Done for a Dime (38 page)

“The Roderick guy you mentioned, one who shot your partner, now there’s a real piece of work.”

Murchison stared blankly.

“You wouldn’t believe what they found inside that house.”

“Sure I would.”

While still at the scene, Murchison learned from an EMT that the old woman wasn’t just undernourished, dehydrated, and mentally ill. A brief inspection suggested she’d also been subjected to repeated sexual assaults. The EMT said his wife worked for the ombudsman, you saw that kind of thing more and more—old women with dementia pimped off by family members for drug money.

“And the botched tanker heist up top of the hill? Your perp in the Carlisle killing got found there. Or at least they think it’s him, pending dentals and prints, if they can get any off him. Did you know that?”

“I heard. Yeah.”

The gas from the tanker had flooded the sewers but left only a film at the station itself, so when a spark source hit it only a surface fire caught, and that got handled by the rain. Luckily, none of the vapor inside the empty tank compartments went up. Too rich a mixture. It meant they had a relatively intact crime scene, complete with three dead men—singed by the fire but not burned to char and bone, they’d be identified—plus a long-bed van. They’d found, too, a .357 and a Smith and Wesson 645, both now being matched against the Carlisle ballistics through IBIS, and a knapsack containing the personal property of one Manuel Turpin, aged twenty-one, with an Oregon conviction for felony arson.

“FBI’s arrived, because of this Turpin mutt. They’re keen on him in a weird way.”

“How so?”

“You’ll find out. They want you in on the big sit-down once they’re through with their preliminaries. ATF’s in town now, too, because of the way the houses went up. Some kind of bomb they’ve seen before, but only in Mob jobs.”

“Fed’s sharing anything real?”

Johndroe laughed. “Get serious.”

Murchison got up from his chair. “Holmes paged me from the hill. He’s got something he wants me to see.”

Johndroe didn’t stand up. “Holmes, he’ll probably get that detective shield now. Got the vacancy, with Stluka gone. Chief’s got no reason not to put Holmes in his place. God knows they’ve both been eager. Might even make him your partner. How’s that sit with you?”

The question, folksy in tone, had insidious intent, but Murchison couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just imagining. Still, he knew pretty soon the nicknames would start. Ebony and Ivory. Ugly and Uglier. And it would be odd, going from partner to the most unapologetic racist on the force to partner of its first Black detective. There was a mood swing for you. But he knew it wouldn’t make him look versatile. It’d make him look like he wasn’t even there.

He shrugged. “Holmesy’s a good cop. Why?”

Johndroe gestured for Murchison to sit back down. “Just a few last questions.”

He didn’t bother to flip the recorder back on. Murchison sat.

“Did Stluka slug one of the kids taken into custody for trespass at the warehouse fire near Dumpers?”

Murchison sagged in his chair. “Kinda late in the game to be asking that. Can’t sue a dead man.”

“Department’s still on the hook.”

“Then I’ll wait for a lawyer. No offense.”

“None taken. Got anything you want to tell me about Officer Gilroy’s handling of the Thigpen arrest?”

How did he know these things, Murchison wondered. “I wasn’t present during the arrest.”

“Anything at all? The hospital? The fact you tore up his booking sheet?”

Murchison felt his mouth get dry. “Like I said—”

“Did you tell this Thigpen kid’s mother you had an eyewitness?”

It was a prickling sensation along his neck Murchison felt now. Sarina Thigpen, she’d already complained. Maybe hired a lawyer. Everybody’d be hiring lawyers.

“That’s permissible deception, Johndroe.”

“The kid’s mother? How about this—you continue to question her son after he made a clear and unequivocal request for counsel?”

“He wasn’t a suspect in the shooting at that point.”

Johndroe rolled his eyes. “Ah, Jesus, Murch—”

“A material witness, I don’t—”

“Murch, stop. You had his clothes. The door was locked. You know better.” Johndroe edged closer. Same as Murchison had with Arlie. “Not like we hide the SOP binder.” Standard Operating Procedure—a three-ring binder filled with the latest great idea on how to avoid the last big blunder. Fifty Years of Fuckups, it got called. “You nuts? You want to lose your house?”

“Over the piddly beefs you just brought up?”

“You want to answer any of my questions?”

