Alien Heat (13 page)

David got up, looked at the books on the bedside table—
The Fearful Parent/The Fearful Child, Scuba in the Bahamas, The Book of Dreams, Reincarnation of the Innocents, Befriending the Dead, Psychic Reincarnation
.

He passed a hand through the hologram, wishing he could thumb through the books, see whether or not the pages were dog-eared, the spines broken. He wondered if Theresa Jenks had found her answers.

David sat back down and flipped through Bruer's file. Theresa Jenks had gone to the Mind Institute with a friend, just as a lark. She didn't believe in psychics, but the friend had talked her into a reading. She had told Bernard about it at dinner, then dismissed the whole thing. No, he did not think she had taken it seriously. Not then.

Then the dreams had started. Bad dreams, about their son, Martin, who had drowned at age four.

David looked up at the picture of the plump-cheeked four-year-old, dressed in well-pressed shorts and a white shirt, tennis shoes unscuffed, hair combed neatly to one side. A happy-looking child—relaxed, compared to the picture of Arthur at the same age. Arthur and Martin had been nearly identical babies, but that changed as they got old enough to walk. Arthur was thinner, he had a habit of ducking his head close in to his shoulders when someone took his picture, and his smile was tentative and fleeting. He had a perpetually anxious look.

David told the hologram to continue.

Double glass doors led into a small room off the master suite. It was oddly shabby inside. The couch was old and well-padded, an ugly shade of green, and inexpensive enough to have graced David's own living room. There were pillows at one end, mashed down as if they had been slept on, and a ratty-looking afghan balled up in the middle. A maroon recliner had an actual tear down the seat of the upholstery, and a table beside it held an open pack of saltine crackers and a juice glass with dregs of milk in the bottom. David saw a Game Boy on top of the television. A pair of undershorts had been thrown over the bookcase, a tie draped over a lamp. Fire hazard, David thought.

“It is the canine death that I find of concern,” String said.

“You been hanging out with my sister?” Mel asked. He pulled the sock back over his foot.

“What canine?” David said.

String called up the hologram of the house where David had fallen through the stairwell. “Upstairs pathway.”

“
Hall
way,” Mel said.

The image wavered and String pointed. “See outline canine there? And body of this Jenks, Theresa, here found.”

Mel tied his shoe. “I know there's got to be a point to this.”

“Who kills this Jenks, Theresa? Say not the family member. Say is to be the stranger.”

Mel leaned back in his chair. “Sensor said only one stranger in the house. Which has got to be Jenks herself.”

“Murderer is left,” String said. “Has bypassed sensor, this is not to be the difficult.”

David was nodding.

“Is thisss a watchdog animal? Is he there at the killing? What does this canine do? Watch? Protect?”

“Lick his—” Mel looked at String. “Never mind. I guess if the dog caused a problem, the perp would—”

“Kill it,” David said.

“Might have gotten bitten for his trouble. Which means the killer's hands could be marked.”

“Be interesting to know if the dog died in the fire, or before.”

Mel was nodding. “We got three detectives in the room, ought to be able to track the remains of one dead canine. Let's flip for it. What you take, String? Heads, tails, or rim?”

“Rim?”

“No, don't take that, it's no fair.”

“I take rim.”

Mel sighed and pulled out a quarter.

TWENTY-ONE

The captain was bouncing a pen on a bare spot in the center of his desk. The surface was covered in computer printouts; the bare spot looked as if it had been cleared specifically for bouncing pens.

The man had his priorities, David decided.

Halliday gave David a small, tense smile and motioned him to a chair. He cleared his throat.

“How are your girls, David?”

“Fine.”

“Rose okay?”

I wouldn't know, David thought. “Fine,” he said.

The captain leaned back in his chair. “Give me a rundown, will you, on how things are going?”

David frowned, shifted sideways, and told the captain what he already knew. “Fire was deliberately set by incendiary devices housed in balloons. We think the balloons were delivered in a bouquet by a man dressed as a clown, fifteen to forty-five minutes before the bomb threat and subsequent fire alarm were called in. The club had been getting threats from SCAE—”

“Doesn't sound like their kind of thing, David, what I know.”

