The Renegades ch-2

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Two days later a county fire department spokesman said that the cause of the fire was a faulty propane coupling on a hot water heater located in the hallway.

  “The gas leaks into the home and if the people are asleep they might not awaken to the smell,” he said. “When the accumulated gas hits a pilot flame or any kind of spark, it explodes. Even static electricity can ignite a gas-filled room.”

  Hood saw that one month later there was a Union-Tribune article about the friends Coleman Draper and Israel Castro. It pictured the two boys outside the barn, dogs present again.

  The article said that five years ago the Draper family had taken in then-ten-year-old Israel Castro after his father was murdered by suspected drug cartel gunmen. Three years after that, Israel had left the Draper home and moved in with relatives living across the border fence dividing Jacumba of the United States from Jacume of Mexico.

  Now, in what the writer called a reversal of fortune, fifteen-year-old Coleman was going to move in with Israel’s extended family in Jacume. It would be temporary. He would finish his education at Campo High. It was an example of good international relations.

  And, as far as Hood could determine, it was the last time Coleman Draper was mentioned in the Union-Tribune.

  A decade later, Israel Castro’s name appeared twice more, both in connection with water-rights issues and his businesses, East County Tile amp; Stone, and Castro Commercial Management.

  Hood looked out the narrow window of his prison room and saw the morning sun reflected on the razor wire of the eastern cell block. The storm had passed and the high desert was damp, clear and cold.

  He wondered how Coleman had gotten along in Jacume, if Coleman had been allowed to bring his dogs, if Draper and Israel Castro were still friends.

  And he wondered what the San Diego County Health and Human Services case worker had thought of young Coleman running off to live with a friend in a smuggler’s hive like Jacume.

  But most of all Hood wondered if the fire investigators could explain why the propane coupler had leaked abundantly on February 4, but apparently not before.

  Three hours later he was sitting across a desk from Teresa Acuna, head of the Child Welfare Services in National City. She had handled the Coleman Draper family-to-family living arrangement back in 1995.

  “We had grant money to seed that program,” she said. She was black-haired and heavyset, early forties. “There had been some success in Ohio. The idea was to make it easier for the families of children who were friends to become foster caregivers. We wanted continuity, familiarity, cohesion. In Coleman’s case, this was complicated by the fact that Israel Castro’s extended family was living in Mexico. We’d never tried anything like that before, so we opened talks with the Baja Norte Bureau of Social Services. At first they said it would be impossible. Then they said it wouldn’t be a problem. That kind of wavering is not as unusual as it sounds, in a place where graft, corruption and dishonesty abound.”

  “Jacume.”

  “Jacumba. East County. North Baja. The entire border, really. It’s a paradise of iniquity out there.”

  “Baja Norte Social Services changed its mind?”

  “Yes. With no explanation. The Castro family was influential and I assumed that they were behind it. When I say family, I mean it loosely. I personally traveled to Jacume to see the home that Coleman had been invited into. It was neat and clean and large and had a free and open feeling to it. Although there were only an aunt and an uncle of Israel’s present that day, I knew from my Jacumba sources that the home was actually shared by three married couples and usually filled with children-cousins, friends, friends of friends. There were frequent guests. The uncle was a landowner in the Santo Tomas Valley. He grew grapes and owned a large winery. He had government connections in Mexico City. There was a taint of prison in that line of the Castros-not the uncle, but the uncle’s uncle. This was not talked about.”

  “Why did you let the boy into this paradise of iniquity?”

  “A good question. I wrestled with it. The good was that he would be with the family of his friend. He would be in a stable environment, and he would have at least some sense of continuity to his life. He would be on the other side of the same city he’d grown up in, as it were. The downside was obvious. What swayed me finally was Coleman himself. He was an exceptionally likable boy-intelligent and well mannered and calm. He seemed emotionally strong and capable, even though he was stunned by the sudden death of his family. I believed that he would have a good life with his friends in Jacume. I believed in him.”

