E is for EVIDENCE Read online

  Behind me, the receptionist was returning to her desk with a fresh cup of coffee and a Styrofoam container that smelled of sausage and eggs. The laminated plastic sign on her desk indicated that her name was Heather. She was in her twenties and apparently hadn’t yet heard about the hazards of cholesterol and fat. She would find the latter on her fanny one day soon.

  “May I help you?” Her smile was quick, exposing braces on her teeth. Her complexion was still ruddy from last night’s application of an acne cure that so far hadn’t had much effect.

  “I have an appointment with Lance Wood at nine,” I said. “I’m with California Fidelity Insurance.”

  Her smile faded slightly. “You’re the arson investigator?”

  “Well, I’m here on the fire claim,” I said, wondering if she mistakenly assumed that “arson” and “fire” were interchangeable terms.

  “Oh. Mr. Wood isn’t in yet, but he should be here momentarily,” she said. The braces infused her speech with a sibilance that amused her when she heard herself. “Can I get you some coffee while you wait?”

  I shook my head. There was one chair available and I took a seat, amusing myself by leafing through a brochure on the molybdenum work rack designed specifically for metallizing alumina at 1450�� C. in a bell-style hydrogen furnace. These people had about as many laughs as I do at home, where a prime source of entertainment is a textbook on practical aspects of ballistics, firearms, and forensic techniques.

  Through a doorway to my left, I could see some of the office staff, casually dressed and busy, but glum. I didn’t pick up any sense of camaraderie among them, but maybe hydrogen furnace-making doesn’t generate the kind of good-natured bantering I’m accustomed to with California Fidelity. Two desks were unoccupied, bare of equipment or accouterments.

  Some attempt had been made to decorate for Christmas. There was an artificial tree across the room from me, tall and skeletal, hung with multicolored ornaments. There didn’t seem to be any lights strung on the tree, which gave it a lifeless air and only pointed up the uniformity of the detachable limbs stuck into pre-bored holes in the aluminum shaft. The effect was dispiriting. From the information I’d been given, Wood/Warren grossed close to fifteen million bucks a year, and I wondered why they wouldn’t pop for a live pine.

  Heather gave me a selfconscious smile and began to eat. Behind her was a bulletin board decorated with garlands of tinsel and covered with snapshots of the family and staff. H-A-P-P-Y H-O-L-I-D-A-Y-S was spelled out in jaunty store-bought silver letters.

  “Mind if I look at that?” I asked, indicating the collage.

  By then, she had a mouth full of breakfast croissant, but she managed assent, holding a hand in front of her mouth to spare me the sight of her masticated food. “Help yourself.”

  Most of the photographs were of company employees, some of whom I’d seen on the premises. Heather was featured in one, her fair hair much shorter, her face still framed in baby fat. The braces on her teeth probably represented the last vestige of her teens. Wood/Warren must have hired her right out of high school. In one photograph, four guys in company coveralls stood in a relaxed group on the front doorstep. Some of the shots were stiffly posed, but for the most part they seemed to capture an aura of goodwill I wasn’t picking up on currently. The founder of the company, Linden “Woody” Wood, had died two years before, and I wondered if some of the joy had gone out of the place with his demise.

  The Woods themselves formed the centerpiece in a studio portrait that looked like it was taken at the family home. Mrs. Wood was seated in a French Provincial chair. Linden stood with his hand resting on his wife’s shoulder. The five grown children were ranged around their parents. Lance I’d never met before, but I knew Ash because I’d gone to high school with her. Olive, older by a year, had attended Santa Teresa High briefly, but had been sent off to a boarding school in her senior year. There was probably a minor scandal attached to that, but I wasn’t sure what it was. The oldest of the five was Ebony, who by now must be nearly forty. I remembered hearing that she’d married some rich playboy and was living in France. The youngest was a son named Bass, not quite thirty, reckless, irresponsible, a failed actor and no-talent musician, living in New York City, the last I’d heard. I had met him briefly eight years before through my ex-husband, Daniel, a jazz pianist. Bass was the black sheep of the family. I wasn’t sure what the story was on Lance.

