Death is in the Details
Heather Sunseri
Sun Publishing
Contents
Also by Heather Sunseri
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Enjoy the Story?
Also by Heather Sunseri
Acknowledgments
About Heather Sunseri
Exposed in Darkness - Book Description
Exposed in Darkness - Excerpt
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Also by Heather Sunseri
THE IN DARKNESS SERIES
Exposed in Darkness
Cut in Darkness
Covered in Darkness
Shot in Darkness
Desired in Darkness
* * *
SPECIAL IN DARKNESS STORY
(Sequel to Cut in Darkness)
Free to Newsletter Subscribers
Protected in Darkness
* * *
THE INTERNATIONAL THIEF SERIES
A Thief Revealed
A Thief Consumed
A Thief Obsessed
A Thief Desired
* * *
THE MINDSPEAK SERIES
Mindspeak
Mindsiege
Mindsurge
Tracked
Deceived
* * *
THE EMERGE SERIES
Emerge
Uprising
Renaissance
The Meeting (A short story)
Death is in the Details
Heather Sunseri
https://heathersunseri.com
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Copyright © 2019 Heather Sunseri
eBook Edition
Sun Publishing
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Edited by David Gatewood
Cover by Jessica Bell
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This work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
* * *
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review or article.
One
Another fire roared to life as the bodies of two parents cooled across town.
I incorporated the sound of my buzzing phone into my dream at predawn hours. I was five years old and cooking with my mom. We were mixing dough to make cutout cookies. The buzzing? An electric mixer—the kind you hold in your hand and with beaters you can lick after.
The sweet scent of vanilla permeated the air. A fire burned in the fireplace, crackling and popping as fire met sap.
The soothing buzzing stopped, replaced by a violent bang.
My eyes shot open, and I gasped. My heart beat wildly. I was not in my childhood home, and my mom was still dead, a memory that rushed back like it had just happened.
With tears running into my hairline from the flood of memories, I stared up from my bed at the golden light that danced along the curved walls and ceiling of my 1969 Airstream—a trailer renovated and situated in the middle of a twenty-acre piece of farmland I grew up on, land I inherited when my mother was brutally murdered and I nearly burned to death.
Sitting up slowly, careful not to make a sound, I took in the flickering light of five votive candles in glass jars sitting on a shelf built around my queen-size bed. Candles I had not lit. Goose bumps sprang up on my limbs, and the hairs along the back of my neck stood at full alert.
I listened carefully for whatever had made the banging sound moments before, no easy task with my heart jackhammering. Had I imagined it?
I certainly wasn’t imagining the candlelight that bathed my trailer in a warm, yellow glow and gave it the soothing scent of vanilla.
Outside my bedroom, near the kitchen, Gus, a stray cat that had wandered onto my property last year and decided to grace me with her extended presence, meowed loudly while staring at the door.
My phone began buzzing again. Still partially paralyzed, I stared at it. It was lying upside down, preventing me from seeing the caller.
A strange scratching noise came from somewhere outside the trailer, and I gripped my comforter with tight fists. I forced my heart rate to slow. Clutching my comforter was not going to keep me alive if there was an intruder here to kill me.
I rolled over and grabbed the Maglight I kept beside the bed—a formidable club of a weapon in a pinch. With the heavy flashlight in my hand, and the minor comfort of knowing that at least the intruder was no longer inside my trailer, I grabbed my phone. “Hello,” I said in a low, hushed voice.
“Faith, it’s Penelope.” She sang brightly like she’d been up for hours—and she probably had. “There’s been a fire, sweetie, and they need you there as soon as possible.” Only Penelope Champagne, Paynes Creek’s finest 911 dispatcher, who also doubled as the receptionist for the Paynes Creek PD, could make the announcement of a crime sound like an invitation to breakfast. Faith, honey, you’re invited to Bryn’s Coffeehouse for cinnamon rolls. See you in ten.
“Okay,” I said, still barely above a whisper, as I climbed out of bed. Penelope didn’t seem to notice I was speaking in a low voice. Something stopped me from telling her about my not-so-romantic candlelit trailer. “I take it there’s more to it than just a fire?” I made my way into the other part of the trailer with the flashlight held over my head, ready to strike. I could take this call and defend myself and my home.
