Returning Fire

by Frans Harmon

  At the lab door, Mace pressed the visitor button. “Routine is dulling your mind, don’t let it.”

  The door buzzed, and Helyn opened it dressed in a white lab coat, her blond hair coiled under a net. She appeared mind-rigid again, focused on business. Disturbed by her cold reception, Mace shrugged it off with a thin smile. “This is Sergeant Anstice Behrenhardt, you might remember, she was first on the scene at the Ford show.”

  Helyn gave a weak smile and extended her hand. “Oh yes, sergeant, thank you for taking care of him. I hope he and his beamer weren’t too much trouble.”

  Anstice glanced at Mace. “Uh, no, not at all,” she said, shaking her head, “I had a contract wrecker drop his car off at the hospital.” They entered an antiroom. Helyn offered them a jar of Vicks VapoRub. Mace placed a dab under his nose,

  Anstice declined. “Bodies don’t bother me.”

  “These are charred cadavers, smell like burned rancid chicken. You might think differently in a moment.” Helyn said and pushed through the sealed doors into the lab. Anstice gagged as a frigid nauseatingly sweet coppery surge of air, assaulted her senses. The three burned bodies, pulled from a bank of twenty coffin-sized refrigerated file drawers, lay like lumps of volcanic rock on stainless steel tables ringed with a trough to drain the ubiquitous fluids.

  The body from the MCS fire was closest. Sharlene’s name replaced with a Jane Doe tag had her legs bent into a diamond shape, forming a dark vision of a dancer doing a deep plié. It was the pugilistic signature of a fire victim. Her hands, still tethered by restraints, were disjointed from an arm and fused into the charcoal that once was flesh. From her side, a bulge of protruding pink intestine was the only visible vestige of her humanity.

  Helyn picked up her electronic tablet. “They transported the MCS body here still attached to the back seat. She was bound but spread open like this when her bindings melted. It’s a typical signature of extreme burn victims. Their tendons contract during the fire pulling their arms and legs into this position. The good news, she wasn’t alive when he torched her. There were only trace amounts of soot in her lungs. We haven’t determined cause.”

  Mace took out his phone and snapped a photo of the body. “You’re working on that, right?”

  “Body is too badly burned. Flesh and body fat fused to blackened bones. No way to discover trauma or punctures, even a bullet would be a teardrop of lead, if we could find it. It was a high-intensity fire.”

  “What about an MRI?” Anstice asked.

  “I was getting to that, why I texted Mace. But first, let’s talk fire. We found trace, an accelerant, methanol, commonly called wood naphtha, and MEKP, it was in her epidermis. MEKP burns intensely and is very unstable. But something the Vulcan always used.”

  A grimace stretched across his face. The Vulcan bandwagon got another member. “Copycat or coincidence, that’s all. Methanol is commonly available if you have the street smarts to find it, and anyone working with plastics has access to MEKP.”

  Helyn tilted her head and gave a face reflecting Mace’s. “We arguing semantics here, Mace? Getting methanol takes effort, but MEKP is only available in a diluted form. To get a fire, this intense would require an almost explosive concentration. That you must make yourself.”

  “Could we put the ex-husband-wife-thing back in the bottle,” Anstice said, “and move on to what you found.”

  Helyn took a breath and returned to reading from her tablet. “He bound Jane Doe’s hands so tight, that the wire left pipe thread marks on her wrist… another Vulcan trademark.”

  Mace smirked. “But not with steel wire.”

  “And you deduced that because…”

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “You’re right. It was twisted-copper wire, common household extension cord.”

  Good an inconsistency, not much but something. “Toxicology?”

  “Negative,” Helyn said, and reached into her lab coat pocket, “but the MRI found this. She held up a plastic evidence bag with a tiny black square in it.

  “It’s a tracking chip,” Anstice said, reaching for the bag. “Common in the elderly death cases I’ve been chasing, dementia and Alzheimer’s is usually the reason why.”

  Anstice handed the evidence bag to Mace. He held it up to the bright overhead lights. “They have a serial number?”

  “Yes,” Helyn said, “registered with the state.”

  “And DPD. I want to track it down.”

  Helyn furrowed her brow. “I don’t know. Gavin is quite tight about protocol.”

  “Her murder, if that’s what this is, happened in Detroit, just miles from headquarters. This is supposed to be a joint effort, and so far, I have been locked out.”

  Helyn rubbed her forehead but remained silent.

  “Look,” Mace said, “she is already working elderly death cases visiting nursing homes and the like. More eyes, more legs. Can’t hurt.”

  “Fine,” Helyn said, “make sure you sign it out. Now, can we get to the other bodies? I have been working around the clock, and I would like to wrap it up and get some sleep. Shall we continue?”

  Helyn pushed Jane Doe’s body back into its refrigerated space and turned toward the table, holding the first victim, Coria Brien. Her body was in a nearly identical geometry. “Same story here, bound hands and same chemical residue.”

  Mace pulled up her DMV photo. Coria was an attractive twenty-two-year-old woman, red hair, green eyes, and a five-four height.

  “So the same story,” Mace said, no teeth, and no chance for a DNA match?”

  Helyn nodded. “You got it.”

  “How did they make the ID?” Anstice asked.

  Helyn flipped the pages on her digital notepad. “Auto registration and personal items found at the scene.”

  Mace pursed his lips. “So, how tall do you think this body was before the fire?”

  Helyn paged her notebook. “Coria was about five foot—"

  “No,” Mace said with a shake of his head. “If you didn’t have an ID and given the ravages of the fire, how tall would you say this person was before their death?”

  Helyn smirked, emitted a massive sigh, just short of a groan, and dropped her digital device on a table. “Fine.”

  From a utility table behind her, she pulled out a tape measure and proceeded to measure Coria’s femur.

  “Nah,” Mace said, waving a hand at her. “Too easy. Do the third victim. Trina Burkett. You don’t have the bias of knowing what the DMV data says.”

  Helyn rolled her eyes and went to the third gurney and measured each charred femur. Retrieving her notepad, she tapped the screen entering her data into a height calculating APP. “She is taller, five-five, or five-six.”

  Mace turned his phone, so both Helyn and Anstice could see Trina Burkett’s DMV file. “Not even close, she’s five-eleven.”

  Helyn threw up her hands and gave Mace a wide-eyed exasperated look. “It’s not an exact science, Mace, what is your point?”

  “Assumptions clouding your judgment,” Anstice said, “If Sharlene is really a Jane Doe, then maybe the other two are also.”

  “You two bookends?’

  Mace smirked, closed his phone notes APP “Maybe, not much of a link: accelerant, no teeth, and similar binding of hands, tying Coria, Trina, and Sharlene to the same UNSUB. I can buy into that. But to a serial killer from five years ago, the Vulcan, it’s a stretch.”

  Helyn returned the tape measure to the utility cabinet. “Okay, I admit it is something I should have checked, but the collateral evidence was strong, tired, oh, I don’t know. But you could be wrong also. Is it a stretch or denial, Mace?”

  “He’s right,” Anstice said, “I queried NCIC after Sergeant McIlrath brought up Vulcan at the incident. It’s not his MO.”

  “National Crime Information Center is not what I would call a deep dive into the subject, more of a Franklyn jump-to-conclusions search,” Helyn said, folding her arms in front of her, “I input most of that data, missy
. So don’t talk expert on me. Mace was in a rush to prove his case on the other three Vulcan victims, now not so much. How come?”

  Mace’s mouth soured, and he shook off a chill stabbing through him. He stared at Coria’s toe tag. Am I that blind? He moved next to Helyn, placing a hand on her shoulder, and rolled his head next to hers, whispering in her ear.

  “No, that didn’t happen,” Helyn said, pivoting facing away from both of them, a hand wiping tears from her cheeks.

  Anstice stepped between them. “What’s going on?”

  Helyn turned, her eyes riveted to his. For Mace, the room was empty except for the two of them. “Jirair Houssain is dead.” He said.

  Anstice’s face flushed. She put a hand to Mace’s chest. “Oh, my God, stop. What are we talking about here? Hypotheticals, right? Just talking, hypotheticals. If the Vulcan, Jirair, is dead, then we are dealing with a copycat. The change in MO says that?”

