Dying Embers

by B. E. Sanderson

  Frank was her go-to guy, but almost every piece of information he knew, he got from Lynn’s data skills. “Talk to me about the background checks.”

  “You were right. Fleming was a waste of human genetic code. He’s had over a dozen charges brought against him over the past thirty years, but the man wore Teflon boxers. Every single one of those cases was dropped. Why no one ever connected the dots and made a case against him is almost criminal in itself.”

  “Any of the complaints have the name Emma associated with them?”

  “Not that I can see, but if Emma’s our girl, then I should be able to find her. What’s her last name?”

  “Something Finnish. Might begin with a P or a K.”

  Laughter floated over the speaker. “You’re not asking for much, are you? Finns in Wisconsin? That’s like asking me to find a John Something-Italian in New York City.”

  “It’s worse than that,” said Ben. “I’m guessing that’s probably her maiden name.”

  Jace’s jaw dropped. In all the fuss, she hadn’t even made that assumption, but if she was one of Fleming’s victims, she would probably be old enough to have one or two marriages under her belt. Who knows what her name could be after all those years?

  “Crap,” Lynn replied. “That doesn’t make things impossible, but it sure doesn’t make them any easier.”

  “Do what you can,” Jace mumbled as she began rebuilding their flowchart on the whiteboard. She wrote Emma with a question mark and stopped.

  The whole damn thing was a question mark, and they weren’t getting any closer to answering the question. Ben and Lynn were talking behind her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the question mark. “Who are you, Emma?” she whispered. “Why are you doing this?”

  Her hand moved almost by its own volition. It filled in all the data she had, and after every entry another question mark arose. Only Arthur Fleming wasn’t an unknown. She could be fairly certain why he’d been killed, and although she still couldn’t blame Emma for ending his life, she couldn’t condone it either. Fleming’s abuse may have been the catalyst for Emma’s breakdown, but too many years had passed between the injustice done to Emma and the justice she sought, for it to be anything more than revenge.

  Is Emma taking revenge against all the men in her life for what one had done to her as a child?

  Jace placed a final question mark. Above it, the simple phrase ‘Victim #11’.

  #

  “Viva Las Vegas,” Emma sang in her best Elvis impersonator voice.

  Every year, Will took her to Sin City. He always gambled while she lay by the pool. Once she tried to watch him play poker, but he barked something about her jinxing his luck, and she never went back. Instead, she spent Will’s money on lavish dinners at the best restaurants and saw all the headliners—Bette and Tom and Wayne—who were there for her amusement. And the shopping… Only Rodeo Drive could thrill her more than walking through the shops. If the place had fewer people, it would win hands down.

  She paused to watch clouds roll across the ceiling. All around her, objects beckoned. With Will’s insurance money, she could buy anything, and he wasn’t around to complain about the bills.

  But none of it interested her.

  She strolled past the tourists and onto the casino floor. The bells and whirrs of the slot machines surrounded her. The flashing lights enveloped her like a child at the bosom of its mother.

  “You can’t play poker, Emma. It’s a man’s game.” She’d heard it more than once, and always in that condescending tone he used when he wanted to put her in her place. Well, now he was in his place—his urn carefully stowed between her laciest underwear and the silk stockings she’d bought on a whim. It had been a no-go, but a little shopping made her feel better. Will always liked her to dress the part of sex kitten, so he could show off his prize. Now he could enjoy the costume without her inside it.

  She wondered what he’d think of her t-shirt and blue jeans look as she sat in the high-stakes room of the classiest old casino on the strip.

  The dealer, to his credit, ignored her laughter as she slapped a wad of cash in front of him. Cheap-ass clothes or not, money spoke, and the dealer knew how to listen.

  “I might need a little help on the first few hands,” she said, with the same tones she used on Will when she wanted a new diamond bracelet or an emerald ring. It had the same effect on the dealer.

