Fire Point

by Sean Black

  ‘You usually check everyone coming in?’ he asked the guard.

  The guard shook his head. ‘Nope, pretty laid back usually. North Malibu isn’t really a crime hot spot, if you know what I mean.’

  The guard made a brief call to check that Professor Cristopher was expecting him and waved him through.

  Ahead of him, the road narrowed for a few hundred yards before opening back up again to reveal the clean-lined, white modernist campus buildings that were laid out on a huge flat pad with multi-million-dollar ocean views. Lock followed the directions he’d been given, parked and headed toward the main administration building.

  Janet Cristopher was waiting for him in her office. She was a petite blonde in her early fifties with a pleasant manner, nothing like the ‘radical’ women’s rights campaigner suggested in the few newspaper articles Lock had found on her after a brief online search. After he had passed on her offer of coffee, she suggested they take a walk around the grounds while they talked. ‘It’s a shame to be cooped up inside on a day like today,’ she told him, as they stepped out into the blazing sunshine.

  ‘You seem to have landed on your feet,’ Lock said.

  She shrugged. ‘It was time for a change. California’s not so bad. Although the Santa Anas are playing merry hell with my allergies.’

  It hadn’t escaped Lock’s notice that the hot desert winds that whipped down through the canyons had picked up in the last couple of days.

  ‘Anyway,’ Janet continued, ‘I take it you’re not here to chat about the weather. You wanted to talk to me about Gretchen.’

  ‘You remember her, then?’ Lock said.

  Janet smiled and swept a hand through her long white-blonde hair. ‘Oh, yeah. She made my life pretty damn miserable until she was finally expelled. This news about her being caught up in these murders in Brentwood, I’d like to say I was surprised, but I really wasn’t. It was only a matter of time before she really hurt someone. I didn’t think it would be this exactly, but . . .’ She stopped.

  It was obvious to Lock that she wasn’t sure whether she should say what she was thinking. ‘Please, Professor, go on,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m supposed to be this big bleeding-heart liberal, bra-burning women’s libber. Which should mean I believe that people are a product of their environment. But let me tell you, Mr Lock, I think Gretchen was just bad to the bone. I don’t think I actually thought someone could be born evil until I ran across her.’

  She looked at him, as if expecting him to be shocked by her outburst. ‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ he said. ‘But that still doesn’t give me a sense of her.’

  They had reached a grassy area.

  Janet took a seat on a nearby bench. Lock sat down next to her. Students were sprawled on the grass, reading or just sunbathing. A frisbee whizzed overhead, and a young student loped past them on his way to retrieve it.

  Janet folded her hands in her lap. ‘Okay, where do I start? Some students are argumentative, or difficult because they’re encountering a subject for the first time. Or they’re idealistic. But Gretchen was just openly hostile. She’d already made her mind up that she thought women’s studies was a bunch of baloney.’

  Lock wasn’t sure that she might not have had a point, but chose to keep his opinion to himself. ‘So why’d she take it as a course?’ he asked.

  ‘Not just as a course. It was her declared major. And by the time she was kicked out, pretty much the entire faculty and most of the students were asking the same question. I guess she saw herself as taking the fight to the enemy.’

  ‘The fight being?’ Lock asked.

  ‘Gretchen believed that feminism and equal rights have destroyed the country. She’s not alone either. There’s a lot of people who would agree with her. The men’s rights movement has been growing over the past decade. And some of its most vocal supporters are women. They want a return to traditional values, whatever those were. Gretchen was way out on the extreme edge, though. To her, I was the Antichrist.’

  ‘And she made that clear?’ said Lock.

  ‘At first it was just arguing with me in class, which was fine up to a point. But after a while it became personal. The tires on my car were slashed. Someone killed one of my cats and nailed it to my front door,’ said Janet.

  ‘Gretchen?’ said Lock.