Gus looked up at me and yawned, then turned back to face the door. She wasn’t usually this interested in people coming and going, except maybe when my brother and his wife or my aunt and uncle stopped by. But Gus wouldn’t dream of hissing or getting loud with Aunt Leah—who often brought her treats—or my sister-in-law. She did sometimes get territorial with Uncle Henry or my brother Finch. She acted more like a guard dog than an ambivalent cat.
Once I’d confirmed that there was no one in the trailer, I lowered the flashlight. I thought about having Penelope send a uniform out to check things out, but I knew it would be pointless, and everyone at the station already thought I was crazy after the last time I called and said someone had been inside my trailer. They found no sign of forced entry. Nothing was missing. All I could say was that I knew things had been moved around.
And they had been. My clothes had been rearranged. The knives in my kitchen were in a different drawer. My bed, which had been left unmade that mo
rning, was made, and pillows were arranged differently. And a bouquet of daisies with a yellow satin bow adorned the bed.
The officers at the station didn’t think I heard the things they said behind my back. They thought I didn’t know they had a betting pool going to see who could get me to go out on a date first—or worse, get me in the sack. Yes, they thought I was certifiable, but the more egocentric ones still viewed me as a puzzle to be solved—a woman with a dark past who needed to be conquered. Not to mention, as I overheard once, they considered me “entirely bangable.” And then there were the rare nice guys, but they all seemed to think they might be able to “fix” me. After all, if Chief Reid saw enough sane and good in me to hire me for my services, I must not be an entirely lost cause. But even the nice guys inevitably found me to be too much work.
All of that combined to keep me from mentioning the burning candles to Penelope. I knew someone was messing with me, but not who, and for all I knew it could even be one of the police officers. Maybe they’d discovered the significance of the white daisies.
Or maybe that was just a lucky guess.
Penelope explained the crime scene I was being called to. “Apparent murder-suicide, but it could also be arson. Chief wants you there to document the scene so they can move the bodies before more press shows up.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“You know the Reynolds girl? The teenager that Mr. Lake, the orchestra teacher, was supposedly having a relationship with? It’s her parents’ home—they’re the two victims. The daughter hasn’t been located. That poor child. They arrested Mr. Lake yesterday for sexual misconduct with a minor, but his attorneys got him out before the ink had dried on his fingerprints.”
From outside the trailer, I caught the distinct sound of a crackling wood fire. I turned and looked out the back window. A bonfire raged in my fire pit, about forty yards away.
“Faith? Did you hear me?” Penelope asked. “You ready for the address?”
The fire was large and beautiful, set by someone who knew what they were doing. Large enough to strike awe without being a danger to spread out of control, and small enough to sit beside it in the Adirondack chairs or on the thick logs surrounding the pit. And this wasn’t the first time in recent weeks that someone had started a fire there.
“Yeah,” I said. “Text me the address.”
I hung up and stared out at the fire. Once upon a time I would get lost in the flames of a fire like this. They fascinated me. The way yellow, orange, white, and blue intertwined like silky-smooth hair. But I wasn’t fascinated now. Now my eyes weren’t drawn to the golden blaze, but to the dark figure standing next to it.
I could just make out the profile of a man. At least I thought it was a man. Tall, pointed nose, baseball cap. A bulky jacket that made him look like he had a beer gut. Or maybe he was just overweight.
I could only stand there and stare, paralyzed. My heart tightened, and I didn’t breathe for several beats. Gus weaved figure eights through my legs.
Then the figure turned, and though the fire backlit him, and I couldn’t see his eyes, I knew he was looking straight at me.
A lump formed in my throat. Even if I wanted to scream, I couldn’t.
I thought about calling Penelope back. Or my brother. Anyone. Just so that someone could see that I wasn’t crazy.
Instead, I spun toward the front door. My sudden movement sent Gus sprinting to the back of the trailer. I flew down the steps and raced around the front of the Airstream. I would face this man who was stalking me, taunting me, making me question my sanity even more than usual.
But I was not to discover the stranger’s identity today. Because by the time I turned the corner and faced the fire pit, the figure had vanished. And all I was left with was a blaze reminiscent of a past impossible to forget—a miniature version of my own slice of hell.
Two
The rope wasn’t long enough to have been used for a hanging.
That was my first thought as I snapped pictures of the crime scene that morning. But as a forensic photographer, my job was to document, not investigate.
