Skies of Ash Read online

  Memorial tour complete, I busted a U-turn and headed back to La Brea. As I sped up the hill, gray powder swirled and flecked on my windshield. Los Angeles’s version of snow. The snowstorm intensified, and the smell of smoke and melted plastic wafted through the air vents. I hated the smell of toxic chemicals and burned dining room tables in the morning. Smelled like… job security. Unfortunately.

  Fires kicked our asses. First of all, murder is hard to nearly impossible to prove. And then, most times, homicide detectives reached the scene hours after the fire’s start. By then, witnesses had wandered back home. Crucial evidence had been destroyed by flame, water, and heroes wearing galoshes. And the victims—they rarely survived swelling and blistering so severe and complete that no one, not even their mothers, recognized them, and so the coroner had to study porcelain uppers to call them officially by name.

  My Motorola radio blipped from the passenger seat. “What’s taking you so long?” Colin asked.

  “Dude. I can’t fly there.”

  “It’s a tragedy, Lou. Guess there were some kids in the house.”

  My fingers went cold. “I hate this case already.”

  “You need to get here, though.”

  “The fire all the way out?”

  “No. Still some hot spots here and there.”

  “Those bodies getting more dead?”

  “C’mon, Lou—”

  “Stop wringing your hands, Taggert,” I snapped. “I’ll be there, all right?”

  Last year this time, Colin had been working homicide in a Colorado Springs suburb. But he had shared the D with a chick who was not his fiancée. The fiancée’s dad, who was also the city’s police chief, took Colin’s betrayal of his daughter personally, forcing the young detective immediately to serve and protect a city with no bounty on his head.

  On my best days, Colin merely annoyed me—like the constant beeping of a truck backing up. To be fair, I didn’t know many (okay, any) twenty-eight-year-old, white-boy detectives from the Rocky Mountains. And he didn’t know any thirty-seven-year-old black female detectives from Los Angeles. So there was a cultural rift between my partner and me. A rift that was three galaxies wide.

  Before I pulled onto the street that would shoot me up to the fire site, I parked near an elementary school closed for winter break. I grabbed my iPhone from my bag and held my breath as I tapped the Bust-a-Cheat icon.

  Should I

  1. Turn on Greg’s cell-phone mic and use it as a bug to listen to his conversations?

  2. Use the GPS tracking system to pinpoint the whereabouts of his phone and him?

  3. Or, simply check the phone’s RECENT CALLS log?

  But then what would I do if a Japanese country code—Tokyo’s was 011 + 81 + 3—showed up in RECENT CALLS?

  I bought Bust-a-Cheat two weeks after I had forgiven him.

  I bought Bust-a-Cheat because he had never let his iPhone out of his sight.

  “You bought Bust-a-Cheat cuz you know you’s a sucka.” That’s what my girl Lena had blurted on my deck, where we had been guzzling tall glasses of absinthe and cranberry juice. “And if you gotta do this,” she had continued, “gotta buy spyware—which, by the way, why didn’t they have that when Chauncey was diddlin’ homeboy in the back of my Range Rover—then you don’t trust him, and à quoi bon?”

  Six months later, here I sat. Not trusting him.

  I tapped RECENT CALLS.

  The phone’s screen blinked, blanked, then filled.

  NO CALLS ON 12/11.

  “Thank you, Lord,” I whispered, sounding small, sounding like a woman not packing a semiautomatic in her bra and a .22 Magnum Pug mini-revolver in her ponytail.

  Personal drama handled, my heart found its regular pace, and I shoved the phone back into my bag. I muttered another “thank you,” then jammed up the hill, following a dank river of water and ashes that would end in blood.

  3

  DON MATEO DRIVE RESEMBLED A NEIGHBORHOOD IN A NORMAN ROCKWELL painting. A baby grand piano sparkled in the living room window of an army-green bungalow. The Cape Cod’s hedges had been shaped into snowmen, squirrels, and rabbits. Christmas lights glowed on the eaves of the ranch-style, and fire-hose water shimmered on its roof. Sludge gathered at the base of every window frame at every house.

