Embers (9 page)

“And. . . what happens on the rare occasions when he does show up?” Anya wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Katie pursed her lips. “Then, he gets totally wasted and wrecks your party. He gropes the bridesmaids, yells obscenities into the microphone, and falls into your wedding cake.”

Anya stared down at the page. “Um. He looks more fearsome than any of my relatives.”

“Yeah, well, Sirrush, like the other elementals, isn’t good nor is he evil. . . like many of our extended family members. Sirrush is like a hurricane, or an earthquake. He’s a force of nature. He can be terribly destructive, but it’s nothing personal.”

“Shit.” Anya wrapped her hands around her knees. “If my firebug is trying to summon Sirrush through ritual magick, what are the odds that he’ll succeed? How likely is the cranky dragon to show up to the party?”

Katie spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “No way of knowing. I’d say that the fires he’s setting are definitely getting the spirit world’s attention. Rather than sending Sirrush an invite in the mail, he’s pounding on the door.”

“If Sirrush takes him up on it, what then?”

“Then nothing. You can’t stop a hurricane.” She leaned forward. “Your best bet is to keep this idiot from waking Sirrush up. If Sirrush shows up to the party, there’s no bouncer in the world big or bad enough to keep him off the dance floor.”

The news media ran the arson as the lead story. Neuman’s photo was plastered on the front page of the papers. The little girl found mummified in the pop machine was buried in the back of the metro section and received less than thirty seconds’ attention on the evening news.

Anya watched the local news broadcasts in half-time on her desk computer. Elbows planted on her scarred desk, she had to remind herself to blink in between frames. Headphones covered her ears, blotting out the sounds of ringing phones and office foot traffic outside her door. The transom above the glass and wood door had jammed open years ago, and sound infiltrated the space as easily as smoke.

Her office was a hodgepodge of scavenged steel furniture and files stacked neatly in cardboard bankers’ boxes. She’d put in a request when she’d gotten the job for a file cabinet, but none ever materialized. A map of the city was taped to the dingy yellow wall. The locations of the four arson sites were indicated by red pushpins. No discernible geographic tie had emerged: besides the warehouse fire, the arsonist had hit two abandoned houses on opposite ends of town and a beauty salon. But that didn’t keep Anya from scribbling around them with markers, from tying strings around the pins and trying to determine a pattern or common entry and escape route.

Now she focused her attention on combing the media footage of the crime scenes for suspicious bystanders. An arsonist could rarely stay away from his own work. More often than not, he was compelled to stand back and admire what his hands had wrought, his power. And it was almost always a he. The only female arsonist Anya had ever investigated was a woman who torched the apartment her husband had rented for his mistress. In the majority of cases of arson involving single perpetrators—excluding those that were lit for revenge or monetary gain—the motive was sexual. Anya had caught her fair share of pyromaniacs masturbating at the scene of the crime, but she sensed that the ritualistic motive overshadowed any sexual thrills to be gained from watching buildings burn.

But that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t return to the scene. If the arsonist had any ego at all, he would drive by to see what he’d created. Just seeing it on the evening news wouldn’t be enough. He’d have to be there, touch it, smell it. Who knew? Perhaps the idea of summoning up Sirrush turned his crank.

And so she watched, head in hand, inching through the footage. She’d asked the news stations for any footage they’d shot on the previous fires. No images had been televised and those fires had only warranted small blurbs in the metro section. They hadn’t even bothered to cover one of the house fires at all. The warehouse fire had gotten a good deal of airtime, owing to the firefighter’s injury, but the previous two fires hadn’t been shown. There had been more than enough bad news to overshadow these events; they’d represented little more than ordinary days in Detroit. Those arsons were like the perfunctory mention of the little girl in the paper—business as usual.

She ignored the newscasters blathering in the foreground and watched the crowds behind them, the cars inching behind the crime scene tape. She watched for someone who didn’t belong, someone who was trying too hard to be inconspicuous, someone who couldn’t tear his eyes away from the moment.

