6 Under The Final Moon (9 page)

“They’re upstairs. The Culversons. Gerry Anne, forty-one, husband—”

“Kenneth, forty-three,” I finished, reading over his shoulder.

Alex glanced at me, eyebrows raised, but I just shook my head, anxiety humming through me as we walked.

I followed Alex up the steps, walking close enough that I could smell the cut-grass scent of his cologne, the fresh, soapy smell of his hair. But death still crept in.

We passed a bedroom and I glanced in, stopping when I noticed an officer and a plainclothes detective crouched at the end of a child’s bed. A little boy was sitting on the bed, legs out straight in front of him, his back nestled into the pillows. Tears popped into my eyes, and when the boy nodded, then smiled, I felt like laughing, like rushing into the room and scooping him up in my arms and taking him away from this horrible scene, this stench of death. The boy—who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten—unhanded the teddy bear he was clutching and waved at me, a peculiar finger wave, more apt for an adult than a child. I waved back.

“The little boy—he was spared?” I whispered into the back of Alex’s neck.

Alex turned on a breath. His eyes cut into the room and then back to me. “It was his parents. As you can see, the boy was unharmed.”

I tried to swallow over the knot in my throat. “Does he know yet?”

“Let’s just look at the crime scene first.”

Alex pushed open a pair of double doors, and I sucked in a breath at what should have been the grandeur of the master bedroom. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the bay, the sparkle of the Golden Gate’s white lights poking through endless sheets of fog. The furnishings in the room were opulent but efficient, and the ceilings ran high enough for me to fit all three stories of my squat apartment building inside. We were in the sitting room, I realized as Alex walked with purpose through the beautiful area and turned a corner into the sleeping quarters.

And that’s when it hit me. The smell. Full force. Not just death, but the fetid stench of decaying flesh. The pungent scent of fear. And that smoky, choking smell of a fire just burned out.

“Oh my God.”

I can’t describe the feeling that overtook me. It was fire down my spine. My stomach gone to liquid. My eyes held open in terror even though I desperately, painfully wanted to close them. But somewhere inside I knew it wouldn’t matter because the image in front of me would be imprinted in my mind forever.

Even though it was well charred, I could make out the curved edges of a king-size bed. The headboard and footboard were pockmarked with black buds of fire and weeping stripes of soot. The once-white bedclothes were edged with a muted grey where the fire hadn’t reached, but in the center they were ripped clean, the mattress devoured by flame leaving only the black entrails of half-melted springs.

And then there were the bodies—what was left of them.

A man and a woman were entwined, the blackened remains of her fingers gripping at his shoulder. Their mouths were gaping open, stark white teeth looking freakishly out of place against what used to be—I guessed—the taut, young skin of faces screaming in terror. The fire centered heavily between the two and decimated their torsos, their faces.

“There was an accelerant used here,” Alex said, using the back of his pen to point to the ruined bodies. “You can see where it dripped here and here and this is the line it ran.”

I nodded blankly, begging my mind to focus on anything other than the utter destruction in front of me, but there was nothing else to focus on. Blood arced across a window, a stark trail of red mixing with the muted colors on the other side of the glass. It was on the bed, too, most of it lost to the blackness of the soot, but some of it, like the red velvet trail on the woman’s unburned foot was there, another ridiculous-looking punch of color in the palette of blacks and grays. Just under the woman’s foot—her toenails painted a sweet, bubblegum pink—was a thin replica of a baseball bat.

It, too, had been untouched by the flame, but it was scarred nonetheless. One whole end of the thing was covered with a viscous layer of blood mixed with hair and what I knew—with a pulsing, aching beat of my heart—was skin.

“They were beaten and then set on fire?” I couldn’t recognize the sound of my own voice, but I knew it was me because Alex turned around, eyebrows up.

“That’s what it looked like.”

“Premeditated?”

“We can’t tell yet.”

I leaned in. “Do you know much about the family yet? Are they”—I lowered my voice to a hoarse whisp er—“human?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing para?”

Alex shrugged. “Normal as you and me.”

Neither Alex nor I was anywhere near normal, but it didn’t seem the time to point it out.

“Do you have anything on the son?” I asked.

Alex shook his head and I was immediately thinking of the small child in the other room, sitting on the bed, innocently clutching his fat, fuzzy teddy bear.

