Starke wasn’t sure where Barbaric was headed with this, but he was enjoying the ride. “You sound like a big fan.”
“I’m more of a working breeds guy,” he said. “Like, you know, a border collie can practically run your whole ranch for you.”
“Uh-huh.”
Barbaric seemed to stall, apparently so deep into his metaphor that he’d gotten lost. Maybe he was tired after a grueling eight hours of video slinging.
“And people who collect old computer stuff?” Starke prompted.
Barbaric reengaged. “Same people that own shih tzus. At least the same type. Definitely not my type.”
“So,” Starke said, making a stab at coherence, “to you, computers are like border collies?”
“Exactly,” Barbaric said.
“Better explain that to me.”
“They’re working breeds. They can run your whole ranch. Collectors? I mean, if you want one just to look at, well, what’s the point?”
Man, Starke thought, that was a lot of work. He hesitated before asking another question, wondering if there was enough time for another answer during the ride back to Barbaric’s inherited house. He took a chance.
“Think there’s a way you could hook me into that network of people?”
“Collectors, you mean?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
Starke steered onto Barbaric’s street and pulled into the driveway behind the crippled Datsun. He turned off the engine. “To see if anybody around here might be into that. There can’t be that many of them. It could be important to this case I’m working on.”
“Do I get another hundred bucks?”
Starke sighed. He was running out of options. “Tell you what. You find me some people around here who collect old computer stuff, I’ll get you another hundred. This is coming straight out of my pocket, but I’ll pay it if you get me some names.”
“Deal.” Barbaric opened the Vic’s door.
“Local names,” Starke clarified. “Southern California.”
“I like this,” Barbaric said. “I’m a hunting breed.”
“You still got the card I gave you with my numbers?”
Barbaric patted his pants pocket. Starke could hear a hoarse and strangled rowf-rowfing from inside the house. “Your dad’s pug?”
Barbaric slammed the car door, but he bent down and peered through the closed window. He rolled his eyes and mouthed the words, “Toy. Fucking. Breed.”
33
Suddenly, it was just the two of them.
Shelby and Chloe had been the center of attention from the moment they awoke Wednesday morning until ten minutes ago, when they bid goodnight to the last of those who stopped by Los Colmas Country Club after Paul’s funeral. Some brought food, even though Shelby had arranged a buffet, and most stayed through the afternoon and into the early evening. A few friends asked to speak, and Shelby had been grateful when the affair became an impromptu, good-natured roast. The stories about Paul were funny, sad, wistful. Skip Bronson, the company CFO, lampooned her husband’s inability to relax on the golf course. “He played like he drove—fast and always looking to pass whoever was ahead of him. Think NASCAR, but with golf carts.” A long-time plumbing contractor recalled Paul’s hypervigilant punctuality and his unwillingness to wear a hardhat at construction sites “so he wouldn’t mess up his Conway Twitty hair.” His long-time corporate executive assistant, Darla, made much of his penchant for loud socks. Shelby was glad Chloe got a glimpse into the man whose business-world persona she seldom saw.
But then it was over, and the last guests gone, and the leftover food packaged and dispatched to the local food bank, as Shelby had asked. Talked out, they drove home mostly in silence. At one point, Shelby brought up the young man Chloe had hugged in church, and who later introduced himself in the reception line. “So that Mario guy,” she said. “Is that a thing?”
Chloe didn’t answer. By then her daughter was asleep, or at least pretending to be, and remained so until Shelby arrived at the house. She pushed the remote control button on the car’s rearview mirror. The iron gate at the base of the driveway began to slide out of the way.
“OK, kiddo, you awake?” Shelby asked.
“Mmm.”
“We’re home.”
“’Kay.”
