Combustion

by Martin J. Smith

  Kerrigan turned her pleading eyes to the intruder. “He’ll kill me, too, for God’s sake!” she screamed. “Do something!” Starke aimed the barrel of his gun at the center of the man’s chest.

  “Stay where you are,” he commanded. “Los Colmas PD. This is a crime scene.”

  Kerrigan unclipped her badge from her belt and waved it at the man. “I’m Los Colmas PD.”

  For a second, maybe two, the three of them stood frozen amid the flames.

  “He’ll kill us both!” Kerrigan screamed.

  The firefighter took one step forward. Starke raised his arm until the gun’s barrel was pointing at the man’s helmeted head. Slowly, carefully, the firefighter lifted the mask away from a face Starke recognized immediately despite the layers of grime. They’d played soccer together in high school.

  “Ron?” the firefighter said. “That you?”

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Kerrigan’s shoulders slumped, and she seemed to shrink. She’d done the calculus and come to a fast conclusion.

  She was the outsider.

  Again.

  She turned back to Starke. Now there was no rage or hate in her eyes. Only a plea.

  “You know the deal,” she said again.

  Her move for her gun wasn’t a desperate lunge, but rather a deliberate stride and reach. The whole time, she was looking at him.

  “Don’t,” he pleaded.

  But then she had the bloody weapon in her hand, and she was lifting it from the floor, and she was pointing it at him. Just that quick, the balance shifted. He was the one without options.

  His first shot spun her like a top—he’d aimed for her shoulder—but she was holding tight to the gun as she dropped to the floor. She landed on her hands and knees, then fell forward facing away from him. Kerrigan’s back heaved from the pain. The bullet had gone straight through, he could see now, leaving a two-inch exit wound in her left shoulder. She coughed, but made no other move.

  A deep voice. “Jesus, Ron. What the fuck?”

  From the corner of his eye, Starke could see the firefighter still silhouetted in the doorway. He leveled the gun at the back of Kerrigan’s head and braced its butt in the palm of his left hand.

  “Leave the weapon,” he commanded. “Goddamn it, Chief. Leave it.”

  Kerrigan was motionless for a long moment. Not even a cough. Finally, Kerrigan pushed herself back up until she was again on her hands and knees. The firefighter watched from the doorway, still as a statue.

  “Push the gun out of reach,” Starke ordered. “Now.”

  Kerrigan turned her head, looking back at him over her right shoulder. Her hair was still pulled into an efficient ponytail, and she smiled a smile he knew would haunt him forever. When she shifted her weight to her shaking left arm, it gave way. She sealed her fate as she dropped, raising her right arm and pointing her gun directly at him.

  Starke’s head shot finished it. Kerrigan died sprawled beside Shelby Dwyer’s body. In the stunned-silent moment that followed, just before the ceiling at the back of the house collapsed, Starke thought again of the online phantom’s name.

  64

  Starke didn’t know the name of the sedative, but he was feeling no pain as he lay face down on the emergency-room exam table. He was wearing an open-back hospital gown, but it was untied, and he was basically naked. Every few seconds, he’d hear the tink! of another shard after the nurse tweezered it from the flesh of his back and butt and dropped it into the metal pan beside his head. After two hours, there was an impressive little mound of bloody glass in the center of the pan.

  “Almost done, baby,” she said.

  “Take your time.”

  He checked his wristwatch. Five hours since he’d collapsed outside the Dwyer house and ended up here. He’d regained consciousness in an ambulance at the bottom of the hill, face-to-face with the firefighter whose name he instantly remembered. Dry. Ed Dry. Hell of a striker.

  “Ron?” he’d asked. “What the hell just happened up there?”

  Starke had gulped a few breaths and tried to answer. “Long story. Just say what you saw. The truth, straight out.”

  The firefighter nodded as the paramedics closed the ambulance doors.

  Tink!

  “You won’t sparkle as much after I’m done, mijo.”

  “Never been a sparkly guy.”

