“I couldn’t say. I didn’t see the fire start but the explosion did wake us up. It was, I dunno, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Around five in the morning.”
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Tabitha, why?”
“May I speak to her?”
“I guess, but I told you she doesn’t know anything, Detective.”
“If I can just have a word.” Stanton saw the hesitation on the woman’s face. “Sometimes teenagers can hear things others can’t. They have more sensitive hearing because of their age and hormones.”
“Whatever you say.” She turned to the girl and said, “Come talk to the detective.”
The girl sighed and came over. She rolled her eyes and folded her arms before leaning against the doorframe.
“Hi, Tabitha, my name is Jon and I’m with the San Diego Police Department. I’m trying to figure out what happened last night and I just wanted to see if you saw or heard anything.”
“No, mom already told you we were asleep.”
“So you were in your bed asleep around five in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Was anyone in the room with you?”
“No, it’s just for me.”
Stanton ran his tongue across the back of his teeth as he considered her. She had glanced to the left when she stated that she was in her room. Leftward glancing during conversation tended to indicate constructed images or sounds whereas glancing right tended to indicate remembered images or sounds, correlating to the logic and creative hemispheres of the brain. She had also used distancing language: instead of “my mom” it was just “mom.” Instead of “my room” she had said “it’s.” She was physically distancing herself from Stanton as well by folding her arms; people who are lying typically only move limbs toward their bodies.
With her mother standing right behind her, though, there was no way she would reveal anything.
“Okay, Tabitha, thanks. If you think of anything, you’ll let me know, right?”
“Sure,” she said, turning away and heading up the stairs.
Stanton turned toward the house and saw Benny arrive. There was another arson investigator that the police department liked to use, but Stanton couldn’t remember his name. He would have to look that up when he got back to the precinct.
His cell phone rang. There were two calls he was waiting for and this was the first one, though it came much quicker than he would’ve thought.
“Hi, Danny.”
“You out of the damn multiple-wife havin’, magic underwear wearin’ mind a yours? What the fuck did you go on the news for?”
“I had to—”
“No, no, fuck you. Fuck you, Jon. I had to sit at my desk and have Chin Ho chew my ass for ten minutes. Do you know what kinda panic this’ll cause? How many old farts with itchy trigger fingers will blow their neighbor’s head off ‘cause they think he’s a damn arsonist?”
“I know, but I had to risk—”
“Get your ass back here right now.”
“I’m working the scene.”
“Fuck the scene and fuck you. Get back here, now!”
The phone clicked and ended. Stanton took a deep breath as he walked to his car and watched Benny arrive and get his kit out of the truck and go to work.
CHAPTER 29
Stanton sat in a chair across Lieutenant Daniel Childs’ desk. Captain Phillips was out and Chin Ho had delegated the task of yelling at him to Childs. Stanton watched as Childs rose twice and paced around the room, his muscles bulging underneath the tight long-sleeved shirt he had on. He finally sat back down and folded his arms in front of him on the desk.
“You’re off this case.”
“Danny, I know what I did was risky. But the only way I could get the help we need was to run a segment like that.”
“You had one of the uniforms give a photo of the family to the news. Them kids’ grandparents called us. We hadn’t had a chance to notify next of kin yet. That’s how they found out all six of their grandkids was dead.”
“I’m sorry, but it wouldn’t have been any easier coming from you.”
“What did you say?”
“Danny, this isn’t an accident. This is a pattern. We have something unique here, something we haven’t dealt with before. Benny is useless on this case. I need Emma to help me on this.”
“Who the fuck is Emma? That professor you brought in on the last one? Well you ain’t got to worry about it ‘cause I’m giving this case to Nate and Slim Jim. Now get the fuck outta my office.”
“Danny, you and I go back a long ways, you know me. Do you really think I’m wrong about this?”
Childs shook his head. “That’s your problem, man. That’s why I’m sitting in this chair and you sittin’ in that one even though you ten times the detective I was. It don’t matter if you’re wrong or right. You gotta do things the way the higher-ups want. You think I don’t know they fuck up your cases? You think I don’t know dope dealers go free every damned day ‘cause we gotta get approval to spend sixty dollars for flash money to make a fake buy? You think I don’t see the captain’s friends getting let off of DUIs and bar fights just ‘cause they know him? Don’t forget I been a cop longer than you. I know it all, man. And I’m telling you it don’t matter.”
Stanton rose. “It does matter. And if you don’t do anything about it, you’re no better than them.”
Stanton got into his car and drove away from the precinct well over the speed limit. He didn’t feel like working any cases or speaking to any victims right now. He felt like getting his board and heading out into the ocean and being alone on the waves, if they would have him. But his cell phone rang incessantly and interrupted his thoughts. He answered and it was Melissa, his ex, asking for changes to child support payments this month, then his psychiatrist’s office called to confirm his appointment for tomorrow, and then Gunn called.
“Hey, Stephen.”
“Hey, man. I just heard we’re off the arson cases.”
