Done for a Dime (43 page)

He was unable to duck Joan’s call. She phoned from her parents’ home in Granite Bay and told Gump it was an emergency. Gump sent up one of the operators to stand at Murchison’s desk till he agreed to pick up.

“It would have been nice, Dennis, if you’d called yourself, instead of having someone else do it for you.”

He heard his mother’s voice, buried inside his wife’s. The one brittle in its despair, the other stiffly confident, two sides of the same obstinacy, he supposed. But both disappointed
in him.
No real surprise to that—wasn’t it the eternal curse? We marry our most pathetic secrets.

“I’m not much up for blame right now, if you don’t mind.”

“Blame?” She sounded genuinely hurt. Misunderstood. She did that. Then her voice softened, as though finding the direction she’d meant to take all along. “I heard about Jerry. I’m sorry.”

With unforeseen intensity, he hated her. “Are you, now.”

She caught it, the shift in his voice. “Dennis—”

Now he hated himself. A lot of that today. “I’m sorry. That was—”

“It’s all right, Dennis. Really.”

Murchison felt ashamed and yet unable to apologize. Something unsaid too long lurked just out of reach. He feared what that might be. He’d barely begun puzzling it through when Joan said, “Why don’t you drive up, Dennis? There’s no need for you to stay down there. Take a leave, you’re owed that. My God. The girls have seen the news. They’re scared. You’ve needed a break for ages. If you can’t take one now, I don’t know …”

Her voice was oddly, mechanically resilient, even cheerful. Murchison let the receiver slip in his hand, away from his ear. He could still hear her voice, though her words became unintelligible, just a rhythmic hiss of sounds that echoed strangely with another conversation, one from a year before. Joan again, but she hadn’t been speaking to Murchison.

She’d been at the bedside of a childhood friend, a woman named Chessy, dying of cervical cancer. The woman, only forty-five years old, lay in her sour bed, gaunt from chemotherapy-induced nausea, her head shaved. They’d gone to the hospital to visit. Joan brought flowers, held the woman’s hand, looked into her ravaged face, and spoke in tones much like she was using now, on the phone. Her sister, Ellen, was there at the time and in the middle of Joan’s monologue got up abruptly and left. Chessy seemed hurt, Joan looked puzzled. Murchison excused himself, following Ellen into the hallway to see if anything was wrong.

He found her in the waiting room, by herself, arms folded so tightly around herself it looked like she was afraid she might literally come apart. She was two years younger than Joan, middle child, the family misfit—a childless divorcée with dirty blonde hair cut close, quick temper, wild laugh, six years sober. She was dressed in jeans and a sweater, no makeup. Murchison sat down next to her.

“Everything all right?”

She looked at him like he was insane. “How do you live with her?”

Murchison flinched, feeling accused by the remark and yet spared, too. “I don’t know what—”

“You don’t see it, do you?” She shook her head, wiped at her eyes, which were raw and red. “The way she acts, the way she talks. Like she’s performing for the class.” She reached into her pocket, dug out a handkerchief, and blew her nose. “Chessy was our closest friend in the neighborhood growing up. She spent more time at our house than her own. It’s not some stranger in there.”

“Ellen, I think Joan knows—”

“No. No, you don’t get it. Listen, Dennis—it’s not just the way she talks, the way she acts. Chessy’s been here three weeks. A bunch of us, we’ve traded off, taking turns to stay with her at night, spell her husband so he can take care of the kids. It’s hard, okay? For all of us. Chessy can’t sleep. Doesn’t matter how much morphine they give her, she’s in pain. So we walk. We get up and walk the halls. All night, sometimes. And she’s not all there anymore. The medication, it’s got her loopy, she hallucinates, she’s paranoid. She vomits and pisses the bed and hears stuff that isn’t there. It’s just—it’s the hardest thing imaginable, okay? Joan hasn’t offered to spend the night once. Not once. Today, this visit? It’s only the second. In three weeks, our best friend growing up, like family. Two visits in three weeks. She’s going to die, Dennis.”

