___________________________
He was an old guy, in his seventies, wearing a bright red Santa outfit and leaning against a hand rail at the top of a short flight of wooden steps. He was thick-set. Loose muscles draped over a big frame, like damp laundry slung over a drying rack. He had one of those wind-blasted seafarer’s faces: rugged red, salt-stripped, with a thick white garland of beard hanging between the ears. The beard was real.
“Merry Christmas, Gabe Quinn!” he hollered as we approached. “Didn’t figure we’d meet again under these kind of circumstances. But hey ho, ho, ho.”
I could feel Rae’s inquisitive gaze burning into the back of my neck. I ignored it. I climbed the steps, removed a glove and shook his outstretched hand. “Paul. You’re looking well. It’s been a while.”
“Going on eighteen years, as a matter of fact. I see you’ve become something of a celebrity in the meantime.” He saw my flinch and added: “Anytime that showbiz lifestyle of yours gets too much for you to bear, you should consider moving to Alaska. You’d fit right in; we’re all running away from something up here. When it comes to freedom and no questions asked, nothing quite beats the forty-ninth. Plus, we get cable.” He spotted Rae and tipped his head. “Ma’am.”
“Hey.”
“Rae, this is Paul Engel. Paul’s the resident doctor hereabouts.”
Rae accepted his handshake. “Special Agent Rae Burnett. Pleased to meet you.”
“Same goes, I’m sure.”
“Paul came up here on a fishing expedition about twenty years ago and never went home. Isn’t that right, Paul?”
“Guilty as charged. Used to have a practice down in Vegas, but I swapped the big city lights for small-town America. And can you blame a guy? Take a look at this place. I might be ancient, but I’m not too old to recognize a good thing when I see it.”
Rae was nodding. “I take it y’all know one another, how?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”
Engel held the door open and we crowded into a narrow hallway smelling of burnt toast. It grew stronger as we followed the doc deeper into the dimly-lit building. I glimpsed storage rooms filled with what looked like packing crates on either side. Drifts of packing peanuts.
“Excuse my bad manners. Can I get you guys a drink?” he asked. “Maybe a Christmas tipple? I have a bottle of twenty-year-old Scotch that’ll blow your socks off.”
Rae spoke for all of us: “We’re good, thanks.”
He chuckled, “If you’re worried about being on duty, don’t be; no one’s taking any notes out here. Besides, you might change your mind once you’ve seen what’s coming.”
We came to a small, darkened room at the back of the building. It was an extension of the main structure – cold as a meat locker. There was a letterbox window facing north, I saw, opening out across a Christmas card scene of snowy terrain and barren mountains.
Engel pulled a cord by the door and a fluorescent bulb sputtered into life. Hot air from our lungs condensed in the air. The room appeared to be a basic
patch-‘em-up
first-aid stop on the frontier of nowhere. Glass-fronted cabinets lined the walls, stocked with bandages and potion bottles. Trays of surgical implements stacked on a long worktop. A stainless steel sink in one corner and an 80’s boombox wedged onto a shelf in another. By the looks of things, nothing purchased this century.
There was a collapsible trestle table pushed up beneath the window. A green tarp formed a pyramidal mound on its surface, about three foot tall. Engel wheeled the examination table out into the middle of the room and positioned it beneath the sober glow coming from the overhead strip light. I was already having flashbacks to Sanibel. Same kind of setup, only this was sixty degrees cooler.
Engel hooked fingers under the edge of the tarp. “Hope you both have strong constitutions.”
“Cast iron,” Rae answered.
Like a magician revealing a neat trick, Engel peeled back the waterproofed covering.
I heard someone gasp. Not sure if it was Rae or Officer Locklear.
Thinking back, it sounded like me.
___________________________
This is the part of the job I hate the most.
No matter how many times I haul myself through the process it never gets any easier.
Some things are like that.
We are told, as children, that monsters don’t exist, that they are figments of overactive imaginations. We lie to protect – when the stark reality is they are all around us, lurking in the shadows, and even sometimes within ourselves.
Monsters do exist.
Sometimes they are our children.
And when this happens, we protect ourselves with the lie.
Being a father does that, I guess.
___________________________
The tarp had been hiding a body.
