A Flame in the Wind of Death

by Ann Vanderlaan

  “I don’t think we will since victim ID is wrapped up at this point, but you took samples in case we need to run it later?”

  “We did.”

  “Then I think that will do for now.” Leigh was interrupted by the strident ring of her cell phone. After a brief conversation, she turned back to Matt. “That was Bree. She wants to meet tomorrow. Because it’s a murder investigation, she pulled in some favors and will have the lab results first thing in the morning. She also said there was something recovered at the scene we need to see. She can make time at eleven. You interested in tagging along?”

  “Absolutely. Where do you want to meet?”

  “Bree lives in Salem, so rather than having us drive out to the Department of Fire Services in Stow, she’s arranged for us to meet at the fire department headquarters in town. Do you know it?”

  “No, but I’ll find it. I’ll meet you there at five to eleven.” Matt scanned the remains. “You guys can keep going here?”

  “That’s the plan,” Kiko said. “I’m going to start the skull reconstruction.”

  “And we’ll keep cataloging the bone injuries,” Paul said. “We’re off to a good start, but we still have a long way to go with this much damage.”

  Matt rubbed his hands together in apparent satisfaction and grinned. “Great. Sounds like tomorrow could be a big day.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: CLEAN BURN

  * * *

  Clean Burn: a burn pattern seen on noncombustible surfaces like metal, brick or cinder block where direct flame contact or intense radiated heat burns away soot and smoke condensate.

  Thursday, 10:53 a.m.

  Chief James F. Brennen Memorial Fire Headquarters

  Salem, Massachusetts

  Leigh waited in front of the corner diner while Matt parked behind her Crown Vic. Shading her eyes against the sun’s bright glare, she studied the huge Federal-style red brick building across the street. Located on the corner of a busy intersection, it was just a few blocks from the site of the wharf fire. Two of the four garage doors were open, bright red trucks facing outwards.

  “How did it go at the Simpson house this morning?” Matt asked from behind her.

  She started slightly at the sound of his voice. She hadn’t heard him approach—the man could be stealthy as a cat. She looked over her shoulder to see herself reflected in his sunglasses. “Not bad. I was lucky to catch Judge Connor this morning in chambers before he went into session. Riley had some time, so he came along and gave me a hand.”

  “You know I would have helped if you’d asked.”

  “I know. But when it comes to things like legal searches, it’s better to leave the first sweep to the cops. It didn’t take us very long. She lived in an exclusive condo downtown. High security, very luxurious, very elite. But not too big, so we were in and out fairly quickly. Her condo was everything you’d expect from what we’ve heard of her so far—expensive furniture, fine crystal, spectacular jewelry, tasteful art. No surprises until we found the box in her guest-room closet that contained her supplies from her time in the coven. Everything carelessly tossed together in a jumble: cauldron, candles, chalice, herbs, crystals, potion bottles, oils, books on the Craft. But most telling of all, her grimoire was also there.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s also called a Book of Shadows and is one of a Witch’s most precious possessions. It’s essentially a journal of her experiences in the Craft: dreams, rituals, spells, potion recipes, coven members, daily practices. So, to carelessly toss it away . . . Well, let’s just say that Elanthia would be horrified.”

  “Do you still have yours?”

  Caught off guard, Leigh jerked slightly. “Actually, yes. I fell out of touch with the Craft but, even then, it didn’t seem right to throw it away. It was an important part of my youth.”

  “So a good memory for you.”

  Leigh smiled. “That’s a nice way to describe it. Anyway, there were a number of things that should have been in the box, but weren’t.”

  “The athame.”

  “Actually, the entire matched set from the metalsmith was missing. Riley and I took the place apart, specially looking for any trace of them.” She glanced at the streetlight that was about to turn yellow. “Come on, let’s catch the light.”

  They started across the street.

  “So the question is, what happened to them,” Matt said. “Did the killer steal them or did she give them away?”

