Skies of Ash (34 page)

A fire-engine siren wailed. Neighbors shouted over the murmur of televisions. The jazz band still played standards in the park.

“Move back, Lou,” my neighbor Aiden commanded as he pulled me away.

Big men in yellow jackets pushed past me with a hose that blasted torrents of water.

“You okay?” Aiden asked me. His red face was flecked with ashes, and his gray eyes were bloodshot. “You okay?”

I nodded, even though, no, I was not okay.

“Greg here?”

“No.” I scanned the crowd, searching for Greg’s face, hoping that he had somehow heard the sirens.

Near the curbside, I found one face not like the others. One face that didn’t belong.

And the face that didn’t belong, the one looking at the fire with a camera phone, noticed my staring at him, and his smile dropped. He glanced at the fire, then glanced back at me—he was making a choice. He took a step back.

I took a step forward.

He took two steps back.

I took another step forward.

He blinked, swallowed…
Bam!
He sprinted west.

I tore after him, barefooted and without a gun.

He jammed up Bluff Creek Drive, then darted left to cut through Aiden’s side yard.

I ran in the same direction, anger fueling my speed.

He hopped over the short perimeter fence, but the cuff of his cargo shorts caught. He stumbled and slid down the slope.

I swung my legs over the fence and dove after him.

Together, we tumbled through sharp twigs and bark and dropped to the sidewalk.

He tried to stand while swinging his fist.

I tried to duck—too slow.

His knuckles glanced my left cheekbone.

I saw stars but recovered to strike him in the face with a single palm-heel hit.

He grabbed his nose and crumpled back onto the sidewalk.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted at him. “Why did you run from me?”

Eli Moss growled at me as blood from his nostrils gushed between his fingers.

“Answer me,” I said, raising my hand again, “before I beat your fucking face—”

Someone caught my fist before it met Moss’s nose.

“Relax, Lou,” Aiden yelled, breathing hard, clenching my fist. “It’s okay.”

I tried to pull free from the muscled man, but his grip held me like a vise.

Aiden nodded but tightened his grip. “It’s okay.”

Seven minutes later, Eli Moss, restrained by handcuffs, was shoved into the backseat of a police cruiser.

I glimpsed down at my bloody feet—from Moss’s nose and from sharp twigs and rock. Pain zigzagged from the bottom of my body to the top. I clenched to will it away.

No good.

My knees buckled, and I sank to the wet grass.

A damp breeze from the ocean washed over me, and I lay there, too calm, too cold.

This was all a dream.

I closed my eyes against the swirling blue and red lights of cop cars and fire trucks, closed my eyes and waited to burst through vivid slumber into the waking world.

FRIDAY NIGHTS AT THE PACIFIC DIVISION WERE NO DIFFERENT THAN FRIDAY NIGHTS AT
Southwest. Drunks, wife beaters, gangbangers, babymommas with toddlers on hips and pink bail slips in free hands, terrified high school kids huddled on benches as they waited for their parents to arrive. And tonight, an arsonist.

Through the one-way glass, I watched Adonis Thistle, the stocky black detective from the Arson Unit, interrogate Eli Moss.

Greg placed a pair of socks and sneakers at my feet, then stepped back to the doorway.

I winced while slipping on the anklets and the shoes. Other than a tender cheek, a fiery headache, and cut-up feet, I felt like crap dunked in bile and blood, then twisted dry—and then frozen, thawed, and reheated, but only halfway.

“Why were you at Detective Norton’s home this evening?” Thistle demanded as he leaned forward with his knuckles on the metal table.

Eli Moss, swollen-nosed and red-faced, shouted, “That
bitch
hit me.”

“I should go in there and beat him down,” Greg mumbled.

I killed my third bottle of water and kept my eyes on the scene in the box.

“Why did you have a bag of leaves in the back of your SUV?” Thistle asked.

Moss crossed his arms, then tucked his chin into his chest. “Why was I assaulted by a cop?”

“Why were there candles, lighters, and kerosene in the back of your SUV? Why were you recording the fire?”

“This is America,” Moss shouted back. “I can carry whatever the fuck I want in the back of my SUV and record whatever the fuck I wanna record.”

Thistle banged his palm on the table.

Moss jumped in his seat, his bruised face darkening even more. “I don’t even know what this is about. I don’t even know why I’m here. She chased me down like a dog, then assaulted me for no reason.”

