Jessie scoured the concrete pavement for a minute with his eyes. “They found his body and the remains of a ritual.”
“What ritual?”
“Well, someone drugged him and tied his wrists together. Then, and this is the worst part, he was burned alive.”
“Jeez… and they’re sure it’s Junior?”
Jessie nodded.
“Man, that kind of thing just doesn’t happen in Tranquil Heights,” I commented, to keep him talking.
“I know,” he mumbled. “Junior’s mom and mine are good friends. We were over there when the police arrived. His dad was freakin’ out. I spent last night with them. He was never into drugs or anything, so they’ve got no idea what might have caused this.”
“Junior was a good kid. Do they have any leads?”
“A couple things from what I can tell. The police mentioned this tattoo of an ankh on his forearm, but that’s not much to go on. Lots of people have that,” Jessie explained while staring off into the distant mountains. “What’s even weirder is where they found him.”
“Where was that?”
“The cemetery,” he muttered, “opposite side from your dad’s grave, across the road.”
“Jeez that’s weird. I was just there yesterday.”
“Yeah, they say it happened sometime in the night, probably early morning.”
“How about you? Got any ideas what he might’ve gotten into?”
Jessie shook his head, fighting tears that were struggling to flow. “Did you know I used to babysit him when his folks went out?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, the little man shouldn’t have gone out like that… well, I guess he wasn’t so little anymore, playing linebacker on the varsity team as a junior and all. But still, it ain’t right.”
“I know. Want me to take a look at some of his things? See if anything comes to me?”
Jessie nodded and his chin fell to his chest, eyes closed tight. I rested a hand on his shoulder, and then gave him a minute. I caught up with Paige, who was seated on the grass beneath a dogwood to the side of the walkway.
Chapter Two
New Lead
September 14, 2011
Junior Lee was only the first. The years since college when those murders began have been educational and fraught with easy lessons while faced with embarrassment. After the second year and a second murder, the mayor issued a public declaration that the killer would be caught by any means necessary. Unfortunately, even up to now the police force hadn’t found the appropriate means necessary. Who would’ve guessed that it would take fifteen years to finally catch a break and find a new lead?
The Tranquil Heights Airport could never be considered large. It consisted of one long, cigar-shaped building that looked more like a metal-paneled warehouse than an airport. The entrance and ticket counter on the far end, Benji’s Cuisine and a few waiting rooms for boarding in the center, and one small room at the opposite end where the baggage handlers dropped off your luggage. There wasn’t much need for more because most flights that traveled there were no bigger than commuter flights, seating around twenty people, like a Beechcraft 1900. A handful of flight enthusiasts had their own hangars and small-engine planes. It wasn’t what you would call an international airport.
Being such a small town, there wasn’t much call for security, but they had one guard with a nightstick and taser at the security checkpoint before the terminal—that is, unless he was on break at Benji’s. I had a few occasions to go there over the years.
I slipped out of my Lincoln as the dark-haired woman, who looked like a modern Mary Poppins, crossed the semi-vacant street to the waiting terminal. The gathering clouds overhead left the morning sun dim, and rain began to fall. She quickened her pace, her wide heels clopping on the asphalt as she lugged her bag over the curb and under the safety of the airport awning. Irene Harris was a person of interest. I’d been following her for the past two weeks, since she’d flown in from DC. Tilting my fedora to block the now-slanting droplets from my eyes, I crossed and leapt into the shelter. An escaped droplet ran down my spine, and I shook the collecting water from my long, black overcoat.
Irene was at the counter, picking up her ticket. She was chatty and had an easy smile, talking up the ticket agent. Mrs. Harris was smooth—well I guess Miss Harris or Widow Harris would be more accurate after the loss of her husband last year. He had been a businessman up in the big city, an accountant in a small practice. Over the past year, I’d looked into her and every person she associated with. A judge had let her off with time served for the three-month stint she spent in jail and four years of probation. Although the justice system gave her a slap on the wrist, I was certain she was getting away with a hell of a lot more.
