Touched by Fire

by Greg Dinallo

  “I had to check a few things out first.”

  Lilah made the obvious assumption and brightened. “My father came up with something?”

  “No,” Merrick replied sharply. “Your mother did.”

  “My mother?”

  Merrick stared at her. “You lied to me, Doc.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The name Laura ring a bell?”

  Lilah looked as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus. “Yes it does,” she replied, lighting a cigarette. “A very painful one. What’s she have to do with this?”

  “The cemetery. Woodlawn Cemetery. Your sister’s buried there, dammit. You should’ve told me.”

  Lilah looked genuinely baffled. “She is?”

  “Come on, Doc, don’t play games.”

  “I’m not. I hadn’t given the place a thought until you told me about the return address.”

  Merrick snorted skeptically. “Your mother said she can’t get you to go with her. So don’t try to—”

  “Right,” Lilah interrupted. “She says, ‘Come with me to see your sister.’ Not, ‘Let’s go to the cemetery,’ let alone Woodlawn Cemetery.”

  “You really expect me to believe that?”

  “Look, we’re talking thirty-five years ago. I was seven. You’re the guy who said, ‘It’s amazing what people forget.’ Well, I do remember a whole lot of confusion and pain.” Her eyes saddened in reflection, then came alive with an idea. “Are your parents living?”

  “My mom is.”

  “You know where your father’s buried?”

  “Yeah,” Merrick replied defensively. “Escondido. They retired down there.”

  “What’s the name of the cemetery?”

  “Holy . . . Holy something or other. Holy Family? Holy Moses? Holy Cow? Hell, I don’t know.”

  Lilah smiled in vindication. “You have any idea what it’s like to lose a sibling? An identical twin? I mean, we were like these little mirror images of each other. I was afraid that what happened to Laura would happen to me. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I guess I figured I couldn’t die if I was awake.” Lilah put her hands together in prayer. “ ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ Remember that?”

  “Uh-huh. I always thought it had to be a cruel son of a bitch who dreamed it up.”

  “My mother said it with us every night; and after Laura died, she said it with me.” Lilah paused, toying with her cigarette, then drew the comforting warmth down into her chest. “As I said, that was over thirty-five years ago. The memories are still painful.”

  Merrick held her eyes for a long moment. There was nothing evasive in them, he thought, and her reaction to being challenged seemed genuine and spontaneous. But Fletcher’s diligence had turned up something that gave credence to Merrick’s theory, and he had to test her. “Let’s talk twenty-five years ago.”

  “Twenty-five?” Lilah wondered. “Let’s see, I . . . I was a freshman at Berkeley.”

  “Saturday, October twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-three. You remember that night?”

  “Not especially.”

  “There was a fire in your dorm.”

  Lilah nodded matter-of-factly. “Dorm fires were weekly events at Berkeley in those days. I don’t see the connection.”

  “Well, according to the investigator’s report . . .” Merrick let it trail off and made a ritual of lighting a cigarette, waiting for signs of anxiety to surface; but impatience born of curiosity was all he detected. “As I was saying, according to the A. I.’s report, the fire started in the mail room.”

  “It did?” Lilah blurted, astonished. “Are you saying, the first time this nut came at me was twenty-five years ago?”

  Her incisive question stopped Merrick cold. He’d been so taken by his audacious theory that he’d failed to consider any others, even one as obvious as Lilah’s. “I don’t know,” he replied, shaken by the lapse. “All the evidence was destroyed by the fire. It was arson, but we don’t know if it was a fire-bomb-in-a-box or not.”

  “How’d you find out? My father say something?”

  “Your father?”

  “Uh-huh. He was there. Parents weekend. I begged them not to come, but they insisted. I was mortified. When I was at Berkeley, nobody, I mean nobody, wanted their parents around. No sex, drugs, or rock ’n’ roll for an entire weekend?” She broke into laughter, expecting Merrick would do the same.

