Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  10

  The owner folded his magazine once again, set it aside, and studied Starke’s open shield wallet, matching the ID photo to the face. The detective offered him the same artificial smile he’d given the department’s photographer the day the picture was taken.

  “I run clean shop,” he said. “No problems with Silicon Recycler. Straight up operation.”

  “That’s what I hear,” Starke said. “Friend of mine bought from you a while back. He was very impressed. I’m in the market for a new laptop myself.”

  “Ah, so you’re shopping then, officer?”

  “Well, not today.”

  The owner handed back Starke’s wallet. “Everybody want laptops, nobody buying today. How you expect me to stay in business?”

  When Starke parked on the street in front of the Dwyer home forty-five minutes earlier, Shelby was just easing her white Jag from the driveway and turning right toward downtown Los Colmas, if you could call its collection of strip malls and discount stores a downtown. He’d come to tell her what the coroner had told him: Dental records confirmed that the body in the damp muck of Shepherdsen’s pond was Paul Dwyer’s. He had been shot once in the head, and was already dead when someone sunk him into the pond. A pale manila envelope the size of an index card waited on the passenger seat of the Vic. The tiny lump at its center was a wedding band with beaded edges and the initials of Shelby and Paul Dwyer, the one that had required an indelicate amputation to extract from the swollen folds of skin on Dwyer’s ring finger.

  Starke thought it best to bring only the ring.

  He could have come back later to let Shelby ID it. At that point, it was just a formality. Instead of turning around, though, he’d watched the Jag move away down the block. On instinct, he followed at a discreet distance. Shelby’s daughter was in the seat beside her. They’d stopped briefly at St. Lawrence Martyr, their church, where Shelby dropped Chloe off. Then she’d driven directly to the town’s only used computer retailer. She was there before it opened, waiting for it to open, actually. She took nothing in, and brought nothing out.

  “So why you show me your badge just to shop?” the owner asked.

  “OK,” Starke said. “You got me there. But I only have a couple of questions. Nothing complicated, and you can just say no if you don’t want to answer. Deal?”

  The owner nodded.

  “That woman who was just in here?” Starke said. “She’s a regular customer?”

  The man tensed, just enough to let Starke know the question made him squirm. “She’s in trouble?” he asked.

  Starke gave him his most noncommital face. “I didn’t say that.” He smiled again. “I’m just curious.”

  “Ah, so she is your friend then, no? You could just ask her, if you’re curious.”

  Starke shook his head. “Got me again, Mr.—”

  The owner pushed a business card across the counter: “Jason Samani—Silicon Recycler Inc.”

  “I’m curious in a professional way, Mr. Samani,” he said, tapping his badge, “but it’s all very preliminary. And you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to. It’s just that any help you can give me might clear things up. Just be between us for now, understand?”

  The owner nodded.

  “So, you’ve dealt with her before?”

  His answer came an uncomfortable half-minute later. “Once. A sell-buy maybe three weeks ago. Lady had a good machine, desktop, sweet iMac.”

  He gave Starke a model number. It meant nothing to him, but he wrote it down.

  “Thing is, she wants to switch to a PC,” Samani said. “That’s rare. But I find her something pretty decent. That’s it.”

  “But she came in again today? Was there some problem with the computer you sold her? That’s why she came back?”

  “No, no. Thirty-day guarantee. Any problems, I fix,” he said. “No, today she wants something else. A laptop. She knows my deals. She comes back, see?”

  Starke looked at his watch. How hard should he push? “She sure didn’t shop long this morning. She was here when you opened, and stayed, what? Ten minutes. Fifteen, tops? And she left empty-handed, so I know she didn’t buy.”

  “People do that. They come in. They look. They leave.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Starke said. “That’s why it’s called shopping, right?”

  “This one looks around, asks some questions, then she goes.”

  An awkward moment passed. The owner flipped a page of his magazine without looking at it.

  “Questions?” Starke asked. “About laptops?”

