I Hear They Burn for Murder

by J L Aarne

  “Crewes, you’re with me,” he said, descending the stairs into the bullpen.

  She glanced up at him over the top of her computer, typed something and quickly hopped up, grabbing up her jacket as she rushed to follow him out. “You want to go to the first scene, sir or just the—”

  “I want to see the warehouse building where they found Conway,” Ezekiel said. “You ever look at those Highlights magazines they keep for kids in doctor’s offices, Crewes?”

  “Uh, I’m sure I have, sir, but I can’t recall just off the top of my head at the moment,” Crewes said, sounding perplexed and out of breath as she kept up with his longer strides.

  “What doesn’t belong in this picture?” Ezekiel said. “I look at these pictures we’ve got, at the evidence we have, and you know what’s different?”

  “Philip Conway?” Crewes guessed.

  “Philip Conway,” Ezekiel confirmed. “Who talked to his boyfriend?”

  “Ah… I think Gonzales and Kenner handled that, sir,” Crewes said.

  Ezekiel nodded. “Give it another day. Then we’ll talk to him again, see if he remembers something.”

  “He was pretty damn tore up about it all,” Crewes said. “That’s what Agent Kenner said. He was real distraught.”

  “Yeah,” Ezekiel said.

  He could imagine. Not only had his boyfriend been murdered by the killer who was all over the news, making the horrible thing that had been done to him that much more horrible by smearing it all over the press, but the man would have to wonder why Philip was with the killer in the first place. He would probably tell himself that Philip was taken by force and Ezekiel would never tell him any different, but he knew better. All evidence suggested that The Lamplighter—Rainer Bryssengur—lured them. A man who was lured by Rainer’s looks and his charm and found himself alone with him and vulnerable was looking to be lured by someone.

  If Conway’s boyfriend knew this, maybe he’d feel a little better about him being murdered.

  Then again, probably not.

  Ezekiel drove and they went in silence for a while, but then they got caught in the usual early evening L.A. traffic jam and Crewes cleared her throat. It was only a moment later when she asked, “So, which one of you is the older brother? I mean you and Jacob.”

  “I know what you meant,” Ezekiel said. “I’m older. By about five minutes.”

  “You’re not twins,” Crewes said in surprise.

  Ezekiel turned his head to look at her and said, “Obviously we’re not identical.”

  She smiled. “No, you don’t look a bit alike,” she said. “I mean, your both fine looking men, but—Oh, Lord, that’s terribly unprofessional of me. I’m sorry.”

  Ezekiel smiled faintly. “It’s all right. Just don’t tell Jacob he’s pretty. He can get bent out of shape about it.”

  “But he is though. A person would have to be born without eyeballs not to see that.”

  Ezekiel’s smile became a smirk. “I know.”

  “My uncle Silas, he’s a twin. Has a sister, Brenda. They’re not but a few weeks older than me, so they’re more like my brother and sister, but they fight all the time. All the time. Then they’re friends again like that and nobody can keep up with it. One minute they’re talking about how they wouldn’t spit on the other one if they were on fire, the next thing you know, they’re thick as thieves again and you know, don’t matter which way the wind’s blowing, you don’t ever want to say a bad thing about Brenda to Silas or vice versa.”

  Ezekiel stared at the back of the car in front of them and sighed. “Uh-huh,” he said.

  Crewes wasn’t an unfriendly woman by any means, but this was the most he had ever heard her say all at once. He realized he didn’t really know much of anything about her. Sure, he knew what she looked like on paper or he wouldn’t have chosen her for his team, but he didn’t know her. He knew more about the monsters he hunted than he did about the woman sitting in the car beside him.

  “So, your uncle and aunt are the same age as you are. That must be strange,” he said.

  “Not really,” Crewes said. She thought about it. “Well, I suppose it is some, especially when Silas gets drunk and starts telling me to mind him. As if. They were an accident though. A double-whammy accident because Grandma wasn’t expecting to be pregnant at her age—she was only forty-something, but still. Then Mama got knocked up with me and you know how folks can go on about how wonderful it is being pregnant together and it’s a bonding experience or some such? Not Mama. Mama says it was weird and kinda freaked her out being pregnant while her own mama was pregnant.”

