Awakened by music from her clock radio, Kate unwillingly sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Remembering the events of the day and night before, she added the weight of depression onto the heavy tiredness in her limbs.
She trudged into the kitchen and poured coffee from the automatic coffeemaker, pausing to sip from the steaming mug before taking it with her into the bathroom. Twenty-five minutes later, her preparations for work complete, she sat in her living room and picked at a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, trying to distract herself with the CBS Morning News and the Los Angeles Times.
She folded the paper and dropped it onto the carpet, clicked off the TV with the remote control. No point in avoiding this, she thought. She might as well look at both her failures square on and get on with it.
Although her time with Andrea Ross could hardly be rated a failure—not when intrusion into an exclusive love had never been the remotest possibility, not even a might have-been.
But the Dory Quillin case—was that a might-have-been? True, there had been a failure of corroborating event: witnesses and physical evidence, precious little of the coincidence and plain luck that sometimes descended like a blessing on a homicide investigation. But there was also the nagging feeling that something else still lay within her field of vision, something she had not quite seen, something that might have helped place Roland Quillin behind bars where he belonged.
Even under ideal conditions, she thought venomously, his crime would not qualify him for the electric chair. Not in California where the prerequisite for the death penalty was murder of a particularly heinous nature, the always problematic “special circumstances.” Wishing such punishment on Roland Quillin was irrational and vindictive, she conceded; monster that he was, the death penalty still seemed a basic waste of creatures like him. They should instead suffer the more useful fate of assignment for scientific study and experiment, for whatever could be gleaned from a malign cannibal subspecies which had lost the moral right to be treated as anything other than laboratory fodder. Especially a subspecies which preyed on children…
Kate rose, pulled her notebook from her shoulder bag, leafed through the pages of notes, a cryptic recording of this failed investigation. And it was a failure of the worst kind—for they had pinpointed Dory Quillin’s killer only to allow him to continue to roam the streets, only to put him on guard so that he would perpetrate his acts with greater vigilance in the future.
She thought about Marietta Hall whose determination to make headway in the sewage of crimes against children had foundered, collapsing into exhaustion and bitter recognition of futility. She had promised to remain in touch with this woman, to keep her informed. What could she say to her? Kate looked slowly over her notes of the conversation with the psychologist, many of the phrases evoking clear and powerful memory of that interview.
FQ CONVINCED DQ LIED
DQ HOPED FOR ATTEN TO WARN RQ OFF
ABUSE STOPS WHEN PERP SEES THREAT TO SELF KD: DID DQ TELL FQ?
MH: NO GREATER RISK. MANY MOTHERS DENY. COMPLETE DENY AT ANY COST
Marietta Hall’s words echoed in Kate’s mind: “…a very common response from many mothers is denial. And I mean complete denial. Denial at any cost. Denial of evidence right in front of their eyes…”
Denial at any cost…
Stunned into immobility by the new design she saw for her facets of information, Kate sat perfectly still for some time, her mind tumbling, reassembling facts. Finally she got up and moved trance-like to the phone. It rang under her hand.
“Kate? This is Lieutenant Rodriguez.”
“Yes, sir,” she answered in full alertness at the clipped tones of Lieutenant Manuel Rodriguez, the watch commander. She had grown to like him for his businesslike briskness; he indulged in the amenities of politeness and small talk only in the absence of pressing police business.
“The damnedest thing, Kate. A car fire right next to the station. The parking lot, that mall over there. One fatality. Olds Omega, ’eighty-two, we checked DMV, it’s from that case you and Ed—”
“The Quillin case,” she confirmed, scarcely able to get the dry-throated words out. “I remember the make and model from a five-ten I filled out just yesterday.”
She was trying to assimilate what he had said, needing to get whatever other information he had, desperate to get off the phone and be on her way to the scene. Flora Quillin. Flora Quillin had called her last night from a pay phone… She had been with Roland Quillin…
One fatality…One.
“A license plate blew off when the gas tank went up or we’d have the devil’s own time figuring out this much this soon. We got a body over there so charred we can’t make any ID.”
“I’m on my way this minute. Sir, will you call Ed?”
“He’s next on my list.”
“Thank you.” Kate slammed down the phone, grabbed her shoulder bag and jacket, ran for the door.
* * *
Not having the Plymouth with its red emergency light, Kate wove her Nova aggressively through the early morning rush hour traffic, leaving a blaring trail of furious drivers all along the familiar path through Santa Monica and West L.A. She roared past the brick Wilshire Division station, always a bastion of solidity amid the drab landscape of Venice Boulevard, past the Broadway Savings and Loan on the corner, and screeched into the parking lot of the mall, pulling to a stop in front of Zody’s.
