by Mike Markel
But it didn’t feel right. I didn’t have the evidence yet, but I knew Krista was telling the truth. Not that she didn’t lie every time she opened her mouth, but that her story was true. She had some kind of genuine bond with Virginia. Krista didn’t care about herself, but she did care about Virginia. She never would have hurt Virginia. I knew it, but I didn’t know how to prove it.
“All right,” I said. “One theory is that Krista was stealing from Virginia, right?”
“Right.”
“You don’t mean taking bills from her purse. You mean stealing from her bank account, blackmail, that sort of thing.”
“That’s the sort of thing.”
“Let’s look at Virginia’s financials. Credit cards, banks. See if she’s making any regular withdrawals.” I thought a second. “Of course, she’s got a kid in college.”
“She’d write him a check. Not give him cash every month.”
“Okay, get the authorization from the chief, would ya?”
Ryan got up and headed to the chief’s office. Meanwhile, I started catching up on the paperwork. I checked with Montana State Police to see if they’d had any luck running down Robert Rinaldi’s car, which was stupid because if they found him they would’ve notified us immediately since we were the agency that put in the request in the first place.
I headed home at five, nuked a wonderfully salty, fatty prepared dinner and went to my eight o’clock AA meeting, where I ignored all the heartfelt sob stories and tried to figure out how I was going to link the frat boys to the murder.
A little after nine, I made it home and turned on the TV. The local news was covering a fire at an apartment building. It took me a few seconds to figure out why the apartment looked familiar.
I called Ryan. He picked up. “Look at Channel 5. Now.”
It took three or four seconds. “Jesus.”
He never says “Jesus.” “I’ll see you over there.”
Ten minutes later, I pulled into Abby Demarest’s apartment complex. The driveway forked immediately, one side heading east, the other west. On one side of the driveway was a grassy strip about ten yards wide and the two-story development. On the other side were the covered parking stalls. I followed the red, white, and blue lights slicing through the grey smoke and parked in the staging area the fire department had already set up. One squad car was there, along with a fire engine, an ambulance, and the fire marshal’s sedan. Ryan pulled up in his Mitsubishi just as I arrived.
We rushed over to the scene. I gagged on the acrid air, which was full of suspended bits of paper and fiber and pieces of ash. We pushed through the small crowd and ducked under the yellow crime tape. A uniform named Hollins recognized me and Ryan and came over to us.
“You the first on scene?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“I got a call from Dispatch.” He looked at his watch. “Eighteen minutes ago. They’d already confirmed that the fire crew was on its way. I arrived about twelve minutes ago. They were already here. It was a small fire.”
He pointed to the apartment that had a blackened window frame with grey streaks snaking up the outside wall toward the second-story unit. “That’s a bedroom, almost completely burned out. The rest of the unit sustained some damage.”
“Anybody hurt?”
“Young woman in the unit.”
“How bad?”
Hollins wore a grim expression. “Smoke inhalation. Fatal.”
“Holy shit.” I started to shake, and I felt my knees go rubbery. “You got a name on her?”
“Not yet.”
“Did you go in the unit? Did you see her?”
“Yeah.” His eyes were glassy. He was the right age to have a teenage kid.
“Blond hair, cut short?”
He shook his head. “Dark hair, long.”
It was the roommate. I turned to Ryan. “What’s her name?”
He had his notebook out. “Jennifer Taylor.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” I started to sway. Ryan grabbed my arm and lowered me to the grass. I fought to stay conscious.
Officer Hollins said to Ryan, “Is she gonna be all right?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
Hollins said, “The fire marshal’s got the scene locked down. He already called the state fire marshal.”
“It was arson?” Ryan said.
“He’s pretty sure.”
“Can you point us to him?”
Officer Hollins pointed toward a guy around sixty years old, dressed in civilian clothes and wearing a baseball hat that said Rawlings Fire Department. He was holding a clipboard and talking with a firefighter. “His name’s Hynde. John Hynde.”
Ryan said to me, “You okay?”
I started to stand up. Ryan helped pull me to my feet. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“You want me to get you back to your car?”
“No. No. Let’s talk to Hynde.”
Ryan got the message and we walked over to Chief Hynde. I introduced us.
He said, “Chief Murtaugh assigned a couple detectives already?”
“No,” I said. “We’re working another case, the professor? One of the people we’re working with—college girl named Abby Demarest—lives in this unit.”
“Good thing she wasn’t home. We might’ve had two fatals.”
“You think the victim is Jennifer Taylor, right?”
“We haven’t done a positive ID yet, but yeah, we think so. She was working at her desk in her bedroom. The Molotov cocktail detonated in the other bedroom. The concussion knocked her out of the chair. Maybe she hit her head or something. The fire in the other room burned through the wall separating the two bedrooms.”
“She died in the fire?”
“No, the sprinklers in the ceiling kicked in, but not before the smoke filled her room. It was smoke inhalation.”
“You’ve called in the state fire marshal?”
“That’s right. They do the arson investigations.”
“Can you walk us through it?”
