by BJ Bourg
As I thought back to the conversation now, and the way I’d pictured a child-size version of my wife hopping around on one leg and gagging, I broke out laughing. Susan, who was still straddling me, began pouting. “What’s so funny? I want to know so I can laugh, too.”
I tried to stop laughing long enough to tell her, but it was no use. Each time I thought I had it under control, I’d imagine her little face all freaked out and would picture her hopping desperately around, and I’d break out again. It took a long three or four minutes for me to finally calm down enough to say, “Boots—the frog in your boots.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Hey, that’s not funny! I was traumatized.”
Although she tried to pretend to be upset, she also started laughing, and soon fell to the bed beside me. We were laughing so hard at first that we didn’t hear the phones ringing. When we finally stopped and lay there exhausted and happy, Susan shot up on an elbow and glanced around the room. “Did you hear that?”
I sobered up. “Hear what?”
“One of us has a voicemail. It’s got to be work.”
Susan was the chief of police for the town of Mechant Loup and I was the town’s chief of detectives. We both served at the pleasure of the town’s mayor, who was a widow named Pauline Cain, and we operated as equal and separate branches of the police department. The only difference between her chief title and my chief title was that she supervised three patrol officers and I supervised no one but myself. While we had been on our cruise for the past seven days, the day-to-day police duties in town had fallen into the very capable hands of Susan’s most senior officer, Melvin Saltzman, who normally worked one of the night shifts.
As for my relief, Sheriff Buck Turner had that covered. Turner was the sheriff of Chateau Parish and he had offered to have a detective on standby in case something happened while I was out of town. I had gratefully accepted the offer, and it helped to make my trip more relaxing. But now, we were back on duty, and it appeared duty might be calling.
Susan rolled off her side of the bed and began searching for her phone. I dropped my feet to the floor and stared at the luggage strewn about the room. After spending an hour outside with Achilles when we got back home, we had dragged our suitcases and bags of souvenirs upstairs and just dropped them wherever we were standing and then ripped each other’s clothes off and got back to spending quality time together.
I’d never seen our room in such disarray and didn’t even know where to start searching for my phone. “Do you see my phone?” I asked, snatching the nearest bag and opening it. “I thought I put it in that triangle bag.”
Susan was on her hands and knees on the opposite side of the bed and I couldn’t even see her. Finally, I heard her triumphant cry. “Got it!” Her head popped up at the foot of the bed and she fumbled with the phone, pulled it to her ear to hear the voicemail. Her mouth was partially open as she listened to the message. I just sat there and stared. She looked beautiful in her tank top and nothing else, with the phone pressed to her head, concentrating on what was being said. Of course, she could make an oyster sack look good—
“What is it?” I asked when I saw her eyes widen and her mouth clamp shut. She didn’t immediately answer. After a few seconds, she slowly pulled the phone from her ear and ended the voicemail. She stared down at her hands for a long moment and then looked up at me, her face a shade or two lighter.
“The honeymoon’s over.”
“Why?” My mind raced. “Who was it? What’s going on?”
“Someone set fire to Mayoral Candidate Lance Beaman.” She swallowed hard. “They burned him to death in his car.”
It took a moment for the information to process. When it did, my own eyes widened. “Oh, that’s convenient.”
Susan nodded slowly, a blank expression on her face, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was thinking.
CHAPTER 3
After Susan and I had hurried into our clothes and jumped into her marked cruiser, I called the office to find out more information. Beth Gandy, who was our weekend dispatcher, answered on the first ring.
“Clint, thank God y’all are back in town! What on earth is happening to this place?”
“What more can you tell me?” I asked.
“Well, I received a call at seven thirty-seven from a man screaming for help. He said that Lance Beaman had crashed into the curb near some trees and was burning up inside his car and they couldn’t get to him. I dispatched Melvin and contacted the fire department. They were all there within minutes…” She stopped talking to answer Melvin on the police radio. After letting him know Susan and I were en route, she got back on the phone with me. “Once they got there, Melvin said he could smell an accelerant. He believes it’s arson…he believes someone intentionally burned Mr. Beaman to death.”
“Can you call the state fire marshal’s office?”
“Already done. They’ve got a marshal en route as we speak.”
“Thanks, Beth.” I ended the call and jerked my seatbelt on as Susan smashed the gas pedal and we shot across town, heading north. The sun was rapidly descending in the westward sky and darkness would be here soon. I glanced sideways at Susan. Her jaw was set and the orange glow from the sun sparkled in her dark eyes. “You do know who his supporters will accuse of doing this, right?”
Susan continued staring straight ahead. “What if she is responsible?”
I sighed and rubbed my forehead. The race for mayor had grown contentious and Beaman had said some awful things about Pauline Cain, but I didn’t think she was capable of murdering someone simply to keep her job. “I just hope we solve it right away. If this thing drags out until election day, there’s no telling what’ll happen.”
“And what if solving it means she did it?”
“I don’t even want to think she’s capable of burning a man to death.” Not only was Pauline Cain a good boss and a great town leader, but she had also helped me out on a personal matter when Susan was in trouble. I owed her big. I didn’t want to repay her by doubting her and accusing her of murder.
