Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  Starke slowed as he approached 1512 and steered onto the road’s narrow shoulder. A massive cement truck roared past with a rush of air that rocked the Vic, the name on its rear mudflaps receding into the distance: Esparza & Sons Construction. It was followed by two more just like it. The builder may be dead, but the building continued. The juggernaut that was Dwyer Development was rolling onward, turning dirt into money, paving paradise, bringing barely affordable opulence to the inland strivers while destroying everything in its path. The company created communities, but almost always gated ones like Villa Cordero that excluded far more people than would ever be included. For the people left outside those gates, hating Dwyer Development and the man behind it was a simple reflex.

  He stopped across Spadero at the base of an elegant brick apron that welcomed visitors—or at least those with the iron gate’s access code—into 1512’s long, elegantly curving driveway. Through the gate, he could see the house up the hill, atop a knoll of fresh green sod. From there it looked like it sat almost on top of the ridge, just on the other side of which was the mud flat that once was Shepherdsen’s pond.

  Starke stayed just long enough to read the prominent blue sign, shaped like a police badge, that was affixed to a four-foot metal post and stabbed into the landscaping along the property’s stucco front wall: KGT Protection. He reached for his notebook to write it down, then realized it was back in his office, locked away with every other scrap of information he’d gathered about Paul Dwyer’s murder. He searched the glove box for something to write on, but all he could come up with was the Vic’s most recent service report from the Los Colmas PD garage. The Vic’s oil had last been changed eight thousand miles ago.

  He turned the page over and scribbled himself a note: “1512 Spadero. Access route? Posted KGT Protection.” He’d seen a similar blue KGT sign at the base of Shelby Dwyer’s driveway when he visited there.

  Starke checked the mirror, took his foot off the brake, and let the car move back into traffic. Ahead of him, the setting sun brought the horizon into sharp relief. The column of white-brown smoke that billowed from the approaching wildfire seemed closer than ever.

  49

  Starke officially began his paid administrative leave with a movie marathon. Now it was nearly 4:00 a.m. and his only entertainment alternative was to watch more movies. Sleep? Not an option.

  He stood up and stretched after ten mostly prone hours, startled by the noise level in his joints and cartilage. His body sounded like the finale at a Fourth of July show. Maybe some time off will be good, he thought. Get a little exercise. Start eating better. Use the time productively, you know?

  Before he could seriously consider those possibilities, he sat down again, this time in front of his laptop at his kitchen table. He called up his start page and opened his favorites bar. He briefly considered clicking on the NSA link, but his fingers took him in another direction. In the search box, he typed: “Richard Holywell.”

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was left undone about that whole situation. What it was he couldn’t say, or why he felt that way, but Kerrigan’s relationship with her former husband still felt relevant to him.

  The search engine got 107,000 hits. The search took 0.10 seconds. He resisted the impulse to leave it alone.

  A lot of the links led to England. There was a local councilor in a town called Holywell that was named Richard Busby. There was a Holywell Music Room at a university there, and an uncanny number of the musicians who played in the music room were named Richard. He narrowed the search: “Richard Holywell UltraSharp.”

  The search engine got only 43 hits. The search took 0.03 seconds.

  The first page of links were to stories in the financial or technology press, apparently featuring the correct Richard Holywell. The results got more scattered on the second page, so Starke returned to the first. The stories there chronicled what he already knew from the company’s website. The launch of UltraSharp’s breakthrough circuit that sharpened and brightened screens. The company’s boasts that its technology was “a major leap forward in visual clarity for portable computing and video screens.” Holywell was almost always quoted, usually to the effect that UltraSharp was leading the way into a new frontier of blah blah blah. Other stories described the company’s later success with major computer makers, as the UltraSharp chip found its way into countless tech brands, and eventually tablets and smartphones. The more recent stories announced the sale of UltraSharp to Pei Lan, the multinational Taiwan-based electronics giant that wanted to bring the feisty American innovator under its corporate umbrella.

  One link took Starke to a year-old consumer review about a new twenty-four-inch Dell monitor posted on a website for computing enthusiasts. The review mentioned Holywell by name and credited the UltraSharp device inside the Dell screen for its “luscious” picture. “Brace yourself for some hardcore geek lust, gamers and graphics pros,” the reviewer wrote. “Dell’s monster LCD goes on sale next month!!!!!”

  One of the links took Starke to a short profile of Richard Holywell in a tech-industry trade journal named VisuComp Review. It was a puff piece, but included a link to a full-color photograph that accompanied the story. Starke clicked on that link, and up popped an environmental portrait of Holywell.

  He seemed much like most wonky businessmen, a sort of Woz-goes-to-the-stylist look that seemed to accompany every story Starke had ever read about a tech entrepreneur on the verge of breaking through. What he saw in the background, though, pulled Starke closer to the screen. Holywell was standing in front of a long, low credenza in an executive office. The cabinet was studded with what looked like a collection of massive 1990s-era CRT computer monitors.

  50

  By dawn, Starke had a plan. He’d thought it through from every angle and decided the downside risks were acceptable. The accumulating evidence in the Dwyer case was pointing him in directions he never could have imagined, and he suddenly understood why Shelby Dwyer had kept silent after watching her husband tortured and murdered via live webcam. It wasn’t always easy to know who your enemy might be.

