Cause to Hide

“She doesn’t need makeup,” Ramirez said. “That shit’s for girls.”

“Thanks, guys,” Avery said.

“Whatever,” Connelly said. “So what do you think of this?” he asked, nodding down to the rectangle drawn out by the red stakes.

Inside of the marked-off area, she saw what she assumed were human remains. Most of what she saw was a skeletal structure but it seemed to gleam. There was no age to it. It was unmistakably a skeleton that had very recently been robbed of its flesh. All around it was what appeared to be ash or some sort of grime. Here and there, she saw what may have been muscle and tissue clinging to the skeleton, particularly around the legs and the ribs.

“What the hell happened?” she asked.

“Well, what a great question for our best detective to start with,” Connelly said. “But here’s what we know so far. About an hour and fifteen minutes ago, a woman out for her morning run put in a call about what she described as something that looked like a weird Satanic ritual. It led us to this.”

Avery hunkered down by the red markers and peered into the area. An hour and ten minutes ago. That meant that if the black stuff around the skeleton was ash, this skeleton had been covered in skin at least an hour and a half ago. But that didn’t seem likely. It would take some sick determination and planning to kill someone and then miraculously burn them down to nothing but bone in such a short amount of time. In fact, she thought it would be next to impossible.

“Anyone have evidence gloves?” she asked.

“One second,” Ramirez said.

As he ran to Finley and the other officers who had stepped back to allow Avery some room, she also noticed a smell in the area. It was faint but noticeable – a chemical smell that was almost like bleach to her nose.

“Anyone else smell that?” she asked.

“Some sort of chemical, right?” Connelly asked. “We figure a chemical-induced burn is the only way you can fry a body like this one so quickly.”

“I’m not thinking the burn was done here,” she said.

“How can you be so sure?” Connelly asked.

I’m not, she thought. But the only thing that makes sense to me at first guess seems pretty damned absurd.

“Avery – ” Connelly said.

“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 analyzed,” 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 glass, 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 glass, 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 asshole 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 assortment 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 assigned 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 passing 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.

Shit, 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.