1995
“This Janice Evans?” the detective asked, looking down at the unzipped body bag at their feet. ABRAHAM REID, that’s what it said on the badge he flashed at the crew picking through the wet, smoldering remains of the house. Two of the four main walls were completely gone, and the walkway leading down from the front door was scorched black, but the first responders had managed to contain the fire before it spread to the neighbors. The team was still in yellow rubber coveralls and boots, but Reid was dressed in a nice gray suit that hung loosely from his scrawny frame. The old man didn’t seem worried about the ash that would ruin his clothes, so no one mentioned it.
“Looks like it,” one of the guys said. “Not that you can really tell.”
“She was in the bed,” another one said. He pulled off his rubber gloves and wearily rubbed the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a clean streak through the soot that had blanketed his skin. “Skull’s cracked in a couple places, teeth are all knocked out. Whoever did this really put a beating down on her, then doused her and the mattress in gasoline and lit it up. It burned fast and hot.”
Reid pulled a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and squatted beside the bones the men had collected from the rubble, carefully stirred around the pieces with one end.
“Got at least one tooth in here,” he said, standing up again with a painful grunt. “The coroner’ll need it to ID her.”
“We’ll sweep through again, see if we can find anything else.”
Reid grunted and pulled something out of his pocket. A candy, the fireman thought at first. A wrapped peppermint. Reid gently pulled both of the twisted ends, the same way you’d pull on the two ends of a Chinese finger trap, and the candy flew out, twisting end over end. Reid snatched it out of the air with surprising speed, closed one gnarled hand over it, and popped it into his mouth.
“Good trick,” one of the firemen said.
“Old dogs like me have our ways,” Reid said, smiling faintly. It wasn’t a candy, but a cough drop—the menthol was wafting from his mouth in a thick cloud. “Soaked in gasoline, eh?”
They all glanced down at those words. It was nothing more than a collection of blackened, hardened bones piled into a body bag—more like the leftovers from a campfire pit than a human being. The skull was the one thing that gave the appearance of a person—you could still make out the graceful curve of the head, the sharp stretch of jaw. Reid looked toward the street, where a crowd of neighbors and police had gathered.
“Let me know if you boys find anything else interesting,” he said.