Burned Too Hot: A Thriller (Val Ryker series Book 2)

by Ann Voss Peterson

  “I know it seems whenever I call I need a favor, but I need a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “After I left Chicago, I didn’t keep in touch with anyone but you, and I haven’t done a good job of that. But this is somewhat sensitive, and I hate to impose—”

  “Just ask, Val.”

  “I doubt you remember the doctor I was engaged to, Mark Sheridan, but I need to know what he’s been up to in the past fifteen years or so.”

  “Can’t just ask him, huh?”

  “And get the truth? I doubt it.”

  “Sounds like you need a private investigator, and it just so happens I’m hanging out my shingle.”

  “You? That’s fantastic.”

  “Do you need this information right away?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Okay, I’m not sure I can personally handle it, but I’ll find someone who can. You’ll have to give me a little more to go on.”

  Val gave her his date of birth, his address, and his work history, back when she knew it.

  “When is the last time you saw him?” Jack asked.

  “The day he volunteered to take my engagement ring to the jeweler to have it sized and instead pawned it.”

  “Ouch.”

  “He had a few… financial problems.”

  “So that’s what you’re looking for? Want to see if he has gotten his shit together?”

  Val considered this for a second. “I don’t care about his shit. I want to know why he’s in Lake Loyal. Or at least be ready for whatever it is he’s about to spring on me.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Val thanked Jack. Since there was no threat to Grace, Val dropped her niece off at school and drove back to the Tiedemann house, somewhat buoyed by a feeling she’d done all she could on the ex-fiancé front, at least for now.

  Buoyed, that is, until she actually arrived.

  In the darkness, the house had looked bad. But now that the scene was bathed in the fresh light of morning, it was more along the lines of breathtakingly horrible.

  On one end of the house, the roof gaped like a screaming mouth, charred beams the blackened, chipped teeth. Every window, it seemed, was broken, tracks of soot trailing upward over the siding. The morning twitter of birds seemed incongruous with the devastation, their cheeriness as misplaced as wild giggles at a funeral.

  The house had changed from a first responder situation to a crime scene now, and despite Val’s official intention to wait for the evidence, her every instinct said it would remain that way. Only a handful of firefighters and officers lingered, sticking to the periphery, allowing only essential personnel to get near the house. The fire marshal had arrived and was with Olson, further documenting the scene with photographs and video. The concerned neighbors who’d filled the sidewalk earlier were gone, no doubt either back in their beds or getting ready for work.

  Climbing out of the car, Val was met by Lund. Bunker pants marred with soot, he had stripped down to his t-shirt even in the cold, and the damp cotton clung to him like a second skin. He wore his helmet, but the SCBA and face mask were gone. However the hollow pain she’d seen in his eyes when she’d told him the toddler’s identity was still there.

  “Grace okay?”

  “Grace is fine,” she said. “Lund, I’m so…”

  “Olson and the fire marshal are inside,” he said, cutting her off. He held a clean white t-shirt out to her like a peace offering. “You might want to pull this over your suit. It won’t cover you totally, but it can’t hurt.”

  She eyed the damp shirt on his back. “But weren’t you going to change?”

  “I’m not dressed to go in front of cameras later. Take it. Please.”

  She hated the awkwardness between them, the shirt he gave as a peace offering, the polite talk. His anger with her earlier had been more authentic. But if there was one thing Val had learned in her life, the more raw the feelings and higher the stakes, the less you could afford honesty.

  Leaving her jacket in her car, she pulled the white tee on over her blouse, and Lund led the way to the house. Two other firefighters stood outside the kitchen door, Dempsey and Johnson. Val nodded a greeting.

  “Your alarm system wasn’t tampered with, at least not that we can tell,” Lund was saying. They stepped just inside the door, and he gestured to the melted hunk of white plastic mounted on the wall. “It looks like it just wasn’t armed, not that I can be sure. As you can see, the damage in here is pretty severe.”

  Val couldn’t disagree. If she thought the exterior of the house was bad, she had to admit the inside was pure hell.

  The smell of char was so strong, Val opted to breathe through her mouth. From dishes in the cabinets to the appliances on the counters and the knick knacks on the living room’s built-in shelves, everything was melted and warped to the point where she couldn’t tell one item from another. It didn’t help that the second floor now mingled with the first, the entire place a pile of refuse, broken, burned, and soggy with water.

  She’d barely had the chance to examine the now-deformed security system panel when a SUV pulled into the drive, the outline of a dog kennel visible through the back window. While the handler checked in with Olson and the deputy fire marshal and acclimated the dog to his surroundings, Val asked Lund to continue, wanting to push the search for Ethan Tiedemann’s little body to the back of her mind for as long as she could.

  Lund pointed to the far wall. “See that V pattern in the back of the house? That shape tells us the fire might have started there. In this case, near the sofa.”

  Val squinted through the gloom. “That’s not definitive, though, right?”

  “Right. Which is why we use a number of indicators. And all of them—the V pattern, depth of char, heat damage—suggest the fire started on that end of the house.”

  “In addition to witness reports from first responders and neighbors,” Johnson added.

