by John Case
He swung the rod smoothly to the right, cranking the reel with his free hand. From a few feet away his own voice floated toward him:
‘Hi, it’s Joe Lassiter. I can’t come to the phone just now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’
The river, the fish, the rod and the reel . . . evaporated. He lay in bed with his eyes closed, awake in the darkness, waiting to hear the message. But whoever it was hung up. Figures, Joe thought, pushing his head deeper into the pillows.
He wanted back, back in the dream, but it wasn’t there anymore. The river was gone, the fish was gone, and the only part that he could recover, the only part that he still felt, was his sour indignation about the phone. The phantom phone. His phone.
And then it rang again. This time, he answered it.
‘What?’
The man’s voice was professionally calm, reasonable, and official. But what he was saying was far from reasonable and it didn’t really sink in until ten minutes later, when Lassiter was in his car, driving through the night toward Fairfax. There had been a fire. Positive identification had not been made, but the bodies –
No, Joe thought. No.
– the bodies were consistent with –
Consistent with?
– what we know about the residents. Your sister –
Kathleen –
And her son –
Brandon. Little Brandon.
The road ran along the Potomac, not far from where he’d imagined himself fishing. Across the river, behind the spires of Georgetown University, the sky brightened toward dawn.
They were dead. That’s not how the man had put it, of course. ‘There were two fatalities.’ Joe Lassiter was clenching his teeth so ferociously that his head throbbed with the pressure. Kathy. For once in her whole, fucked-up life, Kathy had actually been happy. Stable. Serene! Against all odds she’d turned out to be a terrific mother, and the kid –
Brandon’s face flashed before his eyes, and he looked away, squeezed it out. Rolled down the window and felt the cold air on his face. In Rosslyn, across the river from the Kennedy Center, he swung onto the ramp for 66. There was already a lot of traffic coming the other way.
How could that house burn down? Lassiter wondered. It was practically new, and everything – the stove, the wiring, the three-zone heating system, everything – was top of the line. He’d gone along on the home inspection himself. There were smoke alarms everywhere. Carbon monoxide detectors. She even had fire extinguishers! Once she’d become a mother, safety had become a very big deal with Kathy.
He knew he shouldn’t be thinking about the house. He should be thinking about his sister. He was turning a catastrophe into an abstraction, thinking about it like an investigator, not like a brother. Maybe he was in ‘denial,’ but on some level he couldn’t believe she was dead. Just being told she was dead didn’t make it real. He couldn’t believe the house had burned down, and if the house couldn’t have burned down, how could she be dead? How could Brandon be dead?
How could they not have gotten out?
The man on the telephone hadn’t given him enough information. He wanted to know more. He wanted to know everything. He stepped on the accelerator even though he knew it was stupid. Fatalities. He wasn’t going to save her.
He’d set out for the morgue, which was in the county building, but found himself taking the turns toward Kathy’s house, driving like an automaton. A few blocks from Cobb’s Crossing the air turned acrid. He could smell the smoke, and it made his heart sink. He’d been holding on to a little spark of hope – somewhere in his mind. It was some kind of mistake: the wrong address, another Kathy Lassiter.
Now it was extinguished. He saw the lights on the fire trucks, pulled the Acura over to the curb, shut off the engine and walked the rest of the way.
He knew that an investigation into the cause of the fire would be under way, as a matter of routine. There is always an attempt to learn a fire’s cause. This isn’t to satisfy anyone’s curiosity, or even to learn from misfortune. The answer to the question – Why did this fire occur? – has important legal and financial implications. Was it a cigarette? A faulty water heater? A defective chimney?
Affixing blame determined who would pay, and how much, and so the question was pursued at once – and vigorously.
