A Flame in the Wind of Death

by Ann Vanderlaan

  Leigh’s gaze stayed on Matt as he jogged back to the temporary medical station on the grass, then she turned away in search of Bree. She hated feeling useless, but for now she had a victim she couldn’t touch until the ME examined him, and her scene was burning up before her eyes. If only—

  She had just cleared the gate and stepped onto the sidewalk when someone moved directly into her path. She took an involuntary step backward, one hand clutching at the nearest iron fence rail to keep her balance.

  “Trooper Abbott, Jason Wells for the Salem Times. Can you confirm that tonight’s fire is related to Sunday morning’s blaze?”

  Leigh’s eyes narrowed on the man crowding into her personal space. He was young, probably only in his mid-twenties, with perfectly coiffed blond hair. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a fashion catalog, complete with cable-knit cashmere V-neck sweater. He held a shiny silver pen and a small pad of paper in an expensive leather cover.

  “You. I saw your article today. You’ve caused enough trouble. I have nothing to say to you.”

  The young man doggedly continued on as if she hadn’t spoken, falling into step with Leigh when she turned away and stalked down the sidewalk. “Aren’t you concerned about a serial killer, Trooper Abbott? Especially considering the pentacle found on the—”

  Leigh rounded on him. “Who told you that?”

  “A reliable source.”

  She leaned in closer. The man’s expensive cologne nearly made her head swim, which was saying something when the air was already thick with smoke and the smell of burning wood. “Who?”

  “A reliable source,” Wells repeated, slowly, as if she didn’t understand him the first time.

  It might have been the stress of a second victim coupled with the loss of a firefighter, but anger exploded in Leigh. She struggled to keep it locked down and was still biting back the caustic comment that sprang to her lips when Wells launched into his next line of attack. “Do you plan to inform the public, Trooper Abbott? It’s in their best interest to know that another serial killer is on the loose. And isn’t it convenient you’re on the case again.”

  Leigh jammed her hands in her pockets to keep from spoiling his pretty face with a broken nose or a black eye. She was too tired, too emotional, and too short of temper for this, and Harper would have her head if she went after the reporter. “Are you implying something, Mr. Wells?”

  Wells’s face took on a wide-eyed expression of feigned innocence, but his dramatics weren’t lost on Leigh. Slimy son of a bitch.

  “Of course not,” he protested. “It’s just . . . you were so successful during the Bradford case, we’re looking for a similar result here. If you’re not willing to comment on the serial killings, can you at least shed light on the source of the fires? Was Trooper Gilson able to pinpoint the cause of Sunday’s blaze?”

  “No comment,” Leigh snapped.

  “Sunday’s victim has been identified as Moira Simpson. Until recently, she was a member of a local coven. I understand she was killed with an athame. Should the Witches of Salem be worried for their own safety? Or do you think the Witches are responsible for her death?”

  “You should watch what you put into print, Mr. Wells. Your unfounded theories could cause a panic. If that happens, rest assured, we’ll make sure the blame for it rests on you. If you want a quote for your paper, talk to Sharon Collins. She’ll be happy to feed you the party line. Now get the hell away from this scene before I have you arrested for interfering in a police investigation.”

  With that, Leigh turned away to stalk down the sidewalk. When she looked back moments later, Wells was gone.

  She stopped then, wrapping her fingers around the tops of the wrought-iron rails and letting the temper thrum through her as her gaze was drawn back to the blaze. The men and women of the Salem Fire Department continued to fight the fire, but they were no longer trying to save the building; they were simply trying to extinguish the blaze. Water cascaded down from massive ladders above, streaming directly into the gaping hole where the roof once rose. Huge clouds of gray steam billowed up, mixing with heavy plumes of black smoke, temporarily obscuring the men on top of the ladders. On the ground, water streamed from hoses through shattered windows and the front doors. Several men were taking advantage of the collapsed side wall, using the large gap to stream water directly inside. But the pall of death hung over the scene. Firefighters moved around the site, shouting at each other as they fought the flames, but the scene was somehow quieter than before, more subdued, grief radiating from the men even from behind face masks and through choking smoke.