  No answer.

  “I mean, that’s what she was asking about then? A new laptop? Gigabytes? RAM? Wi-Fi? Those kind of questions?”

  The owner shrugged.

  “Not those kind of questions?” Starke asked.

  The man stood abruptly. He reached into his display case and began rearranging the items there—an already neat collection of computer components. When he was done, he closed the sliding display-case door with more force than needed. Its woody clack! echoed over the stoic hum of nearby machines.

  “You seem nervous,” Starke said.

  “Not nervous, no, no. Busy.”

  Starke looked around the store. No one else had come in. “I’m sorry to interrupt you at work.”

  “No problem, OK? But I have many things to do.”

  Nervous people hate silence. They often fill it with words. So Starke waited.

  Samani fussed until he ran out of things to straighten on the counter. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any more. “Her old computer, the Apple she sold me. She asked about that, about where it went from here. Did I resell? Sell for parts? Those kind of questions. Happens sometimes.”

  “Really?”

  “People don’t reformat the drives. Lazy, you know? Or they don’t understand how to do it. They sell to me as is, then remember something on it they want or need. Or they worry they left numbers on it.”

  “Numbers?”

  “Bank accounts. Credit cards. Numbers. But not just numbers. Letters. Spreadsheets. Work things. Browser histories. Personal things. Suddenly, too late, they worry. They come back and ask if I can find their old machine, or to make sure I wipe the drives so nobody can get their numbers.”

  “So she was asking about her old computer? About whether you still had it, or if there might be anything on it she wanted back, or needed, or didn’t want somebody else to see?”

  He nodded.

  “And I suppose you reformatted her hard drive and everything?”

  Samani shook his head. “Apples I sell to an Apple guy. These Apple people, they don’t mix with PC people.”

  Starke knew that was true. There are Pepsi people and Coke people; Burger King people and McDonald’s people. In terms of tribal loyalty, Apple users were somewhere between La Cosa Nostra and Scientologists.

  “But you say she switched? From an Apple to a PC?”

  “That’s why I remembered her, yes. Very unusual.”

  “So you don’t still have the computer she sold you?”

  The owner gestured to his shelves. “Not an Apple in the store.”

  Samani would have business records, Starke thought, and he could subpoena those if he needed them. At the moment, he was operating on pure hunch, listening to a faint voice in his head. Why would Shelby sell a killer iMac for a PC that arguably was less of a machine? Why would she come back to the store later worried about what might have happened to the machine she’d sold?

  “Mr. Samani,” he said, “thank you. You’ve been a help, and I want you to know I appreciate that.”

  The store owner’s shoulders relaxed, and a smile creased his face. “So now you buy laptop?”

  Starke shook his head. “I’ve got your card. When I’m ready, I’ll be back. Promise.”

  Samani extended a hand, so Starke shook it. The owner held the handshake a beat too long before leaning across the counter. He lowered his voice: “Tell me, please. The lady’s in tro
uble?”

  “Thank you again, Mr. Samani,” Starke said, extracting his hand. “You have a great day.”

  Back in the Vic, he cracked open a window to let the radiant heat escape. The sun was well up now, hot as hell. The first beads of sweat were rising when he picked up the manila envelope, opened the clasp, and let the Dwyers’ marital promise tumble into his open palm. It was hard and unscratched, and he could tell right away it was, at best, 12 karat gold.

  11

  These were the roughest times. Weekday mornings. Chloe at school. Their air-conditioned house as closed and airless as a confessional. Home alone with little to do except ignore the answering machine filling with calls from well-meaning staffers from the company and the foundation, enterprising reporters, and the few friends who’d heard the news. Bunkered in, Shelby knew she’d be prey to her demons.

  And so, almost against her will, she found herself creaking down the hall toward her office. There was no logic to her caution, since she was alone, but she walked as quietly as she could, avoiding the squeaky floorboard on the hallway’s right side, lifting while turning the doorknob. She twisted the overhead light’s dimmer knob on the left and stepped into her office.