  Starke turned his head so he could see the nurse’s face. She was lovely—Mexican, he assumed—but young. Said her name was—hell, what was it? Was it the drugs, or his middle-aged man’s imagination? He could swear she’d been flirting with him.

  “Just be glad it was your back,” she said. “This was the other side? Hoo-baby. Plus you’d have to watch me do this, know what I mean? It’s one thing—”

  Starke felt the air shift. The nurse looked up toward the blue curtain that offered them the thinnest pretense of privacy in the emergency room. He followed her eyes to where the curtain now split and saw Ramon Chavez standing there like an undertaker.

  The Los Colmas police captain didn’t smile often—something that stood him well with Kerrigan as she shuffled and reshuffled the department’s power structure in recent months. Now was no exception. He looked like a man trying to pass a cantaloupe.

  “’Bout wrapped up in here?” Chavez said.

  “Sir?” she said. “Please wait outside.”

  “How long?”

  The nurse set the tweezers on Starke’s bare, bloodied ass and crossed her arms across her chest. Her playful voice changed as she shifted into pro mode. “Don’t make me call security.”

  Captain Chavez casually held up his shield.

  “I don’t care who you are,” she snapped. “This man’s medicated, he’s in no condition to talk, and he’s undergoing treatment. So you just turn around and walk out of this exam area now before I—now who’s this?”

  The curtain parted even wider as Corie Rosen stepped into the cramped space. Starke had known the county deputy DA for years, but her face was all business until her eyes swept across the exam table. She blanched. Starke made no effort to cover himself, and Rosen quickly looked away.

  “Corie, does this gown make my butt look big?” Starke asked.

  Rosen covered her eyes with her hand. “Chipped Christ on toast, Starke. Your back looks like hamburger. What the hell?”

  Starke pushed himself up onto his elbows and turned to face the nurse. “Sorry. What’s your name again?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the intruders. “Madonna.”

  “As much as I’ve enjoyed our time together, Madonna, I really do need to talk to these folks. I know them both, and I’m pretty sure they’re in a hurry to get some answers. Can we finish this up after I do that?”

  When she finally looked at him, he smiled and said, “It’s OK. Really.”

  Madonna grabbed a bottle of some sort of disinfectant wash, soaked a wad of sterile gauze, and swabbed down the parts of his back where she’d removed his sparkles. He could feel it snag here and there on the remaining bits. “Didn’t get it all,” she said. “Least let me clean you up a little so it won’t get infected.”

  Chavez and Rosen stared at their shoes as the nurse blotted the blood from Starke’s glass-peppered glutes. When she was done, she snapped off her surgical gloves with a bit more violence than necessary, then maneuvered around the visitors and disappeared through the curtain. Still, Starke made no effort to cover himself. Couldn’t hurt to let Chavez and Rosen squirm. He could always blame it on the painkillers.

  “Do you know why we’re here, detective?” Chavez said.

  The most loaded of questions. Starke already knew his answer. “I’m prepared to make a full statement.”

  Chavez and Rosen seemed startled. Rosen stepped forward and looked Starke in the eye.

  “About?”

  “The Dwyer killings. Also, the death of Chief Donna Kerrigan.”

  Chavez and Rosen looked at one another. Chavez spoke first.

  “She’s dead?�
��

  Starke nodded. “Figured you knew by now.”

  “We got two bodies, both badly burned. No ID yet, but Kerrigan’s car was out front. And she’s missing. A county fire captain told us you might know something about it.”

  “It’s her.”

  “And the other?”

  “Shelby Dwyer.”

  Chavez and Rosen look at each other again. This time Rosen spoke.

  “Ron, you need an attorney.”

  He shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt. Know any?”

  She stepped forward and pressed a card into his hand: San Bernardino County Public Defender. “Call them,” she said. “And be down at the cop shop in two hours. If they can’t assign anybody that soon, we’ll wait. But you need somebody there. Understood?”

