“I don’t think she likes either of us, dude,” Hawk said into his phone. “You think she’s a snob?”
“Let me talk to her,” Pidge said. He put his “receiver” down on the table, said to the girl, “Hi. I’m Pidge. I’m a senior. Computer sciences.” He pointed to the Gates Building. “My buddy wants to ask you out, but I was telling him that even though he saw you first, I like you better.”
“Yeah, yeah,” the girl said. “I’m sure you’re not just playing me. Some kind of goof you’re doing with each other.”
Hawk reached out, touched the girl’s forearm. “Ow, that really hurts. You’ve got us wrong,” Hawk said. “I saw you in the library, don’t you remember? I’m not that good at meeting a girl by myself.”
“That’s the truth,” Pidge said. “Hawk’s shy. I’m just helping out as his wingman. But when I saw you just now, I thought – and this is the truth now – you’re more my type than his.”
“What kind of type is that?” the girl asked, warming now to the attention. Herds of bikes whizzed by. The smell of bread baking at Subway floated over the plaza. The sun warmed the top of her head. It was a beautiful day, and now it had gotten better.
“You’re creative, right? I have a feeling that you must be creative. You’re a writer, I’ll bet.”
“I’m in hum bio.”
“Human biology? Cool,” said Hawk. “Actually, I’m a writer. What’s your name?”
“Kara. Kara Lynch.”
“I’m Hawk, Kara Lynch. This is my friend Pidge.”
“What do you write?” she asked Hawk.
“Pidge and I are working together on a novel,” said Hawk. “May I get you another one of those?” he asked. “Strawberry Whirl?”
“Yes. Thanks, Hawk,” Kara said, smiling.
When Hawk left, Pidge leaned across the table, said to the girl, “Seriously, Kara. He’s not your type. Sure, he’s a fuzzy, but I’m a computer genius. Top of my class. If I told you my real name, you’d recognize it. But look, when Hawk gets back, you’ve got to be ready to choose. Either you’ve got to step up and ask Hawk out. Or you’ve got to ask me.
“It’s got to be one or the other, so that the two of us don’t fight. That wouldn’t be good. That would be cruel.”
Kara shifted her eyes to Hawk as he came back to the table with the smoothie. Kara thanked him, then said, “I was thinking, Hawk, maybe we could hang out sometime.”
Hawk smiled. “Oh, wow, Kara. And I was just thinking you’re much more Pidge’s type than mine. He’s famous at Gates. You’d never forgive yourself if you turned him down.”
Kara turned dubiously to Pidge. He rewarded her with a blinding smile. “You have to step up, Kara,” he said.
“Uh-huh. Kiss my ass,” she said, blushing, putting her eyes back on her laptop.
Pidge said, “I can’t do that, Kara. Hawk saw you first.” He laughed.
“Ba-rinnng,” Hawk said.
“Hal-lo?”
“Like either one of us would go out with a fat slob like her,” Hawk said, making sure he said it loud so that Kara and the students at the other picnic tables could hear him. The two boys laughed, made a big deal of holding their sides, falling off the benches to the ground.
Pidge recovered first. He stood and tousled Kara’s hair playfully. “Mea culpa, Kara mia,” he said. “Better luck next time.”
He took a bow as tears slid down her cheeks.
Chapter 56
CONKLIN PARKED OUR CAR on the narrow, tree-lined road in Monterey, a small coastal town two hours south of San Francisco. On my right, one wing of the three-story, wood-frame house remained untouched, while the center of the house had burned out to the framing timbers, the roof open to the blue sky like a silent scream.
Conklin and I pushed through the clumps of sidewalk gawkers, ducked under the barricade tape, and loped up the walk.
The arson investigator was waiting for us outside the front door. He was in his early thirties, over six feet tall, jangling the keys and change in his pocket. He introduced himself as Ramon Jimenez and gave me his card with his cell phone number printed on the back. Jimenez opened the fire department lock on the front door so we could enter the center of the house, and as the front door swung open we were hit with the smell of apples and cinnamon.
