Touched by Fire (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

After leaving Merrick with her parents, Lilah spent the afternoon in her office working on her presentation for the GRASP conference. She was scrolling through it on the monitor when Serena stuck her head in the door.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to put your hockey players on ice for a while,” the J.R. quipped unabashedly.

“Great, another bummer.”

“No, more like a tweener, actually.” Serena saw Lilah’s puzzled look and explained, “That’s somewhere
between
rather good and could be better.”

“Oh?” Lilah prompted, brightening.

“Indeed. After taking some soundings, Dr. Spicer said he expects the league will see the wisdom of cooperating—sometime next season.”

Lilah spent the next hour refining her presentation, then checked the current group of probes, which included her sample and Kauffman’s. The stylus-drawn chart showed that the temperature had remained constant since they’d been consigned to the freezer. “Time to go to work, Ruben,” she announced. “These rads are ready to batch.”

Cardenas knew she needed the results for the conference, that the fire had put them behind schedule, and he
swiftly transferred the cassettes from freezer to darkroom. He slipped the sheet of X-ray film from the first cassette and fed it into an autoprocessor. Moments later, when the developed autorad emerged, he peeled the bar-code sticker from the cassette and affixed it in the bottom right corner. One down, hundreds to go, he thought. It would be a long night.

Lilah left the office with a welcome sense of relief. The conference in Maryland was just weeks away, and the thought of putting some distance between her and the pyromaniac buoyed her spirits as she strode toward Wooden Center, leaning into the searing gusts that had carried on into November.

Kauffman was working out on one of the Nautilus machines when she arrived, snapping her towel at his butt as she passed. The kid lurched to a stop in the middle of a repetition and grinned. “I knew it was you.”

“Well, tomorrow’s the big day,” she said.

He looked a little puzzled as he climbed off the chrome-plated apparatus. “Veteran’s Day?”

“No, your OX-A probe hatches.”

“Oh,” he said warily.

“You mean, you’re not dying to find out if your weird sexual impulses are due to a mutant gene?”

“Weird sexual impulses?” he wondered, managing to keep a straight face.

“Hey, it wasn’t my idea to rub fuzzies on a room-service cart.”

A smug grin tugged at the corners of Kauffman’s mouth. “The ride of your life, huh?”

“Ranks right up there. Sure you don’t want to know if you’re negative or positive?”

“Nope, I figure it’s all perfectly normal behavior for a horny, twenty-three-year-old med student.”

Lilah laughed, then spent the next half hour on a rowing machine, trying to disprove the Erma Bombeck adage that women over forty shouldn’t wave to friends at the beach. Kauffman had already left for his study group by the time she’d finished. She was walking back to the hotel when it struck her that she hadn’t heard from Merrick. She knew nothing of the theory he’d hatched after talking to her mother yesterday, nor that on leaving, he had driven straight to ATF headquarters.

“We’re going to run this lady nine ways to Sunday,” Merrick said to Fletcher when he arrived. His theory was so off the wall, he wanted to find some bit of evidence, some incident in the past, some connection to Lilah, that would support it, before confronting her.

They searched data bases and archives for the schools, colleges, and camps Lilah had attended; and the places where she’d lived and worked in the Boston, Berkeley, and L.A. areas; then ran the data through the WAR, APP, and UAI files. Like APP, the Unsolved Arson Index had national scope and generated a volume of data. They’d been analyzing it for hours when Fletcher left to make some phone calls.

“Just got off the horn with the CHP,” he reported a short time later. “The night the mail room went boom? Eagleton spent it in their lockup. Busted in Trancas for vagrancy. Only call he made was to that legal eagle in tennis shorts.”

“Shit,” Merrick grunted.

“Yeah, we may be up against a pyro with a ponytail, but it ain’t him. Now for the good news.” He put a sheet of
paper on the desk. “Fiona Schaefer’s calls from Santa Barbara? None made even close to the time of detonation.”

