Fire Point

by Sean Black

  One of them had said to him, ‘You don’t strike me as the pro bono type. If you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Lock had told him.

  ‘So why with this job?’

  Lock knew the answer. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, or at least he wasn’t going to admit it to two cops, but he knew. If he’d been asked for help by Teddy Griffiths or Peter Blake he wouldn’t have gone as far as he had. He would have bailed sooner. He wouldn’t have followed up, or asked Ty to get the contents of the hard drive forensically examined.

  The answer he gave the lead detective was a shrug. ‘Didn’t do much good in the end, did it?’

  The detective had smiled. ‘That’s not much of an answer.’

  At that point Lock had been talking to them for almost four hours solid, with only one brief break to use the restroom and get fresh coffee. He was close to out of answers. He sure as hell wasn’t about to admit that he had feelings for Tarian Griffiths that went beyond a concern for her wellbeing. He thought of saying something glib, like ‘It’s nice to be nice,’ but chose not to. Instead they had to settle for another shrug.

  The interview was winding down now. They’d shifted back to the small-talk that they’d begun with. Did he have another job lined up? Could he try to avoid driving head on into one of their patrol cars because next time they might not move over? His answers were, no, he didn’t have a next gig and, yes, he would do his best to be a more responsible driver.

  They thanked him for his time, and walked him out into the corridor. That was it. The LAPD were actively seeking two individuals in connection with the murders of the four people found dead at the Brentwood house. They also had Krank and the others linked to a series of ongoing missing-person cases and one other active homicide where a young woman’s body had been found dumped in a canyon north of Malibu. They were confident they would find them, charge them, put them in jail, bring them to trial and send them to prison for the rest of their lives. As far as law enforcement was concerned, it had been a good end to a bad day.

  Lock walked out into the cool night air where Ty, who’d been interviewed by a different set of cops, was waiting for him.

  ‘Wanna eat?’ Ty asked him.

  ‘Not really,’ said Lock.

  Ty slapped his shoulder. ‘Too bad. I know a place not too far from here.’

  58

  The restaurant that Ty had selected was in fact a strip club with a buffet of such dubious hygiene credentials that it was a miracle the whole place hadn’t yet been condemned by the Department of Public Health. It was three blocks north of the Beverly Center and, in true Los Angeles fashion, came with a high-concept twist. The strippers, or ‘featured dancers’, as the billboard termed them, were also celebrity lookalikes. As far as Lock could see, the real entertainment came from trying to discern which celebrities they were supposed to look like. He wanted to find a regular place but Ty was insistent that, in times of high trauma, such establishments were best designed to take their mind off the day’s horrors.

  As they took a seat at the bar, a dancer allegedly impersonating Beyoncé, but who was also sporting a worrying six o’clock shadow, was on the featured stage, giving it her all. Ty ordered them both a beer and they did what two men alone together in a strip club have a tendency to do when not yet drunk: they lapsed into an embarrassed silence.

  Their beers arrived. Ty tried to engage the bartender in small-talk. The man took his money, brought the change, gave them a couple of comped tickets for the buffet and went back to drying glasses.

  The two men sipped their beer for a few more moments. Lock had always wondered what Purgatory – the way station between damnation and salvation – would look like. He figured Ty had found it.

  Ty seemed to agree. He drained his beer, gave a final scowl in the direction of ‘Beyoncé’ and stood up. ‘Sorry, man, this was a bad idea.’

  Relieved, Lock left what remained of his beer, prayed he hadn’t caught a communicable disease from the bar stool and followed Ty out into the parking lot at the rear of the club. ‘There’s an actual restaurant with actual food a few blocks down. Italian. They might still be open,’ he said.

  ‘Sounds good,’ said Ty, getting into the passenger seat of Lock’s car.

  Lock swung out of the parking lot and onto La Cienega Boulevard. It was getting late. The streets were beginning to clear. In millions of homes rolling news coverage still crackled with the killings in Brentwood. Much was being made of the fact it was the same street where O. J. Simpson had lived at the time of another of LA’s more notorious murders. But Lock knew as well as anyone that public attention would move on. It always did. There would be another outrage. A fresh mass shooting. It had reached the point where they had become monthly if not weekly events. He would have loved to believe that there was a ready-made solution. Experience had taught him differently.

  Without warning, he pulled over to the side of the road. A taxi cab swerved round him.

  ‘You okay?’ Ty asked him.

  Lock shook his head. ‘This isn’t over,’ he said quietly. ‘That thing today. That was a warm-up.’

  ‘How you figure that?’ Ty asked.

  He wasn’t sure how he could answer in a way that would make sense. It was a hunch, but how had he reached it? He wasn’t sure, but he just knew that someone like Krank wasn’t about to go quietly.

  ‘The books that kid had about mass shootings,’ he said. ‘What did all those events have in common?’

  ‘Lot of dead bodies,’ Ty offered.

  ‘But today was different,’ said Lock.

  Ty looked at him. ‘Looked pretty typical to me.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ said Lock. ‘Columbine. Sandy Hook. Isla Vista. They all ended with a suicide or death by cop. None of those shooters escaped, or even made any real attempt to escape. It was like they’d done what they’d come to do, made their point, and that was it for them. But today they made sure they were gone by the time anyone could get there.’