  Teresa Acuna sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “I interviewed Coleman when he turned sixteen, and again when he turned seventeen, and once more before his eighteenth birthday. He seemed happy. His grades were good and his citizenship was good. He played baseball. He had a group of friends.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  She tapped her keyboard, waited and tapped again. “That last interview was November of ’98. He was getting ready to move up to L.A. He said he was tired of Jacume. He wanted to be a car mechanic. I told him that good, honest car mechanics were hard to find, and that he could do well at that. He said he wasn’t sure about the honest part, but he was a joker.”

  Hood told her that he was doing a background check on Coleman because he was a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. He said he was sorry that he couldn’t tell her more but gave her a card with his cell and landline numbers.

  “If he contacts you, I’d like this conversation kept confidential.”

  “I understand. You will want to talk to Lloyd Sallis. He investigated the fire. We had different views.”

  “I have an appointment with him in half an hour.”

  Fire Department investigator Lloyd Sallis had retired and now lived in San Diego. He was a large man with thick gray hair and a deeply lined face. His home was dark and the couches were slouching and he apologized to Hood for his housekeeping. He was a widower, he said, and didn’t mind a little dust.

  He offered Hood a bourbon then told him to sit outside on the patio. He came back with a plastic grocery bag and two drinks and sat across from Hood. The sun was warm in the early afternoon. The backyard trees bristled with hummingbird feeders, and the birds sped from feeder to feeder, squabbled over territory, vanished into the sky like bullets, then hummed back into the yard to start it all over again. A calico cat nosed the plastic bag, then jumped into Sallis’s lap.

  “I helped put out that Jacumba fire,” he said. “And when it was out enough to get in, I helped get the bodies onto stretchers. That was grim business, especially the two children. They were just ten and twelve. It looked like they’d asphyxiated on the gas, then been burned postmortem. When the coroner’s report came in, it confirmed that scenario.”

  Sallis pet the cat slowly with a big gnarled hand. He clinked the ice in his glass and looked at it but didn’t drink.

  “I talked to the first responders and got the narrative. When the place cooled off enough for me to start poking around, I took my time, went slow, took plenty of pictures. It was an older home, stick built, wood siding, a wood shake roof. No sprinkler system inside, no smoke alarms. It had been in the Draper family for twenty years, no changes of ownership or remodeling, so they were out of code.”

  “And a cold night,” said Hood.

  “Yes. Thirty-seven degrees that morning. The heater thermostat was set at sixty-two. It was a typical propane setup, with a hundred-gallon tank about fifty feet from the house and an underground line. The line came up in the laundry room for the clothes dryer and heater, then branched out to the kitchen, then to the hot water heater, which was located in a hallway closet.”

  Lloyd Sallis sipped his bourbon, then sipped it again. His eyes had a distant look to them, reminding Hood of fifteen-year-old Coleman Draper’s in the newspaper photograph. The hummingbirds shot around the yard from feeder to feeder. Hood heard the cat purring.

  “The line was
brass, schedule C, to code, installed by a licensed plumber. The coupler was functional but it was loose. It was a standard gas line coupler, with two sets of opposing threads so you need two wrenches to tighten and loosen them. Well, here, you can see in the pictures.”

  Lloyd set down his glass and picked up the grocery bag. The cat heard the rustle of the plastic sack and it sprang off and hustled away with its ears back. Lloyd watched the cat with gentle amusement and Hood had the thought that he used to do that to his wife. Lloyd pulled out a thick deck of photographs.

  “I always shot digital and film back then,” he said. “Didn’t trust the digital to be there when I needed it. When I retired I made it a point to take these home with me.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at Hood but the distance in his eyes was gone. “Because I thought that someday a detective might sit across from me and ask questions about that fire. Move your chair over here next to mine. I can point out some things.”

  There were pictures of the crew battling the flames, the big hoses blasting water against the house. There were shots of what remained of each room. Then there were dozens of close-ups: burned appliances, beds, electronics. The bodies were charred badly. Their positions and postures suggested that they died in sleep, not in struggle. Only the daughter had somehow gotten out of her bed. She was on the floor beside it.

