But Maggie knew that beneath the grassy surface lay a bed of ash and the charred remnants of the house where a loving family had all met a fiery death.
Or so she’d thought.
Her lungs continued to burn, imploring her to breathe. But Maggie clung to the superheated air, letting the fire spread through her chest until it forced tears from her eyes.
And only when her senses started to get fuzzy and spiral out of control did she let it out.
Chapter Five
EARLY BIRD
At this time of the morning, the Major Case office was all but deserted—just a janitor buffing the floor, and a dedicated civilian administrator catching up on paperwork.
Feeling frayed around the edges, Maggie got herself a coffee and sat down heavily at her desk.
Despite running off her nervous energy, sleep had still evaded her, the gap on Oak Street weighing heavy in her thoughts. She’d tossed and turned and finally given in, deciding that if she was fated to remain awake that she might as well put the time to good use. She’d showered, put on a gray pantsuit and white shirt, and then driven to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office on West Colonial, arriving at five a.m., three hours ahead of the weekend shift.
Her intention was to find out everything she didn’t know about Rita/Dana and her missing years.
But the first thing Maggie had gotten out of the way was her typed prelim report for Smits, knowing that it would be expected when he came in later. Smits wasn’t just a stickler for procedure; he supported and endorsed old-fashioned policing. Although everything was digital and emailed internally these days, Smits preferred case updates on paper. His philosophy being, If you can hold it in your hand, you’re more inclined to absorb it. The single sheet of copy now lying on the sergeant’s desk contained a thousand words summarizing Maggie’s observations of the lakeside crime scene, including discoveries, few as they were. It would have to do. Once the ME had examined the body and confirmed they were dealing with a homicide, a more comprehensive report would follow.
Maggie tapped her workstation out of sleep mode and entered her username and password. The screen presented her with a cluster of icons pinned to a spruce-green background bearing the five-point star of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
She looked at it for a moment, sipping coffee.
Although Maggie excelled at it, she’d never wanted to be a cop, least of all a homicide detective, and after almost eighteen years of working in law enforcement, she still wasn’t sure what made her take up the badge all those years ago.
Like her brother before her, she’d studied at the University of Central Florida with every intention of following in their parents’ footsteps and going into teaching. After all, becoming an educator was the Novak family tradition. A career in teaching was expected, going back generations. Her brother, Bryan, had landed a teaching job right after graduation, and eleven years later, Nora had followed suit. But Maggie, the middle child, had left the College of Education and stalled, all at once not sure that teaching was her true calling.
For months she’d drifted, half-heartedly looking at one dreary career option after another, all the while her parents were encouraging her to do the right thing and teach. She’d contemplated taking a year off to travel the world, to separate herself from their daily indoctrination. Several of her college friends had taken off, backpacking across Asia, through Thailand, and down into Australia. Maggie had thought about joining them, about experiencing life on the road, and perhaps finding inspiration in her travels. Then fate had intervened, and her decision to join the Sheriff’s Office had been divisive, causing a family wound that had never quite healed.
Maggie connected her phone to a USB hub and started uploading the crime scene photos she’d taken a few hours earlier to a folder labeled NOVAK & LOOMIS—HALLOWEEN HOMICIDE located in Major Case’s secure cloud storage. Altogether, there were several dozen pictures and videos, and the onscreen dialogue box announced it would take approximately seven minutes to complete.
As the files transferred, Maggie accessed the Crime Information Center, running a person search through its database. She wanted to know if either Dana or Rita had been mentioned in any police reports during the past twenty years, anywhere in the continental United States.
Within milliseconds, the search reported No results.
Not even a mention of the Pine Hills house fire tragedy.
Maggie wasn’t surprised. Twenty years ago, the electronic storing of crime reports was at its early stages, and computerized information from back then was sparse.
Experimenting, she opened an internet search page and typed Rita Grigoryan into the text box, not knowing what to expect, surprised when almost a quarter-million hits came back.
The first few pages advertised various social media profile links. Maggie clicked through a dozen or so before concluding that she was chasing a wild goose. And clicking Images only confirmed it. Not one of the portrait photos was similar to the image of her flame-haired friend, which was burned into her memory. Although the internet had been commonplace when tragedy had struck the Grigoryan family, social media had still been in its infancy, and in those days of dial-up and capped data limits, hardly anyone uploaded byte-heavy photographs of themselves.
Maggie leaned back and drank coffee.
Where have you been for all these years?
Of course, the obvious answer was dead.
But that wasn’t what she was looking for.
Rita had survived the house fire on Oak Street. Maggie wanted to know how.
Why did you change your name to Dana?
A search for Dana Cullen came back with plenty of hits and no substance. More self-promoting images of women bearing absolutely no resemblance to the woman in Dana’s driver’s license photo.
How can someone go from being dead to being undead?
It was the right time of year for it, but Maggie didn’t believe in the supernatural. There had to be a rational explanation behind Rita becoming Dana, one rooted in fact and not fiction. Examining the original reports from the time of the house fire would be a good place to start.