  Leigh felt their anguish like a punch to the gut. She knew the feeling of having a fellow cop go down in the line of duty, knew how razor-sharp the pain felt. Knew the overwhelming despair when the one who fell was a loved one.

  She also knew the agony of having to continue to do the job despite the gaping hole in your heart and the desire to simply curl into a ball and weep.

  Leigh shut out the rawness of the grief around her, and let her anger burn bright and feed her.

  Now there were two more victims who needed justice.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: BACKDRAFT

  * * *

  Backdraft: rapid burning and the explosion of superheated gases in a confined space after an oxygen-starved fire is suddenly ventilated.

  Friday, 1:53 p.m.

  Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Matt looked up from the dissected throat of the victim when the door of the autopsy suite slammed open and Leigh burst through at a breathless half run. “Sorry I’m late. I was called to a fatal stabbing downtown this morning. I just got free.”

  Matt straightened. “Nothing related to this case, I assume.”

  “No.” Leigh slid the strap of her messenger bag off her shoulder and set it on the counter, well away from any possible splashes. “It’s less than a week until Halloween and the tourists are already swarming. Put that many people and alcohol together and this kind of stuff always happens. We always see an uptick in crime at this time of year, although usually it’s not murder. Salem PD deals with most of it, but things got out of hand last night and I was on call. Thankfully, there were several eyewitnesses to the killing, and it didn’t take long to discover where the suspect was staying. He’s in lockup now. Maybe that will give Jason Wells something else to write about so he’ll leave us alone.”

  Matt’s gaze dropped to the fist Leigh unconsciously clenched and unclenched at her side. “That’s the reporter who was in your face last night?”

  “Yes. He gave the Salem Times another above-the-fold screaming headline about last night’s fire.” Using both hands, Leigh sketched out the title in the air as if it were a billboard. “ ‘PENTACLE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!’ He’s purposely stoking the fires of hysteria to sell papers. I’m waiting for Harper to call me into his office again.” She drew in a deep breath. “But enough about that little weasel.” She came to stand at the end of the table, her lips tightening as she took in the scene. “Where are we with the autopsy?”

  “We’re almost finished,” Rowe said.

  Leigh’s face went a shade paler when her gaze landed on Rowe standing near the open chest cavity, cradling the bloody heart in his gloved hands.

  “Sorry I missed it,” she said flatly.

  Rowe laughed as he laid the heart on the weigh scale. “No, you’re not. You’re always game, Abbott, but you can’t hide it. You hate autopsies.”

  “And here I thought I had you all fooled,” Leigh deadpanned. “So, what have we got so far?”

  “Male victim, approximately fifty to sixty years of age,” Rowe recited. “Death was due to exsanguination.”

  “Not fire?”

  “No. No soot in either the lungs or the trachea.”

  “So the same set up as last time. The throat slash was responsible, I assume?”

  “Yes.” Matt motioned her over to where he stood. “Take a look at the wound.”
He glanced at the students clustered around him. “Guys, give us some room here.”

  Matt’s students stepped out of the way, letting Leigh move in closer. She hesitated for a moment, then firmed her jaw and stepped up to the table.

  “You saw this last night, but Rowe dissected back the tissues so we could really see it.” Careful not to touch the body, Matt pointed out the salient landmarks. “It’s a little hard to see because of the heat damage and the charring, but this center tube leading straight down from under the chin is the trachea or windpipe. On either side is the carotid sheath enclosing the carotid artery, jugular vein and the vagus nerve. As you can see, both the carotid and jugular are completely severed on the left side and the carotid is partially severed on the right.”

  Leigh looked over at Rowe, who was stripping off a pair of bloody gloves and replacing them with fresh. “How fast did he die?”

  “He would have been unconscious in about five seconds and dead a few minutes after that. Blood loss would have quickly resulted in hypovolemic shock.”

