Soul Murder

1:25 p.m.

When Jesslyn pulled in at the truck stop just outside DuBois on I-80, she realized with a start that she could hardly remember a thing about the last hour or so she’d been driving. She’d been operating the car on instinct and muscle memory alone, while her thoughts chased themselves into rolling, tumbling tendrils of confusion.

Her career was over. That much – that alone – she knew. She believed in punishment, and retribution; that was why she’d sought a vocation in corrections. Taking that from her, and in a way which meant she’d never find work in that sector again, was more than she could bear. It was as though Mara Slinger had first led her into evil, then cut her heart out. Here, truly, was the devil.

She wondered whether she should buy a razor here, open the arteries in her wrists, and be done with it all; and even as the thought came to her, she stamped on it with frantic fury, as though trying to beat down a grass fire.

Just the fact that she could entertain such a notion was a deep, shaming sin; 1 Corinthians 3: 16 said: ‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.’

She’d preached that passage repeatedly in the Muncy chapel, knowing that barely a week went past without an inmate trying to take her own life.

Jesslyn stopped her car, a silver Toyota Camry she’d had for a few years, and walked across the parking lot to the restaurant building.

She hadn’t eaten all day. She’d been too nervous to eat breakfast this morning, knowing that today her fate would be decided one way or another, and afterwards she’d been given half an hour to pack up all her belongings, hand in her credentials, and get out. No time to say her goodbyes, let alone get some food.

Twenty years’ hard work, ripped from her in a flash.

The burger bar smelt like all burger bars do; of cooking oil, sweat and resentment.

Jesslyn walked up to the counter, where a Hispanic-looking woman whose nameplate read ‘Esmerelda’, and who was too young to be as overweight as she was, regarded the world without enthusiasm.

‘Help you?’ Esmerelda asked, her tone so polite as to be insolent.

Jesslyn mumbled her order and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

Fat fingers handed her change and food oozing grease through its wrappers.

Jesslyn went to the far corner of the room, past an EMPLOYEES WANTED sign and a couple of truckers with baseball caps trailing raggedy ponytails.

She was halfway through her burger when the tears came, hot with anger and self-pity. She pressed her hands to her face, not to staunch the flood but in the illogical, childish belief that if she couldn’t see the other diners, they couldn’t see her.

Through the hot rising of mucus in her throat, she repeated silently to herself the words of Lamentations 2: 18. ‘Their heart cried out to the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night; give thyself no rest, nor let the apple of thine eye cease.’

Friday, October 15th. 7:11 a.m.

Jesslyn left early the next morning, as though she was going to work as usual.

She’d told Mark – Mark Beradino, her partner – nothing. It helped that she liked to keep her work and home lives separate – whatever Mark knew of her job was what she chose to tell him, or not tell him – but still…How could she explain it all to him? Where would she even begin?

She had no idea; and, until she did, she figured it was best to keep quiet, and somehow square the silence up between herself and God.

What she did know was that the longer she left it, the harder it would be. Every secret she kept from Mark made keeping the next one both easier and necessary.

She hadn’t told him about her affair with Mara, so she hadn’t been able to tell him about Mara’s complaints, so she hadn’t been able to tell him about yesterday’s tribunal, so she hadn’t been able to tell him she’d been dismissed, so she had to go off today to keep the pretence that everything was normal.

And going off today meant she’d have to go off tomorrow, and the next time.

She couldn’t keep doing that indefinitely; at least, not without somewhere to go and something that would pay her, because corrections didn’t pay like Wall Street in the first place, and she didn’t have much in the way of savings.

So she needed a job. Not just any job – a job which offered shifts. Prison work wasn’t nine to five; like the police, prison officers worked eight-hour shifts, sometimes on the night watch. She couldn’t keep up the pretence for long if she took employment as an office clerk.

It didn’t have to be a great job. In fact, it almost certainly wouldn’t be.

But as long as it paid, and got her out of the house, it would do, at least until something better came along. And she could pass the time by savoring the righteous anger which burned within her. She’d given her life to her vocation, and she’d been cast aside like a piece of flotsam.

