Skies of Ash Page 4

  I pointed to the bumper stickers. “You have kids. How are they?”

  “Devastated,” she said. “They gon’ be all right cuz they know: they can do all things through Christ, who strengthens them.”

  “Still,” I said, “it must be so sad and scary for them.”

  “They grew up over at Uncle Christopher’s and Auntie Juliet’s. They swam in the pool. Played Ping-Pong in the backyard. They went to all of Chloe and Cody’s birthdays and”—she squeezed shut her eyes, took a few deep breaths, then whispered—“Thank you, Jesus. Be with me, Lord.”

  “Would you mind if I talked to your kids?”

  “Why you need to talk to them?” she asked, eyes narrowed at the snake in the garden.

  “Maybe they heard the Chatmans talking about troubles they were having. Or maybe Cody confided—”

  “He ain’t set this fire,” Ruby said, with a shake of her head.

  “This fire?” I asked. “What do you mean? What other fires did he set?”

  Ruby licked her upper lip. “Well, there was the Fourth of July—that was just boys bein’ boys. There was firecrackers and leaves in a trash can. And you know, just little…” She swallowed. “He just… He ain’t start this fire.” Her eyes darted between me and the Chatman house.

  “He may not have.” I assured her. “He probably didn’t. But I need to know that for sure. You want to know that for sure.”

  She closed her eyes again, and her lips worked in silent prayer.

  As I waited for her to finish, the noise in my head competed with the noise of demolition.

  She dabbed at her wet eyes. “I got some oil on Christopher before the nurse kicked me out of his room. I wanted to stay a little longer, though, and hold him up in prayer. Let him know that he ain’t alone. But the Lord will renew his strength. We gon’ get through this. Together.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder to the smoldering heap that had been a family’s home just a day ago. “Ain’t nothin’ ever gonna be the same for any of us again. Lord help us all.”

  6

  NO SUCH THING AS EASY FOR THE THE MURDER POLICE, ESPECIALLY IN LOS ANGELES. So many beaten, stabbed, and shot-up bodies in this city. Even with three hundred homicides last year, a pretty low rate for a city as big as many sovereign nations, that’s still three hundred bodies, three hundred families, three hundred accordion file folders with cases that had the potential of going unsolved. Unsolved not because we were inept Keystone Kops. But unsolved partly due to barriers around this town. One hundred—that’s how many languages the Department of Motor Vehicles accommodated every year. And those people—the ones whose native tongues included clicks or whose cultures required women silently to accept violence, as well as those homegrown U.S. citizens whose creed was “Fuck the Police from Sea to Shining Sea,” well…

  * * *

  No such thing as easy for the the murder police.

  The Chatman investigation would not be simple—even though I had in hand enough search warrants to gift wrap every item at Walmart.

  “No lie: this will be hard,” I warned my team, now assembled near the porch of the house. “It’s already the hardest scene I’ve ever processed. Still: we got to do this right.” I tried to take a deep breath but failed—felt like village women were doing a grape stomp on my lungs. “Look for any trace evidence like fingerprints and palm prints, especially in those upstairs bedrooms. Look for blood, ripped fingernails, bullet casings, knives, anything that will help us figure out what happened to these folks.” I nodded at Arturo Zucca, the lead criminalist and one of the smartest men in the world.

  “Be extra-careful,” Zucca said. “Since everything’s wet and mushy, we’ll be taking longer than usual. You see something that looks organic, give a holler and get the hell out of the way.”

  Detective Luke Gomez, stout and beer-bellied, asked, “We’re taking normal things, too, right? Important-looking papers, receipts, mail—”

  “Photographs, computers?” his partner, Peter “Pepe” Kim, asked as he pushed back hair freed from a Dippity-Do stranglehold.

  “Yep,” I said. “Be incredibly thorough. With the water damage, mold’s a-comin’, so we won’t have many chances to boomerang. Oh. Look out for a set of car keys and a cell phone. Another ‘by the way’: a few neighbors saw a suspicious black male wearing an orange hockey jersey hanging around.” I rambled off the guy’s physical description. “If you see him, detain him, then grab me or Taggert.”

