Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  53

  Starke had unleashed the media monster less than four hours before, and now here it sat, waiting to pounce. He eased the Vic along the street in front of Shelby Dwyer’s estate, steering between the six parked satellite trucks from television stations from as far away as LA, Palm Springs, and San Diego—cities where Dwyer Development had significant and usually controversial projects. He knew most were already here to cover the advancing wildfire. But once the webcam video of Dwyer’s murder was out there, news directors had redeployed their forces into “victim reax” mode, even if all they could get was a grab-and-go stand-up outside the gate of the Dwyer home. The on-scene reporter could always speculate about what might be happening inside. Even if the widow wouldn’t talk, what might she have to say about all this?

  The camera was always hungry. Feeding time was a frenzy.

  He didn’t want to stop, couldn’t afford being seen even on the periphery of the Dwyer case. But through the driveway gate as he passed, Starke saw both Shelby’s Jag and her late husband’s Benz parked just outside the home. He thought again of Shelby, trapped inside by the clamoring horde, the webcam video of her husband’s murder still ricocheting from satellite to home dish to TV screen in an endless, numbing loop. She’d seen it once, the night it happened. But had she seen it again on TV? Was it even possible she had not?

  Starke parked well down the block, and for the next few minutes watched the scene in his rearview mirror. He knew Shelby wouldn’t leave until they were all gone. She had no other choice. There was no point in waiting, so he dropped the gear shift into drive and started to pull away, sure in his gut that the endgame had begun.

  Then he noticed something in his mirror.

  54

  At the far end of the block, well beyond the media vultures gathering at Shelby Dwyer’s front gate, an unremarkable white Ford slowed, stopped, and angled backward into an open spot along the curb. Starke watched its arrival in his mirror with a mixture of dread and disbelief. He couldn’t be sure, but from a distance it looked like the city-issued car assigned to Kerrigan.

  He turned up the volume on the Vic’s scanner. The Los Colmas police communications channel was alive with logistical chatter about the evacuation that now seemed inevitable. Kerrigan had to be directing the operation, he knew, but her vehicle was a rolling command center bristling with antenna. She could do it all from her car.

  She had parked on the same side of the street at least a hundred yards away, as far north of Dwyer’s driveway gate as he was south. His main concern: Could she see him? Technically, he wasn’t violating the terms of his administrative leave by simply being here, but he doubted Kerrigan would see it that way if she found her lead detective parked along Dwyer’s street after she’d ordered him off the investigation. From where he was, with the media trucks crowding the street between them, there was little chance she’d notice him snugged in behind a bulky news van at the far end of the block. She’d be far more likely to spot him if he tried to drive away. Better to stay put and hope she didn’t drive right past him on her way out of the neighborhood.

  It was a standoff. He had no choice but to wait. But what was she doing here? She couldn’t possibly have had time to review his murder book, or follow the trail of electronic evidence to the CarbonCopy device still attached to Shelby’s computer in his office.

  Starke checked his watch. Just after noon.

  In his mirror, he could see Kerrigan sitting in her car, working her communications equipment, making no move to get out. From time to time, her voice crackled across his scanner. The chief was fully engaged, mustering their small department for a citywide evacuation, calling in off-duty officers, authorizing overtime. But she was also watching the Dwyer home, just like he was. He got the feeling she was waiting, too, maybe for the media circus to fold its tents and move on, or looking for a chance to slip past the clamoring reporters to get to Shelby on the other side.

  Starke shifted in his seat and adjusted his mirror, figuring he might be there awhile.

  55

  Shelby twirled the rod on the louvered blind beside her front door. The slats between the panes opened to the broad lawn and a nearly empty street just beyond her front gate.

  It was just before 2:00 p.m. She and Chloe had watched the abbreviated webcam video of Paul’s murder replayed on the noon newscasts, watched the frustrated field reporters feed their live stand-ups from in front of their grand estate, listened to them echo the no-comment-from-the-family story line one after the other. Then she’d waited, hoping the urgent need for on-scene fire coverage would divert their attention. Finally, it did. The last of the satellite news trucks was about to pull away.