  ‘She wouldn’t admit it, but she dropped enough hints.’ She turned so that she was facing him. ‘She wanted me to know it was her. Finally, she tried to attack me one night. With a knife. I managed to lock my office door and stay inside. The college didn’t want the story making the news so I agreed not to press charges if they expelled her. That was that. Until now.’

  ‘Has she been in touch since?’ said Lock.

  Janet shook her head. ‘I don’t even know if she’s aware I’m here.’

  Lock got to his feet. ‘For your safety, it’s best if you assume she does. Make sure you have someone walk you to your car. If you think someone’s following you home, call the Malibu Sheriff’s Department or the LAPD. Don’t take any chances.’

  Janet got up. ‘Let me walk you back to your car.’

  ‘Actually, before I go, would you mind doing me one more favor? If I could, I’d like to speak to whoever runs campus security.’

  Together, they went back to the main administration building. It turned out that the head of security was out of town at a conference in Arizona, but Janet arranged for Lock to meet with the deputy, a former sheriff’s deputy from Ventura called Bob Dersh. Janet gave Dersh a brief run-down of why Lock was there, and left the two men to it.

  Lock sat across from Dersh in his office. It was law-enforcement neat. Papers carefully filed or stacked. Everything laid out just so. No personal touches, apart from a couple of framed photographs of a wife, and grown-up kids with their spouses and Dersh’s grandkids.

  ‘So you were helping out the Griffiths family?’ said Dersh.

  As an opener it lacked tact. Lock let it go. ‘Trying to,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone saw what happened coming. I’d like to think no one here will make the same mistake. The woman that’s mixed up with them, Gretchen Yorda, she and Professor Cristopher have history.’

  ‘She’s mentioned that,’ said Dersh, his eyes darting back and forth to the computer screen on his desk. ‘We’re making sure that everyone on campus is on the lookout for anyone they don’t recognize.’

  ‘You haven’t had any incidents so far, then?’

  Dersh shook his head. ‘Right now, I’m more concerned about this,’ he said, reaching over and spinning his computer monitor around so that Lock could see the screen. ‘Two wildfires up in the mountains.’

  Lock stood up and took a closer look at the screen. It showed a map of the immediate North Malibu area from Trancas all the way down Cross Creek. Two pulsing red dots showed the position of the fires. They were, Lock estimated, several miles away, but wildfires were no joke in the area. The last really bad ones, back in 2007, had burned almost a million acres, and cost dozens of people their homes.

  ‘Any word on how they started?’ asked Lock.

  ‘People get careless. Campfire. Even a glass bottle dumped in the wrong place can do it. Land out there is bone dry, and now with the winds . . . Believe me, Mr Lock, when it comes to raw destructive power, Mother Nature makes human beings look like amateurs.’

  ‘How close do they get before you evacuate?’ Lock said, noting the position of the two fires. One was on a ridge line to the immediate north-east, the other in a canyon to the south.

  ‘Oh, we’re a ways away from that. Listen, I appreciate the heads-up. Thanks for stopping by.’

  Dersh tilted the computer screen back round, and started to usher Lock out of the office. Lock dug into his pocket and pulled out a photo-montage of Gretchen. He handed it to Dersh. ‘Some of these pictures aren’t public domain yet. You might want to have your staff take a look at them.’

  Dersh took the paper and laid it
on his desk. ‘Sure will.’

  PART THREE

  73

  Alfonso Fry figured that this just might be his lucky day. Hell, going by his usual luck with women, this might just be the event of a lifetime for him. It was turning out like one of those made-up stories in the back of a dirty magazine, or a scene from a goddamn porno movie. Except it was real and it was actually happening to him.

  It had gone down like this. He had pulled into the truck stop just outside Encino to get something to eat and drink enough coffee to keep him going for another six hours on the road. He guessed he’d noticed the little lady with the long red hair and the Daisy Duke denim shorts that hugged her ass hanging around outside the gas station, a huge backpack at her feet. She was kind of hard to miss standing out there, sucking on a lollipop like it was . . . well, never mind what it was like . . . and staring at all the people putting gas in their car.