Merrick pumped a fist. “ ’Cause she made it from down here. She’s lying. I knew it.”

“Easy now,” Fletcher warned, putting another sheet on the desk. “Jack Palmquist’s calls from Stockholm.”

Merrick gasped. “He called L.A. that night?”

“Both nights—lots of nights.”

“The times match?”

Fletcher waggled a hand. “First, there’s a daylight savings thing we need to check; then we need to find out if the number is assigned to a beeper; and then—”

“No we don’t,” Merrick interrupted brightly. He took the list of Palmquist’s calls, left Fletcher to continue analyzing the data they’d gathered on Lilah, and headed for the Computer Imaging lab. Pam Dyer was staring at a monitor where numbers were sequencing.

“What’s doing, Tattoo?” Merrick boomed as he entered. “Come up with that cap-code thing yet?”

“Nope. Still a chance, though.”

“Good, it has to be registered to whoever sent the fire bombs. Soon as you get it, run the number against these.” Merrick gave her the list of Palmquist’s calls, then looked to another monitor where an unidentifiable image was slowly morphing. The photos of the suspects she’d requested were tacked across the partition above it. “That ponytail still doesn’t have a face, huh?”

“Don’t know if it ever will.”

Merrick frowned, then pointed to Eagleton’s photo. “For what it’s worth, he’s history.”

“Tell me about it. Computer kicked him out first thing. These went next.” Pam indicated the three photos next to Eagleton’s. “Their faces have the least points of coincidence
with the video.
Those
are running neck and neck for the most.” She pointed to the last two photos in the row—the faces of Fiona Schaefer and Jack Palmquist—which shared angular Nordic features.

“It’s one of them?” Merrick prompted.

“No, it
could
be one of them.”

Merrick pointed at Fiona’s. “My money’s on her.”

“Still won’t prove she sent the fire bombs.”

“It
would
prove she’s lying about being out of town; and, as every smart cop knows, Tattoo, if she
did
send them . . .” he paused, suggesting Pam finish it.

“The best way to break her is catch her in a lie,” Pam responded smartly. “Of course, if she didn’t, it still could be any of them, right?”

“Except him,” Merrick growled, removing Eagleton’s photo from the partition. “We keep hitting the wall on this one. It’s really starting to piss me off.”

“Well, as somebody once said, ‘It helps to get away from it for a while.’ Tomorrow’s a holiday. Stay in bed till noon. Play with your sleep toys.”

“I’m going to play with my kid,” Merrick said, brightening. “I’m gonna help him with his—”

The phone rang, interrupting him.

Pam scooped it up. “Agent Dyer . . . Hey, I hear you’re getting your wife a guitar for Christmas,” she said with a sarcastic cackle. “Yeah, he is . . . Sure, no problem.” She hung up and swiveled back to Merrick. “That was your sidekick.”

“The horny married one . . .”

“Uh-huh. He said to tell you he came up with something on Dr. Graham.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Lilab sauntered into the Westwood Marquis in her workout gear and got into an elevator without noticing Merrick slouched in a corner of the lobby. He gave her a few minutes to get upstairs, then followed. She was putting up her hair before showering when he knocked.

“Doc? Doc, it’s me. It’s Merrick.”

Lilah crossed the room, pulling on a bathrobe, and opened the door. “Lieutenant . . .” she intoned, doing the waist tie as she led the way inside. “Why do I have the feeling you were supposed to call me?”

“I had to check a few things out first.”

Lilah made the obvious assumption and brightened. “My father came up with something?”

“No,” Merrick replied sharply. “Your mother did.”

“My mother?”

Merrick stared at her. “You lied to me, Doc.”

“Pardon me?”

“The name Laura ring a bell?”

Lilah looked as if she’d been punched in the solar plexus. “Yes it does,” she replied, lighting a cigarette. “A very painful one. What’s she have to do with this?”

“The cemetery.
Woodlawn
Cemetery. Your sister’s buried there, dammit. You should’ve told me.”

