Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  “Computer monitor, an old CRT, ancient, practically antique,” Oswaldo said. “Still checking on the brand; never heard of it. But it weighed thirty-five pounds even before it filled up with water. The cable’s just your basic bike lock. Four-foot, quarter-inch Master, costs about six bucks. Did the trick pretty well, though. Our boy’d still be underwater if there was still an underwater there. But there’s not.”

  Starke crossed his arms over his chest and turned to face the young assistant. “In a language I can understand, Oswaldo. Help me out.”

  “One of those dried-up ponds. It was there; now it’s not. Just a damp gully between the fucking McMansions. Some of the local juvenile delinquents found him floating like a buoy after the water level dropped.”

  Eckel smiled. “‘Look what I found, Ma. Can I keep it?’”

  “Guys, check this out.” Oswaldo led them to the head of the exam table. The assistant squatted and angled his penlight into the shadow just behind the right ear. Starke could see a jagged gap the size of a dime.

  “Looks like his head has too many holes in it,” Eckel said. “There’s an exit wound on his neck on the other side. I’m guessing somebody shot him, then wrapped the steel cable around his neck, laced him up to the anchor, and hauled him out into the water figuring he’d stay down for a while. And he probably would’ve, except they picked the wrong pond. One of the local land rapers diverted the creek about a month ago, no permit probably. Then this heat.”

  Starke suspected they were looking at that very land raper in question, but said nothing.

  “Might as well have dumped him on the I-10,” Eckel said.

  “Rookie mistake, if you ask me,” Oswaldo added. “And, here, look at this.” He led Starke and Eckel around the exam table to the body’s left hand, which looked like an inflated surgical glove, blue sausage fingers. The ring finger had a curious crease just below the middle knuckle where the flesh had swelled around something. Starke could see a hint of gold.

  “Wedding band.” Oswaldo held up a pair of special, heavy-duty pinking shears. “May I do the honors?”

  Eckel nodded his assent as Oswaldo snapped on some latex gloves, then turned toward Starke, catching him trying to filter a few deep breaths through the shirt fabric at the crook of his elbow. “This could make your ID job a lot easier, detective.”

  Starke suppressed another gag. “You ever get used to this?” he asked, his voice muffled.

  “To what?” Eckel said.

  Starke stepped back to the exam table just as Oswaldo was sliding the ring from the now-detached finger. He laid the finger back down beside the violated left hand before retreating to a nearby faucet. He came back with the cleaned ring in his palm. It had a delicate beaded scroll around each rim. The gold on the outside of the band was dull and scratched, but the metal inside still gleamed.

  “Bingo,” Oswaldo said, squinting into his palm. “There’s an inscription.”

  Starke lifted the ring and angled it back and forth under the magnifier’s high-intensity light. He could see tiny block letters engraved along the inside surface of the ring, but he still wished he’d brought his reading glasses.

  “P.W.D.­–S.L.D,” Oswaldo said.

  Eckel smiled. “You know, Oz, I’m gonna go out on a limb here. This may be a clue.”

  “Gotta be him,” Oswaldo said. “Of course we’ll do the science, just to be sure.”

  Eckel clapped Starke on the back again. “We’ll disassemble him, amigo. We find anything else, we’ll let you know.”

  Starke was more than happy to skip the autopsy. “You’ve got my cell, right?”

  The deputy coroner saluted. “Hope you’re not planning a vacation anytime soon.”

  4

  The Shepherdsen spread, or what was left of the small subsected ranch, was one of the few large properties in Los Colmas still in private hands. It seemed much larger and more remote than it actually was. The remaining land was about three miles west of Los Colmas and shaped like a giant slice of pie, wide as a football field at the driveway and maybe a quarter-mile deep, but only twenty-five feet across at the back property line as it rose up a steep slope. A grove of California oaks stood in the late afternoon light at the rear, but it was a feeble partition between the property and the suburban blight that had sprung up on either side of the wedge’s tip. Still, the trees obscured the dry brown patch at the crest of the hill that once was a creek-fed pond.

