Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  Starke nodded. He took a deep breath, relieved when there was no pain. His lungs were fine, if burning now from the smoke pouring into the room through the shattered window. His heart was pounding, so it was probably fine as well. “Is there a lot of blood?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “OK then.”

  On his hands and knees, Starke made his away across a cluttered floor now glittering with bits of window glass. He placed his palms gingerly, pulling his weight back whenever he felt the slice and bite of a glassy splinter. His knees were bleeding by the time he reached the windowsill, and he took a few seconds to pick out the bits that cut through his pants and embedded themselves in his skin. Then he pulled himself up on the windowsill and peeked into the yard.

  In the smoky haze below, and through the smoke tears burning his eyes, Starke saw someone moving around. He wiped tears on his sleeve and squinted.

  Kerrigan was walking away from the house, between the pool and the home’s detached garage. She was holding something over her face—a damp cloth to filter out the smoke as she picked her way through the patio furniture and massive potted plants. She entered the garage through a small door on its side. He could hear the snap and crackle of burning timbers in the house next door.

  Kerrigan stepped out a moment later with something red and bulky in one hand. When a drifting cloud of smoke cleared, Starke rose up on his haunches and looked closer.

  A five-gallon gas can?

  She began pouring, tracing a dark trail between the garage and the back door before disappearing inside, still pouring. Starke felt a surge of adrenaline. Time quickened. “Is there way out from up here?” he asked.

  Across the room, Chloe shook her head.

  Damn. He had to get her out without sending her through the nightmare of the front hall.

  “No, wait,” the girl said. “There’s a tree at the corner of the house. You can climb down it from one of the front bedrooms.”

  “Think you can you do that, Chloe?”

  She nodded.

  “Go then,” he said. “Right now.”

  Chloe wobbled to her feet. She waited, watching his eyes. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  “No,” he said. “Just go. Get somewhere safe. If you see firemen, go to them. They’ll help you.”

  He looked down into the yard. Kerrigan had been inside for half a minute, but now she was walking backward from the patio. She was bent like a berry picker, holding the open red can as the last of the gas spilled onto the stonework in a second dark trail toward the other tall palm. Its crown had been ignited by the transformer explosion and was shedding sparks and flaming debris.

  When Starke turned away from the window, he was alone.

  61

  With a sudden roar and flash of flame, Kerrigan’s gasoline trail erupted. Starke felt a rush of intense heat as he watched from the obliterated second-story window.

  Below, Kerrigan stepped away from the rising flames and returned the gas can to the garage where she’d found it. She emerged empty-handed, still clutching a white cloth over her nose and mouth, and again headed across the patio toward the house’s back door.

  Burning the place to the ground, and with it Shelby’s body, was a long shot. The coroner’s crew was too sharp to be fooled for long, and Kerrigan surely knew that. But it was her best hope to cover her tracks, or at least complicate any post-mortem on the wildfire’s vast devastation. Kerrigan was in a position to control much of that investigation—much as she’d controlled the investigation into Paul Dwyer’s murder.

  She might get away with it.

  The whole sickening story unspooled for him in an instant. There was only one way this all made sense.

  You’re him.

  What else could Shelby have meant? But why?

  Starke edged away from the window frame and stood. Chloe’s bedroom was filled with smoke now, and he stifled a cough. His eyes stung and tears streamed down his cheeks as he stumbled across the bedroom and through the door, heading for the stairs. He’d have one chance to stop her, to confront her here. It had to be now.

  Smoke was rising into the vast airspace above the foyer where Shelby lay dead, darker than the smoke outside and smelling like gas. It billowed from the rear of the house in great hot breaths and rose toward the entry hall’s high ceiling. From the top of the stairs, through a small round window in the home’s front wall, Starke saw Chloe working her way down the tree she was using as her escape route. He wondered if Kerrigan could see her as well. He waited until, through a first-floor window, he saw the girl jump from the lowest limb and stagger toward the front gate. Then he started down the stairs.