  “She woke up from the gas long enough to climb out of bed,” said Sallis. “Apparently that took all her energy. Looks like she fell back asleep when she hit the floor. Later, I got the propane company delivery receipts and I figured up roughly how much gas was in that tank before it started leaking. I came up with about forty gallons. Well, the tank was empty by the time the fire crew shut the valve off.”

  “Forty gallons.”

  “Give or take ten. You know that the gallons are liquid gallons, right? When the liquid is released to atmospheric pressure it expands as a gas. So forty liquid gallons under pressure can fill a volume many times greater when it enters a house.”

  “Enough gas to asphyxiate four people?”

  “More than enough. Much more.”

  Hood looked at the pictures of the coupler. Sallis had done a good job with the camera-there were wider shots, tight-in and close-ups, all shot from different angles. The details in the closer shots were good and well lit: the dull brown brass tubing, the cross-hatching at both ends of the coupler where it could be loosened or tightened, the glint of brass where the cross-hatching had been disturbed.

  “There’s fresh brass exposed on the coupler,” Hood said.

  “You’re damned right there is.”

  “Not you guys?”

  “We didn’t touch that thing until long after these pictures were taken.”

  “What did you make of that, Lloyd?”

  “My first thought was the father. Gerald Draper, age forty-eight. Owned a local restaurant. He had a DUI when he was in his twenties, an assault and battery from a bar fight when he was in his thirties, but other than that he was clean. The San Diego Sheriffs did some background on the mother, too-Mary. She looked okay. Nobody had reported any domestic problems. The neighbors all said that the Drapers were normal, more or less happy. They ran a decent restaurant. So.”

  “So you looked at Coleman, the survivor. And his buddy, Israel Castro.”

  “Castro struck me as a fairly honest kid. I didn’t feel any meanness in him, nothing out of balance. Ballsy, sure. Arrogant, yes. Headed for trouble, likely. But to my eyes, Coleman was strange. He should have been in some kind of emotional shock, but I could not detect anything like shock. He was calm, lucid, never expanded or changed his story. He was controlled. He cried once and I swear it looked like an act to me. I had the feeling the first time I saw him, the first time I walked into the room where he was waiting, that he had prepared himself for that moment. I did not like or trust him. The sheriff’s investigators and the social workers had the opposite impression. They found him to be sensitive, communicative and helpful.”

  “What did the detectives say about the coupler?”

  “They said the fresh brass on the cross-hatching could have been exposed up to a year earlier. It takes that long for brass to discolor when it’s kept out of the sunlight like that coupler was. At least that’s what the FBI told them. I said if that was true why didn’t the damned house blow up a year earlier and they said well, because it didn’t. They weren’t eager for my help. They thought I was being overly suspicious of the boy.”

  “Did you ask Coleman about that coupling?”

  “Yes, I did. His response was interesting. He didn’t pretend to not understand what I was leading up to. He didn’t even give me a puzzled look, or a surprised look, not for one moment. All he said was that if he’d killed his family he would have used something to keep the coupler from being scratched by the wrench teeth-an old T-shirt, or a cloth.”

  “Did you tell the investigators that, too?”

  “Yes, yes. They were satisfied that the leak was an accident and the disturbed brass could have happened months ago. They found no motive for anyone to have loosened the connection. Coleman’s insurance benefit was modest and he wouldn’t get it for three years anyway. Case closed, a tragic accident. And then Coleman went off to live with Castro in Jacume. Why are you here?”

  “I can’t discuss that.”

  “That’s what I was always supposed to say, too.”

  Sallis picked up his bourbon off the patio. They were sitting side by side, facing the backyard and the late afternoon sun and the trees with hummingbird feeders rocking slightly in the breeze. Hood thought of his father spending his declining days in an assisted living facility. His Alzheimer’s had come on almost suddenly, and it had progressed quickly. Two years ago he was present, owned his memories, had a future. Now he drifted aimlessly, like a boat without a rudder. His memory and his imagination were almost impossible to disentangle, and the concept of tomorrow seemed to have escaped him. He could not recognize Hood’s mother-his wife of nearly five decades-or any of his five children. When Hood looked at him he saw himself, and this terrified him.

  “An LASD deputy was murdered earlier this month,” he said.

