As soon as the liquid hit my tongue, though, I knew it wasn’t water. Way too much kick for that. I jerked the bottle back, spilling a few drops on the counter, and then sniffed. The liquid was odorless and colorless, but I thought it was vodka.
I capped the bottle, wiped the spilled drops with a tissue, then put the bottle back on the table and went out to the ruins of the shopping center my father had built, in part with his own hands.
As I walked, I yawned, and wondered if I’d have passed the call to another detective if I’d known Mike would be involved. Maybe. But how could I have justified that to my family? They had met Mike a few times before we broke up, and liked him. No one had ever questioned why we’d stopped seeing each other, and until I told Harry when we were surfing, I’d never volunteered an explanation.
And what was up with the vodka bottle, at eight in the morning? When we’d dated, Mike had been a wine drinker, preferably red and Italian. He’d gotten a little loopy sometimes, but I had too. I’d never considered that he had a drinking problem.
In the daylight, the center looked worse than it had at night. Traffic slowed on Waialae Avenue as onlookers gaped, but Lidia kept the cars moving, and prevented foot traffic from getting in our way. The devastation the fire had caused was clear, and the harsh smell of burnt wood and plastic was still everywhere. I stifled another yawn as Mike and I started at the far end of the center, by the acupuncture clinic, looking for anything we could find.
“A fire needs three things,” he said, as we began investigating. “Oxygen, heat, and a fuel source. Last night, I talked to a bunch of the guys about what they found when they started fighting the fire. The flames were light yellow, almost white, and the smoke was black. That means gasoline was part of the fuel source.”
He pointed at a charred piece of wood framing. “This building had a lot of wood. If the wood was the only material burning, the flames would have been more red, and the smoke brown.”
I nodded, writing notes for myself.
“You can see various points throughout the center where the fire seems to have burned hotter and stronger. Those were the places where the gasoline was spread. The rapid progress of the fire indicated that those places were linked with some kind of accelerant.”
He pointed to the ground behind the clinic. “The fire was started on the exterior of the building. So our arsonist either didn’t have access to the clinic, or didn’t want to waste time breaking in. There was an alarm system, yeah?”
“An old one-just a keypad outside each back door, and sensors on the front and rear exits. If you broke down the door, you’d trip the sensor, but that’s about it.”
It was weird working with Mike again. I couldn’t help looking at him when his attention was elsewhere, remembering the wiry feel of his hair against my chest, noticing the curve of his ass in his dark jeans. The ghost of our failed relationship hung between everything we said to each other. He felt the tension, too; I could see it in the set of his shoulders, the awkward way he tried to avoid touching me.
“You said the third thing the fire needs is oxygen,” I said, pushing my attention back to the case. “But isn’t there oxygen everywhere?”
“There is. A fire needs oxygen to keep burning. If the arsonist had set a fire in one store that was airtight, it would have burned itself out. But by setting the fires outside the building, he guaranteed a supply of oxygen. And the narrow alley is perfect; the wind channeled the flames down alongside the building.”
I saw something on the ground behind the hair salon and leaned over to look closely. “Think our arsonist was a potato chip fan?” I said to Mike, pointing at a scrap of a chip bag.
“Not necessarily.” He leaned over next to me, and his head was so close to mine that I could have turned just a bit and kissed him. I could tell he felt something, too, from the quick way he pulled back.
“Potato chips are greasy, yeah?” he said, standing up and stepping a little away from me. “So they’re a good accelerant. You lay a trail of chips away from the ignition, and the fire runs down the trail. Soon you’ve got a wall of flames going up.”
He pulled out an evidence bag, and scooped the fragment of chip bag into it. “Good eye,” he said.
He looked at me, and for a moment I saw a flicker of the old Mike in his eyes, as if he wanted to make a joke but then thought better of it. That connection between us was like an electrical spark in the air, only there wasn’t anything to fuel the combustion.
We walked all the way down the alley to the beauty salon at the far end. “We’re not only looking for things that shouldn’t be here,” Mike said, “but things that should be, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there isn’t much reason for a gasoline can to be in a travel agency, for example,” he said. “But people decorate their workplaces with personal items.” He motioned through the damaged wall to the travel agent’s desk, where we could see the remains of photographs in twisted metal frames. “If she’d cleared her desk, that might mean she knew the fire was going to happen.”
“So I guess we can wipe her out as a suspect.”
“We can’t eliminate anyone as a suspect yet,” he said. “We’re just looking for clues, remember?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Gee, I remember when you used to say that and mean it.”
My eyebrows shot up and I was about to say something when I saw Ray pull in the parking lot. “There’s my partner,” I said. “Let me go fill him in.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Mike said.
“I’ve got to pick Julie up at two,” Ray said, when I got over to his car. “If we’re still working, can you follow me down to UH and bring me back up here?”
“Sure. Listen, I need to talk to you before we get started in there.”
There was a hole-in-the-wall malasada shop across the street, and I steered Ray over there. A malasada is a kind of Portuguese donut popular in Hawai’i, and I figured I would tell Ray about my background with Mike over a big dose of sugar. We’d started working together just as I was breaking up with Mike, and I hadn’t felt comfortable enough with Ray then to say anything.
Since then, we’d gotten closer. I remembered one of the first conversations we’d had together on personal subjects. We were in my truck on our way back from a case-an old man whose pills had been tampered with by his son. The daughter was a lesbian, and she’d been our primary suspect until her brother had done something dumb that gave him away.
I said I worried that I’d bent over backward to think of the sister as innocent, because I empathized with her. I took a deep breath. “Because I’m gay, too.”
“No shit?” he asked. “That’s cool. My cousin Joey was my best friend growing up-we used to have a hell of a time together. He turned out to be gay.”
“You still in touch with him?”
Ray shrugged, and turned to look out the window. “Joey got it into his head when we were about twenty that he wanted to own an X-rated porno store. He used to say he wanted to sit behind the counter with his pants open, jerking himself off while the customers shopped.”
“Not a pretty picture.” I realized I had been gripping the steering wheel tight, and relaxed a little.
“He did some stupid stuff to raise the money. Started selling drugs, got killed. That was that for Joey.”
“Wow. Must have been tough for you.”
“That’s when I decided to be a cop,” he said, turning back to me. “I mean, I always knew cops growing up, had a few in the family, but I hadn’t been thinking about it for myself till then.”
I still didn’t talk much about my personal life to Ray, but he’d known I’d been burned by a guy in the past, and when I told him about my date with Dr. Phil he’d cheered me on.