“Where’s your safe, Mr. M.? What’s the combination?” Hawk asked.
“We don’t have a safe,” Meacham said.
“Hawk, go back upstairs,” said Pidge. “I’ll keep these folks company.”
He slapped Sandy’s buttocks playfully, laughing as Meacham cried out, “There’s some money inside the humidor on my dresser. You can have it. Take it all!”
Pidge turned up the TV volume to high, balled Sandy’s socks, jammed a woolen gag into each of the Meachams’ mouths. As Sandy whimpered and squirmed, he slapped her buttocks again, this time almost tenderly; then reluctantly, Pidge tied her ankles together with the fishing line. That done, he broke the neck of the second bottle of Cointreau against the mantelpiece. He poured liquor on a pile of newspapers by the upholstered chair, into a basket of yarn, doused the Meachams’ hair and their clothing, Meacham shouting against the sock in his mouth, starting to gag.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Pidge said, reasonably. “You could drown on your own vomit. That would be nasty, bud.”
Hawk came down the stairs into the living room, a cigar in his mouth, jangling a lumpy pillowcase.
“Swag,” he said, grinning. “About five grand in the humidor. Oh, and I got a book.”
Pidge bent to Sandy Meacham, who was moaning half naked at his feet. He twisted the diamond rings off her fingers, then shouted into Steven Meacham’s ear.
“What is it you people like to say? Living well is the best revenge? Well, enjoy your revenge. And thanks for the stuff.”
“Ready?” Hawk asked.
Pidge finished writing the inscription and capped the pen.
“Veni, vidi, vici, bro,” Pidge said, lighting matches and dropping them where he’d poured the Cointreau.
VOOOOOOM.
Flames flared up around the room. Smoke billowed, darkening the air. The Meachams couldn’t see the two young men wave good-bye as they left by the front door.
Chapter 43
THE SMELL OF BURNED FLESH hit us before we crossed the threshold into the smoking ruins of the Meacham house in Cow Hollow. It had once been an architectural masterpiece. Now it was a crypt.
Arson investigator Chuck Hanni stepped out of the shadows to greet us. He looked uncharacteristically tired and grim.
“My second job tonight,” he explained.
“The first one was like this?” Conklin asked.
“Nope. Meth lab explosion,” Hanni said. “Victim was blown out of the house and into the back of her pickup truck.” He shook his head. “Now this is exactly like the Malone fire.”
We followed Hanni into what was once the Meachams’ living room. I imagined the space as it once was — the cathedral ceiling, the massive fireplace, and the mirror above the mantel. Now it was all smoke-blackened gilt and carbon-streaked marble. The bodies were lying close together in three inches of black water, flat on their stomachs, hands curled in a pugilistic attitude, the result of tendons tightening as their bodies burned.
“If there were ligatures on the victims, they’ve burned up,” Hanni said, hunching down beside the bodies. “No point in dusting for prints. Maybe tomorrow, in the light of day. . . . Anyway,” Hanni went on, “I found this on the kitchen counter.” He handed a book to Conklin. I read the title: A History of Yachting. “Got a signature in there for you, Rich. It’s in Latin.”
Conklin cracked open the book to the title page and read out loud. “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.”
“What’s it mean?” Hanni asked him.
Conklin tried to hunch it out, saying, “Something, something, bad is love? I don’t know. What the hell. My tenthgrade Latin is exhausted.”
“Aren’t we all?” Claire said, stepping into the room, a crew of two assistants trailing behind her. “What have we got here?”
She walked to the bodies, rolled the smaller of the two, and a rush of air came from the victim’s mouth. Paaahhhhhh.
“Look here,” Claire said to Chuck, showing him a liquor bottle that had been partially hidden by the victim’s body.
Hanni picked it up with a gloved hand.
“Maybe we’ll get some prints after all,” he said.
Conklin and I left Claire and Hanni with the bodies of the victims and went outside. The first officer pointed out an attractive woman standing at the front of the now-thinning crowd at the edge of the lawn.