There were six cars parked in front of the house, and he noted them with idle and instinctive care: a squad car, two unmarked police cars with bubbles on the dash, two fire department vehicles, and a tan Camry, which might or might not belong to the insurance company’s investigator. A uniformed man was playing out a roll of yellow tape from a stake at the corner of the driveway. The tape was imprinted, over and over, with the words:
POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS
The smell in the air was intense, a mix of wood smoke and burnt plastic. But the house itself, the sight of the house, hit him like a sucker punch. It was a dead house, and for the first time since the telephone call the truth of the words settled into meaning. Fatalities. His sister was dead; his nephew was dead. The house smoldered in the middle of a tire-gouged lawn, a mess of charred timbers and blackened metal. The windows of the house were blown out, and without their skin of glass, they had the blank look of a dead man’s eyes. Through them he could see the wrecked and gutted interior. He turned and walked over to the policeman, who was tying off a length of the yellow tape.
‘What happened?’
The cop was young, red hair, freckles, blue eyes. He looked up at Lassiter with a smart-ass expression and shrugged.
‘A fire happened.’
Lassiter wanted to smack him, but he took a deep breath instead. When he exhaled, his breath was like smoke in the cold morning air.
‘How did it start?’
The cop gave him a look, as if he was trying to memorize Lassiter’s features. Finally he nodded toward the fire trucks. ‘They’re saying arson.’
For the second time in as many minutes, he felt as if he’d been blindsided. He’d been expecting something else. A cigarette, maybe – Kathy still smoked, never around the kid, but she still smoked. So, maybe a cigarette. Or a space heater, or . . . not a space heater, not in that house, not with that heating system. Lightning, then. A cigarette, some minor appliance shorting out . . .
‘What?’
The kid gave him another look. ‘Who are you?’
Lassiter’s mind was working at warp speed. One part of it was remarking that the kid was on the ball, that he knew that firebugs often returned to the scene of the crime. And another part was thinking that of course, he should have known, the cop cars should have tipped him off. Once arson is suspected, a fire becomes a crime scene. And if victims are involved, it becomes a homicide case.
‘Why would anybody want to burn down Kathy’s house?’ he said out loud.
7
‘HEY, JOE! WHAT are you doin’ here?’
The voice was mock-accusatory, and hearing it, Lassiter turned. A ruddy face was smiling up at him.
‘Jim Riordan,’ he said.
‘I remember.’
‘So what are you doin’ here?’ The detective’s attitude was mostly for the benefit of the people behind him: three men and a woman. They were looking at Lassiter with a mixture of expectation and neutrality.
‘It’s my sister’s house.’
The smile faded from Riordan’s face. He tugged the lobe of his right ear and shook his head. Finally, he said, ‘Jesus Christ, Joe. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
He sat across from the detective in a cubicle at police headquarters and waited for Riordan to finish with the telephone. The last time Lassiter had seen him, their positions had been reversed: Riordan had been sitting across from him in Lassiter’s own office, looking uncomfortable. The cop had been wearing what Lassiter surmised was his ‘good suit,’ an aging pinstripe that seemed about a size too small.
I got a year to go, Riordan had said, leaning toward his desk, and then I’m out. And what am I gonna do then? Sit on
my ass all day? I don’t think so. So, I figure, maybe I should start looking now – test the waters, see what I can line up. And I figure I might as well start at the top, y’know? So that’s why I’m here, that’s why I’m talking to you.
It was a conversation Lassiter had once or twice a week: if it wasn’t a cop, it was someone from the FBI or DEA, the Pentagon or Langley. They all wanted a job, and with their skills, an investigative firm was the logical place to go. But the only thing that made Riordan at all interesting to him as a possible employee was something the detective said on the way out. And that was: Hey! Things don’t work out? I’ll work on my screenplay.
That was interesting. Because cops who could write were as rare as snow leopards, and Lassiter Associates was always looking for investigators who could write reports that could be sent to clients – most of whom were lawyers and stockbrokers. That’s why the company had so many journalists working for it. If Riordan could write, there might be a place for him.
‘It’s your ass,’ Riordan shouted into the telephone. The outright rancor in his voice wrenched Lassiter back into the present. The detective slammed the receiver down, looked at him and shrugged. ‘Sorry about that.’
Then Riordan tried to find something on his desk. He moved some papers around, found one in particular, and pushed it across the desk toward Joe. ‘No question, it was arson,’ he said. ‘Multiple points of origin, obvious accelerant residues – the whole nine yards.’
