He swiped his nose. “Another question: Do you know why Ben loaned me that money? Wanna take a guess?”
I gave my head the slightest shake.
He gasped. “You don’t know that either? Well, then, I’ll tell you. After keeping it a secret for so long, this year my wife started threatening Ben, and she told him that she would tell Sarah about them. And her threats worked for a while, and Ben would sneak us money to help take care of his daughter. We called it a loan so Sarah wouldn’t know the truth. But my wife got tired of lying, and Ben… Well, Ben got tired of my wife. And he was truly tired of Melissa because she knew, too—she’s the one who walked in on them back in 2003.”
He exhaled. “One more question for you: do you really think that Sarah and my wife got along? You’re a female; you know how it is between women. The whole… frenemies thing. I’ll answer: they didn’t get along. Sarah was sensing something between Ben and my wife, so she started following her. So if my wife had anyone to fear, it wouldn’t be me. It would be Sarah Oliver.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “That the Olivers killed…?”
“I’m saying: Do. Your. Job. Because, as you can see, five days in, you still know nothing.”
55
CHRISTOPHER CHATMAN. AFRICAN AMERICAN MALE. BORN JUNE 21, 1963. BANKER. Widower. Liar. Some of what he had just told me had been lies—because that’s what he did. Bees buzzed. Bears growled. Chatman lied. The rest of it was truths as thin as the twisted wisps of fog now clutching the ruined Chatman house like a child clutching her doll.
Long after Chatman had stomped away to Sarah Oliver’s SUV, I stared at the house and wondered what secrets would be exposed—or not—during the trial. Finally, I shook my head. “Guess you’re going in there now. Guess you wanna make sure…”
Make sure what?
That I’d seen and discovered and nosed about, touching everything, putting periods at the end of sentences, being a damn-good, busybody murder police woefully aware that time was not my friend.
“Detective Norton?”
The woman’s voice pulled me from my cloud.
Nora Galbreath, dressed in a sequined-owl nightshirt and gray satin pajama bottoms, stood in her front doorway. She hugged herself and gazed nervously up the street. “I have something you should see.”
A moment later, I stood in her den, in front of a wall of security monitors. Her husband, Micah, stood beside me, remote control in his hand. “I thought the fire destroyed your cameras,” I said.
He shook his head. “The one closest to the Chatmans’ is gone. This one’s on the northern side, which is why what I’m about to show you may not be helpful.” He stopped the video.
2:43 A.M., 12/11: A black-and-white shot of Don Mateo Drive.
2:45 A.M., 12/11: An Infiniti SUV parks in front of the Galbreaths’ home.
My eyes widened—I couldn’t see the driver, but I knew that Sarah Oliver drove a similar car.
The driver remained behind the wheel of the car, sitting… sitting…
Micah pressed FAST FORWARD and said, “Whoever it is just sits until…”
3:01 A.M., 12/11: Light flickers off the SUV’s passenger-side window.
“The fire’s started,” I whispered.
3:04 A.M., 12/11: The SUV pulls away from the curb.
Face numb, I thanked the couple and accepted a disk of the video.
In tears, Nora walked me to the door. “I don’t know what this means, but…” She covered her mouth with her hand, holding back a sob.
I hugged her—hell, I didn’t know what it meant. That the Olivers started the fire, just as Christopher Chatman had implied minutes ago?
But why would they do that? And how could they set the fire—in the footage, no one had left the SUV?
As I walked back over to the Chatman property, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket to talk to someone other than myself. “I’m about to hit the Chatman place one last time, and I need you.”
Colin grumbled about just getting on the freeway and going the opposite direction.
Pepe whined about just sitting down to dinner.
Luke couldn’t wait to leave his house and Lupita and quickly agreed to handle another request warrant to search the Chatmans’ property a second time.
Since my last visit here, something had nagged at my mind. A popcorn kernel stuck in a tooth. Couldn’t figure out what that was, though. After talking with Christopher Chatman during that first interview, that mysterious thing had gained mass. My mind had continued to poke at it but couldn’t push or pry it out.
