had to kick Ricky Malcolm.
“You want to call Malcolm and tell him he can have his truck back?”
Rich picked up his phone, called Malcolm, got no answer.
We took a drive out to the crime lab at Hunter’s Point Naval Yard, opened all the car windows on the way, and let the wind air out my partner’s clothes. At the lab, I signed a release for the truck, and after three more unanswered calls to Ricky Malcolm, we drove to his apartment.
Rich yelled, “Police,” and knocked loudly on Malcolm’s door until a small Chinese man came out from the restaurant downstairs.
He shouted up to us, “Mr. Malcolm gone. He paid his rent and leave on motorcycle. You want to see mess upstairs?”
“We’ve seen it, thanks.”
“He’s gone, all right,” I muttered to Conklin as we got into the squad car. “Ricky Malcolm. Sleaze. Slob. Easy rider. Criminal freakin’ mastermind. Coming soon to a town near you.”
Chapter 17
I WAS RIPPED out of a dream and my lover’s arms by Jacobi’s voice on the phone saying, “Get dressed, Boxer. Conklin is five blocks away. He’s picking you up at your door.”
Jacobi clicked off before giving me details, but this much I knew: someone had died.
It was just after midnight when Conklin nosed our squad car onto the lawn of a smoldering house in the 3800 block of Clay Street in Presidio Heights. Four fire rigs and an equal number of patrol cars were already parked in front of the Greek Revival, the wind whipping smoke into a vortex at an inside corner of the house. Dazed bystanders clustered across the street, watching the firefighters douse the charred remains of what had once been a beautiful home in this upscale neighborhood.
I pulled my canvas jacket closed, ducked under the water spouting from a fire hose just as the generators on the front lawn fired up. Conklin was ahead of me as we mounted the front steps. He badged the cop at the door and we entered the scorched carcass of the house.
“Two victims, Sarge,” said Officer Pat Noonan. “First doorway on your right. DRT.”
Dead right there.
I asked, “Has the ME been called?”
“She’s on her way.”
It was darker inside the house than out. The room Noonan indicated had been a large den or family room. I flicked my flashlight beam over piles of furniture, bookshelves, a large TV. Then my light caught a pair of legs on the floor.
They weren’t attached to a body.
I screamed, “Noonan! Noonan! What the hell is this?” I waved my torchlight around, catching a second body a few feet from the torso of the first, just inside the doorway.
Noonan came into the den with a firefighter behind him, a young guy with the name Mackey stenciled on his turnouts.
“Sarge,” Mackey said, “it was me. I was trying to reel in my line, but it caught. That’s how I discovered the DB.”
“So you dragged the body?”
“I, um, didn’t know that if I picked up the body by the legs, it would fall apart,” Mackey said, his voice cracking from smoke inhalation and probably fear.
“Did you move the entire victim, Mackey, or just the legs? Where was the body lying?”
“He, she, or it was in the doorway, Sarge. Sorry.”
Mackey backed out of the room, and he was right to get away from me. What the fire hadn’t destroyed, the water and the firefighters had. I doubted we’d ever know what had happened here. I heard someone call my name, and I recognized his voice as the glare of a handheld lantern came toward me.
Chuck Hanni was an arson investigator, one of the best. I’d met him for the first time a few years ago when he’d come to a fire directly from a Rotary Club dinner.
He’d been wearing pale khakis at the time, and he’d walked through a smoking house from the least burned rooms to the fire’s point of origin. He’d taught me a lot about crime detection at a fire scene that night, but I still didn’t know how he’d kept those khakis clean.
“Hey, Lindsay,” Hanni said now. He was wearing a jacket and tie. There were comb marks in his fine black hair and burn scars running from his right thumb up into his sleeve. “I’ve got a working ID on this couple.”
My partner stood up from where he’d been crouched beside one of the victims.
“Their names are Patty and Bert Malone,” Conklin said, something in his voice I couldn’t read. The corpses were so burned, they were featureless. He saw the question in my eyes.
“I’ve been in this house before,” Conklin told us. “I used to know these people.”
Chapter 18
I STARED AT MY PARTNER as embers fell from the ceiling of the den and the crackle of water against smoking wood competed with the radio static and the shouts of the firefighters.
“I was close to their daughter when I was in high school,” Conklin said. “Kelly Malone. Her parents were great to me.”
“I’m so sorry, Rich.”