  The cars in front of them started to move again and Ezekiel stepped on the gas, only to have to brake again a minute later. “That doesn’t sound pleasant, no,” he said.

  “I know, right?” Crewes said. “And it was summer. I can’t even imagine; nine months pregnant in the hottest days of July. God, no.”

  All this talk about pregnancy was off-putting. He didn’t mind talking to Crewes and he should get to know her, but his knowledge of her did not need to begin in utero. Thankfully, Crewes changed the subject.

  “And I’ve always thought it was weird calling Silas and Brenda Uncle Silas and Aunt Brenda, so I don’t do it,” she said. “You got any family around here or they all back in Washington and Virginia?”

  The traffic began inching along again while Ezekiel thought about the best way to answer that. He didn’t have family anymore. His and Jacob’s parents had been dead well over a hundred years and they’d had aunts and uncles at one time, but they had lost touch with them all a long time ago. They had not been close—Jacob less so than Ezekiel—and eventually, circumstances being what they were, it hadn’t mattered.

  It still didn’t.

  Somewhere out there they likely had human descendants and distant relations, cousins and great-grand-uncles and the like. It wasn’t something they thought about too much.

  “Jacob’s my family,” was all Ezekiel said.

  He could feel Crewes’s eyes on him in the silence that stretched between them. The cars inched along ahead and he wondered if it might not be faster to walk to the crime scene at this rate. Just pull over and leave the car on the shoulder with a note saying they’d be back for it later and then hoof it. Ezekiel could run incredibly fast when he wanted to and with his inhuman stamina he would make good time, but Crewes was a mortal woman in expensive looking strappy heels who struggled to keep up with him at a walk.

  Still, out of impatience and frustration, he thought about it, though that was all he did.

  “That’s sad,” Crewes finally said.

  Ezekiel cast her an inquiring look.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without my family,” she said. She smiled at something she was thinking. “Uncle Silas especially. You know he went and got himself married last year. Man’s crazy is what he is. Not for getting married, mind you. It’s just a fact.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ezekiel said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Crewes said. “Silas went and married this girl, Fay. She’s not much to look at, but she’s a good old gal and he loves her, bless him. At the reception, he goes and gets himself all liquored up—he’s not an alcoholic, but damn you wouldn’t know it with that man—and everyone’s going to leave and they’re off to go on their honeymoon to Singapore or somewhere like that and it’s time to thank everyone and say goodnight. Which he does. ‘Thank y’all for coming. We’re real happy. We’re so glad you could make it,’ etcetera, right? Fay, she just stands there looking pretty as she’s ever looked in that dress covered with seed pearls and beads and so many sequins she looked like she’d been glitter-bombed, and Silas says, right into the microphone, ‘Now come on darlin’, let’s go get them panties down.’ My mama just about died laughing. So did we all, come to think of it.”

  Ezekiel was surprised by his own laughter. It was She ain’t much to look at, but she’s a good old gal running in a loop through his head with Now come on darlin’, let’s go get t
hem panties down. Both of them chased the narrator around and around while he lectured Ezekiel with his prim, vaguely British accent about the inappropriate, juvenile sense of humor typically found in the free-range psychopath. He peered out the windshield at a faded PETA bumper sticker on the back of the Honda that had been crawling along in front of them for the past half hour and it was all hilarious. He laughed and didn’t even notice the traffic moving again until the car behind them honked—and then he didn’t care.

  “Well, all right,” Crewes said. She was smiling about it though, pleased by his amusement. “We’re about there anyway. If we can get to that off-ramp up ahead, it’s not far.”

  Ezekiel shook his head, still snickering and said, “We could turn on the siren.”

  “Could do,” Crewes said. “Not much of an emergency what with all parties being already deceased and in a cooler at the morgue, but we could do that.”

  “Wouldn’t do any good,” Ezekiel said.

