Sizzle and Burn Page 4

  “No,” Raine said, “I’m not a stranger to the area but I don’t really know anyone in town. Whenever I came up here I stayed with Aunt Vella, and as I’m sure you’re aware, she did not have a lot of close friends in the community.”

  “I get the feeling you don’t have any fond feelings for our fair town.”

  She shrugged. “The people of Shelbyville treated my aunt as if she were a freak. Why would I hold any of them in high esteem?”

  He decided to ignore that. From what he’d heard, it was true. “When was the last time you were here?”

  “A little over a year ago. That was when I helped Aunt Vella move.”

  Vella Tallentyre hadn’t exactly moved. She had been institutionalized. He made a note.

  “And you’re back now because you’ve inherited the house and plan to list it with a local real estate agent?” he said.

  “That’s right. Mr. Spicer and I were going through the place to see what needed to be done to get it ready for sale.”

  “How did you know that something was wrong down there in the basement?