“Air freshener explosion,” Jimenez said. “The crispy critters were found in the den.”
As we followed Jimenez into the fire-ravaged shell, I thought about how some cops and firefighters use jargon to show that they’re tough – when in fact they’re horrified. Others do it because they get off on it. What kind of guy was Jimenez?
“Was the front door locked?” I asked him.
“No, and a neighbor called the fire in. Lots of people don’t bother to set their alarms around here.”
Broken glass crunched under my shoes and water lapped over the tops of them as I slogged through the open space, trying to get a sense of the victims’ lives from the remains and residue of their home. But my knack for fitting puzzle pieces together was blunted by the extent of the destruction. First the fire, then the water and the mop-up, left the worst kind of crime scene.
If there had been fingerprints, they were gone. Hair, fiber, blood spatter, footprints, receipts, notes – forget all of that. Unless a bomb trigger or trace of an accelerant was found, we couldn’t even be sure that this fire and the others we were investigating had been set by the same person.
The most conclusive evidence we had was the similarity of the circumstances surrounding this fire and those at the Malones’ and Meachams’ homes.
“The vics were a married couple, George and Nancy Chu,” Jimenez told us. “She was a middle school teacher. He was some kind of financial planner. They paid their taxes, were law-abiding, good neighbors, and so forth. No known connections with any bad guys. I can fax you the detectives’ notes from the canvass of the neighborhood.”
“What about the ME’s report?” I asked.
Conklin was splashing through the ruins behind me. He started up the skeletal staircase that still clung to the rear wall.
“The ME wasn’t called. Uh, the chief ruled the fire accidental. Nancy Chu’s sister had the funeral home pick up the bodies, ASAP.”
“The chief didn’t see cause to call the ME?” I shouted. “We’re looking at a string of fire-related, probable homicides in San Francisco.”
“Like I told you,” Jimenez said, staring me down with his dark eyes. “I wasn’t called either. By the time I got here, the bodies were gone and the house was boarded up. Now everyone’s yelling at me.”
“Who else is yelling?”
“You know him. Chuck Hanni.”
“Chuck was here?”
“This morning. We called him in to consult. He said you were working a couple of similar cases. And before you say I didn’t tell you, we might have a witness.”
Had I heard Jimenez right? There was a witness? I stared up at Jimenez and pinned some hope on the thought of a break in the case.
“Firefighters found the Chus’ daughter unconscious out on the lawn. She’s at St. Anne’s Children’s Hospital with an admitting carbon monoxide of seventeen percent.”
“She’s going to make it?”
Jimenez nodded, said, “She’s conscious now, but pretty traumatized. So far she hasn’t said a word.”
Chapter 57
A TELEPHONE RANG repeatedly in some corner of the second floor of George and Nancy Chu’s house. I waited out the sad, echoing bell tones before asking Jimenez the name and age of the Chus’ daughter.
“Molly Chu. She’s ten.”
I scribbled in my notebook, stepped around a mound of water-soaked rubble, and headed for the stairs. I called out to Rich, who was already starting down. Before I could tell him about Molly Chu, he showed me a paperback book that he held by the charred edges.
Enough of the book cover remained so that I could read the title: Fire Lover, by Joseph Wambaugh.
I knew the book.
>
This was a nonfiction account of a serial arsonist who’d terrorized the state of California in the 1980s and ’90s. The blurb on the back cover recounted a scene of horror, a fire that had demolished a huge home improvement center, killing four people, including a little boy of two. While the fire burned, a man sat in his car, videotaping the images in his rearview mirror – the rigs pulling up, the firefighters boiling out, trying to do the dangerous and impossible, to knock down the inferno even as two other suspicious fires burned only blocks away.
The man in the car was an arson investigator, John Leonard Orr, a captain of the Glendale Fire Department.
Orr was well known and respected. He toured the state giving lectures to firefighters, helping law enforcement read the clues and understand the pathology of arsonists. And while he was traveling, John Orr set fires. He set the fire that had killed those four people. And because of his pattern of setting fires in towns where he was attending fire conferences, he was eventually caught.
