Dying Embers

by B. E. Sanderson

“You could, but you won’t. You need me.” He said the words, but he didn’t know how true they were. Jace hadn’t been partnered up in a while, so she hadn’t missed it until Ben. Now she knew she’d miss it if he left. “And hey, don’t blame me for hoping she hasn’t struck again.”

  “I can blame you, and I will. If she struck again, she left us a witness this time. Maybe we can catch her before she leaves us another corpse.”

  Ignoring the stares from the local police, she stepped from the rental and scrutinized the scene. The car had been purchased recently enough to not have plates, but not so new, personal effects didn’t litter the interior. Even through the slightly tinted windows, she could make out a baseball bat and glove in the back seat.

  “There’s a child involved?” Her voice trembled with fear and rage.

  One of the officers shook his head. “The kid was at school. He’s inside with his grandmother now.”

  “And the parents?”

  “We got the victim to Nephi and had him airlifted to SLC. The wife went along with him.”

  Beside her, Ben made notes they would go over later. “No fire?”

  “A little, but Wendy… that’s Mrs. Thatcher… she got it out before it spread to the interior.”

  She nodded as she got to a small blackened patch of concrete near the driver’s side door. “She got him into the car, but for some reason couldn’t get him out of the driveway,” she said to herself. “Maybe the car had engine trouble, but that’s unlikely with a new car.” She nodded toward Ben, but he had already written it down. Glancing into the car, she said, “No keys in the ignition. She had to torch him here, but something interrupted her…”

  “The wife,” said the officer. “She went into town for a couple minutes, and when she got back, some woman was standing right where you are. At first, she thought the gal was talking to Devin, but then she noticed him slumped over kinda funny. That’s when the gal struck the match and threw it. She didn’t even look to see where it landed before she took off running.”

  “Which way did she run?” Ben asked.

  “Wendy was too worried about her husband to think about the gal, and after the fire was out, the suspect was gone.” He nodded toward one of the other officers. “The wife called nine-one-one. They dispatched us and the ambulance. By the time we all got here, everyone thought it was pretty clear this wasn’t no typical angry ex-girlfriend thing. He got glued into the car, for pity’s sake. Anyway, one of the boys remembered seeing something about this case and he called your guys. I know we weren’t supposed to touch anything, but we had to get the poor guy to a hospital.”

  “How is he?” The two of them asked over one another.

  “Last I heard, he was still out of it. She cracked him on the head pretty hard. Other than that, though, his hands and the backs of his legs are messed up from the glue. What kind of sick freak would glue a man to his car seat?”

  She didn’t bother answering, but the immediate thought was our kind of sick freak. One glance at Ben told her he was thinking the same thing. They had another crime scene. Thank goodness they didn’t have another body.

  “So you calling in your boys, or can we get to work on the scene now?”

  She shook her head. This whole thing had to be processed with the best methods available, which she wasn’t sure the police force of a mountain community had. “It’s ours.” Even as the words left her mouth, she could see the officer bristle. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you do,” she said, staving off hard feelings that would only get in the way. “It’s just how things are. We still could use your help in searching the surrounding area. I know it’s not what all of you want to do, but it’s the best I can offer right now. The one thing we all need to remember is we need to catch this killer, and we can’t do it if we’re pissed at each other.”

  “Devin’s my brother-in-law,” the lead officer said through gritted teeth. “You couldn’t keep me out of this if you tried.”

  “Then help me in the best way you can. Leave the actual crime scene to us. We have better technology and more resources to deal with anything she might have left behind.”

  The officer thought for several moments, and then made his decision. “What do you want us to do?” The words didn’t come easily from the big man, but they were sincere. Jace hoped his capitulation meant an end to the pissing contest, but she wasn’t hoping too hard.

  “Fan out and find a tree within sight of the house where someone could’ve been sitting and watching these people. When you find it, cordon it off and look for evidence nearby. Until one of us gives the go ahead, though, I only want the evidence marked out—especially anything that might have DNA, like a cigarette butt or a wad of gum.”

  It didn’t take long for one of the younger officers to shout out for Jace.

  “I think there might be blood up there,” he said as both she and Ben arrived next to a lodgepole pine.

  She narrowed her eyes and looked up through the thick needles. About ten feet off the ground, definite signs were present, and as the officer indicated, some of them looked like blood. “Good job.” Along with the one hair they had already, the blood could help with an identity. When they finally caught the bitch, they would also have enough evidence to convict her. Whether for all seven murders, she didn’t know, but with only one life to forfeit, seven guilty verdicts wouldn’t punish the woman any more.

  As the other officers surveyed the property, looking for potential evidence, the only thing left for Jace to do was wait for the S.C.I.U. crime techs to arrive from their last scene, and she hated waiting.

  “Who are you?” said a young voice beside her.

  She startled and looked down into a pair of very serious young eyes. “I’m Agent Douglas.”

  “You’re here to find out what happened to my dad, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. We’re all here to see if we can catch the person who did this.”

  He looked at her intently, as if sizing her up before he spoke again. “I know I’m just a kid, but wanna know what I think?”