On the screen, a reporter drank a diet soda through a straw, unwilling to smear her makeup. She seemed young, fresh out of college; Anya supposed that she was an intern. The assignment was likely her opportunity to practice on a story that wouldn’t see the light of day: this feed from the beauty shop fire had never been broadcast. It had been recorded on the sidewalk across the street after the scene had been released by DFD. The beauty shop owner stood, crying, behind the barricade. Neighbors clotted on the sidewalk behind her, watching the fire crews clear out. The reporter bent over to put the soda on the pavement and Anya squinted.

That guy. Something struck her as unusual about him. He walked by the edge of the knot of people, his hands jammed into his pockets. He was tall, wearing a black overcoat, walking with a limp. Long, dark, glossy hair was pulled back behind the nape of his neck. She couldn’t tell where he was looking; sunglasses covered his eyes. He looked too corporate for the crowd of bystanders on their way to blue-collar jobs—the dark wool among the flannel and denim just didn’t fit. He wasn’t doing anything suspicious, just walking down the sidewalk. He could be a business owner or private individual come to check out the damage to a neighboring property. Maybe.

But there was something about him that prickled the base of her neck, caused her to fish through the DVDs from two weeks ago. She switched discs and her computer grumbled as it digested the new one. She drummed her fingers on the scarred desk, waiting as it summoned up clips of the house fire from two weeks ago.

This had been a suburban fire, in Redford Township, just outside of city limits. The site had been an empty house that had been vacated due to the owner’s bankruptcy. Redford FD had called DFD for help, since the blaze had spread to a detached garage and threatened a school. Once it became apparent the fire was an arson, the township had punted the case to DFD’s crime lab. Anya had toured the site once the arsonist’s hallmark had been discovered. But she hadn’t had the opportunity to see the scene when it had been fresh.

This footage was taken the following afternoon, the newscaster standing in the street before the schoolyard, with school buses parked in view. Parents were picking up their children, milling in the background. She slowed the speed, scanning the crowd. . . and spied a familiar figure walking down the sidewalk. A pale face with a straight jaw turned in three-quarter profile, belonging to a man dressed in a nondescript gray jogging suit. He wasn’t doing anything unusual, but as before, he stood a bit too far apart from the others. Too isolated. Even in these casual clothes, there was something indefinably. . . aloof. . . about his stance. It wasn’t just the limp. He just didn’t blend in. And he entered and exited the shot without a child.

“Gotcha,” she breathed. It was the same guy from the beauty shop scene. And he would have no reason to be at both places, even though both the shots had been taken long after the fires had burned out.

The phone on her desk chirped. She snatched the receiver. “Kalinczyk.”

“This is Jenna from the crime lab. We’ve got some new results from your arson scene
you’ll want to see.”

“Be right there.”

Anya snagged her jacket and keys. Banging the door behind her, she wound her way out of the basement of the Detroit Fire Department headquarters. Like much of Detroit’s downtown, it had been built in the construction boom of the 1920s. Renovations had touched the upper floors, but had forgotten the basement. Black-and-white tile checkerboard still covered the floors. She waved at the guard on the first floor, the echo of her footsteps clicking against the vaulted ceilings.

She’d parked across the street at Cobo Hall, a squared-off concrete building that stood in sharp contrast to the arches and brick exterior of Fire HQ. There had always seemed to be a tension between the old and the new in downtown: the glass and steel tower of the Ren Cen jarred architecturally with the Italian Art Deco styles of the lower brick buildings built in the twenties. Some of the newer buildings, like Comerica Park where the Detroit Tigers played, had attempted to blend into the existing architecture by incorporating brick and sculpture into the design. Still, it always seemed to Anya that the past held more sway here than more recent eras.

Police HQ was no exception. Just blocks south of Greektown, the low brick shops and restaurants with brightly colored awnings gave way to the stately gray Art Nouveau building. Anya found an open parking space, then climbed the short flight of steps to the arched entry. Decorative metalwork on the lower windows cast geometric patterns of sunshine on the tiled floors. She punched the elevator button and waited.