It was positioned on the examination table in a seated posture with the legs crossed – the classic lotus position – leaning slightly forward with the hands curled into fists behind the crease of the knees. Chin nestled against a concave chest in the same way someone practicing a yoga pose. Everything perfectly balanced.
But that wasn’t the worst part.
Now I knew the origin of the burnt toast smell.
The killer had set the body alight.
Baked the corpse to a crisp.
“You can breathe,” Engel said.
I did, through clenched teeth. “You found it like this?”
He nodded, “As a matter of fact, in this exact position. It was still ablaze when we got there. Had to douse the darned thing with snow.”
Morbid fascination tugged me closer.
Every square inch that I could see was blackened and flaky – like a potato left too long in barbeque coals. The intense heat had melted away most of the soft tissue, including the lips and the eyelids. The face and skull were almost skeletal. Boiled egg eyeballs, solidified into milky glass orbs. Remnants of ears shriveled against the blackened skull. Jaw slack and unhinged. No sign of any hair or clothing. Everything overcooked, charcoaled. The entire torso was marbled with red cracks where the seared skin had tightened and split, probably under sudden cooling. Even so, the fierce temperature had hardened muscle onto bone, locking the corpse in its present death pose. It resembled a storefront mannequin exposed to blast furnace heat, cracked and blistered. Some of the scorched skin had flaked and fallen to form black soot on the metal examination table.
Engel rolled a portable lamp out of a corner and powered it up. Angled the cone of light so that it lit up the cremated corpse and cast a gruesome shadow of it across the ceramic floor tiles.
“Judging by the size of the ribcage and the pelvis region, I’d say it’s a fully-grown male.”
Rae moved closer. “Have you determined a cause of death?”
“Isn’t that self-explanatory?” Locklear answered before Engel could. “He burned to death.”
“No,” I countered. “Agent Burnett is right. The killer set him on fire post mortem. There’s no way anyone alive could burn to death and remain in a seated position.”
“Unless he was drugged,” Engel offered. “I checked inside the mouth and there is evidence of smoke inhalation.”
“He must have used a paralytic,” Rae breathed. “He wanted this guy to know he was burning alive.”
Not a nice way to go: surrounded by snow and water, yet unable to raise even a finger to extinguish the all-consuming flames.
“Y’all smell that?” Rae said. “It’s like gas station in here.”
It was sharp and chemically. Something competing with the burnt toast, at a higher pitch.
“It’s Bombe Alaska.”
I glanced at Engel.
“As in the after dinner dessert,” he said. “You splash dark rum over Baked Alaska and then ignite it.”
“The killer used an accelerant?”
He nodded. “Looks that way. The killer flambéed the victim. We found a thermos flask near the body. It contained traces of gasoline.”
“Remind me to stick with pumpkin pie,” Rae said.
“You kept it, this thermos flask?”
Engel pointed to a brown paper bag standing on the worktop.
I picked it up and unscrewed the lid. Felt fumes scratch at my sinuses. “So, the killer drugged the victim, sat him in the lotus position and then drenched him in gasoline, right before turning him into a human candle.”
Each subsequent layer of skin and flesh igniting as it had boiled off moisture and broiled muscle. Fat liquefying into hot wax, accelerating the blaze.
I shuddered at the thought. Placed the bag back on the worktop. “We’ll need it sent over to the Anchorage Crime Lab. Together with the body.” I turned to face Officer Locklear. He was looking like a kid called to the principal’s office. “Definitely no villagers reported missing?”
“I triple checked personally. I grew up here. Everyone knows everybody else. It doesn’t take long to notice.”
“What about visitors?”
“None currently lodging in the village itself.”
“And outside of Akhiok?”
“There are a couple of hunter camps inland by Olga Creek and one or two out by Dog Salmon Flats. Not many this time of year. Mostly fishermen looking for trout and halibut. Come the summer months, when the salmon are flying, we’re overrun.”
“Fewer suspects, then. That’s good. Has anyone questioned them?”
“The coast guard deployed a chopper yesterday afternoon. They were unable to get a complete inventory.”
“How so?”
