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WE PULLED UP to the curb at the same time Conklin’s car arrived. His passenger-side door swung open before he’d come to a full halt and a young woman sprang out, dashed across the lawn toward the remains of the Malone house.
Conklin called out to her, but she didn’t stop. For a second she turned her face into our headlights and I saw her clearly. She was a whip-slim thirty-year-old in tights, a tiny skirt, a brown leather jacket. Her hair was copper-red, worn in a braid down her back long enough to sit on. Wisps of hair had escaped the braid, haloing her face in our headlights. Halo was the right word.
Kelly Malone had the face of a Madonna.
Conklin ran to catch up to her, and by the time Jacobi and I reached them, Conklin had opened the fire department lock on the front door. With dusky light filtering in through the caved-in roof, we walked Kelly Malone through the skeleton of her parents’ house. It was a wrenching tour, Conklin staying close to Kelly’s side as she cried out, “Oh, God, oh, God. Richie, no one could have hated them this much. I just don’t believe it.”
Kelly avoided the library where her parents had died. Instead she walked upstairs into a smoky cone of light. Conklin was beside Kelly when she crossed the threshold into what remained of the master suite. The ceiling had been punched out with pike poles. Soot and water had destroyed the furnishings, the carpeting, and the photos on the walls.
Kelly lifted a wedding portrait of her parents from the floor, wiped it with her sleeve. The glass hadn’t broken, but water had seeped in along the edges.
“I think this can be restored,” she said, tears cracking her voice.
“Sure. Sure, that can be done,” Conklin said.
He showed Kelly the open safe in the closet, asked her if she knew what her parents had kept there.
“My mom had some antique pieces that my grandmother left her. I guess the insurance company will have a list.”
Jacobi asked, “Miss Malone. Anyone you can think of who might have had a grudge against your parents?”
“I haven’t lived here since I was eighteen,” she said. “My dad could throw his weight around at the dealership, but if there’d been any serious threats, my mom would’ve told me.
“Are you sure this wasn’t an accident?” she asked, turning pleading eyes on my partner.
Conklin said, “I’m sorry, Kelly. This was no accident.”
He put his arms around her and Kelly sobbed against his chest. Her pain was breaking my own heart. Still, I had to ask. “Kelly, who stands to benefit the most from your parents’ death?”
The young woman recoiled as if I’d struck her.
“Me,” she shouted. “I do. And my brother. You got us. We hired a hit man to kill our parents and torch the house so that we could inherit our parents’ money.”
I said, “Kelly, I’m sorry. I wasn’t implying that you had anything to do with this.” But she talked only to Conklin after that.
As I stood downstairs with Jacobi, I overheard Rich tell Kelly about the note in Latin written on the flyleaf of a book.
“Latin? I don’t know anything about that. If Mom or Dad wrote anything in Latin, it would have been the first and only time,” said Kelly Malone.
Chapter 27
HAWK HAD TRAPPED the roach under an eight-ounce drinking glass upended on top of the worktable he used as a desk in his room at home. The roach was a Blatta orientalis, the oriental cockroach, about an inch long and shiny black, commonly found in all the swank houses of Palo Alto.
But although this bug was common, he was special to Hawk.
“You’re doing very well, Macho,” Hawk said to the roach. “It’s not much of a bug’s life, I have to admit, but you’re worthy of the challenge.”
Behind Hawk, Pidge lay on Hawk’s bed reading background material on an upcoming class project: a three-dimensional fax, something that had probably been inspired by the “beam me up, Scotty” technology from Star Trek and was now becoming manifest in the real world.
How it worked was, a machine scanned an object at point A, and an identical object was created by a laser carving out a replica from another material at point Z. But Pidge knew all of this. He’d seen the demo. So what he was doing was busywork while he waited for Hawk to get his lazy ass in gear.
“You’re behind on the dialogue,” Pidge grumbled. “Instead of talking to that bug, you should do the dialogue before your stupid parents come home.”
“Why don’t you like Macho?” Hawk asked. “He’s been living on air and whatever body oil might have been on the desk for, um, sixteen days. Haven’t you, Macho? It’s damned admirable, Pidge. Seriously.”
“Seriously, bro, you’re an asshole.”
“You’re missing the nobility of the experiment,” Hawk continued, unfazed. “A creature descended from insects that’ve been around since the first ass crack of time. Macho is living on air. And if he lives for four more days, I’m going to release him. That’s the deal I made with him. I’m thinking up his reward right now.
