by Lori Ryan
Eric growled and squeezed the gel ball again. Dahlia—the name he’d given the ball to taunt Nate Ryder—wasn’t doing much to help him now. In fact, he had a feeling he was in danger of busting Dahlia open if he squeezed much harder.
They had been looking for a connection for hours, but things weren’t making sense.
He was hoping to be able to see Merritt that night, maybe even have dinner with her, but that wasn’t going to happen. Not with this guy out there killing people now. He’d come to grips a long time ago with the fact that they might not always be able to stop everyone who wanted to hurt other people, but that didn’t mean it didn’t gut him that they had been working this case for months and hadn’t been able to keep this guy from killing.
He’d seen Jackwagon coming out of the captain’s office earlier and he wondered if he’d had to admit the FBI wasn’t going to come riding to their rescue on this one. The asshole needed to learn they handled their own cases.
“I got something,” Erica Cross yelled as she walked into the bullpen, holding a sheaf of papers over her head. “I don’t know what it means, but I got it!”
The detectives all stood, looking at her over the half walls of their cubicles.
“Your nurse from the fire,” she said, coming to a stop in front of Eric and John’s cubicle and handing them the papers. “She used to work at the house the Chos live in. It was run as a small assisted living home then. They had five patients who lived there full time and needed care. She was one of the nurses.”
They all stared at each other, the blank looks on their faces almost comical.
“Like I said,” she repeated, “I have no idea what it means, but it’s a link.”
Eric was the first to speak. “Okay, we’ve got four other buildings. Take out Peter Gamet’s business and we’re left with three. Let’s see if any people connected to those are in the area. Warn them they may be targets. And let’s see if anyone has a medical connection. She was a nurse. Gamet sold insurance. Maybe he sold health insurance and that’s connected somehow?”
“Or long-term care insurance,” offered John. “Someone living in an assisted living center might have long-term care insurance. Maybe something wasn’t covered and someone’s held a grudge?”
That’s a hell of a grudge, Eric thought but he knew people had killed over less.
The captain stepped out of her office, looking their way. It couldn’t be good news. Eric and John stood and headed in her direction.
They weren’t halfway to her when she started speaking. “Noelle Gray just called. She’s got a fire that might match your case but she says she’s got distinct differences. She says the scene is still hot but you should get out there fast. If it’s your guy, this might mean he’s past some kind of line in his head. He’s spiraling fast.”
“Location?” Eric asked holding up his cell.
“On the way to you,” she said, with a nod at the phone.
They grabbed their service weapons and car keys and headed for the elevator.
“Gentlemen,” the captain called out behind them. “Take Connie with you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Eric said, getting in the elevator and punching the button for the second floor. They’d swing by and pick up Connie and be on the road in five.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Connie sat in the back as they headed toward the main highway. Eric plugged the address into the tablet on the dash and looked at the map as the mechanized voice confirmed the address he’d entered.
Connie sat up and pulled his phone out of the waist pack uniformed officers kept their gear in. “I know that address.”
“Yeah?” Eric asked turning in his seat. “From what?”
Connie shook his head, skimming something on his phone. The gesture was one of distraction like he couldn’t answer Eric while he tried to confirm something.
Eric watched while Connie started rubbing his forehead.
“Conn, you okay?” John asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.
“I was out this way on a call recently. Domestic violence. Neighbor called in shouting, but when I got there, everything seemed pretty much under control.”
They were quiet the rest of the way there. The domestic violence call could be related to the fire or just as easily, not. They’d need to see why Noelle had called them out there.
Eric had to say, he was getting tired of seeing Noelle Gray. Not that he didn’t like her. He respected her and she was good at what she did. He’d never had an issue with her on a crime scene.
But seeing her at a scene lately meant dead bodies.
“This one is different,” Noelle said, skipping the greetings entirely, “but I think it’s the arsonist you’re looking for. And I gotta tell you, this doesn’t seem good. I don’t know all the stuff the behavioral analysis guys do, but this seems like another jump in behavior to me.”
“Show us,” Eric said, aware of Connie’s grim stance as he followed behind them.
She brought them through the house to a closet. What they saw there was nothing like what they’d seen at the other fires.
A body lay at the bottom of the closet.
Noelle gestured toward the body. “Male.”
“He didn’t die in the fire,” Eric said, his tone making it half statement and half question. He didn’t think victim had, based on the position. The body was sprawled on its back, arms flung out to either side and its legs folded up like they’d been stuffed inside while he was either unconscious or dead. It was hard to tell much else. He was badly burned, mostly just a charred husk at this point.
“No, he didn’t,” Noelle confirmed. “We’re still waiting on a death investigator, but there’s evidence of blunt force trauma on the side of his head.” She pointed. “The arms are splayed out. If he died just before the fire or in the fire, they would be pulled into his chest or face. He had to be partially decomposed for his arms to be in this position. He died well before your fire.”
Connie had one arm wrapped around himself and the other rubbing his face, studying the scene.