  He didn’t get far.

  Down below, Kerrigan rushed into the foyer. She was focused on Shelby’s body, giving it a wide berth, moving around it like someone afraid of getting too close. She clutched the cloth to her face with one hand, and Starke could see now that she was wearing latex gloves. In the other hand, she held a 9 mm handgun with a band of blue painter’s tape around the barrel.

  His gun.

  He watched as she placed the weapon carefully on the blood-slick floor of the foyer, about six feet from where Shelby was curled like a fallen bloom.

  He spoke as soon as she stood up and stepped away from the gun.

  “Don’t turn around,” he shouted. He coughed twice as he moved down the steps. “Hands on your head.”

  Kerrigan, her back to him now, cocked an ear toward his voice from above. Slowly she put her arms out to her sides and bent her elbows, placing her hands on the top of her head. There seemed an odd defiance to it.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Starke walked directly into the pool of Shelby’s blood and kicked his gun away. It skittered across the floor to the entryway table where he’d found the unfamiliar .45 now in his hands. He stepped forward and pressed its barrel through a ponytail of auburn hair and directly into the soft spot at the base of Kerrigan’s skull. With his free hand, he released the leather holster strap on the department-issued 9 mm at her waist and tugged her gun free.

  It was as intimate a moment as they’d ever shared.

  Starke set the safety and tucked her piece into his belt before backing three steps away. He coughed twice more, trying to clear his lungs even as the smutty smoke filled the foyer. He could feel a wall of heat just behind him.

  “Now turn,” he said.

  Kerrigan didn’t move. Said nothing. Starke raised his voice.

  “Turn around, I said.”

  Hands on her head, disarmed, powerless, Donna Kerrigan turned slowly until they stood face-to-face about ten feet apart. There was no apparent fear in her, no hint of shame. Just the same smoldering contempt he’d felt so many other times in her company. She looked him in the eye.

  “You have no authority Ron,” she said.

  He squinted, raised the .45, and aimed directly at the plucked spot between her eyebrows. She didn’t even blink.

  “Maybe not,” he said, “but I do have this.”

  “Put it down now.”

  “I know what happened.”

  “Put the gun down now and I’ll keep this out of your personnel file.”

  Was she kidding? Delusional?

  “I don’t think you understand, Chief. I know everything.” He paused. “Everything.”

  “Put the gun down now,” she repeated.

  Starke shook his head.

  “Now!” she commanded.

  Starke kept a steady bead. This time, before he spoke, he made sure to smile at her across the moral chasm between them.

  “You’re LoveSick,” he said.

  For the first time, Kerrigan blinked.

  62

  In his nearly two decades as a firefighter, he’d never seen anything like it. The blaze was moving like a runaway train, up hills, into valleys, across inland Southern California’s wide, flat plains where tinderbox housing tracts stood like sun-dried dominoes. It spread in every direction from the point of origin in the foothills, f
anned by the winds, a spreading char-black stain of indiscriminate destruction. It had turned more than a thousand homes to ash during the past three days, leaving in its wake only concrete foundations, stand-alone stone fireplaces, and tiny blue flames where open gas lines marked each home site like a flickering candle.

  The captain had brought a crew to this hilltop overlooking Las Colmas to make one last stand. The massive homes here were centered on huge lots. There was defensible space around them. He thought they might have a chance.

  But no, the fire was advancing on several fronts and beat them to the top of the hill. Now he could see the battle was lost. The flames had moved from the wooded hillsides, then from mansion to mansion, finally reaching the massive Dwyer estate that crowned the exclusive neighborhood. A palm tree behind the house was crackling dry and lit up by the hot, glowing ash that rose from the burning homes below. As soon as he’d heard the transformer explode, he’d ordered the crew back down the hill.

  Smoke rose immediately from the big house, and now he could see flames. There was nothing more they could do but hope the people who’d lived up here were safely down. The road that snaked up the hill was the only reliable firebreak, and their only way up or down.