Maggie accessed the online records section of the District Nine Medical Examiner’s Office and ran a search for the twenty-year-old autopsy reports pertaining to the deceased Grigoryan family. She knew the notes would make for grisly reading, but given no obvious explanation to account for Rita’s miraculous resurrection into Dana, what choice did she have?
The search request returned no results.
Again, not that big a surprise. The original documents had probably never been digitized and were still sitting in a box in storage somewhere. All she had to do was file a request to see the paper reports.
A text box popped up in the middle of the screen, informing her that the upload was complete. Maggie clicked back to the virtual folder, expanding and examining each of the photos in turn.
The camera flash had cast a sterile light over each scene, leaching color and blanching faces, highlighting Lindy’s mascara-streaked cheeks and flimsy demeanor, Tyler’s spiteful glare and curled fists. The burned corpse covered in its cracked and crusty coating of crisped flesh and fat.
Who wanted you dead?
Equally important was the question of why?
It was clear to Maggie that Dana’s murder was neither random nor spur of the moment. Her killing hadn’t come about as the result of a mugging or an assault. She hadn’t been killed in a drive-by shooting or in an act of random violence. The location and the accelerant were signatures of someone who had planned to kill Dana and then burn her body in the clearing. In cases of premeditated murder, it was extremely rare for the killer not to be driven by a motive. A purpose existed behind Dana’s murder. Find that reason, that motivation, and Maggie knew she would be more than halfway to an arrest.
Who hated you enough to take your life?
Maggie played the brief video she’d taken of the teenagers, watching it with the sound muted as Tyler glower
ed and Lindy blubbered. On camera, the tension between the pair was obvious. If she’d tried, Lindy couldn’t have positioned herself farther from Tyler, their combined body language saying more about what had happened between them than what they had found in the woods.
No love lost between these two.
Maggie replayed the clip, paying closer attention to their mannerisms and the way Lindy cringed each time Tyler opened his mouth. Then something caught her eye, and she expanded the video to full screen, rewinding it a fraction and then pausing the recording at the moment Tyler thrust his driver’s license at the lens.
There was a big ugly ring on his middle finger and what looked like a dry smear of blood on his knuckles.
She hadn’t noticed it in the low-light conditions last night. But here, backlit onscreen, it couldn’t be missed.
Maggie took a screenshot, the taste of coffee bitter on her tongue. Then she grabbed her Glock and left the office.
Chapter Six
INGREDIENTS OF INTENT
A ghostly haze hung in the eastern sky as Maggie parked the motor pool sedan outside the wrecking yard on Wilmer Avenue. It was just after six a.m., and Orlando was beginning to stir.
She took a flashlight from the door pocket, then approached a service cabin situated next to a mechanized entrance gate. A yellowy light was on inside the hut, and a bleary-eyed youth looked up from his cell phone as Maggie tapped her badge against the window.
“We impounded a red Charger last night,” she said as he slid aside the pane. “You brought it in earlier this morning.”
“Aisle twelve.” He pushed a clipboard toward her. “Sign and date.”
Maggie logged her name and time and purpose for her visit onto the grubby record sheet, then waited for the youth to buzz her through a smaller side gate. The second she was inside the compound, he hung his head over his phone again.
Dawn light accentuated the rooftops of nearby buildings, but darkness still clung to the yard.
Maggie followed the beam of her flashlight across the cracked concrete, the hulks of impounded vehicles looming in its glow, the smells of engine oil and rubber thick in her nose. She passed row after row of vehicles, most showing signs of crash damage, but some lined up neatly like family cars waiting at the theme park admissions.
With no on-site impound lot of its own, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office used the wrecker service as standard practice in the recovery of crime scene vehicles, and a corner of the wrecking yard was reserved for what OCSO labeled vehicles of interest. After being cleared by Forensics, Tyler Pruitt’s bloodred Dodge Charger had been towed here as a matter of procedure. And there it was, gleaming in her flashlight.
Maggie took a photo of it with her phone, the flash briefly revealing the stacks of cars on either side.
The ticket stuck to the Charger’s windshield confirmed it was the correct vehicle. A short checklist documented that its tires had been swabbed for trace evidence, but the bodywork hadn’t been fingerprinted or the insides inspected. Maggie put on latex gloves from her pocket, and opened the driver’s door.
Inside, the car smelled faintly of cheap perfume.
Maggie inspected the empty door pockets before opening the glove compartment and shining the flashlight on its contents.
What was she expecting to find?
She’d come down here on a hunch, following her gut instinct and the voice in the back of her mind that insisted something about the whole Tyler/Lindy setup felt a little hinky.
The blood on Tyler’s knuckles, coupled with the fresh graze on Lindy’s chin, had convinced Maggie that he had hit her.
But why?
Did they have a bust-up right before finding the dead body?
Inside the glove compartment, she found the usual paperwork: an owner’s manual, a service history booklet, an insurance document. Nothing unexpected.
She swept the flashlight over the back seat and into the foot spaces. Again, nothing. If anything, the car was immaculate, spotless, which came as a surprise, given that its owner was a seventeen-year-old student.
Maggie popped the trunk and went around to the back of the car. She took a photo of the license plate before hoisting up the lid.