Lilah looked genuinely baffled. “She is?”

“Come on, Doc, don’t play games.”

“I’m not. I hadn’t given the place a thought until you told me about the return address.”

Merrick snorted skeptically. “Your mother said she can’t get you to go with her. So don’t try to—”

“Right,” Lilah interrupted. “She says, ‘Come with me to see your sister.’ Not, ‘Let’s go to the cemetery,’ let alone
Woodlawn
Cemetery.”

“You really expect me to believe that?”

“Look, we’re talking thirty-five years ago. I was seven. You’re the guy who said, ‘It’s amazing what people forget.’ Well, I
do
remember a whole lot of confusion and pain.” Her eyes saddened in reflection, then came alive with an idea. “Are your parents living?”

“My mom is.”

“You know where your father’s buried?”

“Yeah,” Merrick replied defensively. “Escondido. They retired down there.”

“What’s the name of the cemetery?”

“Holy . . . Holy something or other. Holy Family? Holy Moses? Holy Cow? Hell, I don’t know.”

Lilah smiled in vindication. “You have any idea what it’s like to lose a sibling? An identical twin? I mean, we were like these little mirror images of each other. I was afraid that what happened to Laura would happen to me. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I guess I figured I couldn’t die if I was awake.” Lilah put her hands together in prayer. “ ‘If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ Remember that?”

“Uh-huh. I always thought it had to be a cruel son of a bitch who dreamed it up.”

“My mother said it with us every night; and after Laura
died, she said it with
me.
” Lilah paused, toying with her cigarette, then drew the comforting warmth down into her chest. “As I said, that was over thirty-five years ago. The memories are still painful.”

Merrick held her eyes for a long moment. There was nothing evasive in them, he thought, and her reaction to being challenged seemed genuine and spontaneous. But Fletcher’s diligence had turned up something that gave credence to Merrick’s theory, and he had to test her. “Let’s talk
twenty-
five years ago.”

“Twenty-five?” Lilah wondered. “Let’s see, I . . . I was a freshman at Berkeley.”

“Saturday, October twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-three. You remember that night?”

“Not especially.”

“There was a fire in your dorm.”

Lilah nodded matter-of-factly. “Dorm fires were weekly events at Berkeley in those days. I don’t see the connection.”

“Well, according to the investigator’s report . . .” Merrick let it trail off and made a ritual of lighting a cigarette, waiting for signs of anxiety to surface; but impatience born of curiosity was all he detected. “As I was saying, according to the A. I.’s report, the fire started in the mail room.”

“It did?” Lilah blurted, astonished. “Are you saying, the first time this nut came at me was twenty-five years ago?”

Her incisive question stopped Merrick cold. He’d been so taken by his audacious theory that he’d failed to consider any others, even one as obvious as Lilah’s. “I don’t know,” he replied, shaken by the lapse. “All the evidence was destroyed by the fire. It was arson, but we don’t know if it was a fire-bomb-in-a-box or not.”

“How’d you find out? My father say something?”

“Your father?”

“Uh-huh. He was there. Parents weekend. I begged them not to come, but they insisted. I was mortified. When I was at Berkeley, nobody, I mean nobody, wanted their parents around. No sex, drugs, or rock ’n’ roll for an entire weekend?” She broke into laughter, expecting Merrick would do the same.

He dragged hard on the Marlboro and arched an accusing brow instead. “You didn’t have any trouble remembering
that,
did you, Doc?”

“No, I didn’t,” she replied indignantly. “Someone has made two attempts on my life, and—and—” Her voice faltered and her eyes brimmed with emotion that turned them a rich indigo. “And you’re treating me like a suspect.” Her jaw dropped as the implication of what she’d just said dawned on her. “My God, you—you actually came up here thinking I sent these things—these—these fire bombs—to myself?”

Merrick cocked his head challengingly. “Did you?”

