Private Vegas (24 page)

BRYCE COOPER WAS understandably confused by my call.

“What’s this about? Who are you?”

I repeated myself, and Cooper said, “I’ve got time. Nothing but time. I’m waiting for my wife to get dressed. Could be hours.”

“Mr. Cooper, do you know Tule Archer?”

“Sure. I know the Archers. I went to their wedding. What about Tule?”

I did my best to tell this bad story clearly and gently.

“Hal Archer is my client, Mr. Cooper, and I’m sorry to tell you that Tule has been murdered and Hal is being held pending his arraignment.”

He said, “They think Hal killed Tule? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. That’s crazy.”

I said, “Hal said that Tule was threatening his life.”

Cooper said, “He never said anything like that to me.”

There was a long silence, then Cooper said, “I’m just dumbfounded. This is going to kill Barbie. She loved Tule. I guess I have to tell her.”

“Of course, Mr. Cooper, but I was wondering how you and Barbie were getting along.”

“What? Me and Barbie? I guess not too bad. She’s a nice girl. A little wild. Aspen is kind of stuffy for a frisky kid like Barbie. But I keep up with her pretty well. Why?”

“Has she ever threatened you, sir?”

“Threatened
me?
”

He stopped right there and I let the silence go on for more time than was comfortable. The longer it stretched, and the farther it got from Cooper shouting,
Are you crazy?
, the more certain I felt that Barbie
had
threatened Cooper. That he was running over things in his mind, unsure how to answer.

“No, she’s never threatened me. But I’ve noticed odd things. Phone calls, coming in and going out, late at night. Uh. She got a gun…Anyway, why am I telling you this? I don’t even know you. And if you’re looking for work, forget it. Don’t call me again, Morgan.”

“Mr. Cooper. Sir. Watch out for yourself. I think your wife might try to kill you.”

Cooper hung up, and so did I. I didn’t feel that I’d done anything more than scare him. Or maybe I’d gotten Cooper crazy enough to harm his wife in “self-defense.”

Now I was worried about two people I didn’t know.

SCI WAS STANDING at the tall desk in his office, transparent flex screens forming a semicircular shield in front of him. He was engrossed in the new info about the car bombs—the death of teen star Maeve Wilkinson had finally ignited the LAPD.

Sci understood the value of reciprocity. He had made friends and acquired contacts during his six years at the city’s lab, and now, he and the city shared information selectively.

Ten minutes ago, Kelli Preston, head of the city lab’s arson division, forwarded him reports on a firebombed Dodge Charger that might be connected to Jack’s Lamborghini as well as to the Aston Martin and the other five cars.

Preston thought that the Charger was very likely the first in the series, possibly the learning model.

The photo on Sci’s center screen showed the blackened Charger chassis with its signature split-crosshair grille that had somehow survived incineration. The scene was a Ralphs supermarket parking lot, and the time of the explosion was 2:23 in the a.m.

The city’s deputy arson investigator had concluded that the fire was started under the left front side of the undercarriage and that there was a chemical explosive in the gas tank, a substance that the LAPD database didn’t recognize.

Preston’s note to Sci said
Off the record, the LAPD closed the case on this because it was random and no one was hurt. The owner of the vehicle collected his insurance payout, and Allstate didn’t raise any questions.

Preston told Sci that the LAPD investigated the next four firebombs, but it had been a back-burner case until Maeve Wilkinson died.

Preston wrote,
Let me know if you find anything that could help us, Sci. I’ll do the same for you.

Sci sent Preston a reply, then looked again at the report from the chemical screen of the Charger’s gas tank. He knew that the explosive was the same unnamed chemical he’d found in Jack’s Lambo. The vehicle had been registered to Peter Tong, a science teacher at a very tony private school: Our Lady of the Pacific.

Sci fed Tong’s name into his browser and got a hit on RateMyTeacher.com. This was a website students used to flame their teachers and occasionally praise them.

Peter Tong had about twenty reviews, and most of them were vile, defamatory, and anonymous.

Tong was described as a “diabolical hard-ass who liked to flunk kids just because.” Another student complained that Tong was “a sadist who did unnecessary experiments on lab animals and insects. In fact, he calls us ‘the insect population.’”

Sci knew that arsonists had various motivations: rage, revenge, the thrill, and, of course, the insurance money. He organized the Tong data into a single file and included it in his note to Justine.

