Cause To Hide Part 3

"One second," she said. "I'm thinking."

"Jesus..."

She ignored him, looking at the ash and the skeleton with an investigative eye. No...the body couldn't have been burned here. There are no scorch marks around the body. A burning person would flail and run about wildly. Nothing here is burned at all. The only sign of a fire of any kind are these ashes. So why would a killer burn the body and then bring it back here? Maybe this is where he took the victim...

The possibilities were endless. One of the possibilities, Avery thought, was that perhaps the skeleton was the property of a medical lab somewhere and this was just some stupid sick prank. But given the location and the brazenness of the act, she doubted this was the case.

Ramirez returned with a pair of latex evidence gloves. Avery slipped them on and reached down to the ash. She gripped just a small bit of it between her pointer finger and thumb. She rubbed her fingers together and brought it to her face. She sniffed at it and looked at it closely. It looked like standard ash but possessed traces of the chemical smell.

"We need to have this ash a.n.a.lyzed," Avery said. "If there was a chemical involved, there's a good chance that there are still trace amounts in the ashes."

"There's a forensics team on the way as we speak," Connelly said.

Slowly, Avery got to her feet and removed the latex gloves. O'Malley and Finley came over and Avery wasn't surprised to see Finley keep his distance from the skeleton and ashes. He looked at them as if the skeleton might jump out at him at any moment.

"I'm working with the city to get footage from every security camera within a six-block radius," O'Malley said. "Because there aren't many of them in this part of town, it shouldn't take too long."

"It might not be a bad idea to also get the numbers of any companies that sell highly flammable chemicals," Avery pointed out.

"That could be millions of places," Connelly said.

"No, she's right," O'Malley said. "This burn wasn't done with just a household cleaner or spray. This was a concentrated chemical, I'd say. Finley, can you start working on that?"

"Yes, sir," Finley said, clearly glad to have a reason to leave the scene.

"Black and Ramirez...this is your case now," O'Malley said. "Work with Connelly to get a team on this ASAP."

"Got it," Ramirez said.

"And Black, let's make sure we're prompt for the rest of this thing. You showing up late this morning set us back fifteen minutes."

Avery nodded, not allowing herself to get baited into an argument. She knew that most of the men above her were still looking for any small thing to bust her on. And she was fine with that. Given her sordid history, she almost expected it.

As she started to step away from the red markers, she noticed something else several yards to the right. She'd seen it when she first approached the skeletal remains but had disregarded it as simple litter. But now as she walked closer to the detritus, she saw what looked to be the broken shards of something. It looked almost like gla.s.s, possibly something that had been fired in a kiln at some point. She walked over to it, getting a better view of the murky and stagnant creek along the back of the lot.

"Did anyone take note of this?" she asked.

Connelly looked over, barely interested.

"Just litter," he said.

Avery shook her head.

"I don't think so," she said.

She slipped the latex gloves back on and picked up a piece of it. Upon closer inspection, she saw that whatever the object had been, it had been made of gla.s.s, not a ceramic material. There didn't seem to be any dust or weathered wear and tear on the fragments. There were seven larger chunks, about the size of her palm, and then countless little slivers of it all over the ground. Aside from having been shattered, whatever had been broken looked to be fairly new.

"Whatever this is, it hasn't been here for very long," she said. "Make sure forensics checks this for prints."

"I'll sic forensics on it," Connelly said in a tone that indicated he did not appreciate taking orders. "Now, you two...make sure you get to the A1 within the next half an hour. I'll make some calls and have a team waiting for you in the conference room. This scene is less than two hours old; I'd like to nail this a.s.shole before he gets too much of a head start."

Avery took one final look at the skeleton. Without the cover of flesh, it looked like it was smiling. To Avery, it was almost as if the killer were smiling at her, biting back a taunting laugh. And it wasn't just the sight of a newly stripped skeleton that made her feel a sense of foreboding and doom. It was the location, the almost perfectly sculpted mounds of ash around the bones, the purposefully unhidden remains, and the chemical smell.

It all seemed to point to something precise. It pointed to vast intention and planning. And as far as Avery was concerned, that could only mean one thing: whoever did this would certainly do it again.

CHAPTER FOUR.

