Violet Darger (Book 6): Night On Fire Read online

  “You verified this?” Darger asked.

  “We got it from the daughter and confirmed it with the specialist she saw over at UCLA. It all checks out. Galitis wasn’t faking shit.”

  Darger couldn’t help but feel a sense of vindication that bitter old Mrs. Payne had been dead wrong about everything.

  Bishop leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head.

  “According to Galitis’ daughter, the feud goes way back.”

  “Seemed pretty one-sided for a feud,” Darger said.

  “You wanna talk one-sided? Listen to this. Judy Galitis was big into gardening, right? Had this one particular flower that was her favorite. She grew all kinds, even bred some of her own hybrids. Anyway, I don’t remember the name of it, but the daughter said it was some kind of vining plant. Liked to climb up stuff. A couple of ‘em twined their way over to Mrs. Payne’s side of the fence, and I guess you saw her lawn, if you can call it that.”

  Darger envisioned the sterile space in her mind.

  “Chain-link fence and gravel.”

  “Yeah. Real cozy, right? So she spots some of these vines on her turf, and she hops over into Judy Galitis’ yard and rips ‘em out of the ground, all the way down to the roots.”

  “All of them?”

  Bishop nodded.

  “Called them ‘invasive.’ The daughter also told us that when she was in high school, Mrs. Payne used to call the cops on her for playing music while she was studying. We’re talking like Beethoven or some classical shit, and Payne would call up and complain about the ‘loud partying’ going on next door. I mean, she’s just too fuckin’ much, man.”

  “Any idea what started the vendetta?” Luck asked.

  The other two men shook their heads.

  “Daughter said it was that way from the day they moved in. She just had it out for ‘em, man. I mean, I don’t even think it was personal, really. She harasses pretty much everyone on the block.”

  Bishop stroked his chin. “As my mama would say, ‘That woman would yank out a stop sign to argue with the hole.’”

  Luck blew out a breath, frowning.

  “What the hell makes someone turn out that way?”

  “Lack of sex would be my guess,” Klootey offered, then laughed heartily at his own joke.

  “Anyway, you Feebs need a taste of dealing with the civilian wildlife every now and then,” Bishop said. “It’s good for you. Keeps you honest.”

  With a disapproving scoff, Luck said, “You guys are a pair of assholes.”

  That got another chuckle out of Klootey, but Bishop attempted to look contrite.

  “Hey man, just ‘cause she’s a Nagasaurus Rex doesn’t mean she couldn’t have had some good information,” he said, then started to laugh again. “Lord knows, she’s nosy enough.”

  Luck raised his hands in disbelief and looked to Darger for support, but all of Bishop’s talking had given her an idea.

  “What about the daughter?” she said.

  Luck frowned.

  “Of the deceased?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, I’ll bet she spent a lot of time at her mom’s place. Checking in on her. Helping out.”

  A glance at Bishop indicated her guess was correct. She turned back to Luck.

  “Maybe she remembers something. Something she saw or something her mom told her about,” Darger said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

  Chapter 15

  Caroline Galitis’ apartment was on the second floor of a yellow stucco building in Rancho Park. Darger followed Luck up the exterior stairs, trailing her fingers along the wrought-iron railing.

  They knocked on the door of number 27, and a dark-haired girl answered the door. She was 26, a lab tech and grad student at UCLA, according to Bishop. She looked younger than that to Darger, but then everyone under thirty had a tendency to look more and more like kids the older she got. In this case, it was the girl’s eyes. They were big and blue with impossibly long lashes that lent an innocent appearance to her face.

  Caroline invited them in and offered to make tea. Luck declined, but Darger accepted. She’d found that many people were more comfortable during interviews if they had something to do with their hands.

  The studio apartment was small and appeared to be new digs for Caroline — aside from the mix of IKEA and secondhand furniture, there were stacks of moving boxes taking up most of the living area.

  In the small kitchen, Caroline filled a kettle with water from the sink. Darger saw her glance at the card they’d given her when she first answered the door.

  “You said you’re from the FBI?” she asked, setting the kettle on the stovetop.

  “That’s right.”

  “This isn’t a good thing, is it?” Caroline blinked. “I mean, if the police investigation was going well, they wouldn’t need to call in the FBI, would they?”

  “It’s not necessarily good or bad. It’s just… complicated. Sometimes when an investigation grows to encompass several jurisdictions, the FBI is brought in to help facilitate things. Especially with a serial offender. I assume the police asked whether you’d ever been up to Thorne Farms?”

  Caroline nodded slowly.

  “I couldn’t believe it, when they told me they thought it was the same person that had set fire to my mom’s house.” She covered her mouth. “Why would someone do something like that? My mother never hurt anybody. And all those people at that wedding. There were little kids there. Why?”

  Darger could have explained that it was about power. That they were dealing with a very insecure man trying to prove his superiority to the world and to himself. But she didn’t think it would mean much to a girl mourning the loss of her mother.

  Instead, she said, “That’s what we’re here to find out. And we were hoping we could ask you a few questions about your mom.”

  The girl nodded, and Darger went on.