  Val hadn’t had a chance to read the reports, and there were dozens of them, some fairly technical. Exactly why the fire marshal’s office headed such investigations and not tiny local police departments like the LLPD.

  Lund redirected her attention to the walls and ceilings at the back of the house. “Fire is hot, and hot air rises. So fire is always going to burn upward, then travel along the ceiling until it finds an open door and can spread to the next room. Theoretically, the spot where the fire started is going to experience the hottest flame and the deepest char, but there can be many variables.”

  “So if the fire started over there, why is everything in the kitchen melted?”

  “The sofa’s upholstery, the fabric in those curtains, and the glue in the carpet and wall paneling all burn fast and hot. It doesn’t take long for a fire like that to flashover.”

  “Flashover?”

  “The temperature gets so high that virtually every fuel source in the room ignites.”

  Val looked at the shapes so contorted it was difficult to tell what some items had been. She had a feeling she knew where this was going, but she took it step by step anyway. “What would start a fire in the middle of the living room?”

  “In this case? Arson.”

  “How was it set?”

  Johnson, Dempsey, and Lund exchanged glances Val couldn’t read.

  “You don’t know yet?” she asked.

  “We know,” Lund said. “You remember the recent arsons? The shed out behind the old Murphy place? The old garage on Branch Street? The vacant mining equipment plant in West Baraboo?”

  “The Merlyne plant,” Johnson supplied.

  How could she forget? “A milk jug filled with gasoline?”

  Lund nodded. “With a towel used as a wick.”

  Val glanced at Dempsey then Johnson. “So why the look?”

  Johnson spoke. “We disagree.”

  “Disagree about what?” she asked him.

  “I don’t see how someone goes from setting fires in abandoned structures to burning down a house
with a family sleeping inside. I realize there are a lot of reasons for arson. Collecting insurance money, covering up evidence of another crime. But this guy has set fire to abandoned buildings, a shuttered business, and an occupied home. How do you explain that?”

  “Anger?” Lund said. “Revenge?”

  Val felt his eyes on her. She glanced at him, then back to Johnson. “It can also be an attempt to gain control. The arsonist isn’t able to control anything in his life, but by setting a fire, he can make first responders jump.”

  Johnson scratched the orange stubble on his chin. “I assume that’s why Jimmy Weiss was shooting video of the crowd out on the street. If that’s his motive, he’d want to watch.”

  “Or maybe the other fires were practice runs,” Lund said, “all leading up to this, the main event.”

  “This house? This neighborhood?” Johnson shook his head. “It doesn’t seem like the same guy. Feels wrong.”

  “How many guys you think go around with milk jugs of gasoline handy?” Dempsey asked.

  “The milk jug thing was in the papers and on T.V.” Johnson said. “This could be some kind of copycat. That happens all the time, and you know it.”

  Bix Johnson was a seasoned firefighter with good instincts. His approach was logical. Everything he said made sense… but only if you thought the Tiedemanns were an average middle class family. Only if you thought no one had a reason to target them.

  Johnson didn’t know who the Tiedemanns’ little boy was, and that one fact changed everything.

  “You ready for us?” a voice called from behind them, and Val turned to see dog and handler approaching the house.

  She had met the gorgeous German shepherd named Ulysses and his private-citizen handler, Ronald, while searching for a deer hunter who had gone missing in the forest preserve the previous fall. But while the county sheriff, the state fire marshal, and many larger local PDs had dogs who detected narcotics and accelerants and live human beings, Ulysses was rare.

  He sniffed out dead people.

  “We can wait, if you’re finishing up something,” Ronald called.

  Val mustered a grim smile. “No, no, we’re ready when you are.”

  Ronald led Ulysses into the house.

  “So finding a body… he doesn’t get depressed?” Johnson asked, both he and Dempsey fading back, as if retreating now that the dreaded moment was at hand.

  “He does if I do.” Ronald said. “Kinda takes his cues from me.”

  Val doubted any of them, including the dog, would feel playful when they actually found little Ethan in the charred rubble. “There was a dog, former case back in Chicago, he didn’t want to go near the body. He seemed pretty upset.”

  “Some of them search and rescue dogs whose job is finding live humans can take it pretty hard. But Ulysses here? Human decomposition is just a smell to him. He finds it, we play ball. Simple as that.” He unclipped the leash from Ulysses’s collar, and the dog moved into the kitchen, weaving through the nooks and crevices between rubble. Head up, Ulysses was all business, nose twitching in obvious sniffing mode.

  Val glanced at Lund. The corners of his eyes looked pinched, as if he was bracing himself for the worst.

  Just as she was.

  “I can’t smell anything in here besides smoke,” she said.

  “That’s because we got about five million olfactory receptor cells. A bloodhound? He has one hundred million. A German shepherd is probably close to that.” Roland said over his shoulder, following Ulysses into the next room.

  “I’ve worked with dogs that detect accelerants,” Lund said. “Works the same way. You’ve heard of scent cone theory?”

  “That’s where the smell is strongest at the source and then dissipates in the air, moving outward like a cone?”

  Lund gave her a nod. “Once he picks out the scent he’s trained to look for, he follows it as it gets stronger, reaching the source.”

