by Elaine Viets
“Luther is deceased.”
Eve erupted into harsh laughter. Angela shivered at the ugly sound. “You mean he’s dead?” Eve wiped tears from her eyes. “That’s your idea of the worst? Where is she?” Eve’s head swiveled through the crowd. “Is she dead, too?”
“No, she’s at the hospital,” Nick said. “We think she escaped with minor injuries.” His reasonable words failed to calm Eve.
“Now she gets to keep my father’s two million dollars? She couldn’t even wait to marry him before she murdered him. Well, he’s burning in hell now. If there’s any justice, she’ll die, too.”
CHAPTER 6
Day one
Angela headed straight for the shower when she got home. She kept scrubbing her skin, trying to wash away the stench of smoke, scorched flesh, and burned hair. She soaped and rinsed her hair—once, twice, three times—until it squeaked when she touched it under the hot water. She loofahed her limbs until they were red and raw, but she could still smell the smoke and burned human flesh. She pushed away the thought that the horrible odor came from molecules of Luther trapped in her nose.
When her fingers were pruney from the water, she turned off the shower, wrapped her hair in a towel, and slid into her comforting terry bathrobe. Then she carefully walked down the stairs, gripping the handrail and using her cane for balance. When she was this tired, Angela was unsteady.
In the kitchen, she boiled a pot of water laced with cinnamon—her mother’s trick for freshening the air. Then she got out the eggs and a loaf of whole wheat and put on the kettle for a cup of chamomile tea. At four in the morning, Angela wasn’t sure if this was a late dinner or an early breakfast, but she knew she needed food to sleep. She had to meet Greiman and fire investigator Doug Hachette at nine to finish the death investigation at Luther’s death scene. She was dreading the gruesome visit.
Luther’s autopsy would be conducted sometime that day, probably by her boss, Evarts Evans. Angela would have to turn in her report as soon as she finished Luther’s death scene.
Evarts autopsied all the high-profile cases, unless they were politically sensitive. At the slightest sign that a case could damage his career, he tossed that hot potato to his assistant, Angela’s friend, Dr. Katie Kelly Stern.
Angela’s kettle screamed, and the wheat bread popped up in the toaster while she scraped her scrambled egg onto a plate. Perfect timing. She plunked a tea bag in a mug and poured the water. Once she sat at the table, Angela realized how tired she was. She quickly forked in her food, afraid she might fall asleep at the table. It happened, now that she lived alone.
No chance Katie will get Luther’s autopsy, she thought. His dramatic death promised maximum local—maybe even national—publicity. The cast of characters was a made-for-TV movie script: Old Luther was sleazy, famous, filthy rich, and besotted with a beautiful, young, scheming Mexican American who’d lured him to a fiery death. Priscilla was the victim’s virtuous, wronged wife, and Eve was his outspoken daughter, loyal to her abandoned mother. Reporters would break down the morgue doors for this story, and Evarts would be waiting for them with good sound bites. He kept a camera-ready white lab coat and blue shirt in his office. He knew this case would make him a national name, a celebrity medical examiner.
Angela spread strawberry jam on her toast and crunched a bit. From what she’d heard at the fire, the locals had already condemned Kendra as the killer. Greiman and the firefighters thought she was guilty, too.
By the time she’d eaten her eggs, rinsed the dirty dishes, and turned on the dishwasher, Angela’s kitchen smelled like her mother had been baking pies. She could pick up only the tiniest hint of roasted human.
Angela dragged herself upstairs to her bedroom. The steps seemed longer and steeper at four in the morning. She spent another half hour blow-drying her shoulder-length brown hair to keep it from turning into a frizzy mess. Her hair had grown back thick after it had been shaved for brain surgery.
While the dryer roared and the warm air dried her hair, she carried on her internal debate. How do I know Kendra is innocent? Angela asked herself. I only talk to her once every two weeks, when she manicures my nails. She showed me her ring once, then never wore it to the salon or discussed Luther. Kendra doesn’t seem like a greedy gold digger. But everyone thought so. Except Ann Burris, who believed Kendra was innocent. She and Bryan dared to say that the Forest arsonists were bored rich kids. I wonder what she knows?
