Remnants of Fire

CHAPTER 1

OF all the corpses I’d seen in six years as a news reporter, Lily Kimball’s hit me the hardest.

Found in a shallow drainage ditch along Route 24, the girl’s pale, sightless eyes stared into the gray miasma of the late winter dawn. Two inches deep in snow, she wore only a shabby pair of expensive jeans and a red jersey shirt, with a dried clot of blood on her forehead.

Nausea crept from my stomach toward my throat. She had to be about my age, twenty-something. About my size, too, although those fingers were wickedly thin.

In the half-light, two CSI-types crouched in front of the body taking pictures and samples, thick parka vests protecting them against the thirty-degree early March chill. Each breath left their cold lips as a mist of water vapor.

Damnedest thing I ever saw, the lead investigator said to the waiting medic from the volunteer ambulance service. Why the hell would some girl be out here in the middle of a snowstorm without shoes, without a coat?

Good question as far as I was concerned. I was freezing my butt off, despite a hoodie under my jacket, black sweat pants and fur-lined boots. I couldn’t return to the office until I had some answers. So far, all I had was her name, thanks to the CSI techs.

No evidence of broken bones, no gunshots, no bruising. It didn’t even look like the girl had been tossed out of a car. I angled my pad to catch the headlights of the cop car and scribbled some notes, numb fingers slipping on the pen. Your tech pulled a bank debit card from her pocket. Maybe she needed cigarettes or something. I gestured toward the lights of the Quix-Stop a mile or so along from where the road intersected with Declan Highway.

The officer’s glare roasted his techs for sharing information, before he turned to eye me. Who’re you again?

"Sara Woods, for the Ralston Courier." I tilted my laminated badge so he could read it.

He squinted at the black and white picture of a pixie-like brunette with a slightly crooked smile, and compared it to my pixie-like face, much more florid in the wintry wind.

I tried for the smile, too, in case it helped.

New blood, huh?

Just started. I’m covering for O’Neal this weekend.

The officer chuckled. He’ll be pissed. He loves dead bodies.

The medic snickered along with him and they walked away, back to the running patrol car that polluted the surrounding area with foul smelling exhaust.

With a disappointed shiver I observed the techs. They hadn’t disturbed the body, other than to rule out major trauma. Lily’s skin was icy white, her black hair patchy, so thin it lay atop the snow. Bony stick fingers and toes were dark red, almost violet, from frostbite at the bare tips. It seemed like she’d simply fallen into the ditch. Just let go, dead.

Satisfied with their photos, the techs turned over the stiff body. I contemplated her in disbelief. What would have compelled me to leave home in a blizzard, half-dressed, ending in a frozen ditch with my life sucked out?

I didn’t know what could cause such desperation.

But the goosebumps that rippled across my skin told me it was still out there, lurking.

* * * * *

CHAPTER 2

I hated to be marginalized.

Studying the scene, I found my opening: the junior officer, relegated to walking the perimeter to chase off the random gawker and lookie-loos who slowed down as they passed to get a glimpse. The guy huddled, arms crossed, in a heavy navy-blue parka at the far edge of the area lit by the headlights. Tall, his smooth baby face tipping me he wasn’t long out of the academy, he had close-cut dark blond hair and narrow-set eyes the color of tin. He looked cold. Walking up to him, I said so.

No kidding. Is that why you’re a reporter? he asked. Those great powers of observation?

A smile was in his eyes, so I grinned back. Sometimes I amaze even myself. My name’s Sara Woods. I held out my hand.

He glanced over to the patrol car, but his superior was still gabbing. Brendon Zale, he said, and he shook my hand. Heard Tom say you were a rookie.

"New at the Courier. I reported for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette before I came here." I hoped the credential would make me seem experienced and wise. I also hoped he wouldn’t realize what a demotion it had been from a 186,000-circulation paper down to the Courier, a local paper of about 20,000. That would raise questions. Anything interesting about this dead girl I should know, Brendon?

Her? I have no idea. But that makes four. Brendon kept one eye on the patrol car. O’Neal covered the others. One on this road, one out on State Road 18. One just outside her house in October last year.

Serial killer? I wrote as fast as my chilled fingers would allow.

Nope. All died of natural causes. This one looks pretty much the same.

Natural causes? All of them? That lurking feeling seeped in under my jacket with the cold. I actually looked over my shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

That’s what the coroner said. The door of the patrol car opened, and Brendon stiffened. Better move on, now. He scooted away from me like I had the plague.