  Alfonso had given her a second look, and he was damned if she hadn’t actually winked at him and licked at that lollipop. He’d figured she was making fun and that her boyfriend would appear any second so he’d put his head down and made for the diner.

  The waitress had come over with a menu. He’d ordered coffee and a cheeseburger plate. Next thing he knew the same little redhead had slipped into the seat across from him, grabbed the menu from the table, and said to him, ‘I’m Cherry. I saw you looking at me out there. Thought I’d come say hi.’

  He’d looked at her, blinking, like this couldn’t actually be real. He could see that the red hair was some kind of a wig, but that didn’t bother him.

  ‘Well,’ she’d said, ‘are you going to tell me what’s on the menu, or not?’

  He must have opened his mouth without saying anything because she had reached over and pushed his chin back up. ‘You’re drooling,’ she’d said. ‘It’s not a good look.’

  ‘I don’t have any cash,’ he’d said. She had to be a professional. Just had to be. You found hookers hanging at truck stops and gas stations. But they usually weren’t quite so brazen.

  Now the waitress came back with his coffee and shot daggers at the girl. The girl just smiled sweetly and said, ‘I’ll take some coffee too. Separate checks, though. He’s broke.’

  The waitress disappeared. Alfonso was slowly regaining his composure. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ he said. ‘It’s just I assumed . . .’

  ‘Well,’ the redhead said, ‘you assumed wrong. I need a lift, and I figured with that big load of wood you’re hauling you might be just the man to give me one.’

  Alfonso spat out the sip of coffee he’d taken and began to cough. Cherry grabbed some paper napkins and handed them to him. It was the way she’d said it. With the emphasis on the word ‘wood’. Goddamn, thought Alfonso, this was just plain crazy. Pure porn movie.

  ‘So?’ said Cherry. ‘Can you give me a ride, or not?’ She made a big show of looking around for another prospect before batting her eyelids at him one more time. ‘I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘How old are you anyway?’ he said, feeling better about himself now that he’d actually regained his composure sufficiently to ask a question.

  ‘Old enough,’ she’d said. ‘Now, is it a yes? Or should I find myself a real gentleman?’

  He grabbed another menu from the stack in the metal holder and handed it to her. ‘Pick anything you like. On me.’

  She smiled at him, and it suddenly seemed real.

  She rubbed at his crotch as he settled back into the cab. He rolled a kink out of his neck. He’d decided to go with it, whatever it was. Maybe he wasn’t the fifty-something slob that he saw in the mirror. Perhaps other people saw a different man.

  ‘So where we headed?’ said Cherry.

  ‘Baja, California. That work for you?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, leaning over to dig inside that huge backpack she was toting. ‘But maybe we can take a slight detour first?’ she said, coming up with a handgun.

  He felt the cold metal press against his temple and he froze. With her free hand she lifted off the wig to reveal close-cropped hair. The cute sing-song voice was gone.

  ‘Do exactly what I say when I say it, and you’ll live. Do anything that I haven’t asked you to do, and I’ll kill you. Do you understand me?’

  Alfonso’s brain scrambled frantically. What was that saying? If something looked too good to be true, it probably was. Goddamn right. Goddamn right.

  74

  Krank twisted the throttle and the red Honda Rancher quad bike bucked up the slope toward the line of sycamores. He edged it through the trees and stopped. He climbed off and dumped his pack on the ground. A little further back there were half a dozen eucalyptus trees he’d scouted previously. They would burn fast and intensely. The scrub and duff between them and the sycamores would take care of the rest. The ground was dry as a bone. Conditions could not have been better.

  Opening the top of his pack, he set to work. He had just finished laying out what he needed when he heard the snap of a branch. He looked round to see a man in hiking boots, shorts and a T-shirt walking toward him. He was in his late sixties with a shock of white hair and glasses.

