Eternal

by V. K. Forrest

  “We didn’t know whether we should clean that up, we didn’t,” her uncle apologized.

  Fia patted his arm, thinking old men shouldn’t have to deal with this. She let her gaze drift over the scattered ashes that had obviously been paper. Envelopes. Newspapers. Mail…She could smell the accelerant, gasoline probably.

  You’re sure the head isn’t here somewhere? She moved a piece of charred paper with the toe of her boot.

  I’m sure. Not the head or the feet.

  She stared at him. “His feet are missing? Sweet God—” The words were out of her mouth before she realized she was speaking out loud in response to something Sean had said silently. Glancing over her shoulder in the direction of Agent Duncan’s voice, she just hoped he wasn’t paying too close attention. She pulled her camera out of her pocket and flipped the power switch on.

  I understand the head, Uncle Sean, but why the feet?

  I can’t say, Fee.

  “So the body was discovered by Patrolman Kahill minus the head and feet, with no sign of either in the vicinity,” she said aloud, again refocusing.

  “I got all my available men out looking for the body parts or any blood trail. Pictures, I have, back at the station. Knew ye’d want to see just what things looked like before Bobby…before we removed the body,” Sean said.

  Mahon’s got one those fancy digital cameras, he does. Shows the pictures right on the computer. Didn’t think they should go to the drugstore. I never liked how those pictures came out of that machine anyway. Our faces are always kind of hazy. Why do ye think that is, Fee? Imprints of a man’s soul?

  I don’t know why, Uncle Sean!

  She didn’t mean to snap at him, but the hurt look on his face shamed her. I’m sorry, she thought. I’m as upset as you are. Let’s just get through this, OK, Uncle Sean? “I’d still like to take some of my own photographs, if you don’t mind,” she said aloud.

  She turned slowly, surveying the entire room. It was only twenty-five by thirty feet. Eight-foot tiled ceiling and pale government-green walls that appeared to have been painted recently. Everything as neat as a pin, just as in the lobby…except for the obvious.

  Fia heard Duncan snap his cell phone shut out front and footsteps followed as he approached, their echo booming in her head. She clicked the shutter, barely bothering to look at the viewing screen on the camera.

  Click, click, click. She took photographs of the charred, gory spot on the floor. The ashes of the mail. Other than an overturned mail cart, and a stool Bobby could have been sitting on, very little else looked disturbed.

  She looked up and, spotting a few drops of blood spray on the ceiling tile, she pointed the camera lens and clicked again. She expected more blood. Remembered more…

  “Looks like we’re stuck with each other, Special Agent Kahill.” Duncan walked through the doorway, sounding as if he was trying to speak through clenched teeth. “My SAC talked to your SAC and decided this would be a bipartisan investigation.”

  Great, Fia thought. She’d been afraid of that. Uncle Bill’s office was probably able to request her without riling any suspicions, but she guessed the senator wasn’t willing to put up a fight when the Baltimore office screamed “No fair!” He had his own causes to protect. She continued to take photos, not looking at Duncan.

  “The accelerant was probably gasoline. Easy to obtain without suspicion. Easy to carry. Mail was used to build the fire.” He walked over to stand beside her, sliding his hands into his pants pockets. He sounded as if he was narrating one of her uncle’s favorite police-procedural TV shows. “An amateur. The fire wasn’t hot enough to burn much more than the skin and some fat. You want to completely burn up a body, the fire’s got to be a hell of a lot hotter than this one was.” He glanced overhead, then at Sean. “Fire alarm go off, Chief?”

  Sean shook his head. “Battery’s probably dead, it is. Bobby didn’t get up on ladders, lest he absolutely had to, bein’ the big man that he was.”

  Duncan frowned. “We’ll check for fingerprints on the smoke detector, see if the batteries were taken out.”

  “Uh, have to get some more print powder before we lift any more prints. We’re out.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Duncan looked at Fia, but she didn’t respond.

  “We don’t lift many fingerprints around here, Agent Duncan.”