  Seated in front of his laptop in the kitchen of his muggy apartment, he reviewed the situation. He’d said nothing to Kerrigan about what he’d found inside the tiny CarbonCopy device on Shelby’s computer. It sat with the computer on a desk in a locked office at a police department that was scrambling to manage an approaching wildfire. Because the department’s only other detective, Susan Garza, was for the moment charged with investigating him rather than the Dwyer murder, its story could remain untold for days, possibly weeks. Knowledge is power, Starke decided, and he was still the only one besides Shelby and her husband’s killer who knew about their relationship, and where it apparently had led. He alone had followed the silicon trail to the grisly video still embedded on that tiny electronic spy. He alone had copied that video to his flash drive.

  Now it was time to do something with it. He’d considered his options.

  Confront Shelby Dwyer with what he knew and force her to cooperate? What would be the point? Because of her ongoing silence, he suspected she may not even know the killer’s true identity. Besides, Starke had no official standing in the investigation at this point and was forbidden from talking to anyone involved.

  Take the information to Kerrigan? It was still a long shot, but what if her cash-cow, computer-collecting ex-husband was somehow involved? What if Kerrigan was trying to protect him? Or herself?

  Take what he had to the district attorney? Even Starke would be skeptical about a guy who suggested that his boss—a boss who’d reprimanded him—might actually be covering up a murder.

  No, this was better. He could do it without official standing. It would nudge the crime out of the shadows. It would make what really happened impossible to ignore. Best of all, it might flush the killer into the open. That always involved risk. But he also knew that, with the right provocation, killers sometimes make mistakes.

  Starke raised his hands to t
he keyboard and began.

  51

  Exhausted and filthy, but with no relief in sight, the San Bernardino fire captain slumped against the side of his rescue vehicle. He’d parked it on a residential street in a new tract called Villa Cordera, about two miles due east of where the fire had started. Advance teams of county police, fire, and rescue workers had already evacuated the tract, and he’d hoped they could stop the wildfire’s progress before it could destroy the neighborhood. But two homes on the perimeter street were fully engulfed, and a half dozen more were doomed. If this neighborhood went, it was a short hop over Spadero Road to the much larger new homes that dotted the dry, terraced ridge above.

  There was nothing but fuel between the top of that ridge and Los Colmas, where the city’s houses were jammed together in a tight, combustible little package.

  “Carlos?” he said into his walkie-talkie. “Give me some good news.”

  He waited, pounding down water from a plastic bottle as he did. He was dehydrated and hungry, but there’d been no chance to stop since late the night before.

  “No good news, Captain,” Carlos said. “We’ve lost the two. We’ll redeploy to the north and south sides, see what we can do there. We’ve had some problems with water pressure.”

  Typical, he thought. He’d never known a developer to install more than the bare minimum pipe capacity to get a project approved.

  “Didn’t there used to be a bunch of ponds and small lakes around here?”

  Carlos took his time answering. “Used to be. I asked a couple of the guys. Looks like they drained or filled ’em all. You can’t build on water.”

  Christ. “Do the best you can with it, Carlos. The choppers should be back from Big Bear Lake in about ten. Just tell ’em where you want the drop.”

  He spread his county map across the dusty hood of the truck as a ladder unit whipped past, leaving eddies of smoke and ash in its wake. The fire’s heat was generating its own windstorm, of course, making the situation unpredictable and dangerous. The local temperature was pushing eighty-five, almost no humidity. Another day in paradise, unless your job was to derail hell.

  He took off his heavy gloves and laid them on the map’s top two corners to pin it. He anchored its bottom two corners with his hands. Using the scale at the bottom, he calculated the distance between this tract and Los Colmas. It was a little less than a mile. He also tried to quantify the speed of the wildfire’s advance during the past twenty-four hours, when the offshore winds had turned it east and whipped it into the monster it had become.

  Without a break in the weather or wind, he figured the fire would be at the edge of Los Colmas by nightfall. He’d need to give the evacuation order there soon. He checked his watch.

  It was just past eight o’clock in the morning. By ten, he’d have to decide.

  52

  “Mom?”

  Chloe Dwyer’s voice rose above the chatter of the small kitchen TV. The Los Colmas Unified School District had canceled classes for the third straight day as the fire marched on and made the air almost unbreathable. Shelby turned from the kitchen window.

  Chloe cranked the volume of a Los Angeles station’s midmorning newscast. The word “Exclusive,” in bright yellow letters, blinked on and off in the upper left corner of the screen. In a panel across the bottom, the question: “Is a Killer Taunting Police?”

  “This is about Dad,” Chloe said.

  Shelby joined her daughter at the cooking island. They both leaned forward on their elbows, peering at the screen.

  “—when KTLA received an anonymous telephone tip this morning that a bizarre video had surfaced on YouTube,” co-anchor Golden Vargas-Wong was saying. “That tape apparently shows a cold-blooded murder. Could it be a videotape of the recent unsolved killing of Inland Empire developer Paul Dwyer? Our investigative team has been working hard to answer that question all morning. Brian?”

