Death Night Page 4

  “Fairly recent. The body was still warm, so I’m guessing no more than three hours ago.”

  Immediately, Kat started forming a timeline of events. If Wallace was correct, Constance had died between twelve-thirty and one A.M., around the same time the fire started. Kat assumed that whoever killed her dragged the body into the crawl space before starting the fire.

  “What do you think the murder weapon was?” she asked.

  Wallace gave a palms-up gesture of ignorance before opening his arms wide. “Take your pick. There were probably a hundred objects in here heavy enough to do that kind of damage. Bronze statues. Household items, which were heavier back in the day than they are now. Housewives back then must have had biceps the size of bowling balls.”

  “All the better to keep men like you in check,” Kat said.

  Wallace let out a low chuckle that quickly morphed into a smoker’s cough and seemed to last a full minute. When he recovered, he said, “I’m off to do the autopsy now. I’ll call you as soon as I find anything.”

  He started to wheel out Constance’s body, pausing long enough to pull a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and pop it between his lips.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, the cigarette bobbing up and down. “I won’t light it until I get outside. Not that it’ll make much of a difference to this place.”

  Once Wallace was gone, Kat crossed to the other side of the gallery. She trod lightly, careful not to step on any of the debris that littered the charred floor. What she didn’t see, oddly enough, were many evidence markers. The gallery contained exactly one, placed a few paces to the left of the museum’s front door.

  Two men knelt next to the yellow fold of plastic. One of them was a stranger. The other Kat knew very well.

  “Lieutenant Vasquez,” she said. “No offense, but I wish you weren’t here.”

  Tony Vasquez was a detective with the Pennsylvania State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Neither the town nor the county had the manpower or expertise to handle crimes as big as homicide and arson, so the BCI was usually called to step in. As a result, Tony had worked on the Grim Reaper murders and the Charlie Olmstead disappearance. Now he was here once again.

  “Frankly, I do, too.”

  “I’m assuming you’re in charge.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “Seeing how I know my way around the town by now, they figured I’d be a good point person.”

  “Well, you know the score,” Kat told him. “You’re in charge. I don’t mind that you’re in charge. And I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

  Lieutenant Vasquez got to his feet. In addition to being a professional cop, Tony was also an amateur bodybuilder. Those biceps the size of bowling balls that Wallace mentioned? Tony had them. His sheer size never ceased to amaze Kat. He was so big that he looked out of scale with the rest of the gallery—like Alice after nibbling on the cake that made her grow.

  “It’s looking very likely that the fire hoses washed away all the evidence,” he said. “No trace. No blood spatter. If there is any evidence, it’s mixed in with this rubble. What did you find?”

  Kat caught Tony up to speed on the events before and after she discovered Constance Bishop’s body. She also detailed her interview with Emma Pulsifer and the whereabouts of the other members of the historical society when the fire broke out. Then it was time to talk about the thing she least wanted to talk about. The thing that indicated this was no ordinary murder.

  “There was something written on Constance’s hand.”

  “I know,” Tony said. “I saw it.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I’m not sure. It might be nothing.”

  “Or it could mean we have another Grim Reaper on our hands.”

  Kat couldn’t get those five words out of her head. When she closed her eyes, she still saw them, smudged and startling. THIS IS JUST THE FIRST.

  Tony inhaled, his massive chest expanding and deflating. “Yes. That’s a distinct possibility.”

  It wasn’t what Kat wanted to hear. The answer silenced her for a moment as she pondered what it could mean for her and the town.

  The man standing at Tony’s side cleared his throat, forcing an introduction.

  “Kat,” the lieutenant said, “this is Larry Sheldon. He’s an arson investigator with the state police.”

  Kat quickly sized up the newcomer while shaking his hand. He was younger than her, thirty if a day, and boyishly handsome. Wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a tie, he looked more like a math teacher than someone who’d be studying a crime scene at three-thirty in the morning. His wire-frame glasses, slipping off his nose, didn’t help.