You’re a death investigator, she reminded herself. It’s not your job to prove Kendra is innocent or guilty. That’s for Detective Greiman. Who’s already made up his mind, whispered an unruly thought. Your job is to collect the facts of Luther’s death—and you’ll start the rest of that chore in about four hours. She finger-combed her hair. It was dry at last.
Angela couldn’t bear to look at her empty bed. She and Donegan had made love on it so many times. Now it was a vast ice floe adrift in a cold, lonely sea. She stumped back downstairs with her cane to the living room and pulled her white wedding album from the living-room bookcase. She carried the heavy, leather-bound album to the couch, wrapped herself in her mother’s hand-knitted throw, and looked at the photos of her wedding more than twenty years ago.
She and Donegan had been wildly in love. Their joy in each other radiated from the pages. She saw the photo of her mother, Elise, escorting Angela down the church aisle, the pews decorated with flowers and white ribbons. Elise had been fighting breast cancer. Angela was sure she’d survive, even though her mother had had chemo and a double mastectomy. Elise bravely wore a new dress and a gray Eva Gabor wig on her chemo-bald head to give her daughter away at the altar. Katie was Angela’s maid of honor. Angela had threatened to make her best friend wear ruffled pink chiffon. Katie chose her own dress—a long navy gown with white trim—and carried white roses.
Angela wore traditional white and carried a bouquet of red roses, the special flowers for her and Donegan. Donegan gave her red roses throughout their courtship and marriage, until he died too young from a heart attack last February.
At their wedding, Donegan wore a black tux with a red rose in his buttonhole. They were both terrible dancers—so bad they joked it was good they’d married each other instead of inflicting themselves on innocent people who knew how to dance. But their wedding dance was perfect. She and Donegan had floated around the ballroom, laughing and talking, oblivious to the other guests. She was holding her red-rose bouquet, the white ribbons tickling his neck, and she never wanted to stop dancing. She danced and danced until he vanished and the rose bouquet crumbled and turned into the single red rose she’d tossed on Donegan’s coffin at his burial service.
The soft sound when the rose landed on his coffin lid shattered her sleep.
Angela woke up crying at eight that morning. She’d been dancing in a dream, and Donegan was dead. She couldn’t go back to sleep. She dragged herself off the couch and made coffee, too heartsick and sad to eat. Her sadness was a weight that never left her, but this morning it felt especially heavy. How could she go on? She looked again at the photo of her mother, who’d fought so bravely to live. That photo always inspired Angela. Staying alive was still a struggle. She took comfort in her work as a death investigator and its exacting precision.
A little over a year ago, while still grieving, she’d had six strokes, brain surgery, and been in a coma. She’d made a miraculous recovery, but she still had to fight her sadness and grief. Shape up, she told herself. You have to be at the fire scene by nine o’clock. Upstairs, she washed her face, pulled her brown hair into a high ponytail, and put on dark jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and sturdy boots to inspect the fire scene.
At Olympia Forest Estates, she showed the guard at the gate her ID. The air still smelled like smoke, but now the odor was more tolerable. Either that, or she was growing used to it. The warm spring sun gilded the trees and brick homes, and not a weed dared to show its head in the landscaped yards. The curious crowds who’d gathered on Luther’s street we
re gone, and the development had a slightly hungover, embarrassed feel.
The showcase view stopped at the end of the street, where Luther’s blackened house stood out, a rotted tooth in the white perfection of the subdivision. Police cars and other official vehicles were parked amid the ashy puddles. Yellow tape fluttered in the spring breeze, and police, fire department, and other personnel picked through the blackened rubble, occasionally bagging items.
Greiman was at the end of Luther’s walkway with fire investigator Doug Hachette, talking and laughing. Hachette was a fit thirtysomething with a lean runner’s body, wearing a hard hat and dressed in jeans and work boots. Angela parked her car, grabbed her cane, and carefully rolled her DI kit across the debris-strewn street, avoiding smoky glass shards, twisted bits of metal, and charred wood.
“Finally,” Greiman said, though Angela was five minutes early. She ignored him and introduced herself to the fire investigator.
“Captain Douglas Hobart Hachette. But I’m Doug.”