  “Or did she sell them on eBay or at a pawnshop? We need to follow up where they went. eBay will be trickier to track, but Riley is calling local pawnshops and those in and around Boston, since we know she liked to visit Newberry Street. We also recovered her laptop, which I’ve already dropped off with Tucker.” Rob Tucker, the detective unit’s computer hotshot, had been instrumental in helping solve their first case. “He’s going to go through her email and files and see if there’s anything there that might shed some light. And I’m going to call the other Witchcraft shops to see if they take secondhand items.”

  “You know,” Matt said, “when you think about it, you keep a grimoire.”

  Leigh glanced over at him. “I know. I told you I put that away years ago.”

  “No, I mean you still keep one. Your notepad.” He tapped his knuckles against her blazer pocket where she always kept her notepad and pen. “It contains your experiences and tricks of the trade.”

  They walked together up the wide sunlit driveway that ran the width of the building and entered the dim quiet of the garage. To their right was a shiny red engine, a large panel of dials and gauges and draping loops of yellow hose peeking out from just behind the cab. To their left, a huge ladder truck filled the bay from garage door to the rear wall, the massive ladder stretched along the length of the truck roof from windshield almost to the back bumper. The front doors of the cab were open, and a heavy black turnout coat hung from the hand bar installed beside the open door. Below the coat was a pair of boots, toes neatly pointing toward the truck, with a pair of bunkers puddled limply around them. Inside the truck, a helmet lay on each seat.

  “Set up for a fast getaway?” Matt suggested.

  “Looks like it. If all your stuff is right here, you can just step into it and go.” The sound of something metallic striking the concrete floor echoed through the garage, and Leigh peered toward the back of the building. “Come on. Sounds like someone’s here.”

  Emerging between the two vehicles, they approached two young firefighters, busily folding hose and loading it onto the back of the engine, who directed them up a wide set of stairs to the administrative offices.

  They found Bree inside the main control room, a huge open space with a long L-shaped console that ran along one side and the back of the room. Two uniformed men sat at the console, surrounded by blinking lights, monitors constantly scrolling information and maps lining the walls, listing every street and fire hydrant in Salem. The low murmur of the radio was a constant background noise as the fire alarm operator at the desk routed calls to stations all over the city while staying abreast of ongoing incidents.

  Bree nodded as they entered the room, and quickly finished her conversation with one of the men. She crossed the room toward them, a file folder tucked under her arm. “Thanks for coming. I’ve had time to look over the reports. We definitely have something unusual.”

  Bree led them down the hallway, past bulletin boards overflowing with newspaper clippings of local fires, and open doors leading into neat, sparse sleeping quarters.

  They turned into a small conference room near the end of the hallway. Once seated, Bree opened the file folder. Lying on top of a stack of papers was a piece of scorched metal sealed in a plastic evidence bag. “Let’s start with this.” She passed the bag to Leigh. Inside was a pentacle, approximately two inches in diameter. “This was found at the scene. I asked around and one of the guys who was in the initial attack said he’d seen it nailed to the front door. As the fire progressed and the door burned, it got l
ost in the debris near the entranceway. I know this is Salem, but it seemed unusual to me that it would be on the door. People tend to wear pentacles as charms, or have them woven into cloth or inscribed onto chalices, but you don’t normally find one nailed to a door. I happened to catch the shop owner that day; he’d never seen it before, which made me think it was related to the fire itself. Or the murder.”

  Leigh passed the bag to Matt, who took a moment to study the design. “I’m betting this isn’t a coincidence considering the knife.”

  “The murder weapon?” Bree leaned forward over the desk, her eyes alive with interest. “There’s a connection?”

  “The knife was a ceremonial athame adorned with a crescent moon and pentacle,” said Leigh.

  Bree cocked an eyebrow. “Interesting. I didn’t get the impression the shop owner is a practicing Witch. Then why so many symbols left there?”