Murchison wondered where all this was headed. Whatever he did in the room with Arlie Thigpen seemed wildly irrelevant at this point. What charge was the kid facing, resisting arrest? That would depend on Gilroy, and it seemed pretty obvious he’d decided to hedge his bets and get down first with Johndroe. The Carlisle killing would stay unsolved or get pinned on Manny, depending on the call from IBIS with the ballistics match, unless somebody came forward with something different. Even if Murchison’s questioning of Arlie got admitted in whatever prosecution came up—and that was doubtful—no evidence resulted. Reversible error, if that. Even a civil suit would get settled fast for next to nothing.

Then Johndroe laid out his cards. “Like I said. It’s not just us now. The feds are falling all over themselves. This fire on the hill, it’s a very big deal. Rumors are flying everywhere, the whole town’s scared or pissed or both. Gonna be a feeding frenzy.”

“Yeah. But, Johndroe, this thing here, between you and me—it’s a shooting review.”

Johndroe finally stood up, his eyes strangely sad and cold at the same time. “I know. That’s why the recorder’s off. But if any of that other stuff comes up, it won’t be me running the show, okay? They’ll bring somebody in from outside. Just a heads up.”

That was Johndroe. Not a bad guy.

21

M
urchison lowered his window and showed his badge to pass through the various checkpoints outside Baymont. Some were manned by MPs from the National Guard brigade out of San Francisco, called in by the sheriff. The uniforms evoked an eerie sense of déjà vu that stayed with him as he drove on. It accentuated the awkward unreality of driving itself. Stluka had been the wheelman so long it seemed not just backward but, in a certain sense, wrong to be steering the car himself.

The Red Cross had set up shelters in local schools and church basements, but a lot of the crowd still waited out on Magnolia, restless, combative. Stirred by rumors of looting, they argued with the officers manning the perimeter, wanting permission to go back to their homes, get clothes and valuables left behind. Some, sick of the runaround, slipped over the stonework fence and tried to steal uphill unnoticed—thus becoming themselves suspected looters. Murchison saw a few of them sitting on curbs as he drove up the hill, women as well as men, all ages, dressed as they’d been when fleeing their homes, their hands now secured behind their backs with come-alongs.

On top of the hill, firemen still battled a line of house and underbrush fires, but elsewhere the destruction was done. Here a line of homes reduced to blackened timber and brick and smoldering char, then one untouched, grimed from smoke but still standing, eerily whole. This neighborhood gutted, that one spared. Hundreds of trees had burned down to scorched shafts, horror movie stuff, while others looked as green as yesterday. It felt a little like mockery, that randomness. Meanwhile, the heavy stench of smoke hung everywhere, stinging the mouth and throat and lungs, while grayish swirls of ash fluttered through the air, like fine dry snow.

Along the streets, sanitation crews pried open manholes to ventilate the sewers. Smoke ejectors chugged noisily, pumping out fumes, while utility crews bled gas lines, creating eerie plumes of blue flame amid the ruin. If you watched long enough, out of the corner of your eye you’d spot a crouched shape, edging from one shadow to the next, as a pet ventured back into its former neighborhood, nose piqued, ears and tail slack as it hunted for food or just something, someone, familiar.

A few of the stay-behinds showed up in their soot-black doorways to watch, blinking like sleepers suddenly wakened. Neckerchiefs obscured their faces, to help against the smoke and windblown ash.

Patrol and fire units were parked in front of the house where Holmes was waiting, if
house
was still the word for it. The front window was shattered; the roof and walls had burned away in places. It seemed a miracle of sorts the thing still stood there. Other houses up and down the block had suffered, too, but not like this. He showed his badge to the officer manning entry/exit and ducked inside.

Unfolding a handkerchief, he covered his mouth and nose. Like shoving your face in a damp ash pit, the smell. The fire had reduced the living room to cinders, the furniture nothing but blackened debris from the flashover. Everything, ceiling to floor, dripped black water, sodden from the pumper hoses and bucket drops. Toward the back, where the fire damage was less, window glass bellied in toward the room in syrupy shapes, and the aluminum frames had melted, too, like wax, oozing down the walls to form hardened shapes on the floor. Above, you could see sky where the fire had eaten through the ceiling. The floor underneath was a mulchy bog of char and ash.

The overhaul crew plodded about in their turn-out gear, prodding the ash beds with hooks and halligan tools as they hunted for melted copper or brass that might reignite. An arson investigator, holding a tool intended to check tire tread, plunged it into the wall, trying to measure char depth. How in God’s name do you control your crime scene, Murchison thought, when you throw in fire, the men who fight it, and the way they have to do their job?

