Fire and Ashes Read online

  “Fuckers! Leave me alone.” Kendra’s frantic fight was straight from a porn video: her white lace crotchless bodysuit exposed her bouncing breasts and round bottom and gave a gynecological view Angela definitely didn’t want to see.

  Everyone else in the development was staring. Some were almost as scantily clad as Kendra, but nowhere near as provocatively. Even the predatory public insurance adjusters—gray-suited vultures hoping to snag a percentage of the claim money—stopped to stare. Some were slack-jawed. On the sidelines, a pack of men howled with laughter at Kendra’s struggles. Angela saw Ray Greiman, the detective she was working with, in the pack. She was disgusted but not surprised.

  A square-jawed, blond paramedic told Kendra, “You have to go to the hospital, miss,” and moved to clamp a meaty hand on her arm. She dodged his grip and kicked him in the knee with a dirty bare foot.

  Square Jaw backed away as a no-nonsense woman made a grab for Kendra, but she raked that unlucky paramedic’s neck with her red nails. “Ouch! Damn, that hurt!” the paramedic swore, as blood ran down her neck onto her uniform shirt.

  “Quit fucking with me and save Luther!”

  “It’s too late, miss,” said a third muscle-bound paramedic with a military buzz. “I’m sorry.” He seemed genuinely sad.

  Kendra brushed away his sympathy and shrieked, “Damn you. I’ll save him myself. Luther! Hang on, sweetie.” Buzz tried to cut her off, but she lunged toward the house’s smoke-filled front entrance. As he grabbed for her, Kendra gave him a swift kick in the crotch.

  “Oof!” he said, and bent over.

  “Right to the cojones,” Greiman said to the uniform next to him.

  “She’s a little Mexican wildcat.” The uniform leered.

  “Hell, I’d pay money to watch this show,” a firefighter said.

  Angela was pretty sure he was being paid by Chouteau County to control the blaze.

  “When we got here just before midnight, she didn’t make any sense at all,” the firefighter said. “She was hysterical. Couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Now suddenly she’s Wonder Woman and wants to run in and save him.”

  “Old Luther was right,” Greiman said. “He said she had the best ass in Chouteau County.”

  “She’s certainly the richest piece of ass in town,” the uniform said. “I heard Luther gave her two million when they got engaged, and she’ll get another two mil when they marry. She must be some spectacular fuck.”

  “At Luther’s age, any fuck is spectacular,” Greiman said. “Look at her go. She’s running right toward the front door.”

  “The smoke will stop her in her tracks,” the firefighter said. “Even those lungs can’t breathe in that.”

  He was right. The thick smoke left Kendra coughing and choking. She backed down the walkway, wheezing and gasping as she tried to catch her breath.

  The portable emergency lights gave Angela a clearer view of the frantic Kendra. Her glossy black hair seemed singed, at least around her face. Her light-brown skin and white bodysuit were smeared with soot, and the skimpy lace outfit had a ragged tear at the waist. Kendra’s long red nails—a manicurist’s advertisement—were broken, but Angela didn’t know if Kendra had broken them when she attacked the paramedic or during her escape from the house. Her hands and feet were cut and bleeding, but it was hard to tell how bad her injuries were.

  “Help him.” Kendra’s voice had a harsh rasp, and she started choking again. “Please.” This time when the paramedics closed in on her, Kendra didn’t fight them. She was almost doubled over from the racking coughs.

  Angela saw three firefighters—no, two firefighters and maybe a man—at the smoky second-floor window with the aluminum ladder leaning against it. Both firefighters wore helmets and masks and had SCBA—self-contained breathing apparatus—tanks on their backs. One firefighter stood at the top of the ladder while the other rested the man on the window opening. Angela thought the sill was gone.

  “Luther!” Kendra’s scream was cut short by a choking fit. “You’re alive.”

  Angela wasn’t sure. The man appeared to be unconscious and badly burned. His hands were charred claws, and his face was a black-and-red crispy mass. Angela couldn’t see any hair. If that was Luther and he was still alive, he was facing excruciating pain and little hope of survival.

  “Jesus!” Greiman vomited into the bushes. “Is that thing alive?”