  “You find anything interesting?” Kat asked.

  “A lot that’s interesting, actually,” Larry said. “And before you ask, I’m ninety-nine percent sure that this fire was arson.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “This is the point of origin.” He turned to the patch of floor he and Tony had been examining. “Although a trail of accelerant at the wall caused the most damage.”

  Kat tapped him on the shoulder. “This is my first arson. You’ll have to dumb it down for me.”

  “Oh, right. Sure.” Larry paused to push his glasses higher on his nose. “The mark on the floor right here indicates that this is where the fire burned the hottest and brightest. That’s the point of origin. The marking is typical of a fire in which an accelerant was used.”

  “Gasoline?” Kat said.

  “Possibly. But my gut tells me it was kerosene.”

  Kat stared at the charred floor. “You can tell all that from a burn pattern?”

  “No. I can tell from this.”

  Larry pointed to a twisted jumble of wood and metal lying nearby. The shards of glass surrounding it were different from the ones from the shattered display cases. These pieces were opaque, almost milky. It took a minute for Kat to realize it had all once been a kerosene lamp.

  “Judging from the burn pattern, the accelerant wasn’t poured onto the floor,” Larry said. “It was thrown, if that makes any sense.”

  “Our guess is that someone smashed the lit lantern onto the floor,” Tony added. “This building is old. The floor is untreated wood. The fire spread very fast to the walls, which are also wood. No drywall or Sheetrock here.”

  “Do you think whoever started the fire knew this?”

  “Not necessarily,” Larry said. “Truth be told, most arsonists don’t even think about such things. They just want to watch something burn.”

  “Which brings me to my next question,” Kat said. “What type of person would want to start the fire in the first place?”

  “That depends on the arsonist’s goal. More often than not, the fire is set for a specific reason. Sure, there are guys—and it’s almost always a guy—who do it because they’re messed up in the head.”

  “Pyromaniacs,” Kat said.

  Larry pointed at her like a game show host commending a contestant for guessing the correct answer. “Setting fires gives them a sense of power, of having control over a situation. But these cases are extremely rare. Whenever I investigate a fire, I assume there was something else at play. Collecting insurance money, for example. Or revenge.”

  “Or,” Tony chimed in, “someone trying to destroy evidence after they just murdered someone.”

  “Maybe,” Larry said. “But there’s also the possibility that the fire, and not murder, was the ultimate goal here.”

  It was entirely possible that whoever set the fire had been caught in the act by Constance, who paid for the discovery with her life. But Kat didn’t think so. All one needed to do was look at Constance’s hand to debunk that theory. Still, she played along with Larry Sheldon.

  “Say someone torched the museum just for the sake of torching it,” she said. “How would we narrow down the suspects?”

  “Have you interviewed the firefighters yet?” Larry asked.

  “Not yet. Why?”

  “
Because those are your suspects. It’s no big secret that pyromaniacs tend to gravitate toward careers that have to do with fire. So the first people you have to suspect are the ones who put out the fire in the first place.”

  If Dutch Jansen had been here, Kat had a feeling Larry wouldn’t still be standing. He’d be sprawled on the floor, knocked out cold. Dutch was an old-school chief. He protected his own. And he wouldn’t take well to someone like Larry Sheldon casting doubt on his squad, especially when the speculation was so far off base. Maybe what he was saying was true of fire departments in other towns, but not in Perry Hollow. Still, it didn’t stop Kat from deciding to have Carl look into the records of all the town’s volunteer firefighters. Just in case.

  “Other than firefighters, what else should we be looking for?”

  “People who were watching the blaze.”

  “Which was approximately half the town,” Kat said.

  “Did you notice anyone who seemed particularly fascinated by it?”

  “Yes. Half the town.”

  “Was anyone taking pictures?” Larry was getting exasperated. “And if you say half the town was, then I’m just going to give up and go home.”