“Why?” she demanded in a plaintive wail. “Why would I do something like that? How could you think that I’d—” She began sobbing and let it trail off.

Good question, Merrick thought, filling the space between them with smoke. He hadn’t been able to come up with a motive and hoped confronting her would force one to surface, but even through the tears, her eyes still engaged his forthrightly. She seemed upset rather than threatened, and genuinely offended that he could think such a thing of her. “Sorry, Doc. When you’ve been at this as long as I have, you learn to consider anything, no matter how crazy. As I said,
everybody’s
a suspect till it’s over.”

“You could’ve been more up front with me about it.”

“Occupational hazard,” Merrick explained. “We’re trained to be devious.”

“You’re also trained to see the obvious, aren’t you?” She whirled to the table, opened her briefcase and removed some papers with her handwriting on them. “Does this look like bold angry printing to you?”

“I ‘saw’ that, Doc. I also ‘saw’ that whoever it is could be disguising their handwriting.”

Lilah pulled a sleeve over her teary eyes and settled on the sofa, taking a moment to collect herself. “I think you were right the first time. This pyromaniac is a real sicko; and the sick joke is, I’m going to join my sister in the cemetery.”

“No you’re not,” Merrick said in a heroic tone that surprised him. “I mean, just because we eliminated one suspect"—he paused and smiled sheepishly at what he’d said—"doesn’t mean the others are off the book.”

“But the pyro has to be someone who knows Laura is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, right?”

Merrick nodded.

“Well, whoever it is, I didn’t tell them. So how’d they find out?”

“You didn’t have to tell your mother, did you?” Merrick responded, a little too sharply.

“Come on, I told you, we have our moments, but I can’t believe that—”

“And as I told you, ‘Everybody’s a—’”

“No need to repeat it, Lieutenant.”

“Good. Far as the rest goes, maybe one of them knows a friend of the family, or the doctor who cared for your sister, or they came across an old obituary.”

“Yeah,” Lilah said, her tone sharpening. “Someone like Fiona Sutton-Schaefer.”

“Yeah, I’m still looking real hard at her. But we just found out your pal Jack-be-nimble in Sweden has a thing for calling L.A.—especially on certain nights.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. How a guy in Stockholm comes up with a thirty-five-year-old obit puzzles me a little, but—”

“Try the Internet, the World Wide Web . . .”

“Damn . . .”

“Sounds like we’re right back where we started, doesn’t it?”

Merrick shrugged with resignation.

“Not the first time, Lieutenant,” Lilah teased with a demure smile. She was tucked into the corner of the sofa in her loosely tied robe, eyeing him with that combination of childlike vulnerability and mature sexuality that she always seemed to exude.

“Maybe . . .” Merrick said, his eyes sweeping over her desirously. “Maybe we should do something to change our luck.”

“What do you have in mind?” Lilah wondered in a sexy whisper that sent a current surging through him. She had just finished putting up her hair when Merrick arrived, and now she arched back sensuously, running her hands up behind her neck, and began taking it down. Her slender fingers moved with practiced grace until the flame-red waves spilled wantonly onto her shoulders and across the front of her bathrobe and breasts.

This was the moment. They’d both felt the rush. They’d both acknowledged it with their eyes. The bed was plush, inviting, and just steps away; they knew that in a few seconds, seconds during which the pent-up sexual tension would explode in a passionate frenzy, they would be naked and writhing beneath the sheets. But despite their
past flirtations, despite all the entendres—now, at the very moment of truth—they both froze like members of a religious order faced with breaking their vows of celibacy.

Merrick had suddenly found he was as baffled and confused about Lilah as he was about women in general, starting with his ex-wife. He’d thought he understood her, only to be informed after twelve years that he had completely missed the mark in every category; and he had no reason to think he might not be missing it where Lilah was concerned. She was complicated, neurotic, and promiscuous, not to mention marked for death by a pyromaniac. The more he learned about her, the less he knew; though he had no doubt she was dangerous, which, along with the scent of her perfume, made her all the more tempting and all the more forbidding.

