Dying Embers

by B. E. Sanderson

  As the arroyos and mesas of southern Utah flew by her car, her attention didn’t stray toward their unique loveliness. Emma’s focus shifted as she remembered those damn eyes…

  A glimpse of him as he passed her locker on the way to class, and she found herself lost in the azure sea. At least that was the way she wrote about him in her notebooks—complete with hearts and arrows proclaiming her truest love forever. His long, lithe body, taut from hours of tennis; his bright, sharp mind honed from hours of debate. He was everything she ever dreamed about—a hero from the depths of Austen and Bronte. Brooding and dark with a rapier wit, the very fact he’d been unapproachable served to heighten her romantic notions.

  All she needed was to catch his attention.

  As she drove, Emma relived every moment of that year. His last year at Vander High meant her last chance to earn his attention, and if she didn’t catch him now, he would be off to UCLA. Without his fire, the halls she spent so much of her time wandering would be lifeless and gray.

  They shared two classes—basket weaving courses to keep his GPA high, and core courses for her artist’s soul. She sat as close as she dared. She whispered private wishes to her friends, loud enough to be sure he heard her. Speaking in terms she’d only read about, she made her intent known to her intended as easily as if she’d written him pages upon pages of rose-scented sonnets.

  He only took what you were offering him, Sweet Pea, Will said in her ear. She cringed at the nickname she’d always hated. With one hand, she tried to sweep the urn from its place beside her, but the seatbelt held it firmly in place.

  “Shut up!” she screamed. “I loved him, and he used me! You all used me!”

  A truck driver blew his horn, startling Emma back into her own lane and thrusting her back into her practiced calm. “You all used me,” she said again, the lilt returning to her voice. “But you’ll all pay.”

  The rest stop kid didn’t use you.

  “He would’ve. I know it. I just didn’t give him time.” Her fingers clenched around the wheel tightly, belying the serene attitude she tried to wrap around herself. “That was always my problem, you know. I gave you all too much time, and you took it. Never again, though. From now on, I take my time back from all of you.”

  She thought back to the young man’s shining eyes as they drifted down to her breasts. Given half a chance, he would’ve bent her over the hood of her car right there in front of God and everybody. Well, she took his half a chance and used it to show him what being truly fucked felt like.

  Chapter Seven

  The burned steel frame reminded Jace of all the others, save the last. No evidence would be found within the ash; none would’ve survived the heat generated by the generous dousing of gasoline each victim received.

  “Sports car?” Ben said.

  She nodded absently. The models were never the same. Similarity lay in their price tag, and judging by the general shape of the newest crime scene, this fit the M.O. “Porsche, probably. Red. Maybe maroon.”

  Until the S.C.I.U.’s crime scene technicians arrived, the only other occupants of the desolate rest stop were a police cruiser and a semi—its side proclaiming the qualities of Baby Betty Snack Cakes. Its driver paced between the state trooper and the rig.

  As Jace and Ben approached, the trucker shouted at them to hurry up. “I’m already way overdue. I don’t have time for this shit.” He ran a handkerchief over his shining scalp, and from where she stood, she saw his fingers trembling. “Listen, I’m sorry,” he said when they got within a few feet of him. “I shouldn’t be that way, but I told these guys everything I know. Can’t you just let me leave already?”

  A large man in a blue trooper’s uniform and a wide-brimmed hat shook his head at the trucker. “You can go when I say you can go. We’re waiting on…” He followed the trucker’s gaze straight into Jace’s. “…them.” The state trooper nodded. “You with Serial Crimes Investigation?”

  “Agent Douglas, and this is Detective Yancy.”

  “Great.” The middle-aged officer tipped his hat back and Jace had to shield her eyes from the reflection off his mirrored sunglasses. “This mess is all yours. When I took this post, I didn’t sign up for…” He swept one hand toward the wreckage. “Talk about nasty. Car wrecks I can handle, but stuff like this… It’s just sick.”

