by Dale Mayer
“Neither can I,” she said, “and that’s why I want to make sure they are okay now. The worst should be over with. The other two puppies will be okay without Mom now, right?”
He nodded. “They were being weaned anyway because of her lack of milk,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you can thank that shepherd in there for hunting and giving them enough food to keep them all alive.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “He deserves a special dinner tonight.”
“And for a lot of nights to come,” he said with a smile. “He has looked after them for a long while, and now he needs to be looked after.”
“We got this,” Rowan said from the open doorway. And he had all three ropes, the two pups sitting properly and staring up, curious as to what would happen next. Beside Rowan was Hershey, the well-trained and seasoned look in his eyes seemed to say, Okay, stage one over. Next?
She looked at the pups and asked Rowan, “How did you get the pups to sit still? When I had them, all they did was wander.”
He chuckled. “Pups will wander if you give them a chance. But, just like children, they do really well with order. So I suggest we go make plans and leave these guys to look after the two here.”
She nodded and followed him outside. “I don’t even know what plans to suggest though,” she said. “I’m not allowed any pets where I am. So the first order of the day is to get out of that lease and find a place where I can be with Lacey again.”
He asked, “Did you ever get any insurance payout on your house?”
“It’s caught up in my grandmother’s estate,” she said. “Because she died, the case is even more difficult.”
“You’re the only one left to inherit?”
She nodded. “As much as I would love to rebuild, in theory anyway, I’d like a little more distance between me and my neighbors,” she said. “So I was thinking about moving a little farther out of town.”
“What about work?”
“I work on the edge of town at a big lab there.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a lab tech. We’re doing stem cell work,” she said absentmindedly.
“I know this is a tough question,” he said, “but I have to ask. Any chance that’s related to the shooter?”
She looked at him in surprise and then slowly shook her head. “I have no idea what’s with that shooter,” she said. “I can’t imagine anybody up there taking potshots at people.”
“He also took potshots as we left,” he said.
She stared at him in horror. “I didn’t see that … or hear anything,” she cried out. “Dear God, if we hadn’t found those dogs …”
“Well, the shooter might have taken all five of them out, like some target practice,” Rowan said. “But the thing that really concerns me is he would have also taken us out. And I want to know why.”
He’d already passed on the messages to Badger that they found Hershey, the female dog, and her three pups, and that they had been shot at twice. Badger was not impressed and was doing a rundown on Hershey’s history to see if that had anything to do with it. They already knew some basics, but maybe there was more that they hadn’t considered. Rowan had also given Brandi’s name and her license plate number to Badger for them to do a check on her.
“I’m sorry about your grandmother,” he said.
Tears sprang to her eyes, and she smiled through them. “I am too,” she said. “I know the tears will stop one day, but, for the moment, it seems to be, every time I just hear her name, I start blubbering.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all anyway,” he said. “Everybody deserves to be remembered fondly.” He paused, then asked, “Did you ever get an autopsy report on her?”
“No. Not much was left to autopsy,” she said. “The house itself was razed to the ground with her in it.”
“Then how do you know that she died in the fire?” he asked.
She stopped and turned and looked at him. “Oh, I don’t like the sound of that at all.”
“We do have a shooter involved. Who are you dealing with at the coroner’s office?”
Brandi and Rowan remained standing next to their vehicles in the vet’s parking lot. She pulled out her wallet and brought out a card. Rowan looked at it and quickly dialed the number. When a man answered at the other end, Rowan said that he was looking into the death of—and he looked over at Brandi.
“Isabella Malcolm,” she said, followed by the address.
“Isabella Malcolm was in the fire, and her address was 4294 Pine Road,” he said. “One of the houses that burned to the ground with her in it.”
“Right, we’ve got seven deceased from that road alone,” he said.
Rowan replied, “Her granddaughter said that she understood no body was left.”
“There would have been something but likely not much. That happens sometimes,” the man said. “And just what is your reason for asking these questions?”
“Because obviously we’re gonna have an insurance issue here, and, with the death of her grandmother involved at the same time, we need to have all the facts straight before we start suing insurance companies.”
“Good luck with that,” he said. “They’ll do everything they can to avoid paying out on this one. There was just so much property damage and loss of life.”
“Potentially, but I understand that the government was also stepping in to help.”
“You have to check with them regarding that. I’m checking our files, and we do have some remains from her grandmother here.”
“Really?” He looked at Brandi. “They have your grandmother’s remains.”
She stared at him, her jaw dropping. “They said there wasn’t any.”
“Brandi is right here with me, and she said that she was told there were no remains.”
“Well, there’s not much, that’s for sure,” he said. “The fire was an extreme heat source, but we do have whatever was left, and we have to collect all of that from the biohazard point of view.”
“Got it,” he said. “Were there any personal effects, any wedding rings, things like that?”
