by Alec Peche
“Trixie, find.” Jill commanded the dog to search for the cigarette butt that she thought might connect this case to the others. The dog moved back and forth across the area for a long time. It seemed like she wasn’t going to find a butt, but after some fifteen minutes, she finally focused on a spot, and Jill approached to see if the dog had found anything. Using her tool and with Detective Mullin leaning over the area, Jill began gently moving the fire debris to see if the dog had found anything.
“There,” said Detective Mullin, pointing to what looked like a butt.
Jill brought out her tweezers and grabbed the item in question, putting it into a specimen bag.
“What do you want to do with this? The Sacramento Coroner’s Office sent the last three butts out to a private DNA lab and got results in about three days. Either you or I could drop off this specimen there. If you have an alternate lab to process it, then we’ll have to get the other butts and have your lab process all four of them.”
“I prefer to send it to the same lab as the other three butts. I know this case is not the Sacramento coroner’s case as it is a Butte County victim. If there’s a problem with the cost of the test, my agency will cover it. I’ll drop this specimen off with Dr. Galloway.”
Jill nodded and then pulled out a piece of clothing from their fourth victim and repeated the same routine she went through with Trixie to find the cigarette butt. She wanted the dog to sense the victim’s scent in case he had touched anything else in this fire zone. Close by to where they were kneeling, the dog found additional evidence. It was a piece of latex balloon.
“I’m surprised this didn’t melt in the fire.”
“It might have. Does it have the same elasticity as your average balloon?” asked the detective.
Jill dug around a little more and then said, “Maybe something in the wildfire area protected it. Since this is where the fire started, it might not have been as hot as the fire is now since it’s been under way for several days. This is a really important piece of evidence as we believe that our killer is disabling these men with perhaps helium or nitrogen gas.”
“How does that work? How do helium and nitrogen kill people? Is it quick?”
“You may die in less than a minute breathing these gases. Pure helium or nitrogen will displace the oxygen in your lungs. You will die of hypoxemia, or low oxygen in the blood. You will be unconscious after about thirty seconds. Then your major organs will shut down as they detect the lack of oxygen. It’s a fairly popular way to commit suicide as it’s painless and usually not reversible. You can buy helium at a party supply store, but it’s diluted with air. You can buy pure helium and nitrogen from industrial suppliers as it is used in welding.”
“What do you want to test this balloon for?” asked the detective.
“There may be DNA on it, and we should be able to detect from the residual what kind of gas was in the balloon before it burst.”
“What would that tell us?”
“It would give us a cause and mode of death if we knew these guys were inhaling helium. With that, you would have the murder weapon. It won’t help in identifying our arsonist, but you would have confirmation of homicide, not a suicide or accidental death, with these cases.”
“Why couldn’t this be an accidental death?” asked the detective, though the way he asked it suggested he knew the answer to his own question.
“Where’s the source of the helium? If you knock yourself unconscious with helium or nitrogen gas, where did it come from? Someone else had to be here watching you inhale the gas so they could take the canister away once you were dead. Is that the scenario you saw in your imagination?” Jill asked.
“Are all four deaths from inhaling a gas?”
“No. She killed the first man by putting barbiturates in a mojito drink.”
“We’ve got a smart woman on her hands. She’s doing an excellent job of hiding her identity and hiding the fact that these are murders and not accidents.”
“I think we’re done collecting evidence here. Trixie hasn’t alerted us that there’s any additional evidence. Now we need to find out what the attraction is with this trail. So I’m going to put her mask back on. And we’ll walk up that hill and see what’s at the top. Can you check for anything else that might be interesting in this area? Identifying whatever is special about this trail is the last piece of forensic evidence that we will find at the scene.”
The detective nodded, and they parted ways to explore the area around where their victim was murdered. Jill found a small pond and decided that the feature was likely what made this hiking trail special. That is, unless the detective found something more interesting.
After exploring the area, they joined together to walk back to the car. The detective hadn’t found anything unusual in his walk around the murder scene, so they agreed that the pond must be the attraction. When Jill got home, she planned to research this hiking trail to see what people said about the trail and how crowded it might be. She bet that someone somewhere wrote that they never saw another human on the hiking trail, and that would be the attraction to their arsonist. They passed through the law enforcement checkpoint and returned to where Jill’s car was parked at the convenience store. They tossed ideas back and forth about how they would identify and capture this arsonist. Still, the reality was they had so little information about her identity that, at this point, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Before the detective drove away, Jill noticed she had an email from Marie that had been holding out in cyberspace, waiting for Jill’s phone to reconnect to the Internet. She read the message from Marie and then told Detective Mullin, “My friend, the social media maven, did not find a single woman in common with the profiles for all four victims.”
The detective nodded, seemingly not surprised that Jill’s friend Marie came up with nothing. He had low expectations of them from the start, just like she remembered in a previous case with domestic terrorists. She and her friends hadn’t been to any law enforcement academy. What did they know about finding criminals?
