Touched by Fire

by Greg Dinallo

  Pam winced at the thought and nodded.

  Merrick headed for the door. “Call me soon as that ponytail has a face or that beeper has a name.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Sunlight streamed through the blinds of Doug Graham’s den, sending a pattern of bold stripes across the wall of citations and awards. He stubbed out a cigarette and leaned back in the recliner as Lilah slipped her stethoscope inside his warm-up suit.

  Marge stood nearby, eyeing a glass of orange juice on his tray table. “Drink your juice, Doug,” she ordered the instant Lilah finished.

  Doug’s eyes widened with apprehension.

  “No, I’m not taking blood today, Daddy,” Lilah said reassuringly. “He’s not due for weeks, Mom. I thought I’d give him a quick once-over while I was here.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” Marge retorted. “He still needs his vitamin C, and D, for that matter. Remember, you’re supposed to get some sun this morning.”

  Doug eyed her with suspicion, fingering the soiled slipcover on his recliner. “You’re going to put this in the wash, aren’t you?” he said, winking at Merrick, who was off to one side watching with veiled amusement.

  “Oh, Doug,” Marge admonished. “Why don’t you and the lieutenant go out back and let me get on with this?” She undid the zipper that ran up the back, revealing a slice of the flowery upholstery beneath.

  The sound of the zipper cut through Lilah like a knife. “Mom. Mom, he likes it that way.”

  “But it’s grimy and smells like old socks. God knows the last time it was—”

  Doug thumbed his remote as if trying to shut her off and broke into a mischievous cackle that sent her scurrying into the kitchen. “We’ve been through a lot together,” he said, referring to the recliner. “Sort of like . . . like . . .” He sighed, unable to find the metaphor.

  “An old sweater,” Merrick offered.

  Doug nodded emphatically. “See? Told you he was my kind of guy.”

  “I think it’s time I left you two smoke-eaters to your war stories,” Lilah said.

  Doug raised his arms. “Give us a hug, princess.” She embraced the bag of bones in the warm-up suit and kissed his prickly cheek. “You’re my girl, Lilah.”

  “I know I am, Daddy.” She circled behind the recliner to fetch her briefcase, deftly zipping the slipcover en route. “Call me later, okay?” she said to Merrick as she strode off.

  Her mother came from the kitchen and hurried after her. “So . . .” Marge began coyly as she caught up.

  “No, nothing’s going on in my love life,” Lilah said, before Marge could ask. “Yes, I did it again. No, I don’t know why I park there; and I wish you wouldn’t make such a fuss over his chair.”

  “Me? The slipcover was your idea, as I recall.”

  “That was then, this is now. He’s lived in it for thirty years, and . . .” Lilah paused and lowered her voice. “If he wants to die in a recliner with a dirty slipcover, he has the right.”

  Doug Graham didn’t hear that, though he chuckled with glee at all that preceded it; then his eyes narrowed and found Merrick’s. “You gonna catch the bastard who’s trying to hurt my little girl?”

  “Do my damnedest,” Merrick replied, lighting a cigarette. “You might be able to help.”

  “I’ll die trying,” the old fellow said with a bold gesture, ticking the recliner with his cigarette. A tiny shower of ashes and sparks fell on the upholstery and into the folds of his warm-up suit.

  “Want to meet the local engine company up close and personal?” Merrick scolded in a gentle tone.

  The old guy smiled sheepishly, then sighed and settled back in the chair. Merrick saw the signs of fatigue and wasted no time explaining his theory that the pyro might have targeted Lilah to get at him. He asked about the men he’d worked with, about notorious fires, angry victims, and arsonists he might have identified or apprehended. He poked and prodded and did whatever he could to jog Doug Graham’s waning memory, but neither enemy nor vengeance seeker came to mind.

  “You’ll get him, son,” the old fellow said, seeing Merrick’s frustration. “Just like you got those guys out of that canyon. Hell, they owe you the keys to the city for that one.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. My name’s permanently engraved at the top of Decker’s shit list.” He saw Doug’s puzzled look, and added, “He’s the county B.C.”

  “What’s his problem?”

