The two teens glanced at each other and remained silent.
“Are you afraid to tell me you were going in there to have sex? You think I give a shit about that?”
“We don’t want to get in trouble,” Melissa said. “If our parents…”
“I’m not saying a word to your parents or anyone else. And trust me, there isn’t a soul here who wouldn’t have known what you two were up to when they saw you sneaking off into these woods.”
The teens looked at the ground.
“Just walk me through it,” Danny said. “You may have seen or heard something and didn’t even realize it.”
Melissa let out a breath. “Alright. Right after we walked past those trees, we heard the jogger make a weird noise. We turned around and thought we saw something in front of him.”
“What was it?”
Will answered. “We didn’t know. It was like a shadow or something. It was weird.”
Melissa nodded in agreement.
Danny kept his face impassive. “What then?”
“Nothing,” Melissa said. “It was there and then it wasn’t. Next thing we knew the guy started burning.”
Will turned red and stared at the ground.
“What else?” Danny asked. “I get the feeling you’re leaving something out.”
“It was just so crazy,” Will said. “We heard someone chanting right before the fire started.”
“Chanting? Chanting what?”
“We didn’t know. Whatever he was saying, it wasn’t in English.”
“You said he. So it was definitely a man’s voice that you heard?”
“Yes,” Melissa answered. “It just sounded like random words from God knows what language. We couldn’t tell.”
“Does either of you two know any languages besides English?”
“I take Spanish in school,” Will said.
“I know some French.”
“So you don’t think it was either one of those two languages you heard?”
Both teens shook their heads no.
“Not even close to either of them,” Will said. “The words sounded kind of harsh.”
“We couldn’t figure out who was talking,” Melissa said. “It was like the voice was right in front of us over by the jogger but we couldn’t see anyone.”
“We just kind of froze,” Will said, hanging his head. “We were so scared.”
Danny patted the boy on the shoulder. “So was I, buddy. Everyone here was.” He paused before resuming his questions. “When you first went into the woods, did you hear anything else weird before the chanting started? Smell anything?”
Both teens shook their heads. “It was just all the baseball game stuff,” Will said.
The conversation was interrupted by a woman calling Will’s name as she ran towards the trio. “Will! Will, are you okay?”
“Your mother, I assume?” Danny asked.
The boy nodded.
“You two go catch up to her,” Danny said. He fished out a business card from his pocket and handed it to the girl. “Keep this and let me know if you remember anything else that might help us. Thanks for talking with me.”
The teens ran as quickly as possible across the field to Will’s mother. Danny watched them go before turning to scan the crowd around him. There was an older black couple leaning against the fence and trying to quiet their dog, a nondescript brown mutt who reminded him of Sox. A younger dark-haired white man in a Mariners baseball cap stared at the medical examiners and the coroner as they arrived on the scene. Two middle-aged white women sat on the grass and wiped tears from their eyes.
There were literally thousands of witnesses to this scene of carnage and all of them had to be interviewed. In addition, odds were good that at least 95 percent of the people here had cell phones with them. There was a good chance that someone recorded the fire and may have even caught footage of the jogger before he was burned alive. In spite of the fact that every available officer on the Fairbanks force had been dispatched to the scene it was still going to be a very long night.
****
Chapter 5
Danny stumbled through the woods, his dimming flashlight a solitary shard of light in the ink black darkness of the night. His feet felt as if they weighed 100 pounds each as he struggled to lift them enough to walk through the knee-deep snow. He wasn’t dressed for winter and his thin shoes had long ago become encased in ice.
The wind shrieked through the trees around him, but it couldn’t block out the sounds of the footsteps Danny heard coming towards him. Or perhaps footsteps weren’t the right word for the sounds he heard. It sounded more like someone was gliding towards him, skiing over the snow with an effortless grace that merely emphasized his own clumsiness.
Clumsy or not, he had to keep going. He had to get away. The flashlight sputtered and Danny knew the battery wouldn’t last much longer. He had to find his way out of here before he was left in total darkness.
He dared to glance backwards towards the sound of the skier behind him, only to realize the sounds were now coming from the front. Or were they coming from the side? Was more than one thing out there, closing in on him from all sides?
Frozen in place, his eyes darted from left to right as he tried to decide the safest direction to move. The howl of a wolf made him jump and start moving again before he made a decision. The important thing was to keep going. Any direction would do. Danny yelled out as he stumbled over something in his path and fell on all fours into the snow.
He dropped the flashlight and watched it disappear into the snow. Danny reached forward with his hand to find out what had tripped him and froze as his fingers touched human flesh.
To his amazement, he no longer needed his flashlight. The moon had emerged full in the sky and cast a silver glow over the snow around him. And a glow over the arm his fingers touched.
Danny leaned back on his haunches and stifled a scream. In front of him lay a blond woman dressed in an emerald green Victorian gown. Her long blond hair had been piled on her head and now formed a golden halo around her face in the snow. Blood dripped from her neck and speckled the white landscape with spots of bright red. She looked so familiar….