Forty minutes later, Avery stepped into the central conference room in the A1 headquarters. It was already filled with an a.s.sortment of officers and experts, totaling twelve in all, and she knew most of them, though not as well as Ramirez or Finley. She supposed that was her own fault. After Ramirez had been a.s.signed to her as a partner, she had not gone out of her way to make friends. It seemed like a silly thing to do as a Homicide detective.

As they all took their seats around the table (except for Avery, who always preferred to stand), one of the officers she did not know started pa.s.sing out printed copies of the scant information they had so far-pictures of the crime scene and a sheet of bullet points of what they knew about the scene. Avery scanned one and found it succinct.

She noted that as everyone started to take their seats, Ramirez sat in front of her. She looked down at him and realized that she had instinctively stepped closer to him. She also found that she wanted to rest her hand on his shoulder, just to touch him. She backed away, noticing that Finley was looking oddly at her.

s.h.i.t, she thought. Is it that obvious?

She went back to busying herself with rereading the notes. As she did so, O'Malley and Connelly entered the room. O'Malley closed the door and went to the front of the room. Before he started speaking, the murmurs and conversation within the room died down. Avery watched him with great appreciation and respect. He was the sort of man who could take charge of a room by simply clearing his throat or letting it be known that he was about to speak.

"Thanks for scrambling together so quickly," O'Malley said. "You have in your hands everything we know about this case so far with one exception. I had city workers pull everything they could from traffic light cameras in the area. Two of the four cameras show a woman walking her dog. And that's all we got."

"There's one other thing," one of the officers at the table said. Avery knew this man's name was Mosely, but that was about all she knew about him. "I got word two minutes before stepping into this meeting that dispatch fielded a call this morning from an elderly man claiming that he saw what he described as 'a creepy tall man' walking in that area. He said he was tucking some sort of a bag under a long coat. Dispatch took note of it but a.s.sumed it was just a nosy old man with nothing better to do. But then when this burn case kicked off this morning, they pinged me on it."

"Do we have this old man's contact information?" Avery asked.

Connelly shot her an annoyed look. She supposed he thought she was speaking out of turn-even though he had told her no more than forty-five minutes ago that this was her case.

"We do," Mosely answered.

"I want someone on the phone with him the moment this meeting is over," O'Malley said. "Finley...where are we on a list of places that sell chemicals that can burn this fiercely in such a short time?"

"I've got three places within twenty miles. Two of them are e-mailing me a list of chemicals that could do such a thing and whether or not they keep it in stock."

Avery listened to the back-and-forth, taking mental notes and trying to sort them into the appropriate slots. With each new bit of information, the more sense the odd crime scene from this morning started to make. Although, really, there wasn't too much sense to be made at this point.

"We still have no idea who the victim is," O'Malley said. "We're going to have to go on dental records alone on this one unless we can make some sort of connection with the footage from the traffic cameras." He then looked to Avery and gestured her to the front of the table. "Detective Black is the head on this one so everything you find from here on out will go directly to her."

Avery joined him up front and scanned the table. Her eyes landed on Jane Parks, one of the lead investigators on forensics. "Do we have any results from the broken gla.s.s shards?" she asked.

"Not yet," Parks said. "We know for certain that there were no fingerprints, though. But we're still working to find out what the object was. So far we can only imagine it might have been some sort of knickknack that is in no way related to the crime."

"And what is the opinion of forensics in regards to the fire?" Avery asked. "Are you also in agreement that this was no casual burning?"

"Yes. The ash is still being studied, but it's obvious that no standard fire could burn human flesh so thoroughly. There were barely even any charred remains on the bones and the bones themselves almost look pristine, showing no signs of scorching."

"And can you describe to us what the usual process of a body burning might be?" Avery asked.

"Well, there's nothing typical about burning a body unless you're cremating it," Parks said. "But let's say a body is trapped in a burning house and is lit on fire that way. Body fat acts like a sort of fuel once the skin is burned away, which keeps the fire going. Almost like a candle, you know? But this burn was quick and very succinct...probably so intense that it vaporized the fat before it could even act as a fuel."

"How long would it take a body to burn down to nothing more than bone?" Avery asked.

"Well, there are several determining factors," Parks said. "But anywhere between five to seven hours is an accurate number. Slow and controlled burns, like the ones used at crematoriums, can take up to eight hours."

