Skies of Ash (2 page)

Downstairs, our living room smelled of forest—we had purchased a Christmas tree on Sunday, but the seven-foot noble pine still sat there, naked.

“Maybe we can decorate the tree tonight,” I suggested.

“Probably have to work late,” Greg said. “You can start, though.”

I froze—
who decorates a tree alone?
—then grabbed my bag from the couch.

On the way to the garage, we walked past his home office, a grotto filled with video-game boxes piled atop art books perched against tubs of markers, pencils, and empty Gatorade bottles. I noticed on his drawing table a charcoal sketch of a busty, brown-skinned female with long, windswept hair, a badge on her giant left boob, and a big-ass cannon on her ultracurvy hip.

“Look familiar?” Greg asked, standing behind me. “Pretty good, huh?”

My skin flushed—I was staring at me, reimagined and hypersexualized for teenage boys and their gamer dads. The complexity of Lou had been rendered to boobs, hair, and gun. “New character?” I asked as my inner June Jordan wept.

He gave me a lopsided smile. “Maybe.”

This drawing of Sexy Cop would soon join drawings of Sexy She-Elf and Sexy Marine on our walls.
Yay?

My favorite LAPD unmarked Crown Vic, a light blue beauty that reeked of sweat, Drakkar Noir cologne, and dill pickles, awaited my arrival. It was parked next to Greg’s red and black motorbike and my silver Porsche Cayenne SUV, the automotive equivalent of a decathlon-competing supermodel who built rockets in her spare time.

Greg hit the switch on the wall and the garage door rumbled up and away.

The sky was bright blue and the sun was as high and white as a crank head in San Bernardino. Little clouds puffed from my mouth as my skin tightened. No breeze wafted from the west—no salty, decaying smells from the Ballona Wetlands at the end of our block or from the Pacific Ocean just a mile away.

“What are you doing today?” I asked, watching him amble to the driveway. My mind ran that query again to ensure that it didn’t sound as suspicious as I had meant.

He grabbed the newspaper from the pavement. “A stand-up at ten to see where we are on
Last Days
and then over to the mall for surveillance.”

Even though he was now vice president of creative development for M80 Games, Greg still enjoyed watching customers play the titles he had designed. He had spent a month in Tokyo working on the art for his new “zombies meet the Book of Revelation” series. Between meetings, he had also worked on a purse designer named Michiko Yurikami. Greg was a master multitasker, an unfortunate result of my soft-gloved management style.

For this last transgression, I had won a “baby, I’m sorry, maybe I have an addiction” diamond-platinum cross pendant. Even though I’m not religious enough to buy or wear a cross. I wore it, though, and ignored the frothy anger in my stomach, just like I drove the “please, baby, please” Porsche with whitened knuckles.

“This you?” Greg held out his phone to show the
Times
’s Web site and its picture of a two-story, Spanish-style house engulfed in flames. The headline screamed,
FIERY BLAZE IN THE HILLS
.

I startled seeing that house on fire, knowing that someone had died in one of its rooms. “Think so.” I stopped reading—I needed to see the mess firsthand to make my own calls.

“How does Rodriguez know this is a homicide and not an accident?” Greg asked. “People die in house fires all the time.”

I shrugged. “There was this strange 911 call. Guess I’ll soon find out.”

He slipped his arms around my waist. This time, he melted against me, and we kissed slowly… deeply… “And you will solve the case,” he said. “A winner is you.”

“Totally.”

“Your ass looks great in those jeans.”

“Not intentional.”

“Never is. Where’s your jacket? It’s cold out here.”

“In the car,” I said, certain he didn’t want me covered up cuz of the
weather
, not
really
.

After one last kiss, I slipped behind the Crown Vic’s steering wheel. After a whinny and a cough, the giant Ford rattled to life.

Greg smiled and waved at me as I backed the beast out of the garage. Strange (but not infrequent) rigidity filled me again.

Because of his smile…

What was he hiding?

THE CHATTER AND BURSTS OF STATIC FROM THE CROWN VIC’S POLICE RADIO
pulled me from lingering unease about Greg’s smile, and I loosened my grip on the steering wheel.

“…requires additional units…”

“…still in the house, one may be a Hispanic male…”

“…4893 Crenshaw… Stand by… Shots fired…”

All of this as the city sipped its first cup of coffee.