That wasn’t the way you treated people. There would be retribution; that was not only her right, but her duty too.

She recited to herself the words of Exodus 21: 23. ‘And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’

Burning for burning. Stripe for stripe.

Jesslyn realized she was heading towards Muncy; reflex, perhaps, or providence. Ahead, she saw signs to the DuBois travel plaza, where she’d stopped yesterday.

She pulled off the interstate, parked the Camry, and went back into the burger bar.

Esmerelda wasn’t on duty today. At the counter was a guy with acne and eyeglasses who could barely have been out of his teens. His nametag proclaimed him not only to be ‘Kevin’, but also the manager.

‘Help you?’ he said, in exactly the same tone Esmerelda had used the day before. Must have been something they taught at burger college.

Jesslyn couldn’t remember feeling as demeaned as she did now. Only her faith that God would provide, and that He moved in mysterious ways, forced the index finger of her right hand up and in the direction of the EMPLOYEES WANTED sign.

‘I’d like a job, please,’ she said.

Monday, October 18th. 6:53 p.m.

‘You don’t recognize me?’ I ask.

Michael Redwine shakes his head. He can’t speak, as I’ve put duct tape across his mouth; and he can’t take the tape off or lash out at me, as I’ve cuffed his hands behind his back. The cuffs are those thin plastic ones, good for one use only.

One use only is all I need.

Besides, the plastic won’t last long, not with what I’ve got in store for him; but by the time he’ll be able to break them off, he’ll be long past doing anything at all.

His mouth moves furiously around the gag, spilling saliva down his jaw. It takes me a moment to work out what he’s saying.

‘You’re praying?’ I ask.

He looks at me with wide eyes and nods.

‘That’s funny,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think people like you believed in a higher power.’

His brows contract in puzzlement.

I look round his apartment again.

Nothing much wrong with it, truth be told. He lives in The Pennsylvanian, about the most luxurious apartment block in all of downtown. It’s built on the site of the old Union rail station, and the arched canopy which covers the main entrance is often cited as the most captivating architectural arrangement in all of Pittsburgh.

The Pennsylvanian has thirteen stories, the apartments getting ever grander the higher you go. Redwine’s apartment is on the tenth floor, where the building’s loft homes are located: all elegant arched windows, crown moldings, wood paneling and intricately detailed, fifteen-foot ceilings. The windows give on to warehouse roofs and overpasses swooping towards the Strip. Far below me, streetlights glow low sodium.

This, all this luxury, is what you get when you’re one of the premier brain surgeons in all Pennsylvania, possibly in the entire United States.

And all this luxury means nothing when you’ve done what Michael Redwine did, and you’re going to be punished like I’m about to punish him.

I open my bag and bring out a red plastic container. It can take a gallon, and pretty much everyone in the world recognizes its shape and what it’s designed to hold.

Redwine is screaming mutely behind the duct tape even before I open the lid and let him smell the gasoline.

‘Remember what you did?’ I ask, beginning to pour the gasoline over his head.

He jerks his body across the floor and tries to stand; anything to get away from the pulsing glugs that mat his hair to his forehead and run into his eyes.

He kicks at me, but I skip easily out of reach, still pouring.

The gasoline is drenching his shirt now, rivuleting down his trousers.

‘Remember what you said to me?’ I ask.

He throws himself against the wall; to knock himself out and spare himself the agony of what he knows is coming, perhaps, or as a last desperate call for help.

Neither works. He’s still conscious, and no one’s coming.

‘And remember what I said to you?’

When the plastic can’s empty, I put it back in my bag.

I take out the juggling torch and the lighter. Then I put the bag by the door, the easier to grab it fast on my way out if I have to make a sharp exit.

I light the torch’s wick and look at Redwine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more terrified in my entire life.

‘Isaiah chapter fifty-nine, verse seventeen,’ I say. ‘“For I put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon my head; and I put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and am clad with zeal as a cloak.”’

The torch flares in my hand like the fount of justice. I take a step towards him.

He backs away until he reaches the far corner and can go no further.

He curls himself into a ball and turns his face away from me.

I lower the torch to his shoulder.

10:04 p.m.