  “I hope not. For his sake.” Angela felt queasy and dizzy but kept her dinner down. She was glad she had her cork-handled Austrian walking cane to keep her upright.

  The firefighter at the window gently pushed the man’s legs out of the opening. Now the badly burned body was in the arms of the second firefighter, who guided it down the ladder to the bottom. The paramedics abandoned Kendra and grabbed an orange plastic backboard. Kendra rushed over, crying, “Luther, my poor Luther. Speak to me!”

  Greiman squished across the wet, muddy lawn in his mud-caked dress shoes to Angela. “He’s Kentucky fried. The paramedics can’t even put a face mask on him. Skin’s peeling off. She killed him.”

  “We don’t know if Luther is dead yet,” Angela said. “And why would Kendra kill him? Doesn’t she get another two mil when they marry?”

  “She already got two million when they got engaged. That’s enough for a beaner like her. Now she won’t have to screw that scrawny old geezer. And he’s gonna die. You don’t have to be a doctor to see that. She set him on fire, and he was too drunk to get out of there.”

  “How do you deduce that, Sherlock?” Angela asked.

  “You didn’t hear what happened tonight at Gringo Daze?”

  “It’s their bargain night—five dollars off the bill,” Angela said. “I expect the whole Forest was there. No one’s tighter than the old rich. You should see them at a pancake supper.”

  “They were, and they all saw what happened. That’s where Luther had his last supper, although I don’t think he ate much. He was in the bar, pounding down Dos Equis and grabbing Kendra’s ass. Drunk as a skunk. Talked about what great sex he had with her. Popped Viagra with a beer and said he and his little ‘greaser gal’ were going home to screw and we should expect to see flames. Too bad they were the wrong kind.”

  “Poor Kendra. She must have been humiliated.”

  “Who knows what those people think? She was trying to drag him out of there while he kept pawing her. Finally, the owner had to help her get him in the car. So she had plenty of motive. See that fire investigator putting that half-melted gasoline container in an evidence box? The firefighters found it by Luther’s door. That’s her father’s lawn-service logo on it. Her old man has the contract for most of Olympia Forest.”

  “So? The crew left it behind.”

  “On the night the house happens to go up in flames? I don’t believe in coincidence. She had the means and the opportunity, and it added up to two million reasons to kill Luther.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Day one

  “It’s official,” Greiman said. “Pop Roast is dead as a doornail.” He’d managed to talk to the paramedics before they raced away.

  Pop Roast? That was his nickname for Luther? Angela hoped none of the bystanders heard him. She glanced at the nearest knot of spectators and was relieved to see them busy talking to one another.

  “Who pronounced him dead?” she asked. Missouri had weird rules about who could pronounce someone dead. Most states required some medical training. Not the Show Me State. Anyone could do it, as long as whoever signed the death certificate believed the pronouncer could determine if the person was really dead. Never mind that the moment when death occurs has baffled the best medical minds. Angela had pronounced two people dead, but she’d had no doubt: One was an old woman in full rigor who’d died in bed. The other was a man who’d been dead so long, his body was decomposing. Both times were solemn, scary experiences.

  “The paramedics.” Greiman was trying to wipe mud streaks off his expensive slacks with his handkerchief. “The
y’re taking Kendra to SOS.” An engine’s roar, flashing lights, and siren’s wail confirmed his words: the ambulance was rushing to Sisters of Sorrow Hospital.

  “There goes the killer. I’m getting a warrant for her fingernail scrapings and blood samples at the hospital,” Greiman said.

  “Why do you think Kendra is the killer?” Angela asked.

  “I already told you.” Greiman sounded as if he were speaking to a child. “I talked to the neighbors. She ran out of Luther’s house screaming her head off. She distracted the firemen from doing their jobs in that porn-movie getup—and before you start your feminist bullshit, they were firemen, and she was damn near naked. She had the perfect setup to commit murder: She has a public wrestling match with the old man when he is drunk and horny. He humiliates her. She pours gasoline on him and has herself a weenie roast.” Now Greiman was almost shouting. “And remember, she never said Luther was inside until it was too late to save him. The old bastard was dead.”

