California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  Turns out they can help her.

  48

  Pam was sober that night, Letty says.

  She and Jack are sitting at an outside table at Pirets, beside the main entrance to South Coast Plaza.

  “She was at a meeting that night,” Letty says between sips of her iced tea. She picks up the glass and the paper napkin blows away in the hot, dry Santa Ana wind. “She was sober then. The meeting broke up at 9:30, then she went out for coffee. With eight other women. She was sober then.”

  “That doesn’t mean,” Jack says, “that she was sober at four the next morning.”

  Jack’s drinking a Coke. The good folks at Pirets had to search long and hard to find a soda that didn’t have the word Diet in front of it. They got it done, though.

  “She told her AA friends she was scared,” Letty says. “Scared that Nicky was going to kill her. They told her to call the cops. They begged her to stay with them; she said it would just postpone things.”

  Jack says, “So she went home and the fear and anxiety drove her to the bottle.”

  “After Nicky left, she didn’t keep any booze in the house.”

  “She bought a bottle of vodka—”

  “I checked every liquor store on her route home,” Letty says. “I talked with everyone who worked that night. Nobody remembers her.”

  “You’re good.”

  “I’m motivated.”

  “Forget about it,” Jack says.

  “Forget about what?” she asks.

  She knows just what he’s talking about.

  “About getting custody of the kids,” Jack says.

  “If I get him convicted of murder …”

  Jack shakes his head. “You’re a long way from there. Say it is an arson—how did Pam die? Ng’s got it as an OD. Say you can make the next step, say it’s murder. You have nothing puts Nicky there. Say you somehow manage to cross that bridge—I don’t know how, but say you do—say you get Nicky convicted of murdering Pam … Mother Russia is still the declared guardian. Mother gets the kids.”

  “She was in on it.”

  “She provided an alibi,” Jack says.

  “So they’ll take the kids from her.”

  “No, they won’t,” Jack says. “Besides which, the murder conviction isn’t going to happen. Even if you could develop enough information to embarrass Bentley into moving off his call, or enough that the Sheriff’s would have to reopen. Or enough to get the DA interested.”

  It’s a long shot. A long shot to get a criminal investigation, a longer shot to get them to charge, a regular NBA three-pointer to get a conviction, because the evidence is getting colder every day.

  And Letty knows all this, she just doesn’t want to know it yet.

  No, Nicky and Mother Russia keep the kids.

  Nicky gets away with murder.

  “So what are you going to do?” Letty asks. “Drop it?”

  “No,” Jack says. “I’m going to do my job. I’m going to investigate the claim. I’m going to see if Nicky Vale had the motive and opportunity to set the fire and kill his wife. If I find sufficient evidence, I’ll deny the claim.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “The worst that happens to Nicky is he doesn’t get paid for killing her?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But it works for you, huh, Jack? You don’t care what happens to the kids. All you care about is that the claim doesn’t get paid, right?”

  “That’s my job,” Jack says.

  It’s not all I care about—it’s all I can do.

  Letty gets up, says, “Same old Jack.”

  “Same old Jack.”

  “Well, same-old Jack,” she says. “I’d like to tell you to go to hell, but you’re the only chance I have. If you deny the claim, maybe Nicky will sue you for bad faith. Then maybe there’ll be a jury verdict that says that Nicky killed Pam. A family court judge would have to take ‘judicial notice’ of that verdict in a custody hearing.”

  “That’s a very long shot.”

  “So do your job, Jack,” she says.

  Like he’d do anything else.

  She tosses her napkin down on the table.

  “And get a life,” she says.

  Right, Letty, Jack thinks. Tell me to get a life.

  As you walk out, take it with you.

  49

  Dinesh Adjati takes one of Jack’s samples, a small piece of charred wood, and scrapes a fragment into a glass flask. He adds 50 milliliters of pentane to the flask, then pours the whole mess through some filter paper into a clean flask.

