James Patterson - 7th Heaven

Brenda turned and, swinging her hips, walked back across the gray linoleum to her desk. Jacobi read the note.

“Molly Chu is responding to the hospital shrink,” he told us. “She might be ready to talk.”

Chuck got out of his chair, but Jacobi stopped him.

“Let’s talk, Chuck. Just you and me.”

MY HEART LURCHED when I saw the little girl. Her hair was singed to an inch of frizzed, black fuzz sticking out from her scalp. Her eyebrows and lashes were gone, and her skin looked painfully pink. We approached her bed, which seemed to float under a bower of shiny helium balloons.

Molly didn’t look at me or Conklin, but two Chinese women moved aside and a white-haired woman in her seventies with rounded features and sapphire blue eyes stood up and introduced herself as Molly’s psychiatrist, Dr. Olga Matlaga.

The shrink spoke to the little girl, saying, “Some police officers are here to see you, sweetheart.”

Molly turned toward me when I said her name, but her eyes were dull, as if the life had been sucked out of her, leaving only a stick-figure representation of a child.

“Have you found Graybeard?” she asked me, her voice whispery and slowed by painkillers.

I cast a questioning look at Dr. Matlaga, who explained, “Her dog, Graybeard, is missing.”

I told Molly that we would put out an APB for Graybeard and told her what that meant. She nodded soberly and I asked, “Can you tell us what happened in your house?”

The child turned her face toward the window.

“Molly?” Conklin said. He dragged over a chair, sat so that he was at the little girl’s eye level. “Have lots of people been asking you questions?”

Molly reached a hand toward the swinging arm of the table near her bed. Conklin lifted a glass of water, held it so the child could sip through the straw.

“We know you’re tired, honey, but if you could just tell the story one more time.”

Molly sighed, said, “I heard Graybeard barking. And then he stopped. I went back to my movie, and a little later I heard voices. My mom and dad always told me not to come downstairs when they had guests.”

“Guests?” Conklin asked patiently. “More than one?”

Molly nodded.

“And they were friends of your parents?”

Molly shrugged, said, “I only know that one of them carried me out of the fire.”

“Can you tell us what he looked like?”

“He had a nice face, and I think he had blond hair. And he was like Ruben’s age,” Molly said.

“Ruben?”

“My brother, Ruben. He’s in the cafeteria right now, but he goes to Cal Tech. He’s a sophomore.”

“Had you ever seen this boy before?” I asked.

I felt Dr. Matlaga’s hand at my elbow, signaling me that our time was over.

“I didn’t know him,” Molly said. “I could have been dreaming,” she said, finally fixing her eyes on me. “But in my dream, whoever he was, I know he was an angel.”

She closed her eyes, and tears spilled from under those lashless crescents and rolled silently down her cheeks.

“HANNI IS IN THE CLEAR,” Jacobi said, standing over us, casting a shadow across our desks. “He was working the scene of a meth lab explosion the night of the Meacham fire. He said he told you.”

I remembered.

He’d told us that the Meacham fire had been his second job that night.

“I’ve spoken to five people who were at that meth scene who swear Chuck was there until he got the call about the Meachams,” said Jacobi. “And I’ve confirmed that Matt Waters is doing life for the deaths of the Christiansens.”

Conklin sighed.

“Both of you,” said Jacobi. “Move on. Find out what the victims have in common. Boxer – McNeil and Chi are reporting to you. So make use of them. Concentrate on the Malones and the Meachams. Those are ours. Here’s the name of the primary working the Chus’ case in Monterey. Conklin, you might want to smooth things over with Hanni. He’s still working these cases.”

I was looking at Rich as Jacobi stumped back to his office.

Conklin said, “What? I have to buy Hanni flowers?”

“ That ’ll confuse him,” I said.

“Look, it made sense, didn’t it, Lindsay? The book was about an arsonist who was an arson investigator and Hanni missed it.”

“You made a courageous call, Richie. Your reasoning was sound and you didn’t attack him. You brought it into the open with our immediate superior. Perfectly proper. I’m just glad you were wrong.”

“So… look. You know him. Should I expect to find my tires slashed?” Conklin asked.

I grinned at the idea of it.

“You know what, Rich. I think Chuck feels so bad about missing that book, he’s going to slash his own tires. Just tell him, ‘Sorry, hope there are no hard feelings.’ Do the manly handshake thing, okay?”

My phone rang.

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.”

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.