Dying Embers

by B. E. Sanderson

  Already, the image of her next conquest burned behind her eyes. And her next. And her next. Until she reached her final destination on the west coast.

  As she turned onto the highway, she began to sing, “California, here I come…”

  Chapter Four

  “Jaylinda Charlene!” Her mother’s voice seemed a long way away even though she couldn’t have been farther than across the paddock.

  From her perch in the hayloft, her teenage self couldn’t see a thing through the haze. Laying her book aside, she rose and brushed the chaff from her jeans. Most likely there were chores to be done, and Mama would tan her hide if she caught her reading instead of pulling weeds.

  Right then, the nearby ladder seemed miles off—like looking at it through the wrong end of Dad’s telescope. She walked the loft, but instead of covering the distance with her long, lanky strides, she only moved a fraction of an inch.

  “Jacey!” her baby sister cried.

  Jace curled up her nose in disgust. Whatever chores she had to do, she did them alone. No one ever made the baby lift a finger. Well, someday soon, Jace would go off to college, and the little princess would learn to pull her own weight. She knew the natural order of things. With Mama and Dad both working, the chores would fall to the youngest.

  Finally, she reached the ladder, but instead of the usual twenty feet down, the barn floor seemed to stretch away from her. She could barely make out the concrete below. In one corner of the barn, her horse nickered, and the fear in that one small sound filled Jace with dread. Something had gone terribly wrong.

  The realization hit her at the same instant smoke drifted into the barn. Her first instinct told her the barn had caught fire. If she didn’t hurry, she would be trapped inside. And the horses. What about the horses?

  She took the ladder two rungs at a time, but when she reached the bottom, she saw no fire. The horses whinnied, but more to get her attention than with high-pitched terror—like when Ms. Ruthing’s filly got her legs twisted in the barbed wire.

  Smoke rolled in through the open doors, stinging her eyes.

  What she glimpsed through the window. It hadn’t been haze. The house was on fire!

  Between one blink and the next, she found herself in the front yard, gazing up at the porch. Red tongues licked along the doorway and orange danced behind the curtains. In the distance, she heard sirens, but they were too far. They’d arrive too late.

  Her heart urged her to run into the building. She had to save her mother. She had to protect her baby sister. But she couldn’t make her feet move. She could only stand in the bright light of her burning home, her face feeling more sunburned with every passing moment.

  When the roof collapsed, Jace woke up—like every other time she’d had this dream.

  Lying in the Laze E. Daze motel just inside the city limits of La Junta, Colorado, the full weight of those nightmares crushed her like a bug.

  If she hadn’t wanted to escape her boring life—if she hadn’t hidden in the barn with her newest book—she would’ve been inside there with them. Maybe she could’ve stopped the whole thing from happening, or maybe she simply would’ve died with them like she was supposed to. Either way, she wouldn’t have carried the sound of their last moments in her memory for the next twenty-one years.

  At sixteen, the memories and the guilt killed her every night. At thirty-seven, they were reminders of a past she’d rather forget. In more recent years, the dreams’ frequency had dwindled—until this fiery murder case landed on her desk. Now, every time she encountered a new victim, the nightmares came back—each worse than the last.

  If she didn’t solve this case soon, she’d risk more than the lives of new victims. Too many more burnt bodies would put her sanity in danger, too.

  The cheap motel clock glared its red eyes at her. Three oh four was too early to get up, but she never slept after reliving the nightmare. Grabbing the remote, she flipped the TV to a news station and sat in the ever-changing light. She didn’t need to know what was happening in the world. Enough happened in her own world to make national news, if not unimportant, at least not high on her list of priorities. For now, the television simply provided a softer light than the nearby lamp supplied.

  Wishing for the millionth time motel people would put more than one pot worth of coffee in her room, she set the machine to work. Even before the first drop hit the carafe, she knew it would be one of the worst cups she ever drank.