He was tried, convicted, and stashed in a small cell at Lompoc for the rest of his life, without possibility of parole.
“Did you see this book?” Conklin asked Jimenez.
Jimenez shook his head no, said, “What? We’re looking for books?”
“I found it in the master bathroom between the sink and the toilet,” Conklin said to me.
The pages of the book were damp and warped, but it was intact. Incredibly, books rarely burn, because of their density and because the oxygen the fire needs for combustion can’t get between the pages. Still holding the book by the edges, Rich opened the cover and showed me the block letters printed with a ballpoint pen on the title page.
I sucked in my breath.
This was the link that tied the homicides together.
The Latin phrase was the killer’s signature, but why did he leave it? What was he trying to tell us?
“Hanni was here,” Conklin said quietly. “Why didn’t he find this book?”
I muttered, “Got me,” and focused on the handwritten words on the flyleaf, Sobria inebrietas. Even I could translate this one: “sober intoxication.”
But what the hell did it mean?
Chapter 58
CONKLIN AND I had never had a serious fight, but we bickered during the entire two-hour drive back to the Hall. Rich insisted it was significant that a pro like Hanni had missed “the only clue in the whole damned crime scene.”
I liked Chuck Hanni. I admired him. Rich didn’t have the same history, the same attachment, so he could be more objective. I had to consider his point of view. Was Hanni a psychopath hiding in plain sight? Or was Conklin so desperate to close the Malone case that he was turning an oversight into a major deal?
I saw that Chuck Hanni was with Jacobi in the glass-walled corner office when Conklin and I entered the squad room. As we wove around the desks toward Jacobi’s office, Conklin said to me, “Let me handle this, okay?”
Jacobi waved us into his small office, and Conklin leaned against the wall inside the door. I took a side chair next to Hanni, who squirmed in his seat in order to face me.
“I was telling Jacobi, the Chu fire looks like the work of the same sick asshole who set the others,” Hanni said. “Don’t you think?”
I was looking at Hanni’s familiar face and thinking of the time he’d told me about spontaneous human combustion.
“It’s like this, Lindsay,” he’d said over beer at MacBain’s. “Biggish guy is drinking beer and smoking cigarettes in his La-Z-Boy. Falls asleep. The cigarette drops between the cushions and catches fire. Biggish guy’s fat is saturated with alcohol. The chair catches fire and so does the guy, like a freakin’ torch.
“After they’ve been incinerated, the fire extinguishes itself. Nothing else catches, so all that’s left is the metal frame of the chair and the guy’s charred remains.
“There’s your so-called spontaneous human combustion.”
I had said “Ewwww,” laughed, and bought the next round.
Now Conklin said from behind me, “Chuck, you were at the Chu scene and you didn’t let us know about it. What’s up with that?”
“You think I was keeping something from you?” Hanni bristled. “I told Jimenez to notify you guys as soon as I saw the victims’ bodies.”
Conklin took the paperback book from his inside jacket pocket. He reached over me, placed the book, now enclosed in a plastic evidence bag, on top of the pile of junk on Jacobi’s desktop.
“This was inside the Chu house,” Conklin said, his voice matter-of-fact, but there was nothing innocent about it. “There’s block lettering on the first page, in Latin.”
Hanni looked at the book in silence for a moment, then muttered, “How did I miss this?”
Jacobi said, “Where’d you find it, Rich?”
“In a bathroom, Lieutenant. In plain sight.”
Jacobi looked at Hanni with the hard-boiled stare he’d perfected in twenty-five years of interrogating the worst people in the world. He said, “What about it, Chuck?”
Chapter 59
CHUCK HANNI’S CHAIR scraped the floor as he pushed back from Jacobi’s desk. He’d been caught off guard and was now indignant. “What? You think I’m like that Orr prick? Setting fires so I can be a hero?… Oh, and I planted that book to point suspicion at myself? Look! I gave the ATF a standing ovation when they brought John Orr down.”