“That’s the woman who called it in. Her name is Debra Kurtz,” the cop told me. “She lives directly across the street.”
Kurtz was in her late forties, five four or so, a tad too thin, maybe anorectic, wearing black spandex running gear. Mascaraed tear tracks marked her cheeks. I introduced myself and Conklin, asked Kurtz if she’d known the deceased.
“Steve and Sandy Meacham were my closest friends,” she said. “I called 911 when I saw the fire. God, oh, God, it was already too late.”
“Mind coming down to the station with us?” I asked. “We need to know everything we can about your friends.”
Chapter 44
DEBRA KURTZ WAS DRINKING day-old coffee in the smaller, cleaner of our two interview rooms. “The Meachams were the greatest couple in the world,” she told us tearfully.
“Any reason you can think that anyone would want to hurt them?” I asked.
“I’m going to the soft drink machine downstairs,” Conklin said to Kurtz. “Can I get you something else?”
She shook her head no.
When Conklin was gone, Kurtz leaned across the table and told me about Sandy’s drinking and that both Sandy and Steven had had casual affairs. “I don’t think that means anything, but just so you know.”
Kurtz told me that the Meachams had two children; a boy, Scott, nineteen or so, away at college, and a girl, Rebecca, older and married, living in Philadelphia. Kurtz choked up again, as though something painful was stuck in her gut — or her conscience.
“Is there something else you want to tell me, Debra? Something going on between you and Steven Meacham?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, there was.”
Kurtz watched the door as she talked, as if she wanted to finish talking before Conklin returned. She said, “I hated myself for cheating on Sandy. It’s hard to explain, but in a way I loved her as much as I loved Steve.”
I pushed a box of tissues over to her side of the table as Conklin came back into the interrogation room. He was holding a computer printout.
“You have a rap sheet, Ms. Kurtz,” said Conklin, pulling out a chair. “That kinda surprised me.”
“I was in grief,” the woman told us, her gray eyes flooding anew. “I didn’t hurt anyone but myself.”
Conklin turned the pages toward me.
“You were arrested for burglary.”
“My boyfriend talked me into it, and I was stupid enough to go along. Anyway, I was acquitted,” Kurtz said.
“You weren’t acquitted,” said Conklin. “You got probation. I think you made a deal to flip on your boyfriend, am I right? Oh, and then there’s the arson.”
“Randy, my husband Randy, was dead. I wanted to cut my heart out,” she said, pounding her chest with her fist. “I set fire to our house because it was the only way I could see what I felt. The bottomless grief.”
I leaned back in my chair. I think my mouth may have dropped open. Debra Kurtz reacted to the shock on my face.
“It was my own house,” she shouted. “I didn’t even file an insurance claim. I only hurt myself, do you understand? I only hurt myself!”
“Had Steven Meacham broken off your affair?”
“Yes. But it was weeks ago, and it was mutual.”
“You weren’t a little angry?” Conklin asked. “Didn’t feel a little bottomless grief?”
“No, no, whatever you’re thinking, I didn’t set fire to the Meachams’ house. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.”
We asked Debra Kurtz where she was when the Malone house burned, and we asked her if she knew her way around Palo Alto. She had alibis, and we wrote eve
rything down. What she told us added up to a crazy woman with a burning desire to both destroy and self-destruct.
It added up, and yet it didn’t add up at all. And now it was half past five in the morning.
“You have any trips planned, Debra?” Conklin said, in his charming way.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Good. Please don’t leave town without letting us know.”
Chapter 45
JOE WAS STILL ASLEEP when I crawled into bed. I gently shoved Martha out of my spot and snuggled up to Joe’s back, wanting to wake him up so that I could tell him what was bugging me. Joe turned toward me, pulled me close to his body, buried his face in my smoky hair.
“Have you been barhopping, Blondie?”
“House fire,” I said. “Two dead.”
“Like the Malones?”
“Just like the Malones.”
I threw an arm across his chest, rested my face in the crook of his neck, exhaled loudly.