  He lifted his radio. “We’re coming down, Carlos. Clear the road for me, will ya? We’ll need to get the trucks around that tight curve at the bottom.”

  He waited a full sixty seconds for Carlos to answer. His drivers were turning the pumper trucks around in a wide cul-de-sac. It was a painfully slow process.

  “Carlos? Check in when you can.”

  Finally the radio sizzled to life: “Little busy here, Cap.”

  In the background, he could hear the desperate and unmistakable sounds of a horse in agony—the heavy thump and thud of a large animal thrashing and kicking against its enclosure, a keening, deep-chested cry. He’d passed a small stable on his way up the hill, a stubborn remnant of Los Colmas’ ranching days. The horse trailers were gone, and he’d assumed the owners had been able to evacuate the stables as the fire closed in. Now he guessed he was wrong.

  He lifted his radio again and closed his eyes. “How many were left behind?”

  “Just the one,” Carlos said. “Burned pretty bad. They got ’em all out of the stable, but left this one outside in the corral, thinking he’d be OK. Heat was too much, though. We’re looking for a gun.”

  The captain opened his eyes. His trucks were turned now, moving down the hill. He watched until they were out of sight.

  “We’re heading down. Nothing left to do up here. Just make sure the road’s clear for us.”

  He was climbing into his vehicle when he saw something behind him move in the truck’s side mirror. He looked closer. A tiny, dark silhouette was wavering down the road behind him, backlit by the smoke and flames rising from the big house. When he turned around, he saw what looked like a young woman staggering from the toxic cloud. She was running like she couldn’t see, weaving and tripping and gasping for breath. By the time he reached her, she was on the ground, coughing, barely conscious.

  She was a teenager. Where were her parents?

  He lifted her head and turned her face so he could see her eyes, which were closed. She gasped for breath like an asthmatic. Opening the valve on his respirator, he placed its mask over her nose and mouth, hoping a jolt of oxygen would bring her around. There wasn’t much time, but she needed air before he could move her down the hill.

  Within fifteen seconds, her breathing slowed, and her eyes opened. The girl suddenly grabbed his bicep.

  He lifted the mask away from her face. “Anybody else up there?”

  She tried to talk, but managed only a coughing fit. He replaced the mask until she caught her breath.

  “Are more people caught up there?”

  His stomach clenched when she nodded.

  “How many?”

  She held up three fingers.

  He needed to get her down the hill, away from the inferno. There was no one else to take her now. But he also needed to move up the hill, into the madness.

  “Pumper Five?” he barked into his radio. “Answer me!”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I know you can’t turn around,” he said. “But send one of the guys back on foot. I’ve got a girl here, she needs to get down the hill.”

  He released the talk button and listened. Ten seconds passed. Finally: “Jorge’s on his way, Cap. Christ, you’re saying somebody’s still up there?”

  “Jorge can take my truck. I’ll have her there and ready to go by the time he gets here.”

  He scooped the girl into his arms and carried her to his vehicle. He opened the passenger-side door and propped her into the front seat. She leaned forward, put her head on the dashboard, and vomited onto the floor of the cab.

  The radio crackled again as he closed the door. “Wait, Cap. What about you?”

  He turned and looked back up the hill. Everything was ablaze. The big house at the top was the only structure still standing, but it was fully involved. A thread of wispy black laced through the brown-gray wall of smoke that nearly obscured the house. The fire had found something oily. He lifted the radio again.

  “Just get her down the hill,” he said, and started to run toward the flames.

  “Cap, dammit! There’s no time. Tell me what’s going on.”

  He answered before he lifted the oxygen mask to his face, but after he’d made his choice: “Three souls!”

  63

  “LoveSick.”

  Starke coughed with wracking violence, then shouted the name again over the dull roar of flame at his back. “You’re him!”

  The muscles in Donna Kerrigan’s jaw clenched and unclenched; her eyes had the look of someone whose mask had been suddenly torn away. In seconds, her face registered shock, anger, and a sad vulnerability. Then it reassembled itself into something unmistakable: contempt.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  He nodded to Shelby’s body, and lied: “Shelby told me the whole story. Before she bled out.”

