Embers of Murder (Jill Quint, MD, Forensic Pathologist Series Book 12)

by Alec Peche

  She sent off messages to the other counties to see if they had had a recent case of lone men dying in their wildfires. Wildfire season occurred every year in California as there was no rain from May to November. During that time, anything that didn’t have a water supply dried out and became ignitable tinder. There were just under eight thousand wildfires in the prior year, and if there were deaths, they seem to be concentrated in a particular fire. So lone male victims should be easy to find. While she was waiting for a reply, she went back to a second pass at the forensic records.

  The men were clothed and had wallets with IDs and credit cards, but no cash. They also had phones on them that were returned to the families. All were single, Caucasian, and between a relatively narrow age range. All were employed and left their cars in the area. They appeared to be there for a hike. About a mile into the hike, they stopped for a drink and a smoke. They fell asleep and their lit cigarette started a wildfire.

  Jill agreed with the fire insurance inspector. This all seemed contrived and convenient. Jill couldn’t think of a single person she knew who liked to hike but was also a smoker. Then she paused and realized she didn’t have any friends who smoked, so that was a faulty conclusion. She wondered if the autopsy showed cigarette damage to the lungs or throat? She pulled out the three sets of paperwork on her victims. The narrative mentioned damage from smoke inhalation, but that was from the fire. The cigarette found near the body was identified as a famous brand. It wasn’t an herbal nicotine-free cigarette. If her hiker was a smoker, he should have nicotine in his blood and hair. She could sample the current victim here to see if he was. If his blood came back nicotine-free, then the death became suspicious. If his blood came back with nicotine, he was a smoker or had been exposed to secondhand smoke.

  Jill left the conference room to search in the specimen room for the container of the victim’s blood. She texted Jennifer before she did so in case she had concerns, but she was okay with Jill’s access. She used a cotinine test device in the lateral flow chromatographic immunoassay to test the victim’s blood. Cotinine was the break-down of nicotine in the blood. Brushfires didn’t contain nicotine, so she didn’t have to worry about a false positive. Minutes later, she had her answer. There was no cotinine in the victim’s blood, so the cigarette was either a prop left by the murderer or left by someone else. Again, she found it hard to believe, the butt would have been left by another hiker, close to where their murder victim decided to rest. Who looks around for a place to rest while hiking and purposely chooses to sit or lay down next to an old cigarette butt? This was very suspicious. The butt had been sent off for DNA analysis, but they were backlogged, and it was routine, not a high priority case, so they wouldn’t get the results back for months.

  She retrieved the records from the other victims to see if they also had butts near the body. There was no mention of butts found at either crime scene. She wondered if it was there but hadn’t been recovered. Maybe she would take a ride to the three murder scenes tomorrow. She’d take Trixie with her as her nose was good at smelling things. Of course, if the fire scene was the stuff of her nightmares, the dog might also help her out emotionally.

  If she had the dog sniff a cigarette, she would then go find it at the scene. It wouldn’t even have to be the same brand. The scenes were hundreds of miles apart, so she would visit the two oldest sites to the south first. She wrote down the coordinates of the murder scenes to know where to drive the next day. She located Jennifer just before she left for the day.

  “So, what did you think? Is the insurance investigator on to something?”

  “Perhaps. The victim in your cooler was not a smoker. I did a cotinine test on his blood. So who left the cigarette there? I know you sent it out for DNA analysis, but the results won’t be back for a few months, probably. How many hikers do you know who are also smokers?”

  Jennifer thought for a moment and then replied, “None.”

  “Exactly. Where did the cigarette come from, then? Why was the scene of death made to look like he fell asleep after smoking?”

  “Those are excellent points that we should have thought to evaluate.”

  “No, the detective or whoever was working the death should have asked you to run the test. Your job was to establish the cause of death, and you did.”

  “You’re right, but I must say that playing both the forensic person and the detective looks like fun.”

