Touched by Fire

by Greg Dinallo

  “What did Dr. Koppel say?” Lilah asked, draping the stethoscope around her neck.

  ‘I don’t care what he says,” Doug scoffed. “You’re the genius. I care what you say.”

  “He’s your doctor, Daddy.”

  “He says I should stop smoking.”

  “He’s been telling you that for thirty years.” Indeed, the thoughtful internist had been caring for the Graham family for as long as Lilah could remember; and despite her reluctance, as a matter of medical ethics, to become involved in her father’s care, the two physicians agreed that if it made Doug Graham happy to have his daughter come by once a month and run a stethoscope over his chest and take a vial of blood, so be it. “Now, let’s see if there’s any red stuff in those veins,” Lilah said with a wink. She took a vacutainer kit from her briefcase, swabbed the site with an alcohol prep, and uncapped the needle.

  Doug Graham stiffened apprehensively. “I’m tired of being turned into a human pincushion every month.”

  Lilah steadied his arm and found the vein on the first try. “How’s that?”

  “I think you’re getting the hang of it.”

  She laughed and inserted the vial. “Different needle, a butterfly. We use them on babies.”

  “Babies?” he echoed with an offended whine.

  “Uh-huh. Our veins get thinner as we get older. Makes them hard to find. Brittle too. That’s why you get those black-and-blues.”

  “He gets them because he doesn’t drink his orange juice,” her mother said, delivering a frosty glass to one of the snack tables. A slim, nervous woman with busy hands and anxious eyes, Marge Graham wore her SMFD T-shirt bloused over neat cotton slacks that brushed the tops of her tennis shoes. Her dismissive tone and rapid-fire delivery gave everything she said the sound of frivolous chatter. “Vitamin C prevents bruises. I keep telling your father that, but he won’t listen.”

  “It’s too pulpy,” Doug Graham said with a scowl.

  “Because it’s fresh. Fresh has more vitamin C. You tell him, Lilah. Maybe it’ll mean something coming from you.” Her eyes darted about while she spoke, and settled on the television, where yet another house was engulfed in flames. “Horrible, isn’t it? Those people losing everything like that . . . horrible. But as I always say—” Her voice rose with the promise of profound wisdom.

  Lilah caught her father’s eye, and added another. knowing smile to the many they’d shared over the years.

  “—the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” Marge chirped, not disappointing them. Then, without missing a beat, she turned to Lilah and asked, “By the way, did you park behind me again?”

  Lilah nodded contritely, and went about removing the blood-filled vacutainer from its holder and then the needle from her father’s arm.

  “Lilah, I have to go,” Marge whined impatiently. She was an energetic woman who enjoyed being busy; and along with church work and community service, Marge worked part-time at the city’s credit union, a fifties-modern-style building on Fourteenth Street opposite Woodlawn Cemetery. “I have to be at work by noon, and before that I have to pick up some flowers at the market and take them to your sister. You must have a mental block when it comes to this, Lilah. I mean, you’d think by now you’d remember not to park there.”

  “I’ll just be a few minutes,” she said calmly, packing up her briefcase. “We’ll leave together, okay? Soon as I make a pit stop.”

  Marge groaned and followed her to the bathroom. “So, anything going on?” she asked coyly.

  “No, really, he’s holding his own.”

  “I meant you, Lilah. You know. Dating. Maybe a boyfriend or something?”

  “I’m afraid ‘or something’ is where it’s at, Mom,” Lilah replied, forcing a laugh.

  “I’m serious, Lilah. I mean, it’d be nice to have a grand-child before your father . . .” She paused and used her eyes to finish the thought. “You’re his only chance, Lilah. How much time does he have?”

  “Not enough, Mom,” Lilah replied sadly, her soft blue eyes reflecting her frustration. She slipped into the bathroom, closed the door, and sighed, taking refuge in the silence; then she scrubbed her hands and threw some cold water on her face, running her wet fingers through her flame-colored hair. Her lips were chapped from the hot winds, and she was applying moisturizer when she paused and tilted her head curiously, studying her face in the stained mirror.