Lilah quickly sensed Merrick’s ambivalence along with her own. From the moment she first saw him she wanted to have sex with him. She’d fantasized about what it would be like, and resented his indifference; and now, with a reassuring glance at the mirror, she was on the verge of doing something more to seduce him, something like letting her robe slip open to reveal a bit of thigh or a glimpse of a breast that she knew men found more stimulating than blatant nudity. But she found herself securing the tie and clutching the collar instead. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe what she saw in Merrick’s eyes wasn’t uncertainty, but pity. Maybe be wasn’t safe like the others, wasn’t someone she could control. Or maybe she just couldn’t bring herself to have sex with a fireman, with someone who had the burnt scent and fiery temperament of her father; then again, maybe it was just her turn to reject him.

Merrick sensed her coolness and sighed, pondering her
question. What did he have in mind? “Algebra,” he replied with a grin. “Can you do it tomorrow?”

Lilah looked blank, then made the connection. “Oh yeah, sure. In the morning. My afternoon is jammed.”

“Manhattan Beach Coffee Shop. About ten?”

“I’ll be there.”

A short time later, Merrick was driving home in the Blazer, his mind racing much faster than the rush hour traffic. One of the suspects had found out about Lilah’s sister and about Woodlawn; but which one? The medical community is a relatively small, interconnected group, he thought. It’s more than possible for Fiona to have gotten to know the doctor who cared for Laura all those years ago. He could’ve been one of her professors in med school, or be running a department at UCLA now. Maybe she came across some records, or a case study somewhere. Then again, maybe she just found it on the Internet. Maybe Jack Palmquist did.

Merrick was finally approaching his exit when, despite Lilah’s earlier admonitions, Marge Graham came powerfully to mind. She knows about Laura and Woodlawn, he thought, and also carries a beeper, probably the same model used to detonate the incendiary devices—but so do thousands of other Angelenos. Furthermore, how could a woman who couldn’t light a barbecue turn a beeper into a remote detonator? And why would she send fire bombs to her daughter?

On the other hand, it was obvious there was no love lost between them; and if whoever cooked up that prayer was cruel, what was a mother who forced a seven-year-old who’d just lost a sibling to say it every night? Maybe
she
was into getting her rocks off? Her hair wasn’t long enough for a ponytail, but she did show up at the condo the
night the mail room blew; she did follow them from the crime scene to the hotel; and she certainly could’ve been lying about the reason.

It would take a deeply rooted pathology like insane jealousy over Lilah’s relationship with her father, or an extreme hatred for Lilah, because she was alive and Laura wasn’t, to motivate her. But why now? Merrick asked himself. Why thirty-five years after the event?

He bounced a fist off the steering wheel in frustration. The more he tried to assemble the pieces, the more confused the picture became. He was cruising down Rosecrans when it occurred to him that maybe Tattoo was right. Maybe he should get away from it for a while, loosen up, have some fun. The Sandpiper wasn’t his kind of place, but Orville & Wilbur’s was. The surf and turf joint, just off the beach on Rosecrans, had served as the local pickup joint since the early seventies. He’d been a regular during its heyday, and his. Many a night he had tied one on with the guys; and, on rare occasion, he’d actually gotten lucky with the girls, though picking up women in bars wasn’t his forte then, and certainly wasn’t now. He started turning into his street, then had a change of heart and continued toward the ocean.

The near miss with Merrick left Lilah feeling hollow and unsettled. She’d spent about an hour pacing the hotel room, and had paused at a window to admire Westwood’s flickering lights when the bursts of violet, yellow, and white began exploding over the rooftops, and the neon-green tentacles came lashing at her out of the darkness. She stood her ground as the rising wave crested, threatening to drown her in churning terror; then, in an anxiety-driven frenzy, she threw on some clothes, stuffed the rest
of her things into the overnight bag, and checked out of the hotel.