From the point of view of a homicide detective, fire scenes are among the most difficult of all to work. What fire doesn’t destroy, it damages; and what it damages, the firefighters tend to destroy in their efforts to extinguish the blaze. None of this bodes well for the preservation of evidence. Only bomb sites boast more destruction and disorder.

The fire department had been on the scene within four minutes of first being called, when one of Redwine’s neighbors had smelt burning, looked out of the window, and seen large black clouds billowing from Redwine’s apartment. The firemen had evacuated the entire apartment block and set to putting the fire out.

It had taken them two and a half hours, but they’d managed it, and had kept it contained to the apartment of origin, more or less. There were scorch marks in the apartment above and those to either side, but nothing worse than that, and no serious structural damage, except to Redwine’s apartment itself.

The senior fire officer on site having declared the building safe, Patrese and Beradino pulled on crime-scene overalls, shoe covers and latex gloves, in that order, and entered Redwine’s apartment.

They’d been called in the moment the firefighters had discovered both the body – presumed to be Redwine’s, though obviously not proved as such yet – and the demarcation line on the carpet next to him.

A demarcation line, in fire terms, marks the boundary between where a surface – in this case, the carpet – has burnt and where it hasn’t. More often than not, it indicates the use of a liquid accelerant, which in turn means the fire was started deliberately.

And since very few people choose to start a fire and then hang around inside a burning apartment – suicide by self-immolation is extremely rare – it seemed likely that someone other than Redwine, someone long since gone, had been responsible for both the fire and Redwine’s death.

This left two possibilities. Either the arsonist had killed Redwine and then set the fire to cover his tracks; or it had been the fire itself that had killed Redwine.

The crime-scene photographer was already there. Patrese and Beradino watched as he fired off round after round of shots, changing lenses and films with practiced ease.

In close for the serious detail, magnifying things a few millimeters across up to the size of a normal print; mid-range images which concentrated on specific objects; and wide-angle images capturing as much of the room as possible.

He was using both black-and-white and color films. Color is usually better, but gruesome photos are best shown to squeamish juries in monochrome.

Beradino glanced across at Patrese, who read in the furrow of the older man’s brow exactly what it meant; concern, that all this would scald Patrese’s memories. It was barely three weeks since his parents had perished in a freeway fireball.

‘I’m OK,’ Patrese said.

They looked round what was left of the room. It was rectangular, though not by much; fourteen feet by seventeen, at a guess.

At either end of the longer side were the windows and a pass-through to the kitchen. The shorter side was bounded by walls, one exterior and one interior.

There were two sofas; a two-seater beneath a window, and a three-seater up against the exterior wall. In the corner between them sat a low, small table, and in the nearest corner to that, where the windows met the interior wall, was a plasma TV.

All of them burnt to the edge of recognition, as was Redwine’s body.

His skin was cracked and patched charred black and bright red, splashed with different colors where his clothes had melted on to him. He was hunched like a prizefighter, arms drawn up in front of him and legs bent at the knee.

This in itself proved nothing, they knew. The position was caused by muscles contracting in response to the heat of the fire, and could not indicate by itself whether the victim had been alive or dead when the fire was set.

But the color of the body could do so.

Reddening of the skin, and blistering, tend to take place on a victim who was still breathing rather than one who wasn’t.

Beradino crouched down by the body and took a small dictaphone from his pocket. He was gospel strict about making contemporaneous notes. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t rely on remembering everything when it came to writing things up a couple of hours later back at the station; it was also that making notes forced the investigator to slow down, think, take his time.

After all, the victim wasn’t going anywhere.

Beradino looked closely at what had once been Redwine’s face.

He didn’t think about what Redwine might have looked like in life, as that was no longer relevant. If he thought of anything, it was of over-barbecued meat. The less emotive and more commonplace he could make it seem, the better.

Twenty-five years on the homicide squad hadn’t hardened him to things, not really. It had merely made him better at coping with them.

There.

‘Around the nostrils,’ he said into the dictaphone. ‘Beneath the burn marks. Smoke stains, clearly visible.’