Shelby stopped after passing through the gate, watching in her mirror to make sure it closed behind her. The Jag’s brights lit the entire front of the house as the car moved up the drive, then slowly focused down to bright pinpoints as she parked facing the retaining wall that bordered the parking spots, to the left of Paul’s black Benz. The interior of the house was already lit, thanks to the sophisticated electronic systems that monitored temperature, light, and moisture, and constantly adjusted them to within the comfort range Paul had specified. She keyed a code into her smartphone’s home security app, deactivating the house’s alarm system. With all she had to carry inside, she didn’t want to be fussing with the keypad beside the front door. She killed the headlights and then the engine.
Chloe opened her door, and the car’s dome light blinked on.
“Don’t forget the stuff in the backseat,” Shelby said. She opened her door, folded her own seat forward, and began collecting the boxes of sympathy notes and personal mementos that people had brought for her and Chloe, things they felt Paul would have wanted them to have. A nine iron borrowed months before but never returned. The photograph of the three of them taken during a ski trip to Whistler. He’d kept it on the credenza behind his desk, and Darla hadn’t wanted it to get boxed up and forgotten with the rest of his office stuff. His custom plastic name badge from the Los Colmas Breakfast Club, the goofy, all-male fellowship organization where Paul spent two Saturday mornings a month listening to the latest Viagra jokes and watching some of the city’s most respectable citizens perform skits in grass skirts and coconut-shell bras.
“Mom, check this out,” Chloe said. “Dad’s car.”
Shelby put down the armload of stuff and circled around to the other side of the Jag, where Chloe was bent down to eye level with the hood of Paul’s Mercedes. It hadn’t been moved for more than three weeks.
“I hadn’t noticed this before,” Chloe said. “Is the air really bad lately or something?”
Shelby bent down as well. “What?”
Chloe swiped a fingertip across the Benz’s hood, leaving a dark trail. Shelby examined her daughter’s fingertip, which was smudged with the fine gray-white dust that had settled evenly on the parked car’s flat surfaces. She swiped a finger across the white hood of her own car, and it came away with the same smudge.
“I guess I didn’t notice it on my car, since it’s so light. But yeah, must be bad lately, or—” Then she remembered. “Oh, you know what? There’s a wildfire over toward Gorgonio. Started yesterday. Heard it on the news. I bet it’s ash.”
“Great,” Chloe said. “Lung cancer.”
“We’ll be fine inside.” Shelby cocked her head toward the Jag’s back seat. “Make sure you get everything. I want to go through it all tomorrow.”
The western sky was oddly bright, but Shelby was grateful for the recessed lights that lit the Tavertine stone of their front walk. Her arms were full and she didn’t want to stumble in the dark.
“Mom?” Chloe said from just behind her.
“What, baby?”
“I don’t know…. Listening to everybody today, hearing all those stories about what a swell guy Dad was, didn’t you just want to get up there and tell the rest of the story? Maybe he was all those things, but he was a lot of other things, too.”
“Yes, he was.”
“So?”
“It was a memorial service, Chloe, not a trial.”
“But they made him sound like such a saint. Didn’t you want to tell them about the rest of it, the crap he put us through, about what happened last summer?”
Shelby groped for an answer. Paul had walked away from that horror show on their kitchen floor a
nd never mentioned it again. Only Shelby and Chloe knew. When they reached the front door, Shelby turned to face her daughter. “It’s not up to us, or anybody else, to judge him now.”
Chloe studied her eyes. “That’s what you were talking about after Mass.”
“What’s that?”
“When you were talking about forgiveness. How you hope God will bear with you, because you’re not ready to forgive. You weren’t talking about forgiving whoever killed Dad. You were talking about Dad.”
She was partly right. “I was talking about both, I guess.”
“I knew that.”
“You’re the only one who does.” Shelby leaned closer and kissed her daughter’s forehead. “And no one else ever needs to know.”
“I don’t get why are you’re protecting him like that.”