  He nodded.

  “Captain Chavez will stay with you,” she added.

  Chavez stepped forward. He looked uncomfortable as he reached toward the back of his belt. “Precaution, is all.”

  Starke knew the drill, so he held out his left wrist. Chavez clamped a cuff around it, probably tighter than was necessary.

  “I’ll wait for you at reception,” Chavez said. “Just have your little girlfriend call me when she’s done cleaning you up.” Before he and Rosen stepped back out, Chavez clicked the other cuff around the metal leg of the exam table.

  65

  The computer?

  Starke’s eyes shot open. The sedatives had overtaken him shortly after Chavez and Rosen left, just as nurse Madonna tweezered the last of the sparkles from his back. How long had he dozed? He was still face down on the table, so he lifted his head and looked around.

  His blue curtain was gone, pushed back along its ceiling track all the way to the wall. He could see now how his privacy, such as it had been, was an illusion. He was square in the middle of a vast emergency room. Here and there small treatment areas were partitioned off by those blue curtains, but for the most part he was one of a dozen people receiving treatment. Four stations down, a team worked furiously over someone who’d been unable to outrun the fire. The smell of charred meat drifted through the room.

  Starke tried to focus on the thought that woke him—Shelby Dwyer’s computer. He’d seen Kerrigan carry it into the house, then again on a table in the front hall as he’d faced her down. He remembered reaching for it as he staggered toward the front door of the burning house, remembered firefighter Ed Dry shoving him outside before he could grab it. Then—nothing. He’d passed out, and those final moments were a blur. Could it have survived as the house went up in flames? Did it matter?

  Starke pushed himself up on his elbows, relieved to see his flash drive still dangling from a cord around his neck. At least he had that.

  Then, a voice: “Thank you.”

  He couldn’t place it, but it came from the treatment station next to him. He turned his head. A young woman was sitting up on an empty exam table nearby. She was wearing the same clothes she was wearing when he last saw her, climbing down the tree at the corner of her burning house. She’d pushed her own oxygen mask up onto her forehead.

  “Chloe.” He smiled. “You’re OK.”

  He tried to imagine the kid’s state of mind—suddenly alone, both parents dead. Did she know her house was gone, too? Just hours before, she’d heard her mother confront Kerrigan, heard the shots, seen her mother sprawled in the downstairs hall. He’d coaxed her out of shock as she cowered in her upstairs bedroom. That had been the easy part. The complicated stuff was still to come.

  Chloe brought the mask down and took a deep hit of oxygen, then lifted it again. “I told,” she gasped. “When I got out. Of the house. Fireman guy. Helped me. So I told him. My mom. Was hurt.”

  Hurt? Could she still not know?

  “Where is she?” Chloe asked. “My mom?”

  Starke tried to roll onto his side to slide off the treatment table, but the sound of metal on metal reminded him that his wrist was cuffed to one of the table’s legs. Chloe noticed the restraints, stared long and hard at them, but said nothing. Just waited.

  Starke shook his head. “Couldn’t save her. Chloe, I’m sorry. She died before I even came upstairs and found you.”

  The girl’s face registered nothing, at first. It was as if he’d told her the time. Then, suddenly, her features crumpled into grief. She’d been floating on the tiniest bit of hope. Starke felt like he’d just handed her an anchor. Chloe clenched her eyes shut, but not tight enough to stop the tears. They flowed down her face, around the outside of her breathing mask, and hung in a little liquid bulb at the bottom of her chin. She didn’t make any sound at all except to gulp more air.

  Starke had more to tell her, none of it good. Better that she take the lead. After a minute, Chloe blotted her chin with her sleeve, brushed the tear trails from her cheeks, lifted the mask, and gestured toward Starke’s shackled wrist.

  “But you didn’t shoot her,” she said. “The lady—”

  Starke looked the girl in the eye. “She’s dead, too,” he said. “I think she killed your dad, and tried to make it look like your mom—”

  The girl waved away his words. “I know.”