  He dragged hard on the Marlboro and arched an accusing brow instead. “You didn’t have any trouble remembering that, did you, Doc?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she replied indignantly. “Someone has made two attempts on my life, and—and—” Her voice faltered and her eyes brimmed with emotion that turned them a rich indigo. “And you’re treating me like a suspect.” Her jaw dropped as the implication of what she’d just said dawned on her. “My God, you—you actually came up here thinking I sent these things—these—these fire bombs—to myself?”

  Merrick cocked his head challengingly. “Did you?”

  “Why?” she demanded in a plaintive wail. “Why would I do something like that? How could you think that I’d—” She began sobbing and let it trail off.

  Good question, Merrick thought, filling the space between them with smoke. He hadn’t been able to come up with a motive and hoped confronting her would force one to surface, but even through the tears, her eyes still engaged his forthrightly. She seemed upset rather than threatened, and genuinely offended that he could think such a thing of her. “Sorry, Doc. When you’ve been at this as long as I have, you learn to consider anything, no matter how crazy. As I said, everybody’s a suspect till it’s over.”

  “You could’ve been more up front with me about it.”

  “Occupational hazard,” Merrick explained. “We’re trained to be devious.”

  “You’re also trained to see the obvious, aren’t you?” She whirled to the table, opened her briefcase and removed some papers with her handwriting on them. “Does this look like bold angry printing to you?”

  “I ‘saw’ that, Doc. I also ‘saw’ that whoever it is could be disguising their handwriting.”

  Lilah pulled a sleeve over her teary eyes and settled on the sofa, taking a moment to collect herself. “I think you were right the first time. This pyromaniac is a real sicko; and the sick joke is, I’m going to join my sister in the cemetery.”

  “No you’re not,” Merrick said in a heroic tone that surprised him. “I mean, just because we eliminated one suspect"—he paused and smiled sheepishly at what he’d said—"doesn’t mean the others are off the book.”

  “But the pyro has to be someone who knows Laura is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, right?”

  Merrick nodded.

  “Well, whoever it is, I didn’t tell them. So how’d they find out?”

  “You didn’t have to tell your mother, did you?” Merrick responded, a little too sharply.

  “Come on, I told you, we have our moments, but I can’t believe that—”

  “And as I told you, ‘Everybody’s a—’”

  “No need to repeat it, Lieutenant.”

  “Good. Far as the rest goes, maybe one of them knows a friend of the family, or the doctor who cared for your sister, or they came across an old obituary.”

  “Yeah,” Lilah said, her tone sharpening. “Someone like Fiona Sutton-Schaefer.”

  “Yeah, I’m still looking real hard at her. But we just found out your pal Jack-be-nimble in Sweden has a thing for calling L.A.—especially on certain nights.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. How a guy in Stockholm comes up with a thirty-five-year-old obit puzzles me a little, but—”

  “Try the Internet, the World Wide Web . . .”

  “Damn . . .”

  “Sounds like we’re right back where we started, doesn’t it?”

  Merrick shrugged with resignation.

  “Not the first time, Lieutenant,” Lilah teased with a demure smile. She was tucked into the corner o
f the sofa in her loosely tied robe, eyeing him with that combination of childlike vulnerability and mature sexuality that she always seemed to exude.

  “Maybe . . .” Merrick said, his eyes sweeping over her desirously. “Maybe we should do something to change our luck.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Lilah wondered in a sexy whisper that sent a current surging through him. She had just finished putting up her hair when Merrick arrived, and now she arched back sensuously, running her hands up behind her neck, and began taking it down. Her slender fingers moved with practiced grace until the flame-red waves spilled wantonly onto her shoulders and across the front of her bathrobe and breasts.

  This was the moment. They’d both felt the rush. They’d both acknowledged it with their eyes. The bed was plush, inviting, and just steps away; they knew that in a few seconds, seconds during which the pent-up sexual tension would explode in a passionate frenzy, they would be naked and writhing beneath the sheets. But despite their past flirtations, despite all the entendres—now, at the very moment of truth—they both froze like members of a religious order faced with breaking their vows of celibacy.