“I’m not protecting him, baby,” she said. “See, whoever killed him…. There’s no point in confusing things. Dad was murdered, and whoever did it is still out there. It’s important to find that person. But if people thought you or I might have tried to kill him, because of what happened, they’d waste a lot of time and ask a lot of questions that don’t really matter. That’s why I want to let it be. Let God judge him, and let the police do their job. That’ll be the best thing.”
Shelby was suddenly conscious of how long they’d been standing at the front door, exposed. He could be watching. She fumbled for the front door key on her key ring. When she found it, she pushed it into the heavy-duty backup deadbolt and stepped into the wide foyer. She set her armload of stuff on a table beneath the hall mirror, and closed the door as quickly as she could. Shelby shook off a disoriented feeling as she did.
She turned the internal lock and gave the door a reassuring tug. She slid the external deadbolt home and set the alarm for good measure. When she turned around again, the same vague feeling settled in. The house seemed emptier, but she couldn’t say why.
34
Wednesday must have been a big day at Suds-Your-Duds, because Starke’s apartment felt more like an armpit than usual as he stepped through the door and into a wall of warm, damp air from the downstairs laundromat. He set his shoulder holster, shield wallet, notebook, and DVD of Wayne’s World on the folding table where he ate cereal and takeout. He hung his jacket on the back of the single folding chair.
Someday he’d buy stuff to replace the furniture he’d driven back up to Rosaleen’s parents in Ojai the week after they buried her. Most of it was theirs to begin with, but that wasn’t why he wanted it gone. It was just a constant reminder of her, of their lives together and what happened, and he didn’t need that.
The red light on his answering machine blinked its own language—two quick flashes, followed by a pause. Two messages. Who’d call him here, and not on his cell?
He grabbed a Newcastle from the fridge and rummaged through a disorganized drawer containing his entire collection of kitchen utensils—four forks, three spoons, one wood-handled steak knife, one German chef’s knife, a butter knife, a plastic spatula, and the extra bottle opener he’d gotten for seventy-nine cents from the nearby “Quicker Liquor” store. He opened the bottle and finished half of the ale, then jabbed the “play” button.
“Let’s do a quick debrief Thursday morning.”
Kerrigan. No hello. No pleasantries. No chit-chat. Just straight to it.
“I’ll be in at seven,” she said. “Say, seven thirty? Call my cell if there’s an issue. Otherwise, see you then.”
Perfect. Kerrigan was asking for a progress report, but things were getting more and more complicated. He’d have to explain to her how he’d identified a long list of potential suspects. She might even compliment him on his diligent work. But she’d also realize they were probably weeks away, at least, from any likely breaks. She’d realize her police department might look slow and plodding. She’d imagine the media glare getting hotter as the investigation dragged on. Plus, she’d probably come back from the funeral Mass with a head full of theories that he’d have to run down, wasting more time.
Clearly, with a seven thirty start like that, his Thursday was going to suck. He hit the “erase” button with enough force that the entire message machine slid several inches across the kitchen counter.
The second message began with an apparently confused silence. Then:
“This is Richard Holywell returning your call. Ah, I don’t recognize your name, and you didn’t leave much of a message, so I’m not sure what you were calling about. But you apparently have my number.”
Starke’s stomach clenched. It was the return call he’d been anticipating, and dreading. Kerrigan’s ex.
The message he’d left on Holywell’s machine was cryptic. Just a first name, his home number, and a request for a call back. He had no idea whether Holywell and Kerrigan were still in touch, and he’d sweated the possibility that Holywell would notice the San Bernardino area code and call his ex-wife to ask if she knew a “Ron” from out this way who was trying to get in touch with him.
He also wasn’t sure exactly what he thought a conversation with Holywell might accomplish. There was a bit of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” going on, and he wondered if the bitter Holywell might spew some bile about Kerrigan that could come in handy if she wanted to edge him out of the department. But he could imagine how Kerrigan might use that against him if she ever got wind of it. So his earlier call to the Santa Monica number wasn’t exactly part of a plan, more like a no-huddle Hail Mary pass with the clock winding down.