Eric looked around at the door and the framing around the closet. “Something else is different here. What is it?”
Noelle nodded at him. “All of the other fires were set from inside the closet. He opened the door, doused the closet with accelerant, and then closed the door after lighting it.” She turned and looked at all of them. “This time, the accelerant was tossed onto the floor, wall, and door around the closet and then the fire was set from there.”
“You’re sure he wasn’t alive? Our killer wasn’t trying to keep him from escaping?” John asked.
Noelle shook her head. “No way. The body would be positioned very differently. The ME can confirm when he examines the lungs, but I’m telling you, that body was well into decomp. There was enough decomposition that the muscles and tendons didn’t respond to the fire the same way they would have with someone who had either just been killed or who was alive at the time of the fire.”
“Our killer didn’t want to see him,” Eric said, quietly. “He had already killed him and didn’t want to see him.”
Connie jerked at that, backtracking out of the house and taking big gulps of air as he bent double at the waist. Eric knew that position. The poor kid was fighting not to heave.
Eric and John waited as he fought for control.
When he stood up, he was shaking.
Eric spoke quietly but didn’t waste time. “Tell us about the call out.”
Connie looked at the house. “Domestic dispute. Neighbor said he was walking by the house with his dog and heard yelling.”
Eric looked around. It made sense. The houses here weren’t sitting on top of each other like they were closer to the city. If the neighbor had been inside his own house, he wouldn’t have heard yelling.
“I took the call. A guy answered the door. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Somewhere in there. Said he and his uncle had a fight. The uncle took off. The nephew was upset. Visibly upset and agi
tated, but he said he felt safe and he was an adult. The uncle was off the premises so they were already separated.” He shook his head. On a domestic violence or disturbance call, they were often just trying to get one of the parties out of the situation so they could all cool off. “There was nothing for me to go further on. He held the door open. I could see the living room. Didn’t appear to be trying to hide anything. Nothing in plain sight.”
Eric knew he was going through a check list in his head. If he couldn’t see any evidence that someone had been hurt or anything that gave him cause to go into the house, there was nothing he could do.
“So you filed an NAT?” Eric knew that was what he would have done as a uniform. They were called to half a dozen of those kinds of calls a night. If they didn’t see anything happening when they got there, they filed a No Action Taken report and moved on to their next call.
“Yeah,” Connie said, but his tone said he was going to be haunted by that decision. He raised his gaze to Eric’s. “I could have saved all these people if I had pushed further, asked to come in and look around.”
“He would have said no, Connie, and you had nothing to get you in that door. An adult fighting with his uncle is nothing in an everyday shift, Connie. It’s not something you should have thought twice over, so you didn’t.”
Shit, Eric wished there was something he could say to him to make this better, but he didn’t have any magic words.
Instead, he gave him something to do. And it wasn’t a bullshit busy work assignment.
“Connie, I need you to find out everything you can about who lived here and who the man at the door was. Did your notes have a name?”
Connie nodded, pulling his phone out again. “Bill Kelly. DOB 10/18/98.”
Eric nodded, jotting the information into his own notes. At a call like that, the subject could give any name and date of birth. An officer wouldn’t have cause to insist on seeing identification. But Connie had done the right thing and recorded the information he’d been given.
They had likely just found their killer.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Merritt answered her phone with one hand while she juggled her car keys and coffee with the other. She had gotten Collin started in an after-school program so she wouldn’t need to pick him up until the evening. That gave her time to come up with something on the case.
Eric had messaged to let her know they had another crime scene. When she said Jason would be covering it, he told her he knew. Jason had asked him to share details and Eric had told him no comment.
It made her feel good to know he was pissed on her behalf and showing it, but she hoped he didn’t get in trouble with his boss.
She’d re-interviewed Jaylen Johnson and had gone to the hospital hoping to see the one living victim, but she was still not able to see anyone other than family. She was hoping to hear back from the Cho family soon.
“Hello, Merritt McKenna?”
“Uh, hi, Ms. McKenna. Uh, this is Liam. I met you the other day at Whitman Electronics.”
Merritt skimmed through her mind. The guy fixing the copier. “Yes, hi. What can I do for you?”
She was actually hoping it was the other way around. That he was calling because he’d remembered something that might help her.
She settled herself in her car and slid her coffee into a holder before switching the phone to her other ear.
“Well, after you left, I realized I still have the key to the office over at that old warehouse. From when I used to have the maintenance contract on their copiers. Since they shut down, no one bothered to get the key back from me. I moved the copiers out years ago, but I remember they left a ton of stuff in that office. Files and things. I don’t know. I just thought maybe there might be something you’d want to look at.”
Merritt didn’t know if there would be anything of use there that the police didn’t already look at, but it couldn’t hurt for her to go look. She wasn’t getting anywhere with talking to the victims and from the sound of it, she wouldn’t be allowed to talk to the burn victim any time soon.