He nodded. “Come with me.” He led us over to the outside of the apartment. A few feet down from the entry door was a kitchen window. “Look at the glass.” He pointed down to the grass. “The flashover blew the glass out.”
We followed him down to Abby’s bedroom window. “This was the point of entry.” There were jagged shards of glass in the window frame, but no glass on the ground. “You stick your head in there, there’s the rest of the glass on the carpet. This window was broken before the explosion. I don’t know if you can make it out through the smoke, but there’s the pieces of the bottle a couple of feet inside the window. My guys saw the bottle right away. Usually there’s gasoline soaked into the carpet beneath it. You can’t smell it out here, there’s so much stuff in the air, but inside the room the odor is strong.”
“So you think someone was driving by and tossed the cocktail inside?” I said.
“I don’t think so. They’d have to time it just right. More likely, they walked up to the window, broke it with their elbow or a hammer or something, and tossed the cocktail in.”
“Are we gonna be able to retrieve prints off the bottle?”
“Possible but not likely.”
“Are you gonna oversee the investigation?”
“No, it’s the state fire marshal. I’ve already briefed Chief Murtaugh. Is he going assign you two to be the liaisons?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. This case we’re working is already spreading out into some other areas. The chief might want to give it to another team.” I paused a second. “You haven’t removed the victim’s body?”
“No, it’s going to be a few hours. We have to do complete documentation of the scene—video and photos—and catalog all the evidence first. The state marshal should be here within a half hour. We need to be ready to assist with canvassing, whatever he wants.”
“Is there any way we can stick our heads in, just take a quick look? It would help us a lot in
our murder case.”
He sighed. “If you let one of my guys escort you,” he said. “You got any booties?”
Ryan pulled two pairs out of his windbreaker pocket and held them up.
Hynde gestured to his guy standing at the door, waved him over. “Escort these two detectives into the bedrooms.”
The guy led us along the concrete walkway to the front door. When the firefighter opened the door, the smoke hit me, and I started to cough again. Ryan tapped me on the arm. He was holding a patch of his windbreaker over his mouth like a mask. I tried it. It helped.
The smoke got a little heavier as the firefighter led us past the kitchen into the living room. But I didn’t see any physical damage from the fire. The carpets, soaked through from the ceiling sprinklers or, more likely, from the hoses, squished underfoot as we walked toward the hall leading to the two bedrooms.
The walls of the short hallway were blackened from about waist height to the ceiling. The doorway to Jennifer’s bedroom was taped off. Except for the smoke and the soaked carpet, you couldn’t tell there had been a fire. Ryan and I looked in from the hallway. On one wall was a low dresser and a small desk. On the desk was a laptop, the screen now black. A book lay open next to it. A plastic desk chair was tipped over. On her side, one arm over her head, one at her side, lay Jennifer Taylor. She didn’t seem to have a mark on her.
“This way,” the firefighter said, leading us to Abby’s bedroom. This one wasn’t taped off. The three of us walked in. “Don’t touch anything, please,” the fireman said.
About five feet in from the window were broken pieces of what looked like a liquor bottle. Beneath the glass, on the carpet, was a darker wet circle about a foot in diameter. As I bent down to look at the bottle, the gasoline fumes hit me. I almost puked. I turned away, took a deep breath, and leaned in again to look at the bottle. There wasn’t enough label left for me to identify the brand, but I could tell there weren’t going to be any usable prints left.
I straightened up and walked over to the queen-size bed, which was up against the wall separating the two bedrooms. On the side facing the room, the two wooden legs were blackened and covered with charred blisters. The sheets and bedspread, except for a little section up near the head, had been consumed by the fire. The mattress batting had burned up, too, leaving only the springs, which were covered by little tufts of tan insulation, now mostly grey and black, that had fallen out of the wall above. Most of the drywall alongside the bed was gone. The ceiling had burned through. The beams and sub-flooring of the unit upstairs were black but intact.
I bent over the bed and looked through the tangle of bedsprings to the fist-sized hole in the wall, through which the smoke had bled into Jennifer’s bedroom.
I walked over to the closet, which had cheap pine accordion doors, partly opened. I turned on my flashlight and looked inside.
“Look at this,” I said to Ryan.
He came over and looked in the closet. “What am I looking at?”
Chapter 24
First thing Friday morning, Ryan and I were in the chief’s office.
The chief nodded to us, but nobody made any small talk. “I got a call last night from Chief Hynde. He briefed me on the fire. He told me he had contacted the state fire marshal, who would be the lead on the case. He said it was almost certainly arson, and he told me about the fatality.” The chief looked up at me, then at Ryan. “He called me again, after he’d spoken to you two on the scene. Were you contacted by Dispatch?”
“No,” I said. “I saw the fire on TV. I recognized the building from when we interviewed Abby Demarest’s roommate. I called Ryan, and we met there.”
“You knew it was her apartment that was torched?”
“I knew it was her apartment complex. I assumed it was her apartment.”
