Arsonist (18 page)

CHAPTER 34

Amber Rose Hill lay under the covers, waiting for direction. The three men in the room stood by the video and audio equipment and there was another female adjusting the lights. This was amateur stuff and she regretted having to do it. The co-star, Bobby Stud, was nude and being fluffed in a corner by a girl that was new to the business. She was sucking him off and he was leaning back in the chair, his eyes closed.

“Are we gonna finish this or what?” Amber said.

“Doesn’t look like it, hon,” the director said. “Having some issues with the video. We’ll have to reschedule.”

She groaned. “I got shit to do all this week, Jimmy.”

“I know
, sweetie, but what do you want me to do? We need tech support to come in here and fix this shit. Unless you know how to fix a twenty thousand dollar camera, we’re cancelling.”

She got out of bed and found her pink robe on a chair. She put it on and began walking back to the dressing rooms. The fluffer was still hard at work and Amber said, “You can stop sucking his cock now, shoot’s over,” as she walked by.

The dressing room was small and she shared it with all the other actresses. Bras and panties and costumes were thrown all over the furniture and the floors. She found her jeans and purse in the closet and dressed and fixed her hair before she left.

Her BMW came to life as she turned the key and she backed out of her stall and slipped on her Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. This film had been a fucking disaster from the beginning and she was pissed. It’d been three weeks of shooting and they weren’t even halfway done yet. Jimmy, the director, was a film school dropout and wanted to get all creative. He was always over-budget and short on time. If the money hadn’t been so good, five grand for
two week’s work, she’d have bailed long ago.

Her cell phone rang; it was Jessica, her sister.

“Hey, Jess.”

“Hey. What’re you doin’?”

“Just leaving work. What’re you doing?”

“Same. You wanna grab some coffee or something?”

“Yes, please. I’m in such a fucking bad mood right now.”

“Where you wanna meet?”

“That bookstore by my house. What’s it called?”

“Phil Weller’s.”

“Yeah, meet me there. I flirt with the coffee guy and he gives me the drinks for free.”

“All right. Gimmie ten minutes.”

Fifteen minutes later Amber was still stuck on the freeway. She blared some Pussycat Dolls on the stereo as some guys in the car next to her kept trying to get her attention. She made a note in the calendar on her phone that she would have to get her windows tinted.

By the time she got to Phil Weller’s her sister was already at a table
, sipping a latte. She was flipping through a few books and her legs were crossed, revealing perfectly tanned thighs. She would’ve made a hot adult film star, Amber knew, and several times she’d asked her sister if she wanted to try a scene or two. She always refused and instead had enrolled in the University of San Diego to study computer science.

“Hey, sorry, traffic was a nightmare.”

“That’s okay. Is that boy here?”

Amber glanced around. “Yeah, hang on.” She went and flirted for a few moments and got her coffee
with two pastries and came back to the table. She took a few sips as her sister flipped through the pages of a book.

“I don’t know if I like this anymore,” Amber said.

“Like what?”

“You know, the business.”

“I told you you wouldn’t,” Jessica said. “You’re a whore with a camera in the room.”

“Hey, don’t be such a bitch.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

She sipped her coffee. “How’s mom and dad?”

“Call them and ask.”

“They don’t want to talk to me.”

“They would love to talk to you, Am. They just don’t understand why you’re doing what you do. Dad said he was at work and in the break room was this calendar and you were in it. You were August or something. He said you were totally naked and shaving yourself in a shower.”

She blushed. “He saw that
?”

“What did you think would happen? That no one you knew would see you naked? Everybody’s seen it. All the young boys at church look you up online and then their parents call mom and yell at her like it’s her fault.”

“I just kinda fell into it, ya know? Like I started stripping and I was making good money and this guy offered to—”

“I know the details, and I don’t believe you. It’s easy. You just suck cock and then bend over and you’re done. It’s much easier than going to school and getting a real job.”

“You don’t think this is a real job? I work eighteen-hour days sometimes.”

“It’s not work, Am. It’s just not, I’m sorry.”