  With that, we all donned masks and gloves, then stepped into the foyer. Pepe climbed up the ladder to the second level. Luke and the two dicks from Arson headed to the garage. And Colin and I stayed on the first floor.

  “Geez.” My partner stood beside me with his eyes cast upon those exposed wet rafters.

  “Stop worrying,” I said, even though worry tightened my arms and legs.

  He rubbed his jaw, then sighed. “Just got a feelin’ that we won’t get much outta here.”

  “I know. Everything will be soaking wet or charred to a crisp, but we can’t not look.”

  He cocked his head, an almost-admission that I was right.

  I rolled my eyes. “What now?”

  “Say that Chatman burned his house down.” He had said each word carefully, testing it to ensure that it would not make me explode. “It’s his personal property—he has the right to burn it down. Maybe he thought the house was empty, that the wife had taken the kids to Disneyland, but he didn’t know that she’d changed her mind cuz she had cramps or somethin’.”

  “Cuz ladies always be havin’ cramps.”

  He blushed. “C’mon, Lou.”

  “It’s a…” I stopped, then started again. “It was a beautiful house. Why burn it down?”

  “Folks do strange shit.”

  “If people died in the course of his, what, artistic statement about, I don’t know, the superficiality and the worthlessness of the American dream, his ass is still grass, my friend.”

  “A lesser charge.”

  “His ass is grass.”

  “So sayeth you?”

  “So sayeth the California felony murder rule,” I said. “Don’t know how it is back in Colorado, but here in California, dead is dead, accident or not.”

  “I wonder if Juliet and the kids were dead before it went up. And I wonder why she was holdin’ that gun. Or if any of that matters.”

  I crept through the debris and toward the dining room. “To a defense attorney? Hell yeah, it all matters. You can’t kill somebody who’s already dead. As for the gun… We’ll find out if she fired it, if there’s any blood from… We’ll figure it out.”

  “Can’t kill the dead,” Colin said with a sigh. “And how did they get dead?”

  “Taggert, please.” I stood at the dark-wooded, country-style dining room table. There was a long bench on one side and heavy slatted chairs on the other. To the table’s left, out through the full-length patio doors, was the flagstone backyard. “Right now, I can’t answer that question, if they were dead or alive. Right now, I need to find stuff, all right?” I pointed to my left without looking. “You start over there.”

  Colin didn’t respond, but his boots crunched to “over there.”

  The Chatmans’ wedding portrait sat on the dining room table, the faces of Juliet and Christopher burned away. There were also soot-covered school pictures of a chubby girl—Chloe—with milk-chocolate skin and sandy eyes and of a boy—Cody—older, less chocolate and more nougat, just as chubby, with doe-big brown eyes. A third picture had also survived: Chloe and Cody standing with Shamu at Sea World. Cheese for her. This is wack for him.

  A few steps brought me into a stainless-steel, white-marble kitchen. The cream paint now looked gray. Smoke wisped the high ceilings. Soot covered the mangoes sitting in a bowl on the center of the island.

  A Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. refrigerator magnet clung to the fridge door. Beneath it: a soccer picture of Chloe wearing six ponytails and a pink and black soccer uniform.

&nbs
p; “The Cotton Candies,” I whispered, reading the magnet. “Fall 2013 AYSO.”

  Four dinner plates, three pots, and silverware had been left in the dishwasher. Three clean milk shake glasses and a roasting pan sat in the drying rack. There was an empty wine bottle—a Syrah from Santa Barbara—in the otherwise empty waste can.

  Dinner last night?

  At the breakfast bar, a girl’s wet peace-sign fleece jacket hung off the back of a tall chair.

  A book of damp paint chips sat on the bar. Yellow sticky notes flagged olive, tan, and brown.

  I wandered down the soggy hallway to a home office.

  The fire had ignored this room. The giant cherrywood desk did not look any different on this day than it probably had on Sunday. Two flat-screen computer monitors had not toppled over, nor had the VLG company mug been knocked to the ground. The view out the window showed parked fire trucks and my Crown Vic.

  I took pictures and measurements of the entire room, pictures of the computer, the desk, and inside the desk drawers. My eyes returned to that view of Don Mateo Drive.

