7th Heaven (Women's Murder Club 7)

“She was still standing there when you arrived?”

“She’d been there for hours. Said she was best friends with the female victim, Sandy Meacham, and she’d also been sleeping with the second victim, Sandy’s husband —”

“Weird definition of best friend.”

I had to laugh. “Sleeping with her best friend’s husband until he dumped her. This Debra Kurtz has a key to the victims’ house. She also has a sheet. An old arrest for burglary. And guess what else? Arson.”

“Hah! She knows her way around the system. So she what? Sets fire to the house across the street — and just waits for the cops to take her in?”

“That’s what I’m saying, Joe. The whole package is too much. Kurtz had the means, the motive, the opportunity. ‘Hell hath no fury’ — plus once a firebug, you know, it’s a hard rush to kick.”

“She strike you as a killer?” Joe asked me.

“She struck me as a pathetic narcissist, in need of attention.”

“You got that right.”

I gave Joe a kiss. Then I gave him a few more, just loving the feeling of his rough cheek against my lips, his mouth on mine, and the fact of him, big and warm and in my bed.

“Don’t start something you’re too tired to finish, Blondie,” he growled at me.

I laughed again. Hugged him tight. Said, “Ms. Kurtz insists she didn’t do it. So what I’m thinking is . . .” My thoughts drifted back to the victims, soot-blackened water lapping around their bodies.

“What you’re thinking,” Joe prompted.

“I’m thinking either she set this fire because she’s so completely self-destructive, she wants to get caught. Or she did it and maybe she didn’t plan for her friends to die. Or else . . .”

“Your gut is telling you that she didn’t do it. That she’s just a total wackjob.”

“There ya go,” I said to my sweetheart. “There . . . ya . . . go . . .”

When I woke up, my arms were entwined around Martha, Joe was gone, and I was late for my meeting with Jacobi.

Chapter 46

I MET CLAIRE at her car after work. I moved a pair of galoshes, a flashlight, her crime scene kit, a giant bag of barbecued potato chips, and three maps into the backseat and then climbed up into the passenger side of her Pathfinder. I said, “Richie got a translation of that Latin phrase that was written inside that yachting book.”

“Oh yeah? And what did it mean?” she said, pulling her seat belt low across her belly, stretching it to the limit before locking it in place.

I cinched my seat belt, too, said, “It roughly translates as ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ I’d like to get my hands on the sucker who wrote that and show him the victims all crispy and curled up on your table. Show him what real evil is.”

Claire grunted. “You got that right,” she said, and pulled the car out onto Bryant heading us north, apparently deciding to take the 1.8 miles to Susie’s like she was racing the Daytona 500. She jerked the wheel around a slow-cruising sightseer, stepping on the gas. “You’re saying ‘him,’ ” Claire pointed out. “So that Debra Kurtz person is off your list?”

“She has an alibi,” I told Claire through clenched teeth. I grabbed the dashboard as she cleared the yellow light. “Also, her alibis check out for the nights of the Malone fire and the Jablonskys in Palo Alto.”

“Humph,” Claire said. “Well, about the two legible fingerprints on that bottle found at the scene. One belongs to Steven Meacham. The other didn’t match to anybody. But I’ve got something for you, girlfriend. Sandy Meacham had a good-sized blunt-force wound to the skull. Looks like she got clobbered with maybe a gun butt.”

I thought about that — that the killer had gotten violent — then I told Claire how the canvass of the Meacham neighborhood had netted us no leads whatsoever. She gave me the results of the blood screen — that Sandy Meacham had been drinking, and that the Meachams had both died of smoke inhalation.

It was all interesting, but none of it added up to a damned thing. I said so to Claire as she pulled into the handicapped zone right in front of Susie’s Café.

She looked at me and said, “I am handicapped, Linds. I’m carrying fifty pounds of baby fat, and I can’t walk a block without huffing.”

“I’m not going to write you up for this, Butterfly. But as for the land speed record you just set in a business district . . .”

My best friend kissed my cheek as I helped her down out of the Pathfinder. “I love that you worry about me.”

“Lotta good it does,” I said, hugging her, cracking open the door to Susie’s.