“This was Corporal Wilson Rogers, one of our MPs,” he explained, pointing to the body that had the burned-out eyes and an apparently broken neck. “He was guarding the entrance to the hangar at the time of the girl’s entrance.”
Scarlet stooped down next to the body to examine its eyes. These burns are severe; the flesh appears to have been completely carbonized.
“He appears to have been looking directly at whatever it was that burned his eyes out,” Scarlet observed. “These burns are very precise; they’re exactly over his eyes. He probably hadn’t categorized her as a threat when he first saw her.”
“So, you think the girl did this herself?” Straub asked incredulously. One of his eyebrows arched upward. “How could she have done that?”
“How could she have done anything that she did last night?” Scarlet countered. She turned to look up at Beth and Rick and instructed them to begin making their own records of the crime scene.
Straub fell silent for a moment, blinking repeatedly as he stared through the ground. The autumn wind played on the wispy, ginger-colored strands of hair on his head.
“I had assumed there must have been another party involved,” Straub said. “I thought she had help getting in and doing what she did. I hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that she did this all—all of this—on her own. Little kids just don’t do that—can’t do that.”
“Maybe she had help,” said Rodrigo, “I’ve been looking for that kind of evidence, hoping for it, but so far there ain’t much of a sign that she needed that help, amigo.” He patted the doctor on the back.
“Still,” said Scarlet to Straub, “if someone had helped her get in, whom do you think it was? Do you have any suspicions? Any leads or even just hunches?”
The doctor thought for a minute. “I can’t think of anyone. I don’t know anyone who could have been associated with that… that girl or that thing or that whatever-it-was that broke in here. Maybe there’s a connection between her and one of our men, but I don’t think it could have been a direct connection. Maybe she knew someone who knew one of us.”
“It’s a hypothesis that we must keep open, Doctor,” Scarlet said. “It’s still possible—I don’t know how likely, but possible—that someone on base was assisting her in some way.”
An image of the handsome, suited man she had just run into flashed into her imagination. She pushed the image away in defiance. However, she stopped to consider how, if at all, the man might have been involved.
“Doctor,” she asked, “there was this man who was coming into the hallway to Col. Westmore’s office just as we were leaving. He appeared to be a civilian, by the looks of his clothes. Tall. Over six feet. Do you know who that was? And what he was doing on base?”
“Only that his name is Mac Stone and that he’s some big-wig multi-billionaire. He’s very secretive. He comes on base from time-to-time. From what I understand, he owns a tech company that was doing some R&D for us.” He looked toward the hangar, as if anticipating Scarlet’s next question.
“Did that R&D have anything to do with what was stolen from this hangar?” she asked, arms folded across her chest.
“I… I don’t know.” He shrugged helplessly. “I’m just a medical doctor. I never got involved in the Force’s technical projects. Certainly not if it required a high-level security clearance. Westmore… Col. Westmore told me I wouldn’t be able to know what was stolen. He said to leave it be. Stone? He could have been involved in this somehow, but I really don’t know.”
Scarlet made a note on her inner-phone to investigate the mysterious billionaire, then turned her attention back to the eyes of the dead airman. “Any idea what caused these burns?”
“None. We haven’t autopsied them yet. We were instructed to leave everything exactly as we found it. Westmore said we had to wait for some civilians to come and investigate the crime scene. It wasn’t a usual order, but I didn’t exactly have a choice. I just left things as they were. The civilians… I guess that’s you guys.”
Scarlet nodded while lost in thought, then instructed Rick to be sure to take close-ups of the man’s burned eyes.
Rick did so, then pulled a scanner from his bag and held it close to the deceased’s head.
“These burns go through nearly the entire head, starting from the eyelids,” he noted. He looked at the output of his scanner a little more. “Any deeper, and we’d see burns on the back of his skull, too.”
