Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  Shelby didn’t like the way he waited before answering.

  “Shel, remember when I asked you in that initial interview about things between you and Paul? And you told me things were good? ‘Great, actually,’ you said. I need to know if you were being straight with me then.”

  Shelby closed her eyes. Could he know? They had so many friends in common, having both grown up in Los Colmas. People gossip. Rumors spread. She’d told no one, but maybe the turtleneck and make-up hadn’t covered her neck bruise last summer quite as well as she’d thought? Maybe Chloe was talking?

  “We had problems just like everybody else,” she tested.

  “That’s different from ‘great,’” he said.

  “Oh come on. Goddamn, Ron. Not you, too.”

  “Straight, Shel.”

  He could be bluffing.

  “I talked to Chloe’s school counselor,” he prompted.

  He wasn’t bluffing. Shelby snuffed her cigarette against the side of her kitchen sink and washed the black ash down the drain.

  “Shel?”

  “Damn you. Goddamn you.” She took a breath. “OK. OK. I’m going to be completely honest with you, but it has to stay just between us.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  Another breath. “Fine. I’ll tell you anyway. And I’ll tell you right now it has absolutely nothing to do with what happened to my husband.”

  “So noted.”

  Shelby tucked a loose ribbon of blond behind her ear. “Everybody knows Paul, right? Love him or hate him, everybody knows him. Knew him. He was the visionary, the man who built the Inland Empire. Or he was the son-of-a-bitch developer who knew the best prices for concrete and lumber, and who rode his contractors like a slavemaster. Or he was the guy whose foundation gave away all that money to the colleges and hospitals around here. Or he was the guy whose wife sat on every charity board in the county. Everybody knew Paul Dwyer, or at least some version of him. But Chloe and me, yeah, we knew another Paul, the one nobody else knew.”

  Starke said nothing.

  “There was a part of him… a private part, an ugly part. Mean. Know what I’m saying? When he drank, he could be just… mean.”

  “I hear he drank a lot,” Starke said.

  “‘Just part of the business,’” she replied. “That’s what he always said. It was bad, but not intolerable.”

  “But sometimes he brought business home with him?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “A lot?’

  “He’d get angry about some stupid thing, or something that happened that day…. Things happened. Look, you know me well enough to know I’m not one of those women who lay down and take it. I give as good as I get. But you can’t actually believe I’d—”

  “Did he ever hit you?”

  Ten seconds passed. “Sometimes, yes.”

  “Chloe?”

  Shelby hesitated. “I was always there for her. She knows that. It was just her and me sometimes when he’d go off, so we’re tight. That’s all.” She felt Starke’s silence pushing her toward a terrifying edge. “What was I supposed to do? File a complaint every time something happened?”

  “The law was always there for you, Shel,” he said. “You know that.”

  “Oh Christ. Pull your head out of your ass, Ron. Put all this on public record? Do you have any idea what that would have done. To his business? To the foundation and all its good work? To him? To Chloe and me? The whole thing collapses. Everybody loses.”

  “Behind closed doors he was a drunk, Shel, apparently a violent one. Only two people in the world could have put a stop to that, the two people who were in there with him. Jesus, Shel, at least Chloe had the sense to talk to—”

  Her thumb found the phone’s “end” button and she pressed it hard. Like she needed his lecture. Again, Shelby found herself listening to the rush of blood in her ears. She knew Starke would focus on finding the truth. But why was he fixating on the wrong truth?

  When she could breathe again, Shelby felt a familiar gravity pulling her toward her office down the hall. There’d been countless nights of her life during the last couple of years—nights when her husband was gone or out whoring or too drunk to stir—when its force was irresistible, when she followed it desperately alone and unthinking, like a moth drawn to the licking heat of flame. Shelby still knew the routine. She stepped to the left side of the hall as she passed the framed family portrait they’d had made when Chloe was six, because the hardwood floorboards on the right side had a noisy squeak. She lifted up while turning her office doorknob, because Paul never did get around to oiling that hinge. The light switch for the overhead was on the left, always on, and if she’d wanted light she could have twisted the silent dimmer knob and entered her former sanctum with no one the wiser.

  This time she didn’t want light, and wasn’t at all sure she wanted to go in again. She peered into the murky space. The only one who’d used the office lately was Chloe, who knew she was allowed in only after homework was done and her bedroom was picked up. Her daughter’s world—her online world, anyway—was always waiting on her mother’s computer, and Shelby understood the attraction better than most. But the only times Shelby went into the room anymore were when she wanted to snoop a bit, to make sure her daughter’s social media life was under control, to peek over Chloe’s shoulder as she chatted and Instagrammed and Snapchatted and explored her electronic universe filled with countless seductions. Chloe was just old enough to appreciate the incomparable thrill of danger.

  Shelby sipped cold coffee at the threshold. Across the room, their new desktop PC crouched in shadow, in sleep mode, just like her daughter. Its only sign of life was the pale green eye of its power indicator, and its stare was relentless.

  Her phone vibrated silently in her hand. She recognized Starke’s number.

  “You were way out of line,” she answered. “My family life is none of your goddamned business.”