  “They’ll be back, Mom.”

  “I know, baby.”

  Chloe stood at Shelby’s shoulder. Angry and confused, she’d packed a duffle bag, and it sat on the floor beside her. Her arms were crossed. “Can we go?”

  “We haven’t decided where, Chloe.”

  “Does it matter?”

  Shelby shook her head. “Not really.”

  Her daughter patted the overstuffed duffle. “Then let’s go. I can’t be here anymore. I’m not even sure I can be with you anymore.”

  Shelby tried not to react. She nodded to the duffle. “I’m afraid to ask what’s in there.”

  Chloe looked away.

  Shelby peeked through the blinds again. The last TV news truck was gone, but now there was something else, a dull white haze drifting over the entire neighborhood. The fire was getting closer. She was about to hustle Chloe out to the car when she noticed a lone figure walk up to the closed driveway gate. A woman. She carried some sort of flat panel, and shifted it beneath one arm as she reached for the intercom button. Shelby squinted through the smoke.

  Chloe was suddenly at Shelby’s shoulder. “Who’s that?”

  Shelby flinched at the sound of the chime. “That police chief.”

  “Just ignore her.”

  Shelby twisted the blinds shut. “But she knows we’re home. The cars—”

  “So?”

  “So—” Shelby’s lower lip began to tremble. She felt like something caught in a web. “So she’ll know we’re avoiding her.”

  “Why do you care?”

  The electronic chime sounded again, echoing through the foyer. Shelby turned to her daughter. “I think I’d better talk to her, baby.”

  “The fire, Mom? We have to go.”

  Shelby looked again. The police chief was back at the intercom keypad, but this time she appeared to be keying in a code. When she finished, the driveway gate began to roll slowly to the side.

  Time quickened. Shelby could hear blood pulsing in her ears. The woman was halfway up the driveway, and Shelby could see that the rectangular panel she was carrying was the flat screen of an iMac computer. Each step closer through the drifting smoke brought its details into sharper relief.

  Shelby turned to face her daughter and put a hand on each of Chloe’s shoulders. “Wait in the car.”

  “No.”

  “I said wait in the car, Chloe.”

  Her daughter again crossed her arms over her chest. “I said no.”

  “I need to talk to her alone.”

  “You said no more secrets.”

  “Baby, please.”

  Chloe turned and headed for the curving staircase that swept up to the bedrooms. “Fine. I forgot something anyway.”

  When the knock came a moment later—sharp, solid, unavoidable—Shelby was breathing like she’d just run a sprint.

  56

  Shelby had a dizzying moment of déjà vu as she swung open the door for the police chief. The first time they met on this doorstep, six days before, Kerrigan had come early in the morning, without warning or explanation, to bring the grim news Shelby already knew. That day, she’d driven right up to the house through the apparently open gate. Now, remembering, Shelby understood. The gate was pointless. The woman could come and go at will.

  “You did it aga
in,” she said.

  “What’s that, Mrs. Dwyer?”

  “Let yourself in. You know the gate code.”

  Kerrigan nodded. “It’s on file. May I come in?”

  Shelby eyed the computer in Kerrigan’s arms. “What for?”

  “I think you know.”

  Shelby crossed her arms and stood in the middle of the doorway. “You realize we’re being evacuated at the moment.”

  “Just a few questions, that’s all.”

  “Some other time.” Shelby began closing the door.

  Kerrigan nodded to the computer. “It’s all in here, you know.”

  Shelby marshaled every muscle in her face into an effort not to blink. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  Kerrigan smiled, a withering, condescending, don’t-patronize-me expression of raw power. “You recognize this machine, I assume?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “No? We have paperwork showing that you sold it the day after your husband disappeared. It took us a few days to find it, but when we did—”

  “I’m not going to talk about this now,” Shelby snapped. “And when I do, we’ll do it right, in a proper setting with my attorney present. Now please, let yourself out the same way you let yourself in. And don’t ever come onto my property again unless you have a warrant.”

