Page 17 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

The drive to a crime scene was always an awkward affair.

As an investigator, your senses were on high alert; they needed to be in order to process the soon-to-be-revealed evidence, to take it all in, piece by piece, as well as see the vital connections between all those pieces.

As a human being, though, you had little relish for what lay ahead: the body, the signs of violence, all the surrounding evidence that reminded you this had once been a person.

Consequently, Kate and Marcus’s journey through the rainy darkness was one of light, almost giddy conversation interspersed by long periods of quiet.

Kate had drifted off to sleep for a moment or two and begun yet another fretful, vivid dream in which Denton appeared as both victim and killer.

She woke with a start, causing Marcus to swerve ever-so-slightly at the wheel.

“Whoa. You okay?”

“Sorry,” she said, feeling a foul taste in her mouth. “It’s those pills – giving me trippy dreams.”

“You shoulda got Effy the massoos to take a look at your shoulder.”

“I think Effy only specializes in one muscle.”

Marcus gazed at her, open-mouthed. “Vee. I’m shocked.”

“I told you. It’s the pills.”

“Maybe let me do the talking at the crime scene, huh?”

“Might be wise. Oh. I never told you what name he used. Sullivan.”

“Go on.”

“Donald Reagan.”

Marcus laughed.

“I like your laugh,” Kate said. “Cheryl is lucky to have found someone who laughs as much as you do.”

There was an odd pause. “Thanks,” said Marcus.

“That came out a bit weird,” Kate said. “Sorry, it’s-”

“Those pills,” Marcus finished off the sentence. But he didn’t say anything else. Kate sat in silence, too, and cursed herself.

What’s the matter with me?

Two huge trucks thundered past in the rain. After they’d roared and hissed out of sight, Kate realized the navy-blue night was growing lighter at the horizon.

“How much do we know about the victim?” Marcus asked suddenly.

“Professor Alan Benedict Paul Whitman,” Kate summoned the file on her tablet, gladly accepting his rescue attempt.

“Born in Boston in 1977, making him forty-eight. Married to Laura Nardone, two daughters together, eight and eleven. He became a Professor of Religion when he was twenty-nine, making him one of the world’s youngest.”

“Isn’t it usually some ten-year-old from China?”

“In Math, yeah. Not so common in the Humanities. He’s studied at Yale, Harvard, and Oxford. A transatlantic celebrity academic. He’s good-looking. Cosmopolitan magazine called him ‘Doctor Fox.’ He’s great value on podcasts and TV: breaks it all down to bitesize, jokes a lot.”

“I hate him already.”

“Well, someone really did.”

They were silent for a while.

“His latest book’s called Fundamental Folly: The Danger of Religion’s Renewal.”

“Sounds like one for the beach,” Marcus said, sardonically. He spotted the turn for Brantley and pulled left with ease.

Shivering the cold early morning air, they suited up in the parking lot, alarming a couple of students returning, unsteadily, from an all-nighter.

Manning the block in which the murder had taken place, meanwhile, was a portly campus security guard, who’d either retired from the local PD, or tried several times, unsuccessfully, to join it.

He eyed both agents suspiciously, examining their IDs with excessive thoroughness.

“Elevator’s out of action,” he said, with a certain degree of satisfaction. “Can’t open the doors. Waiting for an engineer.”

Kate nodded in thanks. “When the engineer comes, make sure they’re suited and gloved, and they make minimal contact with the interior of the car. The killer could have used it, so it’s a part of the crime scene.”

“Ten-four,” said the guard. “Fourth floor,” he called after them, as they went up the stairs.

Halfway up, one of the techs was photographing a set of footprints. “Traces of diesel, soil, and sand. We’ll test to see if we can pinpoint an area. Maybe he parked somewhere and walked to the scene. By the looks of it, he wore size fourteen. Whitman was much smaller, a ten.”

“Mrs. Kerrigan described a big guy,” Marcus mused. “But she thought some of that was his clothes.”

Upstairs, the room was gutted. Everything was black, gray, or white, a monochrome nightmare.

Here and there, tiny traces of color: a fragment of what might have been a glossy book cover, a patch of some pastel-hued fabric, fused to the metal spindle of what could, once, have been an office chair.

The smell was appalling: charred plastic and diesel, the odd, almost biscuity odor of extinguisher foam.

And the incinerated human body, at once sweet and sour.