“The little boy. He was . . .” I gulped down a sob. “He was here when it happened?”

His voice was raspy. “Yeah.”

“So he was spared? Did the—animal—who did this not know? Was he spared on purpose? God, Alex, we need to be working on this right now.” I dug in my back pocket for my cell phone, my finger hovering over Sampson’s name when Alex grabbed my wrist and led me out of the room.

“You don’t want me to call Sampson? Alex, this guy—this—this whoever or
what
ever did this is going to strike again. This isn’t a one-off. This brutality ? This looks like the making of a ser—”

“We know who the perpetrator is, Lawson.”

I sputtered. “We do? Who? Did you catch him in the act—or . . .” I glanced back to the ruined bodies and immediately tried to shake the image out of my head. “I want to be in on the questioning. At least on the two-way. This asshole has to answer for a lot. He orphaned a child.”

I couldn’t hold back anymore. My voice broke on the word and tears raced over my cheeks, tickled the end of my nose. I was crying, bawling even, hard, body-wracking sobs that turned into hiccups and hysteria. Suddenly, Alex’s arms were around me, tight, confining me, and I fell into their comfort. I listened to his heartbeat, steady against my erratic one. He let me cry for minutes or hours until I had cried myself out.

I shook off his embrace and used the heel of my hand to swipe at my cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry—that was really unprofessional of me.”

“That’s all right,” Alex said. “Are you okay?”

I did that fingertip-under-the eye thing as though I were wearing mascara rather than Chapstick and chocolate Pinwheel.

“I just feel so bad for that kid. What’s his name?”

“Oliver.”

“Oliver.” I felt the word in my mouth, round and sweet tasting. “What is going to happen to Oliver now? Does he have family, someone to take him in?”

I watched Alex’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “He has someplace to go. He’s the perpetrator.”

I couldn’t breathe. I must have heard wrong. “I’m sorry. Who is the perpetrator?”

Alex took my arm again and I followed him down the stairs. When we passed Oliver’s room it was dark, the bed made up with a cheery patchwork quilt featuring a red, white, and blue sailboat, the teddy bear he was clutching so fiercely lying upside down on the floor, forgotten.

“Oliver. The kid.”

“That’s insane. He can’t be more than nine or ten years old.”

“Eight, actually.”

I yanked my arm from Alex’s hold and stopped at the edge of the foyer, pushing Alex into the nearest room—a den painted dark green with an enormous desk spotted with black and white family photos. Oliver, and the smiling man and woman on either side of him, at the beach, at Disneyland, looking every inch the normal American family. Not the decimated, tortured one I had just encountered.

“Who told you that the kid did it?” I hissed, suddenly strangely protective of Oliver.

“Lawson, I’m as stunned as you are. But it’s true. The bat, the trajectory, everything. It was Oliver.”

“I don’t believe that. Someone is trying to set him up. Who would set up a child?” I snapped. “Obviously the guy who burned up Armentrout.” I began to pace. “But what could his angle be?”

“There’s no angle, Lawson.” I could hear the exhaustion in Alex’s voice, but it only bolstered me.

“Who told you that this kid, this little boy is responsible for beating his parents and then burning them in their own bed? Who told you this?”

Alex waited a beat before speaking. “Oliver did.”

I shook my head. “No. No. He’s—he’s
eight.
”

He shook his hand, squeezing the back of his neck—a move he only did when he was overwhelmed. “They’re getting younger and younger every time.”

“Oliver told you he did this?”

“The neighbor saw the smoke and called nine-one-one. He broke into the house and found Oliver there”—Alex jutted his chin toward the kitchen table—“eating milk and cookies.”

There was an abandoned milk glass at the kitchen table, a napkin underneath, cookie crumbs littering the glossy wood of the tabletop.

“Did he tell the neighbor someone was in the house? Did he even know his parents were—” I couldn’t bring myself to say “on fire.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “dead” in this house where everything looked happy-family perfect but death clung to everything.

“According to the neighbor, Oliver smiled and welcomed”—Alex checked his little notebook—“Effron Salazar into the house. Oliver told him his mommy and daddy were upstairs and then offered Effron a cookie.”

“That doesn’t sound like a child that just murdered and set fire to his parents.”