  “I’ll admit that I like getting justice for our victims. Justice is why I provide second opinions on the cause of death. It’s a step beyond just figuring out what killed someone. The who part of the equation is fun also.”

  “Okay, I’ll hold our victim’s remains another two days before releasing them to the family in case you come up with a clue from one of the other death sites that needs to be researched with our current victim.”

  “Thanks. I’ll see you in a few days. Good luck with your bus crash victims.”

  “Thanks, Jill. It’s been good to have you around. You stimulate my tired brain.”

  Chapter 4

  Jill was on her way to a small remote area northeast of Bakersfield. Trixie was asleep in the back. They had been on the road for about an hour after she stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes. She never felt such revulsion over a purchase, but she needed something for Trixie to smell. She didn’t dare pick up a cigarette butt off the ground, given the germs it might carry and the confusing scents that might be on the butt. She bought the same brand as the butt found at the scene of their third victim, although this was the site of the first victim. She followed her GPS to the coordinates of where the body was located. She came upon a fire zone and stopped her car, not sure she wanted to go forward. What if the fire reignited and she was trapped? The fire had been out for several weeks, but she couldn’t let go of the idea that something else in the desolate landscape could burn.

  She needed to get a grip on her imagination.

  She started looking for an appropriate place on the road to park. She could smell the fire. Jill had an excellent nose for detecting fire as she was so scared and paranoid about it. It was good the fire was extinguished so she could inspect the scene where the first victim was found. Some wildfires took weeks to be put out. There had been a fire in a remote area of Yosemite that raged for over three months.

  She pulled over when she saw a wide shoulder in the road. She put Trixie on her leash, and grabbed a water bowl and jug, an evidence kit, and the cigarettes. She walked around looking for a trail, then she decided that was a waste of time. The fire completely changed the landscape and there were no trails. She listened for a while but heard no sounds of a fire, and she could see no smoke, so she relaxed. There was no dead brush to walk through either, so it was a matter of pulling out her compass to find the coordinates of where the victim was found. Besides Trixie’s excellent work as a scent hound, she was glad for the large dog as visiting a fire scene was quite creepy.

  Without the leaves rustling, she could hear the trees groaning. Thankfully, there wasn’t any fog, or she would be looking for zombies to chase her out of the trees, or rather what was left of the trees. They were mostly upright blackened sticks. She would have to look up whether dogs held zombies off, or would she need to jog away, making sure the dog kept pace with her. Hopefully, the fire personnel who cleared the fire scene left no undead to rise up as zombies. Isn’t that what made a zombie? She shook her head at her weird thoughts and continued to follow the compass to her spot. It was better to worry about zombies than be paralyzed by a fire scene. She arrived on a plateau then paced off a circle of the geocoordinates as they weren’t exact. It was more like a forty-foot circle.

  She stepped outside of the circle and put the dog’s water bowl down, and filled it. After Trixie drank her fill, Jill held out a cigarette from the purchased pack and said to the dog, “Find.”

  She guided the dog around where she thought the rough circle was, and as she was coming to an end of the search, Trixie focused on a spot. Jill
put on latex gloves and knelt to gently clear the debris away with a screwdriver. The ground was covered in black debris, making it hard to see stuff. She saw the shape of a butt and used tweezers to drop it into a baggie. She spent more time in the immediate area where Trixie located the butt, but she didn’t find anything more to collect.

  Out of her back pocket, she pulled out the folded papers containing the report on the overall fire and the report of the specific personnel who found the victim. Was there anything else she needed to look at here? She wasn’t an expert on the properties of a wildfire, but the thought was the fire started in this area and then spread out from there to the full fire size of three-hundred acres. The victim would have been engulfed in smoke and flames early in the fire before it picked up speed and fuel, so his body hadn’t had much in the way of burn damage. Still, she shivered at the thought of being burned by the flames.