And dropping a powerful family’s name, she thought. The Hobarts helped run the Forest.
He handed Greiman and Angela each a hard hat and said, “A path has been cleared to the front door. The victim died upstairs, and the stairs are safe. Stick close to me and don’t enter a room unless I give the all clear. Miss Richman, I’ll take your suitcase. You’ll need both hands to negotiate. I’ve already videoed the scene and flagged, bagged, and tagged most of the evidence.”
The front door and jamb were gone. Angela choked on the strong smoke smell as they entered Luther’s home. The walls were gray with smoke and streaked with water damage. The sodden furniture was smoke-blackened. “When she ran out of the house, she left the front door open, and it did quite a bit of damage on the first floor.”
The gold-framed mirror in the hallway was broken, and a small gold table was smashed and kicked over in the living room. Luther had let Kendra decorate the house, and from what Angela could tell, the furniture was comfortable but not stylish. The house looked like someone had set a garage sale on fire, with meaningless lumps and clumps of blackened debris and broken knickknacks everywhere. Sometimes she could pick out identifiable shapes. They passed a blackened dining room with a table that was supposed to seat twelve people, though Angela doubted that Luther could have assembled that many members of the Forest upper crust after he left his wife. Angela counted eleven chairs near the table, many overturned.
“Where’s the twelfth chair, Doug?”
“The seat was burned four days before this fire, and Kendra said she was going to have it reupholstered. Luther was a careless smoker. We answered at least two calls for fires before this one. When I was here before, I saw cigarette burns on the arms of a recliner and the edges of the coffee table. He had ashtrays the size of dinner plates everywhere.”
“Bet Priscilla didn’t allow those in her house,” Greiman said.
“No Forest woman would,” Doug said. “Mexican trash.”
Angela wasn’t sure if he was talking about Kendra or the ashtrays.
A pile of burned rubble had been pushed away from the bottom of the stairs.
“Let’s go up,” Doug said. “Luther was murdered in the room at the top.”
Angela braced herself for Luther’s death scene.
CHAPTER 7
Day one
Spring sunlight lit Luther’s bedroom, casting bright, garish light on the destruction. Angela could see blue sky through the blackened roof beams, and burned tree branches with shriveled leaves. The damp, gray-smeared walls were bulging and peeling. Angela had no idea what color the walls used to be. Some kind of electrical cord hung down from the ceiling like a noose, swaying in the light spring breeze.
The room’s colors were charred black and ash gray: total destruction. She saw the burned mattress of a king-size bed. Across from the bed was a scorched dresser with a melted flat-screen TV. Most of the rest was meaningless debris.
“Go ahead, it’s safe to enter,” Doug said. Greiman went straight in. The fire investigator rolled Angela’s suitcase inside and asked, “Where should I leave this?”
“Near the foot of the bed.” Angela took her first steps into Luther’s bedroom.
“Floor’s carpet on concrete,” Doug said, “and the walls are brick over cinder block. That contained most of the actual structural damage to this room.”
The bedroom floor was treacherous, with broken, burned debris. Angela’s eyes watered from the smoke, and she stepped carefully around shards of blackened window glass. Burned drywall and broken slabs of ceiling were piled on the floor like black ice floes. Next to the bed was a charred nightstand. On the floor beside the burned bed was an overturned lamp with a glass base that was shattered but still intact. “That’s heat-crazed glass,” Doug said, pointing to the lamp. “It’s near the fire’s point of origin. I’ll be taking this section of the wood bed frame. See these large, shiny char blisters? That’s what’s known as alligator char. That means an ignitable liquid has been used.”
He kneeled down on the burned carpet at an area marked with a small yellow plastic evidence tent. “Look at this. I saved it to show you. These are trailer marks.”
“What’s that mean?” Angela asked.
“Means we’ve got her. Looks like she dripped some gasoline when she poured it on Luther.”
He pointed at what looked like drip marks on the blackened carpet. “See them? If you move a pot of water from the stove to the sink and spill some on the floor, you’ll see trailer marks like these.”
The fire investigator photographed them, then cut out sections of the carpet and put them in new tin cans that looked like paint cans. As he stepped backward, Angela heard a crunching sound.
