The fire was out by the time Dodge reached the Life Sciences Center at the northeast corner of the university campus. An engine from Fire Station 37 idled on the curving street under an elm tree’s branches. Parked around the engine were three LAPD squad cars, light bars cycling blue and red in the pinkish light of dawn.
Dodge parked his unmarked Caprice behind the nearest patrol unit and strolled toward the knot of firefighters gathered with the cops near the front door of Life Sciences. The firefighters looked tired, and the cops looked bored. That was nothing new. Cops at a crime scene always looked bored.
If this was a crime scene. There was, as yet, no evidence that a crime had been committed. With any luck, it would stay that way. Dodge didn’t need another fucking homicide on his plate.
Spears of light from the sun breaking the horizon jabbed his eyes as he crossed the greensward, his shoes collecting dew. On the fringe of the crowd, he ran into a fireman he recognized as the chief of station 37. He was wearing his heavy canvas turnout coat, the high collar snapped shut. Only the tips of his ears were visible, and they were blistered from the heat.
There was the usual exchange of bullshit hellos and how-you-doin’s, and then Dodge asked him what had gone down here.
"Fucking mess," the captain said. "Oh-four-fifty, we respond to an alarm. I lead in the company-two vehicles, wagon and pumper. The blaze is a worker, basement level of the building fully involved, no way we can get inside. It’s strictly surround and drown. We pump in maybe ten thousand gallons. Use foam too, when the wind dies down. Finally some of us suit up in our BAs"-breathing apparatus-"and get in. Hosemen lay down lines, rest of us search for casualties. Visibility zero. Gotta feel our way through. I pretty much stumble over the victim. Deceased."
"You apply CPR?"
"Wouldn’t have helped. This guy was a goner. Anyway, by then I’m drawing a vacuum on my facepiece, so I get the hell out of there."
"Where’s the DB now?" Dead body.
"Still inside. Figured there was no point in moving it, disrupting the scene any more than necessary."
"You thinking arson? Is that why you wanted to keep the scene intact?"
"Don’t know what to think. We got an arson unit coming over, but they’re hung up on other cases right now."
"Busy night for the firebugs."
"They’re all busy nights."
"Okay, I got the picture. Take care of yourself." Dodge started to walk away.
"Hey, Jim, one more thing. There’s some pooled water from our hoses down there, though luckily there are floor drains in the lab, and once we unclogged ’em, the water mostly ran off. Still, you’ll want waterproof boots. Got any with you?"
"Yeah, right along with my fly-fishing gear and my pup tent. Who do I look like, Eddie fucking Bauer?"
"You can borrow a pair out of the wagon."
Dodge thanked him again, then waded into the crowd and buttonholed the nearest uniform. "Who’s the first officer?"
"Painter." The cop pointed toward a woman in blue.
Dodge didn’t know her. Since he knew all the veteran West LA cops, this one was probably a recent transfer from another division. He looked her over. Wide hips, skin so shiny black it was almost purple. Reminded him more of a goddamn welfare whore than an officer of the law.
He took Painter aside, introduced himself, and got out his notepad as she ran down the details. She reiterated much of what Dodge already knew before getting to the vic.
"Male or female?" Dodge asked.
"Male. That’s about all we can tell so far."
"No idea who he was? Student, teacher, janitor, night watchman…?"
"His clothes were vaporized and so was any DL or other ID he was carrying. Can’t tell what the hell he looked like. They may have to go by dental records."
"That bad, huh?"
"That bad." She added, "Some kids said it might be a student named, uh, Scott Maple."
"What makes them say so?"
"He’s a grad student, apparently worked down there at all hours on some big project with a deadline."
"Oh? What’s in the basement anyway?"
"Chemistry lab."
"I see." Like any cop, Dodge paid attention when the subject of labs came up. A lot of crime revolved around labs.
"You thinking crank?" Officer Painter asked.
"Could be. Or some designer drug."
"Pretty unusual to cook up something like that in a university chem lab, don’t you think?"
Dodge shook his head. "When I went to college, we got some big-name rock groups to play on campus. Nobody could figure out how we induced them to show up. I mean, this was a little shit college in the middle of nowhere."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." He was warming up to Painter a little bit. He liked people who showed an interest in his stories. "So I looked into it. Turned out some enterprising grad students in the chemistry department were paying the bands in LSD."
Painter seemed unconvinced. "Think that kind of thing still goes on? I mean, it was a long time ago."