  “His brother. Senior A.I. Thirty years on the job. Made the mistake of starting half the burns he was working. I made the mistake of busting him.”

  Doug Graham smiled in grudging admiration. “Not easy to blow the whistle on one of your own. I spent my years on the job in the same firehouse with the same crew. We were close, real close. If somebody screwed up, the rest of us stood behind him.” He exhaled a massive volume of smoke; then, in a raspy whisper that came from within the cloud that concealed him, he said, “Every house has its secrets. That’s what we used to say.” He sighed in reflection, then exclaimed, “Well, they didn’t give you an award for that one, did they?”

  “Looks like you collected a few in your day,” Merrick observed, crossing to where the old fellow’s citations and awards were displayed along with the sports trophies and photographs of Doug with his buddies in the firehouse. Photos of birthday parties. Photos of Christmas. Of him playing Santa.

  Merrick was reflecting on the years he’d spent growing up in a firehouse when he noticed the wide-eyed little girl with the freckles and carrot-red hair sitting on Santa’s knee. It was obviously Lilah, and, to Merrick’s surprise, so was the little girl perched on Santa’s other knee. Trick photography? A mirror? Two little Lilahs? He thought about it for a moment, then, thinking aloud, asked, “Lilah . . . Lilah’s a twin?”

  “Uh-huh,” Doug Graham grunted tersely. “Marge? Marge!” he called out, bringing her from the kitchen. “Show the lieutenant the pictures of the girls.”

  Marge showed Merrick into the living room. It was sparsely furnished and had an almost antiseptic quality. Photographs spanning four decades were displayed on the mantel: pictures of Lilah the valedictorian, of Lilah addressing the Rotary, of Lilah at Disneyland, of Lilah in the high school play, Lilah through every age and phase until, suddenly, there were photos of two infants, two toddlers, two little girls in identical starched dresses, two identical little girls who, sometimes, even their parents couldn’t tell apart.

  “Lilah never mentioned she had a twin, did she?” Marge prompted, seeing Merrick’s reaction.

  He shook his head no, analyzing a piece of the puzzle he hadn’t seen before. “Did you say had?”

  “Yes,” Marge sighed, eyes glistening with emotion. “Her name was Laura. She died when they were seven. It’s very hard to lose a child.”

  “I know this is difficult for you, Mrs. Graham,” Merrick said gently. “But can you tell me if it was the result of a fire?”

  Marge smiled thinly. “Leukemia. It was a death sentence in those days. I’ve always thought it inspired Lilah to become a doctor.”

  Not what she said when I asked her, Merrick thought. “If I may, where is Laura buried?”

  “In the local cemetery. It’s just up the street from my office. I go almost every morning.”

  “That wouldn’t be Woodlawn, would it?”

  “Why, yes. Yes, it would,” Marge replied, surprised he knew. “I thought you said Lilah never mentioned it.”

  “She didn’t. Whoever sent the fire bombs has been using it as a return address.”

  Marge looked shocked. “You told that to Lilah, and she didn’t say anything?”

  “Not a word. You’re sure Lilah knows she’s buried there?”

  “Of course,” Marge sighed. “But she refuses to go with me. I can’t even get her to talk about it.”

  “I won’t take no for an answer,” Merrick said, eyeing the beeper clipped to Marge’s waistband. “By the way, how long have you had that?”

  “Oh, since the sum
mer,” she replied, brightening the way she did when she had a story to tell. “You see, our church does a lot of work with inner-city kids. Wouldn’t you know, the day we go to Magic Mountain is the day Doug takes a fall. When I called to check on him, the phone just rang and rang. As you can imagine, I was just beside myself. I called Lilah right away and she drove over, but . . .”

  Merrick listened, thinking Doug Graham had to be a saint to cope with this for forty years. “May I see your beeper?” he finally interrupted.

  “Oh, I was prattling, wasn’t I?” Marge said with an embarrassed smile as she handed it to him.

  Merrick thought it was very similar to the one used to detonate the incendiaries, if not the same model. “This your idea?”

  “No, it was Lilah’s. Why?”