"And this one burned in less than an hour and a half?" Connelly asked.

"Yes, that's the a.s.sumption," Parks said.

The conference room was awash in murmurs of disgust and awe. Avery understood it. It was hard to wrap her mind around it.

"Or," Avery said, "the body was burned elsewhere and the remains were dumped in that lot this morning."

"But that skeleton...that was a new skeleton," Parks said. "It wasn't without its skin, muscle, tissues, and so on for very long. Not long at all."

"Can you make an educated guess as to how long ago the body was burned?" Avery asked.

"Surely no more than a day or so."

"So this took planning and some head knowledge on the killer's part," Avery said. "He'd have to know a lot about burning bodies. And being that he made no attempt to hide the remains as well as killed the victim in such a startling way...that denotes a few things. And the thing that I fear the most is that this is likely the first of many."

"What do you mean?" Connelly asked.

She felt all eyes in the room turn to her.

"I mean that this is probably the work of a serial killer."

A heavy silence blanketed the room.

"What are you talking about?" Connelly asked. "There's no evidence to support that."

"Nothing obvious," Avery admitted. "But he wanted the remains to be found. He made no attempt to hide them in that lot. There was a creek right along the back of the property. He could have dumped it all there. More than that, there was ash. Why dump ash at the scene when you could easily dispose of it at home? The planning and the method of the killing...he took great pride and pleasure in this. He wanted the remains found and speculated over. And that holds the marks of a serial killer."

She felt the room stare back at her, felt a solemn air descend, and she knew they were thinking the same thing she was: this was evolving from an odd case involving an impromptu cremation to a time-sensitive hunt for a serial killer.

CHAPTER FIVE.

After the tension of the meeting, Avery was glad to find herself back behind the wheel of her car with Ramirez in the pa.s.senger seat. There was an odd bit of silence between them that made her uneasy. Had she really been so nave to think that sleeping together was not going to alter their working relationship?

Was it a mistake?

It was starting to feel like it. The fact that the s.e.x had been pretty close to mind-blowing made it hard to accept, though.

"While we have a second," Ramirez said, "are we going to talk about last night?"

"We can," Avery said. "What do you want to talk about?"

"Well, at the risk of sounding like a stereotypical male, I was wondering if it was a one-time thing or if we were going to do it again."

"I don't know," Avery said.

"Regretting it already?" he asked.

"No," she said. "No regrets. It's just that in the moment, I wasn't thinking about how it would affect our working relationship."

"I figure it can't hurt it," Ramirez said. "All jokes aside, you and I have been dancing around this physical chemistry for months now. We finally did something about it, so the tension should be gone, right?"

"You'd think so," Avery said with a sly smile.

"It's not for you?"

She thought for a while and then shrugged. "I don't know. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I'm ready to talk about it yet."

"Fair enough. We are sort of in the middle of what looks to be a majorly f.u.c.ked up case."

"Yes, we are," she said. "Did you get the e-mail from the precinct? What else do we know about our witness other than his address?"

Ramirez looked to his phone and pulled up his e-mail. "Got it," he said. "Our witness is Donald Greer, eighty-one years of age. Retired. He lives in an apartment roughly half a mile away from the crime scene. He's a widower who worked for fifty-five years as a shipyard supervisor after getting two toes blown off in Vietnam."

"And how did he happen to see the killer?" Avery asked.

"That we don't know yet. But I guess it's our job to find out, right?"

"Right," she said.

Silence fell on them again. She felt the instinct to reach out and take his hand but thought better of it. It was best to keep things strictly professional. Maybe they would end up in bed together again and maybe things would even progress to more than that-to something more emotional and concrete.

But none of that mattered now. Now, they had a job to do and anything evolving within their personal lives would just have to be put on hold.

Donald Greer showed all eighty-one years of his age. His hair was a frazzled shock of white atop his head and his teeth were slightly discolored from age and improper care. Still, he was clearly glad to have company as he invited Avery and Ramirez into his home. When he smiled at them, it was so genuine and wide that the unsightly condition of his teeth seemed to disappear.

"Can I get you some coffee or tea?" he asked them as they came in.

"No, thank you," Avery said.