  His tongue shot out and wet the edges of his lips. His eyes, once focused on her face, drifted lower until he was explaining the game of poker to her breasts.

  She considered whether to make the dealer next on her list before she caught up with Owen Nyland.

  He should be easy enough to find—if he hadn’t moved again. Of all the men on her list, he had been the hardest to nail to one city. From her computer, she followed his trail from Milwaukee to Tallahassee to St. Louis to Albuquerque and a dozen little towns in between. Las Vegas was the latest, but it looked like his last. Literally.

  He only spent a few months in each of the other towns, but Vegas must’ve captured him in some way. His stay had stretched to eight years, and he managed to hold the same job as a slot machine repairman through all of them—even if his employers changed from time to time.

  As she looked at her hold cards, she smiled, but the happiness had little to do with the pocket aces she held. Years ago, Will had given Emma her first computer; he paid for her training, too. She never understood its importance, but she had fun learning, and then she had fun playing. Looking up old friends and older enemies had given her many hours of enjoyment, even before Will’s betrayal and her subsequent mission. Before her husband’s convenient demise, she knew exactly how to find half the men who’d wronged her. Those who now deserved justice. Before Will took up with that slut, she lay underneath his heaving frame, fantasizing about how she would make each of those men pay.

  Then as her husband lay burning in the ravine below her, she hit upon the perfect plan, and she made sure she thanked darling Arthur for it just before she executed it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I think your Lynn may just be a genius,” Ben said as he took another buffalo wing from their take-out container.

  Minutes before, Jace left her own meal behind to resume staring at the board, as if by the sheer force of her will, it would reveal all its hidden answers. “Huh?”

  “Lynn? She’s a genius.”

  “I know,” she said over her shoulder. Shaking her head as the notations swam in her vision, she faced her cohort. “She’s always been brilliant to me. What clued you in?”

  When he sucked the last of the tangy sauce away, and she realized she felt jealous of a chicken wing, she drank the rest of her cold coffee in one huge gulp. Once the caffeine kicked in, she would forget how his mouth looked and how much she wanted to feel his lips on her own. At least she hoped the java would do its part and distract her.

  “That part about the Conservation Corps,” he was saying when her attention finally drifted back to where it ought to be, “and the student list from what’s his face’s freshman year in college.”

  She knew she probably looked at him like he’d grown a third arm in the middle of his forehead. Somewhere along the line, he either slipped a gear, or she missed something important. Considering how deep in thought she’d been during the majority of their conference call, she was inclined to think the latter.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t follow.”

  He shook his head. “That’s okay. I’m beginning to learn how you work.”

  The faint humor in his voice shook her fully out of her tiredness and its resulting lust. She never had the patience for games—especially when death was a step away. “I don’t get your meaning.”

  “I’m learning how, when you’re deep in the case, you block out everything else. Which means I shouldn’t assume you heard what Lynn and I were discussing while you were getting vibes off the data.”

  Letting her shoulders relax, she allowed herself a moment
to overcome the tension unnecessarily knotting her up. He wasn’t poking fun at her, and he wasn’t making light of the seriousness of the task before them. Ben was just trying to… She didn’t know. Foster camaraderie? Indulge in a little light flirting? Neither was appropriate given the circumstances, but neither was worth getting worked up over either.

  “Okay,” she said, “so what’d I miss?”

  “Lynn came up with a plan to pull up the records for the Conservation Corps and Northern Wisconsin University and cross reference them until she found someone named Emma who showed up in both places around the time Thatcher and what’s his face were there.”

  He really needed to stop referring to the victims as ‘what’s his face’, but as the list grew, she had a tough time keeping the names straight herself. “Hugh Bower? But he dropped out his first semester, and we don’t know what year.”

  “Lynn’ll figure it out. I believe in her.”