  He exhaled. “And I don’t suppose there was a burglar-alarm system?”

  “Never needed one,” Sean answered.

  Fia pressed her lips together. Everything Duncan had said, a rookie just out of the academy would have been able to deduce. So far, she wasn’t impressed. “No gas can found?” she asked her uncle. “Not in here, not in the alley?”

  He shook his head, reaching for his handkerchief in his back pocket. No, but I once saw this case on that Cold Case Files where this guy—

  She snapped another photo. Please, Uncle Sean…

  “Perp brought it with him; he meant to start a fire,” she intoned, silencing the camera. She tried to take in the entire scene, attempting to concentrate on the crime and not her uncle’s rambling and not the man standing beside her, who was as close to a ghost as she had ever seen.

  “Maybe there was something here the killer wanted, or didn’t want to leave in the post office,” she continued, nodding in the direction of the canvas mail cart lying on its side. “Perp wasn’t expecting the postmaster to be working late. Came in, surprised him. Maybe Bobby was sitting on that stool, back to the rear door. Perp figured he had to kill Bobby so there’d be no witness.”

  “Maybe. Of course, the cash is missing, too, bank bag and all,” Duncan one-upped her.

  Fia glanced up at her uncle. They hadn’t gotten that far in her questioning, but she didn’t like surprises. Not this guy springing them on her. “Could be motive,” she agreed. “But decapitation? Setting the body on fire? Talk about overkill to steal a bank bag that couldn’t have had more than a couple hundred dollars in it. And why take the head and the feet? And how the hell did he cut them off?” Her last words were as much for her own benefit as his.

  “Perp was probably strung out on PCP. I’ve worked some pretty gruesome murders where—”

  “I have, too, Special Agent Duncan.” She looked him in the eye. “But this is my first with stolen body parts. Yours?”

  He seemed unable to tear his gaze from hers for a second, then looked away. “Yeah.”

  She’d gotten him on that one.

  He freed his hands from his pockets, walking around to the other side of the black, bloody soot ring that marked where Bobby’s body had lain. “There’s no point in speculating why the body parts were taken. Not until we have all the evidence.”

  It was easy for him to say. He didn’t understand what the decapitation meant to one of them.

  “You say you have photographs at the station, Chief?” Fia looked up at her uncle, who was beginning to pace now. “I imagine Special Agent Duncan would like to see them.”

  “Actually, I was able to get here in time to see the body before it was removed.”

  Fia glared at Sean who was wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. It was her turn to grit her teeth. You’ve got to tell me these things, Uncle Sean. I feel like I’m coming in way behind.

  “I see.” It sounded so lame. She cleared her throat. “Then why don’t we go to the station, so I can have a look at the photos.” She looked to Duncan. “It’s going to take us a full day to process this scene the way we’re going to want it processed, and we are going to need that print powder. The chief can put in an order as soon as we get to the station.” She looked to Sean. “The back door is locked now, correct?”

  “Course, Fee, what kind of fool do ye think—” Sean cut off the last of his sentence, tucking the handkerchief back into his pocket.

  She shifted her gaze to Duncan, slipping her camera into her pocket. What a mess. How was she going to do this? Investigate Bobby’s murder and keep Special Agent Duncan out of the town’s
business? She couldn’t believe Uncle Bill had let the Baltimore office send an agent. But maybe Gair was right. Maybe because this was a federal building, they wouldn’t be able to keep the murder under wraps.

  Fia looked to her new so-called partner. “Care to go back to the station with me, Special Agent Duncan?”

  “We drove over in my car.” Sean gestured in the direction of the front door.

  He drove two and half blocks? Fia almost laughed aloud, though it really wasn’t that funny. Sean didn’t like to expend any more energy than absolutely necessary, except when it came to lifting a pint of ale.

  “He left his in the station parking lot,” Sean continued to ramble. Drives an unmarked Crown Vic. Nice car. V8 engine. How come you don’t get a Bureau car, Fee? Came in your own, didn’t you? I could hear the Beemer engine. Runnin’ a little rough, she is?”

