“Yeah?”
She cupped her hands together, went into a crouch, blew on imaginary dice, and rolled them out onto an invisible craps table. “Baby needs new shoes.”
“Baby can get as many shoes as she wants.”
“Awww,” she said. “Thanks, Jack.”
I punched in Cooper’s phone number, listened to the line connecting with his lodge on Red Ridge in Aspen. When Cooper answered the phone, I said my name and told him that I was the owner of a private investigation firm in LA.
“Do you have a couple of moments, Mr. Cooper? There’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”
Chapter 70
BRYCE COOPER WAS understandably confused by my call.
“What’s this about? Who are you?”
I repeated myself, and Cooper said, “I’ve got time. Nothing but time. I’m waiting for my wife to get dressed. Could be hours.”
“Mr. Cooper, do you know Tule Archer?”
“Sure. I know the Archers. I went to their wedding. What about Tule?”
I did my best to tell this bad story clearly and gently.
“Hal Archer is my client, Mr. Cooper, and I’m sorry to tell you that Tule has been murdered and Hal is being held pending his arraignment.”
He said, “They think Hal killed Tule? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. That’s crazy.”
I said, “Hal said that Tule was threatening his life.”
Cooper said, “He never said anything like that to me.”
There was a long silence, then Cooper said, “I’m just dumbfounded. This is going to kill Barbie. She loved Tule. I guess I have to tell her.”
“Of course, Mr. Cooper, but I was wondering how you and Barbie were getting along.”
“What? Me and Barbie? I guess not too bad. She’s a nice girl. A little wild. Aspen is kind of stuffy for a frisky kid like Barbie. But I keep up with her pretty well. Why?”
“Has she ever threatened you, sir?”
“Threatened me?”
He stopped right there and I let the silence go on for more time than was comfortable. The longer it stretched, and the farther it got from Cooper shouting, Are you crazy?, the more certain I felt that Barbie had threatened Cooper. That he was running over things in his mind, unsure how to answer.
“No, she’s never threatened me. But I’ve noticed odd things. Phone calls, coming in and going out, late at night. Uh. She got a gun…Anyway, why am I telling you this? I don’t even know you. And if you’re looking for work, forget it. Don’t call me again, Morgan.”
“Mr. Cooper. Sir. Watch out for yourself. I think your wife might try to kill you.”
Cooper hung up, and so did I. I didn’t feel that I’d done anything more than scare him. Or maybe I’d gotten Cooper crazy enough to harm his wife in “self-defense.”
Now I was worried about two people I didn’t know.
Chapter 71
SCI WAS STANDING at the tall desk in his office, transparent flex screens forming a semicircular shield in front of him. He was engrossed in the new info about the car bombs—the death of teen star Maeve Wilkinson had finally ignited the LAPD.
Sci understood the value of reciprocity. He had made friends and acquired contacts during his six years at the city’s lab, and now, he and the city shared information selectively.
Ten minutes ago, Kelli Preston, head of the city lab’s arson division, forwarded him reports on a firebombed Dodge Charger that might be connected to Jack’s Lamborghini as well as to the Aston Martin and the other five cars.
Preston thought that the Charger was very likely the first in the series, possibly the learning model.
The photo on Sci’s center screen showed the blackened Charger chassis with its signature split-crosshair grille that had somehow survived incineration. The scene was a Ralphs supermarket parking lot, and the time of the explosion was 2:23 in the a.m.
The city’s deputy arson investigator had concluded that the fire was started under the left front side of the undercarriage and that there was a chemical explosive in the gas tank, a substance that the LAPD database didn’t recognize.
Preston’s note to Sci said Off the record, the LAPD closed the case on this because it was random and no one was hurt. The owner of the vehicle collected his insurance payout, and Allstate didn’t raise any questions.
Preston told Sci that the LAPD investigated the next four firebombs, but it had been a back-burner case until Maeve Wilkinson died.
Preston wrote, Let me know if you find anything that could help us, Sci. I’ll do the same for you.