“Effron told Oliver they had to get out of the house because there was smoke. He told the boy to run outside to Mrs. Salazar and that he would go up to get Oliver’s parents. At which time Oliver continued eating his cookie and told Effron not to bother because, quote, ‘they’re already dead.’”

I thought of the little boy sitting on the bed, the joyful little finger wave.

“No . . .”

“Effron reportedly asked Oliver how he knew that, and the kid said, ‘Because I killed them.’”

I was doubled over then, dry heaving. My stomach started to spasm and tears dribbled from my clenched tight eyes. “No.”

“That’s what Lewinsky took down.”

I sat down hard on the desk chair and shoved my head between my legs, gulping huge gusts of air. Alex disappeared for a second and returned with a glass of water, filled to the brim.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked, referring to my empty cup.

“Kitchen’s right there.”

“Oh, God. Crime scene. You can’t do that.” I gagged. “I just drank dead people’s water.”

“It’s not like they were swimming in it.”

“I don’t want anything muddying up the crime scene. Nothing. We have to find out who actually did this. It wasn’t Oliver.”

Alex looked at me, open-mouthed.

“It wasn’t the kid,” I snapped. “I don’t believe your account. It’s hearsay anyway. And what is that? Third-person hearsay? Fourth-person, if you count you to me.”

“Do you think I would make this up? To you?”

I stood up, glad when my legs held me. “Where is this Salazar guy? Where is he? I want to talk to him.”

“He’s outside in one of the ambulances. Being treated for smoke inhalation.”

I shoved past Alex, maybe a little bit harder than I meant to, and made a beeline for the front door, snapping off my latex gloves and booties in the process. One of the ambulances had its back doors splayed open, and a heavyset man was framed in the yellow light. His chest was bare and a technician pressed a stethoscope against it while the man breathed slowly through an oxygen mask.

“Salazar?” I barked

The technician looked at me and frowned, holding up a hand stop-sign style. But Salazar straightened and gently pushed the man aside.

“Yeah,” he said, pulling the mask aside.

I was at a loss then, not actually sure what I had come careening out here for. My tough-chick bravado had been swallowed up by the surprise of actually creating a plan and then successfully carrying it out.

“Uh.” I jutted out a hand. “I’m Sophie Lawson. I’m with the San Francisco Police Department.”

It wasn’t a total lie. I was, in fact, here, on the premises, with the San Francisco Police Department.

Salazar took a long, deep breath from the ventilator and nodded. “I already talked to that guy,” he said, waving his arm vaguely.

“Did you know Oliver and his family before the incident?”

Salazar nodded. “We’ve lived here for twenty-two years. The Culversons have been here for six. We’ve known . . .” Salazar looked away, then thumbed at the tears that pulled in his eyes. “We’ve known little Oliver since he was tiny.”

I sat gently next to Salazar on the ambulance tailgate. “And you saw him, Oliver, tonight? You saw him first?”

Salazar nodded and a ripple of something—cold, fear, maybe—wracked his whole body. He pressed the mask against his mouth and nose, and I listened to the serpentine hiss of his breath as he sucked in. His voice sounded very small. “Yes.”

“And he told you . . .”

“I already told this to the police. Please, I don’t want to repeat it. Not again.”

The look in this man’s milky eyes shot aching cracks through my heart. He looked like a kindly old grandfather, and the weight of the evening was pressing on him, so thick and so solid it was nearly tangible even to me. “I’m sorry, sir. You and Oliver were pretty close then?”

He nodded and a tear slid silently down his cheek. “But he wasn’t like that. Not like he was tonight. He was . . . cold. He was empty.”

Salazar started to shake, and I pulled a thick wool blanket from the ambulance and rested it over his shoulders. He eyed me, his gaze suddenly steady and remarkably sharp. “Something happened to Oliver, Ms. Lawson. He’s—he’s not right anymore.”

When I left Salazar with his heavy blanket and oxygen mask, I was numb. The wind had kicked up, and the fog had riddled it with the kind of cold wet that sinks into your bones and settles a deep ache everywhere. My hair slapped against my cheeks, and I knew that life was going on all around me. I knew that lights were flashing and people were calling out orders and car doors were slamming, but I couldn’t hear any of it. The only thing I heard besides the pulsing beat of my own heart were Mr. Salazar’s parting words: “He’s not right anymore.”