They were quiet a long time, glancing around and sipping their drinks. The silence was filled with the sound of turning pages in Jessica’s books. Amber took one of them and opened it up. She read two entire pages before closing it and standing.

“I’m going to look around a minute.”

Her sister nodded, but didn’t say anything.

The bookstore was large
with three stories. The basement was for used books, the main level for new bestsellers, and the third floor for new obscure books, like philosophy and literary analysis. She went downstairs and to her right was a display set up of books about modern art. A man was there that was reading a book on Marcel Duchamp. He was dressed impeccably, dark colored jeans with a blue button-down and a black, silk scarf. But there was something off about him. The skin on his face looked read and portions of it were peeling like he had had a bad sunburn. His eyebrows and eyelashes were gone and he was bald. He looked up at her and smiled. She smiled back to be polite; he was handsome, but probably too young for her and without much money. She turned her attention to the books, absently walking down an aisle and picking one off the shelf.

As a girl, she had loved books and she remembered one summer in junior high at her parents
’ summer ranch she had read ninety of them. Most were teen fiction but she had thrown in some history and literature for good measure. Her plan had been to become a teacher, something her parents despised. Her father had been pushing her to go to business school like he did. He had a legacy at Wharton and two of her three brothers had gone there before starting work at her father’s computer assembly plant. But things hadn’t worked out that way.

Was what she did really so bad? People had sex every day and most people that didn’t were the ones that didn’t have anyone else to have it with. Why was it so bad for her? Especially when she made a ton of money
doing it?

“They’re going to be remaking that.”

She turned around. The man from the modern art display was standing a few feet from her.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Cosmos, by Carl Sagan. The book you’re holding. They made an excellent documentary series based on that book and the series is going to be remade. I suppose everything needs to be remade every so often. People change so quickly.”

“I’ve never really been interested in cosmology.”

“Are you religious?”

“How did you guess?”

“Religious people usually feel they have the answers to life’s biggest questions and they miss out on asking them.”

“So you’re not religious
then?”

“I read a story once, long ago, about a church that was set on fire with children inside. They were there to make packs of goods to send to troops overseas. None of the children could get out, and they burned to death. It seems the innocent suffer the most. I don’t know if a God, at least no
God I would want to worship, would allow that.”

“Maybe it’s part of his plan. Even evil has a purpose.” She placed the book back on the shelf. “It was nice talking to you,” she said, ensuring that the conversation had ended.

She glanced back and the man smiled before turning around and heading up the stairs to the main floor. 

It was two hours later by the time Amber got home to her upscale condo and went inside to have a shower. Her sister had done little more than lecture her the time they were together and she eventually made up an excuse and left. She
hadn’t felt like going home yet so she went to the beach. Sometimes she would go there and watch the surfers for hours, the way they would glide on the water like birds. It looked so freeing. For some reason, she had never tried it and wondered why.

S
ome unopened mail was on the kitchen table, a nice marble she had imported from England, and she flipped through bills and opened the fan letters she had. Of course, she would never publicize her address but the studio would occasionally forward fan mail that caught their attention and they thought demanded a response. Like if a business magnate in New York wanted to hire her for a night on the town or a bachelor’s party at Yale requested that she be their entertainment. This was the real way people in the adult business made their money; outside of the studio. But she could never bring herself to do most of what was requested of her. She would politely decline and let the studio know not to forward such mail to her again, but they always did.

Amber took a long shower, the hot water running over her body and relaxing her muscles. She used a luf
fa to cleanse herself and then toweled off before putting on a silk robe as she stepped out into the kitchen. She went to the sink and took a few vitamin pills out of containers when she glanced up through the window over the sink. The man from the bookstore stood there, a grin on his face as he bowed his head.

She screamed and dropped the glass. The phone was right behind her on the wall and she grabbed it as she heard glass shatter behind her. She got the numbers in, but before the phone could dial out, she felt a hot impact against her head, and the next thing she saw was the floor as it rushed toward her.