“I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I’m not sure it’s safe to enter the building.” When she had been there, a lot of the building had been gutted. She had seen other rooms at the back of the space but hadn’t thought to go in them since she didn’t know if it was safe to walk around the scene of a fire un-escorted.
“Oh, I went in there and looked around. It seemed fine,” he assured her. “I can meet you there, be around in case anything happens.”
Merritt glanced at the clock on her dash. She had plenty of time. “Okay, yeah, that would be great. I can come right now if that works for you.”
“Sure, that’s fine. I’ll bring the key.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Eric threw Dahlia across the room, hitting the wall of the conference room hard with the blue gel ball.
He caught it as it fell toward the floor and looked at it. “Thing is harder to break than I thought it would be,” he said.
It brought a small piece of levity to a room full of pissed-off frustrated cops. Getting the information they needed was taking a lot longer than it should have.
Connie opened the door to the room, a tablet in his hand. “I got it. Bill Kelly is the uncle.”
The Jackwagon followed him in. He’d given up on trying to show them all how to do the job, but he was still there. Eric had a feeling it meant he was right. He had been sent more as a spy for the mayor than anything else.
“Probably our crispy critter in the closet,” one of the other guys said. Connie winced but kept going.
“He has a nephew born 10/18/98 who goes by the name William Kelly even though that’s not really his name. The kid’s real name is William Cavill but he was raised by the uncle.”
Eric nodded to Connie. “Keep going.” They had gotten some of it so far but he seemed to have more.
Connie’s hand was shaking a little when he handed the tablet to Eric and scrolled down. “Look at this. The nephew’s mom died the day I got that call of a domestic dispute.”
Eric looked down at the table and summarized for the rest of the unit. “She was living in a nursing home, not one of the nicer ones. Committed suicide by hanging.”
Jackwagon stood and left the room, texting as he left. Eric didn’t care what he told the mayor. They were going to do their job regardless of whether the mayor and his babysitter wanted to stick their noses into things or not.
Gabe Calder looked up from his laptop. They were all typing and searching as fast as they could at this point. “A doctor from the nursing home where she died reported an attempted break-in three days ago. His alarm went off and he had video of the person on one of those video doorbells. The guy ran. He was wearing a hoodie and looking down so the doctor couldn’t ID him but he filed a report.”
Eric looked to Gabe and his partner, Delany Harrison. “Can you guys go see if the doctor can ID William Cavill?”
He turned to Connie. “Can you see if you can get a picture of William Cavill to all of us?”
Gabe and Delany nodded and left the room while Connie started working his tablet again.
Eric’s phone buzzed. He answered to find it was the doctor from the hospital burn unit their latest victim was in, telling them they could come see her, but the doctor would only give them a few minutes with her.
“John, you and I can go see the nurse?”
When John nodded, Eric turned to Rhys and Mason. “Can you guys hunt up everything you can on William Cavill and his mom. See if he was living with the uncle or if he’s got another address? We need to pick this guy up.”
They all nodded and Eric and John left the room. He didn’t know about John, but he was finally feeling like they were getting somewhere on this case. Now, they needed to find this guy and build a case that would let them put him in prison and keep him there.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
It wasn’t a simple matter to walk into the burn unit and talk to a patient. T
he patients there were highly susceptible to infection, so there was a lot of scrubbing to do ahead of time. A nurse led them through the procedures, watching with hawk eyes as they scrubbed their hands with a small brush. Eric and John were given masks, hair coverings, booties for their shoes, and yellow gowns to put on before entering the room.
“She’s not very strong yet,” the doctor said after introducing herself. “I can let you talk to her for a few minutes, but she’s got second and third degree burns to one side of her body. She’s in a lot of pain. Yes or no questions are going to be best.”
“We just need to show her some pictures.” Eric held up his phone and the doctor frowned. The nurse had already pitched a fit over it, saying it could interfere with the machines monitoring their patient. She’d given in to him bringing it in but had wrapped it in a plastic baggie.
“Quickly, gentlemen,” the doctor said. “And if she reacts badly to this, I’m ending this interview.”
They followed the doctor into the room. It seemed even more sterile and white than most hospital rooms. A woman lay in the bed, heavily bandaged on her right side. Her arm seemed to have taken the brunt of it if the size of the bandage was anything to go by.
Eric ignored the machines and tubes and approached the bed, introducing himself and John without pulling out their badges. They’d left their wallets and keys in a lockbox at the desk outside the room. They had insisted on holding onto their firearms.
“Ms. Diaz?”
She blinked and whispered confirmation.
Eric went on. “Were you able to see who did this to you?”
She shook her head, a small fraction of a movement. “Asleep in chair. Woke up to flames. Man going up the hall.”
“Did you get a look at him at all?” Eric wanted to be sure.
“No. Just a figure.”
A tear escaped and traced a path down her face. The fire hadn’t reached her face. She might not be thankful for that now, but Eric would bet there would come a time when she’d be grateful for it. Maybe. What did he know?