I slipped through the automatic doors and drifted toward Benji’s, perusing the menu until she walked past to her flight. A glance at the digital display of flights said she had fifteen minutes till boarding. I followed, leaving some distance and people separating us. She walked with purpose, dragging her luggage along the white-tiled section of building. A squeaky wheel on the bag made her easy to track, even in a public place. Once on the carpet of the terminal, she weaved through the zigzagging, retractable-belt barriers. It was an overdone maze that led to the security conveyor belt and imaging terminal. I stifled a laugh. The airport and runway couldn’t handle jets or anything of size, but by God, they had enough retractable security barriers to direct crowds of people to a Rolling Stones concert in New York.
The passenger ahead of Irene passed through the metal detector and began putting his shoes and belt back on while gathering his briefcase and items. Miss Harris stepped up and pulled her ticket from the pocket of her purse. Unbeknownst to her and the security guard who was directing her through the detectors, a small, silver Zippo fell from her pocket to the carpet and bounced a few feet away.
I occupied myself reading the list of banned conveniences on a sign to the left, behind a portable wall that may have been standing longer than the building itself considering how dilapidated it had become. Once she’d passed through and started down the length of the building, I slipped under the retractable barrier without a second thought and grabbed the lighter. Larry, the security guard, watched me quizzically as I assessed the Zippo; the edges and cracks appeared scorched. Then the telltale aroma of oiled leather assaulted my senses, but this time mixed with the disturbing smell of burning flesh. I’d grown accustomed to these visions over the years, even expecting them at times, but that didn’t make it any easier when you were immersed. My eyes blurred as I became someone else.
* * *
I flicked the silver, brushed-metal lighter and it illuminated the shadowed room. Puffing the end of my cigarette to life, I lay back in bed, naked except for a pair of brown, striped boxers. I set the lighter back on the nightstand with a contented sigh.
“Hey, Vic, you want a drink?” asked Irene, slipping a skimpy nightgown over her bare body.
“Sure, love,” I answered as she made her way across the room and around the bed. With a mischievous smile and a giggle, Irene snatched my crutches from where they were leaning against the dresser. I leaned forward, shocked at her audacity. “Hey wait. You know I need those.”
“Don’t you go anywhere, honey,” Irene whispered with a glint in her eye. “I’m not through with you yet.” As though she were the worst thief in the world, she tiptoed out the bedroom door with my crutches in hand and a mischievous smile on her face. Her slender shape disappeared behind the closing door.
The door clicked shut and I leaned back against the wooden rails of the stained headboard. Letting out a puff, I followed it with small, circular smoke signals. “What a good woman… What am I doing to her?” I asked the room. Thoughts passed through my mind unheeded. Pam’s a good woman too, but she isn’t my wife, Irene is. What’ve I been doing? I’m an idiot. If not for Irene, that damned store sign would’ve taken me out last week, or anyone. It might have even fallen on Pam. I
could have her blood on my hands, yet Irene stood by me. I have to call Pam—end this before it goes any further.
With a shake of my head, I reached for the nightstand where I always set my phone to charge, but only felt the end of the chord. My fingers fumbled through the receipts and change I had left piled near the phone. Where is it? Finally, I jerked on the lamp chain. The faint light chased the shadows from the moonlit window to the far corners of the room. I scanned the bedside table and then hoisted my pinned and braced legs over the bedside, propping myself up with each hand and searching the dim floor—nothing. Peering around the room, I found no blinking light, no glowing digital clock, nothing to indicate I had even brought it in. I absentmindedly grabbed for my crutches, but found only vacant space where they’d stood. With another shake of my head and a subtle smile, Irene’s words echoed through my mind. “Don’t you go anywhere, honey. I’m not through with you yet.”