  How many hours had she spent in front of it? she wondered. How many fleeting moments had it captured? How many different Lilahs had it reflected and reassured over the years? The hormone-charged teenager aglow with the euphoria of her first sexual experience one minute—beset by nagging uncertainty the next; the cocky junior high schooler smoking her first cigarette; the awkward adolescent watching herself bud and blossom into a young woman; the precocious six-year-old playing with her mother’s makeup, piling her hair on top of her head, her innocent, but knowing eyes now staring back at Lilah from the mirror, triggering waves of anxiety that washed over her in a numbing rush and struck a disturbing chord—a chord whose resonance eluded her.

  Lilah pondered it for a moment, to no avail; then, without thought or hesitation, she took a vacutainer kit from her briefcase and began carefully aligning the components on the counter next to the sink. When finished. she methodically tore open the alcohol prep and swabbed the bend in her arm, then picked up the vacutainer holder, uncapped the needle, and made a fist.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Marge Graham was waiting outside the bathroom when Lilah emerged. “I’m saying it for your own good,” she said, picking up where she’d left off.

  Lilah sighed indulgently and went into the den to say good-bye to her father.

  “A family is important, Lilah,” her mother persisted.

  “I want a husband, I want kids,” Lilah said defensively, the sincerity in her voice leaving no doubt she meant it. “When I meet the right guy and have the time to work at a relationship.”

  “Work? It’s supposed to be fun. Whatever happened to falling in love?”

  “Marge?” Doug Graham growled over the TV. “Marge? Lilah’s right. She has important work to do first.”

  “So do I,” Marge lamented. “I’m going to be late.”

  “Give us a hug, princess,” her father said.

  Lilah stepped behind the recliner and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She’d done it often recently. Each time, the hard-packed muscles she’d hugged as a child were what she expected; and each time, the bag of bones she embraced came as a troubling surprise.

  “You’re my girl, Lilah,” her father said softly,

  “I know I am, Daddy.”

  Doug Graham beamed with pride. He always felt energized after his checkup, after Lilah’s gentle hands had spent those quiet moments gliding across his skin, bringing his drug-deadened senses back to life. He was sitting more forward in the recliner now, his attention, along with Lilah’s, drawn to the rising sound of a helicopter that came from the television.

  They watched intently as the chopper circled over the ocean and landed in the parking lot where Chief Decker had set up field headquarters. It was still settling down when exhausted firemen began stumbling out the door into the arms of paramedics. Merrick was the last to emerge. He was fatigued but wasn’t injured, and unlike the others, walked without assistance. The media closed in, shoving microphones and video cams in his soot-blackened face.

  “Lieutenant! Lieutenant Merrick!” one reporter called out over the whomp of rotors. “We understand you risked your life to save those firefighters!”

  Merrick shrugged wearily.

  “What happened up there?” another shouted.

  “They were trapped. I went in with a hose and brought them out.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Come on, Lieutenant, you’re a hero!”

  “People want to know what you did to—”

  “I did my job.” Merrick pushed on, making no effort to hide his discomfort, which was swiftly
turning to disdain.

  Doug Graham nodded in approval. “My kind of guy.”

  “Knew you were going to say that,” Lilah said. She hugged him again and headed for the door.

  “Drink your juice, Doug,” Marge commanded as she fetched her purse and followed, checking that she had her beeper. “Beep me if you need anything.” Doug aimed his remote control at her in reply and began frantically thumbing one of the buttons as if trying to shut her off. Lilah backed the Jaguar out of the driveway, then waved to her mother in the station wagon and drove off. She was halfway up the hill when she caught a whiff of something. Alcohol? From her arm? No, it was more pungent than that. Nail polish remover? Gasoline? Old Jags were notorious for emitting vapors. Whatever the source, the faint odor was quickly expelled by the air conditioner; and just as quickly forgotten by Lilah, who was preoccupied with more pressing matters. Indeed, she had neither time nor reason to suspect it came from the package in the backseat; no way of knowing what it contained, no way of knowing that the charcoal lighter had vaporized and-despite the obsessive burnishing—acted as a solvent for the adhesive, loosening a strip of plastic packing tape, allowing some fumes to escape.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Merrick fought his way past the media and headed for the barricade that cordoned off field headquarters.