Thistle gaped at him. “You kiddin’ me with that bullshit, ain’t you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You don’t, either.”

“I know that you swung at her first—there were people on the scene who will testify to that.” Thistle pointed at him with a crooked finger. “It’s over, son. You fucked up real good, you know that? Tryin’ to burn down a cop’s house?
That’s
what this is about.”

Moss found interest in his scraped knuckles. But his jiggling knee betrayed his feigned indifference.

“He’s not gonna talk,” Greg declared. “He’s gonna just sit there and ask for a lawyer, who’ll say that his client was gardening and the candles belong to his wife, and the cop beat him down for no good reason, and he’s gonna sue us for everything we got.”

Dread filled my gut as I considered Greg’s prediction.

“Lou,” Greg whispered. “Baby.”

I grunted: I knew that “Lou” and I knew that “Baby”—apple pie, testosterone, and silver mulled into a salve.

He poured it on every time he wanted to be forgiven.

I glanced at him. “Not now, Gregory.”

He sighed: he knew that “Gregory”—razor blades, arsenic, and lemons.

Sammy Khan, Thistle’s partner, joined us. “So he the one who started the Chatman house fire, too?”

Greg gawked at Khan. “The Chatman…?” Then, he gawked at me. “That
asshole
in there is connected to one of your
cases
?”

I started to speak, but my tongue lay in my mouth like a stomped-on slug.

Sammy Khan took a step back. “Maybe I should let you two—”

“Your
job
almost burned down my house and got you killed?” Greg bellowed.

I crossed my arms. “You don’t need an excuse anymore, remember?”

Greg gaped at me, and then his shoulders slumped. He peered at the ceiling and chuckled. “You’re right. I don’t. I’m out of here.”

I waved my hand at the door. “Be out, then.” I turned my back to him and directed my gaze to Detective Thistle and Eli Moss.

Greg stomped to the exit.

My chest tightened, and something there expanded, tightened, and then—
pop
.

Heartbreak. Again.

AT ALMOST THREE O’CLOCK ON A SATURDAY MORNING, I SHOULD HAVE BEEN HOME
hitting another round of REM sleep. But I didn’t want to go home, not after the fire, not after the fight—with Greg and with Eli Moss. Going home meant seeing ribbons of yellow police tape blocking off my destroyed yard. Going home meant smelling ashes and wet earth and the exhaust of fire trucks and firemen. So I asked Adonis Thistle to drive me to my station seven miles away.

Two miles in, he looked over to me. “Want me to turn back so you can kick Moss’s ass some more?”

I zipped up my jacket with an aching hand and muttered, “No. I’m…” I could barely form words now—my face had stiffened from the arsonist’s punch.

In my mind, I saw Eli Moss sitting in the interview room, blood-pressure cuff around his right arm and pneumographs on his chest. I saw Officer Lipsky peering at his laptop, then asking Moss question after question.

Do you intend to answer the polygraph questions truthfully?

Did you participate in any way in causing the death of Juliet Chatman?

Do you know who caused the death of Chloe Chatman?

Did you start the fire at the Chatman house?

Then, Lipsky had left Moss in the box to tell me that the suspect had passed the exam. “He’s an arsonist, but right now he ain’t lookin’ like a murderer.”

I had crossed my arms—I didn’t believe that Moss needed to be dismissed so quickly. He had set the other fires around the neighborhood, and he had filmed the Chatman house fire. Of course he would come after me and burn down my house—I was investigating the murders of three people
he
had killed.

And polygraphs? Not hard science. Unreliable. Inadmissible in court. Usually.

Moss had also claimed to have an alibi. At work at the airport. Hell,
everybody’s
at work when they burn shit down and kill people.

Before leaving Pacific, Sammy Khan had patted my shoulder. “We’ll check out his alibi, Lou. Do some more digging around. We ain’t lettin’ this go, all right? If he has anything to do with the Chatman fire, we’ll let you know ASAP.”

Now, Thistle pulled up to the front of Southwest Division, then touched my arm. “We protect our own—you know we’re gonna get that bastard. Don’t worry ’bout that.”

I gave him a weak but grateful smile. “I’ve always told myself: if my house ever burns down, I want Adonis Thistle to work it.”

“Bullshit.”