  Seated across his desk from him sixty-six minutes later, I began to pick up a few hints. Lance had breezed in at 9:30. The receptionist indicated who I was. He introduced himself and we shook hands. He said he had a quick phone call to make and then he’d be right with me. I said “Fine” and that was the last I saw of him until 10:06. By then, he’d shed his suit coat and loosened his tie along with the top button of his dress shirt. He was sitting with his feet up on the desk, his face oily-looking under the fluorescent lights. He must have been in his late thirties, but he wasn’t aging well. Some combination of temper and discontent had etched lines near his mouth and spoiled the clear brown of his eyes, leaving an impression of a man beleaguered by the Fates. His hair was light brown, thinning on top, and combed straight back from his face. I thought the business about the phone call was bullshit. He struck me as the sort of man who pumped up his own sense of importance by making people wait. His smile was self-satisfied, and the energy he radiated was charged with tension.

  “Sorry for the delay,” he said, “What can I do for you?” He was tipped back in his swivel chair, his thighs splayed.

  “I understand you filed a claim for a recent fire loss.”

  “That’s right, and I hope you’re not going to give me any static over that. Believe me, I’m not asking for anything I’m not entitled to.”

  I made a noncommittal murmur of some sort, hoping to conceal the fact that I’d gone on “fraud alert.” Every insurance piker I’d ever met said just that, right down to the pious little toss of the head. I took out my tape recorder, flicked it on, and set it on the desk. “The company requires that I tape the interview,” I said.

  “That’s fine.”

  I directed my next few remarks to the recorder, establishing my name, the fact that I worked for California Fidelity, the date and time of the interview, and the fact that I was speaking to Lance Wood in his capacity as president and CEO of Wood/Warren, the address of the company, and the nature of the loss.

  “Mr. Wood, you do understand that this is being taped,” I said for the benefit of the record.

  “Yes.”

  “And do I have your permission to make this recording of the conversation we’re about to have?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, making that little rolling hand gesture that means “Let’s get on with it.”

  I glanced down at the file. “Can you tell me the circumstances of the fire that occurred at the Wood/Warren warehouse at 606 Fairweather on December nineteenth of this year?”

  He shifted impatiently. “Actually, I was out of town, but from what I’m told…” The telephone intercom buzzed and he snatched up the receiver, barking at it like a dog. “Yes?”

  There was a pause. “Well, goddamn it, put her through.” He gave me a quick look. “No, wait a minute, I’ll take it out there.” He put the phone down, excused himself brusquely, and left the room. I clicked off the recorder, mentally assessing the brief impression I’d had of him as he passed. He was getting heavy in the waist and his gabardine pants rode up unbecomingly, his shirt sticking to the center of his back. He smelled harshly of sweat ��� not that clean animal scent that comes from a hard workout, but the pungent, faintly repellant odor of stress. His complexion was sallow and he looked vaguely unhealthy.

  I waited for fifteen minutes and then tiptoed to the door. The reception area was deserted. No sign of Lance Wood. No sign of Heather. I moved over to the door leading into the inner office. I caught a glimpse of someone passing into the rear of the building who looked very much like Ebony, but I couldn’t be sure. A woman
looked up at me. The name plate on her desk indicated that she was Ava Daugherty, the office manager. She was in her late forties, with a small, dusky face and a nose that looked as if it had been surgically tampered with. Her hair was short and black, with the glossy patina of hair spray. She was unhappy about something, possibly the fact that she’d just cracked one of her bright-red acrylic fingernails.

  “I’m supposed to be meeting with Lance Wood, but he’s disappeared. Do you know where he went?”

  “He left the plant.” She was licking the cracked nail experimentally, as if the chemistry of her saliva might serve as adhesive.

  “He left?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Did he say how soon he’d be back?”

  “Mr. Wood doesn’t consult with me,” she said snappishly. “If you’d like to leave your name, I’m sure he’ll get back to you.”