Lassiter looked at the fire department’s preliminary report, which included a rough diagram of each floor of the house. There were X marks in seven places, including both bedrooms. Lassiter knew that natural fires almost always had a different pattern, originating at a single source. He looked at Riordan.
‘There’s more.’ The detective drummed his fingers on the desk. ‘The gas was on – and not just the stove. Down in the basement, too. Water heater had been tampered with. Fire department says the truck’s there five minutes later, the house goes up like a rocket. Leaving nothin’. And I do mean nothin’.’
Lassiter frowned. ‘So, you’re saying . . .’
‘I’m saying, whoever it was – this was not a delicate job. It was obviously arson, and whoever set it didn’t care who knew it. And it was overkill, you know? It was like . . .’ The detective’s big features compressed into a puzzled knot. ‘I don’t know what. Like a ‘scorched earth’ kinda thing. Like they didn’t want to leave nothing but ashes.’ The detective leaned toward him across the desk. He opened his mouth to say something and then thought better of it. He shook his head and a pained expression came over his face. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I keep forgetting. You’re not investigating this; you’re next of kin.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Joe said, as if it didn’t matter. ‘The point is: you were thinking, maybe someone was trying to destroy evidence. And you want to know – evidence of what? What was my sister –’
Riordan interrupted him. ‘Right now, I’m thinking before this goes any further, I better take you down to the morgue. Drop you off, so you can ID them. I mean, before we start talking about your sister, we better make sure it is your sister.’
They were on their way out the door when the telephone rang. Riordan hesitated for a second, then pushed past Lassiter and grabbed it.
‘What?’ he demanded, shrugging into his overcoat. The voice on the other end said something, and Riordan shot a look at Lassiter. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Yeah. Okay.’ As they walked through the door to the outside, Riordan extracted a cigarette from a package in his shirt pocket, and lit it.
‘What was that all about?’ Lassiter asked.
Riordan exhaled. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘On the telephone.’
Riordan just shook his head, as if to say, Never mind.
Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of the county building. Lassiter unfastened his seat belt and started to get out of the car, but the detective restrained him with the back of his hand.
‘Look, Joe,’ he said in an embarrassed voice, ‘I have to say something here.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Do you agree that a doctor shouldn’t operate on his own kid?’
‘What?’
‘A doctor shouldn’t operate on his kid, a lawyer shouldn’t defend himself, and you . . . you should leave this case to me.’
‘I’ll keep that in mind.’
Riordan slapped the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. ‘I’m talking to a wall, but . . .’ He shot a look at his watch. ‘I’ve seen it before, you know, ex-cops, spooks, army investigators – guys with expertise. They’re all over some case where they have a personal involvement – and it’s a mess. It’s a load of heartache, and on top of that they just fuck it up.’
Lassiter didn’t say anything, and the detective heaved a sigh. ‘I got somebody bringing your car over. And then I want you to go home. I’ll call you later.’
Joe Lassiter was in a strange frame of mind, as if he was operating at a remove from himself – as if he was a camera, watching himself. He didn’t feel anything, much. It was just: here I am, going to the morgue to identify my sister’s body. He saw himself enter the building and make his way to the waiting area, a bland room with generic seascapes on the walls. He spoke to a woman in a white coat with a name tag that read BEASLEY. She entered his name in a large, green ledger and escorted him to the cold room, where bodies were kept in coffinlike drawers set into the walls.
Even as he identified Kathy, and then Brandon, he felt nothing. It was as if he was operating a Joe Lassiter puppet, and the puppet was doing everything while the real Joe Lassiter watched.
His sister’s blond hair was now a crusty black skullcap. Her lips were parted, her blue eyes stared up at the fluorescent light. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were burnt off and it gave her face a blank, stupid look. Brandon was even worse, his skin charred and blistered.
