by BJ Bourg
“Ten-four, where am I going?”
“It’s right off of Twenty-Three, behind Scales Pawn. The owner said he went behind his shop a few minutes ago and found a burnt vehicle back there. He doesn’t know how long it’s been there or how it got there.”
I acknowledged her radio traffic and pulled out of Dawn’s street, heading north. I called her while I drove and she sounded excited when she answered.
“Hey, how’s it going?” she asked cheerfully. “Did you solve the big break-in at my house?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Well, if you don’t hurry, I’m going to call the sheriff and complain.” She laughed and then quickly sobered up. “I wish you were here.”
“No, it’s important that you spend time with your dad. I’ll go up next time.”
I heard muffled words in the background and it sounded like a man’s voice.
“My dad says hi,” Dawn said.
“Tell him hey.” I still wasn’t sure what to think of Evan Luke. I possessed an unforgiving hatred for men who beat their wives, and, although Priscilla Luke had forgiven him and Dawn seemed to accept him as her father again, I just couldn’t warm up to the man. I tried being cordial when I was around him, but only for Dawn’s sake.
When I didn’t say anything else, Dawn let me now they were approaching this place called Dead Man’s Canyon. “Once we leave the paved road, which will be in about twenty minutes, we’ll lose cell service and won’t get it back until late tomorrow evening when we come back out. So, if you call or text and I don’t answer, don’t go thinking I’m dead in a ravine somewhere.”
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. “What happens if you get hurt? How on earth are you going to get help?”
“No worries,” she said coolly. “I’ll just send up a smoke signal.”
“Very funny.” I was thoughtful. “Can’t you get a satellite phone or something?”
“I could, but it’s too late for that now. I’ll put it on my Christmas list.” She laughed again and then said, “Look, I’ll be fine. Just pretend it’s back in the day when we were kids and no one had cell phones.”
I sighed, not liking how much of a worrier I’d become. There was a time when I cared about nothing. I had no worries and no one to consider other than myself. Life was grand back then. Now, all of a sudden, I was acting like my mom used to act when I was little and she was still alive. I wondered if it would be worse with kids.
“Well, if I don’t hear from you by tomorrow night, I’m coming for you,” I warned. “Just leave some bread crumbs so I can find you.”
Dawn laughed. “I love you London Carter.”
“And I love you, Dawn Luke.”
CHAPTER 14
Scales, LA
I arrived at the scene thirty minutes after taking the call from Headquarters. The owner of the pawn shop waved me around the counter and led me through a massive warehouse littered with all kinds of merchandise. Electric guitars lined a portion of one wall, while at least two dozen long guns rested in an open wooden crate nearby. A set of Yamaha drums had been tossed into one corner and an electric scooter was parked beside the drums, and both items were surrounded by expensive-looking power tools. This kind of place would be a dream come true for any thief, but I didn’t remember ever being called out here for a burglary.
“I’m Peter Winston,” said the owner. “I think we met before on another case.”
I nodded. “I picked up some stolen guns from you a couple of years ago.”
“Ah, yeah, I remember now.”
I shot a thumb over my shoulder to the guns out in the open warehouse area. “Are you not worried some thief will come in and get those guns?”
“I wish they’d try.” He smiled wryly and tapped his waistband. I saw the bulge and knew he was packing. “All of my employees are armed and, when we’re not here, I’ve got four German shepherds patrolling the place.”
He pushed open a steel door that strained against the hinges. “The vehicle’s not really on my property, but outside my fence in an open field. When I came back here to throw out the trash I caught a scent of burnt rubber. It wasn’t fresh and there wasn’t any smoke, but it smelled like a fire that had happened overnight and the smell had just lingered, you know?”
I knew what he was talking about. “I’ve responded to many fire investigations hours—and sometimes days—later, but that scent just hangs around like a bad mother-in-law who’ll never leave.”
That brought a chuckle from Peter and I grinned to myself, as I secretly acknowledged I had no clue what I was talking about. The closest I’d ever come to a mother-in-law was Priscilla Luke, and I would visit with her all day, any day. After meeting her and getting to know her a bit, I understood why Dawn was so awesome.
When Peter and I stepped through the back door of his building, I looked across the concrete lot and through the gate, where Lieutenant Jim Marshall was leaning against a fence post. The back of his uniform shirt was saturated in sweat and his face was dripping wet.
“How the hell are you, London?” he asked when I approached him.
“Better than you, I see.”
“I might just be ready to say the hell with it all and retire right now.” He grunted. “I’ve got the years and the wife keeps begging me to do it. Besides, I’m getting too old for this shit.”
I smiled and walked past him, approaching a large, oblong patch of charred grass where an SUV squatted on bare rims, completely destroyed by fire. The tires were nothing but a melted mess of rubber and wire around the rims. The entire interior had been gutted by flames, and the seats and other material had been reduced to an indistinguishable pile of rubble and ash on the floorboard of the vehicle.
“Somebody was pissed at this car,” Lieutenant Marshall said. “They made damn sure no one would be driving it again. Do you think there’s a body in that rubble?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t look like it from here, but I’ll have to get in there and sift through it before I’ll know for sure.”