  Fia turned away from her uncle, blinking to block his thoughts. If she wasn’t careful, she’d find herself wrapped up in a mental conversation involving maintenance schedules of BMWs built before 1998. Something he’d learned on the Speed Channel.

  “I think I’ll walk,” Duncan said. “Care to join me, Special Agent Kahill?” He waited.

  Apparently, he wasn’t going to give her a chance to speak with her uncle alone. Not yet, at least. She exhaled and started for the front lobby. “Meet you there, Chief.”

  Sean followed them outside, locking the front doors behind them. At the bottom of the steps, Fia ducked under the yellow tape and turned right on the sidewalk. A car passed. A cousin waved. She didn’t wave back.

  “Pretty weird. So many of you related in this town.” Duncan glanced in the direction of the passing car as he caught up with her. “Lot of Kahills to keep track of.”

  She stepped off the curb and started across the street without looking either way. She didn’t have to look. She could easily hear the cars two blocks over. “My family’s been here for a long time, Special Agent Duncan. We have a big family.” She shrugged. “So a lot of us have the same name.”

  The redhead made it somehow seem simpler than Glen sensed it was. Not that he was fortunate enough to be one of those agents with a sixth sense. But something was a little odd here; he just couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Maybe it was merely his imagination. His irritation. When he called his SAC back in Baltimore, Krackhow had made no bones about the fact that Special Agent Kahill would not be removed from the case. It was out of his hands, he had brusquely told Glen. The order came as a result of a request out of Senator Malley’s office. Case closed. If Glen wanted out, Krackhow would send over another agent.

  Of course Glen didn’t want out. A decapitation in a federal building? Missing body parts? It was the kind of case most agents dreamed of their entire careers. Certainly more exciting than the identity-theft unit he’d been working in. But it still pissed him off that the redhead would be assigned to the case, out of her jurisdiction, just because somebody knew someone who knew someone else in Senator Buttinksky’s office. The Bureau his father had grown up in had been that way, àla J. Edgar, but this one wasn’t supposed to be. Things were supposed to have changed. Like bureaucracy ever really changed….

  He had to hurry to keep up with her. Those long legs of hers covered a lot of real estate with each step. He couldn’t deny that she was one of the most strikingly beautiful women he had ever seen. She sure didn’t look like most G-men. Besides having a bombshell figure, she had that dark red hair that no way came out of a bottle. Her skin was pale, like many redheads, but so flawless it was like porcelain, with the tiniest sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her perfectly upturned nose. Her full lips seemed naturally red, but her eyes were what really drew him. They were the strangest color, pale blue with flecks of indigo. Eyes a man could lose himself in…if the woman wasn’t such a hard-ass, he reminded himself.

  Special Agent Kahill was everything Glen despised in a female FBI agent, in any woman trying too hard to do a job society still saw as a man’s. Glen didn’t have a problem with female FBI agents, or cops, or even Navy SEALS, for that matter. He knew women who were better shots on the firing range than he was. Women with sharper intellects. What he had a problem with was the chip on the shoulder they always seemed to come with. It wasn’t enough for a woman like Fia Kahill to just do her job. She wanted to do it better than he did it, and she wanted to throw it in every man’s face. She didn’t want to be one of the boys; she wanted to be better than them.

  He glanced at her, her face set with determination as she strode down the sidewalk. If they were stuck together on the case, he had to make the best of it.

  He slid his hands into his pockets. “When I arrived, the body was just being removed. Chief Kahill said you had a local morgue.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Said the autopsy would be done here rather than in the state medical examiner’s office in Wilmington?”

  “If that’s what Chief Kahill says.” She didn’t look at him.

  It didn’t matter. The minute they’d stepped into the bright August sunlight, she covered those amazing blue eyes of hers with a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses.

  “That just seems odd, doesn’t it? I would think an autopsy of this nature would go to the state medical examiner.”