  Starke led Kerrigan along the steep, overgrown path. Neither had said a word since they left the cars in Shepherdsen’s driveway. He resented her big-footing his case, second-guessing everything he did. After fifteen years at Los Colmas PD, continuing a professional legacy begun by his father, he’d risen steadily through the ranks with an unblemished record of service. He’d been a top contender for the chief’s job after Barry retired. Then? They bring in an outsider, a woman no less, who’d never set foot in the community before her job interviews nearly a year ago. Who despite her considerable professional accomplishments had the people skills of a rattlesnake. Who, despite his occasional rudeness and borderline insubordination since her arrival, had remained annoyingly professional.

  Eckel had released a tentative ID on Paul Dwyer an hour ago based on the engraving inside his wedding ring. The dental charts and DNA samples were in hand and, barring surprises, would confirm what everyone already knew. How Dwyer died was still a mystery; the single bullet hole in his skull probably killed him, but Eckel still wanted to make sure he wasn’t breathing when he hit the water. The crime-scene guys had sifted pond mud since yesterday, looking for the bullet. Just ahead, mounded piles of dirt surrounded the spot where his body was found, testifying to their diligence. But they’d come up empty.

  Starke ducked under the fluttering yellow tape that secured the area between five of the oak trees, then lifted it so Kerrigan could follow—an unthinking habit drilled into him by his dad. They passed the massive granite boulder into which generations of Los Colmas teens had etched their initials. Somewhere on its backside were his own initials, right beside Shelby Dwyer’s. Starke noticed that even a few gang tags had begun to appear as the city’s demographics changed.

  Kerrigan squatted beside him at the edge of a restricted area about the size of a two-car garage. The pond had been bigger once, back when Starke swam naked here as a younger man, but quickly shrank as Paul Dwyer’s bulldozers redirected the water from Golden Creek; the sun evaporated what was left, and the pond gave up its secret.

  “I used to swim up here,” Starke said. “Partied here as a kid and in college. Harder to get away with that now, it’s so built up.”

  He stood. Two faux Mediterranean villas flanked the site, each about a hundred yards away. They were so new that the manufacturer’s stickers were still on some of the windows, and the sod had yet to be delivered for their instant lawns. They sat like twin wedding cakes in the middle of their scraped-brown half-acre lots. The house to their right already featured a Greekish statue of a nude Adonis pissing into a black-bottomed spa. To the left, a bright yellow Hummer sparkled in the semicircular driveway. A year ago, this spot might have looked the same as it did a century before, when old man Shepherdsen carved out his little piece of the California dream and started his groves of avocados, lemons, and walnuts. Today it looked like a lot of places in Southern California, a laughable montage of carefully chosen and carelessly financed image statements.

  “How many ways to get up here?” Kerrigan asked.

  Starke circled the restricted area and walked to the top of the downslope on the other side. The scene that spread beneath his feet could have been most anywhere in Southern California, a circuit board of residential streets and cul-de-sacs knitting together a nearly finished housing tract quickly filling with LA refugees. Paul Dwyer had called this development Villa Cordera—Villa Cordwooda to cynics who saw numbing uniformity in houses stacked so closely together. Amid all that newness, though, County Route 64 stood out. What Starke and other locals knew as
Spadero Road ran along the ridge about a quarter mile below where he stood, bisecting East Villa Cordera from West Villa Cordera. From Spadero Road, especially at night, free movement up the once-wooded hill would have been possible. Not easy, but possible.

  “Only two ways in, both on foot,” Starke said when Kerrigan joined him at the crest of the hill. “The way we just came, along the steep path past the Shepherdsen place, or up this back slope.”

  The terrain was telling. When Starke had carried pony kegs and cases of beer up here as teenager, he preferred the path from then-isolated Spadero Road that followed the lazy switchbacks up through the little canyons. It was a lot easier than the steeper route past the Shepherdsen place. Besides, old man Shepherdsen was a light sleeper, and ornery. A winding, inlaid-stone driveway now covered the spot where the switchbacks used to be.