Conklin smiled, shrugged.
I felt sweat beading up at my hairline. Hanni couldn’t be what Conklin was suggesting, but so many kind-faced seeming do-gooders had been convicted of mass murder, I had to know. I kept my mouth shut and let the scene play out.
“Why didn’t you tell us about the Christiansen fire?” Conklin said, calmly. “Two wealthy people died. Their stuff was stolen -”
“Christ,” Hanni interrupted. “I don’t sit around reminiscing about old cases – do you? Bad enough I see them in my dreams -”
“But the MO was the same,” Conklin insisted. “And so I’m wondering if the killer can’t kick the habit. Maybe he’s still at it, and now he’s leaving clues at the crime scene. Like a book inscribed with a few words of Latin.”
I watched Chuck’s expression, expecting him to bolt, or punch out at Rich, or break down.
Instead he frowned, said, “What do you mean, the killer can’t kick the habit? Matt Waters confessed to the Christiansen fire two years ago. He’s doing time at the Q. Check it out, Conklin, before you start slinging accusations around.”
My face got hot.
Had Cindy gotten this wrong? The Christiansen fire had happened far from San Francisco, but still, I should have double-checked Cindy’s research.
Jacobi’s intercom had buzzed a few times during this meeting, but he hadn’t picked up. Now Brenda Fregosi, our squad assistant, barged into the office, ripped a pink square of paper from a pad, handed it to Jacobi, saying, “What’s the matter, Lieutenant? You didn’t hear me ring?”
Brenda turned and, swinging her hips, walked back across the gray linoleum to her desk. Jacobi read the note.
“Molly Chu is responding to the hospital shrink,” he told us. “She might be ready to talk.”
Chuck got out of his chair, but Jacobi stopped him.
“Let’s talk, Chuck. Just you and me.”
Chapter 60
MY HEART LURCHED when I saw the little girl. Her hair was singed to an inch of frizzed, black fuzz sticking out from her scalp. Her eyebrows and lashes were gone, and her skin looked painfully pink. We approached her bed, which seemed to float under a bower of shiny helium balloons.
Molly didn’t look at me or Conklin, but two Chinese women moved aside and a white-haired woman in her seventies with rounded features and sapphire blue eyes stood up and introduced herself as Molly’s psychiatrist, Dr. Olga Matlaga.
The shrink spoke to the little girl, saying, “Some police officers are here to see you, sweetheart.”
Molly turned toward me when I said her name, but her eyes were dull, as if the
life had been sucked out of her, leaving only a stick-figure representation of a child.
“Have you found Graybeard?” she asked me, her voice whispery and slowed by painkillers.
I cast a questioning look at Dr. Matlaga, who explained, “Her dog, Graybeard, is missing.”
I told Molly that we would put out an APB for Graybeard and told her what that meant. She nodded soberly and I asked, “Can you tell us what happened in your house?”
The child turned her face toward the window.
“Molly?” Conklin said. He dragged over a chair, sat so that he was at the little girl’s eye level. “Have lots of people been asking you questions?”
Molly reached a hand toward the swinging arm of the table near her bed. Conklin lifted a glass of water, held it so the child could sip through the straw.
“We know you’re tired, honey, but if you could just tell the story one more time.”
Molly sighed, said, “I heard Graybeard barking. And then he stopped. I went back to my movie, and a little later I heard voices. My mom and dad always told me not to come downstairs when they had guests.”
“Guests?” Conklin asked patiently. “More than one?”
Molly nodded.
“And they were friends of your parents?”
Molly shrugged, said, “I only know that one of them carried me out of the fire.”
“Can you tell us what he looked like?”
“He had a nice face, and I think he had blond hair. And he was like Ruben’s age,” Molly said.
“Ruben?”
“My brother, Ruben. He’s in the cafeteria right now, but he goes to Cal Tech. He’s a sophomore.”
“Had you ever seen this boy before?” I asked.
I felt Dr. Matlaga’s hand at my elbow, signaling me that our time was over.
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