“I haven’t seen them since Kelly went off to the University of Colorado,” Conklin said. “This is going to kill her.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, knowing that we were going to
treat the Malones’ deaths as homicides unless it was proven otherwise. Upstairs, the fire crew was doing mop-up and overhaul, dismantling the second-story ceiling, putting out hot spots under the eaves.
“The security system was off,” Hanni said, joining us. “The fire department got the call from a neighbor. The fire started in this room,” he said, pointing out the furniture that had been burned low to the ground.
He looked around the room at the mounds of plaster and debris. “After we sift through all this, I’ll let you know if I find anything, but I think you can pretty much kiss off any notes or fingerprints.”
“But you’ll try anyway, right?” Conklin said.
“I said I would, Rich.”
Last thing we needed was for Conklin to get into a fight. I asked him what the Malones were like.
“Kelly said her dad could be a prick,” Rich said, “but when you’re eighteen, that could’ve meant he wouldn’t let her stay out with me past eleven.”
“Tell me whatever else you remember.”
“Bert sold luxury cars. Patty was a homemaker. They had money, obviously. They entertained a lot. Their friends seemed nice – regular parents, you know.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time regular people turned out to be twisted,” Hanni muttered.
A sweep of headlights drew my eyes toward the broken plate glass window. The coroner’s van joined the fleet of law enforcement and fire department vehicles on the street.
Noonan called out to me. “I checked out the bedroom on the second floor, Sarge. There’s a safe in the closet. The lock and the safe are intact, but the door is open – and the safe is empty.”
Chapter 19
“ROBBERY WAS THE MOTIVE for this?” Conklin shouted as Claire stepped into the den with her assistant in tow.
Before Claire could say, “Who died?” I reached out to her for a hug, said into her ear, “Conklin knew the victims.”
“Gotcha,” she said.
As Claire unpacked her scene kit, I told her about the manhandled corpse. Then I stepped out of her way as she took pictures of both bodies with her old Minolta, two shots from every angle.
“There are two doors to this room,” she said as her camera flashed. “Chuck, you say that this room was the point of origin. But the victims stayed in here. Why was that?”
“They could’ve been caught by surprise,” Hanni said. He was cutting samples from the carpet, putting fibers into K-packs.
“If they were drinking and fell asleep, maybe a cigarette dropped down into the couch cushions.”
Hanni explained what was still so hard to believe – that a fire could fill a room this size with smoke in less than a minute, that sleeping people could wake up coughing, be unable to see, get disoriented.
Chuck said, “Someone says, ‘Let’s go this way.’ Other person says, ‘No, it’s this way.’ Maybe someone falls. Smoke inhalation gets them. Boom, they’re down, and they’re unconscious. These two people were dead inside a couple of minutes.”
Conklin came back into the room holding a book in his gloved hand. “I found this on the staircase.”
He handed the book to me. “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. Charles Bukowski. Is this poetry?”
I opened the book to the title page, saw an inscription written there in ballpoint pen.
“This is Latin,” I said to my partner, sounding out the words. “Annuit Cœptis.”
“That’s pronounced chep-tus,” Conklin said. “It’s a motto inscribed on the dollar bill right above that symbol of the pyramid thing with the eye. Annuit Cœptis. ‘ Providence favors our undertaking.’ ”
“You know Latin?”
He shrugged. “I went to Catholic school.”
I said, “So, what do you think, Rich? Is the firebug leaving us a message? That God’s okay with this?”
Conklin looked around at the destruction, said, “Not the God I believe in.”
Chapter 20
AT THREE THAT MORNING, Hanni, Conklin, and I watched the fire department board up the Malones’ windows and put a lock on the front door. The onlookers were back in their beds, and as the sounds of hammering cracked through the otherwise silent neighborhood, Hanni said, “There was a fire four months ago in Palo Alto, reminds me of this one.”
“How so?”
“Big, expensive house. The alarm was turned off. Two people died in the living room, and I had the same question in my mind: Why didn’t they leave?”
“Panic, disorientation, like you were saying.”
“Yeah, it happens. But since I wasn’t called in until a couple of days after the fire, I couldn’t know for sure. Drives me crazy when the fire department decides the fire’s accidental without an arson investigator present. Anyway, the bodies were cremated at the funeral home by the time I was called.”
“You thought the fire was suspicious?” Conklin asked.