  “I can assure you Dr. Caldwell is fully qualified and licensed to perform the autopsy, Special Agent Duncan.”

  She was using that curt tone with him again. It was really beginning to annoy him that she didn’t look at him when she spoke. “I’m not questioning the doctor’s credentials, Special Agent Kahill. I’m questioning procedure on a federal case.”

  They had turned off the main street in town and were now approaching the police station. There were only two cars pulled up in front, his unmarked, and the chief’s old cruiser. All the other officers were, no doubt, out combing the streets for a head and a pair of feet right now.

  She strode up the steps leading to the front door of the hometown police station that greeted “visitors” with a welcome sign. How many visitors did a police station get, he wondered.

  “So call the state medical examiner’s office and verify it.” She pulled open the heavy door as if it was weightless.

  Glen had to hold it as it swung back hard. All he could think about as he hurried to catch up with Fia Kahill was how thankful he would be to find this killer, and get the hell away from her and her weird little town.

  Chapter 3

  “Fia?”

  She sat in the worn, gray, government-issue office chair in the rear of the police station. Every police station in America had a bull pen just like this one—wanted posters, a Heimlich maneuver instruction chart, a photo of the officers at last year’s annual Punkin’ Chunkin’, grinning and only slightly drunk, hung crookedly on the wall. There were a couple of desks, some file cabinets, an old copier on a microwave cart, and a coatrack that had seen better days.

  She leaned forward, her chin resting on her closed hands, and stared at the eight-by-ten photographs, spread across the ancient gunmetal gray desk.

  Hours had passed since she arrived in Clare Point. It seemed like years. Police officers had come and gone in the station, reporting to Sean in subdued voices. Before the shift change, a couple of the men and the lone female patrolman had ventured over to say hello. Everyone had the same information to offer. There was no sign of a severed head or feet, or suspicious persons or activity in the town.

  Her gaze moved from one photo to the next. They were gruesome even to a seasoned agent, but she couldn’t stop studying them. She kept shifting her gaze, looking for something certain, something to help her, some sign. She told Duncan she was searching for clues. Told herself the same lie, but really, she was still staring at them out of disbelief.

  The heat of the fire had made Bobby’s tendons tighten, pulling his arms and legs up into his body. Twisted, on his side, the once big man appeared infantile. Helpless. She shuddered when she saw in her mind an innocent child sleeping, sleepi
ng in flames.

  The Kahill sept had come to the New World in search of sanctuary, to escape from those who had committed these outrages against their people. No humans were aware of their presence in Clare Point. Everyone in the town knew that all of their lives depended on keeping the secret of their identity, and so it had been for centuries. No one knew but the family. But what if someone did?

  Fee…

  Sean’s voice inside her head startled her. She straightened up in the squeaky office chair, letting her arms fall to her sides. She glanced up. Both Sean and Duncan were standing in front of the desk, looking at her.

  “I’m sorry, I was concentrating. What did you say?”

  “I sent the midnight and day shifts home; no more overtime today. Most of ’em have been at it twelve hours or more, and the mid-watch has got to be back in four hours.”

  “Good call,” she responded. “Tired cop’s as bad as a drunk one. We don’t want anything missed.”

  From the rear of the bull pen came the crackle of the radio, and the evening dispatcher, in her small office, responded to a transmission. From behind the large glass window, neither the officer’s words nor the dispatcher’s could be heard. Just static and indistinct, disembodied voices.

  Sean wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “I told my boys to keep looking, fer sure, but every dumpster’s been picked through. Every alley walked. Mahon even drove out to the old feckin’ city dump. He said no one could have been there any time recently, he did. Weeds were too high.”

  “No sign of the head,” she said softly, her gaze falling on the photo directly in front of her again. From the side, where you couldn’t see his hands grotesquely bent back towards his forearms, Bobby looked as if he was praying. His legs were all wrong, chubby thighs narrowing down to the knees, then coming to a charred point at the ankles. What the hell was up with taking his feet?