Darkroom (5 page)

‘Who's
this
, lieutenant?' asked Nancy Broward from CBS News, pointing at Jim.

‘Mr Jim Rook from West Grove Community College. He's agreed to assist us with our investigation. Mr Rook is Bobby and Sara's class teacher … or he would have been, had they survived.'

‘How are you spelling that? Rook as in bird?'

‘Rook as in chess castle,' Jim corrected her.

‘In what way exactly are you going to be helping the police?' asked Nancy Broward.

Lieutenant Harris looked uncomfortable. ‘Mr Rook has some specialized abilities which may enable us to determine exactly what happened here.'

‘Specialized abilities? Of what nature?'

‘I can't tell you any more than that,' said Lieutenant Harris. ‘Now, if you'll excuse us—'

But Jim interrupted him. ‘I've been teaching young people for nearly nine years. Teaching means giving them guidance, as well as facts. There may be some evidence here to tell us if Bobby and Sara had any particular problems. Like drugs, maybe. Or a falling-out with their parents. You know, one of those Romeo and Juliet-type situations.'

‘So you think it could have been a teenage suicide pact?'

‘I don't think anything yet. I haven't seen them.'

‘OK,' said Lieutenant Harris, taking hold of his arm. ‘That's enough for now. You've already given them a goddamned headline.'

He led Jim up the wooden stairs to the living room. A uniformed officer was keeping guard on the door, and the beach house was jostling with crime scene specialists and photographers and fingerprint experts, as well as fire officers and people who seemed to have nothing better to do than shout into their cellphones.

‘It's never like this on TV,' said Jim as a broad-shouldered blonde woman with a digital camera pushed her way past him, and he was unapologetically elbowed by a young black man in a Tyvek suit.

‘That's because the TV production people are always trying to economize on extras. This particular crowd scene, on the other hand, is paid for out of your taxes.'

Jim looked around him at the nautical decor – the ropes and the anchors and the paintings of four-masted clippers. ‘Jesus. Who lives in a house like this? Long John Silver?'

Lieutenant Harris led the way through to the bedroom. Jim had been preparing himself to see two burned bodies, and he knew from experience that it was going to be horrifying. He had seen a burned-out Winnebago once, on the San Diego Freeway, with dad and mom still sitting in their seats. The seats had been reduced to their springs, while dad and mom looked like charred stick people. What was worse, the heat had left them grinning, as if they were still having fun.

Here, however, he couldn't understand what he was looking at, not at first. The bedroom walls and ceiling were covered all over in a fine film of waxy yellow soot. The carpet was black and crunchy when he walked on it. The bed itself was nothing but smoking layers of incinerated fabric, like a huge burned cake, and it stank of wool and latex and shriveled-up nylon.

As he approached the bed, Jim saw a tangle of bones lying on it. They were scorched, like barbecued ribs, and they were so mixed up together that it would have been impossible at first glance to tell that they were the remains of two separate people – except that there were two skulls, with their foreheads poignantly touching, staring into each other's empty eye sockets.

All around the scattered bones lay heaps of damp gray ashes. A criminalist was scooping up samples with a spoon and dropping them into clear plastic bags.

‘Harris!' A big man with a big Roman nose and silver Roman-emperor curls came barging around the bed to greet them. He was wearing baggy blue coveralls with F
ORENSICS
printed across the back.

‘How's it going, Jack?' Lieutenant Harris asked him. ‘Jack, this is Jim Rook. Mr Rook, this is Jack Billings, head of the crime scene unit.'

Jack Billings nodded to Jim and wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his glove. ‘They were cremated,' he said in a thick, harsh voice, as if he had a cold. ‘In fact, they were more than cremated. Your average crematorium oven burns at two thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours to reduce a human body to this condition. I would say that the temperature in this bedroom reached well over five times that, even though it happened over a very short space of time. Possibly in seconds.'

‘How the hell did that happen?' asked Lieutenant Harris.

