John Lutz - Burn

A multiline phone chirped and flashed yellow lights on Mc shy;Gregor’s desk, but he ignored it and the calls were answered elsewhere.

Two detectives Carver had noticed when he’d walked past the booking area were joking and laughing loudly out in the hall. McGregor unwound from his desk chair, strode to the door, slammed it hard, then stalked back behind his desk and sat down.

The laughing and joking got softer then ceased altogether.

McGregor absently inserted a forefinger in his ear, rotated it for what seemed a full minute, then wiped the finger on his shirtsleeve. In the hot, confining office, his body odor was probably enough by itself to make a suspect confess.

“The deal was that we share information,” Carver reminded him.

McGregor grinned and probed the gap between his teeth with his tongue. “Deal? Deals with shitheads like you don’t count. They’re like putting poison out for roaches. On the other hand, if I wasn’t to tell you how this mess of yours wound up, you’d be sniffing around like a cur smells a bitch in heat, being a pest all the longer.”

“You have a poetic way of putting things.”

“Well, it ain’t gonna rhyme, but here it is: Marla was shacked up in Orlando with a guy named Dan, fella who customizes vans so the suckers think they got a rolling Taj Mahal. She’d known him for a while and they had an on-again, off-again thing going. He knows nothing about her being stalked or anything else. Only knew she was a lively piece of tail. He says she left his apartment the evening of the fire but didn’t say where she was going.”

“What about the fire?”

“Arson squad says it was set with an accelerant, probably gasoline, since there was a metal gas can in the debris. There wasn’t much left of the bodies. The autopsy report says each was shot, probably fatally, before the fire got to them. No way to know which of them started the fire, or who shot who first. My bet would be on Brant. Though the place was rented, so Marla might have torched it.”

“What about the guns?” Carver asked, marveling at the idea of a penny-wise murderer-arsonist.

“We found only one gun, or what was left of it. A thirty-two revolver.”

“Two corpses,” Carver said, “only one gun.”

“That’s right. You pass the fucking math test.”

“So where’s the other gun?”

“Who knows and who gives a shit?”

“I don’t and I do,” Carver said. “Were all the bullets thirty-twos?”

“No way to say for sure. The heat of the fire melted them down. Messed up the gun, too. There was no way to run ballistics tests. Way I see it, there might have been only one gun to begin with, and Marla and Brant got shot when they were struggling over it. Or their deaths might have been the result of a murder-suicide pact. Anything’s possible. After all, you never found out what the fuck was going on between them. If there ever was another gun, it must have got lost in the confusion of the fire. Or maybe it got stolen later. Lots of people at the scene, poking around.”

Carver folded his hands over the crook of his cane and leaned forward in his chair, saying nothing.

“Like I said,” McGregor told him, “anything’s possible. And since we got nobody to charge, the case is fucking closed.”

“The way you like them,”

“Nothing wrong with that. I’m a cop.”

“What about the other dead man?”

“The not-so-jolly green giant? He got mashed by a fire engine. We haven’t identified him yet except by that silly a.k.a., Attila Jones.”

“Achilles,” Carver corrected.

“Whatever. It’s all Greek to me, My guess is we never will know who he is. His prints don’t match anything on record, and it’s for sure his mommy’s not gonna turn up and claim the carcass.”

“No ID on him?” Carver asked.

“Weren’t you listening?”

Carver stared at McGregor and waited.

“OK, OK. There was nothing in his pockets except twenty bucks and the keys to a motorcycle parked on the next block.”

“A Harley-Davidson?”

“That’s right. Stolen plates, stolen bike. No surprise there except that sometime somewhere somebody trained the geek to ride a motorcycle.”

Frustration tightened like a fist in Carver’s stomach. He’d never know who hired Jones, or whether it was Marla or Brant who wanted him to back away from the investigation. And if Marla knew she was Portia’s sister, so Brant might have known and had some motive to harass Marla. Carver realized that now there was no way to sort out victim or perpetrator.

“Anything else?” he asked, but not with any real hope.

McGregor sneered. “Only if I can figure out a way to charge you with something.”

Carver stood up and limped toward the door.

“And I’ll think of a way eventually,” McGregor added.

Neither man said good morning. Neither would have been sincere.

Without looking back, Carver went out the door. He needed fresh air almost as much as he had the night of the fire.

“What did McGregor say?” Beth asked when Carver returned to the cottage.

“That the case is closed.”

He told her the details of his visit with McGregor. She listened carefully, all the while continuing making a sandwich at the breakfast bar. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost noon. Without asking if he was hungry, she began building another tuna salad sandwich. For him, he assumed.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“Sure you are,” she told him. “You only had coffee for breakfast. Eat this. You need it.”

He didn’t say no. It was best not to cross her these days.

On the cottage porch after lunch, sitting next to Beth and watching the sun spark off the sea, Carver said, “I’ll never know the truth.” He spoke more to a soaring gull than to Beth. “Who was the stalker and who was the intended victim? Who was the killer? And why?”

Beth turned her face in his direction and raised her sunglasses so the lenses rested above her forehead like a second pair of eyes. She was sweating in the afternoon heat. A bead of perspiration zigzagged from her hairline down her temple and cheek. “But you do know the truth now, lover. Which is that human nature’s so complex the truth’s hardly ever accessible.”

“I have a problem with that,” Carver said.

She laughed. Then she bent effortlessly, picked up one of her sandals from the porch floor, and swatted hard at an insect near her chair. “Only problem is, Fred, you don’t accept it.”

“Sometimes I do.”

“No. Never. You keep flying at the light like a wasp at a window.” She examined the sandal’s rubber sole and made a face. “Why I love you, I guess.”

He stood up and went inside for a cold beer.

Then he sat for a while longer, staring out at the sea.

When Carver parked the Olds in front of 22 Jacaranda Lane the next morning, he found half of Marla’s house still standing. Her car remained where it had been parked in the driveway, tilting toward the house on two partly melted tires, its left side charred and blistered. No attempt had been made to board up any of the remaining windows; there would have been little point, with much of the house reduced to blackened, skeletal framework.

The police were finished there, and probably the insurance investigators, too. The tattered remains of a police-scene ribbon dangled from where it was tied in a bow around a porch rail, reminding Carver of when people put up yellow ribbons in support of political hostages. Partially protected from firefighter action by the railing, the dead potted plants on the porch looked virtually unchanged. One of the terra-cotta pots had been knocked about six inches out of line, but that was all.