Detroit’s forensic laboratory had a rocky history. After a string of false findings that resulted in overturned cases, the laboratory had been closed. It had recently reopened, as the state crime lab had been unable to take on the massive backlog that Detroit had generated in recent years. The entire department had been restructured and reformed, begun from scratch with a series of grants from the feds. Though accreditation had been reinstated, it would take many years for faith to be rebuilt.

Within the decorative outer facade of the building, technology hummed. The elevator doors opened onto a room with drop ceilings and fluorescent light—the central evidence area. Yellow steel cabinets lined the walls and stood in islands; computers perched beside glassed-in cabinets. Black stone countertops held microscopes and paper evidence bags. On one table, Anya glimpsed the pair of shoes that had belonged to the little girl in the pop machine being carefully examined by a lab-coated woman holding a pair of tweezers. Anya’s gaze lingered on the shoes. One of the laces was broken, and the woman was picking apart the knot.

“Sad, aren’t they?”

Anya started, turning at the voice. Jenna Bentham, the forensic department’s trace evidence specialist, stood beside her. She shook her head, clucking at the technician plucking fibers from the small shoes as carefully as a farmer would pluck a chicken. Her long brown braids moved against the shoulder of her lab coat, beads clicking against her earrings.

“Who do those belong to?” Anya genuinely wanted to know. The news reports had indicated that the girl’s identity was unknown.

“A little girl that some monster-hunters found in a Coke machine.” Jenna sighed.

“Found dead?”

“Yeah. Found dead from a long time ago. The ME thinks that she’s been dead for thirty years. No evidence of foul play—yet. But we’re looking to see if we can compile a description to run against any missing little girls from that time.”

Anya wanted to say:
She’s about three feet tall. Brown eyes, round face. Eyelashes as
thick as a doll’s
. But her voice remained stuck in her throat.

“C’mon. I’ve got some preliminary findings on your case.” Jenna gestured for Anya to follow her to a desk shoved in a corner. She opened a manila file folder and paged through it. “We ran your chip samples through the gas chromatograph, checked for light, medium, and heavy accelerants. We didn’t find any conventional or unconventional accelerants—no lighter fluid, gasoline, mineral spirits, kerosene. . . hell, we even checked for jet fuel. Twice.” Jenna handed Anya the page of printed test results.

Anya believed her, but she understood the tech’s impulse to check and double-check; the lab was under too much scrutiny from all sides for anyone to trust them at their word. Anya trusted Jenna, though, and handed the page back. “I wonder if it burned up,” she mused.

“I went ahead and sent them to the mass spectrometer at the state lab,” Jenna said. “The only thing of interest they were able to find was traces of sulfur.”

“Sulfur?” Anya echoed.

She felt Sparky brushing against her pant leg. She looked down to see the salamander creeping across the tile floor, stalking a microscope perched on a table. Anya stepped on his tail, pinning him to the floor. Sparky glared up at her in irritation, straining forward with his legs churning in futile slow motion against the tile.

“Sulfur can melt. . . and when it does, it releases hydrogen sulfide gas,” Jenna continued, oblivious. “It’s toxic and flammable. There wasn’t much there, but it’s something that just doesn’t belong at that kind of scene. . . unless someone’s chemistry set burned.”

Anya frowned. “Wouldn’t we have smelled it at the scene?”

“Depends. The amounts we found in your samples were pretty small traces. It would depend how close one was when the compounds were released. By the time you got there, the smell might have been mistaken for the mercaptan smell added to commercial natural gas lines, or it could have dispersed to the point that it was virtually undetectable. The handheld sniffer that you all carry isn’t programmed to pick up trace amounts of sulfur dioxide.”

Sparky switched directions, circling around to get a better look at an unattended slide projector that had attracted his attention. Anya adjusted her stance to remain on his tail, trying to look nonchalant—not like she had to pee.

“What else have you got for me?” Anya asked.