“Woman, what are you up to?” I asked with a chuckle. Sucking at my cancer stick, my stomach did a cartwheel, anxiously awaiting the upcoming events of the night. I’ll end it with Pam. I promise. No matter what it does to the business partnership, the tax firm, and the company’s future, I’ll end it with her tomorrow, I thought to myself. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, Irene. If she only knew about the affair, I would have said those words aloud. However, this wasn’t the time or place for that, not when things were going so well. Besides, she didn’t know. Why hurt her?
Then, the ebbing, red glow of another cigarette caught my eye from outside the iron security bars we’d had bolted over the window years ago after a break-in. At the edge of the yard, just before the forest line, Irene stood, her slippered feet standing so near our small koi-pond’s fountain that it must have been splashing them. Her figure was radiant under the moonlight, the translucence of her nightgown revealing a silhouette of her trim curves. The trembling glow of her cigarette lit again as I leaned closer to the window. She waved with something in her other hand.
I hobbled to the edge of the nightstand and lifted the window, maneuvering most of my weight to a hand on the dresser. “Baby, what’re you doing? Ain’t you cold?” I asked, raising my voice to carry across the yard.
She shook her head. Taking one last puff, she flipped open the object she was holding and her face lit from below in the glow of a cell phone—my cell phone. The new light illuminated her smile, but it had changed. It was malicious… vindictive.
Something fluttered in the base of my gut. “Honey, what’re you doing out there,” I yelled again.
She didn’t answer, instead flicking her burning cigarette butt to the ground and pressing one button on the phone with an extended, purposeful finger. Then she pressed another, and the subtle glow allowed me to watch her eyes glance up to meet mine. It was a look I had never seen on her face, two-thirds grim determination and a double shot of pure hatred. The look seemed to last for eons.
However, a few seconds later, the glowing ember of her discarded cigarette erupted, engulfing the surrounding grass in flames that coursed toward the window with intent. Leaning closer, I caught a whiff of something different, something that overpowered the smells of dew, grass, and the forest outside, something I should have smelled moments earlier—lighter fluid. The flames met the side of the house, but rushed around the corner and out of sight, leaving the remaining, rising flames to lap at the house’s cedar siding.
My legs trembled through their fragile, pinned bones. “Babe, what the hell’s going on?” I shouted, but then I spotted it. At her feet, just outside the growing flames, sat my old, five-gallon jerry can, the one I kept in the shed to refill the lawnmower. I stumbled backward and collapsed to the floor. “No, no, it can’t be. Why would she—?” But the answer came that instant and stopped my rambling. She knows… but what about this evening, how great it was going, her not being done with me yet—
Suddenly the pieces came together. Oh beloved Jesus! She wasn’t done with me, not yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Fear flooded my gut and flowed through my useless legs, but anger followed it, warming me from the inside out, aided by the rising temperature of the room.
Looking up, I spotted the door a few meters away and pulled myself across the carpet. I stretched for the doorknob and gripped it, but it didn’t turn. I gripped it harder and pulled. It jiggled, but did nothing more. “Bitch!” I shouted. It felt good to let it out, but the knob in my hand was growing hot, and quickly. I peered between the door and carpet, but gray smoke was now billowing through, causing my eyes to tear up.
My animosity for Irene was growing. I wasn’t sure if it was the inferno building behind the door or my own hatred, but it spurred me on. I gripped the corner of the long dresser and pulled myself to my feet. The words, I gotta get out! reverberated through my skull. I grabbed the porcelain change tray in the shape of two hands with fingers intertwined. It had been a wedding present. I flung it at the window with relish. Change scattered, but the tray flew true, shattering one pane of glass. An alarm clock, the lamp, and Irene’s makeup mirror followed, finishing the last of the glass panes, but the security bars and wooden frame remained.
I stumbled through the room, coughing with each smoke-filled breath, and then savored the limited fresh air that made it through the flames circling the window. “You bitch! How could you?”
Irene’s voice answered through the flames, but I could barely make out her figure. “You should have thought of that before you went and stuck your little member where it didn’t belong, Victor. It’s not like I didn’t give you hundreds of chances to come clean and fix it.”
“I’m sorry. I just wasn’t happy and didn’t know what to do.”