Ordinary Monday night…
Juliet’s awful cooking…
Strawberry milk shakes…
Milk shakes…
I called Colin again.
“Geez, Elouise,” he snapped, “I can’t freakin’ fly there.”
“When we searched the house the other day,” I said, “did we ever find the vials left from Juliet’s Valium prescription?”
“Don’t remember loggin’ in any vials.”
The porch lights from Virginia Oliver’s home popped on. The living room curtains fluttered. Virginia Oliver was peeking out at me with the telephone to her ear.
Who is she talking to?
Next, I called Fire Marshal Quigley about the vials.
“Right,” he said, “the vics had Valium in their systems.”
“We didn’t find any vials in our initial search,” I said. “What about you guys?”
“Nope. But if they were left in the upstairs rooms, a fire that hot would’ve melted them into nothing distinguishable. Just more burned-up trash.”
I poked at that for a moment.
Trash.
On my phone, I scrolled through the pictures I had taken with the digital camera upon my first arrival to Don Mateo Drive.
Three trash receptacles sat at the curb of every house. In front of the Chatman house… no trash cans. Only fire and police vehicles.
I remembered mentioning the bins to Colin as we searched that day but… “We didn’t search those.” Had we even noticed the Chatmans’ tubs that day? I closed my eyes and wandered the halls and bedrooms, the den, home office, and kitchen. No—I didn’t see them.
I glanced down the street. Where is Colin?
My phone chimed.
A text from Luke. I got the warrant signed. Sending to your car.
I hustled back to the Crown Vic and grabbed a flashlight, latex gloves, and evidence baggies, then slunk back to the house.
I waited for Colin a few minutes more, then said, “To hell with it.”
Warrant tucked into my jacket, I crept up the driveway. Glass and cockroaches crunched beneath my sneakers.
I threw a cone of light against the broken kitchen window.
Toppled-over pots of cacti. A cookbook stand. No trash cans on the service porch.
I tiptoed to the backyard, praying that a squatter—man or raccoon—had not made a home on the damp patio furniture.
Heaps of burned wooden slats. Piles of black plaster. A tower of twisted rebar.
Glass and cockroaches crunched.
But I hadn’t moved from my spot.
I’m not alone.
I yanked my gun from my holster and spun around.
“Relax, it’s me,” Colin said, his face illuminated by my flashlight, his arms held up because he didn’t want to get shot. “Watch where you’re pointing that thing.”
I stowed the Glock. “I’m looking for their trash cans.”
He shuffled past me. “How was the funeral home?”
“Kinda dead.” Then, I told him about the Galbreath’s gift to the case.
Colin ruffled his hair. “So…?”
I shrugged. “We need to talk to Sarah and Ben Oliver.”
“Maybe it was someone else’s SUV.”
“We won’t bring up that possibility when we talk to them, Detective.”
“Right.” Then, he clicked on his flashlight and tossed light from the patio to the side of t
he garage. There, on the left side of Juliet’s Away Place, sat three giant bins, each filled with a week’s worth of grass clippings, trash, and recyclables.
“And now, we look.” My skin crawled, and I covered my nose with the crook of my elbow. “They don’t show this shit on TV.”
Colin’s eyes watered. “I’m gettin’ cholera just lookin’ at it.”
“The cholera will probably clear up the syphilis.”
“One can only hope.”
I pointed to the stuffed black bin. “Let’s try that guy first.” I plucked the pair of latex gloves from my Windbreaker pocket, then lifted the top. Stink embraced me like a drunken uncle.
Colin pulled out the first trash bag and dropped it in front of me. “For you, darlin’.”
“You give me the nicest things.”
Rotten string beans… empty tub of strawberry ice cream… supermarket circulars… sticky red and white drinking straws…
“It’s like picking through a tomb,” Colin said as he scavenged through his own bag.
