‘You don’t have to go that far. Tonight I’d give this job away.’
Sharon smiled. ‘The job wasn’t exactly what I wanted.’
Halloran watched her punching numbers on her own phone, thinking that he would never understand women.
After an hour working the phones, making enemies of sleeping law officers all across the country, Halloran finally caught a break.
‘Chitterings? Hell, yes, I remember them.’
The minute Halloran had mentioned the name to the California detective, the sleep had gone out of his voice. Halloran could almost imagine him jerking up in bed. He covered the mouthpiece and said to Sharon, ‘Got something.’
‘Damn explosions could have taken out the whole neighborhood if the houses hadn’t been so far apart,’ the detective went on.
‘Explosions?’
‘Yeah. What happened was somebody turned on all the gas in the house, dumped the pilots, then torched it. Blew like a son of a bitch, then burned right to the ground before FD even made it to the scene. Santa Anas that night, you know. Fire rules the world when there’s a Santa Ana wind blowing.’
Halloran was scribbling furiously on the back of an envelope. ‘What about the Chitterings?’
‘Well, that’s the weird part,’ the detective said. ‘They had a little guest house out by the pool. Said they were sleeping there that night, for no good reason I ever heard. And that’s about all I’m going to give until you tell me what you’re working.’
‘Double homicide.’
‘No shit. The Chitterings?’
‘I guess. Only they called themselves the Kleinfeldts here.’
‘Huh. Might have guessed. You know I worked that case for about a week, but before I could really get into it they just disappeared. Poof. Sent me a note, if you can believe that. Sent me a goddamned note saying the fire was their fault, some kind of bullshit about trying to fix the hot water heater.’
‘Is that possible?’
‘Hell, no, it isn’t possible. Arson confirmed accelerants, kerosene, in five different locations in the house, and you know what the Chitterings said? Lamps. Friggin’ kerosene lamps. Bullshit is what I said, but my chief is clicking his heels because we can clear a case, and so he shuts me down cold.’
‘I hear you,’ Halloran said.
‘So they bought it, huh?’
‘Looks that way.’
‘Listen. Department doesn’t have a file here, since according to the vics there was no crime, but I’ve still got my notes. Keep ’em at home. I’ll fax them out to you in the morning if you let me know what you dig up. Damn case has been driving me nuts for years.’
Halloran agreed, gave him the fax number, then hung up and filled in Sharon. When he finished, she leaned back in her chair and whistled softly. ‘Man, that was twelve years ago, and they were still scared. This has got to be some serious vendetta.’
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and thought that if he didn’t move soon, he’d fall asleep where he sat. ‘You get anything?’
‘Zilch in Dallas. Chicago is a maybe. The on-duty guy thought he remembered some hullabaloo about a Sandford family – that’s the name they were using there – that went down years ago, just before he joined up. Sandford’s not exactly a unique name, though, so it could be nothing. Said he’d have someone dig through the archives tomorrow.’
She yawned and raised her arms in a stretch that showed Halloran a little more than he thought he should see of what was under her uniform shirt. ‘I’m whipped.’
‘I seem to remember telling you to go home a long time ago.’
‘Yeah, well, I seem to remember telling you the same thing.’ She gave him a glance. ‘You look worse than I do.’
‘Always did.’
She smiled a little, stood, pulled on her jacket, reached in to settle her shoulder holster properly, then zipped up. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘Getting the first date out of the way.’ She pulled a dark watch cap over her head, flattening a fringe of brown against her forehead. ‘Next time we can sleep together.’
Well, that certainly woke him up.
10
The dead jogger by the river had been the lead story on all the stations in Minneapolis, which was almost a miracle, Detective Leo Magozzi thought, being that it was the middle of football season.
On orders from the chief, he and his partner, Gino Rolseth, had worked the case all day, shunting last week’s murder of a Hmong teenage girl over to Gangs. Gino hadn’t liked that. ‘You know how much this sucks, Leo?’ he’d complained bitterly on their way out of the chief’s office. ‘We get pulled off one murder and slapped on another, and don’t tell me it isn’t politics when the one we’re pulled off of is a Hmong gang member and the one we get put on just happens to be a nice white boy in his first year at the seminary.’
The nice white boy had a set of very nice white parents that he and Gino destroyed in the few seconds it took to say, ‘We are so sorry to tell you that your son is dead.’
After they’d asked the questions they had to ask, they waited until friends of the parents arrived to take their place in the new and terrible solitude, and then they walked away from the dead-eyed, emotional ruins that had been parents before their arrival. Funny. The mother of the Hmong girl had looked just the same.
Gino hadn’t been much good after that. He always took the kids hard, and Leo sent him home early so he could look at his own kids and touch them and talk to them while all the time he’d be thinking,
Magozzi didn’t have any kids to talk to, or any god to thank, for that matter, so he stayed at the station until eight o’clock, making calls, sifting through interviews and the preliminary forensics report, trying to find a lead that would hint at either a motive or a suspect on the dead jogger. So far, he’d come up empty. Jonathan Blanchard was almost a caricature of a model citizen: a 4.0 seminary student who was putting himself through school working twenty hours a week – Christ, he volunteered at a homeless shelter on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Unless he was running drugs or laundering mob money out of the soup kitchen’s back door, they were looking at a dead end.
Frustrated and melancholy, Magozzi had finally given up for the night and gone home to his modest stucco on the edge of uptown Minneapolis. He ate a microwave dinner, sorted his mail, then escaped up a rickety second-floor ladder into his attic studio to paint.
Before the divorce, he’d painted in the garage, slapping mosquitoes in the summer and standing in a circle of space heaters in the winter that doubled their electric bill. The day Heather moved out, taking her aversion to turpentine and chemical sensitivity to anything she didn’t buy at the Lancome counter with her, he’d dragged all the paraphernalia inside and set up in the living room. For two months he painted there, just because he could, and only hauled everything up to the attic when his Froot Loops started to taste like mineral spirits.
He took a deep, calming breath as he popped up through the hatch, savoring the warm tang of turpentine and oil paints that saturated the air. Now this was real aromatherapy.
It was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time he washed his brushes and crawled into bed, exhausted. The fall landscape was still just blocks of color, a mess really; but it would shape up nicely, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.
The bedside phone shrilled him awake at a little after four. For a millisecond, he fantasized about drawing his 9mm and silencing the phone forever, but the fantasy dissolved and he reached for the receiver, wondering if at any time in the history of the telecommunicating world had an early-morning phone call brought good news. He doubted it. Good news could always wait, but for some reason, bad news never could. ‘Magozzi here.’
‘Get your ass over to Lakewood Cemetery, Leo,’ Gino said over the phone. ‘We got a real sparkler this time.