  “Can you remember anything unusual in the week or so before she died? Maybe she mentioned noticing someone in the neighborhood that didn’t belong?”

  Caroline was rifling in one of the cabinets and stopped abruptly. Her wide eyes were even wider.

  “It’s so weird that you say that.”

  “Why?” Luck asked. “What happened?”

  “Mom had been having trouble sleeping, which isn’t out of the ordinary when she’s having a flare-up. But she’d been complaining that a noisy car was waking her up in the middle of the night. Honestly, I thought it was tinnitus. It’s pretty common with MS. And the noises she was describing seemed right for it.” Pulling a box of green tea from a shelf, Caroline shook her head. “But then I stayed over one night, and I heard it, too.”

  Darger was about to ask exactly what it was that she’d heard, but the girl suddenly gasped.

  “Oh god,” she said, stifling a sob. “That was only two nights before the fire.”

  Caroline wrapped her arms around herself and leaned against the counter.

  “If the fire had been that night, I could have done something. I could have gotten her out of the house.”

  The girl’s voice was barely a whisper, but Darger heard the pain in it nonetheless. The sharp edges in her told her to push on, that the girl had something. But the softer side, the part that used to be a counselor told her to give the girl a moment.

  She saw that Luck was poised on the edge of his bar stool, ready to fire off the question — What did you hear? — but she gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

  Caroline sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “That’s what’s so frustrating about all of this. A thousand What-Ifs pop into my head on a daily basis. It’s almost constant. What if the smoke detector in the kitchen had been hardwired, like it was supposed to be? If she’d had that extra two minutes it took for the hallway outside her bedroom to fill with smoke, that could have been the difference. Or what if she’d been having a good day that day? If she hadn’t needed the whe
elchair, maybe she would have made it out.”

  Darger said, “You’re bargaining.”

  Caroline lifted her head.

  “What?”

  “There was a psychiatrist named Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Back in the 1960s, she worked with the terminally ill and came up with a framework for the grieving process. It starts with denial. I’d guess the first thing you thought when you heard your mother was dead was, ‘This can’t be true.’”

  The girl nodded emphatically, her eyelashes glittering with tears.

  “I thought it was a nightmare. I kept waiting to wake up.”

  “The second stage is anger. Once it becomes clear that all of this is real, we want to know why. Why this had to happen. Why someone would do this. And because there aren’t any satisfying answers to those questions, we get angry. We rage against the unfairness. The randomness. Sometimes you’ll probably end up feeling angry at everyone and everything. People and situations that have nothing to do with your mother’s death.”

  A choked laugh burst out of Caroline’s throat.

  “OK. Yeah. I totally blew up at work the other day. I’d just cleaned the microwave in the break room, only to come back the next day and find it absolutely caked with someone’s leftover spaghetti. I screamed at a whole room full of my coworkers, and then I burst into tears. I’ve been so embarrassed about it, but you’re saying it’s… I don’t know… normal?”

  “It is normal. And even though you can go back and forth and even skip around between the various stages, you seem to be right on schedule when it comes to the third stage.”

  “Bargaining?”

  Darger bobbed her head.

  “Now you start thinking of all the ways the fire could have been prevented. All the scenarios in which you might have been able to save your mom. It’s your mind’s way of trying to prevent this terrible tragedy retroactively. But you can’t undo what’s already happened.”

  Tears brimmed again in Caroline’s eyes. She smeared her sleeve across her face.

  “I know. It’s just… it’s like my mind won’t let go of it.”

  Reaching out, Darger patted the girl’s arm.

  “That’s OK. It’s part of the process.”

  The kettle whistled, and Caroline set about making the tea.

  “Are there more?” she asked as she poured boiling water into a small green teapot.

  “More?”

  “More stages?”

  “Ah,” Darger said. “Yes. Two more. After bargaining comes depression.”

  Caroline managed a wry smile.

  “Oh, great.”

  “I know, right? Like, why couldn’t they make one of the stages Nonstop Ecstasy and Bottomless Margaritas?”

  That got a snort of laughter out of Caroline.

  “Not gonna lie. It blows. It’s the worst stage, by far. You’ll have days where it hits you hard. Unfortunately, that’s just part of the shitty rollercoaster.” Darger accepted the steaming cup Caroline handed her. “The important thing is not to let yourself get pulled in too deep. You’re going to be sad. That’s a given. But you need to reach out to people when it all starts to feel like too much. Friends. Family. A therapist or support group. Heck, you can call me if you need to.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure. Why not?” Darger said. “I mean it. You’re going to hit a point where you’ll want to talk about it, but a lot of times, people don’t. They isolate themselves because they feel like no one can possibly understand. Or they don’t want to burden someone else with their pain. But you need to do it. Don’t wall yourself off from the world, OK?”

  Caroline sipped her tea and gave a small nod.

  “Good. Eventually, you’ll reach the final stage, which is acceptance. Sometimes people mistakenly think that means they’ll be OK with what happened. That they get to move on and leave the grief behind. But I think it’s more like you come to terms with moving forward with the grief. Because I don’t think it ever really goes away. Not with a loss like this.”