  “I talked to him earlier this week,” Leigh said. “He doesn’t have any ties to the Craft, and his only link to the crime is that the victim used to shop there occasionally. While he recognized her face, he didn’t remember her coming into the store in the last six or eight months. But the pentacle adds another layer to the theory that the killing was related to the victim’s involvement with the Craft.”

  “You think someone inside her coven killed her?” Bree asked. “Wouldn’t that be a little obvious, leaving a pentacle like that and using a ceremonial knife?”

  “There’s also the fact that a Witch considers the pentacle to be the symbol of creation, not of death.”

  “Unless that juxtaposition is exactly what they were aiming for,” Matt suggested. “She quit the Craft, so it no longer applied to her. Her own athame was used against her so maybe turning the pentacle symbol around metaphorically is all part of the message.”

  “That’s hardly a message for the victim,” Bree said dryly. “It might, however, be a warning to others. ‘Don’t mess with us’ . . . that kind of thing?”

  Leigh plucked the pentacle from Matt’s hands to study it again. “It just doesn’t seem right. The Craft is all about ‘live and let live.’ ”

  “What about black magic? There must be some Witches in the area that practice the black arts.”

  Leigh nodded slowly. “It’s worth looking into.”

  Bree flipped through papers in the folder. “Let me give you something else to look into. The lab results are back. Once you removed the body from the scene, we went back in to take samples from our suspected point of origin. That’s when I saw it—a very minor difference in a roughly one-foot-square section of flooring.”

  “What does that mean?” Leigh asked. “Something else was there?”

  “That’s right. Something was on the floor that initially protected it from the fire. There was even variation within that section because part of it was under the body, which sheltered it even longer. We took scrapings from a number of spots, and that’s where we hit pay dirt.” Bree referred to a lab report. “When the mass spec results came back, they were positive for cellulose, lignin, hydrocarbons, red phosphorus and a mixture of protein, sugars, resin . . .” She slapped the report back down on the desk. “And a list of other things that I won’t bore you with. And likely couldn’t pronounce anyway.”

  “What on earth is all that?” Leigh asked.

  “The lab guys love to make it more complicated than it needs to be,” Bree said. “Scientists. Ask for a straight answer and get gobbledygook.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Hey!” Matt protested.

  Bree stabbed an index finger in Matt’s direction. “Present company excluded of course. As for your question, basically, it’s wood, canola oil, red phosphorus and latex rubber. That combination had me stymied at first so I bounced it off the guys when I caught them sitting down to dinner last night. I used to work with these men, so they’re always extra willing to help out, and their combined experience is priceless. Doc finally hit on it when he remembered that red phosphorus reacts violently with latex. Add to that that it wasn’t the wood from the floor we picked up but newspaper and it all comes together.

  “This is how we think your killer set up his time-delay incendiary device,” Bree explained. “Take a latex rubber balloon, and half fill it with canola oil. Add one small piece of solid red phosphorus, maybe about the size of a pea, being very careful not to contact the balloon in the process or it’s game over then and there as suddenly you’re stuck in the middle of your own fire. Tie a string around the end of the balloon and suspend it. Spread a loose stack of newspaper on the ground beneath the balloon. Then simply poke a hole in the bottom of the balloon with a pin and sit back and wait. Or, if you’re smart, run like hell.”

  “The oil drips onto the paper,” Matt said. “Then as the level drops, the red phosphorus—I’m guessing it floats in the oil— finally contacts the latex of the balloon. I assume there’s an exothermic reaction at that point?”

  “English, please,” Leigh said in a resigned tone. “Remember, we’re not all science majors.”

  A small smile curved Bree’s lips as she translated. “The latex reacts with the red phosphorus producing a sudden burst of heat. The heat melts the balloon, causing it to burst into flames. Then those flaming bits of latex fall to the floor.”

  “Onto the oil-soaked paper,” Matt finished. “Whoosh!”

