She rubbed the cat’s head for a moment before getting into her car and starting the engine. She placed the plastic container containing the samples on the seat next to her and stared at it. It was nearly eleven o’clock and she had an 8:00 a.m. class in the morning. But excitement tingled in her belly. It was so rare that a genuine puzzle present itself in her world. She pulled away, careful to avoid the cat, and sped down to the freeway heading back to UCLA.
CHAPTER 42
Jon Stanton hung around the hospital lobby after he had left Gunn’s room. He didn’t know what exactly he was expecting to happen, but it felt like the place he needed to be right now. He got a Diet Coke out of the vending machines and sat at a table, slowly sipping out of the cold can and listening to the conversations around him.
One woman, older and grossly overweight, was describing the stroke she had suffered. She sat in a wheel chair, her friend next to her, and they laughed about it over ice cream as if she had slipped on a banana peel and hurt her backside. Another table was filled with young girls in their late teens discussing the gunshot wound their friend was being treated for. Speaking in hushed tones, one of them mentioned that she knew where the girl lived that had shot at them.
Stanton ignored them and sipped his drink. He took a good half hour to finish and then rose and walked back to the emergency room. The Richardsons were still there but they were packing up to leave. He was going to stop in and ask them questions about the man that had assaulted them but the uniform came up before he had a chance.
“Detective, I’m takin’ the mom and the kids to a hotel. Dad’s not doin’ so good. He’s got brain damage. Doc said he might have permanent blindness.”
Stanton glanced into the room. The young children sat with blank stares directed at the walls or floors. Only Tabitha had her eyes fixated on her father who was lying back asleep on the hospital bed. Her eyes were rimmed red from crying and he could see the spots on her skirt where the tears had fallen. She looked like she still wanted to cry, but there was nothing left.
“I need to interview them,” Stanton said. “I won’t do it now, though. Tell them I’m coming by in the morning to speak with them. What hotel are you going to?”
“They ain’t got much money with ‘em. I was just thinking the Highway Lodge over there off Friar’s Road.”
“No,” Stanton said. He pulled out his wallet and handed him a credit card. “Take them to the Marriott downtown. Stop at the grocery store first and make sure they have everything they need.”
“You got it.”
Stanton watched them leave without saying goodbye. He headed out to his car and got halfway down the corridor when his cell phone rang. He recognized the number as coming from the UCLA campus.
“Hello?”
“Jon, it’s Emma.”
“What’re you doing up?”
“Nice to hear from you too.”
“I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just late, that’s all.”
“I know you didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. Look I’m calling about the Brichards’ house. I went down and took some samples from the baseboards and the surface of the flooring. I tested it for accelerants.”
“And?”
“Nothing. I was about to call it a night when I decided to run it through one more battery of tests in the spectrometer. Some compounds get burned off so efficiently that they’re difficult to detect so I had to analyze the wood itself rather than looking for accelerant on the surface. I found something.”
“What?”
“It’s not much and I can only give you a range of probability as to the likelihood of its use, but I saw a trace amount of naphtha.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a somewhat broad term and the exact composite varies by manufacturing, but I think I saw a base of thinner. It would have to be nearly odorless and colorless. Something unique. Possibly something made to order.”
“Who could make an accelerant like that for private use?”
“Well, if he’s a chemist, he could make it at home. So we shouldn’t rule that out. He could also just know somebody or have access to some laboratories that contain the compound. There is one other possibility: he could be with the fire department. They would have access to accelerants for training purposes.”
“Let’s hope that’s not it.” Stanton paused. “Is this something Benny should have picked up?”
“It was more difficult to find than other accelerants, but he didn’t even test multiple samples. He took one and didn’t find anything and declared it good. He needs to be fired, Jon.”
Stanton walked outside to his car and leaned against it, watching the front entrance of the hospital as a man helped a woman in a wheelchair out. “Can you get me the lab results and a brief report?”
“Sure, I can email that to you right now.”
“Thanks.” He paused and then said, “I’m sorry about dinner last time.”
“It’s okay. It’s…you didn’t know.”
“I’d like to make it up to you sometime.”
“Sure, any time. You have my number.”
“Thanks, Emma. I’ll get back to you about this.”
“Sure thing. Bye.”
Stanton hung up and got into his car. He began to drive home and made a quick stop at the beach to watch the moon reflect off the water. After a long while, he went back to his apartment and changed into shorts and a T-shirt and tried to sleep. As he drifted off, he pictured the final moments of the Brichards and Humbolts. He felt his throat tighten up and he swallowed hard, and turned to his side. He knew it would be another night without sleep.
CHAPTER 43
It was nine in the morning when Stanton came into Northern and walked by the front desk with a quick nod hello to the receptionist, a manila folder under his arm. He found Slim Jim with his feet up and an iPod on, flipping through some reports in a brown file. Stanton lifted his earphones away from his ears.
“I’m meeting with Childs. I need you on this too.”
“What is it?”