  “Whoa. Anyone see her with gasoline?” Angela asked. “Any record that she bought a can of gas? All you have is that half-melted container. You can’t get prints off that thing.”

  “You’d be surprised. Besides, it’s from her father’s lawn service. The wits say Jose was here tonight, right before the fire, and he had an ugly argument with Luther. Six people heard him. Then the neighbors heard Kendra and her old man jabbering away in Mexican. He was probably telling her how to kill Luther. Jose got out of there, and Kendra grilled the geezer.”

  Angela caught the defensive I-don’t-have-to-justify-myself-to-you note in his voice. Greiman’s last major investigation, the murder of Dr. Porter Gravois, was a debacle that had divided the Forest’s old guard. The detective’s friends—the Forest grandees—made sure he got a raise, but scuttlebutt said he’d also received an off-the-record reprimand for his careless investigation. Maybe the warning had worked. Even Angela had to admit he’d been more diligent this time around. And he was right to get a warrant for a suspect’s blood and nail scrapings.

  “Time for you to go to work. You can check the murder scene in the morning when the house is safe to enter. The crispy critter is on the backboard by that uniform,” Greiman said.

  He pointed toward a twentysomething uniform who looked fish-belly white in the high-powered lights, standing guard over Luther’s body. Angela grabbed her DI kit and rolled the ordinary black suitcase across the wet asphalt and muddy grass, steadying herself on the slippery surfaces with her cane. This wasn’t a typical death investigation. Luther had been moved from the place where he died, which might have yielded useful clues. The paramedics had abandoned him on an orange plastic backboard in a well-lit corner of his yard, then roared off to the hospital.

  Luther looked even worse than Angela thought he would. The Rhinestone Cowboy hardly seemed human. Only part of his saggy buttock and pelvis on the right side were unburned, and that skin was red and seared. She knew this would be an especially difficult death investigation: she would have nightmares for weeks afterward, and it would be a while before she could stomach meat again. Burning deaths were far worse than badly decomposed bodies.

  She approached Luther slowly, her nose now mercifully unable to smell his sickening burned hair and roast-meat stink. Some pros used masks or Vicks VapoRub, but Angela didn’t notice foul odors after a short while. Her nose wouldn’t take them in. But she could definitely see Luther. At one in the morning, Luther was a nightmare vision on his orange plastic bier.

  As she unzipped her death investigator suitcase, Angela’s hands shook slightly, and her knees felt as if they might give way. Inside, she had a tape recorder, thermometers for body and ambient—air—temperature, a measuring tape, vials, Ziploc bags, paper bags, and plastic containers normally used for leftovers. But these containers would end up in the morgue, not the microwave.

  Like many corpses, Luther seemed smaller in death. But he really was smaller. Burn victims could lose up to 60 percent of their weight.

  She brought out the tape measure to record his height (length, actually) at five feet eight. The ME would weigh him. A few hours ago, this charred hunk of humanity had been alive with lust and laughter and the envy of all his friends, thanks to his sexy fiancée. Now he was a pathetic sight.

  Angela steeled herself for the body actualization—the examination—with her familiar rituals. First, she slipped on four pairs of latex gloves. She would strip off the gloves and put them in her pocket as the body actualization went on so she wouldn’t contaminate the investigation with fluids or fibers from other areas. She photographed Luther from about a dozen feet away to capture the entire body, then did a medium shot and finally a series of close-ups. The fire investigator and the police had taken their own photos and videos. These were for the medical examiner. Angela didn’t have a medical degree, but she was trained. Death investigators were sort of like paralegals for MEs. Seeing Luther through the camera’s viewfinder helped calm her stomach, which was pitching and heaving like a stormy sea.

  Angela called up the form she’d need on her iPad: Body of a Burn Victim. The first question was easy. Luther had been positively identified by Kendra. At the morgue, the medical examiner would take X-rays to rule out any foreign bodies—bullets, for instance, or knife tips—that she might not catch in her visual examination. The form’s routine questions soothed her, restoring order to this hellish chaos.

