The Burnt Remains

by Alex P. Berg

  That caught the big guy off guard. “What?”

  I sighed. “I think my boyfriend and I might’ve broken up last night.”

  Justice’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean, you think? Did you or didn’t you?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know. I mean, I’ve broken up with guys before. Normally there’s yelling or insults thrown around, and in one instance punches, but this time… there wasn’t. Just a sense of sadness that lingered. We even slept in the same bed afterwards, but nonetheless, I have a feeling it’s over.”

  Justice’s eyebrows shot up. “You think you broke up, but you still spent the night at his place?”

  “We share an apartment.”

  Justice’s mouth made a little ‘o’, or as little as it was capable of. “Okay. For future reference, I shouldn’t be your go to target for relationship advice, but even I can tell you that you need to find a new place to stay. Like, today.”

  I snorted. “Gee, thanks. I hadn’t thought of that while staring through the windshield listlessly. You want to forget the case and drive me to some listings?”

  The ogre shook his head. “I’m just saying…”

  I turned my attention back out the windshield, feeling a bit miffed, but I only needed a moment to recover. Justice hadn’t meant any ill. “Sorry. That was uncalled for. It hit me out of nowhere, that’s all.”

  Justice shook his head, eyes on the road. “No apology necessary. I get it. Break ups are complicated at the best of times.” He paused for a moment. “Do you love him?”

  I thought about that, and about the note Cliff left me over chicken stir fry. “I don’t know. I like him a lot, though.”

  Justice nodded, as if that was all I needed to say. “That’s what makes it hard.”

  We both rode in silence for the rest of the trip, though it only took us a few minutes before we rolled into the Fogel and Sons parking lot. Justice asked me if I was ready as he killed the engine, but I assured him I was fine. I might let my personal life loose in the car, but I was professional enough to leave it hidden from everyone else.

  Justice and I pushed into the storefront. The shopkeeper’s bell rang, but unlike a couple days prior, there wasn’t anyone at the desk on the far side to help us.

  Justice stepped into the middle of the displays, looking over them. “Hello? Anyone home?”

  The walls failed to answer him, so I suggested we try the back. I headed down the hall and punched through the heavy steel door into the cavernous room behind. Luckily, it was more heavily populated than the front. Fogel stood on the concrete floor in front of a body on a gurney as three goblins circled him: one taking notes on a clipboard, another cataloging personal belongings, and third standing idly by with a mangled push broom in hand.

  Fogel swiveled about at the steel door’s clang. He looked tired. “Officers. Sorry. I must not have heard the bell.”

  Justice descended the steps to the main floor. “Not a problem. We found you. We’re resourceful like that.”

  Fogel nodded, the dim light reflecting off the bags under his eyes. “What can I help you with? Don’t suppose you’ve come to shed light on my gas bill problem.”

  Justice waved for me to take over, given I’d been the one to talk to Jowynn the night before. Good thing I was becoming more comfortable in the role. “Not exactly, Mr. Fogel. Do you remember the sample we scraped out of your furnaces a couple days ago? We analyzed it and found something odd amidst the ash. Asbestos.”

  Fogel’s eyes widened. “Come again?”

  Justice had split off toward the furnaces, his massive hands stuffed into his pockets. A scowl spread across his face, as if he disapproved of something. I don’t know if it was an act, but it seemed to be working if Fogel’s nervous look was any indication.

  “Asbestos,” I said. “It’s a silicate mineral, banned for use in consumer products due to its toxicity. It’s particularly dangerous to breath it in. Can I ask where the flue gas for these furnaces goes?”

  Fogel was running a few steps behind. “Hold on. Asbestos? Why would there be asbestos in my furnaces?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I said. “You mentioned your dad built them from scratch. Do you know what materials went into their construction?”

  Fogel’s eyes remained wide. Between that and the bags, he looked a little wild, but he wasn’t the only one. The two goblins near the cart looked up at him in confusion, but the one with the broom had backed a foot away. I kept an eye on him.