  “You knew?”

  Chloe shrugged. “More than I. Wanted to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  Starke listened as Chloe, between hard-fought breaths, laid out what her mother had told her, about meeting someone online, someone she’d assumed was a man, but whose name and true identity she never knew. How that someone had lured her mother into watching her father’s murder, then terrorized her into silence.

  “It was. That lady?” she asked.

  Starke nodded.

  “But why?”

  Starke shook his head. “Did your mom say anything that might explain all this, Chloe? Because that’s what I still—I know what happened, I just don’t know why. I’ll find out, but right now, I’m not sure why she went after your Dad, or tried to make it look like your Mom was involved.”

  An awkward silence. The girl’s lower lip quivered. Starke tried to imagine being seventeen and as alone as Chloe suddenly found herself. No parents. No brothers or sisters. There was one more bit of bad news.

  “Your house, Chloe. It burned. I’m sorry.”

  The girl closed her eyes. Starke hated delivering that on top of everything else, but at least now she knew everything. Now she could process it. She seemed strong enough, like her mother.

  “There are people who can help you,” Starke said. “You have grandparents, right? People who can find you a place to live. Help you sort things out.”

  She nodded, but Starke could tell by her lost look that she was overwhelmed.

  “My mom talked. About you,” she said. “A lot.”

  Starke looked away. “We were close friends. A long time ago.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you love her?”

  Caught off guard, he still managed a smile. “Once.”

  Chloe smiled back. “I think maybe she loved you.”

  Starke didn’t believe that. He’d once thought what happened between them that summer when they were both twenty-one was real and honest and perfect. But their passion had consequences, and suddenly he was just the guy standing between Shelby and the life she really wanted. She’d made her choice and moved on before he ever knew, and so he moved on, too. Eventually he met Rosaleen, and life happened.

  “Your mom was a good person,” he said.

  Chloe nodded. Could the kid really understand that essential truth, after all that had happened?

  “Mom loved being loved,” Chloe said.

  Starke sat up, the cuffs rattling against the metal leg of the exam table as he tried to gather the open-backed hospital gown around him with his free hand. The effort and noise brought Chavez out of his chair at the far end of emergency room. The police captain attempted a smile as he approached, but it flickered like a candle in a breeze and disappeared. His face resumed its natural scowl as he tossed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to Starke’s
free hand.

  “Found you something to wear down to the station,” Chavez said. “We may be a while sorting this out.”

  “Thanks.”

  Starke rattled the cuffs again, and Chavez stepped forward with a key. He unlocked the cuff from the table leg, but left the other one around Starke’s wrist. Starke waited until Chloe looked away, then worked around the swinging cuff as he pulled the loose jeans over his tender ass.

  “DA already found a lawyer for you,” Chavez said. “They’re waiting for us. You sure you’re feeling up to this now? We’ve got a lot of questions.”

  “I’ve got answers,” Starke said. “Just give me a sec, OK?”

  He turned to Chloe, who’d stripped off her oxygen mask and was standing beside her exam table. “Everything will be OK,” he said. “I just have to tell the police what happened.”

  The girl looked alarmed, abandoned. “I’ll go. With you.”

  They both looked at Chavez, who seemed confused. He shook his head. “And you are?” he asked.

  Chloe sidestepped closer to Starke, then turned and fixed her eyes on his. For the first time they stood face to face, and Starke had a disconcerting moment of familiarity. The girl looked like a younger version of her mother.

  Starke was about to back away when she reached across his waist and took his left hand in hers. The girl shifted her eyes to Chavez, and before the police captain could react, she fixed the open cuff around her own thin wrist.

  Her answer to Chavez left no room for debate: “I’m Chloe Dwyer. You need to hear my story, too.”

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve been blessed to know many amazing and complicated women, and their influences are everywhere in the characters, themes, and random moments of this book. I owe them all a great debt for enriching my life, and my stories, in ways I may never fully understand: