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

by Alec Peche

  Just as she started to walk toward the door of the ME’s office, Agent Sanderson pulled into the parking lot. Jill noted he had someone else beside him in the car. Great, Jill thought. The more, the merrier. She waited for him to join her on the curb outside the office.

  “Good morning Agent Sanderson.”

  “Hello, Jill Quint. This is another agent from my office, Agent Emily Nome. We’ve been assigned additional resources and have some new information. Do you know if there is a conference room we could use inside the building?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is a conference room—the ME assigned it to me as a temporary office, so step into my office.”

  “Great.”

  They went through the process of signing in, and then the two agents followed Jill into the conference room assigned by Jennifer. On the way to the conference room, they met Dr. Galloway who asked Jill and the two agents, “Any news?”

  “Actually, there is. Would you like to step inside and join our conversation?” Jill asked.

  Dr. Galloway looked at her watch and said, “I’ll have to stop by later. I’m due for an autopsy in five minutes, and with what is written on your faces, you have more than five minutes of information for me. I’ll circle back when I’m done with my latest gang victim.”

  “Crips and the Bloods still going at it, huh?” Jill said.

  “Yes. Will they never learn?”

  With that final comment, she left Jill and the two agents to organize themselves. Jill had returned to the office to make calls representing the ME’s office to search for a videotape that might identify her suspect. First, she wanted to hear what the agents had to say.

  “We did a national search of brushfire arsons, trying to get a lead on the suspect. However, there are so many arson-related fires in California alone that I couldn’t narrow the search. There is no pattern of lone men dying outside of these four known cases. Of course, that means that a lone male dying in a wildfire might be misclassified as accidental death, but short of investigating all of the fire reports, and there are thousands, we haven’t found an obvious track record of the arsonist’s work before these four cases. There’s the other issue too that a past pattern might have been with house fires or some other fire scene.”

  “I likewise did a search of Washington and Oregon and reached out to all of the California counties, and I haven’t come upon reports that fit this arsonist’s M.O.,” Jill agreed.

  “We spoke with our behavior analysis unit to see if there was anything to gain from their input. They said our arsonist is highly intelligent. We knew that she did catch a break by failing to fall under the radar of law enforcement by successfully staging the brushfires to look like accidental deaths or suicides. They also said she was in her thirties and probably Caucasian.”

  “So far, none of that is new information. I have a vineyard owner friend who is also a behaviorist. She worked at the LAPD as a behavioral analyst before retiring, and she said the same thing. One thing that no one seems to know is what role our fake Detective Mullin is playing. Did you ask your experts that question?”

  “I did. They believe he has a connection to law enforcement. They also said they don’t think he has harmful intentions directed at us. They couldn’t think of another case containing the odd aspect of our fake Detective Mullin.”

  “So, what are you working on now?” Jill asked.

  “We need to get the DNA report from the outside lab and see if we can match to anyone nationwide. Maybe if we can’t find the identity of her directly, we can at least identify a relative of the arsonist’s and go from there. We’ll also help with the vehicle search.”

  “Great! I came to the office because calling from my home phone got me nothing. I wasted the time of the receptionist here by having my calls routed through this building. That was painful, so that’s why I traveled here today—just for their telephone identification line. I figure the FBI has even more clout, so calling businesses for their videotapes should be even easier. Also, if she’s running according to the pattern, we should discover a new victim any day now in Shasta County.”

  “Sadly, that’s true. Let’s start making calls. I would say we should move over to the FBI’s offices, but we would just waste an hour of your time driving east to Roseville. Our cell phones issued by the bureau say ‘FBI,’ so that should get us somewhere. I’ll have them send us a video to my email address. Then I’ll have to fight falling asleep as I watch relentlessly boring videos,” said Agent Sanderson.

  “Actually, you won’t have to watch boring videos. You’ve seen my facial identity software in use when we identified our fake Detective Mullin. I can also have it search for objects like vehicles. It took twelve hours of video and found the cars I was looking for in under three minutes.”

  “Jill Quint, you and your technology are something special. We probably have similar technology in use in the FBI, but I bet it takes all sorts of paperwork to use it.”

  Using Google Earth, they each took one of the other three murder sites. They developed a grid map with the business names of anyone lining the access roads to and from the brushfires. Calling each of the businesses and then waiting to be connected to whoever could give them access and had the technical knowledge to email a piece of security camera footage from a particular date took the remainder of the day.

  It confirmed what Jill suspected: their suspect drove a white Ford truck. When some of the security cameras were clear enough to read the license plate, they determined that the suspect’s vehicle had different license plates. The white truck appeared on each crime scene’s video footage of the roads although it sported different plates on the vehicle each time. Oddly enough, each set of plates belonged to a different white truck, none of which was reported missing. Their suspect must be borrowing the plates for each murder scene and then returning them before the owner noticed. It was further proof that the Burnt Widow was highly intelligent. Also, any footage of the driver revealed various hats and hair, all disguising the face. The hands holding the steering wheel appeared small and light-skinned, which didn’t help narrow the pool of suspects. It wasn’t proof that the white truck belonged to their suspect, but the recurring appearance of the truck was highly suspect, and it was a crime to switch license plates.

