Don Winslow - California Fire And Life

Even women who weren't alcoholics would go out and get hammered so they could come to the meetings and look like these ladies.

What twelve little steps and a few hundred thousand spare dollars can't do, Letty thinks.

Anyway, she's there, and the ladies aren't drinking greasy coffee — they're sipping Frappuccinos (decaf, low-fat milk) out of clear-plastic go-cups. There are a few guys there, not your nine-to-five types, but real estate brokers and insurance salesmen and other men who can take the middle of the afternoon off to share their experience, strength, and hope and maybe get lucky, and as fortune and solid planning would have it there's a Holiday Inn within a hot five-minute walk of the meeting. There are so many pickups happening at this meeting that it could be called Ladies Who (Drank) Lunch and the Men Who Lust After Them, Letty thinks.

Quit being such a bitch, she tells herself.

It's not their fault they're rich and you're not.

They're gorgeous and you're not.

Get over it.

And get over Jack Wade. Twelve years is too long a time to be carrying a torch. Your arm gets tired. Twelve years and the son of a bitch never even called. Never would have called. You never would have seen him again if you didn't need his help, and you're such a bitch that you'd use him like that.

But the truth is she has been carrying a torch for twelve years. She's had a few boyfriends but nothing serious because in the back of her head — in the back of her soul — she's holding out for something she lost.

Jack.

Jack lost his soul and took yours with it.

So you're pushing forty and you have no husband and no kids and no life outside busting skulls.

And it isn't these ladies' fault.

It's your own.

So get over it, girl.

So she sits and listens to the preamble and to the speaker and it's the same stuff everywhere: if you're a drunk, you're a drunk; no matter what the view is, it turns to shit. She makes small talk with a couple of the ladies during the break, and when the meeting resumes and the chairperson asks if anyone wants to speak, Letty waits for a few people to talk about what's going on with them and then she raises her hand.

My name is Letty. Hi, Letty — blah, blah, blah…

"I'm here," she says, "to ask if any of you knew my sister Pam. She died three nights ago and they say she'd been drinking. She was about five-eight, black hair, purple eyes. I know she used to hit this meeting — I don't know what other meetings she used to go to but I'm hoping you can help me."

Amidst the Oh my Gods and Not Pams and a couple of sudden sobs, about five hands shoot up.

Turns out they can help her.

Pam was sober that night, Letty says.

She and Jack are sitting at an outside table at Pirets, beside the main entrance to South Coast Plaza.

"She was at a meeting that night," Letty says between sips of her iced tea. She picks up the glass and the paper napkin blows away in the hot, dry Santa Ana wind. "She was sober then. The meeting broke up at 9:30, then she went out for coffee. With eight other women. She was sober then."

"That doesn't mean," Jack says, "that she was sober at four the next morning."

Jack's drinking a Coke. The good folks at Pirets had to search long and hard to find a soda that didn't have the word Diet in front of it. They got it done, though.

"She told her AA friends she was scared," Letty says. "Scared that Nicky was going to kill her. They told her to call the cops. They begged her to stay with them; she said it would just postpone things."

Jack says, "So she went home and the fear and anxiety drove her to the bottle."

"After Nicky left, she didn't keep any booze in the house."

"She bought a bottle of vodka-"

"I checked every liquor store on her route home," Letty says. "I talked with everyone who worked that night. Nobody remembers her."

"You're good."

"I'm motivated."

"Forget about it," Jack says.

"Forget about what?" she asks.

She knows just what he's talking about.

"About getting custody of the kids," Jack says.

"If I get him convicted of murder…"

Jack shakes his head. "You're a long way from there. Say it is an arson — how did Pam die? Ng's got it as an OD. Say you can make the next step, say it's murder. You have nothing puts Nicky there. Say you somehow manage to cross that bridge — I don't know how, but say you do — say you get Nicky convicted of murdering Pam… Mother Russia is still the declared guardian. Mother gets the kids."

"She was in on it."

"She provided an alibi," Jack says.

"So they'll take the kids from her."

"No, they won't," Jack says. "Besides which, the murder conviction isn't going to happen. Even if you could develop enough information to embarrass Bentley into moving off his call, or enough that the Sheriff's would have to reopen. Or enough to get the DA interested."

It's a long shot. A long shot to get a criminal investigation, a longer shot to get them to charge, a regular NBA three-pointer to get a conviction, because the evidence is getting colder every day.

And Letty knows all this, she just doesn't want to know it yet.

No, Nicky and Mother Russia keep the kids.

Nicky gets away with murder.

"So what are you going to do?" Letty asks. "Drop it?"

"No," Jack says. "I'm going to do my job. I'm going to investigate the claim. I'm going to see if Nicky Vale had the motive and opportunity to set the fire and kill his wife. If I find sufficient evidence, I'll deny the claim."

"And that's it?"

"That's it."

"The worst that happens to Nicky is he doesn't get paid for killing her?"

"I'm sorry."

"But it works for you, huh, Jack? You don't care what happens to the kids. All you care about is that the claim doesn't get paid, right?"

"That's my job," Jack says.

It's not all I care about — it's all I can do.

Letty gets up, says, "Same old Jack."

"Same old Jack."

"Well, same-old Jack," she says. "I'd like to tell you to go to hell, but you're the only chance I have. If you deny the claim, maybe Nicky will sue you for bad faith. Then maybe there'll be a jury verdict that says that Nicky killed Pam. A family court judge would have to take 'judicial notice' of that verdict in a custody hearing."

"That's a very long shot."

"So do your job, Jack," she says.

Like he'd do anything else.

She tosses her napkin down on the table.

"And get a life," she says.

Right, Letty, Jack thinks. Tell me to get a life.

As you walk out, take it with you.

Dinesh Adjati takes one of Jack's samples, a small piece of charred wood, and scrapes a fragment into a glass flask. He adds 50 milliliters of pentane to the flask, then pours the whole mess through some filter paper into a clean flask.

The result is a clear liquid.

He repeats this procedure for all of Jack's samples, labeling and placing the flasks in a metal rack as he goes through them.

A robotic machine then caps each flask, inserts a syringe needle into each, withdraws a cubic millimeter of liquid, and lines up the samples to go through the gas chromatograph.

One of the allegedly dirty samples goes through first.

The sample gets shot into an injection port that is pressurized at about 60 pounds per square inch of helium gas and heated to 275 °C, which vaporizes the liquid. The helium chases the sample vapor into the core of the gas chromatograph.

This is a capillary tube, about 60 meters long and one-quarter of a millimeter in diameter. The inside of it is coated with methyl silicone, a thick viscous liquid. (Here's how Dinesh explains methyl silicone to juries. He says, "If you put methyl silicone in a jar, and tip the jar upside down, and come back a day later, perhaps half of the liquid will have flowed to the bottom of the jar. If you come back another day later, probably most of it will be at the bottom. That's how thick this stuff is.")