Horndog was a peach-and-white Moluccan cockatoo, a relative of the bird Robert Blake used to have in his TV series Baretta. But Horndog was no movie star. He sulked in his cage plucking feathers from his breast, lifting his head to squawk whenever the door to the pet shop opened.
“He’s depressed,” Seth said. “He needs a home. Anybody comes into your house, Horndog will let you know.”
So Horndog had been renamed Peaches, and now that he was living with Cindy he was no longer depressed. Visibly happier, he now perched on Cindy’s shoulder, chewing a pencil into wood chips and softly chuffing to himself. It took a week or two for Cindy to finally translate that muffled mutter; Peaches was saying, repeatedly, “Kill the bitch. Kill the bitch.”
“Pretty bird, pretty bird,” Cindy answered distractedly, sure that if she said it enough times, she could reprogram her bird.
Tonight Peaches and Cindy were at her computer in her home office. Cindy typed a series of key words into a search engine: “home fires fatalities,” “home fires fatalities Bay Area,” “home fires cause unknown.” But each time she pressed the enter key, too much information flooded her screen.
Cindy scratched the bird under its chin, refreshed her tea with hot water from the kettle, and went back to her desk. The clock icon in the bottom corner of her screen read 10:32 and she was still nowhere. She refined her search, typed “home fire wealthy couple.”
“It’s unreal, Peaches,” she said, as dozens of links appeared on her screen. “Too much information!”
Nearly all of the links led to the same fire, a house outside San Francisco that had been torched four years before. As Cindy scanned the articles, she remembered the story of the victims, Emil and Rosanne Christiansen, who had died before she was assigned to the crime desk.
Emil Christiansen had been the CFO of an office machine company that had been bought out by a computer company. The Christiansens had become instant multimillionaires. They’d moved out of the city to a woodsy setting up the coast. According to the articles, the house had burned down before firefighters could reach it, and the Christiansens had died.
The fire had been classified accidental by the firefighters at the scene, but when the couple’s son did an inventory of the remaining property, he reported that his father’s coin collection was missing and that his mother’s large emerald ring and a sapphire-and-diamond bracelet that was alone worth fifty thousand dollars were gone.
At the bottom of the last article was a quote from the arson investigator, who had told the reporter, “A candle tipped over, papers caught fire, the curtains went up, and so went the house. I haven’t found any trace of fire accelerant, so right now I can’t say if the fire was accidental or intentional.”
Cindy typed, clicked, followed the links, found the medical examiner’s report on the Christiansens. The ME had given the cause of death as smoke inhalation and the manner of death “undetermined based upon the fire marshal’s report.”
“Hey, Peaches. What about the missing jewels? Hmmmm?”
“Kill the bitch. Kill the bitch.”
Cindy’s mind churned with questions. The Christiansens had been robbed, so why, she wondered, had the arson investigator said he didn’t know if the fire was accidental or intentional? And here was a thought: Was it a coincidence that the arson investigator who worked the Christiansen fire was also working on both the Malone and Meacham homicides?
Cindy knew the investigator’s name because Lindsay had talked about him. His name was Chuck Hanni.
She put Peaches back into his cage and covered it. Then she got busy on the phone. First she called her editor.
Then she called Lindsay.
Chapter 55
THE GIRL WAS HEAVY.
She was sitting at the picnic table on campus, right outside the Jamba Juice Bar, facing White Plaza, sipping her Strawberry Whirl through a straw. She was wearing tent clothes: a long prairie skirt and a big red sweatshirt. Her skin was rough and her hair was mousy, and she was, in fact, perfect.
Hawk lifted an eyebrow in her direction. Pidge nodded. They walked over to the picnic table and took seats, Hawk sitting next to the girl, Pidge sitting opposite.
Hawk made a phone with his thumb and pinkie.
“Ba-rinnng,” he said, making a telephone ring tone.
“Hal-lo,” Pidge said, answering the call with his own thumb-and-pinkie phone.
“Pidge. You get outta here, man. I saw her first.”
“But I like her better, dude. I told you how much I like this woman.”
The girl looked up, puzzl
ed by the conversation going on around her. She looked at Hawk, sitting to her left, turned her head, and looked at Pidge. Then she dropped her gaze back to her laptop, where she was blogging an entry in MySpace.
“I don’t think she likes either of us, dude,” Hawk said into his phone. “You think she’s a snob?”