  Merrick was suddenly and deeply preoccupied with her response, and didn’t reply. His mind had made a quantum leap—the kind born of raw intelligence and years of experience—that had him giving serious consideration to adding a new and altogether unlikely suspect to the list. Though Fiona Schaefer’s profile of motive, means, and opportunity had made her his prime suspect, and several other suspects satisfied at least one or more of the three criteria, he still had no proof that any of them had tried to turn Lilah Graham into a french fry; and despite the controversial nature of her work, not a single zealot, protestor, or activist group had picketed her lab, and not a single threatening call or letter had come her way. Everybody’s a suspect until it’s over, Merrick thought, purposely reminding himself of the axiom; and it was far from over.

  Marge Graham sensed the sudden change in Merrick’s demeanor, but she had no idea that a beeper had been used as a detonator, and didn’t know what to think.

  Merrick was thinking the unthinkable.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  After leaving Merrick with her parents, Lilah spent the afternoon in her office working on her presentation for the GRASP conference. She was scrolling through it on the monitor when Serena stuck her head in the door.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to put your hockey players on ice for a while,” the J.R. quipped unabashedly.

  “Great, another bummer.”

  “No, more like a tweener, actually.” Serena saw Lilah’s puzzled look and explained, “That’s somewhere between rather good and could be better.”

  “Oh?” Lilah prompted, brightening.

  “Indeed. After taking some soundings, Dr. Spicer said he expects the league will see the wisdom of cooperating—sometime next season.”

  Lilah spent the next hour refining her presentation, then checked the current group of probes, which included her sample and Kauffman’s. The stylus-drawn chart showed that the temperature had remained constant since they’d been consigned to the freezer. “Time to go to work, Ruben,” she announced. “These rads are ready to batch.”

  Cardenas knew she needed the results for the conference, that the fire had put them behind schedule, and he swiftly transferred the cassettes from freezer to darkroom. He slipped the sheet of X-ray film from the first cassette and fed it into an autoprocessor. Moments later, when the developed autorad emerged, he peeled the bar-code sticker from the cassette and affixed it in the bottom right corner. One down, hundreds to go, he thought. It would be a long night.

  Lilah left the office with a welcome sense of relief. The conference in Maryland was just weeks away, and the thought of putting some distance between her and the pyromaniac buoyed her spirits as she strode toward Wooden Center, leaning into the searing gusts that had carried on into November.

  Kauffman was working out on one of the Nautilus machines when she arrived, snapping her towel at his butt as she passed. The kid lurched to a stop in the middle of a repetition and grinned. “I knew it was you.”

  “Well, tomorrow’s the big day,” she said.

  He looked a little puzzled as he climbed off the chrome-plated apparatus. “Veteran’s Day?”

  “No, your OX-A probe hatches.”

  “Oh,” he said warily.

  “You mean, you’re not dying to find out if your weird sexual impulses are due to a mutant gene?”

  “Weird sexual impulses?” he wondered, managing to keep a straight face.

  “Hey, it wasn’t my idea to rub fuzzies on a room-service cart.”

  A smug grin tugged at the corners of Kauffman’s mouth. “The ride of your life, huh?”

  “Ranks right up there. Sure you don’t want to know if you’re negative or positive?”

  “Nope, I figure it’s all perfectly normal behavior for a horny, twenty-three-year-old med student.”

  Lilah laughed, then spent the next half hour on a rowing machine, trying to disprove the Erma Bombeck adage that women over forty shouldn’t wave to friends at the beach. Kauffman had already left for his study group by the time she’d finished. She was walking back to the hotel when it struck her that she hadn’t heard from Merrick. She knew nothing of the theory he’d hatched after talking to her mother yesterday, nor that on leaving, he had driven straight to ATF headquarters.

  “We’re going to run this lady nine ways to Sunday,” Merrick said to Fletcher when he arrived. His theory was so off the wall, he wanted to find some bit of evidence, some incident in the past, some connection to Lilah, that would support it, before confronting her.

  They searched data bases and archives for the schools, colleges, and camps Lilah had attended; and the places where she’d lived and worked in the Boston, Berkeley, and L.A. areas; then ran the data through the WAR, APP, and UAI files. Like APP, the Unsolved Arson Index had national scope and generated a volume of data. They’d been analyzing it for hours when Fletcher left to make some phone calls.

