Dead Cold

by Claire Stibbe

  “Tell me about the night of the fire?” she asked, wondering how oblivious Tarian really was to Flynn’s suffering.

  “Stupid stuff really. It started when she accused me of telling Cliff how unhappy we were. Because we were unhappy and it was no use pretending anymore. Cliff understood in his way. Told me on the phone how sorry he was. He knew her better than I did. Knew all the resentment boiling up inside her, knew she was going to end it all in one splash of gasoline and a lighted match. The whole thing was beginning to freak me out, especially her accusing me of talking behind her back. I tried to calm her down but this time it was different.”

  “Had she been drinking?”

  “She’d been using. You could smell it on her. You know what I was scared of? I was scared she’d clean out the bank accounts. Leave me with nothing.”

  “Looks like she made two large cash withdrawals in under a week. Do you know what happened to it?”

  “I dunno what she did with it. But I made sure I took the rest before she spent that as well.”

  “Are you OK? You look tired.”

  “All that running, I guess.” Flynn ran his thumb and middle finger along his jaw.

  “Why did you run?”

  “I wanted to find my dad.”

  “Bad timing.” She saw the deep frowns embedded in his forehead. It told her how haunted he was.

  “She could have poisoned me,” he said.

  “Sounds a bit dramatic.”

  “That’s Tarian. Everyone loves a drama queen.”

  “Did you hate her?”

  Malin listened to Flynn clear his throat, try a cough on for size. She didn’t need to spend too much energy figuring him out because his words were clipped. Rehearsed. He was everything she expected.

  “I was scared of her.”

  “Nobody can blame you for that,” she said, spurring him on word-for-word. “Tarian was abusive. It’s normal to be scared of your attacker.”

  “She didn’t know what she was doing.” Then came a quick inhale, the tapping of the water bottle on the table and a crinkling sound as if he had squeezed the neck too hard.

  “We were talking about the fire,” she reminded, hearing the tension in her own voice.

  “Yeah. It was around eleven o’clock in the evening, I know because the clock on the mantel has a fussy chime and I counted eleven of those over her screaming voice. I wanted a divorce and I meant it this time. We argued about the house, the possessions. She always said I loved the house more than I loved her and she’d threatened to burn it down so many times. It was getting old.”

  “Was she bluffing?” Malin asked.

  “I made a call to the insurance agent about a month or two ago. Didn’t go any further than a few questions. So, no, she wasn’t bluffing. I started packing. Called Rosie and asked her to pick me up.”

  “But you had your own car?”

  “Legally the cars belonged to Tarian. It wasn’t worth risking another fallout.” He was silent for a moment and looked at Malin as though the car thing was an implicit joke she had no way of understanding.

  “That’s when it happened,” he said. “Tarian was standing by the bedroom door, shouting at me to put the phone down. I think I just threw it on the bed, hoped it would shut her up. She had a gun, fired two rounds at the wall, missed blowing my brains out by a foot. I thought they were warning rounds until I saw her face. I knew if I didn’t do what she asked I’d regret it a third time.”

  “Do you think Rosie heard all of this?”

  Flynn tilted his head and scrutinized Malin as if the question was obvious. “I’m sure she did. I never hung up.”

  “Dispatch logged the first call at a little before one o’clock. No calls from Rosie Ellis.”

  “Then who called 911?”

  “Mrs. Quinn. Your neighbor. She heard shouts and screams.”

  Flynn looked like he was trying to hit reverse because something flickered in his eyes at the mention of Mrs. Quinn. Malin tried to mouth how sorry she was that the old man died but Flynn began trembling and shaking his head. She asked him if he needed a cup of tea and a break. He didn’t seem to hear her.

  “It was stupid to let her talk to me like that. It was stupid to have called Rosie in the first place. Tarian can be cunning when she’s on top. When she loses it, she’s all ego and hatred.”

  “And so you had a plan.” Malin didn’t want to put the words in his mouth.