“I think you should get a search warrant for that dating app company looking for any women that were deleted from the profiles of the victims on the day they were murdered.”
“Do you?” asked the detective with a sarcastic tone.
He had seemed cooperative and professionally respectful earlier in their examination of the crime scene. Maybe he had just been buying his time until he squeezed all the information out of her and the dog. Jill sighed and thought about describing her marvelous feats in crime-solving despite her lack of being a detective, but she knew her breath would be wasted. Past experience has rarely resulted in a change in attitude. She just walked away from the detective and got in her car to head home.
“Well, Trixie girl, he may have liked dogs, but he was still a knucklehead,” Jill said to the dog as she pulled out of the convenience store parking lot for the long drive home. Jill looked in the rear-view mirror and noted the dog’s response was to fall asleep to her comment.
Chapter 10
Jill was driving home, thinking about the case and what more she could do to help the investigation along. The more she thought about it, the more she felt that these murders were typical of a female killer. All of the men had had a gentle death. That is, if you could call death fifty years before your time gentle. If the test results came back that the men inhaled helium or nitrogen, then they went to their death through unconsciousness rather than feeling the pain of a stab or a bullet tearing through their body.
She was focused on the dating site as the source for where the woman found multiple victims in different geographical locations. These men offered such disparate profiles. They didn’t meet at work or school or church, or a community group. Instead, they met in the online community.
She wondered how many women were on the site, and she planned to create an account when she got home to examine the people on this dating website. She also wanted to search the region o
f Shasta County and see how big the pool of men was. She had about twelve days before the next death to prevent the next man from becoming the arsonist’s latest victim. She wanted to also come up with a name for the woman as she was tired of calling her the arsonist. Maybe she would call her the Burnt Widow. She’d ask Nathan’s marketing brain to give her a catchy name.
She gave Trixie a bath outside once they reached home as they both had remnants of the fire zone on them. Jill felt smoky even though she’d kept her mask on the entire time they were in the fire zone. The smoke was in her hair and on her clothing. Once she was done washing the dog, she took a look around to make sure no one was nearby, then she did a quick strip and left her clothes on the porch, running upstairs to hop into the shower. She thought about going for a run, but after six hours in the car and the need to take a shower after arriving home, she passed on the run. Maybe she would check with Nathan and see if he would be up to a little martial arts practice. She practiced Tai Chi, and he was a master black belt in Hapkido. His house contained a nice dojo that would be perfect for practice. She’d like to kick a bag to work out her frustration with yet another law enforcement officer who believed she didn’t belong in an investigation.
She spent some time on the dating app reading the profiles of the men. She didn’t know the four victims, but she wouldn’t want to get to know them by their profiles. They had typos in their profiles, weren’t interested in physical activity, and said their ideal date was meeting in a bar. The kindest thing she could say about the victims was they were non-smokers. She wondered how the Burnt Widow had talked these men into hiking. She questioned if hiking was their first date or a subsequent date. What motivation did she provide to get the men to hike? Perhaps it was the oldest motivation in the book—outdoor sex. She planned to show the profiles to Nathan and get a man’s opinion on motivation and male attitude.
A short time later, Jill and Trixie entered Nathan’s house to find him cooking in the kitchen. Arthur, Nathan’s cat, gave Trixie his usual I hate dogs stare, which had the Dalmatian looking away in intimidation. Jill smiled as she came around the kitchen counter to kiss Nathan.
“Some things never change. You’re a wonderful cook and a great kisser, and my dog is afraid of your cat after a single glare.”
Nathan chuckled, “Arthur has mastered that glare, and yet he only uses it on Trixie.”
“Oh well, she worked hard today sniffing out evidence in a very smoky site. Since she was strong there, I won’t worry about her being strong elsewhere in her life. I need you to look at a dating site, and I wondered if we could use your dojo after dinner. I feel the urge to kick.”
“Okay, that was a paragraph of random thoughts that I didn’t follow. I understand you want to kick in my dojo. Yes, we can do that. Did you say you need me to look at a dating site? Why would I ever do that?”
“I do tend to blurt out stuff, don’t I? My four victims used the dating site, Matefinder, and I want you to look at the victims’ profiles. I found the men undatable, but that’s an opinion of one.”
“Okay. I’ll be curious to see what your taste in men is not, according to the profiles of these four men. Seems like I better not make those mistakes,” Nathan said with a chuckle.
“Error number one: don’t have typos in your profile. I’m talking about typos that look like you clearly don’t know how to spell, not fingers slipping on the keyboard.”
“In my business life, I can’t afford to have typos. Nothing gets you fired faster.”
“I never thought about that before, but how do you make sure all of your materials are typo-free?”
“It’s a combo of my assistant, Artificial Intelligence programs, and myself. Both my assistant and I attended a course that teaches you copyediting, and it gave us a few tools to use.”
