Diagnosis Murder 6 - The Dead Letter by Lee Goldberg Read Free Book Online

from the scene, he knew.
    The strip mall was a gutted, scorched skeleton of the building it had once been. The smell of smoke was still heavy in the air, the intersection inundated with soot-blackened water, the storm drains clogged with burned debris. He didn't remember what stores had been in the mall, but he knew somebody who rented one of the offices upstairs.
    Nick Stryker. The same guy whom the woman he'd just booked for murder had hired to follow her cheating husband. Now somebody had torched Stryker's office, maybe even killed him.
    Coincidence?
    No such thing. As Steve parked his car behind the medical examiner's windowless black Suburban, he made a mental note to check on Monette's whereabouts at the time of the fire—not that he really figured she was responsible.
    The area was roped off with yellow caution tape, and members of the LAPD Scientific Investigation Unit, affectionately known as the crime scene mice, were on the job.
    The work of the mice had been popularized on shows like CSI, where the forensic team tooled around in Humvees, wore designer clothes, and carried guns. If the mice expected any of that Hollywood glamour to rub off on them, they were mistaken. They drove old Ford vans and wore unisex jumpsuits. The only weapons they carried were tweezers and baggies. And if Steve had ever caught them questioning a witness, he would have shot them.
    He flashed his badge at the LAPD officer securing the scene, stepped under the tape, and began looking for Dr. Amanda Bentley among the investigators swarming over the debris. She was a pathologist at Community General Hospital, where the morgue doubled as the adjunct county medical examiner's office. So she wore two lab coats, one as pathologist, the other as medical examiner, handling overflow for the beleaguered county morgue and the chronically understaffed ME's office. She juggled the inhuman demands of both of her jobs, as well as single motherhood, with astonishing ease and efficiency. Steve wished he knew how she managed it. Even more, he wished he could find her. She didn't seem to be anywhere.
    Steve approached one of the arson investigators, flashed his badge by way of introduction, and asked him where the ME was. The investigator directed him to the alley behind the building, where he found Amanda and another arson investigator peering into a scorched trash bin.
    "What's the story?" Steve asked as he stepped up beside them.
    "That's what we're trying to figure out," Amanda said, motioning towards the trash bin.
    He followed her gaze and saw a charred corpse, vaguely recognizable as human, curled up amidst the burned trash, his fists clenched under his chin as if preparing for a blow from a boxer. Steve knew from experience not to read any thing into the position of the body. The tremendous heat from the fire had dehydrated the victim's muscles, causing them to contract and twist the body into the pugilistic position.
    When Steve looked up again, Amanda introduced him to the arson investigator, Tim Lau.
    With his LAFD baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses, Tim looked less like an arson investigator than a Hong Kong movie version of an American cop.
    "What can you tell me about the fire?" Steve asked, shaking Tim's hand.
    Tim glanced at the building behind them. "Well, Steve, it started on the second floor—"
    "The third office from the left," Steve interrupted.
    Tim smiled. "I'm impressed. What tipped you off? The pattern of spalling on the concrete?"
    Steve shook his head. "The office belongs to Nick Stryker, a PI who likes to catch philandering husbands in the act. I'm surprised someone didn't lob a Molotov cocktail through the window years ago."
    "That wouldn't have been enough accelerant to cause the amount of spalling I saw," Tim said. "It was too widespread."
    "Spalling?" Steve asked.
    "Pockmarked concrete. The flammable liquid seeped into minute cracks in the concrete and ignited, creating fissures, holes, and flakes."
    "That's why you don't