  “No way,” said Fogel. “There’s no chance my dad put toxic materials in the furnaces. They’re made of fire bricks. Besides, if there was asbestos in them wouldn’t it have burned up decades ago?”

  “I couldn’t say. I’m not an expert. What about attire? Might any of the deceased you cremate have been wearing fire-resistant clothing?”

  Fogel shook his head. “We strip everyone down. That’s what we’re doing with this individual. All part of the process.”

  “What about other stuff?” I asked. “Have you ever burned waste materials in your furnaces? Drywall, plaster, insulation, roofing shingles?”

  The goblin with the broom took another step back, suggesting I might’ve hit on something even if Fogel hadn’t realized it. “Of course not. Why in the world would I burn construction materials in my furnaces?”

  I pointed to the goblin with the broom. “You might want to ask that guy.”

  “Urzz? Why would he know?” Fogel did a double take before turning back to the goblin. “Actually… doesn’t your uncle work in construction, Urzz?”

  Urzz hesitated for a fraction of a second before throwing his broom at us and darting toward the rolling shutters on the far wall. Fogel cursed and batted down the broom. Under better circumstances, Urzz’s quick-thinking might’ve allowed him to reach the door before us, but the little guy forgot about Justice. The huge ogre lunged and scooped Urzz up as he might a feral cat, holding him by the back of the shirt as he struggled and cursed in some foreign tongue.

  Justice pulled handcuffs from his back pocket and smiled. “Looks like you could’ve been an exterminator, Phair. You couldn’t have flushed this rodent out any easier if you had a telescoping pole.”

  “Flushing him was the easy part,” I said, as the little guy continued to spit and sputter. “Getting him to explain to us what the heck is going on might be a whole lot harder.”

  Chapter Thirty

  A couple officers slurped their coffee in the Fifth Street precinct lobby as Justice and I entered. A guy who was about seven and a half feet tall loomed over the duty officer at the welcome desk, inquiring about a parking violation, but what drew my eye was Detective Dean, who stood by the entrance to the pit as he spoke with Captain Ellison.

  Dean noticed us, giving us a nod and saying something to the captain that made him take notice as well. The captain patted Dean on the shoulder, meeting my eyes before he turned toward his office. There wasn’t malice in his gaze, just a knowing glance, as if to say he was keeping an eye on Dean and me both.

  Dean met us near the welcome desk as we pushed our charge into the station. He nodded toward the goblin at our knees, his hands cuffed before him. “This is?”

  “Yoiks Glamfist,” said Justice. “Owner and operator of Glamfist Remediation. We’re booking him on conspiracy, breaking and entering, and multiple counts of violating the Clean Air and Asbestos Elimination acts.”

  Dean lifted an eyebrow. “We do that now? I thought we were in homicide. Did I miss a memo?”

  “Yoiks is the uncle of a goblin by the name of Urzz, who until this morning worked at Fogel and Sons Crematorium,” I said. “As it turns out, Mr. Glamfist’s remediation business isn’t on the up and up. He’s been skirting health and occupational safety guidelines while ripping out asbestos insulation and drywall from people’s homes, but he’s been putting more than his own workers’ health at risk. Instead of disposing of the asbestos properly, he’s been having Urzz let him into the cremator
ium and burning the materials in the furnaces overnight, which, I shouldn’t have to tell you, is super dangerous.”

  Dean’s face grew tight as he glared at the goblin. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Glamfist. So instead of paying a fee to properly dispose of that stuff, you incinerated it and spewed the toxins all over the city? All to save yourself a few crowns?”

  Glamfist didn’t say a thing, keeping his eyeballs glued to the floor.

  Justice snorted and shook his head. “You’re not going to get a confession out of him. Glamfist is exercising his right to remain silent. Either that or he doesn’t speak our language.”

  “Oh, he speaks it,” I said. “He didn’t seem to have any problem understanding our commands when we rolled up to his place of business.”

  Dean scowled as he shot a thumb over his shoulder. “Unbelievable. Get him booked, Justice.”

  “You got it.” Justice shoved the goblin forward.

