Fatal Burn

by Lisa Jackson

  “He’s not here,” Travis said gently, but then, she felt his fingers grip her hand more tightly. She saw him lift his head, turning his face toward an arch leading to a dark hallway.

  “What?”

  “Shhh!” he said, tensing, starting toward the arch. “Do you smell that?”

  “What?” She sniffed the air, picked up a thin hint of smoke.

  “The candles…”

  He shook his head, released her hand, and motioned her to stay behind him as he crept toward the dark opening. This is nuts, she thought. We’re in a church. And we’re acting as if we’re in some teenage horror flick.

  Yet she didn’t say another word. As she crept behind Travis into the darkened hallway, her heart was knocking loudly, blood pounding in her ears. The odor of smoke, which she’d attributed to the votive candles or a residue from old incense, became more intense.

  Fire?

  Goose pimples raised along her spine.

  Oh, please, God, no. Not here! Not again!

  Travis stepped around a corner to a short hallway and a door that was ajar. Through the crack in the doorway she saw shadows, golden and shifting, moving against the wall and stairs leading downward to the basement.

  “No!” she cried as the smell hit her fully and she heard the first crackle of hungry flames. “Oliver!”

  Travis tossed her his cell phone. “Call 9-1-1! Now!” He threw open the door and hurried down the stairs.

  Shannon was right on his heels, already punching in the numbers, nearly stumbling on the steep wooden steps. Smoke rose up the staircase, the smell of burning kerosene was thick. Fear pulsed through her. Oliver! Where was Oliver? Here? “No,” she said, over and over, “Please, no!” Images of Mary Beth’s burned body being carried out of her house, being stuffed into a body bag, seared through Shannon’s brain.

  Travis landed at the bottom of the stairs, his boots ringing on the concrete. “Jesus!” he whispered, almost as a prayer, then turned away. “Go upstairs! Now!” She was on the bottom step, staring ahead. “Shannon, no!”

  He tried to shield her with his body, but it was too late. She looked over his shoulder and nearly collapsed as she spied her brother, ringed by small flames, hanging by the neck, swinging gently from a rafter. His body turned, the rope holding him creaking. A folding chair beneath him had been knocked over, as if he’d committed this heinous act himself, and surrounding him, in a wide circle, was a fire of debris, burning low and dying.

  “No!” Shannon cried. “No!”

  “Call 9-1-1!” Travis ordered again.

  In one swift motion, he yanked his shirt over his head. Beating at the flames, he jumped across the line of the smoldering fire. Righting the chair beneath Oliver’s body, he climbed upon it.

  Frantically, Shannon hit the dial button.

  “Nine-one-one, Police Dispatch,” a woman’s calm voice said. “What’s the nature of your emergency?”

  “There’s a fire and a…a man who needs help, possible attempted suicide. He’s hanging but we’re getting him down.”

  “A hanging and a fire?”

  “Yes! Send help! To the church at the corner of Fifth and Arroyo! St. Benedictine’s!” she said, then repeated, “There’s a fire and a man seriously injured! In the basement of St. Benedictine’s Church.” Shannon was hyperventilating, taking in smoke, watching Travis saw at the thick rope with his knife.

  “Ma’am, that’s Fifth and Arroyo?”

  “Yes! Send someone now!”

  “Stay on the line, I’m dispatching now. What’s your name?”

  “Shannon Flannery!” she said, with the sense of déjà vu chasing down her spine. It hadn’t been that long since she’d made the last call, when she’d been attacked in her horse barn. “The man who’s injured is Oliver Flannery! Send an ambulance! Hurry!”

  “Vehicles are on their way,” she was assured as Travis’s knife finally sliced through the rope. Oliver fell into a crumpled heap on the dirty cement, the fire burning bright and deadly around him.

  “Ma’am, could you stay on the line?”

  Travis was on the floor beside him in an instant.

  Shannon dropped the phone. Shaking, coughing, disbelieving she stepped forward. “Oliver,” she cried.

