Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  “Where’s… who’re you? Lemme see your face.” Dwyer seemed to be working hard to focus his eyes. “Wha’s that?”

  Starke recognized the next sound—the crackle-spark of a Taser. Dwyer’s eyes shot wide open, then tightly clenched shut. He seemed to convulse. His head turned violently to one side and his face twisted into the same grimace of pain that Starke had seen in a haunting freeze-frame just a few minutes earlier. From the distinctive burn marks that Eckel had found on Dwyer’s chest and inner thighs, Starke already knew Dwyer had been tortured with a handheld stun device. He had just witnessed the first jolt.

  Within thirty seconds, Dwyer recovered and was completely lucid. The shock had lifted the druggy veil, and suddenly he seemed fully aware he was in trouble. Starke raised the volume on his computer.

  “Don’t fucking do that again!” Dwyer roared. “Don’t you fucking—”

  He convulsed again. His head whipped up and smashed against the post. Dwyer held it there, gasped for air, and exhaled a tormented, “ShitShitShitShitShit,” like the repeating output of a stuck CD. He recovered more slowly this time. When he did, he looked more scared than defiant.

  “What do you want from me?” he said. “Money? Is that what you want? How much?”

  His eyes tracked something off camera, a movement away from him, then back. He followed the movement down toward his lap.

  “Please.” Dwyer’s face distorted in anticipation. “Please no, God don’t.”

  Another jolt. This time, his head bounced off the post and slumped to the left. He was clearly unconscious after the third jolt. The webcam never blinked. The scene didn’t change for at least a minute. Starke heard more rustling off camera, then the brief clatter of what sounded like heavy metal on metal. He knew what was coming, even if Dwyer didn’t.

  Starke pushed his chair away from his computer’s screen and stepped back, a reaction more than a choice. Would the horror diminish if he watched from farther away?

  The pistol’s muzzle and front sight peeked into the top left side of the frame. Dwyer’s captor was standing over him, aiming down from about a foot away at a spot just behind Dwyer’s right ear. What happened next reminded Starke of the infamous footage of the Saigon street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner. It came without announcement, trial, delay, or ceremony. The single shot snapped Dwyer’s head once. It seemed a bloodless act for a moment. Then, a second later, a small red fountain rose from the exit wound on Dwyer’s neck as the life geysered out of him. The bullet must have severed his carotid artery.

  More off-camera rustling. The screen suddenly went black, the final, haunting image of Paul Dwyer replaced by the bright red question, “Watch Again?”

  46

  Kerrigan called as Starke was breaking down Shelby’s computer. He was about the load it into the Vic to take it down to Los Colmas PD to tell her what he had. He still wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, but his next move would be to invite Shelby Dwyer and her attorney down for an interview. While she clearly hadn’t pulled the trigger on the gun that killed her husband, she had remotely witnessed it, and sure had some explaining to do.

  “How soon can you get here?” Kerrigan said.

  “On my way,” he said. “Why?”

  “Come straight to my office,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked again, but she was already gone.

  He drove slowly, thinking, suspicious. What now? Maybe it was related to the wildfire, an all-hands-on-deck call as the blaze approached Los Colmas. They were a small department, and according to the emergency plan he’d helped write, he knew every cop was pressed into service, even detectives, during a citywide evacuation. He’d been through that drill before. As he steered through town, though, he stifled an even darker thought, the memory of Kerrigan staring at the UltraSharp home page on his computer screen at work. He could only imagine how that might complicate their already impossible relationship.

  He patted the center of his chest, feeling for the tiny 2.0-gig flash drive that dangled on a neck cord beneath his shirt. He was taking no chances with what he’d just found.

  The squad room was buzzing when he arrived, a pre-fire scramble. Starke focused on the task at hand, moving Shelby’s computer and its various other parts from his car, through the loading dock, and into his office. He wasn’t about to risk leaving it unattended. It took him twenty minutes, and the whole time Kerrigan watched like a raptor through the glass panels that fronted her office. When he was done, Starke locked his office door behind him and reported to Kerrigan’s office, as asked.