  “I’d guess they came from this direction, up from Spadero,” he said.

  “You’d guess?” Kerrigan said.

  “We know at least two people got here undetected,” he said. “We can probably assume it was at night. Since no bullet was found here, it’s possible that one of them may have been transporting the other’s body.”

  Kerrigan looked skeptical. “Even in the dark, that would take some doing,” she said. “They’d have had to park along the road. They’d have had to cut through these new properties, which all have security gates. They’d have to be pretty strong, or else have some other way of moving two hundred pounds of dead weight.”

  “And let’s assume male, given the—”

  “Let’s not assume anything,” Kerrigan interrupted. “Could have been two people. Three. A lynch mob. You’re sure no one at the Shepherdsen place saw anything?”

  Starke shook his head. “Talked to them myself.”

  Kerrigan turned around and swept her arm across the path they’d just climbed. “How thoroughly did the crime scene guys work this steeper path?”

  Now he was really pissed. A full sweep of the area was a low-percentage shot for an understaffed department already reeling from budget cuts. The path they’d just walked was too steep. And even at his age, Harv Shepherdsen was a light sleeper. So Starke’s scene team focused on the downslope beyond the rear of the property, an unpopulated wooded trail a year ago. It was now a crazy quilt of private, heavily mortgaged home sites, but there were only a few finished houses, and not all of them were occupied. He choked it all down before he answered.

  “We can send them back if you want,” he said. “They concentrated on the pond and the area around it, looking for the bullet, not on the possible access routes. It was an issue of resources.”

  “Who made that call?”

  “I did.”

  In the long, uncomfortable pause that followed, Starke could hear birds in the oak trees behind them. In the distance, a lawn mower buzzed across someone’s new sod. A semi roared along Spadero Road, upshifting as the road angled down.

  “Mode of access is going to tell us a lot,” Kerrigan said. “I want to know how the killer got up here. We’re going to build this case on physical evidence, not guesswork and assumptions.” She turned and fixed him with a stare. “Bust the budget if you have to, but get the crime scene crew back here first thing tomorrow.”

  Starke tucked his boss’s second-guessing into that special place where he stored the things he would never forgive.

  “And how well do you know Shelby Dwyer?” Kerrigan asked.

  He forced a smile. “Small town.”

  “And you planned to mention that sometime, right?”

  Starke clenched and unclenched his jaw before answering. “I’m not sure I like your implication.”

  The police chief just shook her head, then stepped around him, heading back down the path to her car.

  5

  Shelby had waited until the chief’s black-and-white Ford was out of sight before she tried to stand, and even then she braced herself against the door frame. Her breath was coming now without effort, but her heart was racing. She could feel her temples throb, hear her pulse. Had Kerrigan heard it too?

  She ran her fingertips across her forehead and they came away damp.

  Through the open gate at the end of her driveway, she could see Craig DeMott standing on the opposite curb. He lived two houses away, but there he was again, ever vigilant. He and Paul were friendly—rather, Craig didn’t know Paul well enough to see through Paul’s bullshit—and he stood with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at her the same way he’d looked at her since the moment he’d heard that her husband had disappeared.

  She waved. Craig didn’t.

  Shelby stepped across the threshold and back into the dead-quiet house, cherishing the silence, and closed the door behind her. Chloe was still asleep, unconscious in the profound way only seventeen-year-old girls can be at ten on a Saturday morning. She thought about waking her, but opted instead for some extra time alone. Her daughter would be up by eleven, and then she’d tell her about the police chief’s visit, about what they’d found.

  In the kitchen, she rinsed last night’s cup and filled it from the carafe. She sipped the coffee, not bothering to microwave it or even spoon in sugar from the bowl, and fished a cigarette from the spot behind her cookbooks where she hid them. It was her secret vice; never in public. She was less concerned with her image than the Dwyer Foundation’s, which funded public-health initiatives throughout the Inland Empire. But right here, at the kitchen window overlooking the broad patio and the pool beyond, she did her best thinking with a cup in one hand and smoke curling up to the ceiling. There was a lot to think about, so she made a checklist in her head.