David shrugged. “I hear they've turned nasty down in Florida.”

Halliday put his arms behind his head. David saw he was sweating. “Everybody's nasty down in Florida. It's the heat.”

“Detective Clements saw some indication that things were removed from the kitchen before the fire, which means—”

“The owners burning it out.”

David nodded. “Except that the insurance is screwed up. The Bernitski brothers tried to raise the limits on the policy just before the fire—on the advice of their manager, Tatewood, by the way—but it didn't go into effect, and the other policy had lapsed.”

“So they got zip?” Halliday's face creased with delight.

“Clements also says there were some supper club fires in Chicago a couple years ago. She's doing a computer search for arson signatures. The Bernitski brothers have alibis, good ones. If they did it, they hired a torch. But it's a pro job, so we already know that.”

Halliday nodded, glanced up at the ceiling. “What's going on with this Jenks thing?”

“There were balloon devices in the house where she was murdered.”

“So it didn't just catch from the club?”

“Arson says not.”

“Was it the other way around? Club torched to cover her murder? Got any connection between the Bernitskis and Theresa Jenks?”

David shook his head. “Not yet, but Della and Pete are on it. I did run across one thing interesting.”

“Which is?”

“The family in the house where Jenks was killed came into money right before the fire. And seemed to think they were headed for more.”

Halliday took a deep breath and let it out slowly. His voice deepened an octave, and his eyes looked tired. “I have good news for you, David.”

“You don't look happy about it.”

“Chief Ogden told me it was good news, so it's got to be good news, right? He said not to be unduly influenced, about the Jenks thing. Just because they're wealthy, doesn't mean we should give them—how'd he put it? An overemphasis. Especially since we got this supper club thing. A lot of bad feeling on how that worked out, with the bomb threat tying up the grid. Ogden doesn't want it to look like we're ignoring the deaths of 248
poor
Saigo City citizens, to track the killer of one rich heiress from Chicago.”

David raised an eyebrow. “What are you telling me, Captain?”

“I'm not telling you anything, David. I want you to tell me.”

David sighed and leaned back in his chair. Just a few days ago this would have seemed too good to be true.

And it would have been.

“Captain, the Jenks murder has got to be connected to the supper club fire. At the moment, nothing makes sense, but you can't possibly tell me this is some kind of obscure coincidence.”

Halliday closed his eyes. “Of course I can tell you that. The thing is, you wouldn't believe me. Would you, David?”

“No, sir, I wouldn't.”

Halliday kept his eyes closed. “Don't blame you. I wouldn't believe me either.”

David looked through the blinds at Della, sitting in front of her tube, shoulders slumped. He did not think she had combed her hair in a while.

He wondered if Halliday had fallen asleep. “Captain? What is it you want me to do?”

Halliday didn't even twitch. “You do your job.”

TWENTY-TWO

The desk clerk had given him a blank look, a professional glaze that made it clear he was purposely not noticing or wondering why David was back again so soon. That bothered David, in a way that the hostility had not. Hostility was the norm for a police detective. Acceptance made him feel the man thought he was up to something.

He knocked outside Teddy Blake's door and waited. Knocked again.

“You'll never get in that way.”

She walked too quietly, David decided, noting that she was barefooted, and thinking she ought not be. Her toenails were painted brick red. She wore tight, worn jeans, and an oversized white cotton shirt. The left knee of the jeans was worn through, loose strands of material covering the tan brown flesh. She held three cans of Coke and an armful of candy bars, and her fingernails were clipped short and unpolished, not pretty but clean. Her hair was braided back, pulling loose on the sides, giving her the air of a woman who's had a long day.

David wondered why she didn't wear it down.

“Gets in my eyes,” she said absently. She knocked on the door, two staccato taps and one big boom. She gave David a look over her shoulder. She wore large gold hoops in her ears.