Sci sent Preston a reply, then looked again at the report from the chemical screen of the Charger’s gas tank. He knew that the explosive was the same unnamed chemical he’d found in Jack’s Lambo. The vehicle had been registered to Peter Tong, a science teacher at a very tony private school: Our Lady of the Pacific.
Sci fed Tong’s name into his browser and got a hit on RateMyTeacher.com. This was a website students used to flame their teachers and occasionally praise them.
Peter Tong had about twenty reviews, and most of them were vile, defamatory, and anonymous.
Tong was described as a “diabolical hard-ass who liked to flunk kids just because.” Another student complained that Tong was “a sadist who did unnecessary experiments on lab animals and insects. In fact, he calls us ‘the insect population.’”
Sci knew that arsonists had various motivations: rage, revenge, the thrill, and, of course, the insurance money. He organized the Tong data into a single file and included it in his note to Justine.
Justine, see attached. Also, Tong collected ten grand in insurance money. We could be looking at a killer. Be careful.
Chapter 72
JUST BELOW THE edge of the highway, waves charged into rocks and exploded into foam. Sunshine beat down on the asphalt, making the air shimmer. You could almost see across the ocean to Japan, the day was that clear and brilliant. Justine barely noticed.
As Scotty drove the fleet car, Justine used her phone to confirm their appointment at Our Lady of the Pacific High School. They would be questioning Mr. Peter Tong, the head of the science department, a man Father Brooks had described as ordinary with “nothing radical or Fringe Division” about him.
Justine was pretty sure that the headmaster was wrong.
Tong’s car had been firebombed, and the explosive was an unknown chemical that had been packed into a condom, stuffed into the gas tank, and set off with a time-delay incendiary charge.
Peter Tong was a chemist, a science teacher who worked in the same general location as the bombed cars. One of those cars was his.
Was he a victim? Or, as Sci suspected, a serial arsonist who had just made a fatal error?
Justine replied to the text from Mr. Tong, saying they would be arriving within the next ten minutes, then put her phone away.
Scotty said, “So, tell me about your interview with John Leonard Orr.”
“Mmm. Okay. Well, it was about ten years ago. I had just started working at the Santa Monica psychiatric facility,” Justine said. “I asked to see Orr, and he said okay.”
“So, what was he like?”
Justine told Scotty all she knew. That John Orr had been a fire chief in Glendale, California, during a very long and devastating spate of fires that over the course of nine years had consumed sixty-five homes, acres of woodlands, and numerous retail stores and had killed four people, one of them a three-year-old boy.
Orr used a dirt-cheap and ridiculously simple time-delay incendiary device so that by the time the fire blazed, he was long gone. Often he had gone to another fire just a few miles down the road, where he assumed his job as fire chief, an excellent cover, a brilliant alibi.
After literally thousands of fires, Orr’s fingerprint was lifted from one of his time-delay devices, and that’s how he was convicted and imprisoned for life plus twenty.
Justine said to Scotty, “When I met him, I was a kid with a PhD and a new job. He’s a psycho
path. I got nothing out of him except what he wanted me to believe: that he had been a terrific public servant and that he’d been framed. You know what, Scotty? Even in an orange jumpsuit and cuffs, he looked very nice, very ordinary.”
“Why is it that psychos can be so beguiling?”
“Because there’s a big hole in their brains where most people have a conscience. Orr doesn’t give a crap about the damage to life and property he caused.”
“Do serial arsonists always work alone?”
“No. Not always.”
Scotty pulled the car into the teachers’ lot, set the brake, and said, “Those reviews on Tong. While most of the kids who rated him hated him, he has some fans, maybe even acolytes. We don’t know how many people were involved in setting those firebombs, but two at least, right, Justine? One to drive the car, one to jimmy the tank door open, stuff in the explosive, and set the device.”
“Yes. Scotty, you read the review on Tong from the kid who calls himself Zero Sum?”