  She glanced up at the hole on the far end of the house, the stream of sunlight highlighting the smoke-clouded air as if beaming down from heaven. “What if there’s a breeze?”

  “The cone will fan out down wind. Barriers also change the way scent disperses.”

  “Barriers like walls and debris?”

  “The air flow can make the scent molecules pool in various places away from the origin. This scene is pretty small, though, so I doubt that will matter.”

  If she thought of scent molecules and air flow, she could almost forget the dog was searching for the dead body of a child.

  Almost.

  Val listened to the dog’s panting, the jingle of tags on a collar, and the drip of water somewhere in the basement. She wanted to say something, to move, to scream. That she was sure Lund was feeling the same sense of foreboding didn’t help. Both of them tied in knots, waiting for the worst, and not able to say or do anything to make it better.

  Dog and handler passed them and descended the steps to the basement. After a few minutes, the duo was back. “Ma’am?”

  Val tamped down emotion and turned to face him. “Ulysses found something?”

  “No.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “There’s no body.”

  For a moment, his words didn’t register, and when they did, she didn’t want to risk believing. “Are you sure?”

  “If there was a body, he would have picked up the scent. He didn’t pick up anything at all.”

  As much as Val wanted to hope he was right, there were too many questions unanswered, too many possibilities unaddressed. It seemed as though the dog had thoroughly sniffed his way through the debris, but what she saw in front of her wasn’t all there was to the house. Even now she could hear the drip, drip, drip.

  “The basement is filled with water. Maybe he couldn’t—”

  “Ma’am, this dog can sniff out a drowning victim in a lake. There’s only a few feet of flooding downstairs. I’m telling you; there’s no body.”

  No body.

  No body.

  No body.

  Val’s pulse thumped in her ears. An eighteen-month-old child didn’t just walk out of his house and disappear without a trace. They hadn’t found any sign of him last night. The dog found no scent of him this morning. That left only one logical conclusion.

  “Oh my God.” She turned to Lund. “The arsonist took him.”

  Six weeks before…

  THE STATE OF WISCONSIN

  VS.

  HESS, Dixon G.

  PROCEEDINGS

  MR. ASHER: Chief Ryker, you arrested my client before, isn’t that correct?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: Isn’t it a fact that you arrested my client for the murder of a young woman named Kelly Ann Lund, maiden name Meinholz?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: Approximately when did that arrest take place in relation to this current arrest?

  CHIEF RYKER: About two years before.

  MR. ASHER: And there was a trial in that case, isn’t that right?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: Did you testify in that first trial, just as you are testifying now?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: The verdict in that case was guilty, wasn’t it?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: Now if it pleases the court, I’d like to direct attention to this incident report from early December, fourteen months ago, and enter it into evidence.

  THE COURT: Go ahead. Let the record show the report has been entered into evidence.

  MR. ASHER: Chief Ryker, your signature is on this incident report, isn’t that correct?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: And this incident report is dated the same week as the reports the prosecution entered into the record, isn’t that true?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: The incident in this report is also a death, is it not?

  CHIEF RYKER: It is.

  MR. ASHER: A homicide, just like th
e others, correct?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: Will you read for me the name of the person who died? And please do so in a loud, clear voice so the jury can hear.

  CHIEF RYKER: Kelly Ann Lund.

  MR. ASHER: Amazing. And isn’t that the very same woman you arrested and convicted my client for murdering, Chief Ryker? Your honor, I would ask that the court instruct the witness to answer.

  THE COURT: Chief Ryker?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: So you’re saying you arrested Dixon Hess for the murder of Kelly Ann Lund only to have her body turn up freshly murdered months later?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: Do you now admit Dixon Hess did not murder Kelly Ann Lund?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: And that your arrest of my client for Mrs. Lund’s murder and your testimony at that trial caused him to serve time in prison, when in reality he was totally innocent of the crime?

  CHIEF RYKER: Just because he didn’t kill her himself—

  MR. ASHER: I would ask that the court instruct the witness to answer yes or no.

  THE COURT: So instructed. Chief Ryker, you know how this game is played.

  CHIEF RYKER: He has a dangerous influence over others.

  MR. ASHER: Move to strike, your honor.

  THE COURT: Granted. Please strike the witness’s last response from the record, and members of the jury, you are instructed to disregard. I’m warning you, Chief. Are you looking for a contempt charge?

  CHIEF RYKER: I apologize, your honor.

  THE COURT: If you’d like to restate the question, Mr. Asher…

  MR. ASHER: Chief Ryker, didn’t the court rule that my client could not have killed Mrs. Kelly Ann Lund because she was still alive at the time of his conviction?

  CHIEF RYKER: Yes.

  MR. ASHER: Your honor, I’m finished with this witness.

  Chapter

  Five

  Lund

  It took a full minute, maybe more, for the news about Kelly’s baby to sink in before Lund’s voice would function. Hell, before his brain would. By the time he could do more than stand there like an idiot, Ronald was outside giving Ulysses the play time he’d promised, and Lund caught Val between her conversation with Sergeant Olson and her car.