The tech handed her a tiny jar of Vick’s VaporRub.

At every crime scene Kate had ever attended, someone had Vick’s; a smear of it on the upper lip, and you couldn’t smell the body.

But it had also been a staple of the family medicine cabinet when Kate was growing up.

Each murder, inevitably, came with memories of being a sickly child: the night-light, Mom’s cool hand on her burning forehead.

There was nobody in the room. Nothing that deserved that title, anyway, just a shape. A three-dimensional facsimile of a human, made from charcoal and charred bone.

“We’ll get confirmation from dental records in the next few hours,” said the second tech. “But I don’t think we’re going to get any surprises. His wife confirmed with local PD that he was working late. His bike’s in the locker on the south side of the parking lot. And there’s this.”

She knelt down by the radiator under the window.

Amid a jumble of half-burned bone and melted fabric, two metal objects could be seen.

One was a pair of handcuffs, one end still affixed to the radiator, the other lost among the professor’s remains.

The other object, seemingly fused fast to one finger like a barnacle on a rock, appeared to be a signet ring.

There were things to be done. Some of them, such as building up a profile of Whitman’s last hours, would have to wait until the rest of the world woke up. In the meantime, they had to sift through this incinerated room in search of clues.

Poking carefully through the ashes of Professor Whitman’s book collection, Kate had a question.

“How common d’you think it is for diesel to be used as an accelerant?”

She addressed this to Marcus, who was kneeling close to the body. He shrugged, and pointed to the tech. She had earphones in, so Kate repeated the question.

“Not the most common. Tends to be gasoline or kerosene.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Access. Diesel’s more often used in boats, trucks, tractors, big stuff like school buses. It’s more expensive. And it’s got a higher flashpoint, so it takes longer to get going.”

“So out of ten fires, say, how many might use diesel as the accelerant?”

“Depends where. If you’re talking about rural Minnesota, or Louisiana, the figure’s going to be a lot higher than, say, Brooklyn, because you’ve got all those tractors and boats.”

“Boats.”

“Yeah. So, the Maine coast might have a higher rate than inland, for the same reason.”

“What are you driving at?” Marcus asked.

“I’m wondering how much the two crime scenes have in common.

Winters said it was the same MO, but once you get into the finer details, maybe they don’t have so much similarity.

The choice of diesel might not be significant.

And the first body came with a message, very deliberately positioned so that it would survive the fire, and we could find it. There’s no trace of that here.”

“But the victims…”

“One’s a philandering small-town priest. One’s a celebrity academic. It’s worth asking the question, surely. Are we sure we’re looking at one killer here?”

Marcus looked unconvinced. They were interrupted by a discreet clearing of the throat. It was the tech who’d been checking the footprints on the staircase.

“You need to come and see this.”

+++++

She kept her dad’s M.D. bag in her locker.

Sometimes, when things were hard, she’d put it in the desk drawer, so that it was that bit closer to her and her daily goings-on.

The reality was that, thirteen years after his death, it smelled of FBI lockers and desk drawers far more than of her father, but she still fancied that it gave off notes of sandalwood soap, his once-weekly Cohiba cigar, and his favorite tweed jacket.

Its presence was especially important to her right now – close to evening on a seemingly endless day of trials, struggles, and reversals of fortune.

The professor’s body had been just the intro.

Summoned away from the reeking crime scene on the fourth floor, Kate and Marcus had gone down to the lobby where the engineer had succeeded in opening the elevator door.

The car was found to contain just one thing: a pristine copy of Whitman’s recently published book.

Any hopes of finding a note inside were quickly dashed. A quick but careful flick-through of its pages had yielded nothing. No note, no mysterious symbols. Nonetheless, Kate was sure that it would contain a message for her.

The problem was that, as soon as a piece of evidence like this was found, a strict chain of protocols and procedures snatched it from her grasp.

It had been whisked, along with the body and all the other fragments of evidence, back to HQ in Portland, where it would be analyzed for DNA and prints, as well as any other markers that might explain its presence in the elevator car or point to the person who’d put it there.

With the intervention of Kate’s boss, Assistant Director Winters, a compromise had been reached.

The Portland lab photographed and scanned each page of the book, so that no time would be wasted, and the hunt for another message could take place at the same time as the full forensic work-up.

Kate and Marcus had split the drive back to HQ so that both could catch some sleep.