  Except for 6381 Don Mateo Drive, the former Spanish-style house I’d glimpsed on the Times’s Web site. There was no sludge on those windows. Barely any windows. Hell, there was barely any house.

  Crews from every local news station had set up at the saw-horses. And as I rolled past, reporters shouted, “Detective, detective!” One brave soul knocked on my passenger-side window. A flash from a camera blinded me. I bared my teeth and growled, “Back the hell off.”

  I grabbed the Motorola from the passenger seat and toggled the switch. “I’m here,” I told Colin. “Have one of the guys move the press back some more.”

  “Crazy, right?” Colin asked.

  Just glimpsing the destruction, the angriness of this fire made me shiver. “I don’t like it here.”

  “Hell, Lou, you don’t like a whole lotta things. But on this: yeah, I don’t like it, either.”

  A patrol cop lifted the yellow tape, and I drove through, parking near a Frank Sinatra–style house, all weird, cool angles and bop-bop-bum. I wrapped my Windbreaker around my hip and clipped my silver badge to my belt loop, then grabbed the small digital camera from the glove compartment. I climbed out of the car and took pictures of a smoking, charred heap now boasting crime-scene tape and broken ceramic roof tiles. Every house, except this house, had its trio of trash cans—blue, green, black—sitting out at the curb. I snapped pictures of that, and then I photographed the crowd: a bald black man holding a toddler, an elderly Asian couple wearing matching jogging suits, a dark-skinned weight lifter with headphones around his thick neck, and the heroines of Waiting to Exhale wearing yoga pants and fruit-colored tank tops.

  Did one of you do this?

  The tchick-tchick-tchick of lawn sprinklers and terp-terp-terp of birds had been drowned out by the growl of fire trucks and the roar of chain saws cutting holes in walls.

  A sky of poison loomed over the neighborhood—we shouldn’t have been breathing this crap or walking through muddy ashes flecked with half-melted police tape, warped household plastics, and shards of charred wood, some pieces slick with paint and varnish. Even with no visible flame, the ground still burned beneath the thick soles of my boots.

  Colin, coffee cup in hand, and the fire marshal, Denton Quigley, who clutched a walkie-talkie, stood in the house’s driveway next to an ash-covered Mercedes Benz SUV and a garage door now hacked to pieces. Sweat had darkened and flattened Colin’s blond hair. Ashes had landed on his LAPD Windbreaker. But his brown cowboy boots looked right at home. In that strange morning sun, my partner looked golden, bizarrely handsome, Steve McQueen in The Towering Inferno.

  Dixie Shipman, her nougat-colored skin also sweaty and ashy, stood on the lawn with a digital camera and a jumbo tape measure.

  “Hunh,” I muttered. “She’s already here?”

  In her former life, Dixie had worked the LAPD’s Arson Squad, but two years ago she had been caught in a big, fat lie. Which is why she now wore a blue and white Windbreaker with the logo of MG Standard Insurance on the sleeve.

  Her ex-coworkers, men in black jackets, ARSON in white letters on their backs, were also taking pictures.

  I trudged toward the wreck, its death scent assaulting my nostrils.

  Colin met me halfway with the coffee cup extended.

  I took the drink and glanced at his crisp blue jeans. The creases were as sharp as thousand-year-old cheddar. “You just take the dry cleaner’s plastic off?” I asked.

  He held up a leg. “Can you tell?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Bodies are still in the house,” he said, “and the firefighters need to get some debris out of the way so we can see ’em. They’re thinkin’ we can go in, in about an hour.”


  I checked my watch—that would take us to eleven.

  “So the next-door neighbor,” Colin said, “an old lady named Virginia Oliver.” He pivoted and pointed at the house with the animal-shaped hedges. “She lives right there. She called it in around three-forty this mornin’. Mrs. Oliver says she started not to call cuz the smoke detectors in that house were always goin’ off. Seemed like the Chatmans—”

  “That the family name?” I asked.

  He nodded. “The son was always settin’ shit on fire. So the old lady thought nothin’ of it ’til she heard the fire. She said, and I quote, ‘Sounded like God was frying bacon.’ According to another neighbor, Eli Moss”—he pointed to the green bungalow with the baby grand piano—“a patrol unit got here before the fire trucks. I’m guessin’ because of the ‘kill me’ part of Mrs. Chatman’s 911 call.”

