Burn (21 page)

“Then what?”

“What. You want the definitive explanation?” She looked out the window. “I don't know what you're hoping to hear. You were in my father's den, you must have seen some of his pictures. So you've seen me when I was younger. You know I was one fat little kid.”

“I guess I didn't notice.”

She nodded up ahead. “That car's snaking you.”

Andrew saw it. He touched the brake and let the other driver in.

“Kids can be sinister. It's not easy being the daughter
of a man who owns health clubs when you weigh a hundred and sixty pounds in the seventh grade.”

The comment reminded Andrew of his conversation with Caroline yesterday. He thought about Lane Borland, what Caroline had said about the old neighborhood. He said, “I don't suppose it is.”

“But I never liked easy, ” Heather said. “Food was sort of my personal revolution when I was that age. Screw 'em, right? You want fat? I'll show you fat.”

In the visor mirror, he saw her smiling to herself. It really was a nice smile.

“The ironic part is that when I got into my teens, my body rebelled against
me, ”
she said. “I slimmed up and got curvy without even trying. You don't have to be thin to be healthy. Greg believed that, and so do I. But once I felt what it was like to be skinny, I decided I liked it. I didn't stop liking my Twinkies and Fruit Pies, though.”

“Old habits die hard, ” Andrew said.

“The term my nutritionist uses is ‘self-destructive pattern behavior.’ All I can tell you is, I don't care how many health clubs your daddy owns, a girl can only burn so many calories the old-fashioned way. By the time I graduated high school, I had holes in my throat and my teeth from the constant puking. All the gastric acid. When I was nineteen, I broke three fingers catching a Frisbee because my bones had gotten so brittle.”

“Jesus.”

“I'm sure it seems pathetic to you. It seems pathetic to me.”

Andrew shook his head. “Only the fact that you're still doing it to yourself.”

The fact that he cared enough to pass judgment surprised him. Maybe Heather Lomax just reminded him
too much of Caroline. Maybe it wasn't that at all. He had to get away from this girl.

“Hey” she said. She sounded neither angry nor offended. “You've got to work pretty hard to change yourself. I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible.”

Andrew said nothing to that. He kept his eyes on the road. He could feel her watching him.

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you think it's possible?”

Andrew said, “I think you're asking the wrong guy.”

“Take a left at the next light, ” she told him. “I think we're almost there.”

DIGMAN
Self Storage consisted of several squat, square cinder-block buildings on a large dusty lot surrounded by a high chain-link fence. They found it in the heart of a weedy sun-blasted neighborhood of dusty lots and high fences.

A rust-streaked gate arm regulated access to the grounds. Andrew pulled up to the touch-tone key box and played a hunch. He ran down his window and punched in the six-digit number printed on the scrap of paper Lomax had given him.

Bingo. The arm shuddered and then lifted with a grinding sound, granting them passage inside.

Building number 6 crouched at the back corner of the property at the end of a trash-littered frontage road. Andrew parked in front.

“I'll be back, ” he said. “Hang tight.”

“Sure thing, dude.” Heather opened her door and got
out, waited for him to join her on the other side of the car.

He didn't waste time arguing about it. They went inside together.

The first thing Andrew noticed was the musty heat. The concrete floor shone with sweat, and you could smell the iron stairwell railings. If the building was air-conditioned, this outfit wasn't paying much in electric bills.

The access code for the gate didn't help them at unit 601D, the last gray door on the ground level. Andrew saw a regular lock on the knob, plus a Schlage dead bolt up top, both basic pin-and-tumbler jobs. Easy enough to bypass if you knew your way around with a pick and a tension wrench, which he did.

But on their way in, Heather had pointed out what she figured to be the main office building. Andrew headed back outside, and she followed. They walked across the compound.

The air-conditioning in the office seemed to be running fine. A jingle bell above the front door announced their entrance, and in a few moments, a bearded man wearing leather wristbands emerged from somewhere in the back. From where they stood, Andrew could see tooled lettering on the wristbands. The guy's right wrist said:
PISS.
The left:
OFF.
He took position behind the grimy, cluttered service counter and looked at them.

“Howdy, ” Andrew said. “I'm 601D. Lost my key. You got a spare back there somewhere?”

“You got ID?”

“Sure thing, ” Andrew said, handing over his wallet.

The guy took it without looking up, turned his back, and stepped to a large metal file cabinet. Andrew watched
him open the wallet, find the driver's license, and pause. The guy kept his back to them.

“What unit you say again?”

“601D, ” Andrew repeated. “Andrew Kindler.”

The guy tipped a look over his shoulder. Something passed over his face. He turned around. He took another look at Andrew's license, took another look at Andrew. Licked his lips.

“Problem?”

The guy just stood. He moved his mouth but he didn't say anything.

“Oh, come on, ” Andrew said. “You just rented me the place a couple days ago. You forget me already?”

That was all it took. Without a word, the guy flung the wallet back at them and went for something beneath the counter.

Andrew beat him there.

Not a terrible move,
he thought as he vaulted over the countertop,
but you telegraphed it.
He planted both feet in the center of the guy's chest and shoved him back hard against the file cabinet. When Andrew landed on the other side of the counter, he stepped quickly, took the guy's Adam's apple in his fingers.

He squeezed just enough to make the guy gurgle, then used his other hand to pop the guy's head back against the handle of a file drawer. Twice for good measure.

Behind him, he heard Heather say, “Jesus!”

“Go on outside, ” he said over his shoulder. “And wait for me.”

“What are you
doing?”

“Stay if you want, then.”

He heard a long silence.