Catching the other cop’s heated glower, I stepped back and raised my voice. Yeah, thanks for nothing! Muttering, I walked away toward my car. Hopefully that got Brendon off the hook.

The one he’d referred to as Tom came striding toward me. We’ll have a press release later, when we’ve got something to tell you. Step back and let us do our jobs now, all right? He didn’t even bother to use his ‘polite’ smile.

Keeping the city safe, right? Good work. I glanced pointedly at the dead girl and got in my small silver Chevy, the one Jesse had dubbed ‘the Hamster’.

Tom eyed me as I pulled away, and I chastised myself for not sucking up enough. Not only was I the new kid, I was a girl. Cops hated to see females working on scene. Especially in small towns.

Murder was apparently men’s work.

The LED display in the car showed it was nearly seven a.m. in beautiful northwestern Ohio. The body hadn’t been discovered until an hour past today’s deadline, so that meant the television stations from Lima and Toledo would have been all over it for their morning broadcasts. That gave me all of today to deepen the story, to prove that people could still gain something from reading the morning paper that the Internet wouldn’t serve up in a neat package with a click.

Jim O’Neal, the paper’s long-time crime reporter, was away in Columbus researching legislative history of police department funding, or something equally dry and boring. Tom was right. The rotund, bearded writer would be kicking himself. But at least I had access to his other stories for background, and this girl’s name, Lily Kimball.

It was only about three miles from the scene to the Courier offices on Larchmont Street. It wasn’t far from anywhere to anywhere here. Ralston was a quiet town, a ‘nice’ place to live and work. The outlying people farmed for the most part, while generations of family members worked side-by-side at the mobile home factory. The whole city of 14,500 might have fit inside my beloved Pittsburgh Strip District. Memories dribbled in: breakfast at DeLuca’s, tapas and dry red wine at Ibiza on East Carson Street, and my bright little apartment in yellows just inside the North Hills.

My throat closed up, as I pulled into the paper’s lot. I didn’t dare glance at the rearview mirror for fear of seeing Jesse’s ghost, accusing me.

Stop. Stop remembering. Close it off. Survive.

I took deep breaths, forcing my nerves to calm. Ralston was only a waypoint, I kept reassuring myself. It was an emergency landing, a place to find my feet again after the divorce I’d never wanted.

When I had myself in hand, I left the car and hurried inside.

The Courier had seen its heyday long before, maybe in the 1960s or 1970s when people still read. The lobby’s carpet, once brown or tan, had worn to a threadbare beige. Circulation sat off to the left, a mish-mosh of heavy old desks stacked with computers and phones that rang in the same whiny, complaining tones as their callers. Oft-painted stairs with a black rubber mat stapled to them went up from the center of the lobby to the second floor, that housed the news and editorial departments. To the right were the classified and advertising sections, the real heart of the paper.

In my first journalistic years, working for the high school paper in a small Cleveland suburb, I was naive enough to believe that publication of a newspaper was about news. J-school at Kent State had quickly disabused me of that notion. Papers were about income from ad sales. If there was space afterward, the publisher let some news fill the remaining column inches. Most journalists ignored this, letting self-interest and egos make them the stars.

I certainly wasn’t immune.

Hurrying upstairs to my little gray upholstered cubicle, I found myself the first reporter in. I turned on the computer to let it warm up and went for some coffee so I could do the same.

Sara? My office!

My eyes rolled almost without volition. Gloria, the paper’s editor who was working on her twenty-fifth year of tenure, probably would be buried in the damn building someday.

Coming! I called.

Filling a ceramic cup with scalding black coffee, I wrapped my fingers around it and let the blissful heat thaw them. With any luck it would happen before Gloria Wilson stopped talking.

I trudged along the short hall to Gloria’s office. The glassed-in front revealed a row of overstuffed file cabinets. Piles and piles of sturdy boxes were stacked from ceiling to floor along the far wall, barely avoiding the window to the outside. That remained unblocked to support Gloria’s tobacco habit. Whenever Gloria craved a cigarette, she’d defy company policy and crank open the window enough to blow smoke outside to the amusement of the half dozen writers who worked under her. No one called her on it. No one would dare.

Gloria stood behind a desk piled high with to-do baskets. It’s another of those girls, isn’t it? Natural causes, right? Natural causes, my ass! A woman who’d passed over to the dark side of fifty some time before, Gloria still dressed for success, her smartly cut brown hair fading to gray. Tortoise-shell glasses perched precariously on top of her head, as she paced in agitation. Tell me about her.

I shared what limited information I had. The cops weren’t very helpful.

