Farther down the street Deirdre passed boutique after boutique. Finally she entered a dancewear store and bought a dark purple scoop-necked leotard, black leggings, and a flowy white silk shirt that grazed her knees. She passed on the slouchy pink leg warmers the Jennifer Beals–look-alike salesgirl tried to foist on her.
Next door, among Indian bedspreads, Moroccan leather handbags, and feathered earrings, she found a suede belt with a brightly enameled buckle and a long Indian scarf in reds and pinks. A few doors down was a consignment shop with a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS, LOST OUR LEASE sign. There Deirdre found a whole row of what looked like brand-new Keds. She bought two pairs in white—she always had to buy two pairs of shoes because one foot was now two sizes smaller than the other.
She ducked into the consignment shop’s makeshift dressing room—sheets hung from a clothesline in a back corner of the store—and stripped off her clothes, then assembled her new outfit. She fluffed her newly shorn hair with her fingers, cocked her hip, and examined her reflection in the mirror. Locked and loaded.
She was ready to find Tyler Corrigan.
Chapter 26
City Hall was nearby, but just a little too far for Deirdre to walk there and back with her bad leg. So she drove the few blocks over and parked in a handicapped spot in front. This time no news crews were there filming.
She climbed the long, broad front staircase, though there was probably a handicapped entrance at ground level. She caught her reflection in the glass of the door just before she pushed it open. The hair was cute and bouncy, the shirt elegant and casual, the sneakers a hint that she wasn’t taking herself too seriously.
Cool air oozed out as she stepped into the lobby, a magnificent Spanish Renaissance two-story entryway with terrazzo floors, white marble walls, and a coffered ceiling. The vast space hummed with a steady flow of uniformed officers, men and the occasional woman in business suits carrying thick briefcases, and lost-looking citizens who were probably there to file for tax abatements, report for jury duty, or, like her, request a copy of an official document.
It was past noon, and the soy bacon and eggs seemed a long time ago. Deirdre bought a granola bar from a newsstand tucked incongruously in the corner under a massive California state flag and wolfed it down. She chased it with a stick of Dentyne, hoping to dispel the miasma of perfumed conditioner and hair gel that felt as if it were floating in a thick cloud around her head.
She had no desire to run into Detective Martinez, so she made her way quickly down the hall, following the signs to Public Records. The room had linoleum, not terrazzo, on the floor, and its walls were painted mustard yellow. Six rows of folding chairs took up half the space, most of the seats taken. A man wearing a bright green golf shirt and sunglasses on top of his bald head brushed past her on his way to the door. “Good luck,” he said. “Effing incompetence. An hour and a half wasted.”
The number 110 flashed over a counter with a bank of clerk’s stations. Deirdre took a number from the feeder—142. She found the Request for Records form on one of the shelves, stood in the back, and started to fill it out. Her name. Address. She checked the box beside “Incident Report,” then wrote in the date and time of the fire, the address, and a description. When she finished, the number counter had crept up to 112. Two harried clerks seemed to be actually serving customers. Several others were on phones, another hunched over his desk, all of them studiously avoiding eye contact with the thirty-plus impatient citizens sitting and standing beyond the safe barrier of the counter.
Clearly, she had plenty of time to kill. Tyler had said his office was next to some kind of lab in the basement. Deirdre left the waiting area and wandered back through the hall to the atrium lobby. There she found the elevators, their outer sliding doors elaborate wrought-iron grillwork. She stepped inside one and pressed B. The elevator descended two floors and slid open to reveal a basement hallway.
Paint the color of wet sand peeled on the walls. Two rows of Wanted posters—all men—hung on the bulletin board across the hall. The air was cooler and clammier than on the main floor, and Deirdre wondered if that was a whiff of formaldehyde under a layer of Pine-Sol. Signs pointed one way to Maintenance and the elevator, the other way to the restrooms, Arson Investigation, Crime Lab, and Records Storage.
Deirdre followed the sign pointing toward Arson Investigation, continuing to a door with a pebbled glass inset stenciled with the words ARSON UNIT. She was about to reach for the knob when the door opened. A man she didn’t recognize came out. He held the door for her.
The Arson Unit was a single room, mostly bare with a half-dozen desks crowded in, surrounded by shelves and file cabinets. A folding table against a wall was loaded with pamphlets. On the side wall was pinned a massive gray-and-green topographic map with colored pushpins stuck in it.
Tyler was sitting at a desk under a high window by the back wall. He was engrossed in some typewritten pages, switching between writing in pen and highlighting with a yellow marker. Deirdre headed his way. When she was within reaching distance, she said, “Tyler?”
He looked up. “Deirdre!” He shoved the papers he’d been working on into a file folder and stood, grazing his head on one of the pipes that ran overhead. “Hey. I was just thinking about you.” His eyes widened. “You look . . . different.”
Deirdre felt a flush creep up her neck. “I hope it’s an okay different.”
“Very okay. I was”—he shot a guilty look at the closed file folder—“just working on your case. Report’s almost finished.”
“I thought it takes weeks.”
“Who told you that?”
“Our claims adjuster.”
“I guess it can take that long to get processed once I file it. But the analysis—well, we know pretty much what we’re dealing with. Most of the time, anyway.”
“As in now?”
He nodded.
“So? Tell me. You can tell me, can’t you? What started the fire?”
Tyler sat. Deirdre could feel herself trembling as she waited for his answer.
“I can tell you what we know,” he said. “The fire started right where we originally thought it did. In a bag of potting mix.”
“Right. Probably left over from years ago when Mom was still living there.”
Tyler gave her an uneasy look. “You said your mother grew geraniums?”
“Scented geraniums,” Deirdre said, wondering where this was going.
“The thing is, the concentration of ammonium nitrate in that potting mix is much too high. It would have burned the roots of her plants. Even amateur horticulturists know that. Maybe your father bought it?”
“Not likely,” Deirdre said. There was only one way her father messed around with potting mix. “Were there any cigarette butts in it?”
“There were. But they’re not what started the fire.”
Deirdre took a deep breath. “So what are you saying?”
“It looks like someone tried to make it appear as if the fire was caused by careless disposal of smoking materials. So we’d find the cigarette butts and stop looking for what really fueled the fire.”
“Which was?”
“Good old-fashioned kerosene.” Tyler gave her a long, somber look.
Arson. Deirdre dropped into the chair opposite his desk. It wasn’t unexpected, but still the certainty of the verdict knocked the air out of her. Someone had set fire to her father’s garage. Someone had killed her father. “Who? Why?”
“Those are questions for the police.”
Deirdre tried to put it together. Cigarette butts stuck into kerosene-laced potting mix that her mother never would have purchased. Whoever did that knew her father was a smoker who stubbed out his cigarettes wherever happened to be convenient. “Could it have been set up in advance?” she asked.
“Probably was. It would be simple. Lace the mix with kerosene. Wait till there’s no one around, sneak in, and put the bag in the garage. Poke a few burning cigarettes into it and let nature take its course. Might have taken a few minutes or a few hours to really get going, but it was a pretty sure bet that eventually it would.”