“The truth.”

“And if truth was a whore,” he said, “I’d buy her a drink and ask her where the hell she’s been all my life.”

The lobby was unusually quiet for an early Saturday morning. Swope, the pasty-faced desk sergeant, gawked at me—first, for limping through the glass doors at that time of night, and second, for, well… my face. “You get run over by a Sherman tank?”

“Thought I’d switch up my look this evening,” I said, limping past him.

“You need one of them spa days you chicks like. Bathe in the mud and put them zucchinis on your eyes. And a sirloin on your cheek.”

“
Cucumbers
go on your eyes.” I stopped at the elevator. “Anything going on?”

He shook his head. “Pretty quiet up there. No one got dead tonight. But then we got four hours to go. Plenty of time to ruin a pleasant evening with some ass-clown totin’ an Uzi.”

There was no one in the women’s locker room. I pulled jeans and an LAPD T-shirt from my gym bag, then stood beneath the jets of shower water as pounds of blood, dirt, and anxiety washed off my body and into the drain. After toweling off, I dabbed Neosporin over every cut place. Clean and feeling lighter inside and out, I retreated to the squad room and to my desk and to the growing stacks of reports, photographs, and diagrams—all connected to the Chatman case. Only two dicks worked the phones, and as I trudged past them, neither looked away from their own oceans of casework.

I collapsed into my chair, my mind empty and full at the same time.

By now, Colin was probably spooning with Dakota. The same with Pepe and his rocket scientist. And Luke—he was either sleeping next to Lupita or next to one of his badge bunnies. And here I was, fresh from my attempt to have a “personal life,” with tonight’s adventures featuring pink drinks, pole dancing, insurance attorneys, fights with husbands and arsonists, and declarations of divorce.

Viewer discretion advised. Do not attempt this at home.

I studied Colin’s and my handwriting on the whiteboard propped on the file cabinet.

COUSIN FOR RECOVERY SARCOMA—MSK / PROFESSOR—UNLV / CH FIRM—DOES HE STILL WORK THERE? / KEMPER $$$ JULIET—DIVORCE / CANCER, SUICIDE—BELLAGIO / SIGNIFICANCE OF VLG CHKS???

Then, I added, SECURITIES FRAUD (!!), 2 CM TUMOR.

“What am I missing?” I whispered.
These are all trees. I need the forest. Now.

I grabbed the murder book from Colin’s desk, hoping that the quiet of the squad room would help me see something in the report, something in the statements and pictures I had studied since catching the case back on Tuesday. The fifth day of this investigation, and I had learned about a not-mistress and bad loans and Valium. But who set the fire? Without hard (or even medium-well) evidence that Chatman had started the blaze, directly or indirectly, I only had a liar and a thief. But not a murderer.

Eli Moss—he was a professional liar and a serial pyro. He had attempted to destroy my house. But he had passed the murder parts of his lie-detector test. He was at work the night of the Chatman fire. Of course he was.

So what?

Maybe Moss had passed the murder parts of the poly because
maybe
he had not truly and sincerely intended to kill the Chatmans. Just… burn down their house.
Maybe?

Nothing was certain in this case—not even “up is down” and “down is up.” With the Chatman case, “up” was “strawberry,” and “down” was “washing machine.”

I ran my tongue across the inside of my cut lip, then closed the big binder. My eyes found those words again on the whiteboard. Suicide, cancer… And then it overpowered me—exhaustion, and lots of it. Even as I started to snore and drift off to sleep, the Chatman case kept at me. At first, a mosquito’s quiet buzz, but then a beehive on steroids. But the buzzing softened… shushed…
ssh
…

“L.T. brought donuts!”

Colin’s voice pulled me from sleep.

Where am I?

My body creaked as I lifted my head off the desk.

At work. Still.

Pepe ambled toward my cubicle. “Hey, Lou! You better—” His eyes swept over me. “What the
hell
?”

Colin and Luke, standing at the coffeepot, heard Pepe’s half question and turned in our direction.

Luke said, “Oh
shit
.”

Colin rushed over to me, anger sparking off of him, his face the color of cranberries and grape jam. “Did Greg—?”

“No,” I said, holding up my hand.

“You said you two were fighting.”

“Colin,” I said. “Relax.”

He crouched before me. “You protectin’ that son of a bitch?”