“Talk to me, honey,” Joe said.
Excellent.
“It’s about this woman, Debra Kurtz,” I said, as Martha got back up on the bed, turned around a couple of times, then curled into the hollow behind my legs, pinning me in.
“Lives across the street from the victims. She called in the fire.”
“Firebugs often do.”
“Right. Says she got up for a glass of water, saw the flames. Called the fire department, then joined the crowd watching them put the fire out.”
“She was still standing there when you arrived?”
“She’d been there for hours. Said she was best friends with the female victim, Sandy Meacham, and she’d also been sleeping with the second victim, Sandy’s husband —”
“Weird definition of best friend.”
I had to laugh. “Sleeping with her best friend’s husband until he dumped her. This Debra Kurtz has a key to the victims’ house. She also has a sheet. An old arrest for burglary. And guess what else? Arson.”
“Hah! She knows her way around the system. So she what? Sets fire to the house across the street — and just waits for the cops to take her in?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Joe. The whole package is too much. Kurtz had the means, the motive, the opportunity. ‘Hell hath no fury’ — plus once a firebug, you know, it’s a hard rush to kick.”
“She strike you as a killer?” Joe asked me.
“She struck me as a pathetic narcissist, in need of attention.”
“You got that right.”
I gave Joe a kiss. Then I gave him a few more, just loving the feeling of his rough cheek against my lips, his mouth on mine, and the fact of him, big and warm and in my bed.
“Don’t start something you’re too tired to finish, Blondie,” he growled at me.
I laughed again. Hugged him tight. Said, “Ms. Kurtz insists she didn’t do it. So what I’m thinking is . . .” My thoughts drifted back to the victims, soot-blackened water lapping around their bodies.
“What you’re thinking,” Joe prompted.
“I’m thinking either she set this fire because she’s so completely self-destructive, she wants to get caught. Or she did it and maybe she didn’t plan for her friends to die. Or else . . .”
“Your gut is telling you that she didn’t do it. That she’s just a total wackjob.”
“There ya go,” I said to my sweetheart. “There . . . ya . . . go . . .”
When I woke up, my arms were entwined around Martha, Joe was gone, and I was late for my meeting with Jacobi.
Chapter 46
I MET CLAIRE at her car after work. I moved a pair of galoshes, a flashlight, her crime scene kit, a giant bag of barbecued potato chips, and three maps into the backseat and then climbed up into the passenger side of her Pathfinder. I said, “Richie got a translation of that Latin phrase that was written inside that yachting book.”
“Oh yeah? And what did it mean?” she said, pulling her seat belt low across her belly, stretching it to the limit before locking it in place.
I cinched my seat belt, too, said, “It roughly translates as ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ I’d like to get my hands on the sucker who wrote that and show him the victims all crispy and curled up on your table. Show him what real evil is.”
Claire grunted. “You got that right,” she said, and pulled the car out onto Bryant heading us north, apparently deciding to take the 1.8 miles to Susie’s like she was racing the Daytona 500. She jerked the wheel around a slow-cruising sightseer, stepping on the gas. “You’re saying ‘him,’ ” Claire pointed out. “So that Debra Kurtz person is off your list?”
“She has an alibi,” I told Claire through clenched teeth. I grabbed the dashboard as she cleared the yellow light. “Also, her alibis check out for the nights of the Malone fire and the Jablonskys in Palo Alto.”
“Humph,” Claire said. “Well, about the two legible fingerprints on that bottle found at the scene. One belongs to Steven Meacham. The other didn’t match to anybody. But I’ve got something for you, girlfriend. Sandy Meacham had a good-sized blunt-force wound to the skull. Looks like she got clobbered with maybe a gun butt.”
I thought about that — that the killer had gotten violent — then I told Claire how the canvass of the Meacham neighborhood had netted us no leads whatsoever. She gave me the results of the blood screen — that Sandy Meacham had been drinking, and that the Meachams had both died of smoke inhalation.