  “Is there an official reason why you’re not being more cooperative?” one of the reporters asked.

  “Yeah, I’m starving, I haven’t slept in two days, and I need a shower.”

  “Any chance those men shouldn’t have been sent in there in the first place?” another needled.

  “Were safety procedures disregarded?”

  “Should they have had backup?”

  Merrick quickened his pace and slipped through the barricade that kept them from following.

  “Merrick?” Chief Decker called out, waving him over. “Merrick, you okay?”

  “Hey, they didn’t get into my divorce, sex habits, or tax returns—it’s your ass they’re after, Roscoe.”

  “Well, we know you’re not covering it, don’t we?”

  Merrick smiled smugly. “Something on your mind?”

  “I hear you took a chance up there. A dumb one. You’ve always been a pain in the ass, but you’ve never been stupid.”

  “Thanks. It’s kinda the opposite with you.”

  “Fuck you, Merrick.”

  “That’s what she was doing,” Merrick replied with a little smile.

  He grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep, then collected Fletcher and Logan, who had returned in the Blazer, and headed back into the canyon. Free-standing brick fire-places and chimneys dotted the scorched terrain, which had the look of a nuclear desert. Like every other house in the area, the one the witness had located on the map had burned to the foundation. Merrick stuck a cigarette in his mouth, left it unlit, and began walking through smoldering rubble that had once been a gourmet kitchen.

  “What’re we looking for?” Fletcher asked.

  “The kitchen sink,” Merrick replied. “Any ideas how to find it?”

  “Plumbing,” the rookie A.I. replied.

  Merrick and Logan exchanged looks and nodded.

  “Okay . . . Why the sink?” Fletcher asked, wishing he’d figured it out for himself.

  “Witness was looking out the window when he saw the van. Be nice to know where it was parked.” Merrick crossed to a thicket of twisted pipes that came from the charred remains of an exterior wall.

  This narrowed the search area to Merrick’s field of vision. The three men left the burned-out kitchen and walked slowly up the hill, their eyes sweeping the ground for clues; but there were no tire impressions in the rock-hard soil, nor crushed areas of ground cover to be found. Bum pattern and wind direction finally led Merrick to a patch of scorched earth about 150 feet uphill from the house—the point from where the wind-driven inferno had started. “Looks like we got us a flash point here.”

  Logan donned a pressed-fiber mask and surgical gloves; then, using a device that resembled a window screen, he began sifting the ashes for the remains of the igniter. Road flares, Molotov cocktails, butane lighters, matchbooks and cigarettes were the most common; and they often contained fingerprints or traces of saliva from which an arsonist’s DNA and then blood could be typed.

  Fletcher went about cordoning off the area with crime scene tape. Strung between charred stumps, the yellow streamers crisscrossed the blackened hillside, fluttering in the wind like bands of flashing neon.

  Merrick knew the vortex of a rapidly expanding fire could transport the igniter vast distances from the flash point, and he drifted off in search of it. He stepped gingerly between charred boulders and blackened trees to avoid destroying or further burying anything concealed by the ash that covered the ground like gray snow. The desert-dry surface eagerly absorbed the drops of sweat that rolled from his face each time he bent to examine a piece of debris. His eyes were methodically sweeping across the terrain when they suddenly locked on to something.

  The small rectangular shape was barely visible, but its right angles and sharp edges were clearly out of place amid the coal-like chunks of wood, cinders, blackened roots, and stones. He got down on all fours, pursed his lips as if kissing the ground, and gently blew a thin layer of ash aside, revealing a matchbook. The charred cover seemed on the verge of disintegrating. No advertisement for bar, bowling alley, or restaurant was visible.