He’d seen dead people before, and Kathy and Brandon looked exactly that – dead. They looked as dead as dolls, so dead that they might never have been alive. The woman in the white coat – Beasley – held herself in a stiff, defensive posture, as though waiting for him to go berserk with grief, as though readying herself to let the emotion wash over her. Instead the Joe Lassiter puppet nodded and confirmed the identification in a calm voice. The woman’s shoulders relaxed and she wrote something on a form. He heard the sound of her felt-tip pen clearly, squeaking along above the dense whir of the refrigeration units. He signed something without reading it, and they left.
In the corridor, the woman put her hand carefully on his arm. It seemed to him that he couldn’t feel the pressure, but only intuited it from the sight of her fingers against his sleeve. ‘Would you like to sit down for a moment?’ she asked. ‘Can I get you a glass of water?’
‘No, it’s all right. But I’d like to see the medical examiner.’
‘Wellll,’ she said with a worried voice and a frown, ‘that’s not something –’
‘Tom’s a friend of mine,’ he said reassuringly.
‘Let me just call him,’ she replied, and picked up the telephone. ‘He might be in the middle of an au – in the middle of something.’
In the waiting room, a pair of Hispanic kids perched, terrified, on one of the orange plastic couches. A police officer waited nearby, and it looked as if, when their names were called, the kids were going to catapult through the ceiling. Lassiter stared at one of the seascapes on the wall – a dull rendition of a stormy shore. Oily waves breaking forever on a jumble of gray rocks.
He heard a singsong voice behind him – ‘Okay-ay’ – and turned as the woman hung up the phone. ‘If you’ll take the corridor down to the end –’ she began.
‘I know the way.’
Tom Truong looked up from his desk, then got to his feet. ‘Cho!’ he said, extending a delicate hand that came with a faint whiff of formaldehyde. He seemed to smile and frown at the same time. ‘What am I doing for you? You working a case?’
His connect
ion with the medical examiner was an odd one. They’d played soccer together on a thirty-and-over team until a couple of years back, when Lassiter had blown out his knee. Though slightly built, Truong was a vicious defender, with knifelike elbows and a slide tackle that came at you like a scythe. They’d played on the team for a couple of years before the subject of occupations came up – which occurred in a joint called Whitey’s, over a pitcher of championship beer. After that, Lassiter occasionally hired Truong as a forensics consultant and expert witness. He was a meticulous and gifted pathologist, and, despite his wobbly English, a brilliant witness. Juries loved him.
‘It’s not a case,’ he told Truong. ‘It’s my sister.’ He raised his chin. ‘She’s back there,’ he said, ‘with my nephew.’
Truong either thought he was kidding or didn’t understand. ‘What you are saying, Cho?’ he asked with a sly look. ‘You joking me, right?’
‘No. The arson case.’
Truong’s jack-o’-lantern grin faded. ‘Las-sit-ter,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Oh, Cho. Very sorry. So very sorry.’
‘Have you done the autopsy yet?’
He nodded solemnly. ‘Chimmy ask me special rush. Because the arson.’ He sighed. ‘Your sister. And little kid.’ His eyes tightened into slits. ‘Well, not the fire killing them.’
Lassiter nodded. And then it hit him. ‘What?!’
Truong’s big head bobbed on the thin stalk of his neck. ‘No smoke particle in lung. No carbon monoxide in blood. These alone tell us victims die before fire. And not just that. Additional evidence. You see bodies?’
‘Yeah. I identified them. That’s why I’m here.’
‘No. You see bodies? Or you see faces?’
‘Faces.’
‘You look at body, the both body, you see skin covered with . . . looking like small little cuts. This happen to human being in fire, you know. Standard, because – skin cracking! Flesh liquid, expand in heat – skin not expand, so skin splitting everywhere – release the pressure. But in this case, adult female – you sister – she have little cuts on both her hands and these are different, these are not just skin. Flesh also injured. These are the definite defensive wound, you know. I see these, and I continue my looking and I’m seeing why. You sister – stab in chest. Cause of death, aortal valve. Cut! Young boy . . .’ Truong leaned forward across the desk. ‘His throat cut all the way. Ear to ear.’ He sank back into his chair, as if the recitation had exhausted him.