  The trooper’s face showed a slight green tinge to his cheeks. She didn’t blame him. If she could allow herself the luxury, she would curl up in a ball in the backseat of her rental, rather than face the smell of burnt metal and charred paint and… Thoughts like that turned her stomach, so she stuffed them into the back of her head before she lost what little lunch she had.

  “This will only take a few minutes.” She attempted to paste on a reassuring and calm demeanor for the witness. Judging from his dilated pupils and his rapid breathing, the man had been spooked enough for one day. Turning toward the trooper, she said, “We’ve got it from here.”

  “Good,” he said, settling his hat firmly onto his head. “I’ve still got a hundred miles to patrol before the end of my shift, and the wife’s gonna have my hide if I’m late again this week.” He turned to Ben. “You know how it is. She’s probably got dinner on the table already, and… Well, heck, I don’t know how to tell her I don’t want to eat ever again.”

  After she’d seen the first victim, Jace felt the same way. The scent of human flesh baking inside a luxury sedan remained in her nostrils for weeks afterwards, making meat unpalatable and cooking a nightmare. She never thought of herself as someone who’d become vegetarian, but since the case had fallen into her lap, she couldn’t stomach meat.

  “I tell ya,” the trooper continued, “if I get home, and she wants me to grill, I’m going to…”

  Ben put on a good show of being sympathetic, but she could tell this wasn’t his element—whether that meant he couldn’t conceive of having a wife or whether he couldn’t remember his first nasty crime scene, she didn’t know. “If you don’t mind answering a few questions,” he told the officer, “we’ll send you on your way.”

  Sending a silent thanks to her impromptu partner, Jace shifted her focus toward the trucker. She locked her eyes on the antsy man, nailing him to the spot.

  He swallowed hard. “I already told the cop I didn’t see anything.”

  “I understand, sir. Did you call it in?” she asked as she flipped open her notebook.

  “Yep, but I didn’t… I didn’t see…” The trucker’s eyes screwed tight against whatever scene his brain replayed, and his face paled. Despite his words to the contrary, Jace knew the scene he claimed to have missed played in his head on a sick loop—the burning, the screaming. The smell.

  “Anything,” she finished for him. “Yes, I know. Were you just pulling in when you noticed the fire?”

  “I spent the night here, and when I woke up, the whole thing was over.”

  “The smell woke you up?”

  He cast one glance toward the charred mess and glanced away quickly. “It’s a godawful thing. I ain’t smelled anything like that since the Gulf War, and believe you me, I don’t never want to smell it again.”

  “And that’s what woke you up?”

  “The gunshot woke me up, I think.” His hands quivered as he wiped the sweat from his neck. “Heard my share of those in the Gulf, too. It ain’t a sound you forget.”

  Taking in his words and weighing them against his demeanor, she knew what words might make this obvious witness admit he’d seen something. “Well, then, I can understand why you didn’t see anything,” she said with as much sincere understanding as she could muster. “Hearing gunshots out here in the middle of nowhere would make anyone hide. It probably saved your life.”

  The trucker sucked in his beer belly and puffed himself up. “I don’t hide from anything, lady. I’m a Marine.”

  She nodded. “Then you did what any self-respecting Marine would do. You looked out to see what was going on.”

  His face reddened as he
realized he’d stepped on the landmine he’d laid for himself. “Okay. You got me. Maybe I did see something, but trust me, I didn’t see enough to help you guys.” He twisted the handkerchief into knots, shifting his eyes toward the crime scene and then hastily away. After several more times of forcing his gaze from the burned vehicle, he zeroed his focus in on her and said, “Can I go? I’m overdue for my next drop, and every minute I’m late means a penalty. I would’ve been two hours early if it weren’t for that damn psycho.”

