Chapter 19
“ROBBERY WAS THE MOTIVE for this?” Conklin shouted as Claire stepped into the den with her assistant in tow.
Before Claire could say, “Who died?” I reached out to her for a hug, said into her ear, “Conklin knew the victims.”
“Gotcha,” she said.
As Claire unpacked her scene kit, I told her about the manhandled corpse. Then I stepped out of her way as she took pictures of both bodies with her old Minolta, two shots from every angle.
“There are two doors to this room,” she said as her camera flashed. “Chuck, you say that this room was the point of origin. But the victims stayed in here. Why was that?”
“They could’ve been caught by surprise,” Hanni said. He was cutting samples from the carpet, putting fibers into K-packs.
“If they were drinking and fell asleep, maybe a cigarette dropped down into the couch cushions.”
Hanni explained what was still so hard to believe — that a fire could fill a room this size with smoke in less than a minute, that sleeping people could wake up coughing, be unable to see, get disoriented.
Chuck said, “Someone says, ‘Let’s go this way.’ Other person says, ‘No, it’s this way.’ Maybe someone falls. Smoke inhalation gets them. Boom, they’re down, and they’re unconscious. These two people were dead inside a couple of minutes.”
Conklin came back into the room holding a book in his gloved hand. “I found this on the staircase.”
He handed the book to me. “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. Charles Bukowski. Is this poetry?”
I opened the book to the title page, saw an inscription written there in ballpoint pen.
“This is Latin,” I said to my partner, sounding out the words. “Annuit Cœptis.”
“That’s pronounced chep-tus,” Conklin said. “It’s a motto inscribed on the dollar bill right above that symbol of the pyramid thing with the eye. Annuit Cœptis. ‘Providence favors our undertaking.’ ”
“You know Latin?”
He shrugged. “I went to Catholic school.”
I said, “So, what do you think, Rich? Is the firebug leaving us a message? That God’s okay with this?”
Conklin looked around at the destruction, said, “Not the God I believe in.”
Chapter 20
AT THREE THAT MORNING, Hanni, Conklin, and I watched the fire department board up the Malones’ windows and put a lock on the front door. The onlookers were back in their beds, and as the sounds of hammering cracked through the otherwise silent neighborhood, Hanni said, “There was a fire four months ago in Palo Alto, reminds me of this one.”
“How so?”
“Big, expensive house. The alarm was turned off. Two people died in the living room, and I had the same question in my mind: Why didn’t they leave?”
“Panic, disorientation, like you were saying.”
“Yeah, it happens. But since I wasn’t called in until a couple of days after the fire, I couldn’t know for sure. Drives me crazy when the fire department decides the fire’s accidental without an arson investigator present. Anyway, the bodies were cremated at the funeral home by the time I was called.”
“You thought the fire was suspicious?” Conklin asked.
Hanni nodded. “I still think so. The victims were good people, and they had money. But no one could come up with a motive for anyone to kill Henry and Peggy Jablonsky — not revenge, not insurance fraud, not even ‘I hate your face.’ So I was left with a bad feeling and no way to tell if the fire was arson or a spark flew out of the fireplace and lit up the Christmas tree.”
“I guess you didn’t find a book with Latin written inside,” I said.
“By the time I got there, the ‘evidence eradication unit’ had tossed a mountain of soaked household goods into the front yard. I guess I wasn’t looking for a book.”
Hanni took his car keys out of his pocket. “Okay, guys, I’m done. See you in a few hours.”