  Just as they were getting towards the end of the day, Jill received an email from Marie. She had completed additional research on John Mullin and his many identities and found nothing. The identities exist, but there are no details. Her final comment was, Perhaps he’s a spy or in some secret government organization because darn if I can find anything about him other than his face connected to the name.

  Chapter 18

  Special Agent Jeff Lawrence had just ended his call to his superiors at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. He’d spent twenty years doing investigations of rogue Naval personnel. As such, he carried multiple identities given the number of times he’d had to go undercover, including his most recent identity of CBI Detective John Mullin. For over five years, he’d been on the trail of a rogue explosive ordnance disposal specialist by the name of Amanda Moore. The military had trained her as a part of Naval Special Warfare command. She was first in her class at handling explosives. It was only after she was out in the field that the military discovered that her expertise with explosives perfectly suited her arsonist personality.

  There began to be reports of excessive “practice,” as she called it. She would spend triple the time of anyone else with her title out on the bunkers blowing stuff up. She started a few wildfires in the process with the creativity of the explosives she enjoyed using. She was an expensive trainee as she used so much firepower. However, her superiors were pleased as she improved some approaches with explosives.

  Concerns began to surface about a year later after she had been assigned to a unit. She had a preference for leveling any building they entered, rather than using just enough targeted munitions to smoke out insurgents, which killed all the occupants inside That
was rarely the goal of the Navy’s use of explosives. Things went from bad to worse when she discovered a flame thrower in the Navy’s weapons depot. She began lighting little wildfires all over the base. Access to the flame thrower was removed from her clearance level, but the damage was done. In the explosives workshop, she made a flame thrower with materials in the workshop and was soon out setting fires. The military began to fear sending her out on assignment. Fires, big and little, occurred when Amanda’s unit was in the area. She was never seen starting a fire, but it became hard to ignore the coincidence. The breaking point was when one of her fellow soldiers was burned by her suspected actions. The unit spread out on a mission, and Amanda was with the frontline crew assisting with opening doorways for incursions. Once she opened the last doorway, she made to light some fires just to be mean-spirited, and that was when the soldier was burned. During the investigation into what caused the accident, evidence revealed that Amanda was likely starting fires when behind enemy lines, so an investigator secretly shadowed her during the unit’s next assignment. There he collected video evidence of her starting fires.

  She was arrested, and during the military justice process, a psychiatrist evaluated her and determined she had a psychosis related to fire. He also said she was highly intelligent. In one interview, she spoke with delight about her control over fire, the power of heat, and the sound of flames accelerating through a brushfire. She was tried and convicted in a military court and ordered to serve time. She was a model prisoner and was discharged from the prison and the military. While in the brig near San Diego, she took classes for a post-discharge career. Amanda was granted a mandatory supervised release, but she disappeared and never appeared again for any hearing or follow-up. The military lost track of her and spent about a year trying to find her before her case was relegated to a cold case pile. She was forgotten about until very recently.

  A series of fires aboard floating Naval museums on both coasts indicateds they were the work of the same arsonist. A shortlist of known civilian and military arsonists suggested Amanda Moore. A fingerprint aboard one of those ships damaged by fire matched Amanda, yet there was no record of her serving on the ship. It was decommissioned before she was born. Of course, she could have visited the ship as a tourist, but the military had been unable to find her to ask that question.

  That was when Jeff Lawrence was assigned the task of finding Amanda and bringing her in for questioning. She would also likely serve additional time in the Brig for violating her parole. That assignment had been five years ago and one of several cases he carried at any given time. It was the most frustrating case he had ever been assigned. Jeff had no idea where she lived or even what name she functioned under. Amanda Moore was an embarrassment to the military three times over. First that they hadn’t screened her out as an arsonist before assigning her to work with explosives, second when they hadn’t noticed her love affair with fire before she injured one of her fellow servicemen, and third when they trusted her to show up for parole and follow-up. All of those mistakes were made by other people before Jeff got involved.

  As a Special Agent, he’d never failed to solve a case before Amanda. He was a civilian member of the Navy, and he’d underestimated her level of intelligence. He shouldn’t have as he’d read her psychological profile multiple times, but his confidence in his investigative skills had caused him to underestimate her. On top of her intelligence, the military considered the search for Amanda to be highly confidential. He couldn’t reveal his true identity to police or civilians in the search for Ms. Moore. As the years went by, and Jeff was unable to find her location, he vacillated between hate and admiration for her ability to remain undetected. While his superiors were pleased with his investigative skills and how he closed cases, they had been about to move the cold case to a different investigator. That would have been a demerit on his record.

