Four nights earlier, a woman had been found tied to a telephone pole in Sturgis Park – or what was left of her had been found. She'd been burned beyond recognition. But the next day, a guy named Martin Allerdyce filed a missing persons report on his wife, Brenda, who was a practicing witch. She did white magic, of course – the black kind's illegal.
Nobody thought it would serve any useful purpose to have Allerdyce attempt an identification of the charred thing found in the park. But he did provide two items, upon request: a brush containing a good quantity of his wife's hair, and the name of her dentist.
Both dental records and DNA analysis confirmed Brenda Allerdyce as the victim. I wasn't exactly surprised to hear that the funeral had been conducted with a closed coffin.
One of the fire marshals said that gasoline had been used as an accelerant, and Homer Jordan at the ME's office told me that the level of free histamines in the tissues meant that Brenda Allerdyce had been alive when the fire was lit. She must've died screaming, an ugly fact that her husband was probably all too well aware of.
And now the sick fuck responsible had done it again.
"Where's this one?" I asked McGuire.
He looked at me for a second before answering. "Lake Scranton," he said, and his voice contained no inflection at all.
Next to me I heard Karl mutter, "Well, damn."
Lake Scranton is a man-made reservoir just south-east of the city. A few months back, Karl and I, and some others, had spent a very long night in its pump house. Several people had died there, and the survivors would never be the same again. That was especially true of Karl, who'd started the night as a human and finished it well on his way to becoming a vampire.
"Tell me it's not the pump house again," I said.
"Not even close," McGuire said. "The vic was found tied to one of the trees along the shoreline. Somebody whose house overlooks the lake saw the flames and called the fire department."
"Are you sure you want us on this?" I asked. "The Feebies seem to expect us all to be out beating the bushes for whoever's been making those snuff films." I can take as much horror as anybody on the job. But after watching that video tonight, I wasn't eager to look at a charred corpse, and to inhale that distinctive odor that smells so much like roast pork that I haven't eaten any in fourteen years.
A couple of months ago, I'd spent one of my rare nights off having a few beers with Homer Jordan. He'd told me, as if I wanted to know, about some scientific paper he'd read that compared the pain involved in the various ways people die. The paper had concluded, Homer said, that burning to death was the hardest way there is to check out.
Me, I would have said that being tortured to death by somebody who enjoyed his work would have been a contender for the number one spot, but that's kind of like debating which is the hottest corner of Hell, and those kind of arguments don't interest me.
I suppose that the study Homer was talking about had made some kind of valuable contribution to medical research. But I wouldn't want to be married to the guy, or woman, who wrote it.
"I don't think the FBI expects us to abandon our regular case load just to help them with this thing," McGuire said. "And if they do, then fuck 'em. Now get moving."
We got moving.
As I drove out of the parking lot, Karl said, "Think it's those fucking witchfinders again?"
"Well, it's not Crane and Ferris, that's for sure." The last two witch-smellers to visit Scranton had died right here in this parking lot, their necks broken by a vampire named Vollman, and good riddance.
"I figure there's more where those two clowns came from," Karl said.
"I'm sure," I said. "But they're supposed to check in with the local police, whenever they come into a town – just like private eyes do."
"Supposed to, huh?"
"Yeah, all right," I said. "But what those bastards do is legal, unfortunately. If they'd burned a witch, they wouldn't disappear – they'd call a fucking press conference."
"Good point. So what do you figure – some lone psycho?"
"Let's wait 'til we get there," I said. "It's a mistake to theorize in the absence of data."
From the corner of my eye, I could see Karl turn to look at me. "You've been reading Sherlock Holmes again, Stan?"
"Why not?" I said. "If you can memorize all the James Bond books, I can at least read some Conan Doyle once in a while."
"I don't have 'em memorized," he said. "I'm not some geek fanboy."
"Sorry, my mistake," I said – then asked him, "What's the last line of From Transylvania with Love?"
Without hesitating, he quoted, "Bond pivoted, drove the wooden stake through Rosa Klebb's heart, then slowly collapsed on the blood-red floor." After a second's pause, he said, "Hey – no fair. Everybody knows that one."
"Everybody," I said, nodding. "Yeah, you're right. My bad."
A few minutes later we reached the turnoff for Lake Scranton. It got quiet in the car as the flashing red and blue lights up ahead reminded us why we were here.
There's a jogging trail that goes all the way around the lake, but it's not wide enough for cars. Neither are any of the gates leading to it. That's why the two black-and-white units and the ambulance were parked outside the north gate. All three had their red and blue lights going, creating an effect like a madman's vision of Hell. Considering what I figured was on the other side of that fence, the madman would have been right on the money.
Karl and I parked and walked to the gate, which had a uniform standing next to the strip of yellow crime scene tape that blocked it. The cop was a patrolman named Dougherty. We knew each other.
"Where is it?" I asked him.
He pointed. "Down the path and to the right. You'll see the lights."
"Is the ME here?"
"Yeah. It's what's-his-name, Jordan."
"How about Forensics?" I asked him.
"Showed up about five minutes ago."
"Amazing."