7th Heaven

I held Richie’s glum gaze for a moment, knowing how bad he felt, feeling bad for him, then I answered the phone.

Claire said, “Sugar, you and Conklin got a minute to come down here? I’ve got a few things to show you.”

Chapter 62

CLAIRE LOOKED UP when Rich and I banged open the ambulance bay doors to the autopsy suite. She wore a flower-printed paper cap and an apron, the ties straining across her girth. She said, “Hey, you guys. Check this out.”

Instead of a corpse, there was a bisected tube of what looked like muscle, about seven inches long. The thing was clamped open on the autopsy table.

“What is that?” I asked her.

“This here’s a trachea,” Claire told us. “Belonged to a schnauzer Hanni found in the bushes outside the Chu house. See how pink it is? No soot in the pooch’s windpipe and his carbon monoxide is negative, so I’m saying he wasn’t in the house during the fire. Most likely he was in the yard, raised the alarm, and someone put him down with a blow to the head.

“See this fracture here?”

So much for the APB on Graybeard. Whose sad task would it be to tell Molly that her dog was dead? Claire went on to tell us she’d spent the day getting George and Nancy Chu’s bodies from the funeral home.

“It’s not our jurisdiction, not our case, but I finally got permission from the Chus’ son, Ruben. Told him that if I have to testify against the killer and I haven’t examined all the victims’ bodies, I’ll get diced into pieces by the attorney for the defense.”

I murmured an encouraging “uh-huh” and Claire went on.

“Ruben Chu was a mess. Didn’t want his parents to ‘suffer any more indignities,’ but anyway… I got the release. Both bodies are at X-ray now,” Claire added.

“What was your take?” I asked.

“They were burned pretty bad, a few extremities fell off during their travels, but one of George Chu’s ankles still had several wraps of intact monofilament fibers on it. So that, my friends, is evidence that they were absolutely, positively tied up.”

“Great job, Claire.”

“And I got enough blood for the tox screens.”

“You gonna keep us guessing, girlfriend?”

“You’re saying I live to frustrate you? I’m talking as fast as I can.” Claire laughed. She squeezed my shoulder affectionately, then removed a sheet of paper from a manila envelope, put it down on the table next to the dog’s trachea.

She ran her finger down the column of data. “High alcohol content in their blood,” she said. “Either the Chus had been drinking a lot, or else they’d been drinking high-octane stuff.”

“Same as Sandy Meacham?”

“Very much the same,” said Claire.

I flashed on the inscription in the book. Sobria inebrietas. Sober intoxication. I autodialed Chuck Hanni on my cell phone. If I was right, it would explain why he didn’t detect the odor of ignitable liquids at either of our fire scenes.

“Chuck? It’s Lindsay. Could those fires have been set with booze?”

Chapter 63

THE SUN WENT DOWN and someone in the night crew snapped on the bright overhead lights. Rich and I were still wandering around in the dark. Somewhere, a very smug killer was having his dinner, toasting himself on his success, maybe planning another fire – and we didn’t know who he was or when he would strike again.

While Chi and McNeil reinterviewed the Malones’ and the Meachams’ friends and neighbors, Conklin and I sat at our desks, going over the murder book together. We reviewed Claire’s findings, the photos of rubberneckers at the fire scenes, the handwriting expert’s comparison of the inscriptions in each of the books left at the fire scenes, and the expert’s opinion: “I can’t say one hundred percent because it’s block lettering, but looks like all the samples were written by the same hand.”

We reviewed our own eyeball tours of the crime scenes, trying to reduce all of it to a few illuminating truths, speaking in the kind of shorthand that you use with a partner. And I felt that other connection, too, the one I wouldn’t let Rich mention but sometimes just arced across our desks. Like it was doing now.

I got up, went to the bathroom, washed my face, got a cup of coffee for me and one for Conklin, black, no sugar. Sat back down, said, “Now, where were we?”

As the night tour walked and talked around us, Rich ticked off on his fingers what we had: “The couples were all in their forties and well-to-do. The doors to all the houses were unlocked, and the alarms weren’t set. No sign of gunfire. The couples all had a child of college age. They were all robbed, but the killer took only jewelry and cash.”

“Okay, and here are a few suppositions,” I said. “The killer is smart enough and unthreatening enough to talk his way into the houses. And I’m going to also say that it seems probable that there were two assailants; one to tie up the victims, one to hold a gun.”

Rich nodded, said, “He or they used fishing line as ligatures because they’d burn off quickly in the fire. And they used an untraceable accelerant. That’s careful. They don’t leave evidence, and that’s smart.

“But I don’t think Molly Chu was in the plan,” Rich added. “This is the first time another person was in the house with the victims. I’m thinking Molly had already passed out from smoke inhalation when her ‘angel’ found her and subsequently carried her out. Kind of heroic, wouldn’t you say?”

“So maybe the killer thought she didn’t see him,” I said. “And so he felt safe carrying her out of the house. Yeah, I don’t think he wanted the little girl to die, hon.”

Rich looked up, grinned at me.

“I, uh. Didn’t mean – shit.”

“Forget it, babe,” said Conklin. “Means nothin’.” He grinned wider.

I said, “Shut up,” and threw a paper clip at his head. He snatched it out of the air and went on.

“So,” he said, “let’s say Molly saw one of the killers, okay? And let’s say he’s a college-age kid as Molly suggested. The Malones, the Meachams, the Chus, and that couple in Palo Alto, the Jablonskys – they all had kids in college. But their kids all went to different schools.”

“True,” I said. “But a kid, any kid, comes to the door and looks presentable, Mom and Dad might open it.

“Rich, maybe that’s the con. When I was in school, I was always bringing people home that my mom didn’t know. So, what if a couple of kids come to the door and say they’re friends with your kid?”

“That would be easy to fake,” Rich said. “Local newspapers do stories on kids at school. So-and-so’s daughter or son, attending such-and-such school won this-or-that award.”

Rich drummed his fingers on the desk, and I rested my chin in my hand. Instead of feeling on the brink of a breakthrough, it seemed that we’d just opened the field of potential suspects to every male college-age kid in California who knew high school Latin – and, by the way, was into robbery, torture, arson, and murder.

I thought about the puzzle pieces. Providence favoring the killers’ actions, and money being the root of all evil. There was the sci-fi book Fahrenheit 451, and now a book about a high-placed fire official who’d set fires. When John Orr was caught, he’d said, “I was stupid, and I did what stupid people do.”

These killers weren’t making Orr’s mistakes.

They were going out of their way to show just how smart they were. Was saving Molly Chu their one