“That makes sense. Second, don’t make our first date at a noisy bar. Not a bar and restaurant establishment, but a grungy bar.”
“Got that, and I would likewise be put off seeing both of these profile problems in a female as well.”
“Have you ever used an online dating platform?” Jill asked, curious about his dating life.
“Perhaps a decade ago, but there are so many women within a certain range that you’re looking for—no typos, common interests, and age—that it’s depressing to narrow them down. My first date was always in a coffee house of some sort. That way, there was enough activity to keep some kind of flow going, and the women and I would feel safe. I also like to observe someone’s manners as those are important too.”
“What made you give it up?”
“Too many bad first dates.”
“Ditto. It’s obviously a system that works, but I lack the patience for it.”
“I can imagine,” Nathan said, grinning at Jill. He knew from her urgency to solve cases that she could have an extreme streak of impatience, but then he thought of something.
“Wait, you’ve been very patient, taking years to get your tasting room built and operational. You have patience when you need to.”
“I’m much more patient when it comes to the business of growing grapes. You have to be. You spend years growing vines to get your first vintage, then months every year growing subsequent vintages. If you’re not careful, you could lose it all to some pest. I would also say I can be extremely patient when it comes to mixing grapes to get the perfect barrel of wine.”
“True. What’s third on your list of undesirable qualities?”
“Someone who doesn’t enjoy physical activity and the outdoors. I can’t imagine spending time around someone who doesn’t want to explore nature’s bounty.”
“I agree with you as well. Seems like we would have been a match. What specifically do you want to look at with these guys’ profiles? If you’ve already established that they’re not datable material,” Nathan asked.
“I want to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything good about these guys.”
“How does that relate to your case? I can’t always follow that detective mind of yours.”
“So, here’s my premise: We have a female arsonist who uses this dating site to murder random men who have Matefinder profiles that are awful, in my opinion. None of the men indicated they had an interest in hiking. So how did she get them to agree to meet her? They did agree to meet her for a hike as their vehicles are always found afterward. Was the hike the first or second or third date?”
“Ah. I would guess it’s at least the second or third date. No dude with no interest in hiking is going to make that the first date. What woman would be willing to go off on a deserted hiking trail with a man she’s never met? Nothing says I don’t care for my personal safety than that, and from what you’ve said about this arsonist, she cares for her personal safety. Otherwise, she probably would have lit herself on fire by now.”
“See, that’s what I like about the way you think,” Jill said with a smile. “Should I set the table for dinner? Afterwards, we can look at my profiles. By then, our food will have settled, and I can kick a certain detective’s face to my heart’s desire later in your dojo.”
“Yes, set the table; dinner is almost ready. Maybe we can find some other, more cheerful topic to discuss. Read any good books recently?”
Jill laughed and said, “How about if we talk sports. Isn’t that a relaxing topic?
“You’re too singularly focused on football. I dare you to hold a conversation on baseball.”
“You’ve got me there. I know nothing about the SF Giants or the Oakland A’s. How about we compromise with basketball? I can somewhat hold a conversation there.”
Nathan laughed as he began to plate their dinner while Jill poured the wine he’d had breathing.
In the end, they talked about the two classes Nathan was teaching at the University. He had his first class in the past day and had loved it.
“The students were more engaged than I expected. It seems everyone wants to graduate and become my competitor. They see it as a skill they can offer a
winery looking for a manager. I asked them what they planned to do with the lessons from this class, and those were the two main answers.”
“That’s a strong motivation if they can see the point in taking a class. I remember a basic biology class that I hated in college. There is something called the Krebs cycle, which is the key metabolic pathway that connects carbohydrate, fat, and protein metabolism. There’s a bunch of oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon molecules and some enzymes that change over nine steps. We had to memorize those nine steps for a test, getting all the molecules correct. I hated that. The Krebs cycle was discovered in the 1930s and had been in textbooks forever. Why couldn’t we just understand what it was and look it up in a textbook when we needed the actual cycle steps? I never saw any motivation to memorize that. In fact, I did poorly on the exam as I was stubbornly mad that the professor wanted it memorized.”
“You actually did poorly on an exam?” Nathan asked, knowing that medical school was academically rigorous.
“Yep. After the poor grade and the realization that I was potentially hurting my entire future career, I put up and shut up. So as a past student, I would have so appreciated the practical knowledge you’re teaching rather than requiring your students to memorize the wine varietal table to do marketing.”
“Who says I’m not going to do that?”
“You’re far too kind a man to be that mean.”
“Is that another thing you look for in a dating profile?”
“Yes, speaking of which, let’s go review the profiles,” Jill said.
Jill logged into her account so she could show Nathan the four victim profiles. She leaned back quietly, sipping her wine, while Nathan reviewed each of the profiles.
“Sometimes, I’m astounded by the lack of substance in my fellow man or woman. Do none of these men understand that the summation of their profiles would lead one to think they have nothing to offer a woman? They are all vampires willing to suck the life out of any woman they date.”