“Arson cases.”
Slim Jim rose and followed him to Daniel Childs’ office. It was spacious but scarcely decorated. The only thing up on the walls were a few medals and his Marine Corps drill sergeant hat that was framed in a plastic case. Childs was reading over some documents on his computer and said, “Shut the door,” without looking up.
Stanton shut the door as Slim Jim collapsed onto the old couch in the corner. He pulled a sucker out of his jacket pocket and unwrapped it, thrusting it into his mouth and folding his hands on his chest.
“So,” Slim Jim said, “what’s up?”
Stanton took out some papers from the file under his arm and put them on the desk. Childs’ eyes went to them and he began reading through him. Stanton didn’t say anything until Childs pushed them away and then looked up at him.
“I told you you were off these cases.”
“I was right about them. I couldn’t let it go.”
“You were ordered to let it go.”
“Fine, suspend me. But fire Benny and follow up on these.” He took the two sketches out and placed them on the desk, Tabitha’s memory sketch on top of the other. “This is him, Danny. He’s targeting families and using an accelerant that most fire investigators can’t detect.”
Childs breathed heavily out his nose and lowered his eyes to the drawings. He glanced back up. “Slim Jim, you wanna keep these cases?”
“Hell no,” Slim Jim said, picking a piece of lint off his tie.
“It’s your case,” Childs said. “I’ll find another body to partner up with you.”
“Don’t need it. I’ll get Stephen when he gets out.”
“You kiddin’ me? He was shot and you’re gonna put him back to work?”
“I know him. He won’t lie in bed long.”
Childs leaned back in his chair. “All right, it’s your show. You run it. But if you fuck it up and this is wrong, or if you’re right and this…thing, gets a
way. It’s your ass.”
“I know.”
“So what’s next?”
“I want to give these to the media and have them on the six and ten o’clock news and every website and blog we can.”
“Tricky move,” Slim Jim said, pulling the sucker out and looking at it as he twirled it in his fingers, “he could run.”
“I know. I want a phone bank with as many people as we can spare. The calls’ll come quick and we need to nab him.”
“What makes you say that?” Childs said.
“He’s disorganized. He was so frantic to get work done at the Humbolts’ that he let a sixteen-year-old girl ID him. He didn’t care if neighbors of the girl he cut up saw him. He didn’t even bother to wear a wig or a baseball cap. The calls identifying him will come in quickly and we need to have people on standby to go as soon as we get the right call.”
“I ain’t got that many people, Jon. You can pull some interns and secretaries but that’s it.”
“What about the trainees at the academy?” Slim Jim said.
Childs shrugged. “You call over and see if they can send them.”
Slim Jim sighed as he stood up. “I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I thought it was going to be more work for me.”
Childs picked up the sketch. “Man, I hope you’re wrong about this. I hope it was a fucking accident. I don’t wanna know that people like this exist in the same world as my daughter.”
Within two hours, a room had been set up with twenty phones. Trainees had been pulled from their coursework at the academy on a volunteer basis; the volunteers having to make up the missed day on Saturday. Half a dozen interns from the local criminal justice programs at the city college joined them as did two secretaries. Stanton had run to Kinkos and gotten the sketches blown up. He pinned them to the wall at the front of the room. Childs and Slim Jim came in and stood by as Stanton turned to the people sitting on the folding chairs at the long tables they’d taken from the cafeteria. Slim Jim nodded to him, indicating that the sketches as well as an official statement had been sent to every media outlet in the county and even a few statewide.
“We’re going to get a lot of people claiming to be him,” Stanton said. “The accelerant he used was called naphtha. Ask them what type of accelerant they used in the fire and if they say anything else tell them the police are on their way to their location as we traced their number. They won’t be, but we need to get them off the phones as quickly as possible and make sure they don’t call back.”
One of the trainees, a young man, raised his hand. “What if he answers right?”
“Let any of the detectives in the room know and they’ll run a trace on the call. He won’t do that, though, he’s too smart and he hasn’t shown any indication of wanting to make contact with us in the past.” He glanced around. “Any other questions?”
“Yeah,” one of the other trainees said, “can I be the one to take the fucker for a ride when we catch him? I’d hate for him to get hurt by someone else’s crazy driving.”
There was a murmured, forced laugh from the crowd. Stanton smiled but didn’t respond. He gathered a couple of pens and a legal pad, pulled out a folding chair, and sat at one of the tables, staring at the phone.
CHAPTER 44
Nehor Stark sat quietly in the recliner as the young girl across from him woke up. He had cleaned and bandaged her head as well as he could with the supplies he’d found in the condominium. At present, the wound on the back of her skull had stopped bleeding and he was confident she hadn’t suffered any permanent injury. He didn’t say anything as she came to and looked around the living room.
“Where am I?” she said, her voice thick from grogginess that hadn’t left yet.
“You’re home, dear.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m your friend. Don’t you remember?”
“No.” She leaned her head back. “My head hurts.”