“Let me check,” he said. He came back a moment later and said, “No, nothing. That doesn’t mean that she wasn’t wearing anything, just that the pieces that we came in with didn’t have anything like that with it.”
“Right,” he said. “She also wasn’t notified about what to do with her grandmother’s remains.”
“That’s because it’s not been released yet,” he said, hesitating. “From what we can see, I admit it’ll be inconclusive, but a knife was found.”
“She’s right here,” Rowan said, “so please feel free to speak to her.” He looked at Brandi, got a nod from her, hit Speaker on his phone, and handed it to her.
The man from the coroner’s office asked, “Please identify yourself.”
“I’m Brandi Malcolm,” she said. “I’ve spoken to your office several times.”
“I’m the coroner. It was chaos at the beginning,” he said. “We had bodies from several different districts in here because of the fire, but your grandmother’s case is a bit different though.”
“In what way?” she asked. He hesitated and she added, “There’s something suspicious about her death, isn’t there?”
“Yes, there is,” the coroner said, “but, like I said, our findings are inconclusive because of the damage from the fire.”
“You don’t have any lungs to see if she was deceased before the fire? Or did you find any injuries?”
“We have a knife buried in her chest,” he said, “but the knife itself is badly burned and has intermingled with most of the skeleton. So we can’t determine cuts from the knife.”
“But given its position …”
“Given everything that we found,” he said, “there’s a good chance that she was murdered first.”
Chapter 7
Brandi stared at Rowan in horror. “Oh, my God,” she said to the cor
oner. “Will we ever know?”
“I’m not sure that we will,” the coroner said. “Sometimes it’s clear-cut. However, in this case, I’m not sure if it was because of the way the body was brought in or if there’s still …” He hesitated and finally said, “I hate to say it, but it’s possible that the collection wasn’t as complete as we’d have liked. I haven’t been to the house myself, to take a second look.”
“I’m going over there right now,” Rowan said, his voice hard. “At least at that point, I can see if anything else remains to be found.”
“Only if you have had specialty training in identifying remains that have been badly burned,” the coroner said.
“I’m former military, with specialty training.”
“It was pretty chaotic for all of us at the time, and we had a manpower shortage, so it’s possible that my new team went to your grandmother’s house.”
Rowan took his phone back. “We’ll go over right now,” Rowan said. “We just found her dog that had run away during the fire, and so this is another closure for Brandi.”
“Look. I’ll meet you there,” the coroner said, as if making a sudden decision. “I’ve never been really happy with this scenario, so I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.” With that, he hung up.
She looked at Rowan and said, “I can’t believe that now they’re saying my grandmother was murdered.”
“I hear you,” he said. “Again we’re back to the fact that there’s a shooter up on the hillside.”
“And yet somebody stabbed my grandmother to death.” She nodded slowly. “And I’ve been getting weird messages. I didn’t want to say anything because it makes me sound like I’m completely way off base, and also I don’t know anything about the messages.” With that, she pulled out her phone and showed him the latest series of messages.
“What coins?” Rowan asked.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “I have no idea. I can’t, in all the years that I’ve been with my grandmother, remember ever hearing anything about coins.”
“Well, it certainly gives credence to the idea that she was murdered. Then, with a fire like that ripping through, causing so much damage, it didn’t leave much in the way of forensic evidence afterward.”
“I know,” she said. “Now my heart is just sick. I was already so upset to think that she had burned to death in that fire—but to now think that she had been dead first, murdered?”
“Dead first might have been a saving grace in terms of death by fire,” he said in a mild tone. “Obviously we don’t want anybody to be murdered and to be taken before their time, but we also have to consider that maybe she was stabbed while she was asleep. Maybe she was drugged and didn’t know anything. Maybe she was dead first before the fire came in.”
Brandi took a slow and deep breath. “All of them are horrible ways to die,” she announced.
“That’s because the death of your grandmother is horrible to begin with,” he said gently. “And anything other than her being alive and well is not what you want to hear.”
She gave him a wan smile. “I hate to leave Lacey and her poor puppy, but they are in good hands here with the vet.” Yet she stood rooted in place, looking to Rowan for what to do next.
“What will we do about these two pups?” he asked her. She groaned, and he made the decision for her. “I’ll keep all three dogs together and take them to the motel.”
“Are you allowed to?”
“I may have to pay extra,” he said, “but I’m okay with that too. I can get them up to the motel room without anybody seeing them, I think. Which probably won’t matter as I bet these two aren’t quiet and sedate puppies.” He smiled.
Brandi nodded. “You still need to potty train them, and they need to be fed.”
He chuckled. “A green space is behind the motel, a grassy bit of area where I can take them for walks, but I may have to rely on you to deliver some dog food for us.”
“Done,” she said instantly. “Anything you need. You recovered all the dogs, and I can’t believe yours looked after mine while she was down, so anything he needs too.”