  Sliding open one of the kitchen drawers, Caroline removed a silver picture frame. She set the photo on the counter and angled it so Darger could see. Turquoise water shimmered like glass against white cliffs. In the foreground, Judy Galitis and her daughter hovered in mid-air, the photograph taken mid-jump. They wore matching sarongs and gap-toothed grins.

  “You have the same smile,” Darger said.

  Caroline’s fingers brushed the edge of the frame.

  “This was just before she was diagnosed. We were in Corfu. We did a whole tour of the Greek islands. We kept saying we’d go back, but…” Caroline shook her head. “There was always a reason or an excuse not to do it.”

  Luck, who had been quiet for some time, said, “Isn’t that life?”

  Darger’s head swiveled around to survey him.

  “Makes you want to jump up and do all the stuff you’ve always said you wanted to do.”

  Caroline’s brow furrowed, but she nodded in agreement.

  “It does. It really does.”

  Darger was both impressed and surprised at Luck’s comment. And she was confident that they could move on in the interview, now that a path had been paved through Caroline’s grief.

  “Caroline,” Darger said, and the girl blinked at her with her frank blue gaze. “You mentioned something before, about your mother hearing a noise at night?”

  “Right! Gosh, I almost forgot about that. I thought it was just tinnitus, because—” Caroline stopped herself. “No wait, I already said all that.”

  “You said you heard it, too?” Darger prompted.

  “Yes,” Caroline nodded. “The Tuesday night before she died. I went over and made dinner. Linguini with clam sauce. It was one of her favorites. But anyway, I slept in my old room that night. It faces the street. And sure enough, in the middle of the night, I’m awakened by this… this weird noise, just like mom said. I got up and looked out the window, and saw a car idling across the street.”

  Luck sat forward in his seat. “You saw the car?”

  “Only for a minute, then it drove off.

  “Could you tell the make and model?”

  “Sorry, I don’t really know cars. It was an SUV. It looked black, but it was dark, so… I guess it could have been any dark color, really.”

  Luck was busily entering notes into his phone while she talked.

  “Do you remember what time it was?” Darger asked.

  “Almost four AM.”

  “And the noise,” Luck said, “what did it sound like?”

  She closed her eyes and frowned, looking every bit like a fifth-grader focusing on multiplying eleven by twelve.

  “It was this high-pitched squeak or chirp.” She shrugged. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  “Could you make the noise for us?” Darger asked.

  Caroline blushed.

  “I don’t really know if I can…”

  “Come on,” Darger encouraged. “Was it more like — squeak-squawk-squeak-squawk! — or — scrEEeeEEee?”

  She made the most high-pitched, chirpy sounds she could. She wasn’t going for accuracy. She was merely making an ass of herself so that Caroline would feel more comfortable.

  It worked. The big blue eyes crinkled at the edges as Caroline fought off laughter.

  “No, no,” she said. “It was more like — chirpy-chirpy-chirpy-chirpy-chirpy-chirpy-chirpy!”

  “You got that?” Darger asked Luck.

  He nodded, replaying the recording of Caroline’s chirping from his phone.

  Creases formed along Caroline’s forehead.

  “Was that actually helpful?”

  “It might be,” Darger said.

  When she’d finished her tea, Darger thanked Caroline for answering their questions, and then she and Luck excused themselves.

  Back in Luck’s Lexus, Darger fastened her seatbelt. She studied him as he turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.

  “You did good in the
re,” she said. “That stuff about doing the things you want to do before it’s too late. That was good.”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” She slid on a pair of sunglasses and adjusted her sun visor against the late afternoon glare. “I just remember you getting a little squeamish around the grieving family members before.”

  He shrugged.

  “I may have learned a thing or two here and there. From you, mostly.”

  “Hmm. Well, if you learned it from me, then I guess I should be giving myself the praise.” She made a show of patting herself on the back. “Good one, Violet.”

  Luck rolled his eyes.

  Chapter 16

  Bishop’s head snapped up.

  “What kind of car noise?”

  Sliding his phone from his pocket, Luck played the recording he’d made of Caroline Galitis.

  Bishop snapped his fingers and pointed at the two agents.

  “Bad serpentine belt!”

  “Seriously? You can tell that from the noise she made?” Darger asked.

  “Yep. I’m just that good,” he said, wheeling over to his computer.

  He tapped at the keyboard, opening and closing a series of videos from the surveillance they’d been sifting through.

  “Here we go.” Bishop unlooped the headphones from around his neck and held them out. “Check it out.”

  Darger stepped forward and donned the headphones.

  With a tap of the spacebar, Bishop played the video. It was distorted with a fisheye effect, and after a moment Darger realized it must be one of those doorbell cameras. The video segment was taken at night, with everything rendered in shades of gray. Seconds ticked by and nothing happened. The road was deserted. And then she heard it. A faint chirping sound. It almost sounded like crickets, but the noise gradually got louder. Light flared on the right side of the screen. Headlights. The high-pitched squeal swelled to a peak as a dark SUV rolled across the screen.