Seeing Murchison, the arson man gestured toward the back. “Through there.”

Holmes, dressed in street clothes, conferred with a uniformed officer outside a bathroom just inside a black gutted doorway leading out to the garage. Seeing Murchison, he broke off the conversation and came forward.

“This one’s mean.” Holmes nodded back over his shoulder toward the bathroom door. “Seen two houses up here already look like the folks who lived there set fire to the place before taking off. Or somebody else did.”

It was a common problem in major fires and riots. Storekeepers torched their shops, figuring blame would fall on looters. Renters who hated their landlords got revenge.

“We’ll see some insurance fraud,” Murchison guessed.

“Or covering up crime scenes.”

“We got that here?”

Holmes gestured him back. “What we got here defies description.”

The bathroom had been sandwiched between the two advancing fires. Part of the wall had burned away, revealing melted copper piping, oxidized black and coiled into oddball shapes. The floor tiles had peeled up, the edges curled like plastic flower petals. The floor beneath was spalled and tarred with ghost marks.

The glass in the mirror above the sink, melted slightly from the heat, reflected back funhouse images of Holmes and Murchison in the doorway. The faucet handles and water spout were weirdly malformed as well. A body sheet lay across the blackened tub. The aluminum shower rod and plastic curtain were history, melted. No windows. Up top, the ceiling, made of Sheetrock, had survived reasonably well. And trapped the smoke, Murchison guessed.

“Owner here worked on a landscaping crew and did handyman jobs around the hill. Garage was filled with mowers and blowers. All junk now. Plenty of gas and oil, too, I figure. Some solvents, maybe. One side of the fire started there and all that stuff just blew. Other fire started in front and moved in from the opposite direction.”

“The owner,” Murchison said, “the landscaper, we know where he is?”

“Yeah,” Holmes said. He stepped to the tub and pulled the drape away. “Owner, plus his wife and child, maybe five years old.”

All three lay facedown in the tub, charred black from soot and smoke, their bodies twisted into inhuman shapes, muscle shriveled up on bone from the fierce heat. Here and there, reddish pink skin blistered through the grime. Nothing like faces remained, but their tongues protruded, revealing smutty teeth. Worse, the tub was gory with blood spatters, a lot of them. They’d clawed each other raw, fighting for the last gasp of air trickling up through the drain.

Holmes gingerly covered them up again. “Never seen anything like that.”

“I have.”

Murchison suffered another disquieting surge of déja vu, like he had with the MPs at the checkpoints, this time recalling that first killing, almost thirty years ago, the naked young woman cut to shreds in the shower stall by the drunken Spec. 4 from Fort Ord. It seemed a bad omen, that echo.

“People run to the bathroom because the surfaces are cool. There’s water, and the tub, it seems protective. They think it’s safe.”

Holmes couldn’t stop staring at the draped bodies. He chewed his lower lip hard.

“People stay strangely rational in a fire,” Murchison told him, “unless they have to compete for an exit. Or air. That’s when panic sets in.”

The arson investigator called out from the front, “You guys ready to talk?”

Back in the living room, the guy introduced himself. “Name’s Gladden. I’m with the CDF.” Rio Mirada had no arson investigators with either the fire or police department, a sore spot during the recent spate of SUV and carport fires. Thus the need for the California Department of Forestry to step in. “You’ve got a broken window in front, next to no glass shards outside, almost all in. And the point of origin is in a direct line from that window. So first guess? Somebody walked up, shattered the window with a hammer or ax, then tossed in not one but three Molotov cocktails.” He pointed to the center of the room. “There’s shards of bottle glass all over.”

“How come that didn’t melt, like the windows?” Murchison asked.

“It’s on the floor. Coolest place in a fire like this. Even right next to the point of origin. Know what else is interesting?” He pointed in turn to three intact bottle necks, all clotted with singed rags. “This was clever. You want a Molotov to work, the bottle needs to shatter. Lot of guys forget that, throw the thing into a house, it hits the carpet? Oops. These guys planned for that. The rags, they weren’t fuses, they were stoppers.” He pointed to a curled-up sliver of fabric, a hint of silver under the char. “They put firecrackers of some kind, M-80s be my guess, slapped them to the sides of the bottles. Used duct tape.”