  “So dead before the fire was set,” Leigh mused. “What’s the point of the arson, then? Clearly, it’s not to kill. The victim is already dead. Unless the sick bastard was aiming to take out a firefighter or two, in which case, he struck pay dirt.”

  “To cleanse?” Kiko suggested. “Especially in a religious setting like this. All sins wiped clean by the fire?”

  “It makes more sense that it’s a practical exercise,” Paul said. “The killer simply wants to destroy any trace evidence. If he sets the fire and gets out, then the worst-case scenario is that it doesn’t take and the body is found as is. But the victim’s already dead. The fire is just icing on the cake in terms of him getting away scot-free.”

  “But then why leave the knife the first time?” Juka said. “Your theory of evidence destruction doesn’t work when he leaves the murder weapon on scene. Or, worse than that, in the body.”

  “But the knife didn’t point directly to the killer because it belonged to the victim,” Leigh said.

  “That also negates the likelihood that the fire was set to hide the identity of the victim, seeing as the knife led directly to her,” Rowe stated.

  “We were lucky there because it was a custom piece,” Leigh said. “If it hadn’t been, we might still be struggling to identify her.”

  “Has a murder weapon been found at the second fire yet?” Matt asked.

  Leigh shook her head. “Not that I know of. I asked Bree to concentrate on that area and I’m hoping to hear from her soon.”

  “How’s she doing?” Kiko asked quietly.

  “None of them are in good shape,” Leigh said sharply. “It hurts when you lose one of your own.”

  Not able to touch her with his bloodied gloves, Matt leaned sideways, pressing his shoulder to hers. The eyes that met his shone with banked anger. But simmering behind the anger was more pain than simply the loss of an unknown firefighter.

  She gave him a wan smile before turning to Kiko. “I’m sorry. You’re concerned for them and I’m snapping at you. I haven’t talked to Bree personally this morning. All I could get was her voice mail so I left a message. I assume they were back in there first thing once the site cooled enough to really go through it.”

  “The church is likely unstable,” Matt said. “They’ll be slowed down because they’ll have to ensure the remaining walls don’t collapse. They won’t take any risks, not after last night.”

  “No, they won’t.” Leigh reached into her blazer pocket for her notepad and pen. “Okay, back to the throat wound. Are we looking at another athame?”

  “Not sure yet.” Matt pulled back some of the charred tissue. “The wound here on the left looks like it’s gone right down to the bone, striking the fifth cervical vertebra. If we’re lucky, once the tissue is dissected away, we’ll be able to identify kerf marks on the bone. It missed the hyoid altogether, so that won’t help us.”

  “What about a head wound?” Leigh moved to the top of the table, and studied the skull. The scalp had been retracted and the top part of the skull removed with a Stryker saw. The spongy gray brain lay in an open container on the counter. “Any signs of a blow like we saw with Moira Simpson?”

  “No skull injuries, no signs of cerebral hemorrhage. But we did find another sign of incapacitation.” Matt circled the table to stand down by the right knee. “Squat down here, on the floor. We can’t roll the body over right now, so you need to get low to see this.”

  Leigh threw him a questioning look, but crouched down.

  “I noticed the asymmetry in the body yesterday. The left leg was starting to pull into the typical curled formation, but the right leg wasn’t. And that’s because of this.” Slipping a hand under the right calf, Matt lifted the leg into the air, exposing a deep slash just above the crook of the knee.

  Leigh hooked her hands over the edge of the table, pulling herself up a few inches higher to see better. “He was hamstrung?” she asked in amazement.

  “Yes.” Matt pointed out a mass of bunched muscle under the blistered and charred surface of the back of the thigh. “See this bump? When the muscle started to contract from the heat nothing was holding it down at one end, so it formed this mass above the knee.” He slowly lowered the limb to the table. “The killer slashed the back of the knee with a blade, right down to the distal femur. That cut the tendons holding the hamstrings in place. With no muscles to flex the knee, the leg remained straight despite the heat of the fire. A wound like this would bleed badly as the slash cut the popliteal artery. The victim would have been bleeding out even before the fatal blow.”