“There’s what’s left of one of those shitty pottery ashtrays she liked so much,” Greiman said.
Why wouldn’t Doug or Greiman say Kendra’s name? she wondered. Would she become a real person if they used it?
The king-size bed dominated the room, just as it had the last part of Luther’s life. Most of the bedstead had burned away. The damage was heaviest on the side closest to the door. “That’s where Luther slept,” the investigator said. “The sheets were black silk, one of the most flammable fabrics around. She had more of that silky stuff hanging behind the bed. None of it was treated with fire retardant. The mattress was polyurethane, which is equally dangerous.”
The mattress was burned down to the blackened springs, except for a soot-streaked section that had been protected by a curled body.
Luther.
She’d already seen his roasted remains, but her stomach lurched. Her nose picked up the choking odors of wet ash and melted plastic—an acrid, synthetic odor—then shorted out like an overloaded circuit. But when Angela looked at the outline of his body, she imagined she could smell that unforgettable charred-meat and burned-hair odor. It lingered like a ghost.
This was where Luther died. Now quit with the drama. You need facts, not vague feelings. She unzipped her DI suitcase, its sides and wheels already smeared with damp, black mulch. She was determined to finish this bizarre, two-part death investigation. Six hours ago, she’d examined and documented Luther’s body on the paramedics’ backboard.
She photographed the death scene. First, a long shot from the door, followed by a medium shot and several close-ups. Angela didn’t see any blood on the blackened mattress surface. When she’d done Luther’s body actualization earlier this morning, he’d been lying on his back.
Now, the outline on the mattress showed he’d died curled in the fetal position, his head facing southwest. The body’s position on the mattress, from what she could tell, appeared to be natural. She measured the outline: thirty-eight inches from head to the end. She couldn’t see any feet. The body’s outline was twenty-three inches at the widest part, which appeared to be from the pelvis to the drawn-up knees.
“Did you find any restraints on or around the bed?” Greiman asked the fire investigator.
“You mean li
ke handcuffs or some kinda bondage?”
“Yeah. Did she tie him up or cuff him to the bed?”
“Haven’t found anything. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” They exchanged locker-room grins. “The way I see it,” Doug said, “she doused Luther with gasoline when he was passed out, and set the old man on fire.”
Greiman shook his head. “Awful way to die.”
“He may have been too drunk to feel anything,” Doug said. “From what I heard, the old boy really tied one on at Gringo Daze. Drank lots of anesthetic and made a real scene.”
“She’s a heartless bitch,” Greiman said, “setting a helpless old man on fire.”
Doug pointed to charring on the carpet by the mattress. “See these burn patterns on the floor? Those can only be caused by gasoline. The gasoline causes a fireball that rises up to the top of the ceiling—whoosh! It hits the ceiling, slams back down, and that’s all, folks. All she got was some singed hair, a couple of cuts on her hands and feet, and a little soot on her face and arms. Did you ask her if she tried to save him?”
“Talked to her at the hospital about five this morning. The doctor said she was still in shock, but she sounded fine to me. Had a couple of coughing fits, but she could have faked those. She said she and Luther fell asleep shortly after she got him upstairs.”
“Did they screw?”
“She says he was too drunk to ‘make love.’” Greiman minced those last words, and both men laughed.
“Next thing she knew, she woke up choking on the smoke and saw the bed was on fire. She said the flames weren’t very big and there wasn’t much smoke. She tried to wake up Luther but couldn’t. She tried to lift him, but she said he was too heavy.”
“She sure didn’t try too hard. In fact, I don’t think she tried at all. I think she set the fire and then ran out of the house screaming her head off.”
“She says the flames got bigger, and the smoke and heat were so extreme she had to run out,” Greiman said. “By the time she was down the stairs, there was a bright orange glow coming from their room and she heard a roar. She ran outside, wearing practically nothing. Gave the whole neighborhood an eyeful. Perfect way to distract the firefighters. She’s still in the hospital for smoke inhalation, but I have a uniform outside her room. I haven’t arrested her yet. We’re still waiting on test results. Her clothes—if that’s what you call those scraps of lace—are being tested for gasoline. Evarts is cutting open Luther today. I told him what happened. I’m sure he’ll find gasoline on Luther.”