  Merrick’s pulse quickened as he picked it up with a pair of tweezers and turned the edge to the light. Captured between the burned match heads and charred cover, he saw what he thought were a few shards of tobacco, powerfully suggesting this was the igniter.

  Though darkened by intense heat, the back cover was intact; and, as with most safety matches, that’s where the friction strip was located. This meant that the matchbook had to be turned over before a match could be struck; and there, bonded to the varnish used to give the cover its slick shiny finish, there, where the arsonist held it while striking a match, Merrick’s weary eyes detected the pale ghost of a thumbprint.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Jaguar accelerated into the parking garage and began circling up to the next level. Midway down the aisle, it swerved into a space, almost clipping Cardenas, who was leaning against the concrete lattice in his lab coat. The car was still settling when Lilah popped the door and leaped from behind the wheel. “Sorry about that, Ruben.”

  “Hey, no problem, I work for a doctor.”

  Lilah smiled at him and opened the back door. “Thanks for coming down.”

  “Anytime, boss. What do you need?”

  “A thirty-hour day.” Lilah took her briefcase from the backseat, set it on the roof, and removed three blood specimen tubes from one of the pockets. “This one goes to the medical lab. . . .”

  Cardenas squinted at the label. “What’s that say?”

  “Douglas C. Graham.”

  “It does?” Cardenas groaned, pulling a sleeve across his face that glistened with perspiration. “I’ll never get into med school, my handwriting’s too legible.”

  “Give it time.”

  “The usual? CBC and plasma? Reports to you and Dr. Koppel?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How’s your dad doing by the way?”

  “Holding his own,” Lilah replied, handing Cardenas the other specimen tubes. “I scored these for OX-A.”

  Cardenas brightened, then raised a curious brow. One tube had a consent form rubber-banded around it. The other didn’t. “We’re missing a C.F. here, Doc.”

  “I ran out.”

  “Okay. I’ll hold it till you have a chance to—”

  “I don’t know,” Lilah interrupted “This conference is breathing down my neck. Better get it in the works.”

  “Without a number?”

  “I really need you to do this for me, Ruben,” she pleaded, asking for a favor instead of pulling rank. “Get a blank C.F. from the file, put a bar-code sticker on the specimen, have Serena log
it in, and leave the form on my desk. I’ll take care of it soon as I can.”

  Cardenas nodded and slipped the three tubes into the pocket of his lab coat.

  “Thanks a bunch. Oh, and put this in my office, will you?” She took the package addressed to Lilah E. Graham from the car and handed it to him, then hurried to the medical school.

  Lilah spent the afternoon teaching class. Darkness had fallen by the time she finished. She hurried to the gym and threw herself into a series of exercises designed to defy gravity and the onslaught of genetic coding that she feared was turning her into her mother.

  About an hour later she’d showered and was toweling off in front of her locker when her cellular twittered. She draped the towel around her neck, then took the phone from her briefcase. “Hello?”

  “Lilah? Lilah, it’s Paul.”

  “Paul?” she wondered, pretending she didn’t recognize the name. “Paul? Gee, I don’t think I—”

  “I know, I know,” Schaefer groaned contritely. “I should’ve gotten back to you sooner, but I’ve been up to my ass and—” A chorus of female voices screeched through the phone from her end, interrupting him. “Lilah? Lilah, where are you?”

  “I’m in the buff,” she replied with a giggle, as a group of towel-snapping students sauntered past. “I just got out of the shower and—”

  “Lilah,” Schaefer admonished. He sat up straighter and set his glasses on the desk. “Don’t start, Lilah.”

  “I’m not starting,” she purred in a sexy whisper. “I’m standing in front of my locker . . . massaging my breasts with your favorite moisturizer. You know . . . the smooth, silky stuff that really gets me going whenever you—”

  “No, and I don’t recall dialing a nine-hundred number, either.”

  “This is the guy who said I could always turn to phone sex if my career went south, isn’t it?”