  The result is a clear liquid.

  He repeats this procedure for all of Jack’s samples, labeling and placing the flasks in a metal rack as he goes through them.

  A robotic machine then caps each flask, inserts a syringe needle into each, withdraws a cubic millimeter of liquid and lines up the samples to go through the gas chromatograph.

  One of the allegedly dirty samples goes through first.

  The sample gets shot into an injection port which is pressurized at about 60 pounds per square inch of helium gas and heated to 275°C, which vaporizes the liquid. The helium chases the sample vapor into the core of the gas chromatograph.

  This is a capillary tube, about 60 meters long and one-quarter of a millimeter in diameter. The inside of it is coated with methyl silicone, a thick viscous liquid. (Here’s how Dinesh explains methyl silicone to juries. He says, “If you put methyl silicone in a jar, and tip the jar upside down, and come back a day later, perhaps half of the liquid will have flowed to the bottom of the jar. If you come back another day later, probably most of it will be at the bottom. That’s how thick this stuff is.”)

  The capillary tube (a.k.a. the GC column) starts out at room temperature, so the sample condenses into a liquid again, but the column is gradually heated inside an oven that houses it to 200°C. The effect of all this is that the sample will gradually vaporize again and start a migration down the capillary tube.

  Different chemicals make this trip at different speeds, separating from each other as a result. Some of the chemicals dissolve inside the silicone and take a long time to migrate down the tube. Other chemicals race through it lickety-split.

  But, one after the other, the chemicals will emerge, each time registering a blip on the computer screen. The height of the blip indicates how much of that chemical is present. At the end of the process, you’re looking at a forest of blips or peaks of various heights, which together form a recognizable pattern called the gas chromatogram.

  The way Dinesh explains this concept to juries is to talk about cookie recipes. “Look,” he’ll say, “a recipe might call for a tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of sugar. That’s the composition of that particular cookie dough, if you will—it has cinnamon and sugar in certain defined intensities. Gasoline, kerosene, napalm—any of the accelerants you’re testing for—are like cookie dough in this respect: they’re made of many different substances, each present in different amounts.”

  All the substances present in any given mixture will produce a unique and predictable gas chromatogram, a characteristic “signature” of a given mixture.

  Dinesh watches as the samples start to sign in.

  He starts getting a little ripple at around five minutes. At ten a modest peak. The trace drops way down, then gives him a little hill at twelve minutes. At fifteen the peak goes Himalayan. Shoots up like a rocket. Down again at fifteen minutes, ten seconds. Up again at seventeen. Big peak at eighteen, and then it starts to settle. Modest peaks at twenty, which gradually settle down. At about twenty-eight minutes it’s flat again.

  Dinesh watches this on a graph.

  The sample signs in.

  It signs in “Kerosene.”

  For his next magic trick, he’ll analyze the sample through a gas chromatograph with a special instrument, a mass spectrometer, attached to the back.

  What happens is that the gases flow out of the GC c
olumn into a vacuum port, which sucks them into the mass spectrometer. The mass spec is a steel cylinder about four inches in diameter and two feet long. It has a glass port so you can see inside the guts, which basically consist of vacuum devices, steel plates, cylinders, wires, ceramic tubes and turbo-pumps which are whirring at about 100,000 rpm.

  In the center of all this is a glowing filament which bombards the chemical vapors with electrons, breaking them into electrically charged molecule-sized chunks, or ions. In a microsecond these ions are weighed; in a nanosecond they’re counted.

  The size and number of these ions produce a characteristic “fragment signature.”

  (Dinesh explains it to juries like this: “Suppose you throw a flowerpot on the sidewalk. It will shatter into random pieces. It will break into different sizes and different numbers of pieces every time. No two fragments will be alike. But a molecule is a different kind of flowerpot—one with predetermined grooves, if you will. Every time you shatter it, it will break into exactly the same size and number of fragments. Each substance has its own unique, predictable fragment signature.”)