“It’s my fault,” Murchison said, not hesitating to take the blame. “My hours, they’re unpredictable. Joan can’t be sure I won’t get called in the middle of the night—”

Ellen shook her head. “Dennis, stop it. I offered to stay with the kids if that became a problem. That’s not it.” She sniffled, shoving the handkerchief back into her pocket. “Joan’s just incapable of dealing with anything that can’t be solved by pretending it isn’t important. You know that, right? A positive attitude and busy-busy-busy solves everything.” She laughed caustically, thought for a moment. “She ever talk to you about your job? I’m serious. She ever ask you to tell her the really awful stuff, the stuff you can’t tell anybody else?”

Murchison couldn’t respond. Not because he didn’t know the answer.

“It’s not that she’s scared. Christ, we’re all scared. It’s that she’s such a phony about it. I mean, I wonder sometimes, I really do, if Joan came across a drowning man, whether she’d even think of diving in the water. Or if she’d just go and buy the guy a tasteful card.”

Sitting at his desk, Murchison felt it hard not to think of the memory as a premonition. He bobbed the receiver in his hand, tilting his head a little closer to listen.

“… time away plus rest, Dennis. It’s what you need. It’s what you’ve needed for a very long time. Everyone knows that. I spoke to my mother about—”

He pictured a future filled with that voice, sincere in its own false way, and couldn’t bear the thought of pretending it would be okay anymore. He lifted the receiver. “I have to go.” His heart pounded, he felt sick to his stomach. “I’m being called into a meeting. Something’s come up. I’ll call back later.”

“Dennis—”

He pressed the plunger, cutting off the connection. A second later, lifting his hand, he listened to the hum of the dial tone, feeling unpleasantly numb. He sat there like that for what seemed a very long while. Finally, he noticed the receiver clenched in his hand like a weapon. He set it down in its cradle. The hum of the dial tone went away, but not the numbness. It occurred to him, then, what it was Stluka had tried to say as he died.

Not “Macon Bay.”

“Make them pay.”

He tried to bury himself in the Carlisle murder book. It seemed a drudge task now, writing up reports on his dead-end interrogations of Toby Marchand, Arlie Thigpen. A lifetime ago, he thought, kneeling in that man’s front yard, walking through his house. Jerry’s lifetime.

I should be up on the hill, he thought, not here. With Holmes. Except he doesn’t want you.

The station house was thronged now, everyone on duty, everyone buzzing about, ignoring him. He reached for the phone, dialed his voice mail, hoping for a callback from Joan—wanting to hear her relentless cheerfulness again, convince himself he was wrong about it. Instead he heard an unfamiliar male voice. The voice said the following message would serve as a full confession to the Baymont fires.

Murchison pressed the receiver close, listened to the entire recitation, ran it back, played it again, cupping a hand to his other ear to shut out the background noise. He rummaged a microcassette recorder from his desk drawer, stuck the suction cup microphone to the earpiece of the phone, and played the message back a third time, recording it now, wanting to make sure he had at least one copy in his own hands. He played the tape back to make sure it was audible and complete. He then recited his own name, the date and time and place, at the end, and rewound the tape. After writing down this same information on the cassette label, he placed the tape in an envelope and sealed it shut, then stuffed it into his pant pocket.

He ran down to dispatch. Gump, seeing him, seemed about to complain about being dragged in as a marital go-between, but Murchison cut him off.

“I’ve got a voice mail message. It’s evidence. Log it in, Gumper, do it right.”

•    •    •

“No way we can authorize a warrant.” The chief sat at the conference table with Murchison, Peterson, and Chadwick. Gladden, the CDF man, was out in the field, as were the ATF agents and the other Rio Mirada detectives. “We need a reliable informant, with a proven track record of solid leads. This—I mean, good God—for all intents and purposes, this is an a anonymous tip.”

They’d all just listened to the recording twice. The chief looked sick. He’d completed his press conference less than an hour before, going on record across the country as to who was responsible for the fires and why. Now this.

“It’s bogus,” Peterson said. The press in his suit had begun to sag. His eyes hollowed out his face. “And no surprise, given how these people operate.”

“Yeah. Kinda convenient.” It was Chadwick, looking not much better than his partner. “All he has to do is bare his sad little soul, from God knows where. Such a deal.”

“And developers.” Peterson again. “Gee, who’d want to pin this on a bunch of developers?”

“The eco-trash?”

“You think?”

