I put my hand on his shoulder, knowing that we were going to treat the Malones’ deaths as homicides unless it was proven otherwise. Upstairs, the fire crew was doing mop-up and overhaul, dismantling the second-story ceiling, putting out hot spots under the eaves.
“The security system was off,” Hanni said, joining us. “The fire department got the call from a neighbor. The fire started in this room,” he said, pointing out the furniture that had been burned low to the ground.
He looked around the room at the mounds of plaster and debris. “After we sift through all this, I’ll let you know if I find anything, but I think you can pretty much kiss off any notes or fingerprints.”
“But you’ll try anyway, right?” Conklin said.
“I said I would, Rich.”
Last thing we needed was for Conklin to get into a fight. I asked him what the Malones were like.
“Kelly said her dad could be a prick,” Rich said, “but when you’re eighteen, that could’ve meant he wouldn’t let her stay out with me past eleven.”
“Tell me whatever else you remember.”
“Bert sold luxury cars. Patty was a homemaker. They had money, obviously. They entertained a lot. Their friends seemed nice – regular parents, you know.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time regular people turned out to be twisted,” Hanni muttered.
A sweep of headlights drew my eyes toward the broken plate glass window. The coroner’s van joined the fleet of law enforcement and fire department vehicles on the street.
Noonan called out to me. “I checked out the bedroom on the second floor, Sarge. There’s a safe in the closet. The lock and the safe are intact, but the door is open – and the safe is empty.”
Chapter 19
“ROBBERY WAS THE MOTIVE for
Before Claire could say, “Who died?” I reached out to her for a hug, said into her ear, “Conklin knew the victims.”
“Gotcha,” she said.
As Claire unpacked her scene kit, I told her about the manhandled corpse. Then I stepped out of her way as she took pictures of both bodies with her old Minolta, two shots from every angle.
“There are two doors to this room,” she said as her camera flashed. “Chuck, you say that this room was the point of origin. But the victims stayed in here. Why was that?”
“They could’ve been caught by surprise,” Hanni said. He was cutting samples from the carpet, putting fibers into K-packs.
“If they were drinking and fell asleep, maybe a cigarette dropped down into the couch cushions.”
Hanni explained what was still so hard to believe – that a fire could fill a room this size with smoke in less than a minute, that sleeping people could wake up coughing, be unable to see, get disoriented.
Chuck said, “Someone says, ‘Let’s go this way.’ Other person says, ‘No, it’s this way.’ Maybe someone falls. Smoke inhalation gets them. Boom, they’re down, and they’re unconscious. These two people were dead inside a couple of minutes.”
Conklin came back into the room holding a book in his gloved hand. “I found this on the staircase.”
He handed the book to me. “
I opened the book to the title page, saw an inscription written there in ballpoint pen.
“This is Latin,” I said to my partner, sounding out the words. “Annuit C?ptis.”
“That’s pronounced
“You know Latin?”
He shrugged. “I went to Catholic school.”
I said, “So, what do you think, Rich? Is the firebug leaving us a message? That God’s okay with this?”
Conklin looked around at the destruction, said, “Not the God I believe in.”
Chapter 20
AT THREE THAT MORNING, Hanni, Conklin, and I watched the fire department board up the Malones’ windows and put a lock on the front door. The onlookers were back in their beds, and as the sounds of hammering cracked through the otherwise silent neighborhood, Hanni said, “There was a fire four months ago in Palo Alto, reminds me of this one.”
“How so?”
“Big, expensive house. The alarm was turned off. Two people died in the living room, and I had the same question in my mind: Why didn’t they leave?”
“Panic, disorientation, like you were saying.”
“Yeah, it happens. But since I wasn’t called in until a couple of days after the fire, I couldn’t know for sure. Drives me crazy when the fire department decides the fire’s accidental without an arson investigator present. Anyway, the bodies were cremated at the funeral home by the time I was called.”
“You thought the fire was suspicious?” Conklin asked.
Hanni nodded. “I still think so. The victims were good people, and they had money. But no one could come up with a motive for anyone to kill Henry and Peggy Jablonsky – not revenge, not insurance fraud, not even ‘I hate your face.’ So I was left with a bad feeling and no way to tell if the fire was arson or a spark flew out of the fireplace and lit up the Christmas tree.”
“I guess you didn’t find a book with Latin written inside,” I said.
“By the time I got there, the ‘evidence eradication unit’ had tossed a mountain of soaked household goods into the front yard. I guess I wasn’t looking for a book.”
Hanni took his car keys out of his pocket. “Okay, guys, I’m done. See you in a few hours.”
Rich and I stood back from his van as the arson investigator drove off.
“Were you able to reach Kelly?” I asked my partner.
“Got her answering machine. I didn’t know what to say.” He shook his head. “I finally said, ‘It’s Rich. Conklin. I know it’s been a long time, Kelly. But. Um. Could you call me right away?’ ”
“That’s good. That’s fine.”
“I don’t know. She’ll either think I’m a psycho for calling her at one in the morning to say hello after twelve years. Or, if she knows that I’m a cop, I just scared the hell out of her.”
Chapter 21
THE ME’S OFFICE is in a building connected to the Hall of Justice by a breezeway out the back door of the lobby. Claire was already working in the chilly gray heart of the autopsy suite when I got there at 9:30 that morning. She said, “Hey, darlin’,” barely looking up as she drew her scalpel from Patty Malone’s sternum to her pelvic bone. The dead woman’s hands were clenched and her legless body was carbonized.
“She hardly looks like a person,” I said.
“Bodies burn like candles, you know,” Claire said. “They become part of the fuel.” She clamped back the burned tissue.
“Did the blood tests come back from the lab?”