  Dean watched the pair walk toward the pit, shaking his head as they left. “Guys like that disgust me.”

  “More so than the killers you normally pursue?” I asked.

  “I think you’ll find most of the folks we put behind bars aren’t particularly vicious or cruel,” said Dean. “They just get themselves into emotionally charged situations and make split-second decisions that snuff out another person’s life. Even career criminals who commit murder usually don’t do it on purpose. They panic when a robbery or an extortion attempt goes wrong, and before they know it, someone’s dead. There are of course those with screws loose. The ones who get a sick pleasure from killing. I’ll never understand them, but arguably worse are those who put others at risk and don’t even care. That’s Glamfist. He’d let hundreds die so he could afford a slightly nicer car. Think about that.”

  “You really think he’s on the same level as someone like the Tarot Card Killer?”

  Dean shot an admonishing eyebrow my way. “That might be taking it too far. There are those who kill for sport and those who torture their victims as they go. Those who make them suffer even as they’re dying. I don’t think there’s any worse group.”

  I swallowed hard, not wanting to think about it. “Well, we nailed Glamfist, but the bad news is we hit a dead end on our crematorium lead. Fogel and Sons was being used after hours all right, but not to cremate Stella Vernon.”

  “I surmised as much,” said Dean. “I suspected it once I saw Jowynn’s report.”

  “He left you one?”

  “On my desk. Just saw it, along with the report from CSU about Stella’s car.”

  “Any thoughts as to who she might’ve been running away with?” I asked.

  The duty officer at the welcome desk had extracted himself from the giant’s grasp and was on the phone. He held the receiver to his shoulder as he called out. “Detective Dean? Call for you!”

  Dean lifted a finger. “Give me a moment.”

  He headed over and took the phone. The hum of activity from the pit prevented me from hearing everything Dean said into the mouthpiece, but I caught a snippet or two.

  Dean nodded and replaced the phone, heading back to me with his brow furrowed and lips twisted into a frown.

  I put the only snippet I’d overheard to good use. “Was that Mr. Vernon?”

  Dean nodded. “Yeah. And you’ll never guess what he just received in the mail.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  JT Vernon paced behind the desk in his idiosyncratic study, his face flushed. “This is outrageous, detectives! To think of everything I’ve gone through these past few days. Finding out my wife has been murdered, her remains dumped in one of the animal pens at my own circus like so much garbage. To learn it was her from dental x-rays, of all things. To not be afforded the chance to gaze upon her and say one last goodbye. But this? How can this hellish nightmare refuse to recede even after my wife is dead? What kind of callous, despicable rogue would do this? To keep blackmailing me after my wife has been reduced to so much ash and dust? Who, I ask?”

  I sat with Dean in one of the chairs before Vernon’s desk. It struck me as pertinent that Vernon’s self-aggrieved whining was about the effects of his wife’s murder on him, not on the pain and suffering she might’ve endured, but I pushed that to the side as I focused on the new blackmail letter in front of me.

  Dean focused on the letter, too. “To be honest, Mr. Vernon, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say someone has kept blackmailing you after your wife’s death.”

  Vernon scowled, his cheeks red. “You’re an expert on linguistics now, are you? How would you put it?”

  “You’re missing my point,” said Dean. “There are differences between this letter and the first two that suggest a new blackmailer might be behind this.”

  Vernon’s eyes widened. “What? You’ve got to be joking!”

  “I wish I was,” said Dean, “as it would make this case easier to unravel, but no. As you’ve no doubt noticed, the blackmailer has demanded to switch the drop site. The first two letters instructed you to deposit the cash under a bridge. This one requests you leave it underneath the bleachers in the tent at your circus, tonight no less. Do you have a show going on this evening?”

  “Of course,” said Vernon. “Three times a week, like clockwork.”

  Dean rubbed his chin. “I imagine the blackmailer knew that. Instead of demanding you leave the money in an isolated location, they’ve gone in the opposite direction, now choosing a crowded locale. The shift in tactics suggests one of two things. The first is that they suspect the police are now involved. A remote drop location served well when it was you or your butler dropping cash, but the same location is a liability when you have people watching the bag. The other possibility is that we’re dealing with a new criminal who employs a different strategy.”