  A voice cut in. “Something wrong?”

  We both looked up to find a dark-haired man standing in the doorway behind me. Ava Daugherty’s manner became somewhat less antagonistic. “This is the company vice-president,” she said to me. And to him, “She’s supposed to be in a meeting with Lance, but he left the plant.”

  “Terry Kohler,” he said to me, holding out his hand. “I’m Lance Wood’s brother-in-law.”

  “Kinsey Millhone, from California Fidelity,” I said, shaking hands with him. “Nice to meet you.” His grip was hard and hot. He was wiry, with a dark moustache and large, dark eyes that were full of intelligence. He must have been in his early forties. I wondered which sister he was married to.

  “What’s the problem? Something I can help you with?”

  I told him briefly what I was doing there and the fact that Lance Wood had abandoned me without a word of explanation.

  “Why don’t I show you the warehouse?” he said. “At least you can go ahead and inspect the fire scene, which I’m assuming is one of your responsibilities.”

  “I’d appreciate that. Is anybody else out here authorized to give me the information I need?”

  Terry Kohler and Ava Daugherty exchanged a look I couldn’t decipher.

  “You better wait for Lance,” he said. “Hold on and I’ll see if I can find out where he went.” He moved toward the outer office.

  Ava and I avoided small talk. She opened her top right-hand drawer and took out a tube of Krazy Glue, ignoring me pointedly as she snipped off the tip and squeezed one clear drop on the cracked fingernail. She frowned. A long dark hair was caught in the glue and I watched her struggle to extract it.

  Idly I tuned into the conversation behind me, three engineers in a languid discussion about the problem before them.

  “Now maybe the calculation is off, but I don’t think so,” one was saying,

  “We’ll find out,” someone interjected. All three men laughed.

  “The question came up… oh, this has occurred to me many times… What would it take to convert this to a pulse power supply for the main hot cell?”

  “Depends on what your pulsing frequency is.”

  “About ten hertz.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Anything that would allow you to modulate a signal away that was being influenced by the juice going through the susceptors. You know, power on for nine-tenths of a second, off for a tenth. Take measurements…”

  “Urn-hum. On for a half a second, off for a tenth of a second. You can’t really do it easily, can you?”

  “The PID controller could send the output that fast. I’m not sure what that would do to the NCRs. To the VRT setup itself, whether that would follow it…”

  I tuned them out again. They could have been plotting the end of the world for all I knew.

  It was another ten minutes before Terry Kohler reappeared. He was shaking his head in apparent exasperation.

  “I don’t know what’s going on around here,” he said. “Lance had to go out on some emergency and Heather’s still away from her desk.” He held up a key ring. “I’ll take you over to the warehouse. Tell Heather I’ve got these if she shows up.”

  “I should get my camera,” I said. “It’s with my handbag.”

  He tagged along patiently while I moved back to Lance Wood’s office, where I retrieved the camera, tucked my wallet in my tote, and left my handbag where it was.

  Together we retraced a path through the reception room and the offices beyond. Nobody actually looked up as we passed, but curious gazes followed us in silence, like those portraits where the eyes seem to move.

  The assembly work was done in a large, well-ventilated area in the back half of the building with walls of corrugated metal and a floor of concrete.

  We paused only once while Terry introduced me to a man named John Salkowitz. “John’s a chemical engineer and consulting associate,” Terry said. “He’s been with us since ‘sixty-six. You have any questions about high-temperature processing, he’s the man you want to ask.”

  Offhand, I couldn’t think of one ��� except maybe about that pulse power supply for the main hot cell. That was a poser.

  Terry was moving toward the rear door, and I trotted after him.

  To the right, there was a double-wide rolling steel door that could be raised to accommodate incoming shipments or to load finished units ready for delivery. We went out into the alleyway, cutting through to the street beyond.

  “Which of the Wood sisters are you married to?” I asked. “I went to high school with Ash.”

  “Olive,” he said with a smile. “What’s your name again?”

