Death Night

Kat gave him a slight nod. As if she could ever forget. The Grim Reaper, one of the two most evil people she had ever encountered, liked to play games. He’d place a dead animal at the scene, distracting his victims long enough for him to sneak up on them. Then he’d render them unconscious with a handkerchief doused with chloroform. Then he’d kill them.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Henry Goll had been the only one to survive.

“Well, now there’s this,” Kat said.

Her gaze drifted around the gallery, which looked far different than when she first arrived with Dutch Jansen and Emma Pulsifer in tow. The darkness that had previously enveloped them was now banished by a few well-placed klieg lights powered by a generator outside. The blinding glare highlighted the destruction, from the fire-scarred walls to the floors already warping from water damage. Shards of glass were everywhere, glinting in the light.

Above Kat, a portion of the ceiling had been eaten away, revealing both the second and third floors. She remembered from her grade-school visits that on the second floor were rooms decorated just as they would have been during the town’s founding. Above that, she assumed, was the attic, where Emma said the rest of the museum’s collection was stored.

The devastation from the fire and the water damage that followed meant there was likely very little trace evidence to be found. Still, a few crime scene techs huddled around the crawl space where Constance had been discovered. Although her body was now lying beneath a white sheet on a wheeled gurney next to Wallace, Kat still pictured her slumped over that trunk, her wool skirt wet and clinging to the back of her legs. The techs, who were probably used to seeing far worse, worked in silence. One of them, wearing a baseball cap with a penlight duct-taped to the bill, dropped into the crawl space like a seasoned spelunker.

“I’m assuming the cause of death is blunt force trauma,” Kat said.

“Probably,” Wallace replied with a nod. “She was certainly hit hard with something heavy. A single blow to the back of the head. Cracked her skull right open.”

“Any guess as to the time of death?”

“Fairly recent. The body was still warm, so I’m guessing no more than three hours ago.”

Immediately, Kat started forming a timeline of events. If Wallace was correct, Constance had died between twelve-thirty and one A.M., around the same time the fire started. Kat assumed that whoever killed her dragged the body into the crawl space before starting the fire.

“What do you think the murder weapon was?” she asked.

Wallace gave a palms-up gesture of ignorance before opening his arms wide. “Take your pick. There were probably a hundred objects in here heavy enough to do that kind of damage. Bronze statues. Household items, which were heavier back in the day than they are now. Housewives back then must have had biceps the size of bowling balls.”

“All the better to keep men like you in check,” Kat said.

Wallace let out a low chuckle that quickly morphed into a smoker’s cough and seemed to last a full minute. When he recovered, he said, “I’m off to do the autopsy now. I’ll call you as soon as I find anything.”

He started to wheel out Constance’s body, pausing long enough to pull a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and pop it between his lips.

“Don’t worry,” he said, the cigarette bobbing up and down. “I won’t light it until I get outside. Not that it’ll make much of a difference to this place.”

Once Wallace was gone, Kat crossed to the other side of the gallery. She trod lightly, careful not to step on any of the debris that littered the charred floor. What she didn’t see, oddly enough, were many evidence markers. The gallery contained exactly one, placed a few paces to the left of the museum’s front door.

Two men knelt next to the yellow fold of plastic. One of them was a stranger. The other Kat knew very well.

“Lieutenant Vasquez,” she said. “No offense, but I wish you weren’t here.”

Tony Vasquez was a detective with the Pennsylvania State Police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Neither the town nor the county had the manpower or expertise to handle crimes as big as homicide and arson, so the BCI was usually called to step in. As a result, Tony had worked on the Grim Reaper murders and the Charlie Olmstead disappearance. Now he was here once again.

“Frankly, I do, too.”

“I’m assuming you’re in charge.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Seeing how I know my way around the town by now, they figured I’d be a good point person.”

“Well, you know the score,” Kat told him. “You’re in charge. I don’t mind that you’re in charge. And I’ll do whatever I can to help.”

Lieutenant Vasquez got to his feet. In addition to being a professional cop, Tony was also an amateur bodybuilder. Those biceps the size of bowling balls that Wallace mentioned? Tony had them. His sheer size never ceased to amaze Kat. He was so big that he looked out of scale with the rest of the gallery—like Alice after nibbling on the cake that made her grow.

“It’s looking very likely that the fire hoses washed away all the evidence,” he said. “No trace. No blood spatter. If there is any evidence, it’s mixed in with this rubble. What did you find?”

Kat caught Tony up to speed on the events before and after she discovered Constance Bishop’s body. She also detailed her interview with Emma Pulsifer and the whereabouts of the other members of the historical society when the fire broke out. Then it was time to talk about the thing she least wanted to talk about. The thing that indicated this was no ordinary murder.

“There was something written on Constance’s hand.”

“I know,” Tony said. “I saw it.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I’m not sure. It might be nothing.”

“Or it could mean we have another Grim Reaper on our hands.”

Kat couldn’t get those five words out of her head. When she closed her eyes, she still saw them, smudged and startling. THIS IS JUST THE FIRST.

Tony inhaled, his massive chest expanding and deflating. “Yes. That’s a distinct possibility.”

It wasn’t what Kat wanted to hear. The answer silenced her for a moment as she pondered what it could mean for her and the town.

The man standing at Tony’s side cleared his throat, forcing an introduction.

“Kat,” the lieutenant said, “this is Larry Sheldon. He’s an arson investigator with the state police.”

Kat quickly sized up the newcomer while shaking his hand. He was younger than her, thirty if a day, and boyishly handsome. Wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a tie, he looked more like a math teacher than someone who’d be studying a crime scene at three-thirty in the morning. His wire-frame glasses, slipping off his nose, didn’t help.

“You find anything interesting?” Kat asked.

“A lot that’s interesting, actually,” Larry said. “And before you ask, I’m ninety-nine percent sure that this fire was arson.”

“How can you tell?”

“This is the point of origin.” He turned to the patch of floor he and Tony had been examining. “Although a trail of accelerant at the wall caused the most damage.”

Kat tapped him on the shoulder. “This is my first arson. You’ll have to dumb it down for me.”

“Oh, right. Sure.” Larry paused to push his glasses higher on his nose. “The mark on the floor right here indicates that this is where the fire burned the hottest and brightest. That’s the point of origin. The marking is typical of a fire in which an accelerant was used.”

“Gasoline?” Kat said.

“Possibly. But my gut tells me it was kerosene.”

Kat stared at the charred floor. “You can tell all that from a burn pattern?”