  Vernon snarled, his nostrils wide. “That’s ludicrous! What are the chances that not one but two lowlifes are extorting me at the same time!”

  “Perhaps not as slim as you might think,” said Dean. “The key element of an extortion attempt is the blackmail, in this case the photos you don’t want getting out. It’s entirely possible the individual who first blackmailed you was working with a partner, one who’s decided to take another dip into the honey pot. Or it could be the blackmailer sold their operation to another enterprising law-breaker. That’s why we recommend that people who are being extorted only pay off their blackmailers once we’re tracking the money, because if you pay them and they suffer no consequences, they’re going to keep coming back. There’s no incentive for them to ever stop.”

  Vernon wiped a hand across his face. “You don’t understand. I had to pay them! My campaign was ramping up. We’d been getting positive press, radio interviews, newspaper features. The polls were tipping in my favor. I couldn’t have those photos of my wife leak. Everything would’ve been ruined!”

  Dean cocked his head in acknowledgement. “And your blackmailers surely knew that. They target people at their weakest. Their most vulnerable. That’s how they succeed.”

  “Well, they succeeded with me, that’s for damned sure.” Vernon threw an angry hand at the letter. “You said there were multiple differences between this letter and the last. Do you really think we’re dealing with someone new?”

  Dean peered at the letter. “Well, in addition to the drop location having changed, the instructions for the drop are more detailed. That could be due to the logistics of dropping off cash during a live show, or it could be an indicator of a new party at the helm. They’re also asking for double what the previous two letters did. There’s something else, though.” Dean pursed his lips. “Phair, do you see it?”

  Perhaps Dean didn’t want to mention what it was as a way to avoid influencing my thinking, but something had stood out to me from the first sentence I’d read. “The handwriting. This letter is in another person’s hand.”

  Vernon frowned. “Are you sure?”

  Dean nodded, but his focus wasn’t on Vernon. He looked at me with a measure of sa
tisfaction. “It’s definitely not the same handwriting as in the first two letters, which doesn’t definitively mean this is the work of another party. We could be dealing with a crew working together, but someone else wrote the letter, that much is plain.”

  It was the question of who wrote it that bothered me. As Moss had noted, the first two blackmail letters were written in a looping script, something Moss interpreted as a woman’s hand. I wasn’t so sure, but this wasn’t the same penmanship. Nonetheless, there was something about it that looked familiar. In fact, if I knew it wasn’t impossible, I might’ve thought it was Stella Vernon’s handwriting. It reminded me of her diary, but it was shaky, strained, perhaps rushed. Could it be possible she’d written it before her death, perhaps under threat of harm from her eventual murderer?

  Vernon placed his hands on his desk. He sighed, and his shoulders slumped. “Whoever wrote it, it’s blackmail nonetheless. I suppose it doesn’t matter. What’s imperative is that we catch the criminals behind this and destroy the photos. The viability of my campaign is going to hang by a thread once word of my wife’s murder leaks to the press. Perhaps I can spin it as a positive, get a bit of sympathy from voters as a result, but I won’t be able to if these photos get out. If that happens, it’s over.”

  Once again, it struck me how Vernon expressed far more sympathy for himself and his image than he did for his deceased wife, but I didn’t think it prudent to bring it up.

  Neither, apparently, did Dean. “It’ll be tricky to catch the perpetrators in the act on such short notice, but I’m open to trying if you are. We’ll need to scout the circus. Speak to your staff, so they understand they’ll be a police presence there tonight. Study the points of entry for the bleachers. Set up a perimeter with plainclothes officers and detectives at the exits. It’ll be a balancing act baiting the blackmailer to take the drop. If we’re too close, they’ll spot us and flee, which risks them releasing the blackmail, but if we’re not close enough, we risk them getting away. I’d suggest we leave a fake drop. A duffel, as listed in the letter, but filled with blank sheafs rather than bills.”