  What had Christopher Chatman been thinking about last week this time? What to buy the wife and kids for Christmas? Charitable contributions to make before the year’s end? Or…?

  “Something, something kill me,” I said.

  What did Juliet mean by that?

  The roar of blood rushed through my ears as my mind imagined hearing the panic in Juliet Chatman’s voice. It would sound no different than the panicked voices of other women I’d heard pleading for help, begging for mercy, begging for life. That icy finger, the one that had dragged down my spine when I had first arrived, now returned. And with friends.

  I pawed through the seven desk drawers and found pens, notepads, a stapler, highlighters, and business cards, including Christopher’s.

  CHRISTOPHER CHATMAN, M.B.A., VANDERVELDE, LANSING & GRAY, LLP, THOUSAND OAKS, CALIFORNIA.

  I took a few of those cards. And I also plucked from the middle drawer a prospectus created for Peggy Tanner. Chatman’s name had been the only broker listed on the account. And then, I got greedy—I took the desktop computer, a banker’s box found in the closet, a digital camera, miscellaneous papers in the in-box tray, and thumb drives.

  After my shopping spree in the den, I toured more fire-damaged rooms in the lower level of the house. My eyes picked through the jumble of things, including broken, expensive-looking vases that had been filled with the discarded orchids and long twigs of faded blooms. My mind worked the three-second rule shrinks used with hoarders.

  Sterling silver angel?

  Don’t need.

  A soiled pink ballet slipper. An oboe case. A metronome.

  No. No. Don’t need.

  A signed first edition of Slaughterhouse Five.

  Wow, but don’t need.

  I saw everything. And nothing.

  “So it goes,” I whispered.

  I saw a slashed Diego Rivera lithograph, a pair of crystal candleholders, a clay imprint of a child’s hand…

  That hand. So small. So innocent. For Mommy. I love you. Chloe, scratched into its back.

  “Shit.” Panic swirled in my stomach and nausea washed over me. I muttered, “Shit,” again and closed my eyes.

  A hand touched the small of my back.

  “You okay, partner?” Colin was peering at me.

  The softness in his tone sounded foreign to me, and if I hadn’t been looking at him, I wouldn’t have known that the hand on my back had been his.

  Colin had aged since arriving on scene: his blond hair had grayed from all the dust, and dirt had lodged in his skin, already weathered from long days skiing on the slopes of the sunlit Rockies.

  I inhaled through the mask and slowly let out a breath.

  “I grabbed Chatman’s keys to open the Jag and the SUV and… You okay?”

  “Mmhmm.”

  He squeezed my shoulder and waited.

  “I’m good,” I croaked.

  “Pepe found a cell phone—it had been upstairs hidden beneath the vics in the master suite. We also found a laptop in there—pretty damaged, but maybe we can still get somethin’ off of it. Zucca hit those droplets on the Jag’s leather with ninhydrin, and they glowed like you thought they would.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “I’m gonna pull you in a minute so we can chat up some more of the neighbors.”

  He gave me another shoulder squeeze. “Call me when you’re ready.”

  I stood there, alone in the living room crammed with Dead People’s Stuff. No. Not alone. Three ghosts brushed across the back of my neck and pleaded with me in cold, quiet voices to make it right.

  7

  COLIN AND I REUNITED, LOOKING MORE LIKE CHIMNEY SWEEPS THAN HOMICIDE detectives. At my car, we splashed water on our hands and faces, then dried ourselves with towels that came away as black as midnight in a Louisiana bayou.

  After guzzling two bottles of Gatorade, then inhaling a flattened Snickers bar found in the Crown Vic’s boot, and after feeling my heart rate slow and my breathing deepen, I turned to Colin. “Ready, guv’nuh?”

  Colin chomped the last third of a stale granola bar. “Ready, pidge.” He sighed, then pushed up the sleeves of his T-shirt—even the Cracker Jack tattoo on his forearm was slick with sweat.

  We hurried past creepy squirrel shrubs and hopped onto the muddy porch of 6385 Don Mateo Drive.

  If I hadn’t witnessed firsthand Ben Oliver disappearing behind that closed door five hours ago, I would have thought that no one was home. But someone was home—his Jag was still parked in the driveway.

  I knocked and waited, rang the doorbell and waited some more.