Danny stood up and started to back away from the body. He needed to call this in to the station. He needed backup. He froze again as he heard the gliding sound return, closer now. And the moon had disappeared, plunging him back into darkness. Where was his flashlight? A beam of light to his left caught his eye.
“Are you looking for this?”
Aleksei held Danny’s flashlight in his hand. The wind rippled through his blond hair as his dark blue eyes met Danny’s gaze.
“You…” Danny took more steps backwards. “Stay away from me. Stay the hell away from me!”
He fell back into the snow and within seconds, Aleksei, towered over him.
“Stay away from you? Why didn’t you stay away from me? You were never meant to find Maria…”
“Get back!”
Aleksei laughed and leaned closer to Danny. He smiled, revealing his fangs.
“What are you so afraid of, Detective?”
“Stay away!”
Danny jumped and sat straight up in bed. His sheets were a knotted mess at his feet and his pillow lay crumpled in a ball on the floor. Sox sat at the foot of the bed and stared at him with cocked ears and a puzzled expression on his face
Danny gulped in air and looked around his Fairbanks bedroom, trying to convince himself that his surroundings were real. He wasn’t in the Arctic and it wasn’t winter. As if trying to help Danny get his bearings, Sox padded up to him and licked his face.
He reached out to pet the dog with a trembling hand.
“That’s a good boy,” he said. “You must be getting used to this by now.”
Danny continued to take deep breaths until his heart returned to a normal beat and his hands stopped shaking. The nightmares had been increasing steadily over the past few weeks, and last night’s case had done noth
ing to keep them at bay.
Glancing over at his bedside table, Danny looked at his clock and was amazed to see it was only 11:00 a.m. He’d only been asleep for three hours. But that was three hours too many. If there was one thing Danny hated now, it was sleep.
He rolled out of bed and went straight to his kitchen to make a pot of coffee. As the coffee brewed and its scent filled the room, Danny headed for the bathroom and a scalding hot shower. It was time to go to work.
****
Chapter 6
Danny strolled into the Fairbanks police department thirty minutes later with a thermos of coffee in one hand and a cold Pop-tart in the other. Bypassing his desk, he went straight to the department conference room, where he found Jack Meyer, Tessa and Anthony Rizzo already waiting for him.
“Morning, Danny,” Tessa said.
His mouth full of blueberry Pop-tart, Danny nodded a greeting as he sat down at the table. He swallowed his breakfast, took a sip of coffee and immediately stood up again to cross the room and open a row of windows. To his dismay, the hot air outside did nothing to ease the stifling air in the room.
“Why don’t you people in this state believe in central air?” he asked as he sat back down in his chair.
“You know how many days we normally need it?” Jack answered, wiping the sweat that had beaded on his brow. “Christ, half the time we don’t even get above 70 degrees in the summer. Why the hell would we need central air conditioning?”
“We need it this summer,” Danny said. “We could at least get a window unit.”
“Fitzpatrick, can we talk about this poor bastard that burned to a crisp last night or do you have more to say about your own discomfort?” Jack asked.
Jack was a large man, with a booming voice to match his size. His face was perpetually red, or at least it seemed to be whenever he was around Danny. Danny was well aware that he irritated his boss to no end but he made no effort to change the situation.
He took another bite of Pop-tart and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “By all means, let’s talk about the poor bastard. What do we know?”
Anthony Rizzo spoke up. “Not much, I’m afraid. We haven’t been able to find any sign of an accelerant or a combustible substance on the remains or in the area.”
“The flames were white when Tessa and I got to the body,” Danny said. “That indicates the hottest temperature, right?”
“Sure does. You’re talking over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit right there.” Rizzo paused. “So far we’ve done preliminary tests looking for liquids with low auto-ignition points, meaning they’ll start on fire without any kind of accelerant. Keep in mind though, there’s no auto-ignition point that’s anywhere near as close to a normal air temperature even on a hot night like last night, but I don’t know where else to start. I’ll be honest, none of this makes a damn bit of sense.”
“What did we get from the interviews?” Jack asked.
Danny answered first. “I talked to the two kids who were sneaking into the woods for a make-out session right before the fire started. They both said they saw a shadow in front of the runner before he grabbed his throat and appeared to be choking, but then the figure disappeared. I’d think they were just seeing things if I hadn’t seen it too, like I told you last night.”
“Yeah, I remember. But what the hell was it?”
“I don’t know. A shadow, like the kids said. Honest to God, that’s all I saw too. It looked like a figure in shadow. I thought it was a trick of the light because of the sun still being so high in the sky. Wouldn’t thought a thing of it if what came next hadn’t happened.”
“Anybody else report seeing anything?”
“No,” Tessa said.
“Nothing,” Danny said. “The only thing of interest I got was the kids saying they heard chanting before the fire started.”
“What was that about again?” Jack asked.
“The two teenagers who were closest to the fire when it started both told me they heard a man’s voice chanting something. They felt like the voice was coming from right in front of the jogger but they couldn’t see anyone.”
“What was the man chanting?”
“They couldn’t say. They said the chants were in a foreign language and they couldn’t guess what it was. The kids said they know French and Spanish so it wasn’t either one of those. The boy said the words sounded harsh.”