  “You talk to the R/O?”

  Colin nodded. “His name is Bridges. He says when he got here, the fire was mostly in the center of the house, second story. He tried to get in, but that”—he pointed to the wrought-iron security door propped against the house’s side—“kept him out. The fire trucks got here a few minutes later. The neighbor says that once the trucks got here, it took them some time to find the hydrant, which is at the end of the block and too far for the one-hundred-foot hose.”

  I shook my head. “Ticktock.”

  “Almost an hour into the fire—that would be close to five o’clock—the man of the house, Christopher Chatman, pulled up in his car.” He pointed to the dark blue Jaguar sedan now covered in LA snow and abandoned near a sawhorse.

  I frowned. “It’s five in the morning and Christopher Chatman ain’t home?”

  Colin smirked. “Yep.”

  “Why the wonky hours? He a doctor or an astronaut or something?”

  “He’s a commodities broker. Don’t know what the hell that is, but there you go. Anyway, he pulls up, runs to the house, makes it a few feet away from the front porch, where he’s tackled by a few of the heroes. Seems he was tryin’ to save his wife and kids. Her name is Juliet and the kids are Chloe and Cody.”

  “Are all three dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lieutenant Rodriguez had warned me that there would be blood, but I still wanted to make him a liar.

  “And where the hell was Mr. Chatman?” I asked.

  Colin peered at me. “Pissed already?”

  “No time like the present. Where was he?”

  “At work.”

  I jammed my lips together and said nothing. A chill ran up my back, split at my collarbone, and numbed my neck and scalp. “And where is Mr. Chatman now?”

  “At the hospital,” Colin said. “Concussion, minor burns, scratches, and shock.”

  I forced out a breath and said, “Okay.” Then, I strolled over to the Jag and pulled a small flashlight from my jacket pocket. I aimed its beam at the Jag’s thick tires, the chrome, and its tan interior.

  “What are you lookin’ for?” Colin asked.

  “That.” A dark drop of dried liquid on the back of the driver’s seat. “And that.” Another drop, this one on the driver’s-side passenger door.

  Colin checked out the cabin. “Looks old. Could be ketchup.”

  “Does this car look like it sees a lot of Happy Meals, ketchup squirts, and milk shake spills? Cuz other than these two strange drops of dried, reddish shit, there ain’t a crumb, a crumpled straw paper, not one crushed piece of nothing in this car.”

  Colin stared at the drops. “Warrant?”

  “Yep. And is that Benz SUV her car?”

  “I’m guessin’.”

  We walked to the truck. I clicked on the flashlight again and took a look inside.

  “Definitely a mom car,” I said.

  Scattered about the cabin: an open bag of gummy worms, phone charger, broken pencil, lip balm, school bulletin, paperback novel, and an empty McDonald’s cup.

  The back windows were tinted, but I still hit them with light. “Interesting. When you call Luke, tell him to get a warrant for the Benzo, too.”

  Colin peered inside. “I see… one, two, three suitcases. What’s crazy about that?”

  “Suitcases combined with that 911 call of ‘something, something kill me.’ What if they were trying to escape? We need to figure out what happened yesterday when they were packing these suitcases. Before shit got real. What’s in this truck may help us figure out what happened in that house.”

  “Got it.” Colin brought the radio to his mouth and called Luke Gomez back at the station.

  I turned away from him and watched big men in yellow field jackets remove a charred… thing out onto the porch. My shoulders drooped as I gazed at the Chatman house, as I held my breath, as the cold that came with death pinched my heart.

  4

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER ELEVEN O’CLOCK, COLIN AND I MOVED UP THE WALKWAY, glass and wood crunching beneath our shoes. Every third step, I stopped and sniffed the heavy air: smelled burned wood, as well as the fabrics and synthetics that filled every home. But there was something else, too. Something toxic and harsh.

  Colin sniffed. “Turpentine, maybe?”

  On the porch, past banks of drifting white smoke, I saw a used-to-be couch left next to an end table and footstool. The house’s decorative security door sat against the fence. But as we moved into the house’s foyer, that smell continued to hold my attention. And just like the scent of the dead, this odor would cling to me long after I had left this house and showered.