  The police chief shifted the computer’s weight, and adjusted her grip on it. “I know what happened, Mrs. Dwyer,” she said. “There’s a ghost in your machine.”

  Shelby stared.

  “You know him, but you don’t even know his name. But you know he killed your husband, Mrs. Dwyer. You watched him do it, and that’s going to look pretty bad when the time comes to tell this story in court.”

  Shelby understood the art of the bluff. She searched for a tell in the police’s chief’s eyes but found none.

  “I don’t think so,” Shelby said.

  A weighted moment passed. When the police chief stepped forward, Shelby reflexively stepped back. The woman was just too close. Kerrigan took another step forward until she was standing on the doorstep. Her eyes never left Shelby’s, who retreated another step into the foyer. With one foot, Kerrigan closed the front door behind her. It shut with the absolute sound of heavy wood and high-end hardware.

  “He’s still out there, Mrs. Dwyer. The man who killed your husband. He knows we’ll find him, because it’s all in this machine. And now we have the machine. It’s just a matter of time before we follow the electronic trail right back to him. But right now you have a chance to help us. Help yourself. It starts with telling the truth. The district attorney understands the value of that. Judges and juries, too.”

  “You need to leave,” Shelby said. “Now.”

  “If I were you, I’d be worried less about leniency than about your situation right now. Because this guy, he knows something else, too. He knows you’re the only link between him and the murder. That’s not a safe position for you to be in, Mrs. Dwyer. You or your daughter. We both know what he’s capable of.”

  Without shifting her eyes from Shelby’s, Kerrigan took three steps to her left and set the computer down on the empty tabletop where an art piece once stood, the heavy sculpture now at the bottom of the backyard pool. There was something too familiar about the way this woman moved in this unfamiliar space.

  “I know what it’s like to be lonely, Mrs. Dwyer. To be tempted. To be seduced by a fantasy. I understand how things can happen that you never meant to happen. Really I do, and so will a jury. It’s the burden of women of a certain age and experience. We want to be understood. We’re tired of moving unloved through life, where every day we feel a little less, and a little less, until finally we stop feeling at all. That scares us. So we go looking for a little fun.”

  Kerrigan set one hand on the iMac. “You found someone you thought could give you what you needed.”

  Shelby stared at the computer, now certain the police chief knew about LoveSick, had read their online conversations. How else could she understand so clearly?

  “Someone,” the chief said, “who you thought would love you beyond space and time.”

  The hair on Shelby’s arms stood straight up. Those words. She’d heard them countless times from her secret online lover, the words he used each time they ended their sessions. Now they were coming from the mouth of someone else, someone she clearly didn’t know at all.

  Only one person understood her so well.

  “You’re him.” Shelby raised her voice and said it again. Screamed it. “God damn. You’re him!”

  Kerrigan’s expression didn’t change. Her face seemed frozen, hard, but softened by those almond eyes that dipped at the corners. She still looked like someone who Cared Deeply even as her right hand moved to the small of her back. When it returned, it was holding a gun.

  “Your husband hurt me,” Kerrigan said. “Like I’ve never been hurt before.”

  Shelby narrowed her eyes. “My husband?”

  “He made promises. He wanted me, not you. He told me so, and I believed him. So I left everything in LA—my marriage, my career, gave it all up to come here, to start over. With him.”

  “With him,” Shelby repeated.

  “He said he wanted us to be together,” Kerrigan said. “I believed him.”

  Shelby knew so little about Paul’s life away from home. That he’d bedded this powerful and attractive woman didn’t surprise her, or even that he’d whispered vague and insincere promises to her. She wasn’t surprised, either, that this woman let herself be seduced by his power and wealth. But how could Donna Kerrigan, or any woman smart enough to know better, actually buy his bullshit? What kind of desperate fool believes a man like Paul?

