Supervolcano: All Fall Down

bigger one than she’s got. Take a look at Vanessa’s baby pictures if you don’t believe me. He takes after Dad more than Rob or me.”

“Well. .” Kelly, Rob realized belatedly, didn’t want to look at Vanessa’s baby photo. She slid Deborah out from under the light blanket and raised her to a shoulder. “I sort of thought the same thing, but I wasn’t sure. I know my folks think she does, but they aren’t exactly objective.”

“No, huh?” Marshall said. They both laughed.

Kelly quickly sobered, though. “I hope this story has a happy ending. It’s eating up your father, too.”

So much for babies. So much for distraction. “Yeah, I know,” Marshall said. “He’d be even worse if it wasn’t for you.”

“Thanks. That’s one of the sweetest things anybody ever told me,” Kelly said. “I just wish I could do more. I wish anybody could do more. . ” Deborah burped lustily, then spat up. Babies could be distracting in all kinds of ways.

* * *

Colin Ferguson chained his bike to the rack outside the San Atanasio Police Station. Some people made a point of greeting him as he walked to his desk. More made a point of pretending he didn’t exist. It had been like that ever since Caroline Pitcavage found her husband’s body. He kept hoping things would loosen up-a hope looking more forlorn by the day.

“Good morning, Lieutenant!” his secretary said loudly. She left no doubt about whose side she was on.

“Hey, Josie,” Colin answered, at a much lower volume. He wished there were no sides to be on. His wish seemed no more likely to be granted than his hope.

On his desk was a report about a home-invasion robbery from two nights before, at an old tract house near Sword Beach and 135th Street. The bad guys hadn’t shot anybody, but they’d had guns. Jesus Villarobles, the homeowner, was still at San Atanasio Memorial with a concussion from the pistol-whipping they’d given him.

He turned the page. Had they left fingerprints behind? Things would be easier if they had. Before he could find out, his phone rang. He picked it up. “Colin Ferguson, San Atanasio PD.”

“Hello, Lieutenant. This is Lucy Chen, over in the lab. Could I see you for a few minutes, please?”

“Sure,” Colin said, thinking Nice anybody wants to. “What’s cooking?”

“I’d rather talk about it here than over the phone, if that’s all right.”

“O-kay. Be right over.” Colin didn’t scratch his head, but he wanted to. He felt eyeballs boring into his back as he got up and walked out of the big, communal office. He might have been doing nothing more dramatic than taking a leak. Those eyeballs skewered him anyway.

The lab was down the hall, a couple of doors past the men’s room. The air inside it held a faint chemical odor. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was always there.

“What’s going on?” Colin asked Lucy. Whatever it was, he felt sure it would be something he needed to know about and no one else did. The DNA tech didn’t get excited without a good reason, or sometimes even with one-yet another reason she reminded Colin of his wife.

“This is a DNA analysis I ran last night,” Lucy Chen said, handing him a printout. “Tell me what you make of it.”

Colin wasn’t a DNA expert. He wasn’t a fingerprint expert, either, but he made a pretty fair amateur. He made a pretty fair amateur at DNA patterns, too, also because his line of work had turned him into one. And the pattern on the printout looked familiar. He’d seen it, or one much like it, way too many times. He whistled softly. “Lucy, if this isn’t the South Bay Strangler’s DNA, it’s mighty darn close.”

“It isn’t.” She took another printout off the countertop and gave it to him. “This one is from the Strangler.”

He held one in each hand. Excitement tingled through him. They were close. A break! At last, a break! After so many years, a break! If you had a relative’s DNA, you at least knew who the perp’s relative was, which put you a hell of a lot closer to grabbing him, too. He hefted the printout that didn’t come from the Strangler. “So, who does this belong to?”

She looked at it. She looked at him. “Darren Pitcavage,” she answered.

“You’re kidding,” he said automatically. One look at her face told him she wasn’t. He floundered: “But that’s crazy. It’s impossible. If that one’s from Darren, who-?” He ran out of words, but waved the other printout.