  ‘We only missed ’em by a few moments,’ said Ty.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lock. ‘That’s what bothers me.’

  Ty shrugged. ‘Not our problem anymore.’

  ‘You said it yourself – we missed them. That kind of makes it our problem.’

  ‘Ryan, you got the whole of LAPD and everyone else in law enforcement going after them. They ain’t gonna get away. Not for long. Now, can we eat?’

  59

  Gretchen and Loser hefted the last wooden crate into the back of the rental truck. Krank took one last look at the BMW. He took out the key fob from his pocket and dropped it on the ground next to the driver’s door.

  The truck had been rented a week before, using a false ID and credit card. It wasn’t due to be returned for another week. They would drive it to the new location. It would be unloaded, then Loser had been tasked with driving it up the coast into Ventura County and dumping it. Once that was done it was quad bikes all the way. Those had already been purchased and stashed at what Krank lavishly referred to as the Ranch.

  The Ranch was a parcel of land with a shack and a stream right next to their target, carefully chosen for its very specific geographical features. Krank didn’t own the Ranch. They would be squatting. But it would be temporary. Even more temporary since the events in Brentwood. He figured that they had maybe three days max.

  That left only one question. Would Nature favor them? For the past few weeks the weather had been hot and dry. Now they all needed were the winds. Then they could begin. Columbine. Sandy Hook. Isla Vista. They would all be eclipsed – forever and completely.

  Krank climbed into the back of the truck with Gretchen. It was too risky for them to ride up front in the cab with Loser. Theirs were the headline faces on the news.

  He took one last look at Loser before he closed the door. ‘Drive slow, okay? If you get pulled over just follow what we agreed.’

  Loser nodded. He closed the door. D
arkness engulfed them. A few moments later the engine chuntered to life and they were moving.

  60

  Tarian opened the door and Lock walked past her into the hotel suite. It was one of eight at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica. Each one faced out onto the Pacific Ocean. Lock had made sure it wasn’t a hotel that Tarian had stayed at previously before he’d deemed it acceptable. Marcus would have spoken about his mother to Krank, and Lock didn’t want to take any chances that Krank might have connected a location Marcus had mentioned to where she’d be staying until he was captured. A sociopath like Krank would know as well as anyone that people were creatures of habit, especially when they were scared.

  Tarian was in a bathrobe. Lock followed her through into the living area. ‘Thanks for coming, and arranging everything,’ she said.

  ‘How you holding up?’ he asked her.

  ‘It still seems completely unreal,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘All of it. I keep thinking I’ll wake up at home and none of it will have happened. The kids are still with Sylvia. She hasn’t told them yet. I wanted to do it. But I need a little time first.’

  Lock understood what she was saying. Death was one thing, but a violent death, one that was wholly unavoidable, was different somehow. It came with a special bitterness that old age or lingering illness didn’t have. It was harder to move on from. If you weren’t careful, it could corrode you from the inside out.

  She stopped talking and stared at him. ‘You’ve seen a lot of bad things, haven’t you?’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t get any easier,’ said Lock. ‘You’d think it would, but it doesn’t.’

  ‘So why do you keep doing this kind of work?’ she asked him.

  It was hardly a unique question. Women seemed to ask it a lot. Women he became involved with, at any rate.

  ‘It’s a drug,’ he said. ‘The adrenalin is a drug. And I’m good at it. Most of the time anyway.’

  ‘You couldn’t be blamed for what happened today. You weren’t even supposed to be there,’ Tarian said.

  He didn’t detect any bitterness in her tone, though he wouldn’t have blamed her if he had. ‘You’re right. I’m not to blame, but that doesn’t stop me second-guessing.’

  She crossed to the bar area, opened a small fridge and pulled out a bottle of white wine, then took a corkscrew out of a drawer and handed it to Lock with the wine. ‘Could you?’

  Lock set to work while Tarian got two glasses. He filled a single glass.

  ‘You don’t want one?’ she said.

  ‘I need to have a clear head. In case anyone shows up here.’

  She took a sip of wine. ‘Pretty good. The doctor gave me some pills to help me sleep. I think I’ll have this, then take one and go to bed. Or I can skip the pill and you can join me?’

  She walked over and stood in front of him. ‘Don’t let me make a fool of myself here, Ryan. I need this.’

  He leaned in, pinching her chin between his thumb and finger and kissed her softly on the lips. She kissed him back, harder.

  Lock didn’t say anything. They stayed there for a few more seconds, her lips on his, her tongue sliding into his mouth. He pulled back.

  “I can stay with you tonight. You need someone to hold you? Or you want a shoulder to cry on? I got that covered. But anything else will have to wait.”

  61

  A group of college girls, dressed Malibu-casual in shorts and T-shirts, crowded the corridor as they waited for the teaching assistant to open their classroom. Gretchen, her freshly cropped hair dyed bright blue and sporting oversized black-framed glasses with clear lenses, pushed past them, toting a heavy backpack. No one gave her so much as a second glance. The more unique or out there your ‘look’, the more anonymous you became on a preppy college campus.