  “Didn’t rush you, I hope,” she said.

  “I’m here now.”

  Kerrigan pushed a manila file folder across her desk. Starke flipped it open and practically swallowed his tongue. It was his file of Kerrigan’s copied divorce documents. Not a good start. He’d left it on the corner of his desk when he went to meet Barbaric a few hours earlier.

  “Before you say anything,” Kerrigan said, “I’m going to tell you why I took this from your office.”

  There was nothing Starke could do or say that would make this any easier. He nodded for her to continue.

  “I got a call last night from my former husband in LA,” she said. “He said he’d been getting phone messages from someone named Ron in this area code. Since I’m the only person he’s in touch with out here, he called to see if I knew anything about it. Naturally I had no idea, and I told him so.

  “Then this morning before you left, when I ducked into your office, I saw the website you were looking at. I couldn’t help but notice, because I helped Richard build the website and design the home page, back when it was just him and me and a handful of people who understood that someday every computer screen and TV would have an UltraSharp chip inside.”

  In any other circumstance, Starke would have opened his notebook and scribbled the thought that suddenly crossed his mind. But it hardly seemed the time.

  “I put two and two together,” Kerrigan continued. “After you left, I went back and found the file on your desk.” She offered a weak smile. “But enough about me. Why don’t you talk for a while?”

  Starke cleared his throat. “Just trying to get to know you better?”

  It was a fluttering-duck of a joke. He waited for his humorless boss to shotgun it to earth, but the blast never came. She just stared.

  “Alright,” he began. “OK.” Deep breath. “I had a moment a few days ago, up at Shepherdsen’s pond when you questioned my relationship with Shelby Dwyer, when I figured I might be fighting for my job. I always like to know who I’m fighting. It’s no more complicated than that. They’re public records, but I was out of line. I’m sorry.”

  “What was your intention, Detective?” she said. “Looking for dirt? Something to use against me sometime?”

  “No,” he lied.

  Kerrigan waved the word away. “Bullshit. Bull. Shit. Reading the file is one thing. But calling him? What did you plan to talk to him about? Our marriage? Our divorce? He’s still bitter, you know. I’m sure you could tell that from his court statements. But what the hell business is that of yours?”

  “None,” Starke said.

  “You’re goddamned right it’s not.” She stood up, then sat back down. “Like I need this now. Like I need to be dealing with this bullshit in the middle of a goddamned evacuation.”

  Kerrigan seemed almost on the verge of tears—the first real emotion he’d ever seen from his new boss. He’d known other people like her, people whose difficulty in relating to others came off as open and constant hostility. The only way they could survive was by living life by their own personal policy manual, where the rules were written and messy emotions were sanitized for their protection. Starke was having trouble holding her gaze, so he brushed an imaginary crumb from the arm of his chair.

  When he looked back, Kerrigan’s eyes had changed. She’d offered a glimpse of her humanity, then pulled it back. Now he was watching her rebuild the wall behind which she lived, brick by bric
k, until her policy-manual face obscured the woman behind it. If he had to guess, she was either an adult child of an alcoholic, surrounded for life by thick defensive armor, or a sociopath. When she was done, she pulled her chair closer, put her elbows on her desk, and spoke in her most officious voice.

  “I’m placing you on paid administrative leave.”

  Starke couldn’t have been more stunned if she’d reached across the desk and slapped him. “For what reason?”

  “Unprofessional conduct,” she said. “Digging into my divorce case crosses the line. As soon as the fire danger passes and things get back to normal, I’m going to ask Detective Garza to do the fact-finding. If there’s reason for disciplinary action, I’ll make that call. But until her report is complete, you’re off-duty. Obviously, this comes at the worst possible time for all of us.”

  “The Dwyer case,” he said. “I can’t just—not now.”