“Yeah, well, what can you do.”
“Oh, man. Why is it I get scared when you act defeated?”
“What?”
“You’re not stoppin’ on these cases, are you?”
“They’re heading in the wrong direction. And who’s going to solve them? Benny? We used to have a Metro Arson Strike Team and now we have Benny?”
“Metro Arson cost us an arm and leg my friend. You like makin’ more than someone at McDonald’s? Then I suggest you not complain. Now look, get this shit outta your head. I ain’t gettin’ suspended ‘cause of a couple of fires. Besides we got somethin’ more interestin’ on our plates.”
“What is it?”
“Western called over and asked for some help on a scene. They thought it was a fuckin’ massacre but it turned out it was just one vic, a young woman. I’m headed down there right now. You should come too, the news is already there. Supposed to be some fucked up shit.”
“I appreciate you trying to cheer me up with…that, but I think I’m heading out to surf.”
“All right, look, they asked me for help but this sounds like one sick fuck. I need your help.”
“What do you care about a case out of Western? It’s not our jurisdiction, let them handle it.”
“Oh shit. Look who cares about proper procedure and jurisdiction now? It’s my fuckin’ ex-wife’s case.”
“I thought you weren’t speaking?”
“I thought so too, but she called and said I may be able to help her. Can you come?”
Stanton sighed. “Yeah, sure, just text me the address. I’m on my way.”
Thirty-five minutes of sitting in traffic later, Stanton pulled up to Maplewood Drive and drove down the street. Crowds had gathered behind the police tape. He watched their faces, their reactions. Some had brought out lawn chairs.
Several police cruisers and a CSI van were parked nearby. Stanton walked to the tape and showed his badge to a uniform he didn’t recognize. The man was lar
ge, muscular beyond comfort, and asked him a few questions about what he was doing here rather than just letting him through which was custom. Stanton politely answered his questions and heard someone call his name behind him. Gunn ran up and went to duck under the police tape when the uniform stopped him.
“What are you here for?”
“What? Fuck you dickhead. Get the fuck outta my way and go write some traffic tickets.” Gunn brushed past him and got up next to Stanton. “You see Erin yet?”
“No, I just got here.”
The house was large, three stories with a yard. There was a car parked in the driveway and the driver’s side door was open. They made their way up past the car and glanced in before going inside the house.
Music was playing somewhere; a classic rock station. Gunn’s ex-wife Erin Dallas was standing over a pattern of blood spatter on the wall, directing the forensic techs as to what she wanted done. Another tech was walking around the house with a camera filming the scene and there were a couple of other detectives there. A newspaper reporter sat on the couch with a laptop, his press badge dangling from his neck.
“How you doin’, baby?” Gunn said.
“Steve, I’m glad you came. Hello, Jon.”
“It’s good to see you, Erin.”
“You too.” She turned to Gunn. “So you want the quick rundown or you guys wanna explore for a bit? Don’t mind the music; it was playing when we got here.”
“Just tell me what you got.”
“One victim, twenty-three, Monique Gaspirini. She’s, well, what’s left of her is upstairs in the bedroom. Let’s head up there.”
They followed her through the house, forensics giving them some booties and latex gloves to put on. There were masks as well and everyone coming down the stairs were wearing them, but Gunn and Stanton declined.
As they walked past the kitchen, Stanton looked over and saw one of the techs taking photos of a frying pan that was on the burner. Something was in the pan and he stopped and looked more closely: it was a human heart. Part of a heart anyway and Stanton noticed the other portion on a plate that was on a dining room table in the adjacent room.
“You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” Gunn said when he saw what Stanton was looking at.
“It gets worse,” Erin said.
They climbed the stairs and saw stains on the carpets; they were boot prints, outlined with blood. At the top of the stairs they turned left into a bedroom and Erin opened the door which was half-closed.
The room looked like the back of a butcher’s shop. Blood and hair and organ and other tissues were smeared on the walls. Something was nailed on the closet door, it appeared like a kidney. On the bed were the remains of what Stanton could only guess was once a human being.
“If you notice,” Erin said, pointing with a pen she held in her hand, “the face is missing. We haven’t found it yet but he, or they, might’ve taken it as a trophy.”
“It’s one man,” Stanton softly said.
“How do you know?”
“There’s only one set of boot prints going down the stairs.” He leaned down, closer to the bed. Though her legs were still there, they had been severed from her torso.
“You ever seen anythin’ like this?” Gunn mumbled.
“No,” Stanton said, rising.
Gunn turned to Erin. “Why did you call us out here, Er? You got enough man-power without us buttin’ in.”
“I’ve never…I don’t think I’m the best qualified for this type of case. I’m happy to do it and I can figure it out as I go, but I could use a head start. If I went to other detectives in my precinct, well, it’s hard enough being one of only six females in homicide. I don’t need to go begging for help too. They’d lose respect for me. But I also know what I don’t know. And I don’t know what this is.”