  Shelby moved toward the TV. Chloe grabbed her arm. Hard. “You’re not going to turn this off,” Chloe said.

  The screen filled with Paul Dwyer’s face, the official company portrait. In it, his hair and confident smile all but sparkled. Brian, the investigative team newscaster, gave the backstory: disappeared nearly a month ago, body found last Friday with a single bullet wound in the head, search for suspects continues.

  “And now a bizarre new twist to this ongoing saga,” Brian said. “Early this morning, someone posted a video of what could be the actual murder in progress. The man in the video appears to be Paul Dwyer, according to our analysis.”

  A blurry still photo taken from the video appeared on the screen alongside the portrait of a smiling Paul Dwyer.

  The voiceover continued. “Could it be the killer taunting police? We hope to talk to investigators involved in the case for our ‘News at Noon’ broadcast. In the meantime, the undated tape offers new insight into the merciless nature of the crime. It shows the man whose face resembles Dwyer’s struggling and possibly being tortured. It ends with a point-blank, execution-style gunshot. We warn you in advance that even the limited portion of the video we’re about to show is disturbing—”

  “Chloe, no,” Shelby said. She pulled her arm free of her daughter’s grasp and reached for the remote. The TV blinked off. “I can’t watch that. I won’t.”

  Chloe walked to the TV and hit the power button. The screen blinked back on. “How do we know it’s him? The picture’s so blurry.”

  “It is.”

  Chloe fixed Shelby with a stare. “How do you know?”

  Shelby said nothing.

  “Mom, how do you know?”

  “I don’t. It’s just—I don’t.”

  Her daughter turned again to face the TV. “I need to know.”

  The screen had filled with a grainy image of Paul Dwyer in distress. The clip lasted less than five seconds. Chloe reached forward and turned off the TV again. She raised one hand to her mouth and tears ran down both cheeks.

  “Oh God,” Chloe said. “The voice—it is him. Oh Jesus.”

  She lurched toward the sink and retched. Shelby put an arm around her daughter’s heaving back and turned on the water to wash away the little that came up.

  “Nobody deserves that,” she said. “I hated him, but nobody deserves that.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “You know what he looked like, Mom? He looked as scared as you looked that night last summer.”

  “Like he knew he was about to die,” Shelby said.

  Her daughter nodded.

  Shelby pulled Chloe into a hug. She stroked her hair and rubbed her back. Chloe let her do it for a long time, for longer than Shelby could ever remember. This was not a kid who stood still for long. Her exuberance demanded constant motion. But when the rest of your world is spinning, you need to just stop, to plant your feet firmly, and hope everything settles. Shelby understood that feeling all too well.

  “What are we gonna do?” Chloe said. “How’s anybody ever going to find this guy?”

  “I don’t know, baby.”

  “Mom, he’s been in our house.”

  They both looked through the kitchen window and toward the pool beyond. Neither had had the stomach to dive down and loose Boz from the weight that was holding him underwater.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Chloe said. “I want to move away.”

  “What about school?”

  “I don’t care, Mom. I’m scared.”

  “Me too, baby.” Now Shelby was crying. She flashed back to the morning when the police chief came to deliver the news that Paul’s body had turned up. “Don’t leave town, Mrs. Dwyer,” she’d said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Was she about to become a fugitive? Where could they go that no one would find them?

  “I’m so sorry,” Shelby said.

  “You’re still not telling me everything. I know you’re not.”

  Shelby took a deep breath. It was time to tell her daughter the rest of it. “I saw it before.”

  Chloe ga
sped. “That video?”

  “The night it happened, as it happened. He tricked me into watching it. I pleaded with him to stop, to let Dad go. I told him he’d got it wrong. All wrong. But he still—”

  Chloe pulled back. “So you knew Dad was dead from that night on?”

  Shelby nodded.

  “And you never told me?”

  “I couldn’t tell anybody. How could I? It would have looked like I was part of it.”

  “But you were, Mom.”

  “No! No, Chloe. I wasn’t part of that, of killing your Dad. I would have never done that. See what I mean. If you know I watched it, you assume I was part of it. Anybody would. And he knows that. He’s using that to keep me quiet. But please believe me, baby, I wasn’t. Please. I—”

  An electronic chime rang. Shelby held her daughter for a moment more, then headed for the house’s foyer to see who was at the driveway gate. From there, she peered through the window beside their bolted front door. Beyond the sweeping stone patio, across the broad lawn, a news van from a different LA station was parked just outside the gate, its satellite antenna already raised twenty feet in the air and its dish pointing toward the sky. A reporter and a cameraman were standing at the gate. As Shelby watched, another news van pulled up and parked just behind the first.

  “They’re already out here because of the fire,” she said. “They must have seen the other station’s story. Now they’re here. They want to talk to me.”

  “Mom, what the hell?”

  Shelby turned from her daughter and peeked through the blinds. “They’ll go away eventually. They will. It’s just—we’re just not going anywhere for a while.”

  She twisted the rod on the louvered window blinds, and the nightmare disappeared, if only for the moment.