  Crewes twisted around in her seat to look behind them. Then she sat back with a sigh. “I suppose not.”

  They did eventually make it to the off-ramp and it only took them another ten minutes of snail-like crawling, but once they were off the freeway, the jam cleared up. Crewes directed him to the building and Ezekiel pulled up into the lot and parked beside a van. Across the street, LAPD were keeping an eye on reporters and thrill seekers. All of them looked harassed and mildly to moderately irritated.

  A reporter called Ezekiel’s name, but Ezekiel and Crewes walked on like they hadn’t heard anything.

  The building was one of many large storage warehouses. It looked no different from any of the other warehouses around it except for the crime scene tape and the official, busy looking people in various uniforms walking in and out of the place. The scene had been processed, so most of the really official people were gone along with the body, but Detective Candice Parker was there and waiting for them. She had two coffee shop cups of coffee with her and gave the second one to Crewes.

  “The owner’s on us about getting the cleanup crew in here as soon as possible,” Parker said. “He’s afraid the rental value’s going to go down on it. That man’s all heart.”

  “You can tell him from me that he’ll get the property back when we’re done with it and not a second before that,” Ezekiel said.

  She smiled. “Oh, I went ahead and told him that already,” she said.

  Ezekiel walked ahead of her and Crewes into the building. Inside, lighting had been set up to illuminate the wide-open space because the power in the unit was off. There was evidence of people living in the building. It was prime real-estate for the homeless and they passed places where fire pits had been made, areas where people had clearly been bedding down and setting up shelters and tents.

  “Has anyone come forward yet?” Ezekiel asked.

  “Witnesses?” Parker said. “Nah. Even if they did, it wouldn’t likely make a lot of sense. Had a homeless witness try to tell me a few years back that it was Jesus. Of course, it’s always Jesus, but this time Jesus descended from the sky in his star-car. When I asked him to describe Jesus, he told me Jesus wore cowboy boots. Turns out my witness was a delusional unmedicated schizophrenic. He probably saw something, but even he didn’t know what it was.”

  “They’re not all schizophrenic,” Ezekiel said.

  “Nope, but the ones that aren’t didn’t see nothing. Even if they did,” Parker said.

  “About how many people are living in this building?” Ezekiel asked.

  They walked deeper into the room, Ezekiel leading the way by scent. He could smell the burned flesh, the oil, and under that, he could smell the stench of unwashed bodies, of rats and mice, of sour beer in the bottom of old crushed beer cans. Under that, there was something else. Something clean and out of place. Cologne. No one else would smell it but Ezekiel’s nose was the nose of a hunter, of a predator that stalked animals, small and large through the grass and smelled the death on a beast before it was even ill and cut the weakest from the herd. He knew that cologne, too. He had smelled it on Rainer while sitting across from him at his kitchen table.

  Rainer Bryssengur smiling his sly smile, regarding him with his knowing, vibrant blue eyes, sitting there surrounded by the smell of fresh paint being tested to repaint the wall, drop cloths on the floor, the smell of tobacco smoke curling around them like a noose… and Rainer’s cologne. Aqua Velva. Not unpleasant, but cheaply bought at any drugstore.

  “Agent Herod?” Crewes said.

  Ezekiel looked around at her and noticed both women staring at him. He was used to it. This happened.

  “I said, there are five that we know about right now,” Parker said. “Two men, a woman and two kids. One’s a little girl about seven or eight and the other one’s a boy, maybe sixteen, and child services is handling that.”

  “Five people living here and nobody saw a damn thing,” Crewes said.

  “They probably weren’t here if he did it in the day,” Ezekiel said. “Out panhandling or getting food or money or drugs. The boy, he’s probably hooking by now. Our guy wouldn’t choose this place if there were people here. If he did, we’d have found a lot more bodies.”