‘I was hoping that you were going to tell me. As I told you before, there's no evidence of arson … no indication that any kind of accelerant was involved, such as gasoline or kerosene or turpentine. No spent matches, no cigarette lighter. It couldn't have been a gas explosion, since the house isn't fitted for natural gas or butane. An arc welding torch can reach twenty thousand degrees Celsius, but the burning would have been concentrated in a very small area – unlike here, where we have soot spread evenly all over the walls, and the carpet evenly charred all over, and the same with the bed.'

‘A bomb?' suggested Lieutenant Harris.

Jack Billings shook his head. ‘There was plenty of heat, but there was absolutely no explosive force. Look at these remains, these ashes, they're just lying here in a pile. Any bomb that was capable of generating this much heat would have blasted them over a five-mile radius. We would have been picking up selected bits of them in Anaheim.'

‘Lightning?'

‘That's an outside possibility. But it doesn't seem very likely that lightning could have incinerated two people who were lying on a well-insulated bed. Apart from that, there were no electric storms reported along the coast last night.'

‘So that's it? You don't have any other ideas?'

‘Not so far. But you know me. I'm not defeated yet, not by a long chalk. Oh, but there's this to consider.'

‘What's that?' asked Lieutenant Harris.

Jack Billings beckoned them through to the dressing room. There were white louvred closets on the left-hand wall, which backed on to the bedroom, and a built-in dressing table on the right, with bottles of perfume and hand lotion on it. The end wall was mirrored from floor to ceiling, so that their reflections entered the room at the same time as they did. Jim thought he looked crumpled and washed-out. He needed a break. He needed the love of a good woman and three weeks on Oahu.

‘OK,' said Lieutenant Harris. ‘What's to see in here?'

Without a word, Jack Billings opened the closet doors. ‘We only found this because we were trying to see if any of the power cables had shorted out.' All of the clothes that had been hanging on the rail had been pushed right over to one side, so that the back wall of the closet was exposed.

‘My God,' said Jim. He moved closer to the wall and took off his glasses. Lieutenant Harris came and stood close behind him, shaking his head in disbelief.

Printed directly on to the paint was a life-size black-and-white image of Bobby and Sara. They were lying side by side on the bed, both of them half-naked. Sara had her right arm raised as if she were trying to protect her face, and her hair was on fire, so that a shower of tiny sparks was spraying out of the top of her head. Bobby had his eyes squeezed shut and his teeth clenched. It was difficult to tell, but it looked as if his ears were already burned off.

‘This is like a photograph,' said Jim with undisguised wonder. ‘It
is
a photograph.'

Jack Billings coughed and nodded. ‘I'd say that this is an exact image of the moment that Bobby Tubbs and Sara Miller were killed.'

‘What's this wall made of?' asked Lieutenant Harris, knocking it with his knuckle.

‘Seasoned pine – two-and-a half inches thick, painted with regular white emulsion. We've taken samples, but it doesn't appear to have been treated with any kind of photo-sensitive chemicals.'

Jim stepped back. ‘This is exactly what you would have seen if you had been standing at the foot of the bed when Bobby and Sara were killed. It's like somebody took a photograph the instant it happened, and then brought it in here, and printed it on to the wall.'

‘But
who
?' asked Lieutenant Harris.

Jack Billings shrugged. ‘I don't personally know of any photographic technique that could have been used to produce an image like this. But here it is in front of our eyes, so there must be
some
way of doing it, and that's what we have to find out. If you ask me, Lieutenant, once we know how, it won't take us long to discover who, or why. This is highly advanced, highly specialized stuff … There can't be more than a handful of people who have the technology to produce this kind of imaging.'

Jim couldn't take his eyes off the picture of Bobby and Sara. They didn't have the terrified expressions of people who suddenly realize they're just about to die. They were simply reacting to a devastating blast of light and heat – eyes shut tight, face muscles clenched, hands protectively lifted. When this picture was taken, it was already a split-second too late to save them.

He went back into the bedroom. The acrid reek of burned bedding made his sinuses run. He discovered a paper napkin from Roy's Rib Shack in his pocket, and wiped his nose. The napkin smelled strongly of barbecue sauce.

‘Sense anything?' asked Lieutenant Harris hopefully.

Jim shook his head.

‘No spiritual vibes or nothing? No ghostly echoes? No auras?'

