Polar (Book 2): Polar Day (14 page)
Danny sat on his couch with Sox on his lap, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He took a drag from the cigarette and let the smoke sit in his mouth before blowing it out in a perfectly formed “O.” He’d just hung up from a phone call with Amanda, who’d informed him she had definitely decided to stay in Sitka for the rest of the summer due to her mother’s continued health problems. Danny thought that was a good idea considering the ongoing fires. There was no doubt that Fairbanks was a dangerous place to be at the moment.
Amanda had asked Danny about the case but he hadn’t felt like talking about it. He didn’t feel like doing anything at all. In fact, he had even turned off his television and was now merely staring at the wall opposite him. He longed to sleep, but each time he closed his eyes he saw the grotesque shell that was all that remained of Jennifer Higgins.
He took a long drink of beer and set the now empty bottle on the end table next to him. Finishing his cigarette, he stamped out the bud in the ash tray and reached for the open pack on the table. He stopped himself, once again remembering Jennifer's corpse. As sleepy as he was, he didn't need to set a fire and burn himself to death as well. Or worse, burn Sox. Danny hadn't cared what happened to him for quite a while now. But he did care about his dog.
Letting his head rest against the back of the couch, Danny closed his eyes and massaged Sox's ears in an effort to calm his mind. He felt himself drifting into dreams and was once again lost in the snow.
The snow was waist deep and he had forgotten to wear snowshoes. He sunk into the white landscape with each step, eventually winding up stuck in a drift that towered over him. The snow surrounded him, pulling him into the drift and turning his body to ice. He heard a man laughing and turned to see Aleksei standing next to the drift, his fangs bared and his head thrown back in laughter.
The snow was like water pulling Danny down and he knew he was going to drown in it. Aleksei continue to chuckle and didn’t try to hide his glee as Danny sank deeper and deeper into the whiteness.
“Dzubenko,” Aleksei said between guffaws. “Remember? Vasyl Dzubenko.”
Danny jumped straight up and knocked Sox from his lap. The frightened dog whimpered and looked up at him with his tail between his legs.
“I'm sorry buddy,” Danny said.
He reached a trembling hand out to the dog. Never one to hold a grudge, Sox responded by licking Danny’s hand with his warm and wet tongue. He thumped his tail as Danny returned to massaging his ears.
“Why do I know the name Dzubenko, Sox?”
His fingers froze mid-massage as he suddenly remembered the answer to his question. There was a Dzubenko in the old arson cases he had been going through. A fire back in the 1990s....
Danny leaped up from the couch and grabbed his keys from their place on the rack next to his door.
“I have to go back into work,” he said to his now clearly perturbed and confused dog. “You go ahead and go back to sleep.”
Danny ignored Sox's irritated bark as he left his apartment and headed for his car. It was 2:00 in the morning and the sun had set a few hours ago, giving Danny and the rest of Fairbanks a short break from the unrelenting heat. Twilight bathed the night sky in waves of pink and lavender. He got in the car and quickly drove off towards the police station with the rush of adrenalin that always came with the knowledge that he had found the break that had previously eluded him.
He was glad he'd had this revelation in the middle of the night when he could work largely undisturbed. The night shift wouldn't ask any questions and he would easily have the records room to himself. He couldn't help but wish he could simply bring up the file he wanted on the computer, but the reports from the 1990s hadn't been digitized yet. It was a good bet that they never would be, considering the Fairbanks' department's limited budget and manpower. There were much more important things to focus on.
Danny now knew exactly the case he was looking for and he didn’t think it would take him long to find it again. He pressed his foot to the floor and careened through the eerily empty Fairbanks streets.
****
August 1, 2013
“Danny, what on earth are you doing? Have you been here all night?”
Danny turned in his chair to see Tessa standing behind him.
“Close enough,” he said.
Tessa eyed his rumpled blue shirt and khaki pants, which were the same clothes he had worn yesterday, as well as his tangled hair and bloodshot eyes.
“Have you been drinking again?”
“What? No. Or at least I haven’t been since around 2:00. I've been working.”
Tessa sat down at her own desk. “How so?”
“I decided to go back to the old arson cases I'd been looking at before Jennifer was killed. I couldn't sleep so why the hell not, right?” Danny pointed to the open folder on his desk. “And I found an interesting one.”
“What is it?”