  “I knew she’d take me to the shed. That’s what the chair was for. Not some sexual fetish she’d cooked up. But to keep me away from the house while she did what she wanted to do. I didn’t have much choice with a gun in my back. When I refused to sit down she kneed me in the groin. She said if I tried to move she’d cut me, left the shears out so I could see what with.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Hell, yeah.” Then Flynn grinned a row of teeth at her and a bobblehead of nods, displaying enthusiasm at remembering something. “The doll... was there a doll in the shed?”

  “Yes, we found the doll,” she said “We also found the video. That was smart.”

  The comment elicited a grimace and then his voice cracked. “I’ve had to make some tough decisions. It wasn’t easy to do. Wasn’t easy coming back either.”

  “Because there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

  Malin studied the ghost of a frown and the small tick in Flynn’s eye. He kept taking repeated tugs on the bottle of water and stifling a yawn. It had been a long few weeks and if she kept this up for a few more hours he would crack.

  “When I got to the back door I could smell gasoline and I heard shouting,” he said. “Tarian kept saying she didn’t owe any more money and she was yelling to him to get out before she set the place alight. The front door slammed and a car took off. That’s when I saw smoke. Thick clouds of it coming from the hallway. I called to Tarian, tried to get to the bedroom but the flames kept pushing me back. I remember hearing a crack and then everything went black. It can’t have been long because I was crawling toward the back door when I came to.”

  Malin leaned forward. “You heard her talking to someone?”

  Flynn looked down at the bottle and scrunched the entire thing in one hand. “Yes. It was Cliff Jaynes.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  Flynn huddled down in his chair watching a slanting drizzle on the window. He hoped for a cloudburst to keep the dust down and stop the incessant coughing and watery eyes. Nobody was attractive in New Mexico when the allergies hit. Nobody was quite themselves.

  The flashbulbs were frantic outside now and it reminded Flynn of lightning so close it was as if his lids had been sewn open and he saw stars all over again.

  Bastards. Why couldn’t they give it a break?

  Up and down the sidewalk and scurrying to catch up with a news crew, eyes squinting through the rain-spattered windows to make him out. His hands were stained with ink where the officer had rolled each finger to get a good reading and now he wondered if the stain would ever come off.

  Was there some kind of inaudible communication going on between the detectives? Because if there was, Flynn felt left out. He knew how it sounded, insecure and suspicious. Not to mention childish. All he could see was a bald head outside the partly closed door, a head so smooth it reminded him of chocolate liquor. What was it about black men? They always looked good bald.

  He couldn’t wait to kick his shoes off, lie in Rosie’s bed and watch the ceiling fan do a few lazy rotations. Rosie’s house where his pickup and tools were, things that Tarian didn’t want, things he treasured. Cardboard boxes in the spare room had grown another layer of mold and stank from damp. He moaned, not out loud so as you would notice. But deep in his gut, in his mind where no one could hear. He was no better than a magpie lining his own nest.

  Malin came back in bringing Temeke with her this time. “How are you doing?”

  He almost vomited a sob and his voice was so deep and strange he didn’t recognize it. “Yeah, I’m OK.”


  A strip of light shone on the gray surface of the table, which reflected the neon tubes of the fluorescent lighting above. Sometimes one flickered as if struggling to work. The building had the familiar scent of wet brick and freshly vacuumed carpets and a warmth that shut out the drabness of a rainy day. Somewhere in the sky he heard the jackhammering of helicopters; teeth-rattlers, they called them. Large, green and sky-ripping loud. Usually four at a time, sometimes more and he remembered how much he loved them as a boy.

  “Sikorsky,” Temeke said, lifting his chin as if he could see it through the roof.

  “Nah, it’s bigger than that.” Malin said.

  “Jolly Green Giant,” Temeke confirmed.

  Flynn saw Malin lean over to whisper in Temeke’s ear. He couldn’t hear what they were saying but Temeke’s face went from bright and shiny to slack and thinking. He kept perusing the contents of a package he was holding until he jolted suddenly as if woken from an afternoon nap.

  “I understand this has all been very traumatic for you,” he said to Flynn, handing him a water bottle. “I wanted to know if there is anything we can do.”

