Touched by Fire (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“Yes! Yes! God! Oh God! Yessss!” The words came in a rush from Lilah’s trembling lips. “Yes! Ohhhh yes—wait, wait! Joel! Joel, I’m going to fall! Joelllll!” she shrieked, her arms around Kauffman’s neck, her legs about his waist as the room-service cart scooted out from beneath her. It zipped across the room, crashing into a table that held her briefcase, the remains of several meals, and a phone with a flashing message light. Kauffman was laughing so hard he could hardly stand. He had her bare bottom cupped in his palms and was looking for a surface that would support it.

Yesterday afternoon Lilah kept Kauffman on hold until she finished the letter of recommendation for Cardenas and drafted an outline for the presentation she’d be giving at the conference, all the while hoping Merrick would call. When he didn’t, she and Kauffman went to the hotel and spent the night in her room.

They spent Sunday in bed watching football games and ended up in the shower, running a few plays of their own. Neither heard the phone ringing. Neither would have made an effort to answer it if they had. Having soaped each other into a passionate frenzy, they were en route from bath to bed when Kauffman impulsively lifted her onto the room-service cart.

Now, while the message light flashed and Lilah clung to him fiercely, Kauffman fell backward into a chair. She came at him with such enthusiasm that it teeter-tottered and suddenly went over. They tumbled to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs, and broke into hysterical laughter. It wasn’t long before they decided they were starving. Lilah went to the phone to call room service and saw the flashing message light.

“You had a call from a Lieutenant Merrick,” the hotel operator said.

“That it?”

“Yes, he just said to tell you he called.”

Lilah lit a cigarette, disappointed that it had taken him the entire weekend to get around to it. A plume of smoke came from between her lips, curling gracefully upward, like a soul leaving a body. She inhaled deeply as if trying to recapture it, but the emptiness prevailed, along with an awareness that the sexual marathon had been the act of a spiteful child rather than the choice of a mature woman, and was ultimately unsatisfying.

Monday morning, Lilah awakened before dawn with the sense of uncertainty that always surfaced after she’d had sex. She decided to get an early start and headed over to her office well before nine. Kauffman went along to retrieve the textbook he’d left behind, and slouched in a chair, cramming for class. She was reviewing the outline she’d drafted when the intercom buzzed. “Yeah? . . . Okay, Ruben. Thanks for the warning.”

Thirty seconds later Merrick rapped on the half-open door and entered the office. “Got a few minutes?”

“What if I said no?” Lilah teased.

“Bad hair day?”

“I’ve had worse,” she replied, burning him with a look.
“Saturday, I had breakfast alone. My poached eggs were harder than hockey pucks. And I went shopping only to have my credit card rejected and discover my eye shadow’s been discontinued.”

“Ah, a bad eye day too,” he observed wryly. “That it?”

“No. In case it slipped your mind, someone’s been trying to turn me into a french fry.” Lilah smiled and pushed a consent form across the desk. “Sign this.”

“Look, Doc, I’ve got something real important to—”

“Make your mark,” she commanded sharply. “We have a witness. I’ll settle for an X if have to.”

Kauffman emitted a complacent snicker.

Merrick scrawled his signature across the bottom, then glared at him. “You’re outta here, junior. Now.” Kauffman stiffened in protest and looked at Lilah in search of support.

“Do me a favor, Joel, and wait in the lab, okay?”

The kid made a face, then bolted from the office.

“That was uncalled for,” Lilah said, coming around the desk toward Merrick. “You have no right to—”

“It was a beeper, Doc,” he interrupted, silencing her with the impact of a gunshot.

Lilah recoiled and questioned him with a look.

“The detonator. It was a modified beeper. A wire in, a wire out . . . the phone call completed the circuit, and ba-boom.”

“Then it could have been set off from anywhere.”

“Anywhere on the goddamned planet. Which blows Fiona Schaefer’s alibi right out of the water.”

“Jack’s too—” Lilah blurted.

“Jack?” Merrick said. “Who the hell is Jack?”

“Jack Palmquist. Did his post doc here a year ago. Very gifted, politically naive, kind of weird. He got real upset when he didn’t get tenure.”

“This just occurred to you?”

“No, Serena reminded me, but I found out he’s been living in Europe and dismissed it. Even with a remote detonator, there was no way it could’ve been Jack until you came up with this beeper thing, right?”