“In 1996 a house over on McHenry Street that belonged to a family named Dzubenko burned to the ground. The parents and two of their three children were all killed. One boy, a 12-year-old named Jamie, survived. The investigators could never figure out what started the fire. The scene they describe sounds just like the broken record Anthony keeps giving us after each of our fires now.”
Tessa made no effort to hide her interest. “What happened to the boy?”
“He went to live with a relative but I don't know what happened from there. But I do know that a Jamie Dzubenko who would be the age he is now works in the lab at Fairbanks General.”
“Where Max Fugate worked...”
“Exactly.”
“But what made you zero in on this case? There's something else. Something you're not telling me.”
“Damn right,” Danny thought. “And I'm not going to either.”
“Danny?” Tessa asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“One of the investigators viewed Jamie as a suspect and believed that he started the fire that killed his family, but he couldn't ever prove it. I want to talk to him and see why he thought that.”
Danny hoped that answer would be enough to satisfy Tessa.
“Who's the investigator?”
“His name is Frank Wainscott. He retired fifteen years ago but he still lives in Fairbanks.”
“Let's go talk to him then.”
“I'd rather do this on my own. I thought you were doing the press conference with the chief this morning anyway.”
“You're supposed to be doing that too. And why would you want to do this alone?”
Danny ignored the question and got up from his chair. “Well we can't both miss the press conference, can we? I'll just take care of this visit this morning and catch you up on it later.”
“Danny, what's this about?”
“It's about finally meeting someone who could give us some insight into this case.” He turned his back on his partner and walked towards the exit. “I need to take a quick shower so I don't scare Wainscott when I show up at his house. I'll meet you back here this afternoon.”
****
Danny drove up to Frank Wainscott's colonial style home on 21st street and pulled into the driveway. Wainscott apparently liked bright colors, as the house was painted a vivid blue shade that must have made the home stand out like a sore thumb when it was surrounded by snow in the winter. Maybe that was the point. Wainscott wanted to bring a bit of cheer to the long and dark winters. In contrast to the blue, the garage and door were painted white. A German shepherd dog sat in Wainscott's large fenced-in yard, cocking his ears and running to the fence when he saw Danny walking up the sidewalk to the porch. His loud bark alerted his owner to Danny's presence before Danny even had a chance to ring the doorbell.
A stooped and grey haired man opened the white door and gazed at him warily. “Are you Detective Fitzpatrick?”
“I am, sir. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me.”
Wainscott opened the door wider to allow Danny inside. “I’m happy to do it. But it’s hard for me to believe I know anything that can help you. I’ve been retired a long time.”
“That's a handsome dog you've got out there,” Danny said. “I'm a dog lover myself.”
“That's Riley. He was my wife's dog really, but now that she's gone I'm glad to have his company.”
Danny followed Wainscott into a spacious living room decorated in neutral tones of beige and white.
“How long has your wife been gone?” he asked.
“Six months. Please, make yourself comfortable and have a seat.”
Danny sat down on a champagne colored sofa. “I'm sorry for your loss. I can imagine you must miss her terribly.”
“You married?”
“I was. My wife was murdered a few years ago.”
Wainscott let out a breath and sat down across from Danny in a hard-back wing chair. “Well I'm sorry to you too then. That's rough.”
“It was. Is,” Danny paused, “But I didn't come here to talk about my personal problems or yours, sir.”
“Right. So what is it you did come here to talk about, Detective?”
“Danny, please.”
“Then call me Frank.”
“Okay, Frank. I want to talk to you about an unsolved arson case from the 1990s. The Dzubenko family.”
A shadow crossed Frank's face. “That was a tough one.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
“Both parents and two youngsters were killed. The oldest boy, Jamie, he made it out. When we got to the scene he was standing there watching the house burn. Kid had the weirdest damn look on his face I've ever seen.”
“How so?”
“He almost looked happy. Or at least content. At first I thought the kid was just in shock. But he stayed that way. When they carried the bodies of his family out he didn't react at all. No crying, no sign of horror. I swore I saw him smile when they brought out the last body – that of his little sister.”
Frank paused and shook his head at the memory. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject.
“No, thank you. I've had more than my share this morning. But I'll wait here if you'd like to get a cup for yourself.”
“No, no, I'm fine.” Frank stared at the wall above Danny's head and let his mind retreat into the past.