Now he was having serious second thoughts.
Starke retrieved Holywell’s number from the file of Kerrigan’s divorce papers and picked up his cordless home phone. He set it immediately back down in its cradle. He picked it up again and walked over to the apartment’s single window and drained the rest of the ale. He pressed “talk” and heard the dial tone, then hung up.
What could this possibly accomplish? How was he even going to start the conversation? “Hello, your ex-wife got the job I was supposed to get, and she’s now trying to crush me like a bug. I hear you might have some dirt I could use against her.” Bottom line, that’s what it was. And it felt wrong. In all his years of public service, nearly two decades of handling everything from domestic brawls to gang members with guns, Starke had never once done anything to protect himself that wasn’t strictly by the book. He’d never once retaliated against anyone who’d tried to hurt him.
This felt different, though. Maybe it was paranoia, but this time his entire career—professional standing as well as personal reputation—was at stake, along with the unfulfilled ambitions of both his father and himself. This time, it was a fight against someone he didn’t understand, on any level. Given a chance to possibly defend himself, how could he not?
Because it felt wrong, he decided.
Then he picked up the phone and dialed. He was relieved when it kicked into voicemail again. He left his cell number and hung up.
35
Shelby had lived through a lot of wildfire seasons in Los Colmas, but she’d never seen anything like the gray-white ash that had accumulated on her kitchen windowsill by early Thursday morning as she stood there smoking and thinking. The light dusting of grit Chloe noticed on the hood of her father’s car the night before was now thick on every flat surface on her back patio. School had been canceled.
She stubbed out her cigarette and walked to the slider. Her eyes started to itch as soon as she opened it. Then she sneezed. She noticed, too, that the fronds of her towering twin palms were rustling in the opposite direction as the day before. The westerly Santa Anas had reversed themselves and cooled. The hot westerly wind was now blowing east, and blowing hard.
Back inside, she turned on the small flat-screen TV on her kitchen counter and tuned to an LA news station. The inland fire story dominated even there. The images were familiar—helicopter water drops, walls of flame, exhausted firefighters. A fire captain was telling a news crew that a wind shift in the past twenty-four hours had t
urned the blaze. “Riverside looks safe for now,” he said. “The leading edge now is to the east. We’re redeploying our resources as fast as we can.”
Shelby studied the fire graphic on her screen. The burn area was massive. If it was heading east, Los Colmas was squarely in its path. She made a list in her head, just in case they’d need to evacuate.
First, Chloe and Boz. That was her family now. Chloe would need some clothes and her school work; Boz would need a bag of food, his prescriptions, and his joint medicine. She looked across the kitchen floor, to where an untouched bowl of kibble sat next to his water bowl. Where was he, anyway?
Second, gather the family photo albums and DVD recordings, personal financial records, insurance papers—everything in the fireproof safe in Paul’s study just off the foyer. If she’d learned anything over the years of living in a wildfire zone, it was to put the important stuff in the car well in advance, just in case.
Third, reprogram the automatic lawn-watering system. They were set to water before dawn and after dark, because of the drought; Paul had taught her how to override the automatic program to turn the sprinklers on. Their property had a fair amount of defensible space, and leaving the water running guaranteed nothing, but Paul always said it couldn’t hurt to soak everything around the house.
No need to wake Chloe at this point. The fire was still a couple miles from Los Colmas, and the next twenty-four hours would determine whether they’d have to leave. She headed for Paul’s study. She could at least get the paperwork and family stuff into her car.
As she passed into the foyer, the vague sense of emptiness she’d felt the night before suddenly came clear. Where was “Flight”?
Since she bought it, the sculpture—all heavy metal, link chains, and sharp metal hooks from the killing machines at an Arkansas chicken plant, assembled into art—had sat on a side table in a space along the curved wall of the house’s grand entry hall. Because it was so unusual, guests usually noticed it more often than the other pieces in the foyer.
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