Merrick grunted, then grinned at what he was about to say. “So, did Jack and Jill go up the hill?”

“God, you’re nosy.”

“It goes directly to motive, Doc.”

“I’d say the fact that he was an outspoken critic of my work is more on point. It shouldn’t be hard to find out who the beeper’s registered to, right?”

“It was damaged. I’ve got ATF working on it.”

Lilah groaned in dismay. “Only half the people on the ‘goddamned planet’ use them—Fiona for one.”

“Your mother for another,” Merrick observed.

“My mother? Get serious.”

“Everybody’s a suspect till it’s over, Doc. She really all thumbs with the barbecue? I mean, what was she doing tailing us in the middle of the night?”

“Looking out for me.”

“So she leaves your sick father all alone?”

“Yeah, all the time. During the day when she’s at work. At night when she does her marketing. That’s why she carries a beeper.”

Merrick nooded, then settled in her desk chair and lit a cigarette. “By the way, keep the beeper thing to yourself. We always leave a piece of the puzzle in the box. Gives us a way to verify confessions. That’s why I kicked your pussy-whipped friend out of here.”

“That gets an A for strategy and an F for bedside manner, Lieutenant. Now, to purposely change the subject . . .” She
leaned across the desk, making eye contact with him. “You free later?”

“ ’Fraid not. I promised my kid I’d help him with his algebra.” Merrick rolled his eyes. “Talk about the blind leading the blind . . .”

“Hey, I got a perfect score on the SATs.”

“A perfect score?” Merrick echoed incredulously.

“Uh-huh. I’d be happy to tutor him.”

“And he’d be more than happy if you did.”

“Am I picking up on something here?”

Merrick smiled. “What can I tell you. The kid’s got a thing for, uh, foxy redheads with brains.”

“Like begets like?” she ventured flirtatiously. “Sounds like he’s got his daddy’s genes.”

“Sure as hell hope not.”

“You sound just like my father,” Lilah said, and laughed. “Guess firemen all have the same—”

“Hold it, hold it,” Merrick interrupted, struck by a thought that propelled him from the chair. “I’ve been trying to think of this all weekend. You know if your father has any enemies?”

“My father?” she scoffed. “He was senior deacon at church, coached Little League . . . the guy people came to for advice. When did you cook that one up?”

“When I was crashing on you the other night,” he replied with a boyish smile. “I was thinking about him being a fireman, and this little bell started ringing.”

“Not loud enough to keep you awake,” she teased.

“No, but it had me tossing and turning,” he said, assembling the pieces. “You’re the target—but maybe your father is who this pyro is out to get.”

Lilah’s brows arched. “By hurting me?”

“With a fire bomb,” he replied pointedly. “Why not a knife? A gun? A hit-and-run? Remember that?”

Lilah whimpered affirmatively. “Who’d want to hurt a retired fireman who’s dying?”

“Someone who lost a loved one in a fire and blamed it on the smoke-eater who didn’t get there in time. Grief can turn real ugly. I’ve seen firemen spit on, threatened, assaulted—”

“My father put his life on the line more times than I can count. He has medals for heroism, bravery above and beyond the call of duty—”

“Okay, how about somebody he was on the job with? Couple of years ago we had a senior A.I. busted for torching buildings all over the state.”

Lilah’s jaw slackened. “If my father had an enemy on the job, I think he’d have said something by now.”

“Don’t let logic get in the way of common sense, Doc. You’d be amazed what people forget. You chat with them a while, push a button or two, and it all starts coming back. We do it with witnesses all the time. Can you set it up this afternoon?”

“Sure, but he’s much sharper in the morning.”

“First thing, then. Okay?” Lilah was nodding when his cellphone twittered. “Merrick . . . No, Gonzo, I can’t,” he snapped, assuming he was being assigned to another fire.

“Lighten up,” Gonzalez counseled. “You had a call from Campus Security. Said to tell you they got that videotape you wanted.”

Merrick hung up and turned to Lilah. “Where’s Campus Security at?”

“Across the street.”

“Come on, we’re going to watch a video.”

They were just entering the lab when Paul Schaefer came through the door. “Lilah, glad I caught you,” be said,
glancing at Merrick. “The tapes are being transcribed as we speak; but we better cross-reference my data with your bar-coding to make sure—”

“This isn’t a good time,” Lilah interrupted.