  “Don’t! Stay back! Or find a fire extinguisher!” Travis held up a hand and leaned down, listening for the sound of breath, feeling for a pulse. Oliver’s head lolled to the side, his eyes open and staring, glassy and unmoving.

  Inside she broke into a thousand pieces. Memories of summertime, butterflies, fishing poles and running through open fields with her twin brothers cut through her mind. Oliver laughing. Neville urging them both to run faster.

  Her throat worked and she backed up, hitting something, a post at the bottom of the stairs.

  Travis looked up, shook his head.

  Even before he said the words, she knew with mind-numbing certainty that Oliver would never take his final vows, never become a priest.

  Her brother was dead.

  Chapter 26

  “Let’s get out of here.” Travis placed an arm over Shannon’s shoulders and steered her away from the church and the madhouse that had erupted with the discovery of Oliver’s body. Fire trucks, police cars and an ambulance had screamed to the scene, and with their noise and flashing bright lights a crowd of neighbors and the curious had collected around the restricted area that was cordoned off by police officers and crime scene tape. Emergency vehicles filled the small parking lot near the side door. Barricades blocked either end of the street between Oliver’s house and the church.

  Father Timothy, thin gray hair spiking upward, rimless glasses not hiding his bloodshot eyes, had arrived after being phoned by one of the neighbors. He looked disheveled and was unbelieving, aghast and angry that “such a horrible atrocity” had happened not only in his parish but inside the holy walls of St. Benedictine’s Church. He, alone, had spoken to the press who had arrived en masse, white news vans with satellite dishes rolling in to deploy reporters with microphones, cameramen and bright lights. Competing stations had arrived and the reporters were all vying for the best shot of the church, the latest news and/or an exclusive interview with anyone who knew what was going on. Shannon and Travis had repeatedly declined the requests.

  The night was hot and dry, no breath of wind, the heat seemingly fueled by the evil that had been committed. Shannon forced her thoughts away from the image of her brother’s drained body twisting from a bell-tower rope.

  Somehow she and Travis had managed to give their statements to an officer of the Santa Lucia Police Department who had been one of the first on the scene. They’d both promised to make themselves available for further questioning and Shannon knew she’d soon have another face-to-face with Detective Anthony Paterno. What could she tell him? That because of her, someone was killing, abducting or terrorizing people close to her?

  Why?

  If only she’d been able to talk to Oliver, if only she hadn’t been in such a hurry to leave her mother’s house. What would it have taken to give her brother five minutes of her time? Guilt was still eating at her when she spied two of her brothers huddled together beneath the branches of a large sequoia tree planted near the parking lot.

  “Give me a second,” she said to Travis and crossed a patch of grass and shrubs to get close to them. Robert, though not on duty, and Shea, still relieved of his, had shown up separately and had answered questions thrown at them by the police, the same questions that had been asked of Shannon.

  Did they know anyone who would want to do this to Oliver?

  When was the last time they’d seen him, talked with him?

  Did they know anything about his personal life? Lovers? Friends? Enemies?

  Had anyone been angry with him?

  What had been his regular routine?

  Had he strayed from it?

  How did they know to come here? Or, in Shannon and Travis’s case: How did they find the body? Why did Shannon want to talk t
o her brother at one in the morning? Why wouldn’t it wait?

  White-faced, shaking their heads, lips thin and pressed together in something between rage and despair, her two brothers were still reeling at the loss of Oliver.

  “Both twins,” Robert said, his eyes downturned. “Gone. And Mary Beth, poor Mary Beth.”

  “It looks like the same perp,” Shea confided, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth. Robert nodded, then hit Shea’s arm with the back of his hand. “Can I bum one of those?”

  “Sure.” Shea’s dark gaze slid from Shannon to focus on the bell tower, but Shannon figured, like her, his thoughts were a million miles away. He handed Robert a crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights. Robert, hands trembling slightly, shook out a filter tip and lit up.