  The full force of his thoughts struck him, a reality he had kept buried deep in his sub-conscious for five years. He started shaking, sweat rolling off his neck. Mace’s knees buckled. He clung to the table like a drowning man to a raft.

  “My God, Mace,” Helyn said, stepping to him and grasping his arm, “are you sick again?”

  Struggling for composure, he waved her off, caught his breath, and realized he might be placing her into jeopardy, and forcing Anstice to act. “I’m bouquet—” and then snapped his head, “okay, I’m okay.” He straightened, snatched some paper towels from the utility cabinet, and wiped his neck and forehead. “Right, just hypotheticals here. So what else can we say about the bodies.”

  Anstice swallowed. “Okay, if their height makes the ID of the other two vics sketchy. Sharlene’s remains are for an elderly Jane Doe, that seems likely, so what about age?”

  “Histrormorphormetry,” Helyn said.

  Mace and Anstice gave her a blank stare. “It’s the science of bone remodeling; anthropologists use it to determine the age of fossils. Bones get injuries and defects all the time, their history of repair can give us an approximate age.”

  Mace poked at his phone. “Coria was twenty-two, Trina eighteen, and Sharlene was only thirty-eight. So, if the bodies are those of older women, is it feasible to state that with some certainty.”

  Helyn rotated her head while rubbing her neck. “The difference between sixty and twenty or thirty should jump right out. But it is going to have to wait until tomorrow, Mace, I’ve obviously got to get some sleep.”

  Mace was relieved, and his impulse was to hug Helyn, but given the company, he decided otherwise. “Great, okay, we’ll let you do that. You need help with anything?”

  “No, I’ll have the staff put the cadavers back and start on some bone samples.”

  Anstice signed out the evidence bag, and then Mace, and she proceeded to the security desk to pick up their weapons.

  “I don’t know how your cold casework is going, but it looks like our two investigations are linked. I’m taking this to my tech lab and see if we can get an ID. Want to come along?”

  Mace feeling the paper with Coria’s case file location in his pocket, shook his head. “No, I’ll check in later. There is a cold case I want to follow up on.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The chills and fever were gone, but a pang of hunger was gnawing on her insides. Sharlene was on a bare mattress bed, a thin sheet of cotton over her. She sat up, pulling the cotton sheet tight around her. Two women sat whispering, legs under them, on similar beds arranged in parallel. Facing each other, their heads pivoted toward her movement. They stopped talking and stared.

  One was slight, her hazel eyes set wide and round, her mouth, drawn tight, was small, barely stretching the width of her button nose. She was the best dressed in a pink sweater covering a white collared blouse and a tan corduroy skirt with a jagged piece torn from it. Her red hair, braided in the back of her head, seemed held in place by a tight topknot. The other woman wore a denim shirt and pants with short western boots. She was thin and tall, had short white hair that hung just below her chin, brown eyes set close to the bridge of an ordinary-looking nose, and full lips that remain parted as if caught in mid-sentence.

  “You're awake,” the redhead said, “that’s a good, sweetie, and bad for all of us.”

  Sharlene felt groggy as if she were sleeping with her eyes open, her brain struggled to comprehend. She drew the sheet tighter around her and shook her head.

  “Coria’s like that,” the white-haired woman said, “I’m Trina Burkett, she’s Coria Brien. We introduced ourselves couple days back, but I don’t suppose you really remember much. None of us did. But anyway, welcome to the living, sort of.”

  The women came over and sat on either side of Sharlene. They smiled at her as they each put an arm around her. “I’m Sharlene McCrary.”

  “Oh my God, the country-western singer,” Trina said.

  The recognition Sharlene usually found heartwarming, sent a chill through her. Was it the reason she had been taken?

  “Oh, God, what’s happened? Where am I?” Sharlene stood, her brain catching up with reality. “I’ve got to get home, Lali and Sabriel, they need me.”