“Oh? What’s going on?”

“None of your business,” Merrick replied before she could answer. He looked from Schaefer to Serena to Kauffman, then broke into an amused smile. “Talk about the usual suspects . . .” He cocked his head reconsidering it. “Actually, there are a couple missing—”

“Is it one of you?” Lilah shouted. Until now she’d managed to keep her relationships in one compartment and the case in another, but Merrick’s wisecrack blew a hole in the wall that separated them, and she suddenly lost it. “Is it one of you? Is it?”

“Hey, come on, Doc,” Merrick said, taking her aside. “Come on, settle down, this isn’t going to help.”

Lilah resisted briefly, then took several deep breaths to regain her composure and nodded.

“Where was I?” Merrick prompted. “Oh, yeah, suspects.” He burned Schaefer with a look and said, “Tell your wife I want to see her.”

“Fiona? Why? She told you she was away.”

“Her out-of-town alibi just got blown out of the water. Your office—tomorrow—five o’clock. Make sure she brings her beeper.”

Merrick ushered Lilah out of the lab, then led the way to the elevators and thumbed the call button. “You really should’ve known better, Doc.”

“Pardon me?”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

“Shakespeare,” Lilah intoned haughtily.

The elevator dinged as if indicating a wrong answer.

“Nope.” Merrick followed her in, and, in a matter-of-fact tone, said, “William Congreve.
The Mourning Bride.
”

Lilah shrugged, then got back to the matter at hand. “If it was Fiona—or even Jack, for that matter—they won’t be on this video, will they?”

“Not unless they dropped by to see the show,” Merrick replied. “Well, one thing’s working for us.”

“What’s that?”

“Process of elimination. If it’s Fiona or Jack-what’s-his-face, none of the other suspects will be on it either.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Campus Security employs a multizone video system,” Chief Copeland intoned, tapping a pointer across a diagram of camera locations. “Blue-coded units cover what we call SEZs—structure entrance zones. Each provides an RTI—real-time image—to personnel manning the security desk in that structure.”

Merrick squirmed impatiently. On arrival, he and Lilah had been hustled into the operations center, and now they were being subjected to a security briefing with the attention to detail Merrick imagined went into planning the Normandy invasion.

“Yellow-coded units provide GCS—general campus surveillance,” Copeland droned on. “Unlike SEZs, GCS units
are
tied in to VCRs. Tapes are recycled unless they contain potential CRD like this one. If your man was in zone seven—and I have strong doubts he was—this unit would have picked him up.”

“Strong doubts?” Merrick echoed, bemused. “Care to share them, or do we get to wait another week for that?”

“The incendiary device was mailed,” Copeland replied condescendingly. “What would the perpetrator be doing in the target area when it detonated?”

“Getting his rocks off,” Merrick replied sharply. “And
we’d be getting ours off if we were watching that FVT instead of talking about it. FYI, that stands for fucking video tape.”

Lilah made no effort to stifle her laughter.

Copeland glared at her, then aimed a remote at a VCR. On the monitor, a grainy image of figures cloaked in silhouette and shadow began moving through leafy darkness. Date, camera location, and time counter were displayed across the bottom of the screen.

Lilah shrugged as the tape ended in a blizzard of electronic snow. “Nothing.”

“Let’s run it again,” Merrick said smartly. “By the way, that thing have slow-mo?”

“Frame by frame if you want.”

“I want,” Merrick replied. He pointed at the remote, the symbol for control, the symbol that had rivalries raging in living rooms all over the country, and added, “I’ll take that too.”

Copeland scowled. Control was his opiate, Control Freak his nickname, which—to the dismay of the teenage daughters who gave it to him—he took as a compliment. Grudgingly, he tossed the remote to Merrick.

Merrick played the tape frame by frame. This time the obscure figures danced an eerie stop-action ballet in the darkness. He frowned in reaction to a fleeting detail that he’d missed on the first run, and froze the image. If he saw what he thought he saw, two possibilities came to mind. One was a long shot, so he decided to explore the other first. “Any idea what that is?”

Lilah leaned closer to the monitor. “Sort of looks like . . . like a ponytail, doesn’t it?”

“Sure as hell does.” Merrick swatted at Lilah’s hair. “Like you were wearing it that night, right?”

“Yes, I remember putting it up at the gym. Why?”