  Jill reread the reports one more time but couldn’t think of anything else to examine at the brushfire site and the location where victim number one was found. She and Trixie headed back to her car. It was on to location number two, an hour’s drive with a pit stop on the way for lunch and a bathroom. Jill again wanted to have Trixie sniff out the blackened land looking for any evidence.

  As she pulled up to the second location, the first thing that hit her was how similar both scenes were. They were low foothills on deserted roads. The only parking spots were wide margins on a two-lane road, and there was no traffic and no people in the vicinity. Of course, who would choose to hike in a burnt-out area? The smell was not one of fresh air. The view was one of devastation, and it was depressing, which was the exact opposite of what you were hoping to see on a hike.

  Again, Jill watched her coordinates and parked at the closest wide margin of the two-lane road. She had clean gloves, tweezers, and a screwdriver, but everything else in her pockets was the same as her visit to the first fire scene. She did a three-hundred-sixty degree review of her surroundings to ensure no smoke and no zombies. The area was clear, from what she could see.

  Like the last scene, she had to hike about a mile from where she parked to where the victim had been found. She was starting to agree with the fire insurance adjuster that there were many similarities among these victims. It really helped her to visit the scenes despite her anxieties about fire. It was hard to ignore that while these geocoordinates were about sixty miles apart, the landscape and the setup looked remarkably similar.

  This time the geocoordinates represented a small flat area. To her surprise, she could hear flowing water close by. Was it a waterfall? Before examining the scene where the victim had been found, Jill’s curiosity was killing her to find the source of the water sound. This was such a dry part of the state that she was surprised to hear the gurgling of water. She thought about letting Trixie drink from the small creek she found. She tied her up out of reach while she made sure the water was clean and not filled with ash from the fire. There was evidence of fire on both sides of the creek, so it wasn’t a wide enough barrier to stop the spread of the flames. She gathered up water in her hands, and it looked clear. The fire had been extinguished over a week ago, so the ash was probably long gone. She untied Trixie and brought her over to the creek. The dog sniffed at the water and decided not to drink. You could lead a horse to water, but you couldn’t make it drink. Oh well.

  She returned to the area where the second victim was found. She again went through the routine of having Trixie smell a cigarette and then search for it in the area. It took the dog a little longer this time to find a cigarette butt. Still, she focused on an area, and Jill got out her tools and evidence bag, finding the requisite butt under the black soot of the wildfire. She wasn’t sure that the butts would lead anywhere, but the evidence was evidence, and she would be a fool not to collect it.

  She was walking back to her car when her phone came back into contact with the cell towers. She noted she had a message from the insurance adjuster, Jack. She’d sent him an email asking questions about the fire. Then she mentioned she was visiting the two southern sites today, and he was welcome to meet her. He didn’t have time to meet her at the first location, but he was currently parked behind what he presumed was her car. After replying to his email, she picked up her pace to meet him at the car.

  She’d asked Jennifer if Jack could be their suspect if the deaths were ruled homicide and not accidental. She had gone a step farther and researched what she could of Jack’s background and was satisfied that he wasn’t their suspect since a social media post of his showed him to be a thousand miles away at the time of the first fire death.

  She crossed the street to the two cars and saw the man whose picture matched that of Jack, the insurance inspector. He was a tall man of Scandinavian descent and a few years older than her.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. Jill Quint, and this is Trixie.”

  They shook hands while he held out his other hand for the dog to sniff.

  “Hi, I’m Jack with the Forest Insurance Company. I wasn’t sure my telephone call to the state crime lab would go anywhere. I’m glad to see that someone is following up on my information.”

  “I’m not sure anyone else would have made the connection among these fire victims as they seem like one-offs in different jurisdictions. You were the only commonality among the victims, so thanks for making the call. Some things don’t add up, but I’d be the first to admit that I’m not sure anyone would’ve looked for additional evidence in these cases.”

  “What did you find that didn’t make sense?” Jack asked.