  Jeff set up several Google searches to look for evidence of Amanda’s work. Every California fire season, he got alerts about fires that might fit her profile. He would run the details down, and there would always be some factor that didn’t fit her profile. This year, the thrill of the hunt was on. His Google search led him to a series of fires that fit Amanda. He stole the cigarette butt from the one crime scene and had it matched to her DNA that the military had on file. The military collected DNA from all service members for identification of remains.

  Now he was tasked with finding her before the police and FBI. They wanted her back inside the brig to await a trial that would put her away for a long time, and they wanted it done quietly. The military had never informed the serviceman’s family that he had been badly injured by a fellow soldier. It would be ugly if that came out a decade later during a civilian criminal trial. The Navy assigned the Director to watch Jeff’s efforts to capture Amanda. He wanted her arrested quickly and quietly. He was willing to provide Jeff with any number of military police, if needed, to take her into custody.

  That would be all fine and dandy if he knew where she was, but he didn’t. The Director was also aware that she had likely killed four civilians so far. That gave the civilians more rights to prosecute her. Instead, he wanted her quietly arrested and tried inside the military. She had applied to the military when she turned eighteen and left the foster care system, so the Director knew they could secure her away from humanity without a family coming to her rescue. This way, the military could hide its poor handling of her case and her personality.

  Dr. Jill Quint was both an asset and a liability on the case. She was the one to think about bringing her dog to the crime scene, which had given him the evidence he needed to confirm Amanda’s identity. She was also the investigator that figured out the connection to the dating app. However, the downside of all that intelligence was that she also figured out he wasn’t who he said he was. She managed to find his other identities and found that he wasn’t a detective with the California Bureau of Investigation. Jill knew he had some connection to the case and knew he wouldn’t harm her. He’d been lucky at the one crime scene where she was accompanied by the FBI agents. They could have decided to try and detain him, but they hadn’t. So where did he go next?

  When Amanda was discharged from the military, she received no pension. How was she earning a living? How was she moving around the state to facilitate the various crime scenes? He thought Jill was on the right track with the idea that the hiking date wasn’t the first date. She was killing confirmed couch potatoes, and it went against their grain to hike.

  She had to stay in the area where she planned to start a wildfire for at least a few days in order to schedule, at a minimum, two dates. She would want to scope out where she wanted to meet her victim and where she wanted his death to occur. She needed to assure herself that no one would come upon her as she was torching an area, so she probably stopped by several times to verify that her target hiking trail was rarely used. He could stop by some of the businesses that lined the road on the way to the kill sites and see if they had video coverage, or he could check out some bars in the towns from which she picked her victims. Maybe if he showed the picture of the victim to a bartender, he might remember the guy and, by extension, Amanda Moore.

  Yes, he liked that plan. He’d try the bars first and then the traffic cameras second.

  Chapter 19

  Jill was home catching up on the practicalities of life like laundry and paying the bills. She also planned to spend some time reviewing the blueprints for her tasting room. She had set today’s date as her final plan approval date. She didn’t know why she was so indecisive about the blueprints as she had certainly incorporated every possible thing she liked in tasting rooms she had visited around the world. Jill guessed the problem was she had so many ideas in the tasting room that it no longer felt like hers, which was her own fault.

  A half-hour later, having sent her architect her approval of the plans, she leaned back to enjoy the simple pleasure of being on the path to building a tasting room. It was a business success mi
lestone in the winery business. Just when she was at a full-body stretch, her cell phone rang, and she gave a groan that her few seconds of pleasure with the future building were being interrupted.

  She picked up the phone, and it said Shasta County Sheriff. This might be the call she was expecting with news of a new fire victim.

  “This is Dr. Jill Quint.”

  “Hi Dr. Quint, this is Vickie Stockdale from the Shasta County Coroner’s Office in Redding. I saw the alert you issued for any single male deaths in wildfires, and we just got one in our county.”

  “Are you doing the autopsy tonight?”

  “No, the pathologist is off in the evening. It will be handled tomorrow morning.”

  “I’d like to be there, but I live south of Sacramento. Would it be possible to delay the autopsy until, say, ten or eleven in the morning?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the phone. Clearly, the caller hadn’t expected that.

  “Let me check with our pathologist, and I’ll call you back.”

  “I know that Shasta County is not in my jurisdiction, but we have had four other deaths across the state matching what you’ve described. I would also like to bring my dog, who is a trained sniffer dog, to search for similar forensic evidence that we have found at other crime scenes. Is there a place I can leave her indoors while I attend the autopsy?”

  “I’ll have to check on that, too.”

  The call ended, and Jill immediately tried to calculate the time it would take to drive to Redding. It looked to be four hours. She would have to be on the road at six or seven. She would pack a bag for both herself and Trixie in case they got stuck overnight, but she hoped to be back in her own bed. A while later, Vickie called back.