  The college was women-only, one of a dwindling few in California. The total enrollment was under five thousand students, fewer than some LA county high schools. But what Barnes College lacked in numbers it more than made up for in tuition. A four-year undergraduate degree program would cost a cool one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in fees alone. Female-only also made for a lower alumni endowment, which meant financial aid was sparse. As a result it tended to draw students from higher-income groups and offered places to those who might not have had offers from other colleges.

  As Gretchen had described it to Krank, it was for ‘dumb, rich, self-entitled white bitches and granola lesbians’. Certainly all the students she had seen so far that morning pretty much fitted her description. They didn’t have to work a job. They stayed in campus dorms. They all had brand new cars paid for by Daddy. At the same time, as far as Gretchen was concerned, they held themselves up as some kind of downtrodden minority. They were women born on third base who thought they’d hit a triple but resented not being at home plate. They represented everything she had come to despise. Killing them would be a service to the nation.

  At the end of the corridor, she ducked into a restroom. She walked straight into a stall and closed the door. She opened the backpack, took out the contents, primed them, set the timer and waited for the one occupied stall to clear. When the bathroom was empty she climbed out, leaving the stall door locked from the inside.

  Outside in the main college square she sat and waited. Groups of girls flitted past. A tweedy professor hustled from his car with a stack of papers. No one looked at her twice.

  She waited for the series of pops from inside the building she had just exited. She pulled out her cell phone and hit the number for campus security. Someone picked up straight away.

  ‘Hi, listen, I just came out of Broughton Hall and I think I heard gunshots. It sounds like someone’s shooting at people,’ she said.

  Before the person at the other end of the line could ask for her name or any additional details, she killed the call, stood up, and walked quickly toward the main dorm buildings. Within seconds blue-uniformed security officers were peeling out of buildings. She counted twelve. They immediately began directing anyone walking on campus back to their dorm. They were panicked.

  She followed the directions the students had been given. The main entrance to the dorm was open. A heavy-set woman in security uniform was busy shooing co-eds inside. ‘Everyone to their rooms and wait for the all-clear.’

  A young blonde student asked about her friend who was in a lecture. She was told that everyone in a class would have to stay there until the all-clear was given.

  Gretchen smiled to herself as she listened to the conversation escalate. The blonde student argued that she wanted to go check on her friend, and wasn’t it a free country? The female security officer responded that freedom of movement was suspended until they had clearance. It went on for a few more rounds before the blonde girl finally relented. Gretchen ducked out of a fire door and headed back to her bike.

  The all-clear would come as soon as they found the pack of firecrackers rigged to a timer. It would be put down to a prank. Security would be heightened for a day or two. No one would make any connections between this and Brentwood. If the Brentwood killers had been on campus, they would have done more than play a prank. That would be the thinking anyway.

  As she straddled the bike, she called Krank. It took a couple of tries before he picked up – signal was spotty up in the canyon where the Ranch was.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

  ‘Too easy,’ she said. ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel.’

  ‘I was thinking more along the lines of a barbecue, but whatever. You heading back?’

  ‘Yeah. See you in twenty,’ said Gretchen.

  62

  Tarian was still sleeping when Lock woke. He didn’t envy her the morning. He knew from experience that, after bereavement, mornings were the worst. The slow, creeping sense of dread as your new reality formed itself in your mind. Today would be the day she had to tell her two surviving children about what had happened. It would not be easy. It was better that she slept.

 
; He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. She barely stirred. He got up and headed into the bathroom. He showered, dried off and got dressed. He dug out a complimentary bag of toiletries, brushed his teeth and rinsed with mouthwash, then went into the living area and stepped out onto a balcony that looked over a deep shelf of beach and beyond that the ocean. It was going to be hot. A breeze had picked up as the Santa Ana winds whipped down through the canyons.

  His phone brought him the latest local news. No arrests had been made in the Brentwood killings. The search was ongoing and the LAPD were ‘actively pursuing several promising leads’, which could mean almost anything. He read on. A house in the Hollywood Hills, believed to be linked to one of the killers, was being searched. A number of bodies had been found. Lock’s mind flashed back to the haunting green-black video excavated from Marcus’s hard drive by Li Zhang. He wondered if the girl was among them and whether her parents had yet had the knock at their door that brought closure and fresh torment in equal measure.

  Scrolling down, other local news was light. A chimpanzee had escaped from the LA zoo. A bad crash on the 405 with three fatalities. An alarm at a women’s college in Malibu that had turned out to be a prank. The rest was sports news and weather. He’d already worked out the day’s weather – hot, dry and windy.

  He walked back inside and through to the bedroom. Tarian was still fast asleep. He debated waking her. He grabbed a piece of paper from the desk and wrote a note, asking her to call him. He left it where she would be sure to see it. The last thing he wanted was for her to think he was ducking out on her, but right now the absolute best thing for her was rest. She would need whatever last reserves of energy she had remaining over the next few days.

  He could have stuck around, waited for her to wake, and spent the morning with her. If Krank and the others had been found, he would have. But they were still out there, and right now he felt that he was more in Charles Kim’s head than anyone else.