  Her ears perked up. Despite the trucker’s insistence he’d seen nothing, she latched onto that one word in hopes she could make him change his statement. “What psycho?” He clamped his mouth shut and shook his head. “If you’re afraid he’ll find out you saw him, we can protect you.”

  “I told you I wasn’t afraid. It’s just…” He stared downward like his feet suddenly took on great importance.

  Getting a witness statement shouldn’t have to be this hard, she thought and not for the first time in her career. Too many people didn’t want to get involved for one reason or another, and the fact so many witnesses wouldn’t tell her what they knew made her blood boil. “Listen. I know you don’t want to be here, but we’ll get done a lot quicker if you just tell me everything. Then you can go back to work, and I can go back to work. I’ll even write a note telling your customers why you were late. Heck, they can call me to verify.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Every minute we’re here debating about what you know or don’t know, there’s a killer out there getting ready to do this to someone else. Do you want to read about the next murder and wonder if you could’ve stopped the guy?”

  The trucker looked at his feet for a minute longer and then turned a yellow-toothed grin toward her. “You got it all wrong, lady.”

  “What?”

  “It ain’t no ‘he’. At least, I didn’t see a guy when I was looking out the window of my cab.” His face turned several shades of red. “If the guys find out about this, I’ll never live it down.”

  “What?” she said with more bite to her tone than she planned.

  “It was a chick. All right?”

  Jace stood silent while the trucker’s information washed over her. It wasn’t possible they had a similar but disconnected crime. The glue and the fire and the car… It all pointed to her killer.

  And if it was the same crime, she’d been looking at the wrong gender the whole time.

  His tongue snaked out from between his thick lips. “A mighty-hot chick from what I could see. Wouldn’t have thought such a looker could heft a guy around, but she must’ve been one of those lady weight-lifters or something, the way she picked him up and carried him to his little car.”

  “He didn’t fight her?”

  “When I looked out after the shot, the guy was on the ground. She picked him up… Man, she had a great ass.” Jace speared him with a look, but he didn’t notice. “Anyways, she picked him up in one of those firemen’s carries and hauled him to the car. Set him down, went back and got some shit out of her car, then...” His words dried up as the playback loop had started again.

  She wanted to slap him—as much to get his focus back as to punish him for being so damn spineless. “And you didn’t do anything to save him?”

  “Wasn’t anything I could do for the guy. He was probably dead anyways. It’s not worth getting myself killed to save a dead body.”

  “I thought Marines never left a man behind.”

  She expected a glimmer of shame from him, but he didn’t show a bit of remorse. “To tell the truth, lady, she scared the shit out of me. And besides, that kid wasn’t a Marine.”

  And neither are you.

  She released the trucker just as Yancy wrapped up with the trooper. Before they had time to compare notes, the S.C.I.U. crime techs arrived. Everything would have to wait until she heard the words she knew would come.

  “Looks like glue again.” One of them pointed to where the remains had been cut from the vehicle hours earlier. “Or some kind of epoxy.”

  “I was afraid of that,” she said, checking off the M.O. on her list. Her team had been working on the exact chemical formula, but so far, they hadn’t found a match. Whatever it was, it wasn’t mass produced by any of the big manufacturers.

  “No matter how many of these I work, I still think it doesn’t seem possible any substance could hold a man in place while he burned alive.”

  Another guy nudged him with his elbow. “You never saw that commercial where the guy put this special glue on his hard hat and hung from a steel beam? Man, that commercial was all over the place thirty years ago.”

  He shuddered once and looked back at the human-shaped cutout where a man once sat and roasted. “Sick.”

  Next to her, Yancy stood staring at a scene she’d seen too many times. “It always amazes me what one human being can do to another.”

  “Depends on your definition of human being. Whoever is doing this… She stopped being classified as human a long time ago. At least in my book.”

  “She?” The detective’s tone mirrored the incredulity she felt. Jace filled him in on the trucker’s information, trying not to let her revulsion creep into her voice. Judging by the look on Yancy’s face, she didn’t manage it.