While Lieutenant Marshall stood guard over the vehicle, I returned to my truck and grabbed my crime scene kit and camera. I then set about photographing the scene and searching for anything that might help me identify the vehicle. The license plate was gone, and when I checked the dash for the VIN (vehicle identification number) plate, it was missing.
The front grill had been burned out and there were no emblems left on the vehicle, but it appeared from the shape that it was an Escalade. The paint job had been reduced to a gray hue, but I thought I saw some hints of red smeared about in several places. Could this be the same SUV that was involved in the break-in at Dawn’s house? If so, I could think of only two plausible reasons for someone torching the vehicle. One reason would be if the driver thought he had been identified at the crime scene, and that was certainly possible, thanks to Mrs. Billiot. The other reason would be if the vehicle had been stolen and the thieves didn’t want to leave any evidence behind. I scratched my head as I pondered the two reasons.
I couldn’t wrap my head around someone torching such an expensive vehicle for something as simple as kicking down a door. It would make more sense to burn a vehicle that was involved in a homicide—
The mere thought gave me chills and I walked away from the burn site and dug out my phone, clicking on Dawn’s number. It went straight to voicemail. I sighed. She must’ve already reached the dead zone. “I really wish you would’ve gotten a satellite phone,” I said as I turned and walked back to the SUV.
“What’s that?” Lieutenant Marshall asked.
“Nothing. Just talking to myself.” I inspected the door handle on the driver’s side, but it was gone. Using my ink pen, I leaned through the busted out window and sifted through the rubble directly under the dashboard. With luck, I would find the VIN plate and it would be intact.
“Need any help?” Lieutenant Marshall asked. “I can’t fit through the window, but I might be able to do something else.”
“Well, if you don’t need anything from me, I’ll head to shift change and start thinking about completing my retirement papers.”
I thanked him and turned back to the rubble under the dash. I was about to give up when I saw a thin sliver of metal flip over when I flicked my pen. With my gloved hand, I gingerly lifted the object from the ash and held it to the light. The VIN plate!
My silent celebration was short lived, because I immediately saw that the face of the plate had been burned beyond legibility. The metal had flaked and was chipped away by the fire. No matter what angle I viewed it from, I couldn’t make out any of the numbers.
After searching for more evidence but finding none, I secured the VIN plate in an evidence envelope and called for a wrecker. I waited until they arrived and towed the vehicle away, and then I rejoined Peter inside his pawn shop.
“Do you have any cameras out back?” I asked.
“I do, but they don’t pick up anything on the other side of the fence,” he explained. “We had an idiot try to climb the fence a few months ago and one of my dogs must’ve bit him, because there was blood all over the wooden planks. We tried to get a look at the cameras, but it was too dark out there and we didn’t have any luck.”
“I’d still like to have a look. We should be able to see a flash of light and get a good timeline for the arson.”
He grunted like he wished he had thought about it, and led the way to his cluttered office. Four large monitors were mounted on one of the walls and he dropped to a desk beneath them. After accessing the control panel, he found the camera that produced the best angle and began rewinding it. We went backward through all of Saturday morning, Friday night, Friday during the day, and then into Thursday night before we found what we were looking for.
“Right there,” I said, pointing at the monitor when we saw a bright orange flash of light appear toward the top of the screen. “Play it from there.”
Peter stopped the video and allowed it to play in regular speed. The time and date stamp showed Thursday, just before midnight. As we watched, we saw headlights turn from a side street and onto the property behind the pawn shop. The lights jostled up and down as the SUV drove along the bumpy ground. There was enough ambient light in the area that I could see the top of the SUV over the fence, and it was definitely red.
“That’s got to be the same vehicle,” I said under my breath. I continued watching and was able to see a shadowy figure exit the driver’s door. Due to the height of the fence behind the pawn shop, I could only make out from the shoulders upward. As the figure moved around the SUV, it turned toward the light a couple of times and it appeared to be a white man with short cropped hair. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like he was wearing sunglasses.
The man removed something from the back of the SUV and he bent near each tire for a few seconds. He then tossed something—I presumed it to be a gasoline can—into the driver’s open window and stepped back. There was a flicker of light from what appeared to be a cigarette lighter that illuminated the front of the man’s clothes for a brief second. It looked like he was wearing dark gray coveralls.
“This is the guy!” I said out loud. “Mrs. Billiot described him as a shadow wearing sunglasses. It’s the coveralls that made him appear to be a shadow. That’s why she couldn’t remember the color of his clothes.”
Although there was a look of confusion on Peter’s face, he just nodded in agreement.
Using an overhand motion, the man in the video threw the cigarette lighter into the window of the car and there was a violent flash of light as the gasoline vapors ignited. The man shielded his face from the heat and backed slowly away, then stopped to watch the vehicle burn.
Suddenly, headlights from a vehicle appeared to his left and he spun around to face it, reaching for the inside of his coveralls with blinding speed. The headlights flickered on and off twice and the man relaxed, turning back toward the fire.