I plucked the straws from the refuse. “What if Chatman didn’t drink a shake that night, like Juliet and the kids did? I see only three straws. What if these straws were the Valium delivery system?”
“Grind up the drug…”
I pointed to the empty tub of strawberry ice cream. “Put the ground-up drug in the sweetest shit known to man.”
“They didn’t taste it,” Colin said. “With full stomachs, the drug absorbed well. Combine that with watching A Christmas Story for the 179th time, and, hell yeah, they’d be sleepy.”
“Who made the shakes?” I asked.
“Chatman.”
“We’ll test the straws,” I said, dropping them into a baggie. “And let’s take the ice-cream tub, too.”
Back to digging.
Balls of aluminum foil… orange juice containers… Lean Cuisine dinner cartons…
“Yahtzee,” Colin called, pointing inside his trash bag.
Three orange pill vials.
The labels read “diazepam,” the generic name for Valium. Each vial had been prescribed to Juliet Chatman.
Colin dropped each vial into its own bag. “We finished here?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Lemme make sure that there’s nothing else in here.”
Empty butter tub… toilet paper rolls… small jar of petroleum jelly…
My stomach clenched. “Vaseline.”
I opened the jar—half-empty. My hand shook as I held out the Vaseline tub.
Colin looked into the container, then gaped at me.
Yahtzee.
56
BACK AT SOUTHWEST, I PERCHED AT MY DESK WHILE COLIN PACED. IT WAS GOING on ten o’clock, and the room stank of puke left by a drunk driver. The noise from the sounds of police belts, handcuffs, and “I ain’t done nothing wrong” threatened to make me scream and then curl into a tight ball. I was far from sleep, but my burning eyes and heavy limbs told me that I was just as far from being totally awake.
Fire Marshal Denton Quigley charged into the bureau dressed in blue jeans and a fire-department hoodie. He clutched a thick accordion file in one hand and a battered rucksack in the other. “Sure didn’t expect to be here tonight,” he said.
Colin pointed at me. “If it hadn’t been for that nosy kid…”
Lieutenant Rodriguez left his office and came to stand over me with his arms crossed.
I had pulled him from poker night—he had been up a hundred dollars and had not been pleased to receive my phone call.
“Did Khan or Thistle call you?” Quigley asked me.
I shook my head. “What’s up?”
“Eli Moss pled out,” he said. “Admitted to setting your fire and the other fires.”
“He’s Burning Man?” Colin asked.
“Yup.” Quigley watched me express no emotion. “Thought you’d be thrilled to hear that.”
My limbs grew heavier, and I sighed.
“If that’s the best you can do, then all right.” He sat his file and bag on my worktable. “So why did you ask me to bring—?”
I held out the evidence bag containing the Vaseline jar. “Lint and glitter.”
His eyebrow cocked.
“Back on Tuesday,” I said, “we peeked in the Chatmans’ dryer.”
“And all this glitter shit came out,” Colin said. “Like a unicorn had died in there.”
“From Chloe Chatman,” I added. “Girls that age wear clothes with lots of glitter on them. Anyway, I lifted the lint tray, but the lint trap was clean, even though the last load of clothes was still there.”
Quigley nodded. “There shoulda been lint and glitter in the trap.”
“Somebody cleaned it out,” Lieutenant Rodriguez said.
“Somebody cleaned it out,” I said, “and then somebody used it.”
Colin blinked. “I don’t get it.”
“Lint burns longer than paper,” Quigley explained. “There’s cotton, and fiber, polyester, nylon, everything in a fluff of lint. And all of that makes a fire start easier.”
“Which is why I asked you to bring some lint with you,” I said with a smile. “Show Colin what we’re talking about.”
Quigley reached into his sack and pulled out a bag of lint. He cleared a spot on the worktable and then lit a piece of fluff with a gold lighter.
The lint quickly ignited and, just as quickly, disappeared.
