Mother-Daughter Murder Night(57)

“I’m fine,” Lana snapped. She tried to sound as strong as possible.

Ramirez pulled back at her sharp tone. “Well . . . good. This is Detective Choi, from Santa Cruz PD. He’s leading the investigation into the fire at the land trust.”

“Investigation? So it was arson?”

“We’re looking into it.” His white shirt was crisp, his tie well knotted. “I hear you had quite the adventure in our city.”

“You have my Lexus,” Lana said.

“It’s safe in our lot.”

“Safe from what?”

The detective flashed his perfect teeth instead of answering. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Lana sat down at the table and walked the detectives through her experience. Choi interrupted her several times, asking where she had parked her car, who she had seen in the building, and when she first detected the fire. Throughout her retelling, he took careful notes. Ramirez hung back, leaning against the kitchen counter with a travel mug in hand. She didn’t say a word.

“The first thing you saw on fire was a tree behind the building?”

Lana looked to the window. But the slough was invisible to her. Instead, she saw the burning eucalyptus, dropping a fountain of sparks onto the building.

“That’s correct.”

Choi sighed. “Thank you, Ms. Rubicon.” He looked disappointed.

“Have you talked to everyone who was there?” Lana asked.

“You were the last one. I hoped you might have something new to tell me.”

Lana felt very sorry she didn’t.

Then a thought occurred to her. “Detective, was the fire set inside the building?”

Choi looked up, interested. “Is that why you exited via the window? Did you think the main office wasn’t safe?”

“No. I couldn’t get to the office. The door was locked. Or stuck. I don’t know which. And then when no one came to get me . . .”

Both detectives were looking at her now.

“Don’t you think that’s suspicious? That I was trapped in that room during the fire?” Lana tried not to let too much indignation creep into her voice.

Choi checked his notes. “No.”

She frowned. “No?”

“Ms. Rubicon, about how long would you say that you were trapped? From when you first heard the alarm to when you got out?”

Lana considered. There was the alarm. The locked door. And then the convoluted work of smashing her way to freedom. It had felt like forever.

“Half an hour?” she guessed.

“According to the fire captain, less than two minutes passed between when the alarm went off and when you busted out of the window. I think it’s reasonable, in an emergency, that no one was able to reach you in that span. Unfortunate, of course. But reasonable.”

Lana looked at him, incredulous. She couldn’t decide if it was more surprising that she hadn’t been forgotten or that she’d escaped so quickly.

Choi was moving on. “The fire started outside,” he said. “We found remnants of a remote-activated incendiary device in the brush behind the building.” He pulled out a photograph and passed it across the table. “Does anything here look familiar to you?”

The picture was a mess of blackened dirt, splintered wood, and broken glass. The central focus was a puckered exterior wall with a gaping hole in it. The hole looked like it was puking out the guts of the building, a mixture of drywall, curled brown paper, and metal rings.

“This is behind the building?”

“That’s correct.”

Lana closed her eyes and recalled the floor plan. “There was a back door, and a long glass cabinet along the back wall of the building. It held all their records in heavy binders.”

She opened her eyes and pointed to the twisted metal rings in the picture. “That’s probably what’s left of them.”

She thought of everything in Ricardo’s binders, the papers that were now destroyed. Thank God she’d taken pictures. She wondered what, if anything, she might have missed.

“What are those?” she asked, pointing to a few specks of yellow and red in the photograph peeking out from under a charred brown blob.

“We think that’s what was used to set the fire.”

“Dynamite?”

Choi suppressed a smile. “You’d be half-deaf if that was the case.”

“I heard a noise that sounded like a car backfiring—”

He made a note. “That could have been it. It was a black powder device, probably stuffed in a cardboard box with rags and accelerant. We believe it may have been one of those shell crackers orchardists use to scare away birds.”

“Shell crackers?”

Choi nodded. “They look like this.” He showed her a picture of a small, plasticky black-and-orange gun. It looked like a toy. Lana wondered whether the land trust had trouble with birds on any of the reclaimed farms they managed, and, if so, what they used to flush them out.

Choi was still explaining. “But bird bombs can also be in the form of cartridges that are activated remotely. Which is what we believe happened in this case.”

“Is that complicated?” Lana thought of Martin and his tiny robots.

The detective shrugged. “Not particularly. Lots of farmers have remote systems for pest control.”