  “I’m sorry Detective,” she said. “I’ll need your murder book, your notes, everything. I take it you located Mrs. Dwyer’s computer? That’s what I saw you carrying in?”

  “I can’t agree with this decision,” he said.

  “I don’t expect you to. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s my call. And I want you off-duty and off the Dwyer case until we know the facts. I promise we’ll get Detective Garza to work on it as quickly as possible so we don’t leave you hanging. I assume we can count on your cooperation?”

  Starke just stared. He’d done something stupid. But paid administrative leave? How was that called for?

  “Just leave her computer in your office for now. I’ll take care of it, and everything else you turn over. You should have no more contact with anyone involved in the Dwyer case until a decision is made about whether you’ll be returned to duty. Is that clear?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll need your office keys as well,” she said, holding out her hand.

  Starke stood up, fished the keyring from his pocket, and removed his office key. He placed it squarely in the center of her desk.

  “Shield and service piece?” she said.

  He laid those beside the office key, setting the gun down with its barrel facing toward her office’s far wall. He’d put a band of blue painter’s tape around the barrel, to clearly mark it as his among the other identical department-issued weapons.

  “This is a mistake,” he said. “Please reconsider.”

  Kerrigan iced him with a dispassionate look. “I’ve made my decision, Detective. Before you go, is there anything you need to tell me about the Dwyer case that I won’t find in your office?”

  “Everything’s in my office,” Starke said.

  “You’re sure?”

  He looked her directly in the eye as he spoke, because he knew he was telling her the truth. “You have everything I’ve found.”

  As he turned to go, though, Starke reached up for reassurance. Through the fabric of his shirt, he touched the flash drive that hung like a talisman in the hollow of his chest.

  47

  At least Kerrigan let him keep the Crown Vic.

  Starke was climbing into the driver’s seat to head home when he saw Brooks Kaplan jog-walking at top speed across the department’s back parking lot, waving his arms. Kaplan was in charge of the department’s short-staffed and underfunded crime-scene crew, which at Kerrigan’s insistence had spent the past few days scouring the possible access paths to Shepherdsen’s pond for evidence of how Paul Dwyer’s body was transported to the dump site.

  Technically, Starke wasn’t allowed to speak about the Dwyer case with anyone involved. So he just waved. And waited.

  “Got a sec?” Kaplan shouted from twenty yards away. He closed the distance and put both hands on the driver’s-side door. Starke just smiled through the door’s open window. “Glad I caught you, Ron. I think we found something. No direct physical evidence, but I picked up some good intel during the search. Maybe it’ll help.”

  Starke adjusted himself in his seat, rearranging his posture to convey full and undivided attention. When he did, he noticed Donna Kerrigan standing at one of her office windows, watching them from above.

  “We may have answered the question about which path the shooter took up to the pond,” Kaplan said. “The steep Shepherdsen path seemed unlikely, like you said, and we didn’t find anything back there. But we did the paperwork and got homeowner approval to search the new homes on that back slope off Spadero Road. We didn’t find a lot, but get this—ready?”

  Starke offered another encouraging smile.

  “True, it’s a long quarter of a mile from Spadero Road to get up there. But here’s the thing: There’s two McMansion’s within fifty yards of the dump site. We think the killer got access to one of those properties, the one at 1512 Spadero. Its owners were away the whole week when the body was probably dumped. They’d left vacation notices everywhere—the post office, neighbors, their private security company, Los Colmas cops.”

  Starke nodded.

  “While they were away, their security company notified them that someone had accessed their driveway gate while they were gone. No entry into the house, just the driveway. Know what time? Between 3:12 and 3:47 a.m. on the first morning after your guy was last seen alive. So there’s your time on the body dump.”

  Starke furrowed his brow, but said nothing.

  “Thing is, the driveway goes all the way up the hill, and the carport is within fifty yards of the pond,” Kaplan said. “So the killer’s car would have been well off Spadero Road. No one driving along Spadero would have noticed anything unusual. And from the top of the driveway, the pond would have been just a little way across private property. In the dark. You don’t exactly have to be a master criminal to pull that off.”