I raced toward the sun, toward Baldwin Hills, a neighborhood just three miles east of mine. Stark columns of black-and-white smoke hung over upper-middle-class homes, waiting for me to see them before they smeared like paint and pencil across the sky. I passed La Brea Avenue, where I should’ve turned right but didn’t. I kept east and passed the McDonald’s, the ghetto Ralphs supermarket, and the KFC that always forgot to put in your biscuits. I glanced to my right at the perimeters of the Jungle, my childhood home.

Moldy, cramped apartments surrounded by prison-yard wire.
Check.

Red spray-painted tags of
BPS JUNGLES
and
BFL
dripping like blood on walls.
Check.

Plaster and glass and telephone poles shot to shit by bullets and poverty. Stumbling crackheads. Gangbanging drug dealers. Storefront payday check-advance scams.
Still too early for that, but “check” in advance.

I worked this part of Los Angeles and visited here more than my own home. Twenty-five years ago, a man named Max Crase had murdered my big sister, Victoria, at a liquor store right down that street. Crase had later helped build fancy condominiums on that street over there. Six months ago, he murdered another seventeen-year-old girl as well as her sister, a case—my case—that still haunted me. And as I passed Crase Parc and Promenade (
Units Still Available!
), I lifted my middle finger and then controlled the urge to ram the car into the condo’s terra-cotta lobby.
Later, Lou. Not today
.

Memorial tour complete, I busted a U-turn and headed back to La Brea. As I sped up the hill, gray powder swirled and flecked on my windshield. Los Angeles’s version of snow. The snowstorm intensified, and the smell of smoke and melted plastic wafted through the air vents. I hated the smell of toxic chemicals and burned dining room tables in the morning. Smelled like… job security. Unfortunately.

Fires kicked our asses. First of all, murder is hard to nearly impossible to prove. And then, most times, homicide detectives reached the scene hours after the fire’s start. By then, witnesses had wandered back home. Crucial evidence had been destroyed by flame, water, and heroes wearing galoshes. And the victims—they rarely survived swelling and blistering so severe and complete that no one, not even their mothers, recognized them, and so the coroner had to study porcelain uppers to call them officially by name.

My Motorola radio blipped from the passenger seat. “What’s taking you so long?” Colin asked.

“Dude. I can’t fly there.”

“It’s a tragedy, Lou. Guess there were some kids in the house.”

My fingers went cold. “I hate this case already.”

“You need to get here, though.”

“The fire all the way out?”

“No. Still some hot spots here and there.”

“Those bodies getting more dead?”

“C’mon, Lou—”

“Stop wringing your hands, Taggert,” I snapped. “I’ll be there, all right?”

Last year this time, Colin had been working homicide in a Colorado Springs suburb. But he had shared the D with a chick who was
not
his fiancée. The fiancée’s dad, who was also the city’s police chief, took Colin’s betrayal of his daughter personally, forcing the young detective immediately to serve and protect a city with no bounty on his head.

On my best days, Colin merely annoyed me—like the constant beeping of a truck backing up. To be fair, I didn’t know many (okay,
any
) twenty-eight-year-old, white-boy detectives from the Rocky Mountains. And he didn’t know any thirty-seven-year-old black female detectives from Los Angeles. So there was a cultural rift between my partner and me. A rift that was three galaxies wide.

Before I pulled onto the street that would shoot me up to the fire site, I parked near an elementary school closed for winter break. I grabbed my iPhone from my bag and held my breath as I tapped the Bust-a-Cheat icon.

Should I

1. Turn on Greg’s cell-phone mic and use it as a bug to listen to his conversations?

2. Use the GPS tracking system to pinpoint the whereabouts of his phone and him?

3. Or, simply check the phone’s
RECENT CALLS
log?

But then what would I do if a Japanese country code—Tokyo’s was 011
+
81
+
3—showed up in
RECENT CALLS
?

I bought Bust-a-Cheat two weeks after I had forgiven him.

I bought Bust-a-Cheat because he had never let his iPhone out of his sight.

“You bought Bust-a-Cheat cuz you know you’s a
sucka
.” That’s what my girl Lena had blurted on my deck, where we had been guzzling tall glasses of absinthe and cranberry juice. “And if you gotta do this,” she had continued, “gotta buy spyware—which, by the way, why didn’t they have that when Chauncey was diddlin’ homeboy in the back of my Range Rover—then you don’t trust him, and
à quoi bon
?”