  Now the computer automatically compares the fragment signatures against the NIST (National Institute of Standards) mass spectral library profiles of certain substances and comes up with a match.

  Kerosene.

  Which almost every analyst in the country would call a definitive match. Not Dinesh. Not with a GC-mass spec, not with all those plasticizers out there gumming up the works.

  So Dinesh takes the samples and runs them through a GC × GC.

  “Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography” is the technical term. Dinesh doesn’t think of it that way. He thinks of it as looking into chemical mixtures through a Hubble telescope.

  It starts off simply enough. Dinesh runs the sample through a gas chromatograph. Same process: the samples are vaporized and shot through a capillary filled with methyl silicone, where they separate into about two hundred groups of chemicals.

  Instead of stopping there, or running them through a mass spec, Dinesh shoots them through an interface device into a second gas chromatographic column. See, each peak comes out of the first column for about ten seconds. Every three seconds, a little heater inside the oven is mechanically rotated. It has a slot in it which rotates over the column. It locally heats the column, which drives all the chemicals in that area out. As soon as they get beyond that “hot zone,” they come to the unheated “cold zone” and get sucked right back into the methyl silicone. This forms a sharp chemical pulse. This pulse is swept along a short length of column—about fifty millimeters—and eventually is launched down the tube by the heated zone into the second GC column.

  Once again, they all travel down the tube and separate.

  The trick is in the methyl silicone in the second column.

  It’s been doped.

  Doped with chemicals that produce completely different separation criteria from the methyl silicone in the first column.

  (“There are three chemical separation mechanisms,” Dinesh will tell a floundering jury. “Volatility, polarity and shape. Volatility is how much vapor pressure a substance puts out at a certain temperature—its boiling point, put simply. Polarity refers to the electric property of molecules. Shape is simple—it’s the shape of the molecule, whether it’s, say, shaped like a chain, or perhaps a closed loop.

  “Now, the first GC column only separates by volatility. So two chemicals that have the same volatility will come out of the first column together—unseparated—even though they have different polarities and/or different shapes. But when they hit the doped methyl silicone in the second column, they encounter a chemical mechanism that they haven’t seen before, and they separate.

  “So: polarity is an electrical property of molecules. Electrostatically, the positive attracts the negative and vice versa. The molecules tend to hug each other. They can maintain this mutual affection through the first GC column, but when they hit the second … well, love does not conquer methyl silicone doped with chemicals that have electric charges on their surfaces, and they separate. Same with shape. Two very differently shaped molecules that have the same polarity but different shapes can travel down the first column disguised in happy unity as one. But when they hit the second column they will have a different reaction to the stationary phase—to the doped methyl silicone—and they’ll separate.

  “The performance then of one GC multiplies the other. They don’t add, they multiply. So if the first can separate one hundred peaks and the second can separate thirty, then in combination they can separate not one hundred and thirty, but three thousand.”)

  The net result is that the chromatograms look like stalagmites rising up off a floor, instead of shark fins coming up off lines.

  It’s the difference between a graph and a kaleidoscope. Between a coloring book and a Matisse. Between, as Dinesh likes to think, the “Beer Barrel Polka” and a Charlie Parker solo. The GC × GC delivers a beautiful multicolored pattern, which will always be exactly the same—every time—for a given mixture. Every time you set the kaleidoscope at the setting marked “Kerosene,” you’ll get the same beautiful, complex pattern.

  Like a signature in 3-D.

  Like a fingerprint in Technicolor.

  Only better.

  And that’s what Dinesh sees when he finishes running the first sample through the GC × GC. A two-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that portrays one image and one image only.

  Kerosene.

  Six hours later he and his crew have run all the samples.

  The kaleidoscope is always the same.

  Kerosene.

  He calls Jack with the results.