His momentary enthusiasm for Painter’s companionship vanished. "Right, it was the fucking dinosaur age." He didn’t like the insinuation that he was old, especially coming from some fat bitch who’d probably been giving blow jobs to the high school football squad a couple of years ago. "So what the fuck else have you got?" he asked stiffly.
Painter seemed unaware of his disappointment in her, or maybe she just didn’t give a shit. "We’re trying to track down this Maple. His dorm mates haven’t seen him."
"He got a girlfriend? Boyfriend? Anything?"
"Girlfriend. We’re looking for her. Not sure if she’s on campus this weekend. School’s out for the holiday, you know."
"Oh, is this a holiday weekend? I had my head so far up my ass, I didn’t notice."
She ticked a cool glare at him. "Just pointing it out. ME’s not here yet; neither is SID. Not that there’ll be much for SID to look at down there."
SID was the Scientific Investigation Division, the forensics experts. Dodge had to admit that Painter was right. No trace evidence would survive the fire-which might be why the blaze had been set in the first place.
"Any reason we should be thinking arson?" he asked.
"Lot of flammable chemicals spilled everywhere. Beakers and stuff, you know. Place went up like a torch. Could’ve been intentional, I don’t know."
"You have no opinion?"
"It’s not my job to have an opinion."
She sounded tired. Probably she thought she was tired. She was wrong. Let her spend the next fifteen years wearing a badge, taking shit from every asshole on the street, making no money, pissing her life away. Then she would know how it felt to be tired.
He thanked her for the recap, then got two pairs of the waterproof boots and hung around, waiting for his partner to show. By now the sun was jostling the treetops at the far end of the quadrangle. There was a line of rust-colored smog on the horizon, as usual, but the sky overhead was turning blue. Of course its clarity was an illusion. The goddamn smog was everywhere, but up close, you couldn’t see it. Dodge thought there might be some sort of metaphor buried in that observation, but he didn’t bother to dig it out.
Bradley arrived a few minutes later, at 6:15. Dodge filled him in, and then the two of them pulled on their boots and walked into Life Sciences. It was an old building constructed of solid brick, with hardwood floors slightly bowed from decades of hard use. Skylights in the atrium let in the sun. Dust glinted in the air, mingling with flecks of floating ash.
The door to the stairwell was across from the elevators. A sagging length of crime-scene tape was strung across the doorway. They ducked under it and took out their flashlights, beaming them down the metal stairs into the dimness below.
Dodge caught the smell at once. He felt his stomach clench like a fist. The odor was sickening, like a barbecue gone bad.
"Whew," Bradley said. This was as close to an expletive as Dodge’s partner ever used. He was a family man, Al Bradley-or had been, till Cheryl sued him for divorce and took the kids to Seattle to live with their new daddy, a real estate salesman named Bob. Dodge thought it would do Al some good to cut loose with a nice stream of profanity now and then, but the guy was a straight arrow.
"Breathe through your mouth," Dodge advised, trying to sound cool, as if the stench didn’t bother him.
Bradley nodded. "Always do. I’m a mouth-breather by nature. You never noticed?"
They went down the stairs, noting the black tracks of firefighters’ boots stamped on each steel tread. Any other shoe prints-those of an intruder, say-would have been obliterated.
At the bottom of the staircase, they followed the boot prints and the smell to a ruined space that had been Organic Chemistry Lab II.
The laboratory was a single large room arrayed with the charred, skeletal remnants of wooden counters. The countertops had blistered over, the wood cracking and bumping up like alligator scales. Three-legged metal stools lay here and there, the cushioned seats incinerated.
Although a basement, the lab was not windowless. A row of narrow, horizontal windows ran along the top of the room at ground level. Daylight entered, diffusing in the thick, sooty air, barely penetrating the murk.
Dodge passed the beam of his flashlight over the rubble, revealing wet mounds of debris and pools of bubbling flame retardant sprayed by extinguishers. As the fire captain had said, there were puddles of water here and there, amid piles of waterlogged ashes, but most of the thousands of gallons of water had disappeared through large drainage grates recessed in the corners of the lab.
Glassware was all over the floor. Dodge remembered Painter mentioning beakers and stuff. There were plenty of beakers and flasks and vials and test tubes and every other sort of glass container. A few were intact, but most had been either shattered or melted, and in some parts of the room, mounds of fallen glassware had actually fused into surreal volcanic cones.
"What a mess," Bradley muttered. His flashlight swung up toward the ceiling, where fluorescent lighting panels hung down on strands of electrical wire, the plastic covers warped. He aimed the beam at the far end of the room, illuminating rows of cabinets hollowed out by flame.