‘No, nothing like that.'

‘You ever hear of anything like this before? People getting cremated while they're lying in bed.'

‘I've heard about spontaneous human combustion – people catching fire for no apparent reason and burning to ashes. Scientists call it SHC or “ultra-rapid holocaust.”'

‘Do you think something like that might have happened here?'

‘I don't know,' said Jim. ‘It's quite a famous phenomenon. Even Charles Dickens wrote about it. There's a character in
Bleak House,
a rag-and-bone dealer called Krook, who gets burned to a pile of ashes while he's sitting in his chair by the fire. But I don't think there's a whole lot of serious research to back it up.'

‘What about that picture on the closet wall?' said Lieutenant Harris. ‘Damned if I know what to make of that.'

‘Damned if I know, either. Sorry.'

‘Well, if you think of anything at all – if you get any hunches, or funny feelings – you know how to get in touch with me. Just don't talk about any of this to the media,
please.
Especially that picture. I don't want to get the lunatic fringe excited. You know the ones I mean – those people who see images of the Virgin Mary reflected in the windows of Toys R Us.'

‘You got it,' Jim agreed. ‘But you'll keep me up to speed, won't you? If any new evidence comes up … well, it might help me to get a handle on how those poor kids were killed.'

He walked back across the beach and climbed into his Lincoln. The reporters and the cameramen immediately surrounded him, pushing microphones close to his face.

‘Did you see the bodies, Jim? How do you think they died? Will you be talking to Bobby's and Sara's parents? How are their classmates taking it? Pretty badly, I'll bet.'

Jim started the engine, jammed his foot down on the gas, and immediately the Lincoln's rear wheels buried themselves in the sand. He tried revving the car forward, and then back, and then forward again, but the wheels spun deeper and deeper. In the end he had to turn around to the reporters and cameramen and give them a look of utter defeat.

‘OK, OK. I give in. If you people help to push me out of this sand, I'll give you a quote.'

‘Oh, yeah? How do we know we can trust you?' challenged Roger Frick from CNN. ‘We might push you out of the sand, and then you might just drive off.'

‘I'm a college teacher. If you can't trust a college teacher, who can you trust?'

Six or seven reporters gathered around the front of his car, as well as two cops. They all leaned forward, and when Jim shouted, ‘Push!', they pushed. He revved the engine, spraying everybody with twin fountains of sand, but suddenly the Lincoln surged backward and bounced up on to the concrete ramp.

‘Thanks!' said Jim. ‘Thanks, you're terrific! Thank you!'

Nancy Broward came up to him and held out her microphone. ‘OK, Jim. How about that quote?'

‘Of course. Never let it be said that I didn't keep my side of the bargain.' He waited until all of the reporters were gathered around him, and then he said, ‘“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.” Dion Boucicault, 1820 to 1890.'

‘Huh?' said Roger Frick.

‘I promised you a quote … that's a quote.' With that, Jim backed the Lincoln up the ramp, slewed it around, and drove back on to the Pacific Coast Highway.

He walked into Special Class II five minutes late for their last session of the day, which was supposed to be creative writing. All of them were busy, although not one of them had a book open. Shadow was bouncing his basketball from the bridge of his nose to the top of his head and back again, while Brenda Malone was hunched in front of a magnifying mirror, squeezing out her blackheads, and Randy Bullock was eating his way through the largest submarine sandwich that Jim had ever seen. Jim almost expected to see cows' legs hanging out of the side of it.

The classroom was filled with the
chikkity-chikkity
sound of dance music, coming from half a dozen headsets. It sounded like a cornfield full of crickets.

Jim dropped his books on to his desk and then stepped forward to the front of the class. ‘Everyone – I need your attention, please.'

Shadow went on bouncing his ball and Randy Bullock went on chewing and Ruby Montes went on swaying and miming the salsa music she was listening to.

Jim waited for a while with his head lowered. Edward Truscott was giving him a dutiful frown, but George Graves had his back turned, and Vanilla King had almost disappeared inside her huge woven bag, rummaging for something critically important, like a lost eyebrow pencil probably.