  The insurance attorney answered. He was six foot four with lovely chocolate skin, a thin mustache and goatee, damn damn damn just… everywhere.

  Okay, so his hotness made my nerves go boom! and my stomach shimmy. But I didn’t throw parades for hotness alone—Los Angeles abounded with gorgeous men, oranges, avocados, and smog.

  “Yes?” Ben Oliver asked in a smooth baritone.

  Colin introduced himself first.

  Then, I introduced myself, flashing my badge just in case my staggering beauty caused the man to disbelieve that, yes, I was a cop.

  “We’re here to talk to you about the fire,” Colin announced.

  “Now?” Ben Oliver asked, his bloodshot eyes wide, as though Colin had just requested we all go skinny-dipping in a Siberian lake on Christmas Eve.

  “You’re an insurance attorney,” I said, with no room for rebuttal.

  Ben Oliver considered me for a moment, then said, “And that seems outré to you?”

  “A representative from MG Standard Insurance is here,” I pointed out. “Did you suggest that Mr. Chatman file an immediate claim? Or did he call them from the hospital’s room phone? I’m just trying to figure out the timeline of when best to talk to you about this, especially since the insurance company is already here, which, to me, is outré.”

  He squinted at me, then stepped back and opened the door wider.

  The house smelled of cinnamon, bacon fat, and Vicks VapoRub. In a room somewhere, a television blared and an actress raved about the wonders of Downy fabric softener. Framed pictures hung along the foyer walls. Praying Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Hopeful Jesus looking up to heaven. Pensive Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., staring into space.

  “After we talk with you,” I said to the attorney, “we plan to head over to the hospital.”

  “A feckless endeavor,” he said. “I just called—Christopher is suffering from a concussion, but they finally let him sleep.”

  I cocked my head. “I expect that he’ll wake?”

  “Of course he’ll wake.”

  “Then…?” I shrugged and offered a quizzical, What’s the problem? smile.

  An old black woman in a pair of pink-and-white-checkered Vans shuffled from the living room into the foyer. Her snowy, coarse hair had been pulled into a ponytail. Both pockets of her green housecoat had been
stuffed with remote controls. She was my type of granny. She peered at me over the tops of her pearly-pink spectacles. “Who you?”

  “Mother,” Ben Oliver said, “this is Detective Taggert and Detective Norton. I assume they’re handling the investigation. Detectives, this is my grandmother, Virginia Oliver.”

  The old woman kept her gaze on me. “I already talked to the white boy right there. Tol’ him how I heard the fire and called the police.” She hurled a look at Colin. “Ain’t you remember that?” Before Colin could answer, she turned back to me. “So what you want?”

  I cleared my throat, tasting peanuts, caramel, and cinders. “We need to further understand the circumstances surrounding the fire, ma’am. And then determine how the… deaths occurred.”

  She glanced at her grandson. “Benji, ain’t they say it was an accident?”

  He shrugged. “I guess the city doesn’t mind wasting money on piscine expeditions.”

  I chuckled. “This is far from a fishing trip, sir.”

  “Y’all gotta talk to me right now?” the old woman asked. “To you, it’s three o’clock. To me, might as well be midnight.”

  “May I stop by tomorrow then?” I asked.

  She gave Colin the up-and-down. “Boy, don’t go trackin’ no mud round here with them boots you got on.” To her grandson, she said, “Put ’em in the parlor.” Then, she pivoted on her sneakered heel and scuffed down the hallway.

  Ben Oliver glanced at his watch à la Arthur Fiedler conducting the Boston Pops, all swooping arms and cocked chin. “Detectives, I have a meeting at four o’clock, so you have three minutes.” Then, he strode down the hallway, three fingers held up as visual confirmation.

  Colin and I rolled our eyes and followed in the maestro’s wake.

  Sure: in its heyday, this room would have been called a parlor. But the glory had faded from this place the moment Nixon had skulked out of the White House and boarded Marine One. There were magenta-taffeta-covered walls and lamps with dusty ruffled shades and shedding tassels. A yellowed songbook sat in the music stand of a spinet piano. The silk flowers in the vases had died. There was more life in King Tut’s tomb than Virginia Oliver’s parlor.