'Yeah?'
'Yeah.' He was warming up to Painter a little bit. He liked people who showed an interest in his stories. 'So I looked into it. Turned out some enterprising grad students in the chemistry department were paying the bands in LSD.'
Painter seemed unconvinced. 'Think that kind of thing still goes on? I mean, it was a long time ago.'
His momentary enthusiasm for Painter’s companionship vanished. 'Right, it was the fucking dinosaur age.' He didn’t like the insinuation that he was old, especially coming from some fat bitch who’d probably been giving blow jobs to the high school football squad a couple of years ago. 'So what the fuck else have you got?' he asked stiffly.
Painter seemed unaware of his disappointment in her, or maybe she just didn’t give a shit. 'We’re trying to track down this Maple. His dorm mates haven’t seen him.'
'He got a girlfriend? Boyfriend? Anything?'
'Girlfriend. We’re looking for her. Not sure if she’s on campus this weekend. School’s out for the holiday, you know.'
'Oh, is this a holiday weekend? I had my head so far up my ass, I didn’t notice.'
She ticked a cool glare at him. 'Just pointing it out. ME’s not here yet; neither is SID. Not that there’ll be much for SID to look at down there.'
SID was the Scientific Investigation Division, the forensics experts. Dodge had to admit that Painter was right. No trace evidence would survive the fire-which might be why the blaze had been set in the first place.
'Any reason we should be thinking arson?' he asked.
'Lot of flammable chemicals spilled everywhere. Beakers and stuff, you know. Place went up like a torch. Could’ve been intentional, I don’t know.'
'You have no opinion?'
'It’s not my job to have an opinion.'
She sounded tired. Probably she thought she was tired. She was wrong. Let her spend the next fifteen years wearing a badge, taking shit from every asshole on the street, making no money, pissing her life away. Then she would know how it felt to be tired.
He thanked her for the recap, then got two pairs of the waterproof boots and hung around, waiting for his partner to show. By now the sun was jostling the treetops at the far end of the quadrangle. There was a line of rust-colored smog on the horizon, as usual, but the sky overhead was turning blue. Of course its clarity was an illusion. The goddamn smog was everywhere, but up close, you couldn’t see it. Dodge thought there might be some sort of metaphor buried in that observation, but he didn’t bother to dig it out.
Bradley arrived a few minutes later, at 6:15. Dodge filled him in, and then the two of them pulled on their boots and walked into Life Sciences. It was an old building constructed of solid brick, with hardwood floors slightly bowed from decades of hard use. Skylights in the atrium let in the sun. Dust glinted in the air, mingling with flecks of floating ash.
The door to the stairwell was across from the elevators. A sagging length of crime-scene tape was strung across the doorway. They ducked under it and took out their flashlights, beaming them down the metal stairs into the dimness below.
Dodge caught the smell at once. He felt his stomach clench like a fist. The odor was sickening, like a barbecue gone bad.
'Whew,' Bradley said. This was as close to an expletive as Dodge’s partner ever used. He was a family man, Al Bradley-or had been, till Cheryl sued him for divorce and took the kids to Seattle to live with their new daddy, a real estate salesman named Bob. Dodge thought it would do Al some good to cut loose with a nice stream of profanity now and then, but the guy was a straight arrow.
'Breathe through your mouth,' Dodge advised, trying to sound cool, as if the stench didn’t bother him.
Bradley nodded. 'Always do. I’m a mouth-breather by nature. You never noticed?'
They went down the stairs, noting the black tracks of firefighters’ boots stamped on each steel tread. Any other shoe prints-those of an intruder, say-would have been obliterated.
At the bottom of the staircase, they followed the boot prints and the smell to a ruined space that had been Organic Chemistry Lab II.
The laboratory was a single large room arrayed with the charred, skeletal remnants of wooden counters. The countertops had blistered over, the wood cracking and bumping up like alligator scales. Three-legged metal stools lay here and there, the cushioned seats incinerated.
Although a basement, the lab was not windowless. A row of narrow, horizontal windows ran along the top of the room at ground level. Daylight entered, diffusing in the thick, sooty air, barely penetrating the murk.
Dodge passed the beam of his flashlight over the rubble, revealing wet mounds of debris and pools of bubbling flame retardant sprayed by extinguishers. As the fire captain had said, there were puddles of water here and there, amid piles of waterlogged ashes, but most of the thousands of gallons of water had disappeared through large drainage grates recessed in the corners of the lab.
Glassware was all over the floor. Dodge remembered Painter mentioning beakers and stuff. There were plenty of beakers and flasks and vials and test tubes and every other sort of glass container. A few were intact, but most had been either shattered or melted, and in some parts of the room, mounds of fallen glassware had actually fused into surreal volcanic cones.
'What a mess,' Bradley muttered. His flashlight swung up toward the ceiling, where fluorescent lighting panels hung down on strands of electrical wire, the plastic covers warped. He aimed the beam at the far end of the room, illuminating rows of cabinets hollowed out by flame.
The smell was really bad now. All the windows had been smashed, either by the firefighters or by the thermal impact of the fire itself, but there was little breeze entering the room. The air was stagnant, choking.
At least there was no doubt where the body lay. The stink drew them directly to it. It was sprawled near the back of the lab, between two counters, partially buried in ceiling tiles that had popped loose and rained down on the floor.
Dodge and Bradley knelt by the corpse. Enough was left of the pubic area to confirm that it was a man. Dodge brushed away the foam tiles and exposed a charred, crinkly face. The hair was gone-all of it, even the eyebrows. Eyes like poached eggs swam in their sockets, all the color boiled out of them.
The sight didn’t bother him. He’d seen gangbangers decapitated by shotgun blasts. He’d seen horrendous stabbings and mutilations. He was inured to the insults that could be directed at the human body. But the smell was something else.
'Maybe after this,' Bradley told him, 'you’ll lay off the pastrami burritos.' Pastrami burritos were Dodge’s current poison of choice. They were sold out of a fast-food cart on Santa Monica Boulevard by a Filipino entrepreneur.
'No way,' Dodge said. 'I need my fix. Anyway, those burritos don’t smell anything like this.'
'They smell worse.'
Dodge studied the corpse. The victim’s clothes had been entirely burned away. He lay in a pugilistic posture, legs bent at the knees, arms pulled up as if sparring.
'Think he died defending himself?' Bradley asked.
Dodge said no. 'The muscles contract because of the heat. Probably postmortem.'
'You sure? Those look like wound channels on his arms.'
'Splits in his skin. Heat contraction again. Like a fucking frankfurter on a grill. Gets hot, splits its seams.'
Dodge started humming the Oscar Mayer song. Bradley told him to knock it off. 'It’s not funny. This is somebody’s kid.'
'Somebody’s crankhead. Come on, Al, we both know what went down here. Asshole’s got a key to the lab, sneaks in late on a weekend night to cook up some meth. Maybe GHB or something more exotic. Uses this ‘special project’ of his for cover. Tonight his luck runs out. Either he fucks up the recipe and the lab catches fire, or his competition whacks him and torches the place.'
'That’s all speculation,' Bradley said. 'I say he was clean.'
'You have such touching faith in human nature.'
'No. I just have two kids of my own.' Bradley brushed away a few more ceiling tiles, then recoiled. 'God.'
He had exposed the victim’s chest, where skin and muscle had been burned away altogether, leaving a gap