It was all interesting, but none of it added up to a damned thing. I said so to Claire as she pulled into the handicapped zone right in front of Susie’s Café.
She looked at me and said, “I am handicapped, Linds. I’m carrying fifty pounds of baby fat, and I can’t walk a block without huffing.”
“I’m not going to write you up for this, Butterfly. But as for the land speed record you just set in a business district . . .”
My best friend kissed my cheek as I helped her down out of the Pathfinder. “I love that you worry about me.”
“Lotta good it does,” I said, hugging her, cracking open the door to Susie’s.
As we plowed through the gang at the bar toward the back room, the plinking steel-band version of a Bob Marley classic surrounded us, as well as the divine aromas of roasting chicken, garlic, and curry. Cindy and Yuki were already at our booth, and Lorraine dragged up a chair for Claire. She dropped laminated menus that we knew by heart onto the table and took our order for a pitcher of tap and mineral water for Claire.
And then with Cindy urging her on — “Yu-ki, tell them, tell them” — Yuki “volunteered” her news.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Okay. I had a date. With Jason Twilly.”
“And you were careful what you said to him,” Cindy said, sternly. “You remembered that he’s a reporter.”
“We didn’t talk about the case at all,” Yuki said, laughing. “It was dinner. A very nice dinner, no kissing or anything, so all you guys calm down, okay?”
“Was it fun? Are you going to see him again?”
“Yeah, yeah, if he asks me, I suppose I will.”
“Jeez. First date in what, a year?” I said. “Think you’d be more excited.”
“It hasn’t been a year,” Yuki said. “It’s been sixteen months, but never mind that. What’re we toasting?”
“We’re toasting Ruby Rose,” said Claire, lifting her water glass.
“Who?” we all asked in unison.
“Ruby Rose. She’s right here,” Claire said, patting her belly. “That’s the name Edmund and I picked out for our little baby girl.”
Chapter 47
WHEN I RETURNED home from Susie’s, the sun was still hanging above the horizon, splashing orange light on the hood of a squad car parked right outside my apartment.
I bent to the open car window, said, “Hey there. Something wrong?”
“You got a couple of minutes?”
I said, “Sure,” and my partner opened the car door, unfolded his long legs, and walked over to m
y front steps, where he sat down. I joined him. I didn’t like the look on Rich’s face as he opened a pack of cigarettes and offered me one.
I shook my head no, then said, “You don’t smoke.”
“Old habit making a brief return visit.”
I’d kicked tobacco once or twice myself, and now I felt the pull of the many-splendored ritual as the match sparked, the tip of the cigarette glowed, and Rich released a long exhalation into the dusky air.
“Kelly Malone is calling me every day so I can tell her that we’ve got nothing. Had to tell her about the Meachams.”
I murmured sympathetically.
“She says she can’t sleep, thinking how her parents died. She’s crying all the time.”
Rich coughed on the smoke and waved his hand to tell me that he couldn’t talk anymore. I understood how helpless he felt. The Malones’ deaths were shaping up to be a part of a vicious serial killing spree. And we were clueless.
I said, “He’s going to screw up, Richie, they almost always do. And we’re not in this alone. Claire, Hanni —”
“You like Hanni?”
“Sure. Don’t you?”
Conklin shrugged. “Why does he know so much and so little at the same time?”
“He’s doing what we’re doing. Wading through the sludge. Trying to make sense of the senseless.”
“Good word for it. Sludging. We’re sludging, and the killer is laughing — but hell, I’m a bright guy. I can translate Latin platitudes into English! That’s worth something. Isn’t it?”
I was laughing with Rich as he joked himself out of his blue mood when I saw a black sedan crawling slowly up the street in search of a parking spot. It was Joe.
“Oh, look. Stay and meet Joe,” I said. “He’s heard a lot about you.”
“Nah, not tonight, Linds,” said Rich, standing up, grinding out the butt of his cigarette on the pavement. “Maybe some other time. See you in the morning.”
Joe’s car stopped.