James Patterson: 7th Heaven

I WAS AT MY DESK in the squad room the next day when Rich came in after lunch smelling of garbage.

“Tough morning in Jackson?”

“Yeah, but I think the sheriff’s digging for his fifteen minutes of fame before the Feds take over the search. He’s got it under control.”

I pinched my nose as Rich pulled out his chair, folded his long legs under his side of the desk, and opened his container of coffee.

“Phone records show that yes, Junie did call Malcolm at 11:21 on the night Michael went missing. And she called him every night at about that time.”

“Girl stays in touch with her boyfriend.”

“And Clapper called,” I told my partner. “The prints on the knife are Malcolm’s.”

“Yeah? That’s excellent!”

“But the blood is bovine,” I said.

“It’s a steak knife. He ate a steak.”

“Yep. It gets worse.”

“Hang on.” Rich dumped a couple of sugars into his coffee, stirred, slugged it down. “Okay. Hit me.”

“There’s no blood or tissue in the bathtub, and the hair we sent out came back with no match. Furthermore, there’s no sign that anyone tried to cover up the blood. No bleach.”

“Great,” my partner said, scowling. “What is this? The perfect crime?”

“There’s more and worse. There’s no trace of blood in or on Malcolm’s vehicle, no hairs consistent with Michael’s.”

“So I was wrong about the truck. You should have bet me, Lindsay. We’d be having dinner tonight – on me.”

I grinned and said, “You would have showered first, I suppose.”

But my mood could hardly be lower. I was going to have to call the Campions and tell them that we still had no physical evidence, and that Junie Moon had recanted her confession and we’d had to kick Ricky Malcolm.

“You want to call Malcolm and tell him he can have his truck back?”

Rich picked up his phone, called Malcolm, got no answer.

We took a drive out to the crime lab at Hunter’s Point Naval Yard, opened all the car windows on the way, and let the wind air out my partner’s clothes. At the lab, I signed a release for the truck, and after three more unanswered calls to Ricky Malcolm, we drove to his apartment.

Rich yelled, “Police,” and knocked loudly on Malcolm’s door until a small Chinese man came out from the restaurant downstairs.

He shouted up to us, “Mr. Malcolm gone. He paid his rent and leave on motorcycle. You want to see mess upstairs?”

“We’ve seen it, thanks.”

“He’s gone, all right,” I muttered to Conklin as we got into the squad car. “Ricky Malcolm. Sleaze. Slob. Easy rider. Criminal freakin’ mastermind. Coming soon to a town near you.”

I WAS RIPPED out of a dream and my lover’s arms by Jacobi’s voice on the phone saying, “Get dressed, Boxer. Conklin is five blocks away. He’s picking you up at your door.”

Jacobi clicked off before giving me details, but this much I knew: someone had died.

It was just after midnight when Conklin nosed our squad car onto the lawn of a smoldering house in the 3800 block of Clay Street in Presidio Heights. Four fire rigs and an equal number of patrol cars were already parked in front of the Greek Revival, the wind whipping smoke into a vortex at an inside corner of the house. Dazed bystanders clustered across the street, watching the firefighters douse the charred remains of what had once been a beautiful home in this upscale neighborhood.

I pulled my canvas jacket closed, ducked under the water spouting from a fire hose just as the generators on the front lawn fired up. Conklin was ahead of me as we mounted the front steps. He badged the cop at the door and we entered the scorched carcass of the house.

“Two victims, Sarge,” said Officer Pat Noonan. “First doorway on your right. DRT.”

Dead right there.

I asked, “Has the ME been called?”

“She’s on her way.”

It was darker inside the house than out. The room Noonan indicated had been a large den or family room. I flicked my flashlight beam over piles of furniture, bookshelves, a large TV. Then my light caught a pair of legs on the floor.

They weren’t attached to a body.

I screamed, “Noonan! Noonan! What the hell is this?” I waved my torchlight around, catching a second body a few feet from the torso of the first, just inside the doorway.

Noonan came into the den with a firefighter behind him, a young guy with the name Mackey stenciled on his turnouts.

“Sarge,” Mackey said, “it was me. I was trying to reel in my line, but it caught. That’s how I discovered the DB.”

“So you dragged the body?”

“I, um, didn’t know that if I picked up the body by the legs, it would fall apart,” Mackey said, his voice cracking from smoke inhalation and probably fear.

“Did you move the entire victim, Mackey, or just the legs? Where was the body lying?”

“He, she, or it was in the doorway, Sarge. Sorry.”

Mackey backed out of the room, and he was right to get away from me. What the fire hadn’t destroyed, the water and the firefighters had. I doubted we’d ever know what had happened here. I heard someone call my name, and I recognized his voice as the glare of a handheld lantern came toward me.

Chuck Hanni was an arson investigator, one of the best. I’d met him for the first time a few years ago when he’d come to a fire directly from a Rotary Club dinner.

He’d been wearing pale khakis at the time, and he’d walked through a smoking house from the least burned rooms to the fire’s point of origin. He’d taught me a lot about crime detection at a fire scene that night, but I still didn’t know how he’d kept those khakis clean.

“Hey, Lindsay,” Hanni said now. He was wearing a jacket and tie. There were comb marks in his fine black hair and burn scars running from his right thumb up into his sleeve. “I’ve got a working ID on this couple.”

My partner stood up from where he’d been crouched beside one of the victims.

“Their names are Patty and Bert Malone,” Conklin said, something in his voice I couldn’t read. The corpses were so burned, they were featureless. He saw the question in my eyes.

“I’ve been in this house before,” Conklin told us. “I used to know these people.”

I STARED AT MY PARTNER as embers fell from the ceiling of the den and the crackle of water against smoking wood competed with the radio static and the shouts of the firefighters.

“I was close to their daughter when I was in high school,” Conklin said. “Kelly Malone. Her parents were great to me.”

“I’m so sorry, Rich.”

“I haven’t seen them since Kelly went off to the University of Colorado,” Conklin said. “This is going to kill her.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, knowing that we were going to treat the Malones’ deaths as homicides unless it was proven otherwise. Upstairs, the fire crew was doing mop-up and overhaul, dismantling the second-story ceiling, putting out hot spots under the eaves.

“The security system was off,” Hanni said, joining us. “The fire department got the call from a neighbor. The fire started in this room,” he said, pointing out the furniture that had been burned low to the ground.

He looked around the room at the mounds of plaster and debris. “After we sift through all this, I’ll let you know if I find anything, but I think you can pretty much kiss off any notes or fingerprints.”

“But you’ll try anyway, right?” Conklin said.

“I said I would, Rich.”

Last thing we needed was for Conklin to get into a fight. I asked him what the Malones were like.