  Although it had only been a couple of hours earlier, it felt like a day had passed since the museum was engulfed. Kat remembered the atmosphere being quietly excited—like a crowd at a bonfire. But no one she saw had been taking photos of the blaze. She hadn’t even seen a camera. “Not that I noticed.”

  “Was there anyone acting suspicious?” Larry said. “Anyone who looked even remotely out of place?”

  One person immediately popped into Kat’s head—the stranger with the blond ponytail and outdated clothes she had bumped into during the fire.

  “Yes. A man,” she said. “A stranger. He was the only person at the scene that I didn’t recognize.”

  “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  Kat certainly did. Tall. Vaguely foreign. Weird. “Think a sketch artist is in order?”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Tony said. “It might come in handy later if this guy really did have something to do with the fire.”

  Kat added talking to a sketch artist to her ever-growing schedule. It wasn’t even four in the morning, and already her to-do list for the day was a mile long.

  “Once the sketch is done, I’ll compare it with photos of convicted arsonists recently released from jail,” Larry added. “Maybe this guy was one of them.”

  Across the gallery, a small commotion rose from the crawl space. Kat heard excited chatter among the crime scene techs. One of them shouted for Tony.

  “Lieutenant! You’ll want to take a look at this.”

  Tony and Kat crossed the room as fast as they could. Not an easy task when the floor was unstable and covered with shattered glass. The investigator who had been in the crawl space was now sitting on the edge of it, his dangling legs disappearing into the darkness below.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

  He pointed a flashlight into the hole, brightening the space enough for them to see the trunk Constance had been slumped over. It was now open, revealing a burlap sack that filled most of its interior space. The mouth of the sack had been pulled wide open and lowered slightly to reveal its contents. At first, Kat thought the objects inside were pieces of old ivory. They had the same jaundiced coloring, the same dull sheen.

  Then she saw the teeth.

  And the eye sockets.

  And finally, the smooth curve of what could only be a human skull.

  4 A.M.

  The sack lay on the floor, smelling of smoke, mildew, and damp earth. Everyone in the gallery stopped what they were doing to gather around it and watch the crime scene techs slowly remove its contents.

  The skull came first, leaking chunks of dirt as it was placed on a plastic tarp spread across the floor. A hand was next, the fingers long and tapered. Then a foot, a femur, a rib cage broken into several pieces. Within ten minutes, the sack was empty and the full remains of a human being were scattered across the tarp.

  “Why the hell,” Kat said, blinking with disbelief, “was the museum keeping a skeleton under its floor?”

  Tony Vasquez, standing beside her, shook his head. “Maybe it was part of their collection.”

  “In that condition?” Kat knelt next to the tarp, which in addition to the bones now held a sizable amount of dirt that had fallen off them. A few rocks and leaves were also among the debris, as was the dried and twisted form of a dead worm. “Certainly someone would have at least cleaned the bones. And I doubt they normally keep pieces of their collection in a burlap sack.”

  “But what else could it be?”

  “I’m more interested in who it could be,” Kat said. “Not to mention how it got here.”

  She thought of Oak Knoll Cemetery, the town’s only graveyard. Had a grave there been sitting empty for years, maybe even decades? It was a possibility—worse things had taken place in that cemetery—but she assumed no one from the historical society would resort to robbing graves. Then again, one of them might have resorted to murder. That made digging up a skeleton look like child’s play.

  “I’ve got a funny feeling about this,” Tony said.

  Kat shot him a look. “Like it’s not a coincidence? Me, too.”

  Maybe it was all coincidental. Maybe the fire and Constance’s murder and the words on her hand had nothing to do with a bag of bones under the museum floor. But they couldn’t simply assume that it didn’t. They needed to explore every possibility, especially since this—whatever the hell this was—was just the first.

  “We need to find out where those bones came from,” Kat said. “Which means we need to find out who they once belonged to. And in order to do that, we need to find out when and how he died.”