When he heard the bell jingle, Andrew turned his
full attention back to the guy. He looked him in his wide, jittery eyes.

Ten minutes later, Andrew emerged from the office with a key in one hand and a set of carbon forms in the other. He found Heather waiting around the corner of the building. She held her arms tight across her waist. She looked at him with an expression that seemed equal parts scathing and fearful.

“What did you
do
in there?” she said. “What the hell did you do in there? I heard that man scream.”

“Your friend Gregor had his self-defense tactics, ” he told her. “I have mine.”

Based on the look she gave him, he almost didn't expect her to follow him back to number 6 again.

But she did.

“I
don't understand.” Heather turned in a slow circle. “I definitely don't understand this at all.”

Andrew thought he understood even before he started reading the stack of pages he'd just found. He turned and looked all around, thinking,
Larry, you crazy punk. You really outdid yourself.

The storage unit looked to be about eight feet by ten. Cramped, but big enough to pass for what it had been decorated to look like: a hideaway.

The walls had been papered with clippings, obsessive as the bedroom walls of a teenage girl. Or, in this case, the lair of your standard-issue psycho lunatic straight out of central casting. The whole thing was so over-the-top that it almost defied skepticism. Somehow, it just looked too implausible not to be real.

There were photocopies of magazine covers and articles, a few pinup posters. A year's worth of glossy photo
pages torn from what Heather identified as last year's Club Maximum wall calendar. All featured the dead aerobics man, Gregor Tavlin. Andrew tried to imagine the legwork it must have taken to assemble the display.

A scrapbook on a small table in the corner contained every newspaper story from the past two weeks that dealt with the man's death and the murder investigation. In the later stories, each occurrence of David Lomax's name had earned a mark with a highlighter pen.

Larry obviously had wanted electrical outlets, but the storage unit offered none. He'd cleared this obstacle to his artistic vision with a small emergency generator, the kind powered by a car battery. The backup gennie served a small television/VCR combo unit on a roll-around cart. Next to the television: a stack of Gregor Tavlin workout videos. Next to the videos: a crinkled tube of Astroglide. There was a beanbag chair in front of the cart.

Larry had even found an inflatable male sex doll. He would have inflated it with some type of pump, Andrew assumed, leaving no pesky saliva residue around the plug. He'd dressed the doll in a track suit and taped an enlarged photocopy of Tavlin's face over the doll's. He'd slashed out the eyes of the photocopy, first with a black marker, then with something sharp, one thick ragged X over each.

The clincher sat in the center of the space: a chair, another table. Andrew had found the pages he now held in his hand neatly stacked on the table next to an old portable manual typewriter. He handed the top sheet to Heather, still marveling. Larry must have been a busy fellow.

Andrew took his time absorbing it all.

“Check out the typeface, ” he finally said. “Notice anything?”

Heather stared at the page.

“See how the tail is broken on the lowercase a's? And the ink blot in the e's. Ever seen that before?”

“The letter, ” she said. “The letter I showed you.”

“Yep.” He would have laughed if he could have stopped thinking about what this aborted mission no doubt meant for Larry Tomiczek back home. “The letter. You know who really wrote it now, don't you?”

“Your friend, ” Heather said. “I was there when my father called Cedric.”

“No. That letter was composed by a guilty head case who really wants to get caught, deep down.” He held up the rest of the pages. “Same guy who wrote this.”

He handed her each sheet as he finished reading it. She devoured them faster than he did and waited impatiently for him to hand her the next page. By the time he handed her the last, her eyes had gone slightly manic.

“This is ridiculous, ” she said. “What is this supposed to be?”

“My confession, apparently. I never knew I was such an emotionally troubled individual.”

The manuscript was five single-spaced pages in length. Larry's spelling was atrocious, but considering the fact that he'd dropped out of school the day he'd turned sixteen, Andrew thought he'd done a pretty fair job overall. The whole thing had a nice feverish tone to it. Larry was no writer, and that worked in his favor.

They'd met earlier in the summer, Andrew and Gregor had, at some bar down in Long Beach. Gregor Tavlin was the first person Andrew had met since he'd moved to town. And even though they'd spent just that one sizzling night together, they'd connected like Andrew had never
connected with another man. It had been more than just a physical encounter.

But not for Gregor Tavlin, apparently. All summer, he'd rejected Andrew's attempts to make contact. Andrew had become depressed, despondent. Finally desperate. Et cetera, et cetera.

The narrative became increasingly disjointed the longer it ran on, bouncing around, derailing into wandering tangents, finding its way back to the confessional thread again. Larry, wisely, had kept the details vague enough to remain flexible under scrutiny, specific enough for the idea to emerge.

There came the night when Andrew had followed Gregor to the Lomax office building. He'd confronted Tavlin in the parking lot. They'd exchanged words, hurtful words. Andrew hadn't meant to lose control.

After, while Andrew slipped away to retrieve Gregor's car, another man had emerged from the building to find Tavlin's body still warm on the ground. David Lomax.

Lomax had fled when Andrew returned with Gregor's car. Andrew would have given chase, if he hadn't had so much work to do. And quickly.

He'd remembered how the news had predicted that the fires would take Mandeville Canyon by week's end….

“This is ridiculous, ” Heather said again.

“Actually, given what the old goat had to work with, it's reasonably clever, ” Andrew said. “I can't imagine whether it would have worked or not. But you've got to hand it to your uncle Cedric. Framing somebody for a stranger's murder? After the fact? With no firsthand evidence to plant?
And
clearing your brother at the same time? It's a hell of a try.”

“What are you talking about?” Heather shook the pages. “None of this makes
sense.”

“It doesn't have to make sense. I was disturbed.”