  He continued walking into the room, following the smells until they reached the scorched area where the body had been discovered. It wasn’t in the center of the big space, but off to one side, close to a wall with a small window high up. The floor was blackened and still covered in oily soot, the remains of flesh that had peeled and sloughed off, too small to be gathered by forensics, mingling with the hard packed dirt. The pattern was a long, wide area where the body had been laying and in trickles where the oil had been spread around it. Not far from the main spot, there was a smaller burn spot; the organs.

  Ezekiel knelt by the burned ground and looked at it. Conway had been tied up like the others, but unlike the others, the killer had gone one step further and staked him down, hands above his head, rebar through the bones of his forearm. Ezekiel looked at the scorch mark and pictured it, saw it in his mind. Philip Conway would not have been dead when he did this; where was the fun in that? But it had been about more than fun this time. More than just getting his homicidal rocks off.

  He reached out and touched the ground where the stake had been driven. It had been driven deep or it wouldn’t have held, but Conway wasn’t just bound, he had been drugged. Dropped down a K-hole to the bottom of the rabbit hole and this was what it looked like on the other side. It was a hell of a Wonderland.

  Off to Ezekiel’s right, a little farther back from the site of the burned body, there was a little black mark in the dirt. He shifted and reached over to touch it, brought his fingers smeared with it to his nose and sniffed. Cigarette ashes.

  He stood and paced around the body and counted three more such marks in the dirt. In his mind, he saw Rainer smoking a cigarette and he was agitated. Something was different this time. He knelt beside Philip Conway and… What?

  “He talks to them,” Ezekiel said.

  “What?” Parker said.

  Ezekiel stood and backed up from the burned place. “He doesn’t just kill them and set them on fire. He takes his time, really gets into it,” he said. “They’re awake while he opens them up, not just alive. They’re conscious. He keeps them that way, shooting them up with adrenaline if they pass out. He uses ketamine to subdue them, but not to put them under because he wants them awake for it.”

  “That other agent, Brockden, said something about that,” Parker said. “Gave us the profile and I guess he got that much right. Fucker.”

  “Yeah, I apologize for that,” Ezekiel said. “He’s been suspended.”

  Parker appeared mollified by the news and a little pleased about it. “All right. You were saying?”

  “Our guy smokes,” Ezekiel said. “He talks to them and he smokes his cigarettes and he takes them apart. Those little marks on the floor, they’re where he put out his cigarettes, then he put the butts in his pocket and took them with him. T
here was a third site where they found remains?” he asked. “A kidney?”

  “Yeah, it was over by that wall,” Parker said, indicating the wall far to the right.

  Ezekiel walked over and knelt by the spot. It was darker there, but not burned much. There was more blood in the dirt than anything else. He looked around the area then stood to look up. He had a small flashlight on his keys and turned it on to point it up along the wall high up about a foot below the ceiling.

  There was a smudge.

  Well, more of a splat.

  He caught himself smiling and forced it back down. Rainer certainly had been looking for something more than just a good time with Philip Conway. In fact, the evidence strongly indicated that he had not enjoyed himself this time much at all. He’d been angry. At Conway? He was willing to bet that no, it had not been personal. Not for Conway anyway.

  “Aww, somebody’s not getting enough attention,” Ezekiel whispered to himself, again repressing a smile.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Crewes said. She had been following him closely and was standing a few feet behind his left shoulder, looking on. “Did you say something?”

  “Why do you think our guy doesn’t just use gasoline, Crewes?” he asked instead of answering her.

  “Well, the oil doesn’t burn as fast or as hot. It’s less likely to spread and he’s not trying to burn down the city, just destroy evidence,” she said. She was frowning at him; they had covered this already a few days ago. “It might have some kind of ritual element to it, too. I read something the other day about how they use a lamp oil-gasoline combo for fire tricks. You know, like fire-eating?”

  Ezekiel had read about it, too, after Crewes mentioned it in her report. He did not believe Rainer had any circus performer ambitions though.

  “Yes, and?” Ezekiel prompted. He didn’t know her well yet, so he was testing her. If she didn’t know the answer, it was a teaching moment.

  “And…”

  “What happens if you throw a lit cigarette into a pool of gasoline?”