  The spongy, sopping-wet carpet bubbled with each step or gave way to the crack of broken glass. Books, plates, and cushions had been knocked down and trampled, then marred with black boot prints or scorch marks.

  A firefighter with bloodshot eyes and brilliant white teeth handed me a disposable respirator that would cover half of my face. “To keep you alive a little longer,” he said, handing Colin his own mask.

  “LAPD’s finest is finally here.” The fire marshal, Denton Quigley, had lumbered straight out of central casting and into this damp foyer. Ashes flecked his ruddy Irish skin and chocolate handlebar mustache. “How’s it goin’, Detective Norton?” He towered over me with a clipboard in one hand and the radio handset in the other.

  “Depends on what you’re about to tell me, Quig.”

  “So the fire started up there, on the second level.” Quigley pointed above us, to where parts of the ceiling had been pulled down.

  I followed his finger to see blue sky and the exposed second story.

  “You’ll have to climb up a ladder to see the heaviest damage and the three vics,” Quigley was saying. “A boy, in a smaller bedroom. And then the mom and daughter in the master suite. Wanna see them before we talk?”

  “Please.” I glanced one last time at the blackened rafters, at the flaking and peeling plaster, at the pool of water glistening on the dining room table.

  “Hold up,” Quigley shouted to the heavens.

  The banging and sawing stopped. Eerie silence swept through the house.

  Joined by the squad’s videographer, a thick white woman named Sue, we ignored the burned, frosted-looking staircase and climbed up the silver ladder. We reached the hallway, and five careful steps brought us to the master bedroom.

  My heart punched against my chest—there they were. The bodies of a woman and a school-aged girl, huddled in the corner farthest from the door. Their brown skin was blistered, and their noses and mouths were crusted black from breathing poison. The woman wore a sweatshirt and leggings, and the girl wore a nightgown.

  In the woman’s left hand, she clutched a pink rosary, its cross lost somewhere in her daughter’s hair. And in the right hand… silver barrel, black grip.

  The video camera whirred—Sue was zooming in.

  Colin stooped and said, “Smith and Wesson .22.”

  Guns—I knew guns. Fire was Tasmania to me. But guns and the people who used them? Just another day in Southern California.

  Colin snapped pictures of the rosary
and the revolver. “Why was she packin’?”

  “Something, something kill me,” I said. “Don’t forget that.” Eyes still on the gun, I asked, “You see a phone? The one she used to call 911?”

  Colin regarded the room. “I don’t see shit. Everything’s wet and Cajun-style.”

  The woman’s fingernails didn’t appear splintered or ripped—no indication that she was trying to escape the fire by clawing her way out. Nor were there defensive wounds on her palms or wrists to suggest a struggle.

  “On our next trip up,” I told Colin, “after the ME takes custody, we’ll tag and bag the gun, and hopefully we’ll find the phone.”

  The bedroom walls were shades of gray and brown. The pictures and mirrors that had remained on the wall were blackened, but the wall behind them had remained white.

  To reach the second bedroom, we tiptoed past charred paint cans, twisted nails, and heaps of splintered, charred wood. Here, the walls were almost completely black with soot. The thick bedroom door and heavy plaster had shielded the room from open flames, but it had not been enough protection.

  The adolescent boy in bed wore a Lakers jersey and shorts. His skin had also blistered, and there was soot around his nostrils and lips, though not as much as his mother’s and sister’s. He clutched a melted Nintendo Gameboy to his chest.

  We took video, still pictures, and measurements of our three victims, of the darkened bedroom walls, of burned posters, of wood window frames where varnish had bubbled and hardened. We took more measurements, stared out broken windows, stared at the dead. For several minutes, we studied what had been a bathroom just a day ago and gaped at the surviving porcelain bathtub now clogged with water, wood, and ashes. Crisped, black paint cans lay around the small room. The faceplate around the bathroom’s electrical outlet had blackened completely. Colin and Sue captured that image more than any others.

  Then, down the ladder we climbed. As we joined Quigley at the base of the porch, the growls of chain saws and the hacks of axes resumed.