  It was awake.

  Chloe usually shut down the computer when she signed off each night, or at least left it in sleep mode. Shelby had asked her to do that, for so many reasons. But this time she’d left it on after checking her Facebook account before school. The Windows desktop glowed bright and inviting across the room. The icon for its web browser stood out like a beacon.

  No, she thought, even as her feet moved, even as she closed the distance between herself and the portal into that other world, a world where things had gone so wrong, a world from which she’d fled numb and horrified and determined never to return. She hadn’t even been tempted. But this time, she was going in for a different reason.

  No, no, no, no, no.

  She lightly touched the back of the desk chair, but it spun halfway around, offering her a seat. The keyboard and mouse were an arm’s length away. She stepped closer, watching her right hand move toward it like something driven by instinct, something apart from her body and the controlling influence of her mind. Her fingertips found the smooth back of the mouse, and she watched her hand settle over it like a nesting bird. The device disappeared into her palm, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

  She rolled it around the mouse pad without looking at the screen. It felt different than the Apple she’d loved, the one she’d imagined more than once as an electronic version of Eve’s forbidden fruit. When she finally looked at the screen, the pointer was hovering above the browser icon. Coincidence? Fate? Her right index finger moved to the mouse’s clicker, and she felt a rush-prickle of anticipation—still, even after everything.

  She clicked once, highlighting the icon. A second click would bring it alive. A second click would start her down a path. She knew where it would lead, needed it to take her there. Back to him.

  No!

  Shelby yanked her hand back, a reaction almost like a spasm. For a moment she wondered if she’d been shocked, if a thunderbolt of current had been hurled from some other realm, traveled though the wires, into the computer, into her fingertips. Her heart pounded in hammer-like bursts.

  She backed away from the computer, one step, another. Then she stopped, realizing how suddenly alive she felt, how vital life seems when every nerve is sandpapered raw and the body feels everything, how nothing else is quite so elemental, so primitive and scary and thrilling.

  No!

  Shelby could still hear the nagging voice in her head as she sat back down and touched the mouse again. Her hand shook. The room started to spin. She pushed herself away from the desk and stood, unsteady. Not now, she thought. Too soon. If she did this, she knew she’d need to be ready.

  12

  Why Shelby Dwyer’s life diverged from his, Starke couldn’t say, even if he knew precisely when. They were both homegrown in Los Colmas, both ambitious, and both very much infatuated with one another, if only for one summer. If every man forever carries the mark of his first love, for him it was Shelby, whose lithe young body he’d committed to memory. But that was two lifetimes ago, hers and his, and now he was standing across the street from one of the most spectacular residences in San Bernardino County. Shelby’s house was twice the size of his entire apartment building, and it had never been more clear to him that they’d taken different roads. She’d sped away from that summer and ended up here. Him? Just an unpleasant bit of roadkill along the way, and he knew better than most the kind of cold calculations Shelby had probably made to get where she wanted to go.

  But now, suddenly, he was driving.

  He’d spent much of the morning talking to the Dwyers’ neighbors, if people who lived behind the electronic gates of adjoining mansions could be considered “neighbors.” He’d known it would be a waste of time—this wasn’t the kind of street where lives intersect during block parties and yard sales—but with Kerrigan riding his ass, he was making sure to cover every base as quickly as possible.

  He flipped open his notebook. Two people had mentioned Craig DeMott, fourteen Via Cumbre. You should talk to Craig, both had said. He seemed to know Paul.

  Starke walked a few gates down and found the massive wrought-iron barrier between fourteen Via Cumbre and the lesser world. A small keypad and an intercom stood to his left on a matching iron post. He buzzed, and a woman’s voice came back: “Yes?”

  “Good morning, ma’am. I’m Detective Ron Starke from the Los Colmas Police. I’m hoping to speak for a few minutes with a Craig DeMott. Do I have the right address?”