  When she finished, Yancy filled her in on the trooper’s statement—which didn’t take long. “Everything was over by the time the trooper got here, but he suspected the driver saw more than he let on. Good thing he made the guy stay.”

  “Lucky he stayed after he called nine-one-one. He could’ve been long gone before anyone made it out here to investigate.” She shook her head. “I’m betting he stayed more out of a sense of fear that the killer could still be on the road somewhere than any sense of civic duty.”

  “Is there any possibility this is just a coincidence?” he ventured.

  “This?” She swept her hand to encompass the blackened Porsche. “I’d say it was always a possibility, if it weren’t for the glue. Whoever this chick is, she’s starting to lose her careful planning. She left us with the fire and the glue, but she didn’t take the time to find a ravine to push him into.”

  He looked up at the too-blue sky for so long, Jace could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. “Maybe this wasn’t a result of her losing her careful planning,” he said finally. “Maybe this was something she hadn’t planned at all. A pretty woman alone at a rest stop? Maybe she got more than she expected, and so did he.”

  Jace rolled his words around in her head. If their killer took this last victim out because he attacked her, it could lean toward a pattern with the previous victims. On the other hand, it could be one random act of a rapidly disintegrating mind. Either way, the idea was worth checking into.

  Flipping open her phone, she called Frank to fill him in on the latest information, as well as Ben’s idea.

  “As soon as we get an ID on the body, run him for priors and—”

  “I think I see where you’re headed,” Frank said, “but not how this would connect him to the others. Only the second victim had any sexual misconducts on his sheet. A statutory rape case back when he was nineteen.”

  “We’ll worry about whether it ties in later. Right now, I want to know what this kid did to touch our killer off. If he tried to rape her, it would’ve sent her even further over the edge.”

  Frank paused, and the faint tapping of his fingers on a keyboard filled the silence. “Gotcha. Consider it done. Anything else?”

  “Look deeper into the vic’s backgrounds. Find me a woman they all have in common. She’s in their past somewhere. We just have to find her.”

  Wrapping up the phone call, Jace allowed herself a moment to delve into everything she learned, and still came up empty. A female serial killer was unusual but not unheard of. Actually, when she thought about the string of victims, the scenario made perfect sense.

  Totally random serials were so rare; each murderer has his own reasons for killing, as weird as those reason
s may seem to the average man. One of the sticking points in her investigation had always come down to the apparent randomness of the victims. They had no clear history in common, and every time her team thought they found the key, a new victim would turn their theory inside out.

  With a female killer, the reason could almost be something as obvious as sex.

  Whatever the pattern, though, they needed to find the stressor that set her off. Once they figured that out, backtracking through the crime scenes would lead right to her. Too bad they might not figure out the stressor in time to catch her.

  If we ever do.

  With her phone still in hand, it was easy enough to get Frank back on the line. “Concentrate on Arthur Fleming,” she said without bothering with a greeting. “He was the first, and he may be the key to why she’s running around the country killing men.”

  And if finding out her identity was that damn easy, Jace would spent the next year kicking her own ass for missing it.

  #

  “I don’t know why anyone would choose to live out here,” Emma told the urn. “Nothing but scrubby grass and shrubby trees. I like home so much better. Don’t you?”

  Maybe he moved here to get away from you. Will’s voice ringing inside her head no longer startled her—after all, he’d been at it ever since the rest stop—but it still rankled. He always had been one for a snappy, and most often snide, comeback.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Devin was always happiest in the middle of nowhere.” She laughed. “I remember spending hours driving in the woods with him. Nothing for miles but trees. Did I ever tell you about his time in the Peace Corps?”

  The voice went quiet again. Even when he was still alive, her husband didn’t like to talk about her past relationships. Not that she was a slut or anything before marrying Will, but all of them were a sore spot with him. Whenever she wanted to end a fight, she brought one up—just for spite.