“Wouldn’t be the first time regular people turned out to be twisted,” Hanni muttered.

A sweep of headlights drew my eyes toward the broken plate glass window. The coroner’s van joined the fleet of law enforcement and fire department vehicles on the street.

Noonan called out to me. “I checked out the bedroom on the second floor, Sarge. There’s a safe in the closet. The lock and the safe are intact, but the door is open – and the safe is empty.”

“ROBBERY WAS THE MOTIVE for this?” Conklin shouted as Claire stepped into the den with her assistant in tow.

Before Claire could say, “Who died?” I reached out to her for a hug, said into her ear, “Conklin knew the victims.”

“Gotcha,” she said.

As Claire unpacked her scene kit, I told her about the manhandled corpse. Then I stepped out of her way as she took pictures of both bodies with her old Minolta, two shots from every angle.

“There are two doors to this room,” she said as her camera flashed. “Chuck, you say that this room was the point of origin. But the victims stayed in here. Why was that?”

“They could’ve been caught by surprise,” Hanni said. He was cutting samples from the carpet, putting fibers into K-packs.

“If they were drinking and fell asleep, maybe a cigarette dropped down into the couch cushions.”

Hanni explained what was still so hard to believe – that a fire could fill a room this size with smoke in less than a minute, that sleeping people could wake up coughing, be unable to see, get disoriented.

Chuck said, “Someone says, ‘Let’s go this way.’ Other person says, ‘No, it’s this way.’ Maybe someone falls. Smoke inhalation gets them. Boom, they’re down, and they’re unconscious. These two people were dead inside a couple of minutes.”

Conklin came back into the room holding a book in his gloved hand. “I found this on the staircase.”

He handed the book to me. “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. Charles Bukowski. Is this poetry?”

I opened the book to the title page, saw an inscription written there in ballpoint pen.

“This is Latin,” I said to my partner, sounding out the words. “Annuit Cœptis.”

“That’s pronounced chep-tus,” Conklin said. “It’s a motto inscribed on the dollar bill right above that symbol of the pyramid thing with the eye. Annuit Cœptis. ‘ Providence favors our undertaking.’ ”

“You know Latin?”

He shrugged. “I went to Catholic school.”

I said, “So, what do you think, Rich? Is the firebug leaving us a message? That God’s okay with this?”

Conklin looked around at the destruction, said, “Not the God I believe in.”

AT THREE THAT MORNING, Hanni, Conklin, and I watched the fire department board up the Malones’ windows and put a lock on the front door. The onlookers were back in their beds, and as the sounds of hammering cracked through the otherwise silent neighborhood, Hanni said, “There was a fire four months ago in Palo Alto, reminds me of this one.”

“How so?”

“Big, expensive house. The alarm was turned off. Two people died in the living room, and I had the same question in my mind: Why didn’t they leave?”

“Panic, disorientation, like you were saying.”

“Yeah, it happens. But since I wasn’t called in until a couple of days after the fire, I couldn’t know for sure. Drives me crazy when the fire department decides the fire’s accidental without an arson investigator present. Anyway, the bodies were cremated at the funeral home by the time I was called.”

“You thought the fire was suspicious?” Conklin asked.

Hanni nodded. “I still think so. The victims were good people, and they had money. But no one could come up with a motive for anyone to kill Henry and Peggy Jablonsky – not revenge, not insurance fraud, not even ‘I hate your face.’ So I was left with a bad feeling and no way to tell if the fire was arson or a spark flew out of the fireplace and lit up the Christmas tree.”

“I guess you didn’t find a book with Latin written inside,” I said.

“By the time I got there, the ‘evidence eradication unit’ had tossed a mountain of soaked household goods into the front yard. I guess I wasn’t looking for a book.”

Hanni took his car keys out of his pocket. “Okay, guys, I’m done. See you in a few hours.”

Rich and I stood back from his van as the arson investigator drove off.

“Were you able to reach Kelly?” I asked my partner.

“Got her answering machine. I didn’t know what to say.” He shook his head. “I finally said, ‘It’s Rich. Conklin. I know it’s been a long time, Kelly. But. Um. Could you call me right away?’ ”

“That’s good. That’s fine.”

“I don’t know. She’ll either think I’m a psycho for calling her at one in the morning to say hello after twelve years. Or, if she knows that I’m a cop, I just scared the hell out of her.”

THE ME’S OFFICE is in a building connected to the Hall of Justice by a breezeway out the back door of the lobby. Claire was already working in the chilly gray heart of the autopsy suite when I got there at 9:30 that morning. She said, “Hey, darlin’,” barely looking up as she drew her scalpel from Patty Malone’s sternum to her pelvic bone. The dead woman’s hands were clenched and her legless body was carbonized.

“She hardly looks like a person,” I said.

“Bodies burn like candles, you know,” Claire said. “They become part of the fuel.” She clamped back the burned tissue.

“Did the blood tests come back from the lab?”

“About ten minutes ago. Mrs. Malone had had a couple of drinks. Mr. Malone had antihistamine in his blood. That could have made him sleepy.”

“And what about carbon monoxide?” I was asking as Chuck Hanni came through reception and back to where we stood over the table.

“I picked up the Malones’ dental records, Claire,” he said. “I’ll put them in your office.”

Claire nodded, said, “I was about to tell Lindsay that the Malones lived long enough to get a carbon monoxide in the high seventies. The total body X-rays are negative for projectiles or obvious broken bones. But I did find something you’re going to want to see.”

Claire adjusted her plastic apron, which just barely spanned her ever-thickening girth, and turned to the table behind her. She pulled back the sheet exposing Patricia Malone’s legs and touched a gloved finger to a thin, barely discernible pink line around one of the woman’s ankles.

“This unburned skin right here?” said Claire. “Same thing on Mr. Malone’s wrists. The skin was protected during the blaze.”

“Like from a ligature?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. If it was just the ankles, I’d say maybe Mrs. Malone was wearing socks, but on her husband’s wrists, too? I’m saying these are from ligatures that burned away in the fire. And I’m calling the cause of death asphyxia from smoke inhalation,” Claire said. “Manner of death, homicide.”

I stared at the fire-ravaged body of Patty Malone.

Yesterday morning she’d kissed her husband, brushed her hair, made breakfast, maybe laughed with a friend on the telephone. That night she and her husband of thirty-two years had been tied up and left to die in the fire. For some period of time, maybe hours, the Malones had known they were going to die. It’s called psychic horror. Their killers had wanted them to feel fear before their horrible deaths.

Who had committed these brutal murders – and why?