  ‘Hey!’ the hiker shouted. ‘Are you crazy? You can’t set a campfire here.’

  Hunkered down with the Rancher quad bike between him and the man, Krank slipped his left hand back into the pack, feeling for his gun.

  The hiker kept on coming. Krank waited until he was within ten yards before standing up.

  The hiker saw the gun and stopped where he was. ‘Take it easy there,’ he said.

  Krank saw the flicker of recognition flit across the man’s face. He didn’t say anything, but his body tensed, and Krank knew that he’d recognized him. The next few minutes would decide the man’s fate.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Krank asked.

  ‘Look, son, take it easy.’

  ‘Your name? I won’t ask you a third time,’ said Krank.

  ‘Ben. Ben Miles,’ the hiker said.

  ‘You live round here?’

  ‘The Palisades.’

  ‘You live alone, or with family?’ Krank asked.

  Krank knew this would go one of two ways now. Either Ben, like a true beta male, would try to establish a connection, and build rapport, or he’d realize what Krank was really asking him. If he did the latter, and he lived alone, he would lie. Krank wasn’t asking the hiker if he lived alone, he was asking him if anyone would miss him.

  Ben Miles smiled. ‘My wife passed a few years ago. I live alone.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ said Krank, walking toward him, and shooting him once in the chest from less than a yard away. He stepped aside and the hiker fell forward.

  Krank left him where he lay for the coyotes to deal with and went back to the task in hand.

  75

  Something had been gnawing away at Bob Dersh ever since his visit from the private security consultant. More specifically he’d been thinking about the pile of firecrackers that had been placed in one of the bathroom stalls not that long ago.

  It was just – off. Not that the student body didn’t pull the odd prank. They did. They were like any bunch of college kids. A little more laid back, perhaps, but a few of them could make life difficult for the faculty when they wanted, especially if alcohol was involved. This had been different, though. During the day. Intended to disrupt. But without there being any obvious pay-off. It had just seemed dumb and pointless.

  The date and time had been logged. They still had the footage from all the security cameras on their system. Dersh pulled it up. He and his boss had already reviewed it. This time he went back a little further.

  For obvious reasons the college wouldn’t allow cameras in the bathrooms so the closest he could get was the corridor outside. Unfortunately the way the camera was mounted there didn’t actually cover the bathroom door so he had to assume that anyone walking down the corridor was a possible suspect. He started reviewing the footage an h
our before the incident.

  To say it was mind-numbing was an understatement. Although the college kids liked to present themselves as individuals, they all pretty much dressed alike. It would have been easy enough for someone to blend. He got to the point where the firecrackers went off and people began running down the corridor. He hadn’t picked out a single person from the crowd.

  There was a camera positioned at the entrance to that particular building. He repeated the process with the footage uploaded from that position. Forty minutes in, he stopped. He pulled the footage back. She was shortish, slim build, white, wearing a cap and keeping her head down so that her face was obscured by the brim. But just before she passed beyond the gaze of the camera, she looked around.

  Dersh pulled the sheet of pictures Lock had given him from the in-tray on his desk and smoothed them out flat on his desk. He clicked the mouse, pulling the footage back one more time, and hit play. As the young woman turned he clicked again, freezing the image. His eyes swept between the screen and the pictures.

  He couldn’t be a hundred percent certain, but it looked like it was Gretchen. But why? If she wanted to get her own back against Professor Cristopher, why go for such a lame prank? It made no sense. She had gained nothing from it. No one had been hurt. Professor Cristopher hadn’t even known about it.

  76

  Lock drove. Ty rode shotgun up front while Tarian sat in back. She had showered, dressed, put on make-up and, thanks to Lock’s persistence, had had something to eat before they’d left the apartment. At this stage, Lock knew, the key to having some chance of recovery from this type of sudden trauma was to stick to the basics. It was easy to go days without bathing or changing clothes or eating. The hours folded in on themselves, and a person could slowly sink into a hole it became impossible to climb out of.