“That kid stood there on his lawn holding a book. According to the neighbors who called 911 he walked out of the burning house clutching that book to his chest and looking like he had all the time in the world. They came running out of their house asking if he was okay and he just stared at them, and then stared down at his book. He wouldn't speak to them or to us when we arrived.”
“What was the book he had?”
“I don't know. Some kind of crazy crap about magic supposedly. It was in a foreign language so I couldn't even read it. But two of the neighbor kids told us Jamie had been reading it obsessively for months and had told them it was his great-grandfather's magic book. The kids all thought he was nuts. I've thought ever since that they were right.”
“What happened to Jamie?”
“He went to live with an aunt in Anchorage. I never had any further contact with the boy after that. But I thought back then that he started the fire himself. I would have bet my life savings on it. But I didn't have a shred of evidence to back my feelings up.”
“From what I read in your report, the arson team never figured out what started the fire.”
“That's right, they didn't. Not a goddamn clue. And to make it worse, there seemed to be multiple starting points for the fire in various parts of the house. They couldn’t even determine the point of origin. It was the strangest damn thing any of us had ever seen. You would have thought the fire started by magic.”
“What did Jamie say when you asked him about the fire?”
“He said he was sound asleep and woke up to one of the smoke alarms going off. His room was on the first floor of the house while the rest of the family slept upstairs. Jamie said he heard his mother screaming for his sister and tried to run upstairs but couldn't make it through the smoke. He claimed he got so frightened he just ran outside.”
“What about the book?”
“That was one of the reasons I questioned his story. He forgot about the book when he was first telling us what happened. When I asked him about it, he said he grabbed it before he left his room and tried to go upstairs. Now you tell me, what youngster wakes up to the sound of a smoke alarm and the smell of fire and grabs a goddamn book when he's supposedly going to run upstairs to help his family? It didn't make a damn bit of sense.” Frank scowled in anger as if the fire had just happened yesterday. “He just insisted he really loved his book and its connection to his family history and he didn't want to lose it.”
“I can see why you questioned it.”
“Anyone would have. But there wasn't anything else to go on, you know? And how do you go about accusing a kid who just lost his whole family in a fire? The media painted it as a tragedy of course, which it was, but he became their star victim. People were lining up to donate money to help the kid. And who could blame them? On the surface, he had been through an unimaginable hell and had seen his whole family die. But there was more to it, I was sure of it.”
“What made you so certain though? Weird or surprising things like grabbing the book do happen when people are frightened.”
“Right, they do. But it was just the demeanor of this kid. I always got the sense he was enjoying the attention and loving the fact that he was putting one over on everybody. He never showed any sign of grief or pain or sorrow. He never showed any emotion at all. There was something wrong with that kid, I knew it. Hell, I still know it.”
“What you know and what you can prove are two very different things sometimes, aren't they?”
“They sure as hell are.” Frank shifted in his chair. “Now it’s my turn to ask you some questions. You're asking about this case because of the fires this summer, aren't you?”
“Sure am. We're desperate for anything on this. We don't have a clue who is killing these people or how they're starting the fires to do it.”
“It's horrible, that's for sure. Just hearing it on the news makes me glad I'm retired.”
Danny smiled. “I kind of wish I was.”
“Well, I wish I could help you, Danny, I really do. I know what it's like to be stuck in the middle of a nightmare and have no idea how to stop it.”
“You've been a big help, Frank. I'm not sure how yet, but I can feel it.”
Frank chuckled and stood up from his chair. “I know about that too. Sometimes a feeling is all you need.”
Danny followed his lead and got up from the couch. “Thank you again for meeting with me.”
“I was glad to do it. Sometimes it feels good to talk to another cop again. You come back any time.”
“I may just take you up on that offer.”
Danny pulled his phone from his pocket and turned it off as he walked out of Frank’s home and returned to his car. He knew Tessa would be calling him and would also be mad as hell when he didn't answer, but he couldn't worry about that now. He needed to go home before going back to the station, as he had some research he wanted to do on his own computer without anyone interrupting him or looking over his shoulder.
He needed to find out more about Jamie Dzubenko’s life after his family had been killed in the mysterious house fire. And he wanted to know more about Aleksei’s long-ago nemesis with the same last name. He knew there was a connection. There had to be.
****