  Flynn gave a giant exhale of breath. Had to let it out. “I’d like to begin afresh,” he said. “I wish none of it happened.”

  “Sodding impossible, my friend,” Temeke frowned over a smile. “This is arson, not to mention two deaths. A very serious matter. Let me remind you how bad.”

  Temeke laid out several photographs from the crime scene on the table, namely pictures of a badly burned body lying beside the bed he and Tarian had once shared. Flynn tried to force himself to look at it, only his silence seemed to irritate Temeke more.

  Malin pushed a single piece of paper under his nose and tapped it with a finger. “I wanted to talk to you about your late wife’s property,” she said. “As you’ll see here there’s a nomination for an executor, someone to represent the estate, and a description of how the property will be distributed. In light of the damage to house and contents on Vista Bella, Mr. Walley-Bennett will have to rebuild and resell.”

  Rich? Flynn swallowed. What did Rich have to do with it? “I don’t understand. The house belonged to me and my wife.”

  Malin began checking off reasons why it didn’t. “Mr. Walley-Bennett paid the house in full. His name is on the title. He also paid the insurance and land tax. You’ll understand any claim on the insurance is a waste of time. They won’t pay out. Not for arson. As for money, I understand you make well over seventy thousand a year at Manzano National Labs. And you do have your wife’s earnings.”

  Flynn had taken out most of the money in their checking account when he’d left town. The detectives must have known.

  “Here’s a copy of Tarian’s will,” Malin said, handing him a packet. “It stipulates that all her worldly goods are to be returned to her father. But since this is a community state you are at liberty to dispute it.”

  Returned to her father? It was a scam. Tarian never had a will. Neither did he. They weren’t sixty-year-olds who started with a living directive because they were getting sick all the time and then graduated to a full-blown will. And now... now he had nothing. Not a stitch of that large fortune she would have received. He groaned. Out loud this time.

  Temeke pressed his hands together and gave a face as expressionless as a puddle of stagnant water. “We located a one million dollar insurance policy on Tarian McCann. It was over a year old. The policy had a double indemnity clause which meant that the policy pay out would increase to two million if Tarian were to die in an earthquake, flood, or fire. And talking of fire. There is a small matter of timing, Mr. McCann. In your interview with Detective Santiago you say that the house was already burning. It wasn’t, was it?”

  Flynn wished he could have had a few shots of Tequila, enough to take the edge off. “The insurance policy wasn’t my idea.”

  “I’d like to see you in the clear,” Temeke said. “I’m sure you would too. If you could just help me out with a few more questions.”

  Why were the police such fanatics? Had to know the exact time, date, second everything happened. Tarian had blown through ten grand of their earnings because druggy Cliff was robbing her blind. Why weren’t they talking to him?

  “In Mr. Jaynes’ statement,” Temeke continued, “he never came to your house. We checked his alibi. It checks out. According to two of your neighbors there was a large sedan outside the property at eleven forty-five. The neighbors remembered the time it left, eleven fifty because the sound of screeching brakes woke up their kids. Since the initial explosion didn’t occur until one o’clock that leaves an hour, Mr. McCann. An hour during which Rosie came to pick you up in a Mercedes S-280. A car she rented because hers was in the shop.”

  Flynn scratched his chin. He remembered opening the bedroom window that night. There was a cool breeze and a faint drumming of rain on the sill. It cleared his head for a while as he looked down on blonde hair matted with blood. Tarian wasn’t breathing. He’d already checked.

  “You were making good work of covering up your wife’s death,” Temeke said. He kept talking with mock weariness and glancing at a pack of cigarettes he’d left on the table. “By taking the batteries out of the smoke detector, opening the window to feed a flame and dousing the rest of the house with gasoline after you saw what Rosie had done. How could you make her do such a sod-awful thing?”

  “I didn’t make her do anything.”

  “You seem angry about that?” Temeke gave him a long stare. “You told her about the beatings. Made sure you slept in her bed so she could get a good look at those bruises. Enough time for her to work up some serious rage.”

