Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  Starke waited for more. The possibility was intriguing, given what he already knew about the Dwyer marriage. Definitely something he’d want to pursue. He knew Shelby was still trying to give him half-truths and spun sugar at this point; he was convinced she was holding something back. But a drunk husband’s confided hunch to someone he barely knew? It wasn’t much to go on.

  “Did Mr. Dwyer say specifically why he suspected her?” Starke said at last. “Behavioral changes? Suspicious travel or expenses? Telephone records? That sort of thing?”

  DeMott shook his head. “It was just a moment. It came and went. Never gave it another thought until Paul went missing. Then yesterday, when I heard he’d turned up dead, and that someone may have killed him… like you said, you never know what might be helpful. I debated whether to mention it to the other officers, but kept it to myself. Then you showed up, and I thought, ‘It’s the right thing to do. I’ll get it off my chest and let the chips fall where they may.’”

  “I appreciate that.” Starke closed his notebook. “Have you or your wife noticed anything that might support the idea that Mrs. Dwyer had a relationship with someone outside of her marriage? Cars coming or going at odd hours while Mr. Dwyer was away? Anything like that?”

  “Not me. I could ask Bebe.”

  Starke waited again for DeMott to turn toward the house. But he did not. “Bebe’s your wife?”

  “She’s home most days, but usually out by the pool in back. She’s never mentioned anything like that, but I can ask her. Do you have a card, Detective—?”

  “Starke.” He fished a business card from his wallet and handed it over after writing his cell number on the back. “Please do call if you remember anything else you think might be helpful. And if your wife has anything to add, I’ll be happy to talk to her as well.”

  DeMott crushed Starke’s hand again. “Keep my name out of the paperwork, Detective. I don’t want to come off like a snitch in this, since it may be nothing. I just thought it might be another piece of the puzzle.”

  “Our conversation will be part of my murder book—that’s my case file—but that’s not public record,” Starke said. “You shouldn’t have any problems with the media or anything like that.”

  “Sure as hell don’t need that aggravation.”

  They shook hands again. Starke was turning away when DeMott said: “What’s her story, anyway?”

  “Whose?”

  “Paul’s wife,” DeMott said, dogpaddling still. “What’s her story?”

  “I’m not quite sure what you mean, Mr. DeMott.”

  “She’s just….” The neighbor glanced at the Dwyer house across the street. “Well, you’ve met her. You know.”

  “She’s an attractive woman,” Starke said. He was tempted to add, “And single!” but swallowed his sarcasm. Now he was curious about the wife by the pool, the state of the DeMott marriage, the sort of idle amusements that went on among the wealthy denizens of this exclusive hilltop, and just how badly the man standing in front of him coveted his neighbor’s wife.

  Starke looked at his watch. He wanted to schedule an interview with one of Dwyer’s business partners in LA, and had at least two more stops in the neighborhood before he could do that. Plus, Eckel had called twice from the morgue, but hung up both times without leaving a message.

  “Thank you, Mr. DeMott. I’ll be in touch,” Starke said, and with that he headed back down Craig DeMott’s yellow brick drive.

  13

  Starke pushed into the gloom of his one-bedroom cave. Home for the past two years, it still looked like a squatter’s tenement.

  On the way to the fridge, he glanced at the microwave clock—11:43 p.m. It reminded him how little he’d been able to accomplish that day. He’d be back at it early tomorrow, because he’d promised Eckel he’d swing by before heading into LA.