The smell was really bad now. All the windows had been smashed, either by the firefighters or by the thermal impact of the fire itself, but there was little breeze entering the room. The air was stagnant, choking.
At least there was no doubt where the body lay. The stink drew them directly to it. It was sprawled near the back of the lab, between two counters, partially buried in ceiling tiles that had popped loose and rained down on the floor.
Dodge and Bradley knelt by the corpse. Enough was left of the pubic area to confirm that it was a man. Dodge brushed away the foam tiles and exposed a charred, crinkly face. The hair was gone-all of it, even the eyebrows. Eyes like poached eggs swam in their sockets, all the color boiled out of them.
The sight didn’t bother him. He’d seen gangbangers decapitated by shotgun blasts. He’d seen horrendous stabbings and mutilations. He was inured to the insults that could be directed at the human body. But the smell was something else.
"Maybe after this," Bradley told him, "you’ll lay off the pastrami burritos." Pastrami burritos were Dodge’s current poison of choice. They were sold out of a fast-food cart on Santa Monica Boulevard by a Filipino entrepreneur.
"No way," Dodge said. "I need my fix. Anyway, those burritos don’t smell anything like this."
"They smell worse."
Dodge studied the corpse. The victim’s clothes had been entirely burned away. He lay in a pugilistic posture, legs bent at the knees, arms pulled up as if sparring.
"Think he died defending himself?" Bradley asked.
Dodge said no. "The muscles contract because of the heat. Probably postmortem."
"You sure? Those look like wound channels on his arms."
"Splits in his skin. Heat contraction again. Like a fucking frankfurter on a grill. Gets hot, splits its seams."
Dodge started humming the Oscar Mayer song. Bradley told him to knock it off. "It’s not funny. This is somebody’s kid."
"Somebody’s crankhead. Come on, Al, we both know what went down here. Asshole’s got a key to the lab, sneaks in late on a weekend night to cook up some meth. Maybe GHB or something more exotic. Uses this ‘special project’ of his for cover. Tonight his luck runs out. Either he fucks up the recipe and the lab catches fire, or his competition whacks him and torches the place."
"That’s all speculation," Bradley said. "I say he was clean."
"You have such touching faith in human nature."
"No. I just have two kids of my own." Bradley brushed away a few more ceiling tiles, then recoiled. "God."
He had exposed the victim’s chest, where skin and muscle had been burned away altogether, leaving a gap through which the heart and lungs, relatively undamaged, were visible.
"Quite a view, huh?" Dodge smiled. He was getting used to the smell. "It’s like those models they use in science class-the transparent guy with all his guts showing through."
"You’re just chock-full of analogies this morning." Bradley swallowed. "What’s weird is that his internals look pretty much intact. I mean, outside he’s a toasted marshmallow, and inside he’s still in one piece."
Dodge nodded. "That’s normal. Body fluids prevent the inner organs from reaching the same temperature as the skin."
"How do you know all this?"
"Experience," Dodge said shortly. He didn’t bother explaining that one of his first homicide cases had involved a teenager who’d set his parents’ mobile home on fire, with them inside. They hadn’t let him get a tattoo. He’d been a little upset about it.
"And your experience tells you this is a crime scene?" Bradley asked.
Dodge hesitated. He knew the kid had been cooking meth. But it would be easier to call it an accident and let it go. Easier on the school, the kids’ parents, and most of all, himself.
But there was the media angle. College brat supplements his folks’ handouts by turning school property into meth house. Blows up his worthless ass-or gets his ass blown up by pissed-off street rivals who don’t like competition.
That was a story. Myron Levine would pay decent bucks for it, because the college was in Westwood-and Westwood was "affluent."
"Yeah," Dodge said, calculating what he could squeeze out of Levine for inside details on this case, "it’s a crime scene."
Bradley looked away. "Hope you’re wrong."
"Why? What difference does it make?"
"Maybe just because…well, because this would be a real bad way for an innocent kid to die."
Dodge couldn’t argue with that. But what Bradley didn’t understand, even after eighteen years on the street, was that nobody was innocent. Everybody was into something. Everybody was corrupt, tainted, dirty. Some were honest about it, and some put on an act-but no one was clean, ever.
The vic, whether Scott Maple or someone else, had been involved in something ugly. No matter how Dodge looked at it, this case was a whodunit.
And even if it ended up making him some money, it was going to fuck up his weekend, that was for goddamn sure.