  Trina stood with her and placed her hands on Sharlene’s shoulders. Sorrow, fear, and guilt surged from deep inside. Her impulse to see her glitzy car shamed her. How long had she been here? She groaned as Trina’s hands guided her back down. Cradling her head in her hands covering her face, Sharlene sobbed. The women made soft shushing sounds while trying to comfort her with a circling massage on her back.

  As suddenly as she had started, Sharlene stopped crying. She sat upright and with the back of her finger brushed the streamlets of tears away. “Tell me what happened. What do you know?”

  “You sure, sweetie. You going to be okay?”

  “Coria, singing is a tough business. You have to deal with a lot of creeps, and you don’t get anywhere by crying.”

  “You were abducted,” Trina said, “put his hand over your face when you got into his tow truck. Chloroform, I think.”

  “Is that what happened to you two?”

  Trina and Coria nodded.

  “He put his hand over my mouth, that I remember. But I wasn’t in a truck. Ford promised me an eMustang, and I thought that is where we were going. Then I woke up in the foul-smelling room. Where was that?”

  “Sweetie, we don’t know, but it happened to us. Trina was pre-med. She thinks they drained out some blood replaced it with type O, their idea of purification.”

  Trina nodded.

  “Purification, for what?”

  “Don’t know,” Trina said, “but they put you under with more chloroform when they did it. Coria was the first. We are all very lucky we survived. You had a bad infection, that is why we were laying on you to keep you warm. It was the only thing we could do.”

  “Any idea where we are at, any sounds?”

  “In some sort of a basement,” Coria said. “We’re deep, temperature is always the same. Get air from that little vent above the door.”

  “How do they feed us?”

  Trina pointed towards the steel door in the opposite wall from the beds. “Slot at the bottom of the door. Once in a while, the hairy guy, let’s me out to wash dishes and bring a meal. Luckily we have a commode on the other side of your bed.”

  Sharlene glanced over at it and immediately had an urge to use it. She suppressed the thought. “Surely, they will come looking for us, someone will.”

  “Sweetie, I’ve been here a year, no one yet,” Coria said.

  “I remember reading about Coria in Wayne State World,” Trina said, “the student paper, they think we are dead.”

  Sharlene’s face contorted with that painful thought. “Dead? How can that be?”

  They all sat silent.

  “Have they attempted, “Sharlene began, “I’m mean tried to…”

  “Rape us? No, sweetie, just the first time.”

  Sharlene looked at Coria. “Then why are th
ey keeping us?”

  “That’s what Coria and I were talking about when you woke up. We can’t figure it out.”

  Sharlene ran a hand through her hair. “Yuck!”

  “I’ll braid it for you, sweetie. Won’t make it cleaner, but it will feel better.”

  They pulled Sharlene’s bed away from the wall, and Coria began finger comb it. “The Ulama, have either of you actually seen him?”

  “Only the once,” Coria said, “probably like you did when the big hairy guy brought you here. Actually, only heard him.”

  “Sar,” Sharlene said.

  “What?” Tina asked.

  “Sar, the big hairy guy was Sar. That is what Ulama called him.”

  Coria began braiding. “Well, at least we know his name now. That’s something.”

  Sharlene raised her hand. “Just a minute, Coria, something is poking me. Is there something in this mattress?”

  She stood and stroked the mattress, but the coarse surface was smooth. “Oh, praise be Jesus.” She said and reached inside the rear of her dress, and from a hidden pocket, pulled out a phone. They all looked in amazement at the tiny device.

  “Does it work?” Tina asked.

  “It’s my daughter’s. How did he miss this?” Sharlene, eyes fixated on the phone, shook her head to shake the thought. “it’s Sabriel’s. Sometimes she is off stage, and she likes to sing with me. Mic’s don’t pick it up. I forgot all about it.”

  “And sweetie, lucky for us, they missed it.”

  “Turn it on, do you have a signal?”

  Sharlene nodded to Trina and turned on the tiny phone. It had no bars, and the battery was very low. “No signal.”

  She stood on her bed without an improvement. “Try near the door,” Trina said.

  They moved a bed over there, then stacked the mattress on top, Sharlene climbed up and then shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “Turn it off, sweetie, save the battery.”

  “We’ve got to find where we can get a signal,” Trina said.