  He brought a Newcastle into bed with him, drinking half of it before logging into his iPad. Someday he’d buy himself a desk and a chair, if only to save his spine. For now he propped both pillows behind his back and leaned against the wall where he’d affixed the only piece of art in his apartment—a clipping of a famous Peter Steiner cartoon from The New Yorker. One dog seated at a computer is explaining to a four-legged friend: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  His nightly online foray had been his unvarying routine for more than a year. First stop: The website of the San Bernardino Sun. He scanned the updated headlines and read any local stories that might be relevant to his cases. The identification of Dwyer’s body was the lead local story, as he’d expected, but there were no surprises in it. It was accompanied by the corporate-issued head shot of Dwyer looking like a silvered James Bond. Starke scanned other headlines. There’d been a 2:00 a.m. drive-by outside the city’s most notorious gentleman’s club, Pink Velvet; six wounded. A family in Redlands was looking for its reticulated python, Wiggles, who’d gone missing. A story headlined “Local company donates funds for city park” featured a grip-and-grin photo of Los Colmas City Manager Doug Buckley accepting an oversized check from the president of the city’s favored public-works contractor, Esparza & Sons Excavation and Construction.

  A headline under the statewide news tab caught Starke’s eye, mostly because it was accompanied by a grainy video screen grab that looked like something out of Abu Ghraib prison. The headline beside the image of a hooded figure read: “San Diego torture-death video linked to Mexican cartel.”

  Starke felt like he’d read the story before, but it was an easy mistake to make, a varation on a theme. Cartel violence—the brutal, animal kind common among men operating without fear of consequence—was spilling across the US border in bloody spasms. Just last month, acting on a tip, DEA agents broke open a fresh concrete pad behind one of the nondescript warehouses in Otay Mesa, the industrial area of southern San Diego where hundreds of similar warehouses are clustered along the Mexican border. Buried four feet below were the decomposing bodies of eight young men, each with a single bullet hole in the back of the head.

  “Tunnel rats,” the lead investigator had said, and insiders knew what that meant.

  The DEA team had concluded as much based on the calluses on the victims’ hands and the dirt beneath their fingernails, and because agents later found the so-called “supertunnel” they’d spent their final months digging. It was more than a half-mile long and stretched from inside the Otey Mesa warehouse, beneath the US-Mexico border, and into a similar warehouse in Garita de Otay, an industrial neighborhood in northern Tijuana. The tunnel’s sophisticated infrastructure—ventilation ducts, electric lights, a rail system for the easy conveyance of cargo—was a hallmark of El Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa operation. But the grunt labor to build those elaborate projects came from Tijuana’s poorest neighborhoods, where Guzman’s men recruited strong but desperate boys, always thin and narrow-shouldered, with promises of steady work. The recruits quickly found themselves enslaved by gun-toting goons whose job was to ensure completion of yet another underground drug pipeline. The diggers were fed and housed for months, unable to leave but paid generously, always in cash. But they never saw sunshine again once the digging began, and when the job was done and their captors returned their bodies to the same dirt through which they’d burrowed, their accumulated cash was simply collected from their locker within the warehouse and returned to the same stash from which it had come.

  A popular narcocorrido in steady rotation on Tijuana radio stations paid tribute to the young men lured into the cartel’s tunnels. The English translation of the ballad’s title: “The Gopher Boys.”

  Lately, the criminal organization had been waging war with a competing cartel, and had taken a page straight out of the ISIS reign-of-terror playbook: videotaping its revenge attacks and posting them to the Internet. Starke clicked on the latest headline and the story filled his screen.

  A source claiming to be with the Sinaloa group had sent a San Diego TV station a link to a ninety-minute videotape showing the gruesome nail-gu
n torture of a suspected snitch. The station had dutifully edited that tape into twelve seconds of teasing highlights, including the hooded figure’s desperate plea for his family as the nail gun was leveled, finally, at the base of his skull. The Action News Team anchor had delivered the video to the station’s viewers with an appropriate degree of civilized outrage and a solemn warning that “even the select contents of this tape are disturbing.” He noted that the unedited original had been turned over to authorities, of course, but also noted that a copy of it was available in its entirety on the station’s website. Now both the edited and unedited versions were ricocheting around the Internet like a cat on a Roomba, and the station’s web traffic was soaring, and the aficionados of righteous online snuff porn were sated for another day.

  On Twitter, #sinaloathugs was trending.