  “Note to self,” she said into the gloom, “start packing your own java.”

  A quick shower under the low-flow head helped a little. If the place had a pool, she would’ve taken a few laps, but no such luck. Then again, with a little more notice, she could’ve checked into a chain hotel with continental breakfast. Over the past ten years, she learned planning ahead became a luxury—one field agents didn’t usually have—and better accommodations were for branches of the government with better funding. Like it or not, the Laze E. Daze was her Shangri-La.

  With luck, they might offer her a muffin or a stale doughnut.

  Grousing about the room did its job of distracting her from her troubled memories. After a while, she let the irritation dissipate along with the nightmare and settled at the tiny desk. She pulled one folder after another from her briefcase and splayed them in front of her like a card dealer showing off his deck-handling skills.

  The first murder sat on top. She’d been over it so many times in the past few months, she loathed the thought of opening it again. The pages inside were dog-eared and smudged with the sweat of a half-dozen trips into the field. Still, if she didn’t look through it again, she might never find what she was missing.

  And somewhere along the way, she must’ve missed something important. Otherwise, she’d be closer to solving this string of murders.

  Back in Dallas, a dozen more eyes scanned through these files every day, trying to locate the key that would point them toward their killer. Those others read this same material, looked at the same pictures, and thus far with the same results.

  Nothing.

  Someone traveled the country killing men at random, but in a very specific and very personal way.

  Serials didn’t usually go for the random. Especially not when the crimes themselves were so methodical and so personal. A pattern had to exist in the files somewhere, but all of the best minds her unit had to offer couldn’t find it.

  After pouring herself a cup of the world’s crappiest coffee, she paced the area at the end of the bed, talking to herself.

  “Six men,” she said on her first pass. “Three brunettes, two blonds, and one redhead. Two in their fifties, three in their forties, one in his sixties.” She stopped and walked back to the folders. She flipped to the first page of each and let out a frustrated whoosh of air. “Nope. Birthdays all over the calendar. What else is there?” She resumed her path. “Three worked in sales—one with a chemical company, one selling medical supplies, and the other owned a car dealership. But the other three didn’t sell anything. A doctor, a lawyer, and a writer. ”

  The more she paced, the more outlandish her ideas got, but that was usually when she hit on the clue. Tonight, she couldn’t find ideas or clues. “Four with military service, two without. Two had birthmarks. One was uncircumcised. One had VD.” Her brain felt as dry as the riverbed where they’d found the latest victim.

  “Okay, let’s think about these guys as a whole… All of them were either rich enough or insecure enough to fork over the cash for expensive wheels. That’s something.” She already had her techies—Frank and Lynn—working that angle, but despite the similarity there, they couldn’t be connected through those cars.

  “They weren’t all rich, but they all liked to act like they were.” Each of the victims had undergone an extensive credit check, and save one, all of them could afford their cars. The medical supply salesman couldn’t, but the guy’s boyfriend said he leased the car to keep up appearances.

  “One lived in Southeast Wiscons
in. Two of them graduated from a college in Northern Wisconsin, and one of them lived near that same college when he was working for a lumber mill.”

  With one foot already raised for its next step, she froze.

  “It can’t be that easy.”

  She pushed the desk chair so hard it tipped over. Bent over the files, she went from one to the next until she found the information she wanted. Right at that moment, she wished she hadn’t dumped the chair. She really needed to sit down.

  Her hunch had been nothing more than a wishful thought.

  “Why can’t you all have a connection to that damn school? Three of you do. Why not the other three?” she asked the ghosts in the folders. “What went so wrong in all your lives that someone felt you needed a private preview of Hell?”

  At shortly after five in the morning, she called the front desk for another couple coffee kits and a whiteboard. The old lady on the other end of the line readily agreed to the former, but didn’t have the faintest idea about the latter. Still, within fifteen minutes a younger woman marched through her door with acceptable versions of both.