  “Let me see if he’s in,” the voice said.

  Seconds later, Starke heard a subtle click in the bushes to his right. The massive gate rumbled slowly sideways along its metal track. “Thank you,” he said, but no answer came back. He stepped onto the yellow brick driveway and started the long walk toward the main house, but was met halfway by an alpha male in tailored golf slacks and a Ralph Lauren polo. He looked to be about sixty, judging by his silver hair, but with squared shoulders and a broad, powerful chest. Definitely military, Starke thought, probably one of the academies. Grip like a vise, set jaw, no smile.

  “I’m Craig DeMott,” he said.

  “Starke. Ron Starke.”

  “You know, you’re the third cop to stop by since Paul went missing. Already told the others what I know.”

  Starke nodded. “But now—I’m assuming you’ve heard today’s news about Mr. Dwyer? It’s not just a missing persons case anymore.”

  DeMott nodded. “Damned shame.”

  Starke liked to stay as low-profile as possible when working a case, and he was concerned that anyone driving past DeMott’s driveway, including Shelby, could see them. “Would you prefer to talk inside, Mr. DeMott?”

  DeMott made no move toward the house. “You should know in advance that I don’t claim to know Paul, or his family, all that well. So I want to be clear on that.”

  Starke slipped his small notebook from inside his jacket pocket and jotted DeMott’s name and address on a fresh page. “That’s fine, sir. Anything you can tell me might be helpful to—”

  “And I debated whether to even say anything, because it was one conversation months ago, and there was some single-malt Scotch involved, and God only knows if it was the liquor talking, or if there was really something going on. I didn’t say anything to the other cops, but that was before. Now, I think I should say something.”

  “About?”

  “I know it was on Paul’s mind at the time, and I figured I should at least mention it, just in case.”

  “That’s fine. Sure you wouldn’t rather talk inside?”

  Again, DeMott stood his ground. This was not someone who wasted time. “Last winter, during the holidays, we had a little drop-by for some of the people on the street. Just dessert and drinks, egg nog, like that. Adults only, nothing fancy. One of those holiday social thi
ngs my wife thinks are important.”

  Starke scribbled the relevant details without looking at the notebook, making sure to never lose eye contact.

  “I’d played golf with Paul a couple of times—my bank financed a couple of his projects—so we weren’t exactly strangers. And our wives have met at charity events. But it was the first time they’d been to our house. I’ve still never been over there. I’m pretty sure our little holiday party was the only time I ever met his wife. Shelby, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you met her, detective?”

  “I have,” Starke said.

  “Beautiful woman. Really something.”

  For the first time, DeMott was dogpaddling a bit, allowing himself to linger on a thought rather than plowing relentlessly forward. Shelby had that effect on men.

  “The evening went well, and much later than I imagined it would. People came and went. Paul and his wife stayed quite a while. There was a little tension there, you could tell, just they way he was talking to her, about her.”

  “Tension?”

  “Little things he said. Asides. That’s none of my business, of course. After a while, the wives knotted up to talk. The men, maybe six of us, swapped lies till about ten. At one point, Paul and I were at the bar by ourselves. I was pouring him another drink.”

  Starke stopped writing. “Other people have told me Mr. Dwyer drank a fair amount.”

  “Couldn’t say. But that night, the Macallan definitely loosened his tongue. Maybe it was something that was building up over time, or maybe just something that happened that day. I just can’t say. But it was obviously on his mind.”

  “What was that?” Starke asked.

  “Typical stuff for an underserviced man his age. I’m guessing he’s early fifties? She seems quite a bit younger. I’ve been there, detective. You’ll see. A man gets to a certain age, he feels it all slipping away from him. And Paul was in the thick of it. So he was muttering about his wife. Things were dead in bed. She’d married him for his checkbook. All the standard clichés. But he also mentioned that maybe there was someone else in her life. Just a gut feeling. He said, ‘Women change when it’s Big Love. They can’t hide it.’”