  First, Chloe. Shelby had prepped her for the worst, but if they’d actually found her dad’s body, there was no telling how she’d react. With him gone the past few weeks, she’d seemed to open up a bit, to breathe right for the first time since the summer before when it all went so bad, when Paul had both of them cowering and clutching each other on the kitchen floor, wondering if they’d survive the night. Still, Chloe and her dad did have a relationship, and even a relationship rooted in fear still means something to a kid. The first glimpse of death is always a shock.

  Second, the police. They’d be around a lot more now, watching her, everything she did. Today was just the tip of the spear. It was about to get intense, and she’d have to be strong. And smart. For Chloe. It was just them now.

  Finally, the rest of it—reporters, the Dwyer Development and the Dwyer Foundation people, the people at church. All the testing questions, the sidelong glances, the well-intentioned snoops who offered their help “if you and Chloe ever need anything,” but who used their pretense at charity as a license to pry. He hasn’t been in touch at all since he left? Not even on Chloe’s birthday? He hasn’t used his credit cards even once? No one had said it, but they knew all along that Paul was dead.

  How much time passed, Shelby couldn’t say. She was aware of nothing but the swirl of anxiety until a searing heat blistered the web of skin between her fingers. She flinched, and two inches of ash dropped from her cigarette into the sink, leaving a tan filter wedged between her knuckles. The burn and the cold tap water she used to ease the pain brought her back to the moment, and she suddenly felt more alone than she could ever remember.

  She unplugged her cell phone from its charger on the counter, then pulled Ron Starke’s card from her purse. When he picked up, she could tell by the hollow background noise that he was in his car.

  “Ron? It’s Shelby Dwyer.”

  She waited though a long, tense silence. Finally: “Shelby, I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you personally. I needed to be somewhere else this morning, then up to the scene.”

  Shelby lit another cigarette and let Starke wait as she took a deep draw. “There’s nothing you could have done. God, this whole thing is just so unreal. I mean, why kill him? He was a good man, Ron. Maybe not the most popular man, but a damn good ma
n who did a lot of good things around here. And somebody killed him and dumped him like garbage.”

  “What’d she tell you?”

  Everything and nothing, Shelby thought. “In Shepherdsen’s pond. They shot him and sank him in the water. And I’m trying to absorb all this and—let’s just say your boss could use a little work on her bedside manner. She obviously thinks I was involved. She made that real clear. I mean, what the hell, Ron? Where’s that coming from?”

  “It’s an active investigation, Shel. You know I can’t—”

  “We’ve got a lot of history between us, you and me. Ancient history, I guess. I hope. I’m counting on you to be straight with me. Where’s this going?”

  “My job is to look at every possibility.”

  “So why is this—” Shelby glanced at the business card the lady cop left behind. “Chief Donna Kerrigan. She’s after me. Why is she even involved?”

  “No one’s after you,” he said. “That’s the truth. Let me do my job.”

  “Seems like she’s doing your job.”

  Shelby regretted it as soon as she said it.

  After a long pause, Starke said: “The coroner’s call came this morning. I was needed elsewhere, and we didn’t want to delay notification. Didn’t want you to hear it on the news. But you have to understand the pressure here, Shel. Because of who Paul was, there’s a lot of attention on this. And it’s not just locals. His big project in LA, the coastal one out on the peninsula, has got the media there lathered up, too. The Times story last week was just one thing, and that was before we knew what happened. Now we’re getting calls from everywhere, out-of-town papers, radio, network TV. This is Kerrigan’s department, her reputation. Right now it’s under the most intense scrutiny ever. She’s pretty new, and she wants to get it right. We all do.”

  “She made me feel like a criminal.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “I’ve been straight with you, Ron. You guys just be straight with me, OK?”