He shrugged, “We’re a small force. We don’t keep track of everyone who comes here. We’re a few hours from the mainland by boat. Anyone with a decent setup could come here undetected and leave just as easily. The truth is, some trappers don’t want to be found. This is the last great wilderness. People are free to come and go as they please.”
“And to commit murder,” Rae commented dourly.
Locklear’s mouth formed a slanted line.
“What about closer to home,” I said. “Anyone in the village likely to do anything like this?”
Locklear seemed appalled by the insinuation, like I’d just called his mother ugly.
“No, not here.”
“But someone killed this guy,” I said. “Aside from the girl who found the body, didn’t anyone see anything?”
He shook his head inside the ushanka. “I canvassed the whole village. No one saw a thing.”
“This girl,” Rae said, “Julie Tsosie. What was she doing out on the beach at midnight?”
“The Tsosie residence is close to the beachfront. Julie’s bedroom has a direct line of sight. She says the fire woke her. She was curious. She went to investigate.”
“So she went down there in the dead of night without informing her parents?”
Locklear looked offended, but held it in. “Like I say, Akhiok’s a small community. It’s a safe place.”
I nodded at the burned body. “Try convincing this guy. Did you process the crime scene?”
“As best we could, given the conditions. We brushed back the snow and the ice, but we didn’t find anything suspicious. We took pictures, before and after.”
“We’d like copies,” Rae said.
“How many sets of footprints, in the snow directly around the body?”
Locklear’s eyes rolled to the ceiling and back. “Two unique ones, I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s hard to say, for sure. It had snowed overnight. There were multiple overlapping tracks. Some completely snowed over.”
“The thing is, it was chaos down there,” Engel explained. “Julie fetched her parents first. Then some of the local boys heard the commotion and came over. At first everyone was more focused on putting the fire out. Nobody was worrying about standing on the crime scene. We didn’t even realize it was a crime scene until the flames were out and we saw it was human.”
Rae’s brow was wrinkled. “After which you contacted the Kodiak Police straight away.”
Engel nodded.
“And exactly when did you arrive, Officer Locklear?”
“As soon as it was light.”
I huffed. “Ten hours later.”
I could see the first signs of unease creeping across his face. He was thinking our questions had a touch of hostility to them and his defenses were rising accordingly.
“Overnight visibility was poor,” he said through tight lips. “There was a weather advisory in place. Even under the best conditions, flying by night is dangerous here. We came just as soon as we could. The body had been removed when we arrived.”
I turned back to Engel.
“It was my decision,” he admitted. “Figured we couldn’t leave it down there on the beach. The weather was closing in fast. I knew it was important preserving it.”
While everybody else had merrily trampled the crime scene.
“We’re going to need shoe tread impressions from everyone on that beach,” Rae told Locklear.
He nodded, stiffly. Looked a little hot under the collar after our grilling.
“Fortunately,” Engel said, drawing my focus back to the body. “the teeth appear intact. Maybe good enough to cross-check against dental records?”
“Maybe.” I brought the lamp in closer and examined the burned fingertips. They were completely melted. Zero chance of an ID that way.
Something caught my eye.
I repositioned the lamp again and peered closer. “Paul, you got a pair of tweezers at hand?”
I heard him rummage through a tray of implements. He came up with the goods and placed a pair of metal grips in my hand. I leaned in, close to the burnt flesh, trying not to breathe too deeply.
Rae came alongside. “Found something?”
“Not sure.” I used the tweezers to lever open the fingers of the left hand – just enough to shed light on the small sliver of something foreign that had caught my eye. “Got any alcohol, Paul?”
“A few bottles of finest single malt in the other room. Imported from Scotland. Or are we talking its less flamboyant cousin, rubbing alcohol?”
He handed me a plastic pump bottle. I slid the spout in the gap between the fingers and squirted isopropyl onto the crisped flesh. Heard it crackle and fizz as it soaked in. I pulled gently with the tweezers until the object sprang free.
Rae was on my shoulder, “What is it?”
I held it up to the spotlight, turned it over. “Looks like the remnants of a credit card.”
It was a melted wafer of plastic, roughly oblong in shape, completely wrinkled along one edge. I went over to the steel sink and rinsed it under the faucet, then used a paper towel to wipe away tar.