  “I know someone who can do that,” Tony said.

  “So do I. And I suspect we’re both talking about the same person.”

  Kat stepped out the back door of the museum and into the autumn night. The air was chilly, with a slightly bitter sting that told her winter would soon be on its way. At least the cold woke her up a bit. She had no idea when she’d be able to sleep again—an incredibly depressing thought.

  Cell phone in hand, she trudged to the rear of the property. A white picket fence about waist high separated it from the yard next door, its gate ajar and swinging lightly. Sensing her presence, a black cat stalking through the grass jumped onto the fence and perched there, staring at her with glinting green eyes. Seeing nothing of interest, it decamped to the neighbor’s yard, leaving Kat alone again to dial her phone.

  She shouldn’t have felt bad about calling Nick Donnelly so early in the morning. He would have done the same if the circumstances had been reversed. Still, the panic that tinged his voice when he answered the phone made Kat feel slightly guilty.

  “What’s wrong?” Nick asked in that wide-awake way people speak when they are suddenly and soundly roused from sleep. “Is it James?”

  “Relax,” Kat said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “But there’s something going on in town, isn’t there?”

  Nick had helped Kat catch the Grim Reaper killer. In turn, she had helped him crack the Olmstead case when it brought him back to Perry Hollow. Kat was now hoping it was again her turn to get assistance.

  “Yes,” she said. “There’s been a murder. And an arson. And a lot of stuff I can’t even begin to comprehend right now.”

  “Looks like I’ve been away too long.”

  “You have.”

  Although he lived only forty-five minutes away in Philadelphia, almost two months had passed since she last saw Nick. And Kat missed him. Her son did, too. When you worked that closely with someone, their absence was more palpable when they were gone.

  “So why are you calling—” Nick paused as he no doubt checked the clock on his nightstand. “Holy shit, Kat, it’s four-thirty in the morning.”

  “I know,” Kat said, her guilt now kicking in a
t full force. “I’m sorry.”

  “Couldn’t it have waited until morning? Real morning. Not whatever the hell schedule you’re on right now.”

  It couldn’t, and Kat said as much. She quickly briefed Nick about the fire, the message on Constance’s hand, the bones stashed under the floorboards.

  “Damn,” Nick said. “Have you called the state police?”

  “Tony’s here right now.”

  “Of course,” Nick said. “So why are you calling me again?”

  “Do you remember that forensic anthropologist who helped out with the Olmstead case?”

  Nick cleared his throat. “Yes. Lucy Meade.”

  “Do you have her phone number?”

  Kat assumed he did. She was pretty sure—but not certain—that the two of them had gone out on a date when the case was over. Maybe more. Nick had been oddly reticent on the subject.

  “I do,” Nick said, hesitating. “But—”

  Kat thought she heard another voice, murmuring something she couldn’t make out. A woman’s voice. Nick whispered something back.

  “Oh, my God. Is she there?”

  “Yeah.” Nick sighed, knowing he had a lot of explaining to do. “I’m just going to hand her the phone now.”

  Kat listened to the sounds of rustling sheets and a creaking bed. There was even a high-pitched giggle when Nick apparently dropped the phone. Finally, she heard the voice of Lucy Meade, forensic anthropologist and Nick’s secret girlfriend.

  “Hi, Kat,” Lucy said. “I hear you have a skeleton on your hands.”

  “I do. I have no idea how old it is. Or where it came from. Or why it was in our town’s history museum.”

  “And this has something to do with a murder?”

  “Maybe. I don’t really know.”

  But she sensed that the two were related. She had a creeping sensation—like an insect crawling up her neck—that Constance died because of those bones. It was why indentifying who they had belonged to was so important.

  “Tell you what,” Lucy said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Let’s meet up around six.”

  “That would be great. Thank you.” Kat allowed herself a brief sigh of relief. This was one less thing she’d need to worry about. “I’ll have the bones transferred to the morgue and meet you and Nick there.”