“It may be crazy. It is not impossible. We did the autopsy on the chief just a few days ago, so I had easy access to a DNA sample from him.” Lucy handed Colin one more printout. “This is from Darren’s father.”

He examined it. He examined the Strangler’s pattern. No, he wasn’t a DNA expert, but he was a pretty fair amateur. He was plenty good enough to understand what he was seeing. “They’re the same,” he said dully. “Mike Pitcavage’s DNA and the South Bay Strangler’s DNA are the same.”

“That’s right.” Lucy Chen’s mouth twisted as her head bobbed up and down. “I didn’t want to believe it, either. I still don’t want to believe it. But that’s what the evidence shows. Unless the chief has an identical twin I don’t know about. .”

“He doesn’t.” Almost blindly, Colin reached for the countertop. He needed something to steady himself. Who wouldn’t, with the underpinnings of his world knocked out from under him? Yes, cops went bad. That was why police departments needed internal-affairs units. But bad like this? “Jesus!” he choked out.

“Are you all right?” Lucy sounded genuinely alarmed. What did he look like? How gray had he gone? He wasn’t just pale-he was sure of that.

And he wasn’t all right, either-nowhere close-so he answered, “No.” Before Lucy could ease him down into a chair or start CPR or do whatever else she thought he needed, he made haste to add, “But it’s nothing you can do anything about. It’s nothing anybody can do anything about, not any more.”

“No, not any more,” the DNA tech agreed.

Almost in spite of itself, Colin’s mind started working again. Things that hadn’t added up before suddenly made a lot more sense. “Well, now we know why he killed himself,” he ground out.

“That also occurred to me,” Lucy said. “No arrest. No trial. No jail cell. No waiting for them to stick the needle in his arm, if they ever get around to it. He took the easy way out.”

“He sure did,” Colin said grimly. “And now I understand why he always worked so hard to keep Darren from catching a felony rap. He wasn’t just playing softhearted daddy. You get arrested for a felony, you have to give your DNA sample. And that would have pointed at him along with his worthless kid. No wonder he went off the deep end when Darren landed in trouble too deep for daddy to get him off. He totally flipped out-at me, mostly.”

“I heard. . something about that,” Lucy said. Colin wasn’t surprised. A police department was like any other small town. News got around fast. The cops smoking in the parking lot had heard Mike Pitcavage melt down. Their stories wouldn’t have shrunk in the telling.

Once Colin’s brain started grinding away, it didn’t want to stop. “Remember how, when we were at poor Mrs. Mandelbaum’s house, he knew his way around like he’d been there before? He, uh, darn well had.”

“I do remember!” Lucy Chen exclaimed. “I didn’t think much of it then, but I do. I just thought he’d been in a hundred places like it, so he’d kind of know where all the rooms were.”

“Uh-huh. Exactly what I figured, too,” Colin said. “He was a cop for a long time. Of course he’d seen places like that before. Right. He sure had.”

“Hadn’t he, though?” Lucy clicked her tongue between her teeth. “Where. . Where do we go from here?”

Colin didn’t answer directly, not right away. “Who else knows, besides you and me?”

“As soon as I was sure, I told Dr. Ishikawa and showed him the results,” she said. “He told me to call you.”

I owe the coroner one, Colin thought. Yes, Ishikawa would have told Lucy to call him because he’d been chasing the South Bay Strangler so long. But Colin judged that wasn’t the only reason. Ishikawa would also know what was going on in the department. Nobody could blame Colin for the chief’s sudden shuffling off this mortal coil now.

He made himself come back to the business immediately at hand. “Okay. Good, even,” he said. “But this will have to get out. Not just to us-to all the other departments who’ve been after the Strangler.” He let out a long, regretful sigh. “It’ll have to get out to the TV and the papers, too. The suicide already has. San Atanasio’s gonna be in the news for a while. So will I. And so will you, I’m afraid. Get used to it.”

Lucy winced. “Can I go on vacation for about the next three years?”