Hanni nodded. “I still think so. The victims were good people, and they had money. But no one could come up with a motive for anyone to kill Henry and Peggy Jablonsky – not revenge, not insurance fraud, not even ‘I hate your face.’ So I was left with a bad feeling and no way to tell if the fire was arson or a spark flew out of the fireplace and lit up the Christmas tree.”
“I guess you didn’t find a book with Latin written inside,” I said.
“By the time I got there, the ‘evidence eradication unit’ had tossed a mountain of soaked household goods into the front yard. I guess I wasn’t looking for a book.”
Hanni took his car keys out of his pocket. “Okay, guys, I’m done. See you in a few hours.”
Rich and I stood back from his van as the arson investigator drove off.
“Were you able to reach Kelly?” I asked my partner.
“Got her answering machine. I didn’t know what to say.” He shook his head. “I finally said, ‘It’s Rich. Conklin. I know it’s been a long time, Kelly. But. Um. Could you call me right away?’ ”
“That’s good. That’s fine.”
“I don’t know. She’ll either think I’m a psycho for calling her at one in the morning to say hello after twelve years. Or, if she knows that I’m a cop, I just scared the hell out of her.”
Chapter 21
THE ME’S OFFICE is in a building connected to the Hall of Justice by a breezeway out the back door of the lobby. Claire was already working in the chilly gray heart of the autopsy suite when I got there at 9:30 that morning. She said, “Hey, darlin’,” barely looking up as she drew her scalpel from Patty Malone’s sternum to her pelvic bone. The dead woman’s hands were clenched and her legless body was carbonized.
“She hardly looks like a person,” I said.
“Bodies burn like candles, you know,” Claire said. “They become part of the fuel.” She clamped back the burned tissue.
“Did the blood tests come back from the lab?”
“About ten minutes ago. Mrs. Malone had had a couple of drinks. Mr. Malone had antihistamine in his blood. That could have made him sleepy.”
“And what about carbon monoxide?” I was asking as Chuck Hanni came through reception and back to where we stood over the table.
“I picked up the Malones’ dental records, Claire,” he said. “I’ll put them in your office.”
Claire nodded, said, “I was about to tell Lindsay that the Malones lived long enough to get a carbon monoxide in the high seventies. The total body X-rays are negative for projectiles or obvious broken bones. But I did find something you’re going to want to see.”
Claire adjusted her plastic apron, which just barely spanned her ever-thickening girth, and turned to the table behind her. She pulled back the sheet exposing Patricia Malone’s legs and touched a gloved finger to a thin, barely discernible pink line around one of the woman’s ankles.
“This unburned skin right here?” said Claire. “Same thing on Mr. Malone’s wrists. The skin was protected during the blaze.”
“Like from a ligature?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’a
m. If it was just the ankles, I’d say maybe Mrs. Malone was wearing socks, but on her husband’s wrists, too? I’m saying these are from ligatures that burned away in the fire. And I’m calling the cause of death asphyxia from smoke inhalation,” Claire said. “Manner of death, homicide.”
I stared at the fire-ravaged body of Patty Malone.
Yesterday morning she’d kissed her husband, brushed her hair, made breakfast, maybe laughed with a friend on the telephone. That night she and her husband of thirty-two years had been tied up and left to die in the fire. For some period of time, maybe hours, the Malones had known they were going to die. It’s called psychic horror. Their killers had wanted them to feel fear before their horrible deaths.
Who had committed these brutal murders – and why?
Chapter 22
JACOBI AND I would have cared about the Malones’ deaths even if Conklin hadn’t known them. The fact that he had been close to them once made us feel as if we’d known them, too.
Jacobi was my partner today, standing in for Conklin, who was picking up Kelly Malone at the airport. We stood on the doorstep of a Cape Cod in Laurel Heights only a dozen blocks from where the Malone house waited for the bulldozer. I rang the bell and the door was opened by a man in his early forties wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, looking at me like he already knew why we were there.
Jacobi introduced us, said, “Is Ronald Grayson at home?”
“I’ll get him,” said the man at the door.
“Mind if we come in?”
Grayson’s father said, “Sure. It’s about the fire, right?” He opened the door to a well-kept living room with comfy furniture and a large plasma-screen TV over the fireplace. He called out, “Ronnie. The police are here.”
I heard the back door slam hard, as if it were pulled closed by a strong spring.
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