  “Of course it’s the same psycho,” Shannon said. That was the one thing she was certain of. The only thing. “There couldn’t be two maniacs running around, trying to kill off members of our family, making weird burned marks as some kind of sick calling card.”

  “You think that’s what he’s trying to do?” Robert asked.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Then why Mary Beth? And why…Why not…?” He let his question drift away.

  But she caught his drift. “Why not kill me the night he had a chance?”

  “Yeah.”

  Good question, Shannon thought, not for the first time. Why had she been attacked and spared?

  A mistake?

  She didn’t think so. Killing her would have been easy that night. All the murderer would have had to do was turn the sharp tines of the pitchfork on her rather than beat her with the handle.

  A warning, then?

  No, this guy struck fast and hard. The grisly murders of Mary Beth and now Oliver had been meticulously planned.

  A glimpse of the future?

  She inwardly shrank. The killer wanted her to know fear. Dark, soul-clawing terror. And he’d managed that.

  And tonight…Witnessing Oliver’s death scene had been mind-shattering. Seeing her brother swinging softly from a crossbeam—blood staining his palms, a short wall of flames surrounding him as he’d been suspended overhead—had burned into her brain. She’d screamed, her stomach had wrenched, her knees had given out, and it had been all she could do not to throw up.

  After cutting Oliver down, Travis managed to drag the would-be priest’s body out of the circle of flames, but no amount of resuscitation attempts had worked. Oliver was dead. Grotesquely murdered. The EMTs hadn’t been able to revive him and the police had discovered, after the flames were extinguished, that the ring of fire surrounding his swinging corpse hadn’t been a ring at all, but a star missing several points. Numbers, marked as they had been on the backpack and mirror, had been drawn in kerosene and probably burned first, before the final shape had been lit around his body. The shape had been similar to the other drawings except in this case one more spoke, the upper right-hand point as you looked at the star, was missing. In its stead had been a number four:

  Shannon felt sick at the image.

  Someone had gone to a lot of trouble.

  Someone was making a macabre point.

  Someone was out to get every member of her family.

  Not just your immediate family—Mary Beth as well.

  Travis spoke as Robert and Shea silently smoked. “Whatever is happening includes more than just your family, since my daughter was abducted.”

  Robert exhaled gray smoke. “But she’s Shannon’s daughter, too. Still blood.”

  “True, but another woman was killed in Oregon. Dani’s piano teacher, Blanche Johnson.”

  “Wasn’t she murdered so that he could kidnap your daughter?” Robert asked Travis.

  “Maybe. Or, it might have been a separate act. Dani wasn’t at Blanche Johnson’s house that afternoon. At least there’s no evidence of that. She was missing from school before her scheduled lesson, which had been cancelled anyway.”

  Shea shook his head and frowned.

  “So why was the woman killed?” Robert asked.

  “That’s what the police are trying to figure out.”

  “Was there any image left behind? Like the complete star or something?” Shannon asked, still trying to make sense of the tragedies.

  “No star, just a simple message, left in blood and written on the wall: Payback Time.”

  “Jesus, payback for what?” Robert muttered. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Is Dani part of the payback?” Shannon asked, hardly able to say the words.

  Travis’s scowl deepened. “We don’t know. Yet.”

  Shannon held on to his arm and glanced up at him. What more did he know that he hadn’t shared?

  “Look, I’ll break the news to Mom,” Shea said as the silence grew awkward. He tossed the remainder of his cigarette onto the pavement and ground it out with his heel. “I’ll stop by tonight.” He looked over his shoulder to the news vans still parked on the scene. “She gets up early and I don’t want to have her wake up and see what happened here on the television.”

  “She’ll be devastated,” Robert muttered.

  “Aren’t we all?” Shannon asked.

  “I think we all had better brace ourselves,” Shea said as a cat slunk between the bushes, then trotted across the street. “It’s not over yet.”

  Shannon’s stomach clenched. Goose pimples rose on her skin. Who was the madman? What did he want? Dear God, couldn’t they find Dani Settler and end this? “Has anyone called Aaron?” she asked.