  Merrick had suddenly found he was as baffled and confused about Lilah as he was about women in general, starting with his ex-wife. He’d thought he understood her, only to be informed after twelve years that he had completely missed the mark in every category; and he had no reason to think he might not be missing it where Lilah was concerned. She was complicated, neurotic, and promiscuous, not to mention marked for death by a pyromaniac. The more he learned about her, the less he knew; though he had no doubt she was dangerous, which, along with the scent of her perfume, made her all the more tempting and all the more forbidding.

  Lilah quickly sensed Merrick’s ambivalence along with her own. From the moment she first saw him she wanted to have sex with him. She’d fantasized about what it would be like, and resented his indifference; and now, with a reassuring glance at the mirror, she was on the verge of doing something more to seduce him, something like letting her robe slip open to reveal a bit of thigh or a glimpse of a breast that she knew men found more stimulating than blatant nudity. But she found herself securing the tie and clutching the collar instead. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe what she saw in Merrick’s eyes wasn’t uncertainty, but pity. Maybe be wasn’t safe like the others, wasn’t someone she could control. Or maybe she just couldn’t bring herself to have sex with a fireman, with someone who had the burnt scent and fiery temperament of her father; then again, maybe it was just her turn to reject him.

  Merrick sensed her coolness and sighed, pondering her question. What did he have in mind? “Algebra,” he replied with a grin. “Can you do it tomorrow?”

  Lilah looked blank, then made the connection. “Oh yeah, sure. In the morning. My afternoon is jammed.”

  “Manhattan Beach Coffee Shop. About ten?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  A short time later, Merrick was driving home in the Blazer, his mind racing much faster than the rush hour traffic. One of the suspects had found out about Lilah’s sister and about Woodlawn; but which one? The medical community is a relatively small, interconnected group, he thought. It’s more than possible for Fiona to have gotten to know the doctor who cared for Laura all those years ago. He could’ve been one of her professors in med school, or be running a department at UCLA now. Maybe she came across some records, or a case study somewhere. Then again, maybe she just found it on the Internet. Maybe Jack Palmquist did.

  Merrick was finally approaching his exit when, despite Lilah’s earlier admonitions, Marge Graham came powerfully to mind. She knows about Laura and Woodlawn, he thought, and also carries a beeper, probably the same model used to detonate the incendiary devices—but so do thousands of other Angelenos. Furthermore, how could a woman who couldn’t light a barbecue turn a beeper into a remote detonator? And why would she send fire bombs to her daughter?

  On the other hand, it was obvious there was no love lost between them; and if whoever cooked up that prayer was cruel, what was a mother who forced a seven-year-old who’d just lost a sibling to say it every night? Maybe she was into getting her rocks off? Her hair wasn’t long enough for a ponytail, but she did show up at the condo the night the mail room blew; she did follow them from the crime scene to the hotel; and she certainly could’ve been lying about the reason.

  It would take a deeply rooted pathology like insane jealousy over Lilah’s relationship with her father, or an extreme hatred for Lilah, because she was alive and Laura wasn’t, to motivate her. But why now? Merrick asked himself. Why thirty-five years after the event?

  He bounced a fist off the steering wheel in frustration. The more he tried to assemble the pieces, the more confused the picture became. He was cruising down Rosecrans when it occurred to him that maybe Tattoo was right. Maybe he should get away from it for a while, loosen up, have some fun. The Sandpiper wasn’t his kind of place, but Orville & Wilbur’s was. The surf and turf joint, just off the beach on Rosecrans, had served as the local pickup joint since the early seventies. He’d been a regular during its heyday, and his. Many a night he had tied one on with the guys; and, on rare occasion, he’d actually gotten lucky with the girls, though picking up women in bars wasn’t his forte then, and certainly wasn’t now. He started turning into his street, then had a change of heart and continued toward the ocean.

  The near miss with Merrick left Lilah feeling hollow and unsettled. She’d spent about an hour pacing the hotel room, and had paused at a window to admire Westwood’s flickering lights when the bursts of violet, yellow, and white began exploding over the rooftops, and the neon-green tentacles came lashing at her out of the darkness. She stood her ground as the rising wave crested, threatening to drown her in churning terror; then, in an anxiety-driven frenzy, she threw on some clothes, stuffed the rest of her things into the overnight bag, and checked out of the hotel.