“I’ll bet you are… now.”
The walls blackened in places and began deteriorating before my eyes, revealing gaps of the skeletal structure beneath. Then fear settled deep within my chest. I’m going to die.
“I know I did wrong, but I was going to tell you. I was. But—” I coughed. Air was becoming a rare commodity, even at the window. After taking a shallow breath and hacking for a moment, I wheezed out, “Better than that, I decided to call it quits with Pam.” Another coughing fit seized me. “I didn’t want to hurt you anymore. I loved you, and you didn’t—” My chest struggled to free itself of the clogged air, and I gasped, coughing again as I fell to my knees. Bones snapped under the pressure, and pain shot through my lower appendages. A glance down told me that they weren’t on fire, but the edges of my boxers were singed and the carpet beneath my fingers began to melt.
The walls were caving in, the ceiling loomed closer, and I could only move my arms. Rather than flinch from the pain, I dug my fingers into the melting, plastic weaves, mingling the burning ache with my anger. I was running out of time. I took a deep breath. It came somewhat easier in my lower position. “I didn’t think you deserved it before, but now I know you did. You sadistic, twisted lunatic! You deserve every misery that comes your way,” I screamed.
Another fit of coughing gripped me. Then, the memory box Irene gave me last Christmas shone through the growing smoke, beckoning from the nightstand. Using my free hand, I threw it through the window, this time avoiding the bars and aiming for the ghostlike figure past the fog of smoke. It fell short.
“Oh, you didn’t like that present, I guess,” came Irene’s taunt.
“Screw you, you bitch!”
“Yeah, I think I’ve heard that one before. Know who I’m dialing?”
“I don’t give a shit!” I yelled as flames inched their way up my supporting arm. I grabbed my silver lighter off the burning side table and flung it out the window. It flew true, and Irene jerked backward.
“You little bastard! You shit!” Irene screamed, lifting a bloody hand from her forehead. “You know, I think I’ll wait a little longer before dialing the last digit. I don’t want them arriving in time to save you. You gotta burn for your sins.”
“You arrogant, sick, heartless wench!” I cried. “You’ll go to hell for thi
—” But another round of coughing assailed me. Ragged gasps were all I could manage—no words, but the lengthy list of curses rattled on in my thoughts, slowly being overwhelmed by the anguish of blistering skin and the smell of burning flesh.
Minutes passed like years, but Irene’s feigned words of panic filtered through the roaring blaze. “Help, I just came home and found my house on fire… Yes, my husband’s inside!”
I screamed once more, hoping they would hear me, but unsure whether the sound made it beyond my lips. Spots were clouding my vision, and the roaring flames began mixing with her voice, like loud white noise that permeates your very mind.
“It’s too far gone,” she wailed. “I can’t get… him. It’s getting too… Oh no… screams. I can’t take… help, help… please!”
Over the lip of the window, I watched her vague shape vanish as pain flooded my thoughts. The thought of dying had passed, leaving me only with the horrific, throbbing agony. The ceiling collapsed and the dream became etched into my memory forever.
* * *
The smell of aged leather and burnt flesh drifted away, leaving me to rotate the brushed-metal Zippo in my fingers. For Victor Harris, the engraving read, my darling, my savior, my life. With love, Irene. Thinking back to the horrific end, the irony of the gift wasn’t lost on me.
My thoughts turned back to the job at hand. Irene was dwindling down the long, tiled corridor, passing makeshift rooms of linked chairs at each flight gate. This woman was certainly guilty, but she’d served her time in the eyes of the law. Could she really be guilty of the other murders? I didn’t have time to think on it further. Everything pointed to her. Too many times killers are let off scot-free, but not this time. She might have gotten off easy because of politics before, but not in my town. Around this time of the year, Mayor Dihler always became touchy. However, this year he’d taken off the gloves, saying, “Use every means possible to catch this bastard.” And yes, he used those words.
A Life of Death: Episodes 5 - 8 Page 9