“You got to know the secret knock. Come
on
, Arthur, it's me, hon.
Look through the peephole first
.”

“Arthur's here?” David did not like the sound of this.

“I know, I hated to leave him alone in this dump, but I was only down the hall for a second. Poor thing is starving. You know what boys are at this age.”

The door swung open. Arthur saw David and took a step backward.

Teddy grinned and tossed a candy bar. He caught it, but it bounced out of his hand and hit the floor. David could see the boy's face turn red as he bent over to pick it up. He decided that people who felt nostalgic for childhood were mentally ill.

Blake slammed the door shut with her rear end. “Locks,” she said absently and held up the candy bars. “Nestlé Crunch, Almond Joy, or Butterfingers?”

“Almond Joy,” David said.

He caught the candy bar in midair, knowing Arthur admired him for this very small thing. Teddy handed David a Coke, gave one to Arthur, and leaned against the door.

David popped the lid on the can. Brown foam shot out of the small keyhole opening and sluiced his arm and the cuff of his shirt, then dribbled down to the worn maroon carpet.

It was an old trick, but that did not stop Teddy and Arthur from being amused, almost to the point of hysteria. Teddy was a young thirty-two, he decided.

He went to the bathroom to clean up. She had just the kind of bathroom that made him crazy. The sink was full of water and suds, and the counters were burdened by tubes of lipstick, a makeup bottle without a cap, a toothpaste tube trailing green paste, and a red toothbrush with bristles so tightly balled together it had probably earned retirement years ago. A woman's razor hung by a cord from the wall, red nail polish was turned on its side. David tightened the cap, then set the bottle upright. The cutoff jeans hung damply over the shower bar, along with a pair of socks.

David let the water out of the sink, found lace thong panties clogging the drain. He shrugged. He was an old married man. He rinsed the panties and rung them out gently, thinking they were awfully small. If she was annoyed about the intimacy, it served her right for leaving them out.

David ran water over the cuff of his shirt, noticing a smear of toothpaste across the bathroom mirror. Had she spit, missed the sink, then not cleaned it up?

He was startled by the way he looked—serious, angry, tired. His face seemed to have settled into permanent lines of fatigue and unhappiness. No wonder people were avoiding him.

Arthur and Teddy were sitting side by side on the bed when he came out, and they had an air of contrition that did not fool him. His Coke can had been cleaned of all stickiness and set on a table next to his Almond Joy. They had even provided him with a chair.

He sat down and took a drink. The can was still three quarters full and he was thirsty. He liked it that Teddy was drinking Coke instead of beer, with Arthur in the room. He picked up the Almond Joy and began unwrapping it.

“You guys didn't do anything to my candy bar, did you?”

This made them laugh again, and David decided that at the moment the two of them seemed very much like brother and sister, and that he felt about a hundred years old.

He took a bite of the candy, thinking how much he loved coconut, and how rarely he ate it. Teddy was eating the Nestle Crunch, which he considered a woman's candy bar, and Arthur had moved in on the Butterfingers. The boy seemed different today—goofy and relaxed. Was this how he was without his father? Mother's husband, David corrected himself. No wonder the child was tense.

“Arthur has something to tell you,” Teddy said.

Something in her voice warned him to go easy. Arthur stopped chewing, swallowed a mouthful of candy, and looked up at David. The boy's shirt was straining at the buttons, and the shoulders were tight. He was growing fast, and no one was noticing.

“I talked to my mom. On the phone, the night before.”

David's heartbeat picked up but he nodded calmly. “The night before she died?”

“Yeah.”

David kept his voice gentle. “Tell me.”

The half-eaten candy bar melted in Arthur's hand. He had been alone in the hotel room eating pizza and playing video games. Jenks had gone to the pool to swim. Arthur was not a good swimmer.

What had she said? Hard to remember, exactly.

She missed him, she loved him, she was very, very sorry. He asked her why. She said because she had a beautiful son she had left behind, to search for something that could not be. That Bernard had been right, for all that he was wrong. She had laughed and said the scales had fallen from her eyes.