  Starke marveled that all this was unfolding just a hundred miles from Los Colmas, but resisted the urge to dwell too long on the thought. He had plenty of problems of his own. He scanned the sports headlines, skipped to Dilbert, read his horoscope (“Romantic notions can cloud your thinking. See the whole person, not just the one you want to see.”), then checked the weather. Tomorrow’s expected high: ninety-three. Four percent humidity. Steady westerly wind moving through the San Gabriel passes from Nevada desert. Fire danger: high.

  Next stop: Netflix. He checked the offerings. Too tired to watch anything now, but he felt another binge coming on.

  Last stop: the NSA Room. His guilty pleasure. It was a poor man’s Ashley Madison—no registration or fees required, no chance of exposure by malevolent hackers—an online sexual swap meet of webcam wankers, one-timers and fuck buddies, friends-with-benefits, and artlessly posted crotch pics; a teeming, twenty-four-hour parade of needy people open to adventure and the sometimes peculiar fantasies of strangers. A fair number of them, he knew, were straight-up hookers. A lurker among the crazies, he pulled down the bookmarks in his web browser and clicked on the link, then typed in his username—DirtyHarry.

  He’d long ago forgiven himself for this odd indulgence. Lonely people deserved a little latitude in life, he figured, and there were far more destructive ways to cope with loneliness than this kind of virtual voyeurism. Online, as an avatar moving anonymously through the “casual encounters” party rooms, he’d met countless women who seemed eager to indulge him, or anyone, as long as their fantasies were indulged in kind. Some women just described themselves and their fantasies in their postings. Others offered pictures. He enjoyed the game. He’d communicate with the ones who seemed interesting, just to see where things went. Sometimes they’d play roles. Sometimes they’d just talk, messaging back and forth with no sex play at all. With no strings attached, as the NSA name implied, there were none of the messy entanglements of real-world relationships. The ground rules were clear. No pressure. No pain. Win-win.

  It was all he had for now.

  Starke finished the Newcastle, set the empty bottle on the floor beside his mattress, and began scanning the bios. He opened one with the subject line “BBW looking for threesome!!!” There was a frontal shoulder-to-navel photo showing two asymmetrical breasts squeezed together by hands with bright red fingernails.

  “I’m cute but 25# overweight,” she’d written. “I’d love 2 meet a couple or 2 guys for regualr get togetherz. No strings just fun. I’m 5’6”, 155, long brown hair that i love pulled, 38DD for reals.”

  Starke moved on. She sounded like a scam, or a dude, or a pro, or a porn-site bot. Besides, he had no interest in actually getting together. The only posts he responded to were the ones where the poster was interested in having a conversation. That’s what he wanted most, the contact.

  The beer had left him a little light-headed. He looked at the clock again: 1:42 now. When was the last time he’d eaten?

  14

  “You’re the cop, right?”

  Starke glanced over at his father in the Vic’s passenger seat, then at the dashboard clock. Just past 2:00 a.m. With the help of a night charge nurse accustomed to their eccentricities, he’d coaxed Tommy Starke out of bed with the promise of carne asada, signed him out, and together they made their escape from Foothill Village. His father was wearing only pajama bottoms, a Cal Poly Pomona T-shirt, his “No Spin Zone” ball cap, and the flip-flops he wore on shower days, but Starke knew it was the only time they were likely to have together in the coming week.

  Tommy Starke’s memories flared bright at times, but in unpredictable ways. Most of them remained tangled and lost somewhere in his eroded neural wiring. They’d had this same conversation, more or less, a thousand times, and probably would have it a thousand more.

  “That’s right, Dad. Los Colmas PD. Just like you. Detective now.”

  “Detective? No shit?”

  Starke steered into a discount-store lot. Every local night-shift patrol cop knew their favorite food truck would be parked there between midnight and seven o’clock. Sure enough, two cruisers were idling alongside the hand-painted El Burrito Rodeo. The black-and-whites sat amid a harum-scarum collection of street-racing rice burners, rocking low-riders, and bored Uber drivers waiting for drunken passengers trying to sober up with tacos el pastor after the nightclubs closed. Not far away, a driver clutching his warm, tinfoiled prize climbed into the cab of a massive concrete mixer. This time of night, El Burrito Rodeo was the great equalizer.