  “He’d never have left me,” she said. “Too complicated. Too expensive. You finally figured that out, and you decided to make him pay.”

  Kerrigan’s smile was full of contempt, the gun steady in her hand. “I decided,” she said, “to make you all pay.”

  57

  Too many coincidences, too many odd choices. Everything was starting to make a sickening sort of sense, even if Starke still wasn’t sure how it had all played out, or what exactly was happening at the moment.

  As soon as the driveway gate had rolled shut behind Kerrigan, he’d opened his car door and stepped out into the thin veil of smoke that descended over the hilltop street of exclusive homes as the wildfire advanced. The people who lived in the neighborhood’s four other houses already had been evacuated. From the streets below, the sounds of emergency equipment and crews rose in a desperate, hopeless clamor. At least two homes down there already were ablaze, and it wouldn’t be long before the flames and firefighting equipment blocked one of the two streets that led up to this higher ground.

  Starke moved quickly across the road and slid along the high wall of the Dwyer property, edging closer to the closed gate for a peek between the bars. When he leaned around the corner, he saw Kerrigan stepping through the massive home’s open front door carrying the single most compelling piece of evidence he’d found during his investigation of Paul Dwyer’s murder: Shelby’s computer. Then the door closed behind her.

  What the hell was happening?

  Standing now at the gate, he reached his right hand into his sports jacket for a reassuring touch, thinking now might be a good time to unsnap the strap of his shoulder holster. What he found—nothing—reminded him that he was, for the moment, a private citizen.

  He leaned around the wall for another look, but this time his knee brushed against something sharp and metallic. Spiked into the lush soil of the Dwyers’ perimeter plantings was a three-foot-high sign for KGT Protection—the same company that monitored 1512 Spadero Road, the staging area for the killer who dumped Dwyer’s body in Shepherdsen’s pond. Kerrigan had been so casual about entering the Dwyers’ security code.

  Starke checked his watch. Whatever was happening inside probably wouldn’t take long. Kerrigan had her radio with her—he’d heard its sq
uawk and crackle as she stood at Shelby’s front door—probably so she could continue to monitor and coordinate the evacuation. She had to know that the only escape routes from the hilltop neighborhood would be closed off soon. Within twenty minutes, they’d all be trapped and helpless as the flames moved house by house to the top of the hill. He leaned around the wall for another look, waiting, watching. There was nothing else he could do.

  Seconds passed. Minutes. He checked his watch again. Kerrigan had been inside for nearly five minutes.

  Then he heard it, even among the uproar of the advancing fire—the unmistakable report of a distant gunshot. Then another. They were muted but familiar, like the snap-sharp thunder of his own Los Colmas PD service piece, but distant and tiny.

  The shots came from inside the house.

  Starke looked around. He was alone in the thickening smoke and swirling ash. Without thinking, he took a deep breath, reached for the crossbar of the driveway gate and swung one leg up, hooking the instep of his left foot on the same crossbar. Adrenaline carried him high enough to hoist himself over, but the hem of his sports coat snagged on the pointed tip of a vertical iron bar. It slowed the speed of his fall, but only for as long as it took for the fabric to tear away. He landed heavily on the elaborate brickwork of the driveway itself and started to run, peeling the shredded jacket down his arms as he did.

  He chose a route that avoided the curving drive, running instead through the sprinklers gurgling without water pressure on the soft pad of lawn along the perimeter wall. It’d take him twice as long to reach the house that way, but surprise was the only weapon he had.

  Starke watched the front door as he advanced. There was no rear gate on the Dwyer property, so the shooter had only one way to get out. He hoped he’d moved far enough to the periphery to see without being seen.

  When he reached a spot deep into the property, beyond the sight line of the front door, Starke took the chance of cutting across the side lawn, past a sleek fountain, and into the shrubs that stood just outside a floor-to-ceiling ground-floor window on the side of the massive house. Peeking in, he saw nothing but a closed room, a masculine study of some kind, probably Paul Dwyer’s office. Nothing inside seemed out of order.