Faye Kellerman - The Burnt House

Decker started by carefully taking out the books, the CDs, and the DVDs and searching behind them. When nothing materialized, he checked behind the audio/video equipment. Satisfied that the phone wasn’t stashed anywhere in the entertainment unit, he began looking under couches and chairs. Since the condo’s living room, dining room, and kitchen were open space divided by a breakfast bar, he could hear Marge opening and closing doors in the kitchen.

“Any luck?” Decker asked her.

“Not so far. What about you?”

“Zilch.”

The three detectives searched through the late afternoon until the sunlight dimmed and early evening set in. They rooted through drawers and cupboards, peered under couches and chairs, snooped inside medicine cabinets, and turned over the master bedroom’s mattress to see if anything had been squirreled away. Ninety minutes had elapsed before the blood-spatter experts arrived. By that time, Ivan had all but barricaded himself inside his home office.

Once the techs arrived, it took another hour to focus in on the areas to test. They decided to concentrate on spraying the carpet under the couch where Marge had found the pen and felt something sticky. Then they moved on to the walls, the floorboards, and the baseboard molding in the kitchen. They also sprayed the walls in the living room, office, the guest bedroom, and the master bedroom. Last, they applied luminol to the marital mattress. By then night had fallen. They drew the drapes and turned off the lights, shrouding the condo in inky darkness.

To say there was no blood-protein luminescence at all would have been a lie. A very careful eye could pick up random specks of blue in the kitchen (accidental cuts made in food preparation), a decent amount of glow around both bathroom toilets (urine as well as blood glows blue under luminol), and as Judge Puhl had predicted, there were several splotches of blue on the master bedroom’s mattress (old menstrual leakage). But there was nothing indicating a bloodletting had taken place anywhere inside the condo.

The lights were turned back on. Decker then asked if the techs would luminol the corners of the dining-room and the coffee tables as well as the breakfast bar. His logic was that maybe a physical altercation had taken place and perhaps Ivan pushed Roseanne, causing the phone to fly from her hand and under the couch. Just maybe she fell and hit her head on the table, and the blow knocked her unconscious or dead.

The breakfast bar and the corners of the tables were tested and came up clean. The breakfast bar did glow slightly, but that could have been caused by raw chicken or ground beef spilling juices. Luminol did not distinguish between animal or human sera. The techs took a slide scraping, hoping to have enough material to test for presence of human blood.

And that sticky area that Marge had felt under the couch-Decker had felt it as well-showed no luminescence. The matted carpet nap had probably come from some other source, most likely a food accident.

Four hours later, Decker was thanking Dresden for his time and for his cooperation. Dresden was magnanimous in his forgiveness, shaking Decker’s hand with a firm grip. “I hope that this finally puts to bed some very evil rumors about my love for my wife. It was hard enough grieving the first time, Lieutenant. By these hideous innuendos, I’ve felt like I’ve had to grieve all over again.”

Decker said, “We’re sorry for any inconvenience, Mr. Dresden, but your wife’s body hasn’t turned up. We’re doing our job and I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“I realize you’re public servants, but it’s still a terrible thing…to lose your wife and then be a suspect in her disappearance. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave. I could use a little privacy…not to mention the cleanup.”

“Of course.” Decker granted Dresden a slow smile. “By the way, I didn’t see your lawyer anywhere.”

“I decided not to call him. Why bother wasting bucks when all he’d do was twiddle his thumbs and watch you work. I knew I didn’t need him. I had nothing to hide.”

THEY PILED INTO the unmarked, Oliver driving them back to the station house to pick up their respective cars, Marge sitting shotgun. Oliver said, “Could it be that the sleaze had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance? Lots of guys cheat. Most of them don’t kill their wives.”

“Yeah, that part’s true. But of the guys who kill their wives, almost all of them have girlfriends.” No one spoke for a second. Marge looked over her shoulder at Decker in the backseat. “What do you think, Loo?”

“I don’t know. He seems sleazy enough. Maybe Roseanne did die in the crash. Just as likely, she was murdered elsewhere.”

Marge said, “Even if she was murdered elsewhere, it doesn’t mean that Dresden didn’t do it.”

“Or he could be innocent,” Oliver insisted. “Maybe the phone we saw was Roseanne’s old, lost phone. Maybe she bought another one exactly like it.”

“Then why didn’t Ivan just tell us that?”

“Because he knew that our finding Roseanne’s phone would make him look bad.”

“Not as bad as throwing it away,” Marge said. “That’s an immediate sign of guilt.”

Decker said, “If Ivan did it and the condo wasn’t the murder scene, where else could he have done it?”

Marge shrugged. “Maybe he did it in his car. Maybe that’s why he sold it.”

“Who’d he sell it to?” When the question was met with silence, Decker said, “Maybe we should find out?”

IN THE HEART of the north Valley sat the major parts manufacturing plant for Katumi Motors, the factory housed in a white, cinderblock rectangle, and fronted by a green lawn sporting a flower bed that spelled out KATUMI in white petunias. The commercial area held industries of all types, along with granite, brick, lumber, and marble yards. Decker often came here for wholesale prices whenever he embarked upon a home-improvement project, and each year it seemed to get uglier and uglier. Today the Sunday skies held rain clouds and the smoggy, foggy air was infused with gloom. The bad weather plus the lack of anything green made the vicinity feel like an old, depressed company town.

Once inside Katumi headquarters, he was led to the third floor and introduced to Brian Alderweiss, a lab-coated, thirtysomething tech who was the undisputed leader of Katumi’s Rapid Prototyping. The monolithic machine took up a nice portion of its dedicated room with computers, monitors, and other unidentifiable equipment occupying most of the wall space. It took some time for Brian and his assistants to load the CT images and then to calibrate them to the laser arm of the apparatus. He spoke as he worked. “The most important transmitted data is for us to tell the beam what portion of the image to cut out. If you mess this up, you’re not going to get the model you want.”

“Take your time,” Decker said generously. Hours later the techs were still calibrating and Decker rued the casual comment he had made, even though there was damn little he could do about it. Besides, this entire day wasn’t about him. It was about trying to give an anonymous set of grieving parents a body to bury.

When the programming was finally put into action, a precision laser beam did as told, happily cut through paper-thin laminates of wood, one sheet stacked atop another.

Alderweiss said, “Our machines take our virtual designs off our computers and transform them into cross-sectional computer images. In our specific case, we use the technology in anything that involves innovative or major design reconfigurations that will affect hood mechanics-things like engine blocks and radiators. It helps to be holding a physical model to see if it actually does fit the space it was designed to fit.”