Six months later, here I sat. Not trusting him.

I tapped
RECENT CALLS
.

The phone’s screen blinked, blanked, then filled.

NO CALLS ON
12/11.

“Thank you, Lord,” I whispered, sounding small, sounding like a woman not packing a semiautomatic in her bra and a .22 Magnum Pug mini-revolver in her ponytail.

Personal drama handled, my heart found its regular pace, and I shoved the phone back into my bag. I muttered another “thank you,” then jammed up the hill, following a dank river of water and ashes that would end in blood.

DON MATEO DRIVE RESEMBLED A NEIGHBORHOOD IN A NORMAN ROCKWELL
painting. A baby grand piano sparkled in the living room window of an army-green bungalow. The Cape Cod’s hedges had been shaped into snowmen, squirrels, and rabbits. Christmas lights glowed on the eaves of the ranch-style, and fire-hose water shimmered on its roof. Sludge gathered at the base of every window frame at every house.

Except for 6381 Don Mateo Drive, the former Spanish-style house I’d glimpsed on the
Times
’s Web site. There was no sludge on those windows. Barely any windows. Hell, there was barely any house.

Crews from every local news station had set up at the saw-horses. And as I rolled past, reporters shouted, “Detective, detective!” One brave soul knocked on my passenger-side window. A flash from a camera blinded me. I bared my teeth and growled, “Back the hell off.”

I grabbed the Motorola from the passenger seat and toggled the switch. “I’m here,” I told Colin. “Have one of the guys move the press back some more.”

“Crazy, right?” Colin asked.

Just glimpsing the destruction, the
angriness
of this fire made me shiver. “I don’t like it here.”

“Hell, Lou, you don’t like a whole lotta things. But on this: yeah, I don’t like it, either.”

A patrol cop lifted the yellow tape, and I drove through, parking near a Frank Sinatra–style house, all weird, cool angles and
bop-bop-bum
. I wrapped my Windbreaker around my hip and clipped my silver badge to my belt loop, then grabbed the small digital camera from the glove compartment. I climbed out of the car and took pictures of a smoking, charred heap now boasting crime-scene tape and broken ceramic roof tiles. Every house, except this house, had its trio of trash cans—blue, green, black—sitting out at the curb. I snapped pictures of that, and then I photographed the crowd: a bald black man holding a toddler, an elderly Asian couple wearing matching jogging suits, a dark-skinned weight lifter with headphones around his thick neck, and the heroines of
Waiting to Exhale
wearing yoga pants and fruit-colored tank tops.

Did one of you do this?

The
tchick-tchick-tchick
of lawn sprinklers and
terp-terp-terp
of birds had been drowned out by the growl of fire trucks and the roar of chain saws cutting holes in walls.

A sky of poison loomed over the neighborhood—we shouldn’t have been breathing this crap or walking through muddy ashes flecked with half-melted police tape, warped household plastics, and shards of charred wood, some pieces slick with paint and varnish. Even with no visible flame, the ground still burned beneath the thick soles of my boots.

Colin, coffee cup in hand, and the fire marshal, Denton Quigley, who clutched a walkie-talkie, stood in the house’s driveway next to an ash-covered Mercedes Benz SUV and a garage door now hacked to pieces. Sweat had darkened and flattened Colin’s blond hair. Ashes had landed on his LAPD Windbreaker. But his brown cowboy boots looked right at home. In that strange morning sun, my partner looked golden, bizarrely handsome, Steve McQueen in
The Towering Inferno
.

Dixie Shipman, her nougat-colored skin also sweaty and ashy, stood on the lawn with a digital camera and a jumbo tape measure.

“Hunh,” I muttered. “She’s already here?”

In her former life, Dixie had worked the LAPD’s Arson Squad, but two years ago she had been caught in a big, fat lie. Which is why she now wore a blue and white Windbreaker with the logo of MG Standard Insurance on the sleeve.

Her ex-coworkers, men in black jackets,
ARSON
in white letters on their backs, were also taking pictures.

I trudged toward the wreck, its death scent assaulting my nostrils.

Colin met me halfway with the coffee cup extended.

I took the drink and glanced at his crisp blue jeans. The creases were as sharp as thousand-year-old cheddar. “You just take the dry cleaner’s plastic off?” I asked.