  50

  Maybe the best view on the south coast is the one from the patio bar at Las Brisas, with its view of Laguna Bay and Laguna town stretched out beneath you like some old Mediterranean city with its white buildings and terra-cotta-tiled roofs. Especially at sunset, with the sky turning from blue to lavender and the red summer sun starting to kiss the ocean horizon.

  “Thanks for coming,” Nicky says. He tilts his vodka collins in a salute to Jack.

  “Thanks for the drink,” says Jack, raising his beer bottle.

  Nicky says, “Well, I wanted to thank you for intervening in that ugly situation in the church the other day.”

  “No,” Jack says, “you wanted to find out what Letitia del Rio told me.”

  Nicky smiles. “That, too.”

  “She told me some disturbing things.”

  “No doubt she did,” Nicky says. “I am sure that she concocted some wild and wonderful tales for you. I imagine at times she even believes them herself. Letty is a sick woman.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, they came from the same dysfunctional family, didn’t they.”

  “Letty says that Pam went to rehab.”

  “Yes.” Nicky laughs. “Would you like to see those bills?”

  “And?”

  “She stayed sober for about two weeks afterwards, I think,” Nicky says. “Not a bargain.”

  They sit and drink and watch the progress of the sunset, a spectacular Southern Californian light show gone from lavender to purple as the sky turns into a violent red.

  “This might be Paradise,” Nicky sighs. Then he says, “Think about this, Jack. The next beneficiary on the life insurance policy after me is Letty, in trust for the children, of course. It would be in her interest to make up stories, wouldn’t it?”

  Jack watches the bottom of the sun melt into the ocean.

  “You know what I think?” Jack asks. He takes a long belt of his beer.

  “I wouldn’t presume to guess, Jack.”

  Easy, relaxed, maximum cool.

  “What I think,” Jack says, “I think that you killed your wife and burned the house down around her. That’s what I think.”

  Grinning at Nicky, who turns pale.

  Nicky stares at him for a long moment, then forces his face into a condescending smile. Looks Ja
ck square in the eyes.

  Says, “Prove it.”

  Jack says, “I will.”

  Behind Nicky the sun, the sky and the ocean are on fire.

  This beautiful inferno, Jack thinks.

  This drop-dead gorgeous hell.

  51

  Here’s the story on Nicky Vale.

  Daziatnik Valeshin grows up in Leningrad, his father a minor apparatchik, his mother a teacher at the state gymnasium. She feels that she has fallen in the world—both her parents were professors and she did brilliantly at university. Were it not for one foolish, unguarded night she would doubtless have become a professor as well. But then, she had a child to raise—alone—as Daz’s father splits early, a divorce while young Daz is still in the crawling phase.

  Mother he sees.

  Constantly, oppressively.

  She’s raising him to be something, most decidedly not a minor apparatchik. They go meatless for weeks to afford ballet tickets, the soup is thinned yet again for a Tchaikovsky recording. At a precocious age he reads his Tolstoy, of course, and Pushkin and Turgenev, and at bedtime she sits and reads Flaubert to him—in French. Not that he understands French, but it is Mother’s firm belief that he will somehow absorb the meaning through the rhythm and tone.

  Mother teaches him to appreciate the finer things—art, music, sculpture, architecture and design. She teaches him manners—at the table, in conversation, with a woman. They sit and practice an evening out at a fine restaurant—sitting at the fold-up table in their cramped kitchen, she takes him through the various courses and scolds him into making conversation as if she were the young lady and he were the suitor.

  She’s as brutal about his grades as she is his manners. Nothing but a “first” will do. The moment he comes home she sits him down in front of his books, then has him review his work for her.

  It must be perfect.

  Otherwise, she tells him, you will end up like the rest of the proletariat, like your father. Stupid, unhappy, bored and with no future but to be stupid, unhappy and bored.

  When he gets to the age where he’s interested in girls, she chooses them for him. Or more often chooses against them for him. This one is too silly, that one too fat, this one too clever, that one a slut.