  Leigh surged to her feet, her gaze darting from Matt to Rowe. “The victim couldn’t run?”

  “The victim couldn’t walk,” Rowe clarified. “In my opinion, the victim was on his knees at the time of death.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The trachea.” Rowe pointed to the slash in the neck with a freshly gloved finger. “The cartilaginous rings are sliced on an upward angle.”

  “So the killer disabled the victim by hamstringing him. The victim fell to his knees, the killer yanked his head back and slashed his throat.”

  “I wonder if there’s some significance in the method of death.” Matt came to stand at the end of the table, his gaze fixed on the body. The scene played over in his head, killer and victim in a final dance of death.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, assuming from the cross we saw that this is indeed a priest, that’s a man who spends a lot of time on his knees in prayer. And they found the body at the front of sanctuary near the altar. The throat wound, the exsanguination . . . the blood of Christ spilled for all sinners.”

  Leigh crossed her arms over her chest, looking up at him in surprise. “I had no idea you were religious.”

  “I’m not. But you pick things up as you go through life and I was friendly with the chaplain in my unit when I was overseas. Anyway, it’s just a thought. Nothing in the first death indicated anything like that.”

  “No, but maybe the method of death is more suited to the individual victim than the killer. Maybe—”

  With a whoosh, the autopsy suite door swung open and Bree marched in, an evidence bag clutched in one hand. Her face looked drawn, and there were dark circles under her dull eyes and deep brackets around her mouth. She nodded curtly to the medical examiner. “Rowe. Sorry to barge in on you.”

  “Gilson. What can we do for you?”

  Bree’s gaze ran over the body on the table, and some of the tightness in her face eased.

  She was expecting the body of the fallen firefighter.

  She marched briskly across the room. When she reached Leigh, she held out the bag. “You need this. We found it in the church near where the body was found.”

  Matt stared at the blade in surprise. Instead of the expected straight bladed implement, the bag contained a knife with a long curved blade and a soot-covered white stone handle. He stripped off his gloves
and stepped forward for a closer look. “Is that . . . a sickle? Like you’d use to harvest crops?”

  “Close. I mentioned this to you before. It’s one of the ritual knives of the Craft—a boline.” Leigh ran her fingers over it, feeling the metalwork on the grip of the knife. “It’s the same design as the athame and it matches the pictures the metalsmith emailed me.”

  “The handle’s a different color,” said Paul. “You’re sure it’s from the same set?”

  “The white handle is typical. Athame handles are usually black; boline handles are usually white. But the metal and stonework are clearly from the same metalsmith as the athame used in the first killing. I can also tell you this piece didn’t come into the killer’s hands through any local pawn or Witch shops. Both Riley and I struck out there.”

  “What’s a boline used for?” Kiko asked.

  “It’s a work knife, not a ceremonial knife like the athame. Witches cut herbs, flowers, or cord with it, or use it to carve candles or wands with runes or symbols.”

  “Let me see that.” Without waiting for Leigh’s response, Matt took the knife from her, ignoring her glare. He studied it for a moment, turning it over in his hands.

  “You’re looking at the curve,” Kiko said. “And the length of the blade.”

  “Oh, man.” Paul leaned in closer. “That would be . . .” He winced and left the rest of the sentence unuttered.

  “What?” Leigh demanded.

  Matt held the bag up so everyone could see the knife. “Look at the shape of the blade. This wouldn’t require a slash. Just slide the curve of the blade around the leg or throat and rotate it sideways.”

  Leigh’s expression wrinkled in distaste.

  “That’s why the left carotid is severed, but not the right.”

  Matt’s gaze landed on Paul, who immediately threw up his hands. “No way. Just the thought of this is grossing me out.”

  Matt fixed him with a flat stare and waited.

  “Fine,” Paul muttered. “Standing or kneeling?”