  Jace tilted her head to the side, ready to present him with another argument for why Lynn’s plan would never work. Then she remembered their discussion in the parking ramp. If she was ever going to stop being a pessimist, it had to start now. She knew the capabilities of her team, and if anyone could figure out a way to find lost records, Lynn was the perfect person to do it. She just had to trust in the fact that Lynn knew her stuff.

  “I believe in her, too.”

  Ben smiled at her like he knew the battle raging inside her. “Good girl,” he said. “Now, how about some mindless vegging?”

  “I don’t think…”

  “Exactly what I had in mind. Just an hour of not thinking.” He began putting everything back in the files and stacking them as neatly as he could. “After you stop trying so hard, the answer may come to you. You know, sometimes not thinking is the best way to get the brain cells unstuck. Gets your conscious focused on something else and frees up the subconscious so it can play.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Let me guess. You took a few psych classes?”

  “Nope. Didn’t need ’em. I spent years studying human nature instead.” With his task complete, he flopped on the bed closest to the door. “Just trust me. Sixty minutes of late night TV won’t hurt anyone. Seeing as how Emma usually takes weeks between her kills, she probably won’t be prowling just yet.”

  “Not with the last two,” she said and received one of Ben’s scowls, “but I guess a little time off won’t make much of a difference. One hour, and that’s it. Then we get back to work.”

  He flipped on the set and surfed through the channels while Jace stretched out on her stomach with her chin resting on her arms. Law & Order rerun…trashy B-movie… MTV… The Weather Channel…

  The sound of Ben’s laughter woke her later. She cracked one itchy eye to find the antics of The Three Stooges glaring back at her.

  “What time is it?”

  He shrugged as Moe went to poke Larry in the eyes only to be thwarted by the old lengthwise hand maneuver. She grinned while the detective went into seizures of delight.

  “I love these guys.”

  “Apparently,” she said dryly. Personally, she never saw the point of the Stooges, but if they made Ben happy, she wouldn’t complain. Rolling onto her back, she caught the glaring red numbers of the hotel clock. “It’s after two in the morning. Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You needed the rest.”

  Pushing herself off the bed, she rose to make another pot of coffee. If they were ever going to get ahead of their suspect, she needed to work more, not sleep more. As she rose, though, something on the television held her spellbound. Just as the idea gelled together in her head, the channel changed.

  “Wait! Put it back!”

  “Why?” he asked as he returned to the channel. “It’s just an infomercial. The show’s over anyway.”

  She let his words flow past her. On the screen was one of those commercials you only see late at night; one for products like the Potato-Genie, only this one didn’t slice, dice, and make Julienne fries.

  “Turn up the volume.”

  “…Glue-Tyte bonds instantly to any substance. We just glued this man’s boots to a steel beam…” While Jace watched, the man strapped his boots on and they hoisted the beam thirty feet into the air. He stayed put, even after they managed to flip the beam over and hang him upside down. The bottom of the screen flashed the usual warning message, but she was more interested in the company name and address scrolling beneath it. The company name seemed too familiar, and the address was in Racine.

  “I’ll be damned. You were right,” she told him. “Like you said, the answer could come when I least expect it. Well, I sure as hell wasn’t expecting that.”

  “What?”

  Putting marker to whiteboard, she underlined the company name Chemistix, Inc. twice. “Fleming worked for the company that makes Glue-Tyte, and I’m betting if we test every bit of the epoxy from every crime scene, we’ll find she’s been using it all along.”

  Ben took it all in and then whistled long and low. “Damn, that’s mean. I get that Hell’s fury can’t compare to a scorned woman’s, but she’s carried it to the extreme.”

  “And she’s tying everything together for us. Now, we just have to find out where Emma met Fleming, and together with Lynn’s magic, we should have a name to go with the perp in no time.”

  Jace reached for the phone. “I have to get the crew on this—”

  “Not right now, you don’t. For Pete’s sake, it’s before four o’clock in the morning Dallas time. Your crew, if they’re smart, are home in bed. Which, I might add, is where we both should be.”