  “Just got off the horn with the CHP,” he reported a short time later. “The night the mail room went boom? Eagleton spent it in their lockup. Busted in Trancas for vagrancy. Only call he made was to that legal eagle in tennis shorts.”

  “Shit,” Merrick grunted.

  “Yeah, we may be up against a pyro with a ponytail, but it ain’t him. Now for the good news.” He put a sheet of paper on the desk. “Fiona Schaefer’s calls from Santa Barbara? None made even close to the time of detonation.”

  Merrick pumped a fist. “ ’Cause she made it from down here. She’s lying. I knew it.”

  “Easy now,” Fletcher warned, putting another sheet on the desk. “Jack Palmquist’s calls from Stockholm.”

  Merrick gasped. “He called L.A. that night?”

  “Both nights—lots of nights.”

  “The times match?”

  Fletcher waggled a hand. “First, there’s a daylight savings thing we need to check; then we need to find out if the number is assigned to a beeper; and then—”

  “No we don’t,” Merrick interrupted brightly. He took the list of Palmquist’s calls, left Fletcher to continue analyzing the data they’d gathered on Lilah, and headed for the Computer Imaging lab. Pam Dyer was staring at a monitor where numbers were sequencing.

  “What’s doing, Tattoo?” Merrick boomed as he entered. “Come up with that cap-code thing yet?”

  “Nope. Still a chance, though.”

  “Good, it has to be registered to whoever sent the fire bombs. Soon as you get it, run the number against these.” Merrick gave her the list of Palmquist’s calls, then looked to another monitor where an unidentifiable image was slowly morphing. The photos of the suspects she’d requested were tacked across the partition above it. “That ponytail still doesn’t have a face, huh?”

  “Don’t know if it ever will.”

  Merrick frowned, then pointed to Eagleton’s photo. “For what it’s worth, he’s history.”

  “Tell me about it. Computer kicked him out first thing. These went next.” Pam indicated the three photos next to Eagleton’s. “Their faces have the least points of coincidence with the video. Those are running neck and neck for the most.” She pointed to the last two photos in the row—the faces of Fiona Schaefer and Jack Palmquist—which shared angular Nordic feat
ures.

  “It’s one of them?” Merrick prompted.

  “No, it could be one of them.”

  Merrick pointed at Fiona’s. “My money’s on her.”

  “Still won’t prove she sent the fire bombs.”

  “It would prove she’s lying about being out of town; and, as every smart cop knows, Tattoo, if she did send them . . .” he paused, suggesting Pam finish it.

  “The best way to break her is catch her in a lie,” Pam responded smartly. “Of course, if she didn’t, it still could be any of them, right?”

  “Except him,” Merrick growled, removing Eagleton’s photo from the partition. “We keep hitting the wall on this one. It’s really starting to piss me off.”

  “Well, as somebody once said, ‘It helps to get away from it for a while.’ Tomorrow’s a holiday. Stay in bed till noon. Play with your sleep toys.”

  “I’m going to play with my kid,” Merrick said, brightening. “I’m gonna help him with his—”

  The phone rang, interrupting him.

  Pam scooped it up. “Agent Dyer . . . Hey, I hear you’re getting your wife a guitar for Christmas,” she said with a sarcastic cackle. “Yeah, he is . . . Sure, no problem.” She hung up and swiveled back to Merrick. “That was your sidekick.”

  “The horny married one . . .”

  “Uh-huh. He said to tell you he came up with something on Dr. Graham.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Lilab sauntered into the Westwood Marquis in her workout gear and got into an elevator without noticing Merrick slouched in a corner of the lobby. He gave her a few minutes to get upstairs, then followed. She was putting up her hair before showering when he knocked.

  “Doc? Doc, it’s me. It’s Merrick.”

  Lilah crossed the room, pulling on a bathrobe, and opened the door. “Lieutenant . . .” she intoned, doing the waist tie as she led the way inside. “Why do I have the feeling you were supposed to call me?”