“Let’s go to your grandmother’s house first,” he said. “See if we find anything and at least meet the coroner there.”
“Yes,” she said and frowned. “I think I may have just emailed the coroner’s office earlier, asking about my grandmother. It was too close, too intense, for me to call. All I did was bawl all the time.”
“And that’s an easy way for people to push you off too,” he said. “Let’s go right now.”
She walked over to her vehicle, hopped in, and drove off from the vet’s parking lot. She kept checking to make sure he followed behind her. As she led the way back to the fire area, she remembered the shooter, wincing as she realized they were driving back to that area—not the exact same area but close enough that he could find them. If he was still around. There was no reason for him to have been there in the first place.
At her grandmother’s house, she pulled up off to the side. It was so strange to see ash covering the street and everything on it. Depending on how the wind blew, it would pick up the ash and show the pavement underneath, like a slash of a scar under a scab. She got out slowly and stood on the front sidewalk. She waited for Rowan to join her.
When he got there, he whistled slightly. “I saw this from above via satellite feed, and I walked up and down this area before,” he said, “but, when you realize somebody died in this mess, it adds so much more personal grief to the story.”
“So much more,” she said.
They walked up the sidewalk. All the trees on the property had been turned into toothpicks, glowing black in the afternoon light. The lawn was black too, and a few bricks were up and around the base of the foundation, but everything else had been turned to ash.
He looked at it and said, “The other neighbors have the odd rafter or two still standing, or a chimney, but, in your grandmother’s case, it’s completely down.”
“I wondered about that too,” she said. “It didn’t occur to me that it was anything other than normal. My grandmother’s house was very, very old.”
“And that’s possible,” he said, as he wrinkled up his nose. “Such a heavy smoke-filled death smell is at this place. I can’t imagine if it’s even possible to find if an accelerant was used here or not.”
She looked at him. “Are you saying that somebody may have burned down the house anyway?”
He nodded. “It’s a great way to hide the murderer’s tracks,” he said. “The fact that the forest fire was in the vicinity was just great luck for whoever was involved in this nightmare because it completely hid any evidence of whatever he’d been doing.”
She wandered to the side of the foundation. She pointed and said, “It’s just a crawl space.”
“A lot of the houses here didn’t have basements,” he said, as he looked over to see the difference in the burn patterns between the several houses next to this one. There was still the odd tree standing; one had a chimney left but not a whole lot else. Another one had a rafter or two over the garage, but the fire seemed to have been put out there or at least didn’t incinerate that part of the house. As they stood here and studied the other houses, another vehicle drove up.
She walked over when she saw coroner’s vehicle on the side.
An older man got out with a frown on his face. They shook hands, and he said, “I’m Dr. Peter Carmichael. I can’t tell you how crazy it was at the time this all began. But I did want to tell you that your grandmother’s case is not something we’ve forgotten about.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “We were just wondering that, at my grandmother’s house, the fire completely demolished everything. Is that normal or was an accelerant used?”
Rowan added, “And do we have any idea whether the fire here, possibly man-made, was started ahead of the natural fire or not.”
She frowned. “Would cameras have anything to show regarding that?”
; The coroner held out his hands, palms up. “I’m afraid it’s all still under investigation. As you can imagine, there is so much land to cover, looking for evidence that got blown away with the wind or carried on the flames even. Yes, our forensic arson unit is asking those questions too. But don’t forget. At that point in time, the fire was within a few blocks already, so some of the fires picked up and moved and started because of the wind.” But he did walk up around the foundation and said, “It’s a slab house. So where was the bedroom? The fire was at night, she should have been asleep in bed.”
Brandi pointed out the far back corner on the second floor. “It would have been up here.”
“And nothing is here,” he said. “I checked the notes on the file, and they had assumed that she was on the ground floor.”
“But nothing’s here regardless,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Nothing burns quite as hot as a full-blown forest fire, and the devastation is immense.” He wandered around, looking. There weren’t even timbers to move; it had all been reduced to a fine ash. A metal stove could be discerned, a crumpled-up twisted piece of fridge, and not much else.
She watched him roam, went over, and joined him. She heard the two men talking, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what they were discussing. But realizing she couldn’t walk away anymore from this event, she headed over and asked, “Did you guys find anything?”
Rowan looked at her and said, “The thing is, we’re not finding anything.”
“Meaning?”
“If there was anything,” he said, “the evidence has been removed.”
“And, of course, there’s been no security or anything on these sites since the fire was put out, has there?” Rowan asked the coroner.
“Nobody could even get here because of the danger, and then it just became this recovery mission,” the coroner said. “There was no doubt as to how any of these people died anyway, so not a whole lot of forensic backup was needed, outside of the usual determination of the fire’s origin.”
“So then, my grandmother?”