  She almost smiled, but the grim set of the boy’s mouth told her if she smiled, she might ruin his resolve. “You know, sometimes kids can know a whole lot more than adults give them credit for.”

  He glanced toward the lead officer. “I tried to tell Uncle Marty, but he just told me to get back inside. You won’t do that will you? Even if Uncle Marty comes over and says so?”

  “I won’t do that. Even if he does come over here.”

  The boy nodded. “I think that weird lady I saw standing out here the other morning did this to my dad.”

  Jace surveyed their surroundings. Not another house for at least a mile, and too remote for even the bravest door-to-door salesperson. “Tell me about the her.”

  With the clarity of youth, the boy recounted the whole encounter, even providing little details most adults would overlook. “She smelled funny,” he said at one point during his speech.

  “Smelled funny how?”

  “Like when Dad works on the lawn mower. It was really weird, because Mom never smells like that.”

  “Was the smell like when you go to the gas station?”

  He tilted his head to one side and mulled the idea over. “A little, but there was something else in there, too. Maybe it was her perfume getting all mixed up in the other smells, like when Mom makes stew and you can almost kinda smell the carrots, but not really like carrots anymore.”

  The more he spoke, the more certain she became that the little boy represented her first solid link to the killer she’d been chasing for months. And he almost hadn’t been allowed to tell his story. Letting out her frustrations in a long, controlled breath, she thanked the young man for his help and asked him to write everything down, so he wouldn’t forget it.

  He gave a toothy grin and raced into the house.

  “Well?” Ben said as the screen door slammed. “What was that all about?”

  “That, my good man, was our first piece of luc
k. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to have a little chat with the locals. We damned near missed out on an eyewitness account because they weren’t using their heads, and I’ll be damned if we going to miss anything else because of it.”

  #

  A half-mile above them on the mountainside, Emma watched and waited. She’d failed, and the taunting of her dead husband rebounded in her skull so loudly she could barely drown it out. She shouted at him to shut up until the sight of swarming uniforms below her—first blue, then white, then blue again—forced her silence. Far below, she saw Douglas arrive with a new friend—the cop from La Junta—and she knew the festivities were winding down.

  She watched the circus play out, and she waited for Will’s jibes to stop—but mostly she waited until it was safe for her to finish what she started.

  Devin lay outside her reach now; his family untouchable.

  Not that she couldn’t make the wife pay when she found her—she already had plenty of blood on her hands—but a promise is a promise.

  And still, two others waited beyond the mountains. When the sun set, and the cool breezes swept through her hair, she came down from her tree and started the long hike toward her car.

  As she looked down at his urn, Will had nothing more to say.

  #

  “Did you get a good description from the kid?” Ben said as they retraced their path toward Salt Lake City.

  “Good enough so she won’t get within a hundred feet of Devin Thatcher. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow to get a sketch artist up to the house.”

  “You think his memory’s good enough?”

  “It better be. We don’t have time to wait for his father to wake up, and even if Thatcher does regain consciousness, he may not remember the incident.” She ran a trembling hand through her hair and tried to force it steady. Too much coffee and too little sleep proved more powerful than her will, so she stuffed her hands between her knees. “What good is it if she left one alive when he still can’t tell us anything?”

  “I have a feeling if she hadn’t knocked him out, she wouldn’t have left him around for us to find, let alone worry about whether he remembers.” Ben sounded as tired as she felt, making his words come out with more vinegar than usual.

  “Thank goodness for head injuries?” She ventured for wryness but ended up with sarcastic.

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  Jace opened her mouth to say more, but she suspected her impromptu partner didn’t need her acid tongue any more than she wanted to use it. Closing her eyes, she settled back in the crook between the seat and the door. Maybe she could catch a wink or three before she had to use her foggy brain again.

  “Listen,” Ben said just as she was hovering on the edge of sleep, “I didn’t mean any of that to come out the way it sounded.”

  She opened one eye and stared at his face in the green glow of the dashboard. Nothing he said warranted an apology. Maybe he said that to encourage one from her. Well, he’s not getting it.

  “No problem,” she said, hoping to leave it at that. As the silence stretched, though, she sensed he was waiting for something more. “Listen,” she said. “I’ve been working this case for too damn long. Sometimes it makes me bitchy. I don’t have anything against the Thatchers, and I definitely don’t want another body—it’s just frustrating that we finally get a live victim, and she might’ve knocked the crime right out of his head.” She sat up, thoughts of sleep chased away by the anger she’d hoped to ignore. “It’s almost worse than having another body. The dead can at least tell me what happened to them to a certain extent. All the bodies had a story of their own. Now, with Thatcher, the story’s had several pages yanked out. Any evidence on his body has been either tainted or washed away, just like his memories. We’ll be lucky if we get anything off this guy.”

  “They think they found fingerprints—”

  “We had fingerprints, and no matches in any database. Whoever she is, she’s a ghost. Except for that trucker, no one who’s seen her has lived to tell about it, and he just got lucky because she didn’t know he was watching.”

  “We still have the kid.”