“That’s untreated. Now, watch this.” He pulled out a small tube of petroleum jelly and squeezed a glob over a new fluff of lint. He lit the treated lint, and the Vaseline started to melt from the heat.
“The petroleum jelly helps start the fire and also lets it smolder some,” Quigley explained. “Add more lint and more Vaseline, and the flame lasts longer. Put all of it in an electrical outlet, and the lint and Vaseline will catch a spark and smolder until the flames grow.”
“Which means,” I said, “when the wife and kids were knocked out, Chatman probably made a trailer.”
“A what?” Colin asked me.
“A trail of lint. And it probably led from that bathroom outlet in between the paint cans to the hallways with all the still-wet thinner on the walls.”
“And we found the vials,” I told Quigley. “In the bins out back.”
“What’s the big deal with that?” Lieutenant Rodriguez asked me. “Of course, there’d be medicine vials in their trash. They were prescribed to one of the occupants. I bet if I went to your house, I’d find a vial with your name on it.”
“And you’d find one vial per drug.” I held up one finger. “One prescription a month. And I’d toss out the empty vial as soon as I brought home the new one. In this instance, the old ones weren’t tossed. Why? Besides that, Juliet’s doctor said she’d stopped taking the drugs back in the summer. And yet Juliet and the kids had crazy amounts of Valium in their systems.”
Lieutenant Rodriguez leaned on the edge of my desk. “So?”
“So any fingerprints on Juliet’s vials should either belong to her or to the pharmacist who initially filled the order.”
“And if the fingerprints don’t belong to Juliet or the pharmacist?” he asked.
“Then someone else drugged her and the kids. Which also means we’ve just eliminated one of our primary suspects: Juliet Chatman. It’s no different than if we had found his prints on her gun. These pills were just another type of weapon.”
“Chatman could’ve picked up the meds for her,” Lieutenant Rodriguez said. “So his prints could be on the vials.”
“And he handed her a pill each day without her ever touching a vial?” I asked, eyebrow cocked. “Even if he picked up her prescription as a favor, her prints should be on one of those vials, right?”
My boss nodded. “Fine. I’ll put a rush on the prints.”
“The prints on the Vaseline tub, too?”
“And the prints on the Vaseline tub, too.”
“And process the straws?”
“And process the straws.” He tapped my
shoulder. “You doin’ okay?”
I paused, then said, “Uh-huh.”
His gray eyes searched mine. “I know what’s going on.”
“Yeah?”
“His Ducati. That’s a beautiful bike. Art.”
I squinted at him. “I won’t take a tire iron to it.”
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart, hope to die, and so on and so forth.”
Satisfied with my promise, he and Quigley wandered back to his office and closed the door.
“So what is Chatman lookin’ at?” Colin asked me.
“Arson,” I said. “Three counts of murder. And if the SEC investigation is related, then murder for financial gain.”
“Sounds like he’s getting the needle.”
“He will if California still does that kind of thing.”
He glanced at his watch. “Think we’ll get a print hit tonight?”
My desk phone rang. “Maybe this is them.”
The caller didn’t speak at first. After I said, “hello,” twice, the caller said, “This is Sarah Oliver. Ben’s wife.”
My body went cold. “Hi.”
“Hope I’m not catching you at a bad time. I know you’re probably very busy right now. Although, looking at my husband’s last phone calls, it seems you’ve been in constant contact with him beyond normal work hours.”
Stunned, I paused before grabbing the recorder adapter and jamming it onto the phone. “I talked with Mr. Chatman this evening, and he told me many interesting things, some of which involves your family.”
She laughed without humor. “I guess it all comes out now. I knew about Ben and Juliet.”
Chatman had told the truth.
“Did you confront her about it?” I asked.
“No. But I confronted my husband. He asked for a divorce. I told him no.”
“So Chloe—?”
“He showed interest in Chloe,” she said. “But I told him no about that, too.”
“What was there to tell him no about?”
“The girl had a father—Christopher. My money, our resources, would not be taken from Amelia just because he fucked around and got caught.”
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