Chief Murtaugh nodded. “I filled in Chief Hynde on our interest in Abby Demarest. He already knew who she was—I mean, that she was in the video.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
He shook his head. “Apparently, someone they interviewed during the initial canvass told him.”
“Do you see him and the state fire marshal cooperating with us?”
“Yes, I’m confident they will. But remember the state fire marshal’s office calls the shots on the arson and the fatality.”
“But we’re still in charge of Abby and her involvement with the Rinaldi murder.”
“That’s right—if there is any involvement.” He paused a second, apparently finished with that issue. “The chief said he let you take a look inside the apartment. What did you get?”
“It was just what he said. The pieces of the liquor bottle in the middle of the bedroom. You can see where it exploded, the path the fire took to the bed, then where it burned through the wall into the other bedroom.”
“I went over there early this morning.” The chief shook his head. “Chief Hynde said he hoped he’d have the forensics later today. He said he’d be happy to share them with us, but he wasn’t optimistic there’d be anything on the bottle to identify the arsonist.”
“Has he got the resources for canvassing and interviewing?”
“He said he thought he was okay, with his people and the state people. I offered to give him whatever resources he needed.” He looked up at me, then at Ryan, as if he wanted to wrap it up.
“I’d like to talk to Abby again.”
He raised an eyebrow, asking me to explain.
“I want to ask her if she came back to the apartment.”
“You mean, since the fire?”
“No, before the fire.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe to get something.”
The chief could tell I was trying hard not to tell him something. “What are you saying, Karen?”
“I’m not sure what I’m saying. It’s just—something about the apartment was off.”
I felt the two guys looking at me. The chief said, “What?”
“It happened at dusk. The Molotov cocktail was thrown into Abby’s bedroom.”
“If you’re going to break an apartment window and torch a place,” Chief Murtaugh said, “you wait until after dark.”
“She wouldn’t be asleep at that time,” I said. “You want to kill her, you do it at three am.”
“The guy was trying to scare her, not kill her.”
“Yeah, I understand that.” I knew I had to say it. “I think Abby knew someone was gonna torch her place.”
The chief’s eyes narrowed. “You mean, she was worried she might be torched.”
I shook my head. “No, I think she knew it.”
The chief raised his palms, asking me to explain.
“There were no clothes in the closet.”
The chief scratched his cheek slowly. “Maybe she liked her clothes? She took them with her when she cleared out?”
I shook my head. “She’s scared shitless because of all the threats. The university gets her someplace to live. She grabs her phone, her computer, textbooks—those things. Whatever she needs for three or four days. Underwear, three or four outfits. She tosses the stuff in the trunk of her car and drives off. But Abby took all her clothes. A girl doesn’t do that if she’s planning to come back in a few days.”
The chief rested his chin on his tented fingers. “Does she know who’s going to torch her apartment?” He spoke slowly, like he was trying hard not to misspeak and reveal he thought I might be having some kind of brain episode.
“She knows—but I don’t.” I shook my head. “Most obvious possibility is Richard Albright. But I have no idea. Could be her new fuck-buddy Krista, or Krista’s pimp, or that idiot from the fraternity.”
“Motive?”
I shook my head. “Haven’t figured it out yet. There could be some real harassment going on. I’m pretty sure there is. But she’s playing it up, you know, to make herself look more like a victim. There’s no way she can control the bad publicity about the porn
video, but at least she can try to spin it. You know, so she’ll look like a good girl who made a mistake, and she’s paying a heavy price for it, so everyone should cut her some slack.”
“Okay, I see that. But why Krista or her pimp?”
“Maybe Krista’s really pissed about the video getting online. Maybe the pimp is pissed that he’s losing one of his best girls. He wants to teach her a lesson. He already took out Virginia, now he’s sending a signal to Krista’s new girlfriend.”
“And the fraternity boy? Give me a motive.”
“He’s afraid we know he drugged Krista at the party. The arson is a diversion. Takes the attention off him. Maybe scares Krista so she won’t press charges against him and the other rapists.” I sighed. “I know. I know. It’s just not coming into focus for me yet.”
“We need a motive,” the chief said. “We’re not going to identify the arsonist until we have a motive.” He paused. “What’s your next move?”
I looked at Ryan, who shook his head. He didn’t have a good answer. “I’d like to talk to Mary Dawson at the university,” I said, “see if the university wants us to take over custody of Abby. Plus, I’d like to know how they’re gonna handle the arson.”
The chief said, “You mean, see if they’re going to link Jennifer Taylor to Abby and the video?”
“Yeah, if they make the link public, that might set Richard Albright and his guys in motion. I’d like to be prepared in case they make a move.”
The chief nodded. “Keep me in the loop.”
“You bet.” Ryan and I stood and left the chief’s office. Back in the bullpen, we grabbed our coats and headed out to the Charger. We were at the Administration Building in eight minutes.
“Is Mary Dawson in?” I said to the secretary in the dean of students’ office.
“Sorry, she’s in an important meeting.” She looked at her watch. “She should be back in ten or fifteen minutes. Would you care to wait?”
“Actually, could you tell us where the meeting is?”