  “Try proving it,” Kerrigan spat. “Your word against mine.” She nodded to the long-legged table nearby, beneath which sat Starke’s gun. She’d dropped it as he watched from upstairs, a classic cop throw-down.

  “Your gun has her blood on it. I found it when I got here,” she said. “You’re the one with reason to worry.”

  Starke reached into his belt, where he’d tucked her service piece after pulling it from her holster. He forced a smile, fired two shots into Shelby’s body, and dropped Kerrigan’s gun into the wide red pool between them. He raised his voice. “We’ll let forensics sort it out.”

  He cut his eyes quickly to the left. Shelby’s computer still sat on the foyer table. He’d backed up the contents of the CarbonCopy device to his flash drive, but—was there still a way to get the machine out of this inferno?

  Kerrigan noticed him looking at it. She looked almost smug. “There’s nothing on the hard drive. She wiped it before she sold it.”

  Starke played his trump card. “It wasn’t on the hard drive. It was on a keystroke logger plugged into the back. Everything, the conversations, the video—it was all in there. I found it. I leaked it.”

  Kerrigan blinked again.

  The smoke was so thick now he could hardly see the second floor. The house’s grand staircase ascended into a dirty cloud.

  “You’ve got nothing, Ron. Put the gun down. Now.”

  He was running out of time. “It was all online, all anonymous. You sucked her in, made her an accomplice.”

  Kerrigan gave him a deathly stare.

  “I’ve read the chat transcripts. I still don’t know why you killed Dwyer, but I know you duped Shelby into watching him die, so she couldn’t tell the truth even if she wanted to. You made sure she knew just enough to make it seem like she was part of it.”

  “Shut up!” Kerrigan was breathing hard now, her chest heaving as the smoke thickened and he piled h
er lies at her feet. “Stop it now!”

  “I know how you dumped Paul’s body by yourself. You had access to security company gate codes.”

  Kerrigan was shaking.

  “That computer monitor belonged to your ex, didn’t it? He’d fucked you over in the divorce. Why not a little payback for him, too?”

  She screamed—a hoarse, guttural howl. Barely human. An animal sound. A raw purging of rage. It echoed through the vast space around them, louder even than the roar of flame and the crackle of burning timber.

  “I know everything,” Starke shouted.

  Despite the smoke, Kerrigan’s breathing slowed. She seemed suddenly calm, looking at him with the resolve of someone who’d made a decision.

  “Enough,” she said. “This ends now.”

  It wasn’t a threat; he could tell that from her tone. More like she was asking a favor.

  “Turn around and open the door,” he ordered. “Get clear of the house.”

  “No,” she said. “It ends right here. You know the policy. About provocation. About threatening moves.”

  Starke studied her, his finger tensing on the trigger. She had a plan. He felt the sudden, sickening realization that he was part of it.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  Her eyes shifted to her gun, which lay where he’d dropped it. Slick with Shelby’s blood, her service piece was one lunge away. Kerrigan was measuring, calculating. If she went for it, he knew she’d lose.

  So did she.

  The script was clear; his role set. The next move was hers.

  “Don’t put this on me,” he said. “You’ve done enough damage.”

  She gestured to the front door, to the world beyond it.

  “No choice,” she said.

  Starke moved a step closer to the gun on the floor, intending to kick it away. His eyes fixed on Kerrigan’s, he extended his foot, searching by feel for the elusive metal lump. He was still searching when the house’s front door burst open. An explosive rush of air made the flames inside the house roar even higher.

  They both turned. A filthy firefighter in a yellow flame-resistant suit stood silhouetted in the doorframe, his sooty face hidden behind a full-face breathing mask. From inside it, the man’s eyes swept the scene—the now-billowing flames in the foyer, Shelby’s body curled on the floor, a man threatening another woman with a gun.