  Were there any thermal injuries present? Luther’s arms were raised in the familiar “pugilistic stance” of a burn victim, as if he’d gone nine rounds with death and lost. His arm muscles had contracted in the heat. Normally she would note every cut (“cutlike defect”) and bruise (“contusion”) on the body. Now she measured the burns and blisters on his seared flesh, from his head to his blackened, twiglike finger bones. She carefully covered his fragile hands in paper bags secured with rubber bands. They might crumble when the body was transported to the morgue. She saw no jewelry, but then he had no finger left to hold a ring. The heat from a fire made bones brittle, and they could fracture when the body was moved. Angela didn’t see any bones jutting through the skin and noted that.

  Her stomach twisted, but she knew this scene could have been far worse. Sometimes, the burned skull burst, and the cooked brains spilled out. She’d never seen that and hoped she never would. She tore her eyes away from the horror and returned to the next question.

  Hair color? Luther’s magnificent mane of white hair had been burned away, but Angela knew the color and noted the absence of hair.

  Eye color? She couldn’t tell. The eyes were cooked and shriveled. She fought back her nausea. Focus, she told herself. You have a duty to help Luther. He was a rich, silly old fool led around by his libido, but now he needs your skill. The man who’d been powerful enough to give $2 million to his young mistress was now a brittle-boned mess of kindling.

  Was the victim’s clothing consumed by fire? Luther wore the remnants of white silk boxer shorts: a melted elastic waistband and enough cloth to cover his genitals. She saw no sign of other clothes. She didn’t remove his underpants. That would be the ME’s job.

  Was there an odor of petroleum product on the clothing? Angela forced herself to lean in closer but couldn’t smell either oil or gasoline.

  Was the victim a known smoker? Were there smoking materials found in the pockets? Angela knew Luther smoked cigars, but she saw no smoking materials on the body. The fire investigator would have to find out later how many cigars he smoked a day and if he also smoked cigarettes, a pipe, weed, or something stronger. Angela knew many otherwise law-abiding senior citizens liked a toke. Families sometimes tried to hide any illegal substances before the death investigation, and Angela would have to gently explain that she wasn’t with the DEA, but she did need accurate information for her investigation.

  Did the victim use alcohol? Yes. The Forest knew he was a drunk. Greiman said Luther was chugging beer and popping Viagra earlier. The Forest’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Evarts Evans, would have to
confirm that.

  Was the victim known to drink to excess? Yes. Angela had no idea how much he’d drunk tonight—or rather, last night—but it had to be a lot. If his body was too cooked for the ME to do a blood alcohol test, he would have to use a piece of brain.

  List all the medications prescribed to the subject. Since this was a fire-and-police investigation, they would have to get that information from his doctor later. Most of the Forest went to Dr. Carmen Bartlett. She treated just about everyone. Greiman said Luther had gulped down one drug—Viagra—with a beer chaser. A dangerous combination. Did Doc Bartlett prescribe the Viagra, or did Luther get it from some illegal source? Even virile young men took Viagra, believing it enhanced their performance. During the royal wedding of William and Kate, Scots brewed a special limited-edition India pale ale—laced with Viagra, chocolate, horny goat weed, and “a healthy dose of sarcasm”—called Arise Prince Willy. Why am I thinking of that? Angela wondered, but she knew. She’d allowed herself to be distracted from the stomach-turning scene on the backboard. She shook her head, as if to clear her jumbled thoughts, and attacked the next question.

  Could the victim’s medical problems have contributed to the fire or to his/her inability to exit the fire scene? If yes, describe. Ollie Champlain said Luther was falling-down drunk when he came home. Victim was extremely intoxicated when last seen alive, she wrote. The neighbors told Greiman the old man was in a fighting mood—at least that’s what Greiman said to her. Luther had argued with Kendra’s father. Could twenty-year-old Kendra have carried a drunken Luther down the stairs? If he fought her, could she subdue him? Was he too drunk or confused by the smoke to follow her instructions to escape? Did she even try to save Luther? Forest gossip said she got two million bucks just for wearing his oversize rock. She could abandon him to his death and still keep the money. And how could Greiman and the fire investigator determine that? Were they smart and unbiased enough to find out what really happened? Based on Angela’s past experience, the answer was no. She pulled herself back to the questionnaire.