“And unless he were held in place or already dead,” Scarlet reasoned, “these burns were made in an instant. I can’t imagine how it could have been otherwise. If something is that painful, you’d turn away from it immediately.”
“A flash of light?” Rodrigo asked. “Like the one that took out the security cameras?”
“Maybe something like that,” said Rick, “but I doubt it was exactly the same. That first camera resumed recording, remember? So, it wasn’t destroyed, just temporarily disabled. Of the two cameras, it was only the second that didn’t come back online. Maybe we’re looking at bursts of different types or intensities of electromagnetic radiation.”
“Such as RF? Like the comm tower?” asked Scarlet, catching the hint of something.
Rick shrugged. “Again, maybe related; it’s hard to tell without more analysis. But the energy that hit these men and cameras appears to have been much, much more intense and concentrated than what that comm tower is putting out.” He looked in the direction of the tower. “Comm towers’ electromagnetic radiation is diffuse. You’d have to get really close to it to get burns this bad, and even if you did, the burns would be generalized, not tightly localized like this.”
Scarlet’s mind pursued a new line of thought. Could the girl have controlled the intensity and duration of the microwave radiation from the comm tower? Directed it and refocused it at the men somehow? These men’s burns would have required an enormous amount of power emitted over a tiny fraction of a second. The tower had the power to do that, but to get the tower to direct the radiation so precisely, and at just the right angles…?
It was a stretch, to put it mildly, she had to admit, but she had no grounds to dismiss it, either. This girl—this entity—could do things that normal people simply couldn’t. She didn’t know what was, or was not, within the realm of the girl’s abilities. She decided to set the idea aside and place a question mark by it, at least for now. Another idea presently came to her.
“Maybe a directed EMP-burst,” she offered.
“If it were my money,” said Rick, “that’s what I’d bet took out the cameras. The burns on these guys?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Rodrigo was about to say something, but Beth suddenly called out to the group, “Found something!”
When everyone gathered around her, careful not to disturb the scene, she held up a plastic evidence-bag for them to see. “This was tangled in the fingers of one of the airmen, the one missing his jaw.”
The bag contained a single, long strand of auburn hair.
At last, Scarlet thought, satisfaction flowing through her veins. DNA.
To be continued in Installment #2…
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A Sneak Peak at the Next Installment…
Beth, never having met Eastman or his team, tugged on Scarlet’s sleeve and whispered, “Who’s Eastman?”
“Hal Eastman. Our best. A legend among us. Had he been here, he would likely have been sent out to the Air Force base, not us. He’s… a specialist, you could say.”
“A specialist? In what?”
“In doing the impossible, Summers.”
Beth looked with surprise at Scarlet, who was grinning ever so slightly.
“He started off in one of the Bureau’s assassination squads,” Scarlet explained, “but he moved into a PIR Unit several years ago. Said he wanted more of a challenge, something scarier, more exciting. He’s been rising through the ranks pretty steadily ever since he got a PIR badge. Pulled off some of the greatest and most dangerous investigations our division has ever seen: stuff of nightmares wrapped inside of nightmares. The things of a madman’s foulest hallucinations. That’s what Eastman’s team takes on. Unofficially, they’re our vanguard. The best of us, Summers.”
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About the Author
I grew up on a plot of untamed land in rural Texas in the 1980s. The environment of my childhood instilled in me a great love and respect for the natural world. I recall the hot summers with singing cicadas, the cold winters with sleet and clouds, the smell of juniper trees, and how earth-scents would fill the air right before a rainstorm. I remember the way wind would hint of its secrets and stories, especially when no one else was around (which was often). I am a Native American, and my love for the land is endless.
When I was struck with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 2017, I could no longer work at my previous job. I refused to get on welfare. I decided instead to write stories for others’ enjoyment, as well as a means of livelihood. Due to my illness, I cannot publish full-length books as quickly as many of the other authors out there, but I do what I can.
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The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #1 (Scarlet McRae) Page 6