  Her breath came out in one long whoosh. It was too late, and she was too tired. Any optimism she had was already held together with duct tape and chewing gum, but this late night crap made it worse. “I’m sorry. I know we’ve got more than it looks like, and we’re getting closer to her every day. Ignore me. I’m just frustrated.”

  “And beat to hell.” He laid one gentle hand on her thigh to comfort her, but only succeeded in making her more tense. Right then, she didn’t want to think about how long it had been since any man touched her. She didn’t need a man; she only needed sleep. And to catch this bitch. “Why don’t we hit the next motel we see?” he continued, unaware that his kneading heated her up more than it calmed her down. “We’ll catch up with the Thatchers in the morning. By then, he may even be awake and ready for visitors.”

  With the path her hormones and sleeplessness were taking her, she didn’t need to be alone with him at a motel. No matter how tired she felt—or maybe because of how tired she felt—she wanted to act on all the urges swirling through her right now. She shook her head hard enough for the tips of her hair to sting her cheeks. “We’re going to the hospital tonight. If he’s wakes up sometime between now and morning, I want to be there.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The bitter antiseptic scent filled Jace’s nostrils until she could only think of watching her father die. Too many months battling a little-known disease had left him wasted and sallow, the victim of a holocaust from which there was no liberation, and only a microscopic murderer to blame for the senseless violence visited on his organs. By the time anyone figured out he was suffering from Wegener’s Disease—a malady without any known cause or cure—it had been too late.

  Cream colored hallways passed on either side of her, but she spared little attention for them. She’d seen them before. If she never saw another hospital corridor, it would be too soon. The doorways were always open in ICU, prepared for a moment’s harried rush to bring a life back from the flatline. Each room held a body in pain; any silence merely a signal of either coma or a drug-induced sleep. Each bedside chair held a spark of hope that may or may not kindle into happiness.

  She kept her eyes forward, looking toward the room where the killer’s only living victim lay mute, but images from her own past still tattooed themselves on her brain, laying their pain-filled tracks.

  Dad never was the same after the fire, but he tried to go on living. He tried to be a good parent to the only child he had left, but something in his eyes told her his heart wasn’t in parenting any longer. When he submitted to her hugs, she could feel the distance he put between them, even as her arms wrapped tightly around his chest. Each kindness became a duty he had to fulfill; each act of fatherhood a tragic reminder of what lay unspoken between them.

  When she finished college and was well on her way to completing her training at Quantico, he finally gave up the act and his last grasp on life. The doctors gave his illness the strange name that would haunt her for the rest of her life—one she’d never heard of and never wanted to hear again. Still, she knew in her heart, the reason for his death lay in the fact he believed he’d completed his last obligation. Once he believed she didn’t need him, he could finally rest.

  Her final vision of him remained as a husk lying in his hospital bed as the machines quietly stopped. It stayed with her for many years, and came unbidden as she reached the latest stop in this killer’s trail.

  Devin Thatcher lay unmoving in the last room on the left. A large purple bruise spread from his temple to cover his right eye. The point of impact was the epicenter, but the worst damage spread unseen beneath his skull.

  Lucky shot. A little bit to the left or right and Devin wouldn’t have lost consciousness. If his attacker had missed, the man would be dead. If his brain damage was bad enough, he may wish he were anyway.

 
; “Mrs. Thatcher?” Ben said as they stepped into the room.

  A willowy woman stepped from the shadows near the window. Her long red hair had been swept back into a tight ponytail, but after the strain of the day, many strands had escaped. Eyes that appeared as if they should be filled with joy were instead tinged with sorrow. “Yes?”

  Jace introduced them both, and stood over the inert figure. Below her lay Devin Thatcher, with the image of Charles Douglas imprinted over him in her brain. Tearing herself back to the present, she whispered, “Has he woken up yet?”

  The large brown eyes staring back at her were made larger by the dark rings encircling them. Evidence of her tears was all the answer Jace needed. Devin Thatcher hadn’t come out of his coma, and from the look on his wife’s face, he wouldn’t any time soon.

  “Would it be all right if we asked you some questions?”

  Wendy Thatcher nodded. “I told everything I could to my brother before we left, but… I know the drill. You ask me things he might not have thought of, and something might jiggle loose.” Jace tilted her head. “My brother is a cop. My father was a cop. I have an uncle who’s a state trooper. You spend enough time around all this, and some of it rubs off.”

  “Thank you for understanding.” Thinking back to all the spouses of all the victims she ever dealt with, she wished half of them had been so level-headed. She understood the frustration and the anger and the total disintegration that sometimes comes after a horrendous event like this. Regardless, though, she needed information, and she needed those who could speak for the dead to do so, even if it hurt.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?” Ben said, motioning outside.

  “We can talk here. The doctor said the sound of voices could stimulate his…” She lowered her face, and Jace thought the woman would break down from the stress, but she just shook her head. “I’m sorry. That doctor… He was speaking so fast, I don’t remember what part of his brain, but wherever it is, I’m willing to try anything to get Devin to wake up. I’ve been sitting here talking to myself and to him and to the fake plant in the corner. I thought about buying a book on tape just to give us both a break from my voice. Yours will be good for him.”