The blackened, steaming hulk of a car sat in the side parking lot of the savings and loan, perhaps a hundred feet from the station house. Four black-and-whites, two fire trucks and a fire department official vehicle surrounded it. Thick clusters of silent spectators crowded the sidewalk, held back by a half dozen officers and a yellow tape barricade.
Kate picked her way carefully over the asphalt parking lot which was stained and puddled with chemicals from the extinguishing of the car. Her nostrils quivered and recoiled from the acrid stench. She remembered a trip along the coast she and Anne had taken in the aftermath of a forest fire, the noxious fumes that had reached them from the charred and smoking corpses of dead trees and animals…
She nodded to Hansen, who impassively returned her nod; then she circled the wreckage. Taking measured breaths against the stench, she peered into the car, at the black-red remains of a figure behind the steering wheel, its hands drawn up and hooked like claws. She knew the posture was typical of a fourth-degree burn victim, the claw-like hands the result of contraction of cooked and charred muscles. She resisted memory, forcing her mind away from her very personal knowledge of burn trauma on the human body.
Hansen came up to her, clipboard in hand. “The Quillin tragedy continues,” he intoned. “Pretty obvious it’s suicide, from the look of it.”
“You’re wrong,” she said shortly. “Tell me what you’ve got, Fred.”
He looked at her, then obediently recited, “Pearson turned it in at six fifty-eight. Saw the car going up like a torch as he was rolling out of the station. Couldn’t get near it, said it was an inferno. These guys—” Hansen motioned with his clipboard to the fire truck and the official car, “—they were here in less than two minutes. Chief Scarborough—” Again Hansen motioned with his clipboard, toward the official car and the black man in a battalion chief’s hat who was writing on his own clipboard, “—he says the inside of the car was soaked in gas, the victim as well. That, plus the gas tank—not much wonder it went up like a bomb.”
A yellow Honda Civic pulled into the parking lot next to Kate’s car; Taylor climbed out, yanked his blue plaid jacket out of the backseat, and shrugged into it as he walked over, splashing heedlessly through the chemical puddles. He clapped Hansen on the shoulder, glanced at the corpse in the steaming wreckage, shook his head dolefully at Kate. “Should’ve listened to you, partner,” he said. “The son of a bitch went and did it to sad sack Flora.”
“No, he didn’t, Ed. It’s Roland Quillin in that car.”
Taylor stared at her; and Hansen lowered his clipboard and peered intently into the charred wreckage as if to verify her identification.
“Okay, Kate,” Taylor said calmly. “So how do you figure it’s him?”
Kate ignored him. “Fred, did Pearson see anyone leaving the scene?”
“No, Kate. He checked around thoroughly, so did the rest of us when we got here. But there were a lot of spectators, really fast.”
And Flora Quillin, Kate thought, scanning the crowd outside the tape barrier, could fade into the pavement, much less a background of spectators.
“Fred,” she said, “send a car to the Quillin house. It’s—” She reached into her bag for her notebook and read him the address. “She’s fiftyish, no more than five-two, maybe a hundred pounds, dyed blond hair. It’s not likely she’ll be there, but we still have to check it out.”
“Right, Kate. I take it she’s a suspect?”
“Right.”
Hansen hurried off.
“Kate,” Taylor said patiently, “I feel like I’m on a whole different planet from you. I don’t figure what you’re figuring here at all.”
“It only came to me this morning. I was just about to call you when Rodriguez got me. Dammit, Ed, it was classic misdirection. I was so intent on one solution I never even looked at anything else. Flora Quillin heard every single word we said yesterday. She didn’t respond because she realized what I should have seen too—that if she came forward, Roland Quillin would walk away a free man. Because Roland Quillin didn’t kill Dory. Flora Quillin did.”
Again he stared at her. “Kate, I know I’m not the brightest guy—”
“I’m the stupid one.” She bit off the words. “It was all there, I should have seen it. Flora Quillin had exactly the same motive as Roland Quillin—to prevent Dory from blowing her whole life apart. In a different way she had as much to lose as her husband. Marietta Hall gave us the first clue about Flora—that some women deny child abuse by their husbands at any cost.” She raised her voice in emphasis: “At any cost. We had corroboration from Neely Malone. Flora Quillin herself showed us that she wouldn’t see what she didn’t want to see—that she’d rather abandon her own daughter than look at the kind of man she married and the kind of lie she was living.”