The pathologist would doubtless find blackened lungs when he came to do the autopsy, which would confirm it; but for now, Beradino had more than enough to be going on with.

Smoke stains meant inhalation. It was this which had almost certainly killed Redwine – breathing in smoke finishes people off before burning flesh does – but it didn’t alter the chronology of what had happened, or the central conclusion.

Michael Redwine had been alive when the fire had been set, and he’d been burned to death.

10:30 p.m.

The doorman was dressed in a suit which, Patrese thought, almost certainly cost more than any of his own suits, and very possibly more than all of them put together.

He tried to ignore this slight on his sartorial standards, and instead read the name on the doorman’s lapel badge. Jared Foxworth.

Foxworth handed Patrese two lists.

The first showed which apartments were occupied and by whom, though some of the names were of companies rather than individuals. The Pennsylvanian was a popular locale for corporate lets, allowing companies based outside of Pittsburgh to put up employees or clients here instead of paying for hotels.

The second was a record of every visitor who’d gone up to the apartments today. The Pennsylvanian’s rule was simple; you asked at the reception desk, the doorman rang up to the apartment in question, and if you went up, you signed in with him first. If you stayed in reception and waited for a resident to come down before leaving the building, you didn’t need to sign in; but Redwine’s killer couldn’t have done that, as Redwine had been found in his apartment. Anyway, he’d had no visitors at all today, said Foxworth; none, full stop.

There were, he added, no other ways into the building unless you knew enough about The Pennsylvanian’s layout to sneak in through the underground parking lot or up the fire escape; but even then you’d have to rely on doors being open that shouldn’t have been, and risk being spotted by someone who might ask you what you were doing. Hazardous, to say the least, but not out of the question.

Whichever way Redwine’s killer had entered the building, he – of course it could be a ‘she’ too, Beradino said, but since the majority of murderers were male, they would for simplicity’s sake refer to the killer as a ‘he’, all the while maintaining an open mind – had not had to force the door of the apartment itself. The firefighters had broken down the door when they’d arrived on scene, and they were adamant both door and lock had been intact.

Which in turn suggested two possibilities.

Firstly, that the killer had a key with which he’d let himself in. This might have been a surprise to Redwine, or he might have been expecting it. Perhaps the killer had thought Redwine would be out, and the surprise at finding him in the apartment had been mutual.

Secondly, that Redwine had known the killer, and opened the door to him.

There were two sets of crowds out front. First, the building’s residents, who’d been evacuated and were massed under the canopy waiting to be questioned. Second, the rubberneckers who’d heard that there’d been not just a fire but a death too, which was for a dispiriting number of people more than reason enough to drop everything and stand behind police barriers for hours on end.

One of the uniforms was subtly filming the latter group. Murderers sometimes returned to the scene of their crime; arsonists often did. The detectives would study the footage later, looking for known troublemakers or simply those who looked shifty.

A film crew from KDKA, Pittsburgh’s local TV station, were also on site. The event was newsworthy because of The Pennsylvanian’s prestige as a place to live, and the fact that the victim had been a surgeon, but the body language of the reporter and cameraman betrayed their instinct that this was not a major story.

Man dies in fire. Tragic, but happens every day. The TV crew would go through the motions and hope for something bigger, more exciting, or quirkier next time.

Beradino and Patrese introduced themselves to the residents and asked if a Magda Nagorska was among them as, according to their records, she lived directly beneath Redwine’s apartment.

She was indeed there, and she looked as old as God, possibly older.

If the way they had to shout every question two or three times was anything to go by, Redwine could have been murdered in her apartment, perhaps right next to her, without her having heard a damn thing.

‘Did you see or hear anyone go into his apartment?’ Patrese asked.

‘He was a charming man,’ she shouted.

‘No commotion? An argument? Your apartment didn’t shake?’

‘It’s dreadful, that it happens somewhere like here. Dreadful.’

One of the uniforms bit on his hand to stop himself from laughing. It was like giggling in church; the more taboo it was, the more tempting it became.

Patrese didn’t think it would do much for the reputation of the Pittsburgh homicide department if he fell to his knees weeping with laughter in front of a potential witness.