CHAPTER 35

Jon Stanton sat in the pew at his local Mormon ward with his head down to the floor. It was a fast and testimony meeting. Once a month, the members were asked to fast during the day and pray and ask the Lord for something; for themselves or their families if they required it but mostly for others. The money they saved on the meals would be given to the poor. Then at sacrament meeting the sacrament would be passed and the time would be turned over to the members to come to the podium and bear their testimony. That meant anyone could get up there and talk about whatever they thought was relevant.

Most of the members discussed small miracles they had seen in their lives and didn’t feel there was any explanation other than God’s hand. Some members told stories of things that had occurred to them and challenged their faith. But a small percentage of members felt they could vent and discuss whatever they wanted. Stanton’s Bishop
, who was in charge of the meeting, was an elderly man who was hard of hearing and didn’t have the heart to take the microphone from anyone, and so those few that wanted to were given a chance to rant.

Stanton’s eyes closed and he felt himself slipping into sleep so he leaned back and stretched his neck. The past four days had been a blur. He had followed up on the car that was left behind at the scene of Gunn’s attempted murder. It belonged to a woman in Watts who the LAPD couldn’t locate. The shells for the shotgun were bought from Wal-Mart, the gun itself probably
was as well. A young man had checked in to a hospital with two gunshot wounds that day but it was in Los Angeles and by the time word got down to SDPD, he was already gone.

Stanton had also followed up on Monique Gaspirini, interviewing neighbors and going over the crime scene video, painting a picture of the type of person that would do something like this. As far as he could tell, it was the worst type of offender: a sexual sadist. Most murders of this sort were either rage or sexually motivated but a sexual sadist was both rage and sex. It was the most dangerous type of personality disorder that Stanton dealt with in his work.

There had been a case he remembered of a sexual sadist that had kidnapped a young college student and tied her to the ceiling of his basement for torture. She had died early from a heart attack, perhaps surviving no more than ten minutes. He was so enraged, he beat her corpse with his fists for over half an hour. Flustered, he dragged the body out in broad daylight and a neighbor had called it in.

Stanton had been working
eighteen-hour days without stop. Given that he spent at least one hour a day surfing, that left only five for showering, eating, dressing, spending time with his children, and sleeping.

Sacrament was over, closed with a hymn, but he hadn’t noticed. He sat in the pew and waited until the rest of the congregation filed out before standing and following them. There were two more sessions, but he simply didn’t have it in him to go. He decided he needed to get home and sleep before he passed out behind the wheel of his car.

As he walked out of the front doors of the building, a woman brushed past him. She stopped and turned and said, “Detective Stanton?”

He turned to her. She was middle-aged with a creased face and no make-up. A large purse was slung over her shoulder. “Yes?”

“I’m Jenna Pywe. You don’t know me, but I’ve emailed you before. I got a response but I just wanted to meet you in person. I hope you don’t mind me coming here. I know you’re Mormon and this was the closest Mormon ward to your house.”

Stanton ignored the fact that she had just revealed she knew where he lived. He was too tired to question her. Besides, with the internet, anyone could find out anything about whoever they wanted.

“I’m on my way home. What is it you need?”

She reached into her purse and came out with a photo. It was of a young girl, perhaps eleven or twelve.

“This is my Claudia. She’s been missing for two years now. I called the detective from Missing Persons every Friday to check on her case but eventually he stopped returning my calls. He sent me an email saying that the case was cold and there was nothing he could do until more evidence turned up.” She thrust the photo toward him. “Please, I’ve heard things about you. I know you have the highest rate of solved crimes in all of San Diego. I read the interview in the
Tribune
that said some people in the police think you’re psychic. Will you please help me?”

There was such deep sadness in her eyes that Stanton could tell the pain was as fresh as the day she realized her child was missing. It was the type of pain that consumed everything else in its path and left nothing behind.
In the creases in her face, Stanton could see all the nights without sleep, the job she had been regretfully let go from, the isolation from family and friends…he saw all of this in just a few seconds, and there was nothing he could do about it. Right now, there was nothing left in him. His mental energy was completely spent and all he could do was get home.

“I’m sorry,” he said, without taking the photo. He turned and walked to his car, not looking back.