“Well where in hell was the guy who was chanting?”
“They never saw anyone. I didn’t see anyone either.” Danny shrugged his shoulders. “It’s another mystery. What about the surveillance cameras at the park? Or the cell phone videos? Anything useful there?”
Jack sighed. “We’re pulling together the cell phone footage but so far all anyone recorded is the fire itself. That and selfies of themselves at the game before the fire started. But honestly there’s not much. Only a few people recorded the fire. Almost everyone there was too stunned and horrified to remember to turn their damn cameras on and record that poor stiff burning to death. I’ve got guys going over the surveillance cameras now too but none were focused on that area of the track. I don’t think we’re going to get anything from them. And I went through the uniforms' reports from last night and they didn’t get anything either. Not a damn thing that could point us to a lead. All we’ve got is some unseen person chanting and Fitzpatrick’s shadow thing, which means we've got shit. No offense, Fitzpatrick.”
“None taken. But don’t forget the kids saw it too. It could mean something, if we can figure out who or what it was.”
Jack turned back to Anthony Rizzo. “Have you heard anything on the identification of this guy? Do we know who he is? Or was?”
Rizzo shook his head. “No. Forensics was able to get partial prints and we're waiting for a match on those.”
“They got fingerprints from that?” Danny asked. “How?”
“The victim was in what's called the fighter's stance – fingers clenched, arms up. It's what bodies do when they're burning. The balled up hands usually allow for fingerprints, at least partial ones.”
“No one has called in to report a family member or friend going jogging last night and not coming home,” Tessa said.
“It seemed like half the city was at that game last night,” Danny said. “Everyone must have heard about this by now. Somebody must know the guy.”
Jack sighed. “With luck we'll get a call on a missing person. Or a match on those prints.” He rubbed his eyes with beefy fingers. “Christ what a mess.”
“What could have started that fire?” Tessa asked Anthony.
“Honestly, I don't know. All I can figure is somebody tossed something combustible onto the trail and since everything is so dry because of this heat it caught fire. Maybe something as simple as a burning cigarette.”
“You really think a cigarette could have started a fire that intense in such a short time? The way those flames engulfed that poor guy, it seemed like someone poured gasoline all over him and then tossed a match,” Tessa said. “I've never seen a fire like that. I almost got burned myself just standing next to it.”
“The guy was rolling in the grass to try to put the fire out while Tessa and I were running towards him,” Danny said. “Didn't make a damn bit of difference. If anything, the flames just got worse.”
“So much for stop, drop and roll,” Jack said.
Anthony shook his head. “I know it doesn't add up,” he said. “But I can't find any explanation that does.”
“Let's go back to the interviews,” Jack said. “Anybody acting strange when you talked to them? Maybe overly excited? We know arsonists love to hang around the scene of their handiwork.”
“I didn't pick up on anything like that,” Danny said. “Everyone I talked to just seemed to be in shock.”
“Same here,” Tessa said.
“I don't really know what we can do here,” Jack said. “We don't even know if this is a homicide or some kind of freak accident.”
“Or even a f
reak of nature,” Anthony said.
Jack raised his eyebrows. “Meaning?”
Anthony shrugged his shoulders. “Spontaneous human combustion?”
“Is that real?” Tessa asked. “I know I've heard of it but I've always thought there must be some rational explanation for the fire that people just can't discover.”
Danny stared at the table and remained silent. He didn't know anything about spontaneous human combustion, but he knew there were things that defied rational explanation. In the past, he would have scoffed at the idea of spontaneous human combustion and questioned its existence just like Tessa. But thanks to Aleksei Nechayev, there wasn't anything he scoffed at now.
“Christ Almighty,” Jack said. “I don't even want to go there. Let's just wait for the report from the ME. I don't know what else we can do for now.”
Danny and Tessa started to get up from the table when Jack stopped them.
“Fitzpatrick, I need to talk to you for a minute.”
Danny sat back down in his chair.
“You two are free to go,” Jack said, gesturing at Tessa and Anthony.
Danny watched his colleagues leave the room and turned back to his boss.
“Did I do something to piss you off again?” he asked.
“No, no,” Jack said, shaking his head. “I wanted to let you know I got a report from the FBI team up in the Arctic.”
A chill took over Danny’s body in spite of the heat in the room.
“You know Fairbanks isn't the only part of the state under a heat wave,” his boss continued. “It's warmer than usual up there too. The snow melt is helping them with their investigation.”
“How so?” Danny asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
“They've turned up three more bodies. All young women. The cold and the ice left them remarkably preserved.”
Danny nodded. “Have they ID'd them?”
“One of them. They found your old case. Anna Alexander.”
Danny's throat closed up. Anna was the reason he had stumbled upon Aleksei Nechayev. Her resemblance to another missing woman, Maria Treibel, had sent Danny sniffing in Aleksei's direction. He'd followed his gut instinct that the two women were connected, never imagining where that instinct would ultimately lead him.
Polar (Book 2): Polar Day Page 3