  “Terry Laws. Lancaster.”

  “I got the nod from IA to look at him, see if there was some good reason why a deputy would get gunned down in cold blood. Well, I found out some interesting things about Terry Laws. He had a lot more money than he was supposed to have. Cash money-seven or eight grand a week coming in from somewhere. I still don’t know if it came from a hole in the ground or if he was earning it as he went. I’m doing the same thing you did with the burned-out house in Jacumba. I’m asking questions, doing the legwork. And I’m coming up with a bad arrest by Laws, a large amount of missing drug money and a dead-cold murder of two cartel couriers. And guess who keeps coming up?”

  “Coleman Draper.”

  “He’s a reservist. Gun, badge and a dollar a year to play cops and robbers. He and Laws arrested the suspect in the courier killings, but they beat his brains so bad the court sent him to a mental hospital. When the bust started looking bad I started looking at Draper. That brought me to Child Welfare Services, who thinks Coleman was a charming and innocent boy, and to you, who has a different story to tell.”

  “I saw the way he talked to those people,” said Sallis. “Very different from how he talked to me. He told them what they wanted to hear. Have you ever come across a dog that doesn’t like you? Somebody’s pet, a family dog, loves everyone around him but you? He wants to chew your balls off and you know it and he knows it, too. That’s how it was with Coleman. First I thought it was me-like he knew something about me, or I gave off some smell only he could detect. Then I thought, naw, it isn’t me. It’s him.”

  The cat came walking across the patio and jumped into Sallis’s lap.

  “Well, you got the cat fooled,” said Hood.

  “Israel Castro still lives in Jacumba, last I heard. Bought the old Draper house. He’s a mover ou
t in East County. Big fish, little pond. But his name comes up now and then. I don’t know. Maybe he could help.”

  “I don’t want Coleman to know I’m looking.”

  “Oh, yes, of course not.”

  “Why would he kill his entire family?”

  “I thought about that a lot. Talked to some people. It happens occasionally, extremely disturbed children-almost always a young male adolescent, almost always by fire. The doctors say these boys have a psychotic break. Sometimes there’s a family history of mental illness. Sometimes it seems to come out of nowhere. There’s usually problems with the parents and siblings. They’re usually isolated boys, loners. They pee the bed and torture animals, really. On a PET scan, their brains give off different charges than normal people, different levels of activity. They become paranoid schizophrenics, hallucinators, pyromaniacs. I’m no doctor but I didn’t see that in Coleman Draper. I saw a boy with blackness in him. Cruelty. Malice. Those words don’t accurately describe what I saw. But I don’t know any words that do.”

  “Can I take a couple of those pictures?”

  “Take the whole bag. I told my story. I’m done with it now.”

  Hood parked down the street from the former Draper home in Jacumba. The new house was modern and proud and looked nothing like the burning hulk in the newspaper picture of fourteen years ago. A skinny boy clanged down the street past Hood’s car, rolling a hubcap in front of him with a stick. There was a chain-link fence around the property and an electric gate. There were cottonwood trees in the front but they were leafless and still. The boy guided the hubcap around the corner ahead of Hood and was gone.

  Hood cruised by Amigos restaurant. It looked quiet but it was late afternoon by then, between lunch and dinner.

  He drove around Jacumba the same way he drove around L.A.-attentive and curious but not looking for anything in particular. The town was sullen and bleak, Hood thought, even for a person who enjoyed the desert and its rough land and hard weather and tough people. Hood saw a Border Patrol SUV spitting up gravel on a dirt road. He saw a Homeland Security jeep parked off in the brush. Two dust-covered Suburbans with blacked-out windows made their way along a ridgeline. Above them five vultures glided in a ragged circle. High above the birds a helicopter hovered, a tiny black spider fixed in a vast blue web. An older, low-slung Impala came toward Hood, bling swinging from the rearview mirror, catching sunlight, the four men inside staring at him as they rolled past. Two boys on quads sped along an invisible trail on a very steep hillside. Smugglers of the future, Hood thought, getting the lay of the land. He heard a familiar clanging sound and saw the skinny boy guiding his hubcap along another dusty street.