  “Mom doesn’t know jack about the new stuff, but we got just as many perks as them fancy joints down the road,” she said, pushing a mop of frizzy curls out of her eyes. “Don’t you worry about that. If you need anything, you just give a holler and ask for Shirley. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of, Officer.”

  Before Jace could open her mouth, the lady was gone. “Agent, not officer,” she said to the closed door.

  By six-thirty, she’d covered the surface of the board with squiggles only she could read. Her handwriting was horrible, and she liked it that way. In her line of work, it helped that she could read every word, but no one else could. In Missouri, a reporter bribed a maid to get into her room, but when Jace found him, he just shook his head. He’d been there for an hour trying to decipher her work and went away with less information than he needed for the morning news.

  Sometimes being messy paid.

  When the phone rang moments later, she grabbed it without taking her eyes from the board. The clue she needed lay in there somewhere. She felt in her gut that if she looked long enough, she’d see it. In a way, the board became her very own deranged magic-eye painting.

  “Douglas,” she finally said after realizing the person on the line had begun yelling to get her attention.

  “About time,” said her techie, Frank. “The preliminary reports arrived. You have anything that’s not on them?”

  “Nothing yet,” she said. “Do you have an ID on the vic?”

  “Kyle Delisky. Forty-three. Divorced, no kids.”

  She’d read the files when they came through her email and plugged his data into her mental map of the case. “Skip all that and tell me you found something good.”

  “I wish I could.” Silence stretched. She could almost imagine Frank pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, and back down again, while he thought. “I hate to mention it, but Lynn might be onto something. Too bad she won’t tell me what until all her Ts are crossed.”

  As usual. She depended on the woman’s commitment to the facts, but sometimes she needed a brainstorm more than she needed confirmation. “What do you think she’s thinking?”

  “Not sure. She mumbled something about Wisconsin when she walked by earlier. Does that mean anything?”

  Jace nodded to the empty room. “Maybe. We have three vics already with ties to Wisconsin, but I can’t find links for the other three. For all we know, Delisky may be the linchpin to tie it together. Tell her to keep on whatever she’s cooking up, and when she has something—even if it’s not one-hundred percent certain—she needs to call me. This is vic number seven, and we really don’t need a number eight.”

  “Gotcha. How many more do you think—”

  Her stomach clenched. Maybe if she had a crystal ball—maybe if she believed in their abilities to read the future, she could predict when this would end. “No clue. But I’ll tell you, if it’s up to me, not one more victim than absolutely necessary to catch this asshole.”

  She could’ve sworn she heard the words ‘sing it sister’ as the rustling of papers drifted across the line.

  Leave it to Frank to have her on speakerphone. “I hear you back there, Lynn. Do you have anything for me?”

  “Sorry, boss,” she said, “but I’m playing a hunch. When I have something firm I’ll let you know.”

  Jace sucked in her response. Lynn was a force unto herself—and most times her hunches were right. Pestering the woman to pony up with her theory wouldn’t get anyone anywhere. The tech genius would let go when she’d solidified things and not before.

  “A list of your new evidence just hit my inbox.” Frank chimed in. “The locals actually found some hairs in the backseat of Delisky’s car. Looks like blond or maybe gray. A little on the long side for your vic.”

  Maybe their luck was changing, but narrowing the field from the entire human population to someone with blondish, longish hair didn’t help too much.

  “Some guy named Yancy called to say the evidence is on the next flight out. I’ll send a car to meet the shipment at the airport so we can get right on it.” If she knew Frank, he’d be the one driving to DFW himself. “As soon as we get those hairs, we’ll shoot ’em off to DNA, but you know how long those guys take.”

  She knew. With the backlog of cases those guys were working, they wouldn’t release anything firm for weeks. “Keep on them, and get me what you can as soon as possible. If we’re lucky, he’s got a record.”

  “We’re never that lucky.” Frank’s gloom mirrored her own.