  His statement stopped her fingers on the number pad, but his last few words stopped the breath in her throat. “What?” Images of the two of them curled in each other’s arms, their breath coming slow and deep, made the blood rush to her face.

  “Easy there, Gunga Din. I meant you in your bed and me in mine.” He stood and caressed her cheek with one callused finger. “Trust me, Jace,” he said on a whisper. “When we decide to sleep together, we’ll need to be fully rested, because actual sleeping won’t be involved.”

  #

  “You’re good,” said a voice behind Emma. “I’ve been watching you for a couple hours now, and you’re either damn lucky, or you’ve got skills I haven’t seen in years.”

  She looked at her seven-two off-suit and tossed them into the muck. Every hair on the back of her neck stood at attention as the heat from the man’s breath wafted across her skin. “Thank you,” she said. “But I’m new at this, and I need to concentrate.”

  Her frostiest tone had no effect on the stranger. He took the empty seat next to her and tossed a stack of bills at the dealer. “Don’t mind me. I just know a good thing when I see it.”

  “And so you decided to come over here and give me some of your money?”

  “What can I say? I like a challenge.”

  The other players continued the hand, not paying the two of them much attention. Table talk was a way of life for them, and they chattered through every hand like a bunch of old ladies at the local coffee shop. She phased their voices out while she plotted her next move, both on the table and on her mission.

  “You aren’t afraid you’ll lose?” she asked without shifting her eyes away from her competition. The slick-haired guy next to the dealer grinned like an idiot every time he bluffed; he was grinning now, but his aggressive tactics forced the old lady on the end to fold what was probably the winning hand. With that kind of information, the next good hand Emma got should put all of their money in her stack.

  “I’ve been playing poker long enough to know if I lose a hand or two, it’s not going to break me.” He spoke like he didn’t care one way or the other, but she learned early that bravado was a tactical move in poker, too.

  “And you don’t mind if you lose those hands to a woman?” She really wanted this urban cowboy to leave her alone, but as she glanced up from the green felt tabletop into his cocoa-brown eyes, a sma
ll part of her warmed to the idea of having him next to her. When the cocktail waitress slipped another drink in front of her, she even felt a little irritated over the momentary disconnect from his heated gaze.

  “If I minded every time a lady took my money, I’d be unhappy fifty percent of the time. Some of my best poker buddies are women.” Another round of cards was dealt, and the stranger didn’t even look at his before he raised the pot. “You know,” he said, glancing at her under hooded lids, “you talk a mean game for someone who supposedly just learned poker. Let’s see how you play before you go worrying about how I’ll react to you taking my money.”

  Raising one eyebrow, Emma looked at her own cards. They weren’t exactly crap, but they weren’t worth wasting money on. By all rights, she should’ve thrown them away, but something made her double his raise. “Indeed,” she whispered. Maybe it was the countless free fuzzy navels talking, but she found herself wanting to set an entirely different kind of fire with the man next to her.

  He called her raise, while everyone else folded, and together they saw the flop. As usual, the three cards on the table were junk, but for once, the junk on the table melded nicely with the junk in her hand. Luck was certainly on her side tonight, and if she played her cards right, more than money could be sliding across the table toward her.

  He raised and in an instant, she went all-in. Grinning, he lifted the edges of his cards one by one. His fingers drifted toward his stack of chips, and he flipped them together artfully, shuffling them like a pack of cards.

  “You caught me,” he said as his cards flew to land in front of the dealer.

  Emma showed the friendliest grin she’d given in years. “Not yet, but give me time.”

  After another dozen hands and a couple more drinks, he cashed out and reached toward Emma. “Shall we?” was his only comment, but it was all the comment she needed.

  A short elevator ride later, they were falling onto his bed, each racing the other to peel away the annoying layers between them. His hands efficiently stripped off her t-shirt, while her own inexpertly tore at his. When her hands splayed across his furry chest, though, she stopped and tried to pull away.