  “I was abused. You saw the tapes. I wasn’t going to stoop to my wife’s level of madness. Something had to be done. Someone had to stop her.”

  “We have receipts,” Temeke said, pushing a tatty oblong piece of paper across the table. “Someone from Smith’s remembered you buying four Gerry cans on Saturday, March 29th. Two days before the fire. That same someone left the store soon after he’d checked you out and happened to fill up behind you at the gas pumps. Said you filled all four cans and put nothing in the car. Thought it was odd, that’s all.”

  Flynn remembered telling Tarian he was going to see his stepdad. But he’d gone to Smith’s instead, red-cheeked and angry after she’d called him a bastard, a stinking low down crap-under-my-shoe bastard because he had taken the rest of the money. He was done. And in all that done-ness he vaguely remembered buying the cans and filling them with gas. He vaguely remembered wanting to kill her for spending all they had.

  “Evidence collected at the scene showed a lighter in the mattress springs and metal objects they took for processing,” Temeke said. “There was twisted plastic, partially burned out but enough to tell the arson investigator their sequential origin. Amazing things, laboratories. They can compare pigment, grain, surface scratches. Even fingerprints, Mr. McCann. The same fingers—I should say—that doused the rest of the house in the hour you had alone with your dead wife.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t like that.” Flynn’s stomach began to seize and all he could do was stare at the floor.

  Temeke didn’t seem to be listening. He calmly tapped out a cigarette. “You said your wife was having new custom made drapes installed over a small window in the bathroom. Detective Santiago called the store. It appears your wife took photos of the window before ordering the hardware, which at the time, was leaning up against the corner of the room, along with a few choice tools. Namely, an eighteen inch pry bar for pulling nails. Those same photos were found in an album in your childhood bedroom. Left there so we wouldn’t have any idea what the house looked like before the fire. This shows intent, Mr. McCann. Cops aren’t all stupid like me.”

  Flynn knew he would have to say something to save himself and his mind kept tinkering over the terrible impact it would have.

  “Tarian and I had a fight about the money,” he said. “She kept taking more and more out of the account. We ba
rely had enough to pay the bills. I called Rosie and that’s what set Tarian off. She tried to shoot me. I bet your lot found evidence of that.”

  “They did.”

  “I told her I wanted a divorce. She said that wasn’t happening.” Flynn paused for a moment, trying to remember exactly what happened next. “She dropped the gun and said she was sorry. Started kissing me, trying to get me in the mood. She always does that after a fight. She kept telling me about a surprise she had in the shed and she gave me a glass of wine to calm me down. We went back there to look at it. Ugly thing. Looked like the electric chair with straps and leather cuffs. She wanted me to try it out and I said no. It made her mad, hurt her feelings, I dunno. She kneed me the balls and tied me up. I think there was something in that wine because I couldn’t fight back. When I came to I had to cut myself out. I didn’t kill her. There’s no way.”

  “No, you’re absolutely right you didn’t kill her. When we detectives take interviews there’s always something that sticks out, something that keeps you up at night. Like the time when I was talking to Violet Chavez. Nice lady, remember her? She said she respected Rosie for her loyalty. Know what the definition of loyalty is? A strong sense of support or allegiance. So I asked Rosie to come in today to see Detective Cornwell and myself. We had a nice little chat. She confirmed she’d met you at the lake. That you both like water sports. Cliff happened to let slip that Rosie was an excellent skier. Takes a lot of upper body strength to water ski. So, no, you couldn’t have killed Tarian if you were in the shed taking a nap.”

  Flynn knew Temeke wasn’t bluffing. He had been scenting tidbits from the very beginning, enough to know exactly who had done it.

  “When Rosie arrived to pick you up Tarian told her you’d already left,” Temeke said. “Rosie didn’t believe it. She rushed through the house, looking in every room and all the while listening to Tarian’s mouth going off about what a whore Rosie was. How she was trying to steal you away. Well, you can understand how that went down. How Rosie would react to being called a thief. Somehow on the way back into the bedroom—and this is the part Rosie doesn’t recall too well—she grabbed the pry bar and hid behind the door.”