“Yeah,” Scotty said. “‘Tong is very dark and powerful in a great and exciting way.’”
“Let’s see if Mr. Tong lives up to his reviews,” said Justine.
Chapter 73
JUSTINE AND SCOTTY knocked and entered Mr. Tong’s classroom, a laboratory with windows in the back wall giving a view of the upslope of the canyon.
A long desk was centered between the windows, and on both sides of the desk were floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with hundreds of jars of preserved animals and body parts.
Between the desk and where Justine and Scotty stood in the doorway were two dozen spanking-new workstations outfitted with cutting-edge microscopes and computers. Three chrome carts packed with cages of white mice were randomly parked like shopping carts in a supermarket lot.
The whole operation was impressive, and Justine thought it spoke of high tuition, generous alumni support, and a faculty that wanted only the best so as to attract the best.
A man sat on a stool at the back of the lab, his head bent over a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a pricey piece of forensic equipment used for trace analysis and not usually found in high-school labs.
Justine called out, “Hello, Mr. Tong?” and the man working at the GC/MS turned around.
He was Asian, of medium height and build, wearing a tight white T-shirt, black jeans, and neon-green track shoes. He wore his hair in a brush cut, and his thick glasses had red plastic frames. He had a wide and electrifying smile.
Tong bounced off his stool, stepped forward with his hand outstretched, and introduced himself to Justine and Scotty.
“I’m very glad to meet you.”
“Good to meet you too,” said Justine. “Thanks for offering to help.”
“I will if I can.”
Tong led Scotty and Justine to his desk, brought over some stools, and said, “I understand you’re interested in this rash of car bombings. I was victim number one, you know. I gave the police names of people to interrogate. They refused to do it.”
Scotty asked, “Why do you think they refused?”
“I told them that the arsonists were kids,” Tong said, “but I had no proof.”
“You had some reason to believe what you told the cops?”
“Sure. As a group, the kids here are overeducated and un-dercivilized. But they are smart. They function at college level, even in the ninth grade. They seem angelic, but they’re fearless. And they don’t respect authority. Not at all.”
Tong polished his glasses, repositioned them on the bridge of his nose, and went on. “Add their rich parents to the mix, and you can see that the school must have kept everything quiet. Look, no one died, so no one cared—until now.”
Justine averted her eyes from quart jars of assorted eyeballs. She said to Tong, “See, what worries me is that arsonists escalate.”
“Dr. Smith, that worries me too. I’ve blown the whistle and I have rung the bell. The headmaster and the board have told me to shut the hell up or get out. If I’m blacklisted by the headmaster, I can’t get another job in LA. Maybe I can’t get another job anywhere.”
“We’re private investigators,” Scotty said. “Private.”
Tong nodded. He opened his desk drawer, took out a small notebook, flipped through it. Then he pulled a page out of the binding and handed it to Scotty.
It was a handwritten list of names.
“Please keep me out of this,” said Tong. “One of these insects set fire to my car. Next time, they could set fire to me.”
Chapter 74
JUSTINE PHONED CHARLES Boyd Jr., the first name on Peter Tong’s alphabetically organized suspect list. Boyd was seventeen, an A student, in the honor society, a math wonk. Tong had added a note next to the boy’s name: A vicious little centipede. A tease. A plotter. A bully. Smart, but also dumb. His parents donated three million—yes, three followed by six zeros—to the gym-renovation fund. They own strip malls.
The Boyd residence on Malibu Road was an impeccable, many-windowed modern beach house with an unobstructed view of the Pacific. The front gates opened for Scotty and Justine’s fleet car, and Scotty parked on the gravel near the entrance of the house.
Boyd had told Justine to just come in, and in fact, after ringing the bell a number of times, Scotty realized that the door was open.
The two investigators stood in the foyer taking in the drama of waves crashing ahead of them, right outside the living-room windows. Scotty said, “I’ve actually never seen anything like this. I don’t ever want to leave. In fact, I think I could live here and no one would even know.”