  I told him and we chatted idly for the remainder of the short walk, dropping into silence only when the charred skeleton of the warehouse loomed into view.

  Chapter 3

  *

  It took me three hours to examine the fire scene. Terry went through the motions of unlocking the front door, though the gesture seemed ludicrous given the wreckage the fire had left. Most of the outer shell of the building remained upright, but the second story had collapsed into the first, leaving a nearly impenetrable mass of blackened rubble. The glass in the first-floor windows had been blown out by the heat. Metal pipes were exposed, many twisted by the weight of the walls tumbling inward. Whatever recognizable objects remained were reduced to their abstract shapes, robbed of color and detail.

  When it became apparent that I was going to be there for a while, Terry excused himself and went back to the plant. Wood/Warren was closing early that day as it was Christmas Eve. He said if I was finished soon enough, I was welcome to stop by and have some punch and Christmas cookies. I had already taken out my measuring tape, notebook, sketch pad, and pencils, mentally laying out the order in which I intended to proceed. I thanked him, scarcely aware of his departure.

  I circled the perimeter of the building, noting the areas of severest burning, checking the window frames on the first floor for signs of forced entry. I wasn’t sure how quickly the salvage crew would be coming in, and since there was no apparent evidence of arson, I didn’t feel California Fidelity could insist on a delay. Monday morning, I would do a background check on Lance Wood’s financial situation just to make sure there wasn’t any hidden profit motive for the fire itself… a mere formality in this case, since the fire chief had already ruled out arson in his report. Since this was probably the only chance we’d have to survey the premises, I photographed everything, taking two rolls of film, twenty-four exposures each.

  As nearly as I could tell, the probable point of origin of the fire was somewhere in the north wall, which seemed consistent with the theory of an electrical malfunction. I’d have to check the wiring diagram from the original blueprints, but I suspected the fire chief had done just that in coming up with his analysis. The surface of charred wood bore the typical pattern of crevices known as “alligatoring,” the deepest charring and the smallest check in the pattern localized in this rear portion of the building. Since hot gases rise and fire normally sweeps upward, it’s usually possible to track the course of the flames,
which will tend to rise until an obstacle is encountered, then project horizontally, seeking other vertical outlets.

  Much of the interior had been reduced to ashes. The load-bearing walls remained, as black and brittle as cinder. Gingerly, I picked my way through the charbroiled junk, making a detailed map of the ruins, noting the degree of burning, general appearance, and carbonization of burned objects. Every surface I encountered had been painted with the black and ashen pallor of extreme heat. The stench was familiar: scorched wood, soot, the sodden odor of drenched insulation, the lingering chemical aroma of ordinary materials reduced to their elements. There was some other odor as well, which I noted, but couldn’t identify. It was probably connected to materials stored there. When I’d called Lance Wood the day before, I’d requested a copy of the inventory sheets. I’d review those to see if I could pinpoint the source of the smell. I wasn’t crazy about having to inspect the fire scene before I’d had a chance to interview him, but I didn’t seem to have much choice, now that he’d disappeared. Maybe he’d be back for the office Christmas party and I could pin him down then about an appointment first thing Monday morning.

  At 2:00 P.M., I packed my sketch pad away and brushed off my jeans. My tennis shoes were nearly white with ash, and I suspected that my face was smudged. Still, I was reasonably content with the job I’d done. Wood/Warren was going to have to get several contractors’ estimates, and those would be submitted to CF along with my recommendation regarding payment of the claim. Using the standard rule, I was guessing five hundred thousand dollars replacement cost, with additional payment for the inventory loss.

  The Christmas party was indeed in progress. The festivities were centered in the inner offices where a punch bowl had been set up on a drafting table. Desks had been cleared and were covered with platters of cold cuts, cheeses, and crackers, along with slices of fruitcake and homemade cookies. The company employees numbered about sixty, so the noise level was substantial, the general atmosphere getting looser and livelier as the champagne punch went down. Some sort of Reggae version of Christmas carols was being blasted through the intercom system.