I watched the source of the headlights come into the camera’s full view and saw that it was a white pickup truck with four doors. It stopped several yards from the burning SUV and two men exited, one from each side. They joined the mystery man and watched as the fire made quick work of the SUV.
When the fire faded to a dull glow, the men spoke briefly amongst themselves and then they all turned to walk toward the white truck. The mystery man got into the driver’s seat and the others got in on the passenger’s side—one in the front seat and the other in the back seat—and they drove away. It was ten minutes after midnight.
I sank back in my chair and stared at the dimming glow from the fire on the screen, trying my best to figure out what the hell was going on. Why would someone break into Dawn’s house, steal the corner of an envelope, and then torch the vehicle he was driving? And who were his accomplices in the white truck?
As I pondered these and a host of other questions, one thing became crystal clear…whatever was happening, it had begun on Thursday evening, and that meant I was at least two days behind.
CHAPTER 15
It was a little after four in the afternoon when I exited the pawn shop and strode to the shoulder of Route Twenty-Three, looking up and down the highway. The white truck must’ve come from the east, because that’s the only way to get here from Dawn’s house, but which direction had it headed once it left the torch scene? The view from the pawn shop’s cameras didn’t extend out to the side street along which the truck had made its getaway, so I would have to guess which direction it fled.
Since the driver of the SUV had headed west to destroy the vehicle used to commit the break-in at Dawn’s house, I decided to continue westward. There were three convenience stores and a grocery store at the intersection of Route Twenty-Three and Scales Avenue, so I decided to check those locations for surveillance footage.
Before stepping out my truck at the first stop, I tried calling Dawn’s cell phone again, but it went straight to voicemail. Damn it!
I didn’t know if she was being targeted or if the break-in was completely random, and I was worried about her. Shoving my phone in my pocket, I entered the convenience store and asked to speak with a manager. Minutes later, I was in the back office looking at video surveillance footage with a woman who looked old enough to be my grandmother, but who knew her way around electronic equipment better than most teenagers I’d met.
“Here’s our road camera beginning at eleven-thirty on Thursday,” she said, pointing to the left side of the screen. “And the pawn shop is in that direction.”
I leaned close and watched the highway, waiting for a vehicle—any vehicle—to drive by.
“We don’t get much traffic through here on week nights,” the manager explained. “If we do, it’s mostly out-of-towners passing through. They’ll stop to get gas, a snack, coffee, or just to use the bathroom—and then they’re gone again.”
I nodded and was about to say that the only time I drank coffee was when I was on long road trips, but clamped my mouth shut when I saw a white truck blow by heading west. “There—that’s it.”
The manager stopped the tape and rewound it to twelve minutes after midnight, playing it again. There—plain as day under the traffic lights—was the white four-door pickup truck that had picked up the driver of the red SUV, and it was heading west.
“Can you burn a copy for me?” I asked. “I’ll be back to pick it up in a few minutes.”
I then made my rounds of the other convenience stores and the grocery store. The grocery store cameras were useless, but the other convenience stores had footage similar to the first, only from different angles. None of the angles covered the back of the truck, so there was no chance of recovering a license plate number.
With copies of the surveillance footage in hand, I headed east on Route Twenty-Three. When I reached Gracetown, I turned south onto Highway Three and stopped at Bestman’s Market. Bestman’s was a busy convenience store on the western side of
Highway Three and it was the last gas station before the onramp to Route Twenty-Three. If my suspects purchased fuel to burn the SUV, this would’ve been the most likely spot.
It was almost seven when I walked through the doors and asked to see the surveillance footage from Thursday. The kid behind the counter was probably still in high school, but he acted very businesslike and was polite. He apologized, but said only the day shift manager could access the surveillance equipment, and she had left for the day and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow morning.
“If you like, Mr. Detective, I can call and ask her to come back to the store, but it’ll take her a while to get here. She lives in Chateau.”
I thanked him and told him I’d be back in the morning. There was no guarantee the red SUV had stopped here for gas, and I would’ve hated for her to drive all the way back to Gracetown for nothing. I stopped at the remaining convenience stores along my route to the detective bureau, but they all said the same thing—no one on the night shift could access the cameras.
With nothing more to do that night, I drove home and hoped for a quiet evening so I could try and figure out what was going on. I tried calling Dawn several times while I made dinner—smothered shrimp with Jasmine rice and cucumbers—but it was no use. She was out in the mountains somewhere and she had no idea what was going on.
If something nefarious was about to happen out at that address, at least she wasn’t going to be at her mom’s house—
I suddenly dropped the spoon I’d been using to stir the shrimp and grabbed my phone. Scrolling through my recent calls, I found an old conversation I’d had with Dawn while she had been on her mom’s landline, and quickly pressed the button to dial it. A woman picked up on the third ring and I recognized Priscilla Luke.
“Mrs. Luke, it’s London,” I began. “How are you?”
“I’m just happy to be healthy. How are you?”
“Great—look, have you heard from Dawn or Evan lately?”