Justine laughed. It was breathtaking. It was as if there were no walls, just white sofas and exotic animal skins on shining hardwood floors that led out to a pool, a deck, and then the beach. The anthemic sounds of Florence and the Machine singing “Never Let Me Go” pounded over expensive, unseen speakers.
“Um. Let’s follow the music,” Justine said.
Following the music took Justine and Scotty through many splendid rooms, all of them empty until they reached the second floor and what was likely a bedroom. The music was turned to “deafening.” The walls vibrated.
Justine knocked on the door, calling, “Charles, it’s Dr. Smith.” But her voice was overwhelmed by the music. So Scotty beat on the door with the heels of his palms and yelled, “Charles, open the damned door.”
Florence and the Machine cooled their jets, and the door cracked open, releasing the heady aroma of pot.
Justine said, “Charles, I’m Dr. Smith. I called you, remember?”
The kid’s face was slack, his pupils the size of Frisbees in bloodshot eyes. He wore a stained school T-shirt and red plaid boxers. His room was a rich kid’s playpen, decorated by a pro and equipped with every favorite accessory of a teenage boy.
“Welcome to my abode,” Charles Boyd said, making a dramatic bow.
Behind him, a teenage girl wearing only sheer black panties laughed.
Chapter 75
THE TEENAGE GIRL sprawled across the California king. She was thin, with translucent skin and dark, messy hair. She raised herself on one elbow, looked sleepily in the direction of the open door, said, “Could you…turn up the music?”
The two kids were drinking and stoned, but still awake.
Justine crossed the room, opened all of the windows. Then she went to the side of the bed, picked up a cotton pullover and a pair of jeans from the floor, said to the girlfriend, “What’s your name?”
“Jess. Ica.”
“Jessica, put these on, please.”
“But. I just took them off.”
Charles Boyd lurched toward the bed and took a menacing stance between the girl and Justine.
“Leave her alone,” he said.
Justine gave Boyd a little shove. He lost his balance and toppled sideways onto the mattress. The teens giggled, clutched at each other, and rolled around, ignoring Justine and Scotty entirely.
Scotty said, “Are you guys insane?”
He picked up an open bottle from the floor, capped it with his thumb, shook it up, then showered the kids with beer.
The girl shouted, “Hey. What? Are you doing?”
Scotty plucked a blanket from the floor and tossed it at the girl, saying, “Cover up.” Then he brought a chair over to the foot of the bed and sat down.
“We’re not the police,” said Scotty. “We’re private investigators. If you help us, we’re gone. If you don’t help us, we’ll call the cops, who will charge you with possession. Then they’ll interrogate you for three days until they get everything they need to charge you with murder.”
Scotty had taken a direct approach, riskier than befriending the kids and teasing it out of them, but it was a safe bet that they’d never been confronted by law enforcement before. Justine thought Scotty’s method might work.
Justine said, “I’d listen to Investigator Scott, Charles. If you play this the wrong way, your life—all of this—will be over. Understand?”
“No,” Boyd said.
Scotty said, “No?”
Scotty pulled his cell phone out of his back hip pocket, started tapping in numbers. Boyd rolled onto his back. He said, “I plan on going to Northwestern next year.”
“That depends on what you do in the next five minutes,” said Scotty.
Chapter 76
WHILE SCOTTY WORKED on Charles Boyd Jr., Justine stepped over to the dresser and took a good look at a metal cash box made of burnished steel, about ten by twelve and about six inches deep.
There was a combination lock showing 000. Justine raised the lid and saw a neat row of snack-size baggies filled with white powder, an opened box of Pleasure Plus condoms, and a small metal gizmo, like a mousetrap, that looked to be a remote-controlled detonator.
“Uh-oh, Charles,” she said. “I don’t think this looks good for you.” She opened her phone, took a few shots of the makings of a car bomb, took a few more that showed the placement of the box on the dresser, kids on the bed in the background.