  “With the third victim, crime scene staff collected a cigarette butt. The speculation by the fire marshal was that the victim fell asleep smoking and started a brush fire. However, he appears to be a man who was hiking in the area and not someone who was living outdoors in the wildfire area. I don’t know about you, but personally, I don’t know anyone who is a smoker and a hiker. The two qualities just don’t go together. So, I ran additional tests on the third victim, and he was not a smoker. There is no evidence in his blood of the product that nicotine breaks down into.”

  “Were there cigarettes at each location where the dead men were found?”

  “A cigarette butt was found in the third wildfire scene. Trixie is a sniffing dog, and I bought the brand of cigarettes found at the third scene and had her search the other two scenes for any cigarettes, and she found one at each scene. The first cigarette was sent in for DNA analysis, but it will be months coming back. I collected the two butts that Trixie found today, but it remains to be seen if these are evidence that will help solve the case. Certainly, it does make the three scenes appear to be connected. What are the odds that a man who smokes also hikes the great outdoors? What are the odds that all three men fell asleep and caused brushfires with their cigarette which wasn’t extinguished before they fell asleep? What are the odds that all three cigarettes are the same brand? I don’t have an answer to that last question, but I will soon. I’m trying to retrieve blood samples from the first two victims to run the blood for a nicotine test. The evidence is piling up that these are not accidental deaths.”

  “Of the brushfires I’ve inspected over the years, there have been a few that were started by someone throwing a cigarette butt out a window of a moving car. There have been other brushfires started by men camping in the area and losing control of a campfire. Either they threw something on the fire that caused sparks to fly everywhere, or they were not paying attention and did not clear the brush from a perimeter around the fire. That said, none of those men died during the fire. They tried to put it out, and when that didn’t work, they ran to safety. Some of those men are in jail at the moment.”

  “How many fire scenes have you been to?” Jill asked.

  “I’ve been to twenty to thirty brushfire scenes for insurance purposes. I’ve been to a lot more houses that were accidentally set on fire by Christmas trees or electrical wiring or for some other reason.”

  Jill looked at her watch and decided she
had time to explore the scene more.

  “I’d love to use your expertise; would you mind coming back to the scene with me and tell me how the fire occurred? It helps to have a vision in my head.”

  As they walked back to the area where the fire started, Jill quizzed him about unusual fires he’d seen in his professional career. In her career of providing second opinions on the cause of death, she so far had not had any fire victims. She also had no proof of an arsonist at work in these cases either. Instead, there were too many coincidences not to think that there was a human hand behind the three murders and brushfires.

  “Where did your dog find the cigarette butt?” Jack asked.

  Jill walked over to the spot and pointed, “Here.”

  “Fire likes to move uphill and likes to be pushed by the wind. Did the fire agency report mention the direction the wind was blowing at the time the fire started?”

  Jill pulled out the report and opened it up to look. Jack, who had more experience looking at the reports, skimmed down and pointed to the weather comments. The report contained the approximate ambient temperature and humidity at the start of the fire and the wind direction. Of course, big fires could create their own weather, including bending the direction of the wind. This fire was contained at about a hundred acres, which would be considered small.

  “So your victim, in theory, was lying close to the cigarette butt, and the wind was blowing in a southeast direction. If this is a case of arson, then he would’ve started the fire about here,” Jack said, pointing to the ground. “And then the wind would’ve pushed the flames over the body.”

  “He?”

  “I’ve not investigated a case of arson where the perpetrator wasn’t a male, but I suppose it could’ve been a female. I think they are a much smaller segment of the arson population.”

  “I saw the autopsy pictures of the victim found at the site. The burns that he had were from a backpack that had nylon straps. His clothing otherwise didn’t burn that well which makes me think that has something to do with where his body was in relation to the start of the fire. Wouldn’t the fire have been at a much cooler temperature than when it picked up speed and fuel after it had been burning for a while?”