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“The first one was like this?” Conklin asked.
“Nope. Meth lab explosion,” Hanni said. “Victim was blown out of the house and into the back of her pickup truck.” He shook his head. “Now this is exactly like the Malone fire.”
We followed Hanni into what was once the Meachams’ living room. I imagined the space as it once was — the cathedral ceiling, the massive fireplace, and the mirror above the mantel. Now it was all smoke-blackened gilt and carbon-streaked marble. The bodies were lying close together in three inches of black water, flat on their stomachs, hands curled in a pugilistic attitude, the result of tendons tightening as their bodies burned.
“If there were ligatures on the victims, they’ve burned up,” Hanni said, hunching down beside the bodies. “No point in dusting for prints. Maybe tomorrow, in the light of day. . . . Anyway,” Hanni went on, “I found this on the kitchen counter.” He handed a book to Conklin. I read the title: A History of Yachting. “Got a signature in there for you, Rich. It’s in Latin.”
Conklin cracked open the book to the title page and read out loud. “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas.”
“What’s it mean?” Hanni asked him.
Conklin tried to hunch it out, saying, “Something, something, bad is love? I don’t know. What the hell. My tenthgrade Latin is exhausted.”
“Aren’t we all?” Claire said, stepping into the room, a crew of two assistants trailing behind her. “What have we got here?”
She walked to the bodies, rolled the smaller of the two, and a rush of air came from the victim’s mouth. Paaahhhhhh.
“Look here,” Claire said to Chuck, showing him a liquor bottle that had been partially hidden by the victim’s body.
Hanni picked it up with a gloved hand.
“Maybe we’ll get some prints after all,” he said.
Conklin and I left Claire and Hanni with the bodies of the victims and went outside. The first officer pointed out an attractive woman standing at the front of the now-thinning crowd at the edge of the lawn.
“That’s the woman who called it in. Her name is Debra Kurtz,” the cop told me. “She lives directly across the street.”
Kurtz was in her late forties, five four or so, a tad too thin, maybe anorectic, wearing black spandex running gear. Mascaraed tear tracks marked her cheeks. I introduced myself and Conklin, asked Kurtz if she’d known the deceased.
“Steve and Sandy Meacham were my closest friends,” she said. “I called 911 when I saw the fire. God, oh, God, it was already too late.”
“Mind coming down to the station with us?” I asked. “We need to know everything we can about your friends.”
Chapter 44
DEBRA KURTZ WAS DRINKING day-old coffee in the smaller, cleaner of our two interview rooms. “The Meachams were the greatest couple in the world,” she told us tearfully.
“Any reason you can think that anyone would want to hurt them?” I asked.
“I’m going to the soft drink machine downstairs,” Conklin said to Kurtz. “Can I get you something else?”
She shook her head no.
When Conklin was gone, Kurtz leaned across the table and told me about Sandy’s drinking and that both Sandy and Steven had had casual affairs. “I don’t think that means anything, but just so you know.”
Kurtz told me that the Meachams had two children; a boy, Scott, nineteen or so, away at college, and a girl, Rebecca, older and married, living in Philadelphia. Kurtz choked up again, as though something painful was stuck in her gut — or her conscience.
“Is there something else you want to tell me, Debra? Something going on between you and Steven Meacham?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, there was.”
Kurtz watched the door as she talked, as if she wanted to finish talking before Conklin returned. She said, “I hated myself for cheating on Sandy. It’s hard to explain, but in a way I loved her as much as I loved Steve.”
I pushed a box of tissues over to her side of the table as Conklin came back into the interrogation room. He was holding a computer printout.
“You have a rap sheet, Ms. Kurtz,” said Conklin, pulling out a chair. “That kinda surprised me.”
“I was in grief,” the woman told us, her gray eyes flooding anew. “I didn’t hurt anyone but myself.”