  “Shel?” His voice had calmed. “We’re still waiting for final word from the coroner.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Starke cleared his throat. “How’d you know he was shot?”

  6

  News traveled fast in Los Colmas. Bad news traveled faster, and now, farther. In the grand central nervous system of Southern California, the little foothill town had always been an insignificant node, a once-remote settlement of second-generation immigrants and city refugees who could lead off-radar lives assured that, no matter what happened there, the wider world wouldn’t much notice. But things changed as the place was colonized and gentrified by refugees from the great metropolis to the west. Money brought with it a new ethos. The newcomers wanted good schools, safe streets, security.

  Kerrigan stood outside the city manager’s office, not nervous exactly, but curious. The first call had come from a reporter in Riverside; the second from San Bernardino. She’d had her assistant refer both callers to the department’s public information officer. That was SOP. When a news producer from the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles phoned, though, it kicked things up to a whole other level. Now her new boss wanted to see her. Any dead body demanded answers. The body of someone as prominent as Paul Dwyer? The media’s feeding frenzy was underway.

  She’d only had a few conversations with Douglas Buckley outside of regular staff meetings. He’d offered her little more than chit-chat, but he’d seemed sincere in welcoming her to what he called “the city family.” She’d come for complicated reasons, first of which was wanting a fresh start, but knew there’d be a suffocating intimacy in a small-town government where the thirty-one employees were led by a man who, like many of them, had never worked anywhere else, and whose massive insecurities presented as insufferable arrogance. She hadn’t ignored the red flags; she’d just decided, all things considered, she could handle it. Still, nothing about the next fifteen minutes was going to be enjoyable.

  Buckley’s secretary stood up from her desk, peering through the wide window of the
manager’s office. “Looks like he’s off the phone, sweetie. Go on in.”

  Sweetie? Kerrigan let it slide. This time.

  Buckley was seated at his desk, shoulders squared to an open file folder. He read through glasses that clung to the tip of his nose, and didn’t look up until she’d sat in one of the two godawful purple-and-chrome chairs.

  “Well, hello,” he said, as though Kerrigan had arrived unexpectedly instead of being summoned.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  Buckley stood, stepped around the desk, and closed his office door. Back in his chair, he removed his reading glasses and offered a relaxed smile. “Looks like you’ve got the hottest case in Southern California. Just a glorified missing persons situation when this started three weeks ago. Now it’s not.”

  “Not by all indications, sir,” Kerrigan said. “I’ve handled my share of high-profile murder cases in LA, though, before I came here.”

  “So you’re comfortable with it?”

  “Completely.”

  Buckley creaked back in his desk chair. He was maybe forty, good-looking in a Crossfit-training kind of way. He’d risen steadily through the ranks without distinguishing himself, but without ever screwing up badly enough to derail his ambition to become city manager. The council had rewarded him with the job three years before. She’d heard he was twice divorced, and she wasn’t surprised. He was the kind of guy who had his suits specially tailored to accentuate his broad chest and pinched waist.

  “We don’t get many of those around here, you know. Murders outside of the bad areas, I mean.” He let a meaningful moment pass. “If you’re in any way sheepish about what this may bring, the media interest, the pressure, all that, you just let me know. Because we certainly have guys here who’ve been around this community a long—”

  “I believe, sir, I said I was completely comfortable with it.”

  Buckley nodded, unflustered. “So you did.”

  “Anything else?”

  The city manager slipped his reading glasses back on and leaned toward the open file on his desk. “You’ve already read up on this one, I know.”

  “Not a lot to read until this week, sir. Wife reports him missing three weeks ago, but no sign of foul play at the house. No body turns up, but nothing to suggest Paul Dwyer was still active during those three weeks, either. No contacts. No attempts to get money from their accounts. No credit card traces. Absolutely nothing until they found him in the pond.”

  “So you think he’s been dead the whole time?”

  Kerrigan nodded. “Condition of the body bears that out, I’m told.”

  “And the wife’s reaction?”

  “A little stunned. Not surprised, just stunned.”

  Buckley pushed away from his desk and leaned back in his chair. “I knew Shelby in high school. Nice girl back then. Good family. Not wealthy, but solid. She was bound for glory, though. A climber.”

  Where was this headed? “Had you kept in touch?”

  Buckley shook his head. “Saw her around. Kids’ ballgames. Grocery store. That’s about it. Don’t know much about her. Didn’t know the husband personally, just by reputation. Older. Second marriage. Not a nice man, I hear. Maybe he had some enemies?”

  “One for sure.”

  Buckley’s smile seemed genuine.

  “What can you tell me about her?” Kerrigan asked.

  The city manager leaned back and stared at the ceiling. “It’s funny how high school still defines us, all these years later. It may not be right, but reputations do stick, don’t they?”

  “So,” she said, “freak, geek, goth, or jock?”

  “Shelby was—” He was a man trying to jam an ill-fitting piece into a puzzle. He turned it every which way, then gave up. “I wish it was that simple. You’re right, most of us fell into one of those categories in high school. Shelby just seemed more complicated than that.”

  Kerrigan noted the familiarity with which he used Shelby Dwyer’s name.

  After a pause, Buckley said, “Librarian.”