“You said you got back to the lab sometime after eight.” Merrick pointed to the time counter. “Any chance it was seven fifty-four?”

“No. No, I remember the clock in the lobby. It was definitely after eight. Eight-ten, eight-fifteen.”

“Then that can’t be you, can it?”

“Guess not.”

“What about Fiona Schaefer?”

“Fiona? I thought she was up in Santa Barbara.”

“That’s what she claims, and some people we talked to are pretty sure she never left the place; but I’ve had this feeling she’s been lying about it. If it is her, she never figured we’d come up with the beeper. So being out of town was the perfect alibi.”

“You’re thinking, beeper or no, maybe Fiona came back to . . . ‘to get her rocks off.’”

Merrick nodded, then zoomed in to the figure’s head. Instead of being enhanced, the image further disintegrated. “Damn. She ever wear a ponytail?”

“I guess. I mean, most women with long hair do, especially when it’s hot.” Lilah squinted curiously. “It sort of looks a little like a guy now, no?”

“Sort of,” Merrick echoed with uncertainty.

“You think maybe it could be Jack Palmquist?”

“He have a ponytail?”

“Not when he was working for me.”

“Figures,” Merrick grunted, forced to consider the alternative he’d avoided earlier. There wasn’t a shred of evidence to link the two cases, but it couldn’t be ignored. “The name Eagleton mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing. Why, he have one?”

“Yup,” Merrick replied, explaining Eagleton’s link to
the Las Flores fire. “He was up there that night, and could’ve been down here the next. It’s off the wall, but he had opportunity, and he sure has expertise.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Copeland said with an amused smile. “It’s called motive.”

“What would I do without this guy?” Merrick asked sarcastically. He showed Lilah the photo of Eagleton. “James Eagleton. Any connection come to mind? Grade school? High school? College? Church group?”

“No.”

“One-night stand?”

“Not a chance.”

“Don’t answer so fast. Maybe he tried to hit on you in a bar or something, and you told him to buzz off, and ever since he’s been—”

“Who knows? A lot of guys’ve hit on me in bars.”

“Okay . . . shifting gears, but still on motive,” he said with a sideways glance to Copeland, “any chance he might have a grudge against your father?”

Lilah shrugged. “You can ask him, tomorrow.”

Merrick grunted, then called Pack-Tel and asked if Eagleton had mailed any packages recently. “Large ones—bold, black printing.”

The owner typed Eagleton’s name into his computer. “Nope, not since we put this system in.”

“Which was when?”

“Little over six months ago.”

“Shit,” Merrick groaned. He resisted an impulse to throw the phone, and kicked a wastebasket instead. It went tumbling across the floor, spilling its contents.

“You break it, you bought it,” Copeland crowed.

Merrick muttered an expletive, then took a twenty from his billfold and tossed it on the desk. “That’s for the
basket.” Then tossed another after it—making it an even hundred he’d doled out in recent weeks—and made a mental note to put in for reimbursement. “That’s for a copy of the tape.” He locked his eyes on to Copeland’s. “The one I’m taking with me now.”

“Now?” Copeland echoed smugly. “These things take paperwork, Lieutenant, and paperwork takes time.”

“I don’t have time, dammit!”

“That’s your problem,” Copeland said coolly. “This tape belongs to UCLA and the state of California. You want a copy of it, go get a subpoena.”

Lilah stiffened with rage. “Subpoena? Lieutenant Merrick is trying to stop this nut from killing me, and you’re into marking your territory? Well, pee on all the hydrants you want, but not on my time!” She stepped to the VCR, ejected the cassette, and tossed it to Merrick. “Come on, let’s go.”

Copeland glared at them, then shifted his look to the technician. “Make the goddamned copy,” he ordered.

A short time later, tape in hand, Merrick and Lilah were walking across campus beneath forty-foot palms that were rustling in the wind. “You know, you were something else in there,” Merrick said with unmistakable admiration.

“Really?” she prompted, pleased by his praise. “You don’t think I overreacted?”

“No way, the jerk had it coming. The bit about hydrants was primo.”

“Thanks,” Lilah said, cupping her hands to light a cigarette. “But something tells me our brains were running on dangerously low levels of sero in there.”

“Sero?”

“Serotonin. It’s a chemical that controls impulses.”

“Well, if I don’t lick this case soon,” Merrick growled, “mine’s going to be running on empty.”