  Lilah wandered Westwood’s teeming streets still in the throes of the episode. By the time she came out of it, she had completely traversed the village and found herself walking up the hill toward her condo. Her eyes narrowed at the sight of the Jaguar, parked where she’d left it the night of the fire. She threw her briefcase and overnight bag inside, got behind the wheel and took a winding, high-speed drive along Sunset Boulevard to the ocean. The moon was almost full, and huge waves were breaking over the rocks, sending up plumes of spray. She left the car and walked to the bluff that overlooked the boiling surf. Putting her hair up in a ponytail, she sat there for a while, staring at the sea; then, stirred by its power and intensity, she returned to the car and headed home.

  A short time later, the Jaguar came up the hill toward the Spanish-style complex, passed several parking spaces, and turned into the driveway that led to the underground parking. Lilah thumbed the remote on the visor. The door yawned open, and she drove straight into the garage beneath her condominium.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Manhattan Beach Coffee Shop was buzzing. On workdays the crush started about six-thirty and began tailing off a couple of hours later; but on holidays the regulars slept in, arriving mid-morning for a late breakfast or lunch. Jason slouched in a booth by the window, toying glumly with his Kings cap. An algebra workbook, spiral-bound pad, and pencil were on the table in front of him. Lilah sat opposite, sipping coffee and keeping an eye out for Merrick, who was late. “Come on, algebra’s not that bad,” she prompted, sensing Jason’s mood.

  “That’s not it,” he lamented. “My mom washed it.”

  Lilah looked confused. “Washed it?”

  “My jersey,” he replied glumly. “It’s gone. All the Enforcer’s blood is gone.”

  “Oh,” Lilah intoned, as disturbed now by his dismay as she’d been at the game by his elation. “Why don’t we get started, and take your mind off it?”

  Jason shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Okay. For openers, do you understand the concept of balance? I mean, whatever you do to one side of the equ
ation, you must do to the other, right?”

  “Uh-huh. I got that. I mean, I was doing great till we got to negative and positive numbers.”

  “Ah, they do have a way of ruining your day.”

  “I mean, like I get the right answer, but I’m a total doofus when it comes to figuring out the sign.”

  “You mean whether it’s negative or positive.”

  Jason nodded sheepishly.

  “Well, there’s a little trick that’ll let you know what it should be even before you solve the equation.”

  “Really?” he exclaimed, his eyes brightening.

  “Uh-huh. If the numbers in the equation are all the same sign, whether all plus or all minus, the answer is always positive.”

  “Always?”

  “Every time. But if they’re different, a mixture of plus and minus signs, the result is always . . . what?”

  “Negative?” Jason ventured hopefully.

  “Exactly. Same signs—plus. Different signs—minus. For example . . . ” She had just begun writing out an equation, taking care to make her physician’s scrawl legible, when a waiter appeared with an order pad.

  “Sorry for the wait. We’re short-handed today.”

  “So are we,” Lilah said with a smile. “You think maybe we should wait for your father?”

  Jason shrugged. “He probably forgot and went to work or something.”

  “Maybe he just overslept. Why don’t we call him?”

  “I’ll be back,” the waiter said, moving on to the next booth.

  Lilah took the cell phone from her briefcase, then dialed as Jason supplied the number. The line was busy. She waited a few minutes and tried again. “Still busy,” she reported with a shrug.

  “He leaves it off the hook sometimes when he’s really zonked,” Jason explained. “It’s not far. I could bike over and get him.”

  “I’ve a better idea. How does he take his coffee?”

  “Black, two sugars,” the waiter piped up.

  A short time later Lilah was following Jason’s bicycle through the winding streets. The Blazer was in the carport when they got to Merrick’s apartment. The boy leaned his bike against the wall and dashed up the stairs, the untied laces of his high-tops slapping at the treads. “Dad? Hey, Dad?” he called out, knocking on the door as Lilah, carrying the container of coffee, joined him on the landing. “It’s me, Dad. It’s Jason!”