Then you damn well make them helpful! Her brow furrowed with displeasure. Our readers have a right to know.

I had to smile. At least every other day of the two weeks I’d worked here, Gloria lectured us with fervent opinions of eras past, tales of the times when she started out, the Woodward and Bernstein era, her namesake Ms. Steinem and Betty Friedan, who’d opened the way for women, as liberation moved forward in the form of civil rights for all and the country crawled out from under the oppressive Nixon years.

All of the professors had assured us it had been a great time for journalists. Since then, freedom of speech and the press had been kicked to death by the Bush administration and The Patriot Act. Small-town cops still thought women belonged off the streets. Jerks.

I know, I finally replied. Actually, one of the guys referred me to O’Neal’s other stories. That was my first order of business when I got back, besides ditching the ice cube imitation. I raised my cup. So if I could get on it?

Gloria snapped her glasses back into place, dismissed me with a curt nod and picked up her Blackberry, her thumbs tapping away. I returned to my assigned desk. Its flat gray surface held no personal mementos, no photos, nothing to personalize it like those in cubicles around it. No sense in making it ‘home’ when it wasn’t.

I dug through the newspaper’s online morgue until I found the stories about the other women. At first glance, they had nothing in common. One was a teacher, one a housewife, the other a fast-food service worker. All were under thirty. One was married. Two were mothers. They lived in different areas of town. Nothing to tie them together.

So what about the new one? I opened a web browser and ran the name Lily Kimball through a people search on the Internet. Apparently, there was a blues singer of the same name in the country, but that clearly wasn’t my Lily. No local address or occupation that I could find.

The debit card had been from Huntington Bank. I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even seven-thirty. No one would be there for another hour and a half. A sip of coffee found it cooled to an appropriate temperature, so I gulped down about half of it. I’d been up since four a.m. To stay coherent enough to pull together this story, more caffeine would be needed. I shucked my coat and shuffled down the hall to put on a fresh pot.

* * *

By the time anyone arrived, I’d rifled through O’Neal’s Rolodex, trying to track down likely sources of information and had made a few calls in to some of his sources.

Dedra Rhodes, the summer intern from Bowling Green, came in armed with a dozen donuts from the mom-and-pop place on the square downtown. You’re early. Her shrill voice carried a perky joy. The blonde reminded me of a St. Bernard puppy, awkward, bouncy, all legs, and about to burst with boisterous excitement.

Dead body, I said with some pride.

No way! Her bright blue eyes widened with what I hoped was hero worship.

Way. My smile faded as I considered Lily’s fate and the odd feeling I’d gotten standing by her lifeless corpse.

Dish it, girlfriend. She cozied onto the corner of my desk, pulling an oversized purple sweater close around her. She opened the pristine box of donuts in my direction. Don’t take the chocolate one. It’s for Mitch.

I considered Mitch Calvacca, a New York Italian and the paper’s sports editor, whose first reaction to meeting me had been a hungry glance at the ring finger of my left hand. When I caught him looking, he just gave me a ‘bad boy’ smile and a cocked eyebrow. It wasn’t likely that he’d get any of my time. I hadn’t bothered to let him know.

Why are you sucking up to Mitch? You don’t even cover sports. I selected a maple frosted round, licking a bit of frosting from my fingers.

He’s an editor, Dedra confessed, biting her lip. I just—you know. I need all the friends I can get. She took a cream-filled monstrosity and closed the box. Besides, I’ll do anything to avoid another assignment tramping through cow barns. I totally ruined a pair of Michael Antonio boots. Her lip slid outward in a soft pout.

Cow barns. I chuckled at her misfortune, inwardly praying I’d be spared any such assignments.

Seriously. The girl sighed and poked at her pastry. So what about the body?

I told her what I had. Everyone seems to think this death is linked to those others, but no one can say why. Nothing on the surface matches.

Maybe they’re all getting poisoned at some restaurant, but no one knows they’re going there. She crossed her legs. As long as it’s not that vegan place out by the college. I love that place.

What place? An amused contralto came from behind us.

Lifestyle section editor, Melissa Jones had slipped close on her little cat feet, her pure white hair flowing loose. Soft but not fat, she favored long flowery skirts and gave off vibes of some mysterious vitality. If she were in a European village, I would have pegged her as the town Sybil. She just had that way.

Fresh Horizons, the vegan place, Dedra said with a vibrato tingling with excitement. We’re just debating who’s killing all these women.

Melissa closed the box lid. More likely these donuts are killing people than healthy food. All sugar and oil. Nothing redeeming in a one of them.