Stanton swallowed and turned to the only window in the room. He walked over to it and looked outside. You could see down onto the street. A tech walked in just then and began filming and taking measurements.
“All right,” Gunn said, “we’ll help you. What d’ya need?”
“Just what I said, a head start. We’ve notified the family and are talking to all the neighbors but it doesn’t sound like anybody has anything to say other than they’re shocked.”
“She have a boyfriend?” Stanton asked.
“Yes, but we haven’t been able to get ahold of him. One of the neighbors identified a man she saw here a few days ago but it could be her boyfriend. She’s working with a sketch artist right now to get us a face.”
Stanton noticed something on the victim’s right shoulder. He approached and bent down over her. His heart was racing; he never knew if the dead were truly dead and hardly anything would have frightened him more than one of them sucking in breath, crying for help when there was nothing he could do.
“Look at this,” Stanton said. The other two crowded around and looked at what he was pointing at. It was a small circular wound on the flesh.
“Cigarette?” Gunn said.
“No, but it’s definitely something involving heat. The outer dermis is completely melted away.”
“Huh,” Erin said.
The tech behind them said, “I need photos of her back if you guys want to help me lift.”
Erin nodded and they gently lifted the girl up as the tech took photos. Stanton glanced at her back; it was filled with the circular burn patterns.
“ME will be able to tell us more,” Stanton said. “I’d like his autopsy report as soon as it’s done, as well as any forensics reports.”
“You got it,” Erin said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Gunn interjected, “keep your gun next to you at night.”
CHAPTER 30
Emma Lyon stood at the head of the classroom and watched the clock. The exam was the second of the year and it was the most difficult one she gave. On a first exam the students would be frightened enough; by the third and final exam apathy and a full semester of work would wear them down; but the second exam was the great test. They would be overconfident from the first exam, assuming they knew what was coming next, and then be thrown off by the difficult and esoteric questions. They would be unsure what was coming and the apathy of the third exam would be shaken away.
The exam was focused around entropy and Gibbs energy. The topic made her uncomfortable; she was never one to see science as a closed system and applying entropic principles to daily life was a frightening prospect. According to thermodynamics, thermal energy always flows from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature. This process reduces the state of order in the initial system so, in a manner of speaking, entropy is the measure of chaos in a system. And as the second law of thermodynamics has shown, entropy only increases or stays the same; it is never reduced.
When she first learned this principle, images of empires laid to waste, of entire species gone extinct, of space stations destroyed, of planets made uninhabitable filled her mind. She saw humanity as a species that was born, reached its apex, and began its slow decline into chaos and then extinction. It was a thought that stuck with her and made the actual subject much more difficult than it needed to be.
“Time,” she said, “please put your pencils down.”
Groans of joy and frustration from the class of twenty-eight. A few mumbles came up about the pure difficulty of the exam and more than one person was certain they had failed.
“You can turn in your scan-tron sheets on my desk. I’ll see you guys next week and we’ll begin modules fourteen and fifteen so make sure to have those read.”
The class filed out and she sat down at the desk, waiting for a few stragglers as they gathered their items and placed the sheets down on the desk in front of her. When they had left, she gathered the sheets together and placed them in a folder. For just a moment, she considered throwing them away and assigning grades randomly to stress entropy’s point. It would be poignant and humorous at the same time, but she felt few of her students would find it
amusing and instead she just placed the folder in her bag and walked out of the classroom.
She decided she wasn’t going to pick anything up from her office and would instead just head home.
It was a long drive on a freeway that was congested to the point of immobility. The radio announced that four separate accidents had occurred and officers were trying to clear them both up as quickly as possible. She rolled down her window and leaned back in the seat, trying to calm herself as wafts of exhaust came into her car. Eventually she had to roll the window back up.
Her cell phone rang. It was Steve Cutler, the dean of the college of science.
“This is Emma.”
“Emma, it’s Steve. Didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”
“No.”
“I need you to cover that symposium next Thursday and Friday up there in San Francisco.”
“What? Steve I told you I can’t do that. I have several labs and a research thesis that’s due for publication in just—”
“No excuses. Just do it.”
“This is the third time you’ve sprung something like this on me. I don’t see too many other tenured professors getting that.”
“No one else can do it. Just suck it up and go. You might like San Francisco.”
“What is all this about, Steve? Is it because I told you to go home to your wife?”
“I was drunk when I did that. Pussies like yours are a dime a dozen out here. Don’t flatter yourself. Now go to that fucking symposium and quit being such a pain in the ass.”
He hung up before Emma could say anything else. She felt like throwing her cell phone out the window or punching her steering wheel. Instead, she decided she would have to go to the symposium and suck up the humiliation. She had played with the idea of a lawsuit and now it seemed inevitable: Steve Cutler should not be supervising anyone, much less young women looking to rise up the career ladder.
By the time she got home it was already dark and the street lamps were on. She parked in her garage and went inside the house. The home was near the beach and the air always had a salty tinge to it that at first she had hated, but now had grown accustomed to.
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