7th Heaven

cathedral ceiling, the massive fireplace, and the mirror above the mantel. Now it was all smoke-blackened gilt and carbon-streaked marble. The bodies were lying close together in three inches of black water, flat on their stomachs, hands curled in a pugilistic attitude, the result of tendons tightening as their bodies burned.

“If there were ligatures on the victims, they’ve burned up,” Hanni said, hunching down beside the bodies. “No point in dusting for prints. Maybe tomorrow, in the light of day… Anyway,” Hanni went on, “I found this on the kitchen counter.” He handed a book to Conklin. I read the title: A History of Yachting. “Got a signature in there for you, Rich. It’s in Latin.”

Conklin cracked open the book to the title page and read out loud. “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.”

“What’s it mean?” Hanni asked him.

Conklin tried to hunch it out, saying, “Something, something, bad is love? I don’t know. What the hell. My tenthgrade Latin is exhausted.”

“Aren’t we all?” Claire said, stepping into the room, a crew of two assistants trailing behind her. “What have we got here?”

She walked to the bodies, rolled the smaller of the two, and a rush of air came from the victim’s mouth. Paaahhhhhh.

“Look here,” Claire said to Chuck, showing him a liquor bottle that had been partially hidden by the victim’s body.

Hanni picked it up with a gloved hand.

“Maybe we’ll get some prints after all,” he said.

Conklin and I left Claire and Hanni with the bodies of the victims and went outside. The first officer pointed out an attractive woman standing at the front of the now-thinning crowd at the edge of the lawn.

“That’s the woman who called it in. Her name is Debra Kurtz,” the cop told me. “She lives directly across the street.”

Kurtz was in her late forties, five four or so, a tad too thin, maybe anorectic, wearing black spandex running gear. Mascaraed tear tracks marked her cheeks. I introduced myself and Conklin, asked Kurtz if she’d known the deceased.

“Steve and Sandy Meacham were my closest friends,” she said. “I called 911 when I saw the fire. God, oh, God, it was already too late.”

“Mind coming down to the station with us?” I asked. “We need to know everything we can about your friends.”

Chapter 44

DEBRA KURTZ WAS DRINKING day-old coffee in the smaller, cleaner of our two interview rooms. “The Meachams were the greatest couple in the world,” she told us tearfully.

“Any reason you can think that anyone would want to hurt them?” I asked.

“I’m going to the soft drink machine downstairs,” Conklin said to Kurtz. “Can I get you something else?”

She shook her head no.

When Conklin was gone, Kurtz leaned across the table and told me about Sandy ’s drinking and that both Sandy and Steven had had casual affairs. “I don’t think that means anything, but just so you know.”

Kurtz told me that the Meachams had two children; a boy, Scott, nineteen or so, away at college, and a girl, Rebecca, older and married, living in Philadelphia. Kurtz choked up again, as though something painful was stuck in her gut – or her conscience.

“Is there something else you want to tell me, Debra? Something going on between you and Steven Meacham?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, there was.”

Kurtz watched the door as she talked, as if she wanted to finish talking before Conklin returned. She said, “I hated myself for cheating on Sandy. It’s hard to explain, but in a way I loved her as much as I loved Steve.”

I pushed a box of tissues over to her side of the table as Conklin came back into the interrogation room. He was holding a computer printout.

“You have a rap sheet, Ms. Kurtz,” said Conklin, pulling out a chair. “That kinda surprised me.”

“I was in grief,” the woman told us, her gray eyes flooding anew. “I didn’t hurt anyone but myself.”

Conklin turned the pages toward me.

“You were arrested for burglary.”

“My boyfriend talked me into it, and I was stupid enough to go along. Anyway, I was acquitted,” Kurtz said.

“You weren’t acquitted,” said Conklin. “You got probation. I think you made a deal to flip on your boyfriend, am I right? Oh, and then there’s the arson.”

“Randy, my husband Randy, was dead. I wanted to cut my heart out,” she said, pounding her chest with her fist. “I set fire to our house because it was the only way I could see what I felt. The bottomless grief.”

I leaned back in my chair. I think my mouth may have dropped open. Debra Kurtz reacted to the shock on my face.

“It was my own house,” she shouted. “I didn’t even file an insurance claim. I only hurt myself, do you understand? I only hurt myself!”

“Had Steven Meacham broken off your affair?”

“Yes. But it was weeks ago, and it was mutual.”

“You weren’t a little angry?” Conklin asked. “Didn’t feel a little bottomless grief?”

“No, no, whatever you’re thinking, I didn’t set fire to the Meachams’ house. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.”

We asked Debra Kurtz where she was when the Malone house burned, and we asked her if she knew her way around Palo Alto. She had alibis, and we wrote everything down. What she told us added up to a crazy woman with a burning desire to both destroy and self-destruct.

It added up, and yet it didn’t add up at all. And now it was half past five in the morning.

“You have any trips planned, Debra?” Conklin said, in his charming way.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Good. Please don’t leave town without letting us know.”

Chapter 45

JOE WAS STILL ASLEEP when I crawled into bed. I gently shoved Martha out of my spot and snuggled up to Joe’s back, wanting to wake him up so that I could tell him what was bugging me. Joe turned toward me, pulled me close to his body, buried his face in my smoky hair.

“Have you been barhopping, Blondie?”

“House fire,” I said. “Two dead.”

“Like the Malones?”

“Just like the Malones.”

I threw an arm across his chest, rested my face in the crook of his neck, exhaled loudly.

“Talk to me, honey,” Joe said.

Excellent.

“It’s about this woman, Debra Kurtz,” I said, as Martha got back up on the bed, turned around a couple of