  “Whoosh indeed. The oil would have splattered the floor and the victim’s clothing and it all would’ve ignited. The oil also would have accelerated damage to the body by ensuring that her clothing was well engulfed. But something was nagging at me, so I went back through the scene photos. We took really extensive shots of the point of origin. One of the items we found in the debris was a long armed hook. I didn’t think anything of it at the time because of all the other odd junk in the store, so we didn’t take it into evidence, but it’s there in the pictures. Keeping this scenario in mind, I think the hook was jammed into the door of the wardrobe in order to hang the balloon.”

  “I don’t understand something,” Leigh said. “How would a pile of newspaper protect the floor? Surely it would have burned in the fire.”

  “Think about the last time you tried to start a fire with newspaper. You have to let air in between the sheets or it won’t burn due to lack of oxygen. The killer may have thought that a bigger pile was better for getting the fire going, but in actuality, he could have snuffed his own fire that way. A thick pile of paper would have insulated the floor temporarily, giving us that slight gradation in burn patterns. Luckily for the killer, he had enough oil soaked into the edges and top layer to get the fire started. And with the size of the fuel load in there, once it was going, he didn’t need the paper anymore. Eventually, even the thick layer of paper burned.”

  “Ingenious,” Leigh said. “This certainly tells us something about our killer.”

  “It tells us that he knows at least a little chemistry,” Bree agreed. “But there’s something more intriguing about the red phosphorus. It’s so pure that it’s basically a controlled substance.”

  “Why would a chemical like that be a controlled substance?” Matt asked.

  Bree leaned back in her chair, casually crossing her arms over her chest. “Because it can be used in the production of methamphetamine.”

  Matt’s eyebrows shot skyward. “Meth? I had no idea.”

  “Guess you haven’t been cooking anything up in the lab, then.”

  “My students keep me on a short leash,” Matt shot back.

  “If the red phosphorus is controlled, that actually gives us a leg up,” Leigh observed, ignoring their banter and quelling the urge to roll her eyes. “Chemical houses will be required to document all buyers. That could significantly narrow our search. At the very least, it will give us a paper trail to start with.”

  “God knows, we love a good paper trail.” Matt’s tone clearly said otherwise. “But I guess it’s a good thing because I bet there’ll be no way to trace the latex or the oil. Too common and—”

 
; Matt was interrupted by the ringing of Leigh’s cell phone. She pulled it out of her pocket, glanced at the caller ID, and froze. “I need to get this. Sorry.” She accepted the call. “Abbott.” She automatically straightened in her chair. “Yes, sir. I’m meeting with the representative from the state fire marshal’s office at FD headquarters, but I can be back at the unit inside of an hour. Yes, sir. I’ll see you then.” She ended the call.

  “Was that Kepler?” Matt asked.

  “No, Detective Lieutenant Harper. He needs to see me ASAP.”

  Concern flashed over Matt’s face. “About what?”

  “I have no idea. But there was something in his tone I really didn’t like.”

  “When the chief needs to see you right away, it’s never a good thing,” Bree said.

  Leigh gnawed on her bottom lip. “No, it isn’t. But I guess I’ll find out soon enough. Now, where were we?”

  “We were talking about the incendiary device,” Matt said.

  “How much lead time did this give the killer? From the time the device was set, how long did he or she have to get out of there?”

  “Depending on the size of the hole in the balloon, I’d estimate as much as six or seven minutes. Plenty of time to be long gone by the time the fire really got rolling.” Bree pulled several sheets of paper from the folder and passed them to Leigh. “These are your copies of the lab reports. I haven’t had time to finish my scene report yet, but I’ll email it to you later this week.”

  Leigh stood and they shook hands. “Thank you. You’ve given us a great lead.”

  “I hope so. I hate firebugs. Find this guy and let’s put an end to it.”

  “We’ll do our best.”

  “I’ll walk you guys out.”

  They were halfway down the stairs when an ear-piercing alarm went off—a long, deafening beep, followed by a series of beeps and whoops. Bree crowded them against the stair railing. “Stay to the side,” she snapped.