“Would you like some medication? I found quite a stash of Percocet pills in your bathroom.” He rose and took two pills out of an amber bottle that was on the coffee table. He held them up and she opened her mouth without protest. He placed them on her tongue and grabbed the plastic water bottle that was on a side table, putting it to her lips and allowing her to drink.
“What happened?” she said.
“Apparently you fell down and hit your head. Quite hard I’m afraid.”
“Shouldn’t I go to the hospital?”
“Not yet, but you will.”
“Who are you again?”
“Dear, I swear, you’re going to start hurting my feelings.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, lifting her head only to have it collapse back down. “I don’t feel good.”
Nehor rose. “Get some sleep. I’ll be back to check on you.”
As he walked around the couch he checked the cuffs on her ankles locking her to the chains that had been wrapped around the massive entertainment center. They gave her almost nine feet of slack, but it didn’t matter. All the phones had been smashed and the two entrances to the condo were at least twenty feet away.
Nehor stepped outside and got into Amber’s BMW. It purred to life and he pressed the accelerator a few times to hear the engine. He smiled to himself as he pulled out of the parking stall and onto Balboa Avenue. Pacific Beach wasn’t far and he briefly considered going there and putting his feet in the ocean. It’d been so long since he’d seen the ocean he had forgotten what it looked like. He had an image of it in his mind, but he knew it wasn’t accurate any longer.
He drove for a long time and got on Interstate 15 for a while, putting the top down and enjoying the blasts of warm air over him. He pulled off when he spotted a police cruiser behind him and came to a quaint neighborhood he hadn’t been to before. There was a yoga studio on one corner and a coffee shop next door with an alternative jewelry retailer across the street. He parked behind the yoga studio and went inside the coffee shop.
It never ceased to amaze him how much the style of clothing had changed since he was young. Then again, his memories were little more than fragments and even those had been altered in the time he’d spent in the little square room with no window. He didn’t trust his memories anymore to give him accurate information and he considered himself lucky. He was a man that wasn’t bound to anything.
He ordered a coffee with milk and argued with the cashier who quoted him four dollars for it. He paid with a five and went to a little station, mixing in sugar with a thin straw before finding a seat by the window. He watched the passing traffic, the monstrous SUVs and trucks that swallowed the road. Cars had gotten larger, more shiny, more a status symbol and less transportation. He remembered suddenly the smell of his mother’s Buick as they drove from Nevada to California, stopping only once a day to eat at greasy fast food restaurants to save money.
A man sitting across from him at the next table was staring at him. Nehor caught his glance and smiled and the man turned away. When he thought Nehor wasn’t looking he turned back, and then his eyes lifted to the television screen. Nehor glanced up to see a drawing of his face.
His heart began to beat in his ears and the world seemed to slow. There was no sound and the television had writing across it in white lettering, something he knew well but didn’t know the name for. Many times, as punishment at the institution, they would turn off the sound to the television or leave the sound on and turn off the picture. They weren’t allowed to starve or beat them, so it was the little things they used as punishment. He watched in amazement and phrases caught his attention.
…LEAD DETECTIVE JON STANTON…MASS MURDER OF…SEVERAL FIRES IN THE LA JOLLA AREA…MULTI-JURISDICTION MANHUNT…REWARD OFFERED
Jonathan Stanton. He spoke on the television and Nehor watched him with wonder. He was lean and Caucasian with a light olive skin. As if part of his heritage was Mediterranean. He had soft eyes.
Nehor flipped over the table he was sitting at to the shock of the patrons before storming out of the
coffee shop. One man tried to get in his way, saying something about the cost of the table before Nehor grabbed a glass bottle out of a girl’s hand and smashed it into his head, the man instantly toppling over into a heap.
The sun was high and bright as Nehor hopped into his BMW and pulled away. Led Zeppelin, a band he was fond of, was playing but the music was far away in the background and he didn’t really notice it. There was only one thought on his mind now: Jon Stanton.
CHAPTER 45
Stanton checked the clock on the wall behind him rather than pulling out his cell phone. Six and a half hours had passed since he’d sat down and started taking calls. By his estimation he’d handled over a hundred and fifty of them. Most were nutcases calling and pretending to be responsible for the fires or claiming they were married to the man in the sketch. A couple asked if there were any female officers they could speak with, probably hoping to talk dirty.
But there was one call that stuck out. A fifty-one-year-old woman who believed that her son was the man in the sketch. Stanton pressed her and she offered a few details. He was a loner at school and kept to himself at any social events. He seemed interested in girls as the mother had caught him watching pornography several times, but he couldn’t speak with them without stuttering or looking away. The other day his mother saw him starting fires in the backyard.
“How old is he?” Stanton asked.
“Sixteen.”
“I highly doubt it’s him. The man we’re looking for is probably mid to late twenties. But I’ll still send down an officer to speak with him.”
“Please hurry, Detective. I think he’s going to really hurt someone.”
Arsonist Page 18
