Conklin turned the pages toward me.
“You were arrested for burglary.”
“My boyfriend talked me into it, and I was stupid enough to go along. Anyway, I was acquitted,” Kurtz said.
“You weren’t acquitted,” said Conklin. “You got probation. I think you made a deal to flip on your boyfriend, am I right? Oh, and then there’s the arson.”
“Randy, my husband Randy, was dead. I wanted to cut my heart out,” she said, pounding her chest with her fist. “I set fire to our house because it was the only way I could see what I felt. The bottomless grief.”
I leaned back in my chair. I think my mouth may have dropped open. Debra Kurtz reacted to the shock on my face.
“It was my own house,” she shouted. “I didn’t even file an insurance claim. I only hurt myself, do you understand? I only hurt myself!”
“Had Steven Meacham broken off your affair?”
“Yes. But it was weeks ago, and it was mutual.”
“You weren’t a little angry?” Conklin asked. “Didn’t feel a little bottomless grief?”
“No, no, whatever you’re thinking, I didn’t set fire to the Meachams’ house. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.”
We asked Debra Kurtz where she was when the Malone house burned, and we asked her if she knew her way around Palo Alto. She had alibis, and we wrote eve
rything down. What she told us added up to a crazy woman with a burning desire to both destroy and self-destruct.
It added up, and yet it didn’t add up at all. And now it was half past five in the morning.
“You have any trips planned, Debra?” Conklin said, in his charming way.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Good. Please don’t leave town without letting us know.”
Chapter 45
JOE WAS STILL ASLEEP when I crawled into bed. I gently shoved Martha out of my spot and snuggled up to Joe’s back, wanting to wake him up so that I could tell him what was bugging me. Joe turned toward me, pulled me close to his body, buried his face in my smoky hair.
“Have you been barhopping, Blondie?”
“House fire,” I said. “Two dead.”
“Like the Malones?”
“Just like the Malones.”
I threw an arm across his chest, rested my face in the crook of his neck, exhaled loudly.
“Talk to me, honey,” Joe said.
Excellent.
“It’s about this woman, Debra Kurtz,” I said, as Martha got back up on the bed, turned around a couple of times, then curled into the hollow behind my legs, pinning me in.
“Lives across the street from the victims. She called in the fire.”
“Firebugs often do.”
“Right. Says she got up for a glass of water, saw the flames. Called the fire department, then joined the crowd watching them put the fire out.”