Exactly, I retorted. That’s why we eat them. I leaned back and felt a pinch in my spine. A set of muscles in my back tightened in practiced response. Not again! With a groan, I stood and twisted slightly, trying to get the old physical therapy moves to release the spasms.

What’s the matter? Dedra’s expression bunched into a frown.

Melissa was close, very close, and she reached out to lay a hand on the offending area. Let me see.

I gasped, as I felt heat where Melissa’s hand passed. What are you doing?

Just checking things out. She poked her thumb into my mid-back vertebrae and twisted gently, and then moved down each one and did the same, until she reached the waistband of my slacks.

But you didn’t even hardly move, Dedra cried, clearly confused.

Sometimes I don’t have to, I said, grunting as Melissa pushed a little harder. Thing was, as her hand moved along, the spasm was relaxing. I had a car accident three years ago in the winter. Someone T-boned me. I had surgery and physical therapy and all, but it’s just never been the same. If I move just right, I pull something out of whack and then it’s usually two or three days with heat packs and muscle relaxers to get it back in gear. I paused, pleasantly surprised, stretching just a little as the pain faded. That really feels better. Wow. Thanks, Melissa.

I’m happy to help. The old woman beamed. You know, I learned that technique at the Goldstone Clinic here in town. They teach other practices for self-healing. You should really check them out. She ran her hand down my back again, and I felt the heat pass again. Do you want me to make an appointment for you?

I turned, something in that sudden offer seeming very forward. Dedra also had a bemused look, as she studied the old woman.

No, thanks, I said. I can handle my own doctoring.

Melissa broke into a sunny smile. Sorry, of course you can. Don’t mind me. I just get a special treatment, like a bonus, if I refer someone. When you get to be nearly seventy, every little bit of health counts, you know?

Her skin was almost free of wrinkles. Her fingers and knuckles were not twisted or thickened with arthritis. Her dark eyes sparkled with vigor. I might have guessed sixty, but seventy was pushing believability.

It must work for you, I ventured.

It’s a lifesaver, she said.

Do they treat migraines? Dedra interrupted. Because, you know, I’ve got migraines that are killer.

I believe they do. I’ve got some of their flyers on my desk. Just a minute. Melissa disappeared around the corner of the cubicle.

I set aside the donut, feeling guilty after all this healthy talk. Dedra winked and took the box to the lunchroom next to the coffeepot.

Melissa reappeared with several glossy, full-color flyers for the Goldstone Clinic. The cover showed three beautiful women in lab coats and the motto Devoted to serving our community by bringing you good health.

The caption introduced the tall chignoned brunette as Dr. Francesca Ruprei, a medical specialist from Europe with a host of letters after her name. She was flanked on the right by a petite elfin brunette with huge dark eyes, Sheila Morgan, identified as a nurse practitioner. On her left was a muscular Amazon with dark blonde hair worn in a pixie cut and who looked like she took no nonsense. The Amazon’s name was Ulrike von Dorn. The brochure didn’t say what she did. Anything she wanted, I thought in the parody of a bad joke.

Ralston wasn’t exactly mainstream medical America, so I was intrigued that a European doctor would tend to the citizens of this small town. It sounded more like the kind of practice one would find in South Side Pittsburgh or Beverly Hills, something fluffy and indulgent for those with the money to spend.

I flipped to the inside, finding a list of maladies treated by the clinic’s professionals, office hours and location on Declan Highway, out west of town, according to the tiny map. Not too far from that Quix-Stop I’d spotted earlier.

The list of available techniques was extensive, from petrissage to shiatsu to Reiki energy treatments, and art depicting spheres of energy extending several feet around a dark silhouette of a human body. Inside the silhouette were seven colored circles that ran the gamut from red at the hips up through white at the top of the head. The copy suggested it was possible to adjust one’s energy fields as easily as a chiropractor adjusted the spine.

Now this was ooga-booga stuff for sure. What, no magic mushrooms? No animal sacrifices? I smothered a nervous laugh that insinuated itself in my midsection as I simultaneously promised Melissa I’d check it out. Gloria’s bellow for Dedra shattered the tense moment. Melissa vanished back to her desk.

Dedra giggled. Government by decibel. Yikes. She hurried off to see what Gloria wanted. I stretched a little, back and forth, still amazed at the relief Melissa had given me. That had been the fastest an episode had ever resolved itself. I glanced at the flyer again. Maybe I would check it out. It couldn’t hurt.

* * * * *

CHAPTER