“Not only do you have to think she’s capable of doing it, but you also have to ready yourself for the possibility of having to arrest her for doing it.”
I knew Susan was right, but I wasn’t ready to go there in my mind. “Let’s just get to the scene and see what we’ve got. Maybe there’s a perfectly good explanation for what happened.”
Susan cocked her head to the side. “And what could possibly be a good explanation for burning a man alive?”
I only stared out the passenger’s side window and waited as she drove. It barely took a minute for us to reach the Mechant Loup Bridge, and, before long, we were zipping through the Mechant Loup-North neighborhood. I saw red and blues flashing brightly in the waning light of the day and pointed up ahead. “It’s way at the back.”
Susan cut the steering wheel to the left and cruised down the street until we saw a large house set far back from the main boulevard, which was called North Boulevard. It was the biggest house in the area and it rose up from the ground like a mountain on the horizon. I hesitated to call it a house. A more accurate descriptor would be mansion. It was two stories tall, but each story must’ve had twelve-foot ceilings. The windows that lined the front of the house were at least eight feet tall, and the bright light that glowed from inside lit up the front yard like the daytime.
However, as bright as the lights were, their glow did not quite reach the portion of the driveway farthest from the house, and it was in these shadows that we spotted the smoldering remains of what was supposed to be Lance Beaman’s car. Dark smoke lifted from the wreckage and drifted away on the soft breeze, and I wondered if one of the tufts of smoke carried Beaman’s soul on it.
Susan pulled up beside an ambulance and we stepped out, covered the rest of the distance on foot. We had barely gotten out of her cruiser when I caught the first familiar whiff of burnt human flesh, and it only grew stronger as we approached the two fire trucks and
Melvin’s fully marked police truck that were parked in a semi-circle around what was left of Beaman’s car.
As we rounded the first fire truck, I saw a young fireman sitting on the back bumper sucking on oxygen. I stopped and looked down at him. The name sewn into the chest of his bunker gear read, Cole Peterson. His dark hands were trembling and his big brown eyes were wild. “I’ve never seen someone burning before,” he said to the fire chief who stood over him. “He…his arms looked like burning logs sticking out from his body. And the smell…I never knew a body would smell like that when it burned. I didn’t mean to throw up on the scene.”
“It’s okay, kid,” said the fire chief, a forty-something-year-old fellow named Ox Plater. “It happens to all of us.”
Ox was a hell of a fire chief and a good mentor. He had fought the fire that took the police department years ago and his courage under fire—literally—was unmatched.
“What’s it look like?” I asked when he turned away from the kid.
“Definitely arson.” He removed his helmet and ran a gloved hand across his rough face and through his graying hair. It was hard not to notice the layer of scarred tissue that covered his forehead and both cheeks. He had never volunteered the cause of the scars and I never asked. He shot a thumb toward Melvin, who was photographing the car. “He got here before we did and he said he could smell gasoline. The smoke was dark, so it’s possible some motor oil was added to the mixture. There’s also glass on the ground around the car—and it’s different than the window glass.”
I rubbed my chin. “Are you thinking Molotov cocktails?”
“The poor man’s grenade.” Ox nodded. “It looked to be an amateur job, but somebody really wanted this man dead.”
I traded looks with Susan and then thanked Ox. I put my hand on the young fireman’s shoulder before walking off. “You’ll come out the other side of this day a stronger man and a better firefighter.”
He forced a grin, exposing a row of bright teeth, and nodded. “Thank you, sir.”
Susan and I then turned away and approached Melvin. I frowned as we walked away from Ox and Cole, remembering the first time I’d smelled burning flesh. It was back when I worked as a young detective in the city of La Mort, and it my first homicide case. This pervert who had recently gotten out of prison snatched a young girl from a playground and dragged her off into the woods. He’d done unspeakable things to her and then burned her body. I was twenty-two at the time and had already been a detective for two years. Although I’d experienced a lot in four years on the job—two as a patrol cop and two as a general detective—I was not prepared for what I’d seen on that crime scene, and I spent many years wishing I could repay that evil bastard in kind.
I aged quite a bit that night, and it had only gotten worse for me from that point forward. Now, at thirty-three years of age, I was an old soul. Sure, by most standards I was still a young man, but, on the inside, I was old and gray. Maybe a bit wiser, but I was definitely old.
I glanced over at Susan and couldn’t help the smile that spread across my face. And a lot luckier, I thought.
CHAPTER 4
Susan and I stopped beside Melvin and I studied the car in front of us. Melvin wiped a rivulet of sweat from his shaved head and swatted at a mosquito that landed on his arm. Members of the fire department had set up some flood lights and it lit up the area like daytime, but it also attracted swarms of the Louisiana state bird.
“Want some mosquito repellant?” Susan asked Melvin. He nodded his thanks and she strode off to grab a can of spray from her Tahoe.
While she was gone, I stepped to the front of the car and studied the burn patterns across the shell of the vehicle that was left. It appeared that most of the windows had been busted open. I wasn’t sure if the Molotov cocktails had broken the windows or if the arsonist had used some object to break them open before launching his fire bombs into the vehicle.