  She looked at the scribbles on her board, and then at the scattered papers around her feet. “Since we aren’t lucky, that means we have to be good, and no matter what they say at the poker tables, good beats lucky any day.”

  Chapter Five

  As she drove through the mountains of Western Colorado, Emma whistled a strange mixture of Big Rock Candy Mountain and the theme from The Big Valley. Her happiness made her too impatient to look for songs with words.

  The sky lay in one sheet of solid blue above her; the wind ruffled her bangs. All in all, she couldn’t remember a more beautiful day. Letting loose a lilting giggle, she pulled her new, platinum blonde hair from its confines and let the open air have its way with her tresses. Her husband wouldn’t allow her to drive the convertible, and when he drove, he insisted the top stay up. Personally, Emma never saw the point of owning such a beautiful car if you didn’t utilize its finer points. With Will out of the way, she could do as she pleased, and she decided driving with the top down had to be the car’s best selling point.

  “You don’t mind me driving your baby, do you, Darling?” she shouted into the wind. Other than the sound of the world around her, she received no answer. With one hand grasping the steering wheel, she reached out to caress the gentle curves of the metal container buckled into the seat beside her.

  “I thought not.” He really had become so much quieter since the accident, and after the cremation, so much easier to handle.

  Nine down and three to go, then back home to enjoy the fruits of your labors. The big house overlooking Lake Michigan, the Packers season tickets he never bothered to share with her.

  “I bet he took that bitch,” she grumbled, shattering the lighthearted mood she’d spent all morning adopting.

  Of all the women in the world, the fact her husband chose to fuck around with the likes of Molly Jensen still grated on her nerves. A career woman through and through—Molly chose her work over her marriage, and look what happened. Women weren’t made to work. Her mother told her often enough; Will echoed the sentiment. Truth be told, Emma liked it that way. Work was for people too stupid to find another way of getting what they wanted. And even worse, Molly’s husband actually wanted her to work.

  A more whiny, sniveling man didn’t exist. He wept at the funeral like a girl, hanging on Emma like she represented his last, tenuous thread to realit
y. Going on and on about how he didn’t believe Molly would cheat on him—that there had to be some mistake. She wanted to push his face in and make him shut up, right there at the graveside.

  Killing him had really been more mercy than justice, but in the end, only the strong should survive. Miles didn’t give anyone the impression he’d ever be the strong type. After a few hours in his company, she could easily tell who’d worn the pants in their family. Too bad, it had been Emma’s husband who took those pants off. If Miles had been a stronger husband, maybe she wouldn’t be forced to do any of this.

  Miles Jensen—stay at home dad to their three grubby children—couldn’t even begin to be a man who would make her list. He was no more than—what was the phrase—collateral damage? No. More like euthanizing a runt puppy; it was too weak to live in the world anyway. Those children would be better off now—without a cheating whore for a mother and a spineless weenie for a dad. After the funeral, Miles slid silently into his last goodnight on a wave of painkillers. No one would ever know she’d been the one to crush them into his wine. A few swipes to remove her fingerprints and while Miles went into his forever dreamland, she slipped away into life as a blonde avenging angel with a mission.

  Her list of wrongdoers held an even dozen. Such a miniscule number—considering the number of men in the world—but these were the only ones who wronged her personally. They earned the justice she had planned. Plenty of others deserved some minor form of retribution, to be sure, but only the original list deserved to die. For now.

  After Will, the next few could be found within the Great Lakes region. The rest, she discovered, were laid out like a hopscotch pattern on the sidewalk. The last four lay in a straight line west through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, leading her at last to her final goal in California.

  Her teeth ground together at the thought of the last bastard on her list. His actions had started the whole litany of pain her life had become, and he would be the last to die. Maybe she’d combine a little bit of Will’s accident with a little bit of Kyle’s—let him suffer for a long time, and then let him feel the heat of Hell’s breath on his neck as he died.