Apart from a solitary plastic storage box pushed right up to the back seat, the trunk was empty. Maggie dragged the box toward her, and right away she knew she’d made a discovery.
Tyler Pruitt had a kill kit in his car.
Chapter Seven
CATCH THE WORM
The sedan’s tires crunched bits of loose asphalt as Maggie drove along Wolf Road in Pine Hills. Dawn light casting long shadows. The neighborhood looked fast asleep, a palpable end-of-the-world stillness on the street.
Maggie decided she’d watched one too many zombie movies.
She pulled up outside a single-story house half-hidden by hunched trees, and took a moment to assess the property.
From the little she could see beyond the threadbare front yard, the house looked tired and partly dilapidated. Naked wood siding in desperate need of a new coat. Window panes grayed with grime. A weathered American flag hanging limply from a pole that jutted out at an angle from the front wall.
Nearer, the corroded skeletons of several dismantled motorcycles were going to seed on the balding lawn.
Maggie wondered how Tyler could afford a high-spec car when he lived in a dump like this. No being cradled in the lap of luxury here. No transformational lottery win. No way he could even begin to make the monthly repayments working whatever weekend job he might have.
A sheriff’s cruiser pulled up behind her sedan, and a green-uniformed deputy sheriff climbed out. Barrel-chested with a trim moustache. She recognized him, pinning the name Willits to his roundish face.
Maggie slipped into her suit jacket as she got out of the car. “Deputy Willits.”
“Ma’am.”
She nodded toward the house. “Male teen suspected of striking a female. I need you to provide backup, that’s all.”
“No problem.” His expression was serious.
Maggie clipped her Glock to her belt, then made her way up the oil-mottled driveway, knowing that if the outside of the house was anything to go by, the inside would be much worse.
As an investigator, Maggie saw some sights that would make regular folk’s toes curl. Homes seemingly plucked from third-world slums, complete with feces-infused carpets and rat-infested kitchens. Squalor that made the sewer system seem sterile. On occasion, she’d even had to resort to wearing a protective breathing mask when entering certain properties, hoping that her inoculations would safeguard her from any bacteria lurking inside. As a rule, she tried not to judge people by their lifestyle choices, but it was hard to understand why some people chose to exist in a continual state of uncleanliness, especially when a bar of soap cost pennies.
Near the front door, a mismatched pair of weathered lawn chairs stood on either side of a foam cooler with several inches of water going stale in the bottom. Crushed beer cans and empty food cartons lay where they’d fallen.
She rapped her knuckles against the discolored wood of the front door, waited ten seconds, then knocked again, this time harder, longer. When no one answered, she reached across to a small grubby window and banged the flat of her hand against the pane until her palm began to sting.
Finally, she heard movement coming from inside. Heavy footfalls, and a man’s voice cussing and complaining as he approached the front door.
The door scraped open to reveal a stocky, shaved-headed man with a shaggy gray beard and a craze of tattoos on his arms. Fiery dragons chasing voluptuous nymphs onto his shoulders and up his neck. He had on stained sweatpants with holes in the knees, and a black tank top with the words May Contain Alcohol emblazoned in white across the chest. Suspicious blue eyes under the shadow of a heavy brow. Maggie estimated his age to be midsixties.
“Don’t want any,” he snapped before she could introduce herself. “Don’t think I need any either. Got more than enough to
go around and then some. And if you’re selling redemption, lady, I ain’t buying. Not today.”
He tried to shut the door in her face, but Maggie put out a hand, stopping it halfway. He pushed, but Maggie resisted.
“Sheriff’s Office,” she said, holding her badge in the gap. “I’m looking for Tyler Pruitt.”
He seemed to notice the deputy standing off to the side for the first time, and eased off the door. “What’s the kid done now?”
“Are you his father?”
“Do I look like that cretin?” he said.
“I wouldn’t . . .”
“Tyler’s my grandson.”
“Are his parents home?”
“Nope. His father skipped town the day he was born. And my daughter, she died from breast cancer, couple years back. Tyler lives with me now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? You knew her?”
“No, but . . .”
“Then there’s no need for your fake sympathy, is there?” He stared at her, eyes challenging.
Maggie put away her ID. “Sir, I need to speak with your grandson. Is he here?”
He nodded over his shoulder. “Far as I know, still in his room and sleeping like a baby. Kid hit the juice pretty hard last night. Both did.” He worked up a belch, as though to confirm it. “You here about that body he found?”
“Yes. That’s right. I know he was pretty shook up. I need for him to answer a few questions. Then I promise I’ll leave you alone.” She put her foot on the doorstep. “May we come in?”
“Not sure about that.”
“You have my word, I’m not interested in anything else you might have going on here.”
He looked offended. “As in, what?” He waited for her to answer, raking thick fingers through his straggly beard.
Maggie sighed. “You know, I think we got off on the wrong foot.”
“I’ll say.”
“It’s early and I’m pretty strung out. I don’t mean any disrespect. It’s been a long night. If I can just have a quick conversation with Tyler, we’ll be on our way.”
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