Justine, see attached. Also, Tong collected ten grand in insurance money. We could be looking at a killer. Be careful.

JUST BELOW THE edge of the highway, waves charged into rocks and exploded into foam. Sunshine beat down on the asphalt, making the air shimmer. You could almost see across the ocean to Japan, the day was that clear and brilliant. Justine barely noticed.

As Scotty drove the fleet car, Justine used her phone to confirm their appointment at Our Lady of the Pacific High School. They would be questioning Mr. Peter Tong, the head of the science department, a man Father Brooks had described as ordinary with “nothing radical or Fringe Division” about him.

Justine was pretty sure that the headmaster was wrong.

Tong’s car had been firebombed, and the explosive was an unknown chemical that had been packed into a condom, stuffed into the gas tank, and set off with a time-delay incendiary charge.

Peter Tong was a chemist, a science teacher who worked in the same general location as the bombed cars. One of those cars was his.

Was he a victim? Or, as Sci suspected, a serial arsonist who had just made a fatal error?

Justine replied to the text from Mr. Tong, saying they would be arriving within the next ten minutes, then put her phone away.

Scotty said, “So, tell me about your interview with John Leonard Orr.”

“Mmm. Okay. Well, it was about ten years ago. I had just started working at the Santa Monica psychiatric facility,” Justine said. “I asked to see Orr, and he said okay.”

“So, what was he like?”

Justine told Scotty all she knew. That John Orr had been a fire chief in Glendale, California, during a very long and devastating spate of fires that over the course of nine years had consumed sixty-five homes, acres of woodlands, and numerous retail stores and had killed four people, one of them a three-year-old boy.

Orr used a dirt-cheap and ridiculously simple time-delay incendiary device so that by the time the fire blazed, he was long gone. Often he had gone to another fire just a few miles down the road, where he assumed his job as fire chief, an excellent cover, a brilliant alibi.

After literally
thousands
of fires, Orr’s fingerprint was lifted from one of his time-delay devices, and that’s how he was convicted and imprisoned for life plus twenty.

Justine said to Scotty, “When I met him, I was a kid with a PhD and a new job. He’s a psychopath. I got nothing out of him except what he wanted me to believe: that he had been a terrific public servant and that he’d been framed. You know what, Scotty? Even in an orange jumpsuit and cuffs, he looked very nice, very ordinary.”

“Why is it that psychos can be so beguiling?”

“Because there’s a big hole in their brains where most people have a conscience. Orr doesn’t give a crap about the damage to life and property he caused.”

“Do serial arsonists always work alone?”

“No. Not always.”

Scotty pulled the car into the teachers’ lot, set the brake, and said, “Those reviews on Tong. While most of the kids who rated him hated him, he has some fans, maybe even acolytes. We don’t know how many people were involved in setting those firebombs, but two at least, right, Justine? One to drive the car, one to jimmy the tank door open, stuff in the explosive, and set the device.”

“Yes. Scotty, you read the review on Tong from the kid who calls himself Zero Sum?”

“Yeah,” Scotty said. “‘Tong is very dark and powerful in a great and exciting way.’”

“Let’s see if Mr. Tong lives up to his reviews,” said Justine.

JUSTINE AND SCOTTY knocked and entered Mr. Tong’s classroom, a laboratory with windows in the back wall giving a view of the upslope of the canyon.

A long desk was centered between the windows, and on both sides of the desk were floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with hundreds of jars of preserved animals and body parts.

Between the desk and where Justine and Scotty stood in the doorway were two dozen spanking-new workstations outfitted with cutting-edge microscopes and computers. Three chrome carts packed with cages of white mice were randomly parked like shopping carts in a supermarket lot.

The whole operation was impressive, and Justine thought it spoke of high tuition, generous alumni support, and a faculty that wanted only the best so as to attract the best.

A man sat on a stool at the back of the lab, his head bent over a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a pricey piece of forensic equipment used for trace analysis and not usually found in high-school labs.

Justine called out, “Hello, Mr. Tong?” and the man working at the GC/MS turned around.

He was Asian, of medium height and build, wearing a tight white T-shirt, black jeans, and neon-green track shoes. He wore his hair in a brush cut, and his thick glasses had red plastic frames. He had a wide and electrifying smile.

Tong bounced off his stool, stepped forward with his hand outstretched, and introduced himself to Justine and Scotty.

“I’m very glad to meet you.”

“Good to meet you too,” said Justine. “Thanks for offering to help.”