  “I was a cop,” his dad said.

  Starke reached over to pat his father’s knee. “One of the best.”

  Before getting out to order, Starke set the Vic’s door locks so his father couldn’t climb out and wander. Foothill Village insisted he wear an electronic ankle bracelet so he wouldn’t stray beyond the Alzheimer’s unit. Its pinpoint LED blinked in the footwell of the passenger seat every five seconds, casting his father’s flip-flopped feet in a pale red glow.

  “Wait right here,” he said, looking Tommy straight in the eye. “I’ll be over there at the food truck, getting our burritos. You can watch me the whole time.”

  “Burritos?”

  “You like them, Dad.”

  “Sounds Mexican.”

  “Carne asada. Trust me on this.”

  His father shrugged. “Need help?”

  “I got this. But you stay here, OK?”

  Starke stood backward in the line, facing the car in which his father was captive. For most of the time, Tommy Starke surveyed the dark parking lot with a cop’s wary eye. Once he appeared to test the car door. Unable to open it, he seemed to content himself with exploring the swivel-mounted laptop and his walkie-talkie. Starke had moved the shotgun into the trunk for exactly that reason.

  By the time he climbed back in, juggling the hot burritos, the old man’s eyes were fixed on the bulbous concrete truck parked about thirty yards away. Its mixing cylinder spun slowly, for the moment the only thing moving in the parking lot. Starke set the food on the dash, handed his father a wad of paper napkins, then climbed out again to retrieve the two Cokes he’d set on the roof.

  “What’s that smell?” Tommy Starke asked.

  “Carne asada. You like it.”

  “Smells pretty good.”

  “Hungry?”

  His father nodded. Starke peeled some of the foil back from the top of one burrito, wrapped the bottom in a few napkins so it wouldn’t burn his father’s fingers, and handed it to him. “It’s a little hot, but you should be OK. Just don’t eat too fast.”

  Tommy Starke stared at the fragrant beef bomb, holding it awkwardly, uncertain.

  “You eat these with your hands, Dad. Just hold it by the silver part and go for it.”

  His father took a tentative bite, mostly tortilla from the burrito’s top fold, and chewed slowly.

  “Doesn’t taste like much,” he said.

  “Keep going. But the middle stuff’s hot. Let it cool a while.”

  Starke unwrapped his own burrito and took a small bite, mostly to let the molton contents vent. His father watched, doing the same. Steam rose and disappeared i
n the long, salsa-scented silence. They watched the cement truck’s bulbous mixing cylinder in the streetlit parking lot.

  “Esparza,” his father said.

  Starke looked at him, then followed his gaze to the cement truck. As the cylinder spun, the construction company’s name and logo, emblazoned on the side, kept flashing past: “Esparza & Sons Excavation and Construction.” Their equipment was so common on local roads during the ongoing construction boom that it just seemed like part of the landscape.

  “Lot of houses going up around here, Dad. You ever imagine Los Colmas would be a suburb of LA? Crazy.”

  “Rafael Esparza,” his father said.

  Starke bit into his burrito and wondered what synaptic connection was taking place inside his father’s head. He took another bite. “What about him, Dad?”

  “He was dirty.”

  Starke stopped chewing and set the burrito on the dash. His father was glaring at the cement truck.

  “Why do you say that?”

  Tommy Starke stared ahead, unblinking. Then, suddenly, he looked down at his burrito, as if seeing it for the first time.

  “What’s this?”

  “Carne asada burrito, Dad. But what do you know about Rafael Esparza?”

  His father sniffed his burrito. “Smells really good.”

  The moment was gone, but Starke tried once more. “You know something about Rafael Esparza, Dad?”

  “Who?”

  Starke pointed at the truck, wondering again how deep that particular rabbit hole might go. Paul Dwyer did business with the Esparzas for years, through two generations of the family. “You seemed to know something about the guy whose name is on that cement truck,” he said.