“He’s reliable,” Murchison countered, “because his information tracks the fires down to the smallest details. Things not made public.” Like the incendiary ingredients used, he thought, the exact location of each placed bomb, the time progression of how they went off, entry and exit points, precise descriptions—of the truck, the tanker valve releases, the driver, the gas station owner, the guns used and the placement of wounds, down to which side of Manny Turpin’s face had been blown away. “And the court in
Camarella
—”

Peterson cut him off. “
Camarella
granted a
Leon
exception on the basis of good faith reliance on a warrant that lacked probable cause. You can’t fudge up a warrant based on tips you know going in are loose on deck and expect a
Leon
ruling.”

“Okay, then what about
Gates
?
Gates
gives us a totality of circumstances criteria with an anonymous tip, and this information tracks exactly with the facts surrounding the fire. That should give the court its comfort zone. And this isn’t an anonymous tip, the guy gave his name.”

“
A
name,” Peterson corrected. “Not necessarily
his
name.”

“Which reminds me.” Chadwick rose from the table and left the room. Murchison watched him go with a sense the whole thing was pointless.

Peterson added, “And in
Gates,
what made the information credible was the tipster didn’t just provide facts about past acts. He predicted events that hadn’t yet occurred.”

Murchison’s head pounded, his migraine was worse. Every few minutes it got hard to breathe.

The chief went back at him. “Look, everybody agreed all along there could be a second guy involved. And yeah, that guy’s going to know everything about the fires. He should. He helped set them. But you want to drag in third parties who’ve got—I mean, Clint Bratcher, for fuck’s sake. Ralston Polhemus, Wally Glenn, Bob Craugh. Christ, we’re talking—I mean, why not the goddamn mayor?”

“What if I said I had a corroborating witness?”

“To Bratcher’s involvement?”

“To how the thing at the gas station went down.”

“Reliable?” Peterson was shaking his head. “That’s the whole issue here.”

“He wants immunity.”

“Well, knock me down.”

“He’s an abscond. A parole beef. That’s all, but he—”

“Wants it to go away. Shopping stories. Detective, really, tell me you’re not this stupid.”

Murchison checked his anger. Slowly, he said, “I spoke with him earlier, before I got this recording. Understand?
Before
. He says it wasn’t a botched hijack. It was meant to go down that way. Baymont was the target all along.”

“Not given everything else—”

“I’ve got another witness, too. He’ll confirm Ralston Polhemus, the candidate this Ferry guy mentions on the tape, is already pushing eminent domain and negotiating lowball payouts to home owners on the hill, trying to pave way for redevelopment.”

“None of that is going to justify a search warrant of Bratcher’s accounts.”

“I won’t authorize it,” the chief said flatly. “I’ll put a call in to the presiding judge, every other judge and commissioner in the county while I’m at it. Probable cause, Detective. Good Lord.”

Murchison turned to Peterson. “What about phone records? Find out who Bratcher’s been talking to and who’s been talking to him. You guys don’t need a warrant for that, not anymore. If you really think this is domestic terror, use the Patriot Act—”

“Let’s slow down for a minute, shall we?” Peterson leaned forward, forcing a smile. “This tape. There’s no small problem, Detective, with the scenario this character lays out. I mean, just for argument. Let’s say this Ferry character planned to do the job with the Turpin kid the way it looks at first blush.”

“The bank as target,” the chief said.

“But the thing goes haywire. Truck driver has a gun.”

“My witness saw the whole thing. It didn’t happen that way.”

“Eyewitnesses get things wrong, you ever find that to be true? Especially ones trying to buy their way out of trouble. Look, just bear—”

“It couldn’t have happened—”

“Shut the fuck up, Detective, and listen to me.” It came out eerily quiet. Peterson wasn’t smiling now. “This Ferry character, he can’t drive the truck, he’s up there alone with Manny Turpin dead, and Manny was the one supposed to move the rig downhill.”

“I said it before: they’d never have made it.”

“Not the goddamn point, Detective. Once the Turpin kid dies, the plan is meaningless. Regardless how harebrained it was to begin with, it’s over now. This Ferry character, he’s going to run, no matter what. So the only question is: Why wouldn’t he just do that, disappear, instead of empty the tanker?”

“Exactly.”

Peterson leaned forward, as though tutoring a child. “Because we’re not talking about people who are idealistic. I don’t care what load of crap they use to defend what they do. They just … like … setting … fires.”