  “Librarian?”

  Buckley nodded. “You know on TV commercials, where there’s a mousy-looking woman in glasses with her hair up in a bun. And then she uses the right shampoo or something, and the glasses come off and she shakes her hair free and, vavoom, she’s Katy Perry? Except with Shelby, back then anyway, I never knew her to take off her glasses or shake her hair loose. Way too focused and ambitious. Driven, really. But she could’ve. Does that make sense?”

  “Beautiful but not showy?”

  The manager shook his head. “One of those girls who sized you up, made an immediate decision about your value to her, and looked right past you if she thought you were a waste of her time. Like she knew she was going places, and you could either help her along the way—or hold her back. We all knew even then that she wasn’t like the rest of us. That’s just a perception from an old jock, of course. I could be wrong.”

  “Did she look right past you?”

  Buckley smiled. “Shelby was after way bigger game than me.”

  “Paul Dwyer?”

  “Ultimately, him. Yeah. But someone like him, for sure.”

  “Good student?”

  “Couldn’t say. School records would tell you that, if you think it’s important. Always wanted something bigger, though. Better. I’m sure she saw Dwyer as a way to get that. Wasn’t a long courtship, as I recall. She graduates college, then wham, bam, suddenly she’s started a family with this very wealthy, much older guy.”

  Kerrigan nodded. “Always pays to know who you’re dealing with.”

  Buckley leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk. “Anything useful from the scene?”

  “The forensic stuff’s a little odd. You heard about the anchor, right?”

  “Old computer monitor, busted screen. What do you make of that?”

  “It’s heavy,” she said.

  “Anything else?”

  “I figure we’re looking for somebody who’s had a lot of computers. The old equipment tends to stack up as you upgrade. I know it does with me. So this old monitor was sitting around the house somewhere, and came in handy when the time came to weigh down the body.”

  “Doesn’t exactly narrow it down much, does it?” Buckley said. “Somebody with an old computer?”

  “No sir. But it’s probably a guy.”

  “We know that from statistics.”

  “Beyond that. Has to do with the location of the body.” Kerrigan leaned forward as well and sketched a crude map on the desk with her finger. “Just two ways up to that pond. Both are at least a quarter-mile hike, with some steep parts.”

  “Used to party up there,” Buckley said.

  “Seems like everybody around here did. It didn’t change much until ten months ago, when the development started. It’d take a strong guy, or more than one person, to get a body up that climb, not to mention lugging that heavy monitor. May even have taken a couple of trips.”

  “That assumes Dwyer was killed somewhere else and brought there. It assumes he didn’t get caught up there by someone, something weird and random. Or maybe he was taking a look at his development project from up there? What if he walked up there willingly with someone who turned out to be his killer?”

  “With a heavy computer monitor?” she said.

  “Two could carry it easier than one.”

  “But does that make any sense to you?”

  Buckley sat back. Kerrigan did the same. For a long moment, the room was tense, airless. She knew his reaction to her pushback would likely color her career here.

  “Good point,” he said. “Guess that’s why I’m not a cop.”

  “For whatever it’s worth,” Kerrigan added, “Detective Starke tells me the crime scene folks sifted the pond pretty well. No bullet found.”

  “If you’re right about when he was killed, though, the site had time to degrade.”

  “Bullets don’t disappear. So I think he was killed somewhere else and dumped.”
>
  Buckley steepled his index fingers beneath his nose. “Nice work so far, chief.”

  “Thank you.”

  The city manager stood and stepped toward a mirror on the wall behind his desk. The man actually began to preen. “Let me deal with the media on this,” he said. “You just stay focused and keep me in the loop as things develop.”

  Buckley walked to his office door, but didn’t open it. His hand was on the doorknob when he spoke again. “Just curious. The wife. Shelby. Think she knows anything?”

  Kerrigan chose her next word carefully: “Yes.”

  “Because?”

  Because. Because. “I don’t know, sir. I know a lot of women like her, I guess. She strikes me as someone with something to hide.”

  Buckley fixed his eyes on hers for long enough that she felt uncomfortable. Without another word, he opened his office door and stepped out of her way.

  7

  The automatic doors of the Foothill Village Health Center slid open with an institutional whoosh. Starke stepped into the vestibule and, with his free hand, picked up the handset of a telephone on the table to his right. Through the second set of glass doors, at the far end of a long and joyless corridor, he could see Glenda Mendez pick up, spot him, and wave.

  “Didn’t expect you, Ronnie,” she said. “Not today, at least.”

  Had she seen the news? Was his name in the report? “I’ve got ten minutes between things, G. Just wanted to check on him. Everything OK?”

  “About the same. I’ll buzz you in.”

  The doors slid open. Starke stepped from the stifling heat into the cool, antiseptic-smelling interior of the facility where his father had been housed for the past three years. The old man’s journey to what he called “the lockup” began with a fire in his condo. A neighbor had doused the flames with a kitchen extinguisher, and the damage was minimal, mostly just a light char to the stove and the vent fan above. No, he was not cooking something, Dad had patiently explained to the young Los Colmas cop later sent to investigate. He was simply drying his bath towel.

  In the oven.