  “Why wake him?” Shea asked with a shrug. “He’ll get the news soon enough. I heard about it from someone in Dispatch and Robert, you were called by Cuddahey, right?”

  “Yeah, Kaye called me when the call came in to the station. I’ll tell Aaron tomorrow. Right now…I just want to get home. To my kids.”

  “I’m shoving off, too,” Shea agreed soberly. “Nothing more we can do here. Shannon, you need a lift?”

  “I’ll take her home,” Travis interjected.

  Neither brother commented, but as Travis and Shannon walked the short distance to the street where his truck was parked, she felt her brothers’ gazes following her. She heard a reporter call out to her, but she just kept walking. She was in no mood for inane questions, or recriminations or dredging up of a past she knew would be regurgitated in the news all over again.

  Bone-tired, she just wanted to go home.

  With Travis.

  She was glad for his strength, for his clear-headedness and though she realized it was a silly fantasy, she felt as if she and he were bound together, working toward the same cause, searching for the monster who held their child.

  She slid into the cab, yanked the door closed, leaned her head against the backrest and closed her eyes. It had been a long day and an even longer night. She wanted nothing more than to sleep for a million hours, to chase away the demons, to block out the horrible images she’d seen, to start over.

  Which was impossible.

  Travis maneuvered his rig around the barricades at the end of the street. They rode in silence with the wheels skimming over the pavement and the engine rumbling. With practically no traffic at this time of night, the drive to her little ranch took less than twenty minutes.

  Nate’s truck was missing.

  Again.

  In the middle of the night.

  In the shop? She doubted it. Nate’s apartment looked dark, but then wouldn’t it be, if he was inside and asleep?

  As Travis slowed his truck to a stop, Shannon wondered if Nate had taken a lover; a woman he hadn’t yet mentioned to Shannon. Why else the late hours? The long stretches of time when he was missing? It crossed her mind that he might be involved in crimes against her family, but he had no reason. No, she couldn’t lose faith in him, but she’d damned sure talk to him the next time she saw him, get to the bottom of it. What had been his last feeble excuses? He had been “in and out,” his truck had been “giving him fits,” he’d “tried to get
in touch” on the cell phone but couldn’t get through. And his voice mail box had been too full to leave a message with him.

  Things aren’t always what they seem.

  It wasn’t enough of an answer.

  Not when murder and mayhem had taken over.

  So what was it he was hiding? That thought bugged her. In all the time that he’d worked for her, he’d taken very little time off, but just before the first attack, he’d told her he’d be gone for a while, that he needed some time off. She’d said “No problem” and had agreed to take care of the horses for the week he’d be away.

  Then he’d shown up here on the night she’d been attacked, before he was scheduled to return, and helped to save her. Afterward he was, as he’d said, “in and out,” though he never neglected the stock. He’d be gone at all hours of the day and night, but the animals were fed and watered, maybe not on their usual schedule, but taken care of nonetheless.

  So what had he been doing?

  Travis cut the engine and she reached for the door handle.

  “I need to check on the animals,” she said, then tossed him a glance over her shoulder as she slid outside. “Want to help? I could use the company.”

  “You got it.”

  She stepped out of the cab. The night was warm, still holding on to summer, just the hint of a breeze offering relief, a partial moon visible through the canopy of branches overhead. The buildings were quiet and dark, the shed still a blackened skeleton and reminder of the fires that had taken the lives of those close to her.

  She felt bone-weary but there was work to be done. For now, she looked past the shed and the tragedies. Travis walked with her as they found the horses dozing and woke every dog in the kennel by switching on the lights. But all seemed to be as it should.

  “So where’s Santana?” Travis asked as she closed the door to the kennel and started for the house.

  She glanced up at the darkened rooms over the garage. “He could be home, he mentioned he was having trouble with his truck, but…I don’t know, he’s been acting funny lately. Gone a lot.”

  “Describe ‘funny.’”