  Starke gave another thoughtful nod. If the killer had mastered the fireman’s carry, those final fifty yards would have been a short ramble up the rest of the slope to the edge of the pond, even with two hundred pounds of dead weight. Moving the heavy and unwieldy computer monitor probably would have been the more difficult task.

  Before Starke could say a word, Kaplan obliged with a theory.

  “And that computer monitor?” he said. “Wheelbarrow. The concrete contractor was still working on hardscape stuff around the property, and his guy had left a big wheelbarrow at the top of the drive. We found track marks from its tire way up near the pond, well away from any of the hardscaping pour.”

  For a moment, Starke flashed to the odd late-night conversation with his father as they ate burritos in a parking lot, watching an idling Esparza Construction cement truck. He was dirty.

  “So my guess is that’s how a single person could have moved that big goddamned thing up there. Two trips, one carrying or wheeling the body, another to wheel the monitor up there. Wouldn’t have taken more than ten, fifteen minutes, leaving enough time to strap him up to the anchor and sink him. Whole thing takes thirty minutes, tops, which fits the time frame from the security company. Just my theory,”

  Starke smiled. It made perfect sense. He reached through the window and shook Kaplan’s hand. “Brooks,” he said, “I need to tell you something.”

  Kaplan leaned down.

  “I’m currently on paid administrative leave and no longer involved in the Dwyer case,” Starke said. “So while I appreciate the update, I have to tell you I’m unable to talk about details of the case with you or anyone else involved until further notice.”

  A look somewhere between disbelief and confusion transformed Kaplan’s face. “What the hell’s that about?”

  Starke winked. “Just doing what I’ve been told. I was asked to refrain from speaking to anyone about the case, and so I can’t really say anything to you about it except to say I’m not involved at the moment.”

  Kaplan realized he’d been had. He smiled. “Understood.”

  “Do me a favor, Brooks, OK?”

  Kaplan nodded.

  “Don’t turn around when I say this, because we’re being watched from upsta
irs. Just make sure Kerrigan knows I did the right thing here. I didn’t speak to you at all about the case, right?”

  Kaplan saluted and stepped away from the car. “Not a word, Ron. I can testify to that.”

  Starke started the Vic. He was off the case, but he had a sudden and undeniable hunch. And nothing was stopping him from detouring past a couple of McMansions on his way home.

  48

  Private security operations ran the gamut. The best ones worked hand-in-hand with local police, fire, and ambulance services to monitor client properties. They maintained monitoring centers twenty-four hours a day, trained their operators well, and made sure their alarm and notification systems were installed by professionals. The worst ones offered a lawn sign and empty promises.

  If Kaplan’s theory about the route to Shepherdsen’s pond was correct, Paul Dwyer’s killer had somehow defeated the security system at 1512 Spadero Road, or at least the driveway gate. Access to the driveway of an unoccupied home gave the killer access to the dump site, as well as the privacy needed to dispose of a body.

  It had to be someone who knew the owners were away.

  Starke steered slowly west along Spadero Road. All along the ridge above him on his left, massive homes rose in faux Mediterranean splendor, lacking only a view of the sea to conjure an image of the Valencia, Spain, Italy’s Amalfi coast, or the hillside homes of the French Riviera. These homes overlooked heavy truck traffic along Spadero Road and the beginnings of a lesser housing tract, one of Paul Dwyer’s other works in progress. At the moment, with the approach of Thursday’s late-afternoon dusk, that site was a parking lot for the fleet of earthmovers that had spent the day excavating dirt and scraping lots for these bloated American Dreams.

  Above Starke, some of the hillside homes covered ten thousand square feet and cost more money than he had made in his entire career. Still, most were jammed cheek-by-jowl on lots no larger than an acre. A startling number were owned by people much younger than him, and the thought of that depressed him.