Although the car had come to rest against the curb at the center of the boulevard, it was obvious by several small piles of glass on the concrete that the initial attack had taken place somewhere between there and a large pickup truck that was parked a dozen yards behind the car. The truck didn’t have any burn marks on it, but the front end was damaged and it seemed to match the damage on the back end of the car. There were also several dark burn marks on the concrete to indicate where some of the fuel from the fire grenades had splashed.
I pointed to the blotches along the street. “It looks like the attack began back there and Lance—if, indeed, that is him inside the car—tried to back away, but he slammed into the truck. It seems he then drove forward but got jammed up on the curb. He couldn’t have been driving fast while moving forward, otherwise he would’ve jumped the curb and crashed into the trees. I guess he was burning up pretty bad by that point and writhing in pain. His foot must’ve come up off the accelerator.”
“You said something about if it’s Lance.” Melvin’s brow furrowed. “You don’t think it’s him?”
I looked toward the house, where an older man stood with a small group of people in an arched foyer near the front door. “Did you interview them yet?”
“I interviewed the mansion owner, a Chet Robichaux, and he said he saw Lance get in this car and start it up. He said he returned inside and a few minutes later he thought he heard some kind of explosion. That’s when he came outside and saw the car on fire.”
“Did he see anyone in the area?”
Melvin wiped his face again, shook his head. “When he saw the car stopped up against the curb, he thought it was some kind of accident. According to him, everyone had already left the event, with the exception of the few people standing there with him now, and they were all inside.”
“So, this was a political event?” I dreaded the answer.
“Yep. It was a political meet-and-greet for the citizens of Mechant Loup-North—and most of them support his bid for mayor.”
“Does Chet or any of his friends think this is a murder?”
“Not that I know about.”
I was thoughtful, then moved closer to the front door so I could look inside and see Lance’s body. I reached a hand behind me, toward Melvin. “Can I borrow a flashlight?”
“He was still alive when I arrived.” He handed me his light and I flicked it on, aimed the beam of light in what we assumed was Lance’s face. We’d have to wait for a formal identification from the coroner’s investigation. I noticed that Melvin had turned his head away from the car. “I could hear him moaning. I tried to put the fire out with the extinguisher from my truck, but it was no use. I tried to get inside the car, but the fire was just too hot, you know?”
I detected a hint of pain in Melvin’s voice and stopped what I was doing to look into his eyes. “You did everything you could, but there’s nothing anyone could’ve done for him. Even if the fire trucks had arrived with you, they couldn’t have saved him. It was already too late.”
He nodded slowly. “I appreciate you saying that and I know you’re right, but I’m going to question myself for a while, wondering if I could’ve done something more to save him.”
“And that’s a good thing, because it means you still care.” I slapped his thick shoulder. “When you stop caring is when you need to start worrying.”
He grunted. “Okay, Doctor Phil.”
I laughed, he didn’t, and I turned back to the interior of the car. I’d seen Lance’s campaign signs around town and I’d come face-to-face with the man at the Mechant Loup Spring Festival, but the body in front of me looked nothing like him—nor did I expect it to. Fire can do some wicked things to a human body, and it hadn’t gone easy on poor Lance. While most burn victims usually die of smoke inhalation before the flames get to them, Lance hadn’t been so lucky.
I was pulling my head out of the car when Susan walked up with a can of bug spray. After stepping far away from the car so we wouldn’t get repellant on any trace evidence, we took turns carefully wiping a thin layer on our exposed arms
and faces. The firemen had stripped off their gear and Ox was directing the cleanup of the area, beginning with the gathering of all of their gear and then the rolling up of the hoses. Once they were done, we began the tedious work of processing the scene.
Other than broken bottle glass and burn marks on the concrete street, there wasn’t much to see. After documenting the surrounding area with photographs, sketches, and measurements, we set about documenting the different piles of glass on the concrete and identifying them with evidence markers. While there were different amounts of glass in each pile, they all appeared to have come from the same type of bottles. I knew that some of the bottles had made their way into the car, so that would explain why some of the piles had more glass than the others.
There were only a few shards of window glass on the ground outside of the car and along the street, which confirmed for me that the bottles had been thrown into the vehicle, and not the other way around.
“Do you think we’ve accounted for all of the bottles?” Susan asked, pointing to the fifth evidence marker on the ground next to the last pile of bottle glass. “I mean, do you think it’s possible some of the bottles went completely through the window and none of the pieces fell to the outside?”
I shrugged. “I guess anything’s possible, but we know there were at least five different bottles.”
She put the unused evidence markers aside and joined me as I peered into the car, trying to get clear photographs of who we believed to be Lance Beaman. It was well into the night and the only light we had now was from the fire trucks. Ox had been nice enough to keep the trucks out there as long as we needed.
“Thank God for these lights,” Susan said.
I snapped another picture and nodded, changing positions to get a better angle of his hands and arms. They had folded upward into a pugilistic position, which was common among burn victims. The fire had been so hot it burned the clothes off his body, and his skin was blistered and dark.
