"I don't know." Her eyes went back to the now-gutted house. The flames were mostly contained by now, although men still worked a couple of the hoses and a pillar of thick, black smoke continued to rise into the sky. Her voice broke. "I'm just so afraid that she is."
Durbin reached over, put his arm around her shoulders, drew her in next to him. Chuck came jogging up from where he'd parked a couple of blocks away. Kathy threw her arms around her husband and he embraced her, patting her back consolingly and whispering words of comfort. Then, over her shoulder, he said to Durbin, "I'm sorry it took so long to get here. I didn't check my messages until after my morning class." His eyes went to the house. "God, Michael, Jesus." Then he paused in a kind of double take. "Where's Janice?"
Kathy, blotched and tearful, made a mewling little noise and just shook her head against him.
"We don't know," Durbin replied. "Not at work. Not answering her phone."
Chuck threw a glance at the smoldering ruins, came back to Durbin, gesturing now toward the firemen. "Do these guys know anything?"
"Not yet. The arson inspector couldn't get inside until, like, five minutes ago."
But even as Durbin spoke, the arson inspector-Arnie Becker-emerged from the front door. He'd stuck his hands deeply into the pockets of his coat and walked, leaning slightly forward as though into a stiff wind, with a slow deliberation. His shoulders sagged. Looking up, his eyes glanced over where Durbin stood-the incident commander had introduced them to each other soon after Durbin's arrival-and then quickly he looked away. In a few more steps, he'd come up to the IC's table.
Durbin, who'd moved away from the immediate area when his brother-in-law had come up, now broke out of their little knot of neighbors and other onlookers and got back over to the table in time to hear Becker say the word police.
"What do you need the police for?" Durbin asked.
The two men turned to look at him. The expressions on both of their faces were so obvious that neither of them really had to say anything, but Becker reached out a hand and placed it gently on Durbin's arm. "I'm sorry," he said, "but there's a woman's body in there in one of the upstairs rooms."
Kathy and Chuck had come up directly behind him, and now she split the air with a keening scream. "Janice! Oh God, no! Janice!" As Chuck turned and held her, she covered her face with both of her hands and broke down. After they left messages at their jobs saying they wouldn't be in, both leaving their excuses suitably vague, Abe and Treya dropped the kids off together at their respective school and preschool, then had come home and gone back to bed. Closing in on noon, they had finally gotten dressed and now sat in a booth at Gaspare's.
"This is the best pizza in the city, you know that?" Treya said. "I don't care about any of those newfangled places, or even the other old ones."
"Tommaso's?" Glitsky said.
"Very good, no question. Just not this good."
"A-sixteen."
Treya shook her head. "Again, delicious, but too long a wait. So let me ask you a question."
"General category of pizza?"
"No."
"Okay, hold it." Glitsky put down his pizza slice. "No, wait, it's coming to me. The Battle of Thermopylae."
"Wrong. The what?"
"The Battle of Thermopylae. And how can you say it's wrong when you don't know what it is?"
"I know what it is, or was. It was a battle between the Greeks and somebody, maybe the Persians, I think."
"Correct. Very good. What year?"
"What year? I'm sure. Sometime around ancient Greece. Close enough?"
"How about four-eighty BC."
"I'd say definitely yes. What a relief to have that nailed down. That sounds just perfectly right."
"It is completely right. And yet you said it was wrong."
"It was wrong because it definitely wasn't the answer to my question, which was going to be, if I remember correctly, if you felt as guilty as I did."
"What's it going to be now?"
"What's what going to be?"
"Your question."
She shook her head, smiling. "That silver tongue of yours got to wagging so much I don't even remember."
"Something about if I felt guilty." He reached over the table and put his hand over hers. "You really feel guilty?"
She cocked her head sideways. "A little bit." Now sighing. "I feel like I'm letting Wes down. He's clueless enough about his appointments and his schedule as it is anyway. If I'm not there to spoon-feed him…"
"He's a big boy."
"Not so much, really. And pretty much out of his depth."
"I've noticed."
"You're not the only one. I know you don't read the Courier, but he's taking some pretty serious abuse there."
"That paper's a rag. Nobody reads it."
"Well, that's half right. The 'rag' part. But don't kid yourself, Abe. People read it. It swings a lot of votes."
Glitsky shrugged. Votes were not part of his universe. And his respect for those people to whom votes were the issue was minuscule. "I don't know. You want my opinion, Wes deserves to swing in the wind a little."
"I don't know how you can say that, Abe. He came down on the right side with you last week."
"Only under great duress. And let's not forget that the reason Ro Curtlee's out in the first place, and the reason we got threatened, is because Wes didn't step up and do the right thing the first chance he got. He could have demanded no bail, and got it."
Now she covered his hand with hers. "I know that. He was naive, hoping to keep the Curtlees happy. He knows that, too, now. And I know you did the right thing. But I don't think Ro would dare do anything to us now."
Glitsky made a face. "Well, that's the hope. I'd be a lot happier if Wes pushed a little on getting his new trial date set. But as to whether I feel guilty taking a day off… I don't plan to make a habit of it, but after Monday, and now he's out again, and I still don't have enough inspectors or the budget to hire more." He let out a breath. "I don't know, Trey. I feel I'm a toxic presence at the Hall, and I've got to let some of this anger leach out before I poison my own troops. If I'm going to do that, I might as well quit altogether."
"Are you really thinking about that?"
"Sometimes. Frequently, in fact. I don't know what the point is anymore."
"Same as it's always been, babe. Putting killers in jail."
"Yeah," Glitsky said. "But then they let 'em out."
"Not always. Not even often."
"I know, I know. You're right. But that's why I need a day off here. Get some perspective back. Speaking of which…"
He reached down and pulled his cell phone off his belt.
"If it's the office, don't…," Treya said.
But Glitsky was shaking his head. "It's not downtown," he said. "It's Arnie Becker. I ought to get this." And he pushed the connect button. "Arnie, it's Abe. What's up?"
13
"Of course," Becker was saying, "we won't know for sure until-"
"Arnie." Glitsky held up a hand and cut him off. "You got any doubt at all?"
Becker drew in a large breath through his mouth. The stench of the burn was strong, but a whiff of the pervasive scent of cooked meat could bring even a strong man's stomach up. "Very little," he said.
They were standing, hands in their pockets, on the second floor in the bright sunlight that shone through the collapsed roof of Michael Durbin's home. The temperature was in the midforties, abnormally cold for San Francisco in February. The body was still in place in the burned-out shell of the upstairs bedroom, itself pretty thoroughly destroyed. The coroner's van had just arrived out front, but the crime scene unit, with their surgical masks in place, had been photographing and collecting what little evidence they could since before Glitsky's arrival about twenty minutes ago.
Though the face was unrecognizable, this body was in somewhat better condition than Felicia Nunez's had been. Neither of this woman's shoes, in this case low-heeled black pumps, had been burned away completely. One had come off, possibly from the power of the hoses during the active phase of fighting the fire, and had wound up under the bed, about eight inches from the woman's right foot. But the other shoe still appeared to be a snug fit on her left foot. There were no unburned scraps of clothing under the body, no sign of a bra or other underwear, and Becker's conjecture from those facts was that the woman had been naked either at or shortly after the time she died and was set ablaze. Due to the relatively light amount of charring where the woman's body was in contact with the floor, Becker told Glitsky that if she'd been wearing any clothes, they would not all have burned away.