The odor from the burned car again assailed Kate; she moved farther away. “Flora made only one mistake yesterday—telling me about that note Dory left in their mailbox. My guess is, Dory wrote to both parents about what she’d found out in Summerville, threatening to sue and spread scandal and make very major trouble. Flora Quillin found the note. My next guess is, she never showed it to Roland Quillin. She told me she destroyed it and I think she probably did.”
“So you figure Flora came over to the Nightwood Bar, not Roland.” Taylor’s tone was skeptical; he scratched his bald spot and then layered the hair back over it.
Kate nodded. “To try and reason Dory out of what Flora thought was just her latest craziness. My theory is that Dory said she had incontestible proof about her father. And Flora being Flora, she wouldn’t see or hear that proof. She saw only that Dory had come up with a terrible new way to bring more grief and maybe even financial ruin to their lives. So it was Flora Quillin who picked up that bat and killed her.”
“And yesterday Flora finally sees how wrong she’s been.” Taylor’s tone had not lost any of its skepticism. “So she decides to knock off Roland because she knows we can’t touch him for any of the things he did to Dory or anybody else.”
“Yes, Ed. You see? Yesterday we forced her to look at the truth. She had no choice but to own up to it, and by the standards of her religion as well.”
“Yeah?” Taylor gestured to the car. “So why didn’t sad sack Flora torch herself along with her husband? How come we don’t have two bodies in there?”
She indulged herself in a sardonic response. “Because murder is justifiable, but suicide is against her religion.” Then she said impatiently, “She may still do it for all we know. That’s why we have to get moving and find her.”
Taylor scratched his head again, sighed. “It’s so goddamn crazy it sounds like it could be right. But there’s one big major flaw in your theory, Kate. How’d sad sack Flora manage that all by herself?” Again he gestured to the blackened car, the darkly crimson corpse. “How’d little Flora knock off big husky Roland who’s twice her size?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “The fire department people say the car and the victim were doused with gas. Somehow between last night and seven o’clock this morning Flora managed to get him helpless and keep him helpless till forty minutes ago.”
He said sarcastically, “And she very thoughtfully brought him right here next to the station so we wouldn’t be inconvenienced. I don’t buy it, Kate. You’re dead wrong on this one. You were right the first time about Flora being in danger. It’s Flora in that car, and Roland put her here and he’s on his way outta town laughing his head off.”
“Ed—”
“Hear me out, Kate. Look at this car, for chrissakes. Even if Flora’s holding a gun on him, is he gonna sit there and let her pour gas all over him and then strike a match? Anybody’d rather take a bullet in the head than burn, for chrissakes.”
“So maybe she shot him first,” Kate retorted. “Look, right now she’s got unfinished business. She called me from a pay phone last night wanting to know where Dory’s body was. I think that’s where she is.”
Taylor jabbed at the burned car. “And I think that’s where she is.”
She turned, walked toward her Nova. They were wasting too much time with all this arguing. They would drop their personal cars off at the station, take the Plymouth.
Taylor was hurrying to keep up with her. “Dammit, Kate, the only thing Flora could shoot is a popgun. The recoil from anything else’d knock her into the middle of last week. Sad sack Flora doesn’t have it in her to shoot somebody, much less turn her husband into barbecued ribs.”
Kate did not reply.
“She wouldn’t even try something like this, Kate. I mean, you know better than I do women don’t do this shit.”
We don’t very often, Kate thought, opening her car door. But we’re capable.
“Ed, I don’t have a clue how Flora pulled this off. But I do know one thing—she’ll talk to us now. And we’ve got to pick her up fast in case she decides to do something to herself. Let’s get the coroner and the technicians out here, it’s all we can do here anyway.”
“Okay, okay,” Taylor grumbled. “I still think we oughtta be checking airports for Roland Quillin.”
“And I think Flora Quillin’s at USC Medical Center. Because I can’t see her going there last night with Roland Quillin. We’ll check with the hospital on the way and stay in contact with the car that’s checking the Quillin house, just in case.”
“How’d she get out of here without a car?” His sweeping hand took in the wide boulevard. “She catch a bus? How’d she get anywhere for chrissakes without us seeing her leave?”
“I don’t know that either,” Kate said, sliding into her car.
“If you’re right about any of this,” Taylor said, yanking open the door of his Honda, “I’m an idiot and you’re Sherlock Holmes.”
You’re definitely an idiot, she thought sourly, slamming the door of her car, but as far as this case is concerned, I’m Inspector Clouseau.