Penelope had called this an apparent murder-suicide. Apparent. That’s what news reporters liked to call it when they got unsubstantiated “tips” surrounding an investigation. In this case, it was “apparent” that a man had hanged himself, according to Chief Reid. And because the man’s wife was also dead, it was presumed that he must have killed her first.
And then the entire house had burned down.
But who or what had started the fire? Did the husband start the fire before killing himself? Or was it accidental? Had they left a candle burning? A pot on the stove?
I snapped a photo of the charred rope lying loosely against the man’s neck. Looked for more rope, but didn’t find any. This was no hanging, in my opinion.
The part of this couple’s story that was so heartbreaking involved the teenager they’d left behind: Bella Reynolds, a seventeen-year-old at the center of Paynes Creek’s latest scandal. Days away from being eighteen—not that that would make a relationship with a teacher any less inappropriate. And now, not only had she been emotionally violated, not only was she being gossiped about by just about every bored housewife and teenage kid in town, but she would have to face it all without her parents.
I knew what that was like. Rumors still surrounded the circumstances of my mom’s and her husband’s deaths—rumors and speculation about what had caused my stepbrother Ethan to snap. It was hard to believe that it was only twelve years ago that he was charged, and later convicted, of murdering both my mom and his father before burning down my childhood home with both victims inside.
So, yeah, I knew what Bella was facing.
I moved around and snapped a different angle of the rope. I placed a measuring stick alongside the rope in order to give scale.
Staring at the bodies of Bella’s parents, I vowed not to become personally vested in whatever had happened here. For me, this would be nothing more than another bad day, a convenient distraction. A way to temporarily cloud those memories I could never forget—literally. I suffered from hyperthymesia, which meant I possessed the highly unusual trait of remembering every single day of my life with near one hundred percent clarity. Just another thing about me that made me “strange.” Or, in the eyes of many, mentally ill.
I once attended a high school reunion. I joined in conversations with people I’d known most of my life. But when I shared crystal clear memories of trivial conversations with classmates, or recalled precisely what they were wearing on days in the distant past, I got strange looks. People don’t like to be reminded of everything that ever happened. Especially the bad or embarrassing stuff. The past is supposed to fade—or better yet, be misremembered.
For that reason, I’d always tried to keep it a secret that I had hyperthymesia. A few people knew, but not many. Better to just let the rest go on thinking I was weird.
Some people don’t mind weird.
Bundled in a thick down coat and covered in protective gear to keep my DNA out of the crime scene, I looked around. It was just after sunrise, and the autumn air had turned colder overnight, made worse by thick clouds that promised to keep the sun from breaking through. The stench of smoke from the burning of wood, plastic, and human flesh drifted up from the soot and ashes and penetrated my face mask. There wasn’t much left of the house. Or of its furnishings. Just blackened debris that someone would try to sort through later for any kind of salvageable photos and other valuables. Between the fire, smoke, and water damage from the firemen, there wouldn’t be much to salvage.
There wasn’t much to salvage from the two bodies, either. The larger one, assumed to be the husband, was propped against what was left of a wall. The other, presumably the wife, lay three feet away, next to a metal chair, her face burned beyond recognition.
“That poor child,” Penelope had said in a rich Kentucky accent when she called me back as I drove toward the crime scene. “To be the center of so
much gossip, and now this. Losing both of her parents.” I imagined Penelope shaking her head and closing her eyes in prayer as she spoke to me. She was that type of woman—the praying type. I was glad she seemed to be on my side. I liked having that positive energy near me, even if I was incapable of returning it.
But it wasn’t the seventeen-year-old girl I was thinking of now. My mind kept going to that awful night twelve years ago. I remembered that night like it was yesterday. It might as well have been yesterday with my screwed-up hyperthymesiac mind.
Too similar, I thought. The deaths. The fire. The positions of the bodies.
Chief Sam Reid sidled up beside me. His hair was thick and gray, and like me, he wore protective clothing to preserve the scene as much as possible. “The daughter hasn’t been located yet,” he said. Then, without giving me time to respond, he asked, “Does this look like a murder-suicide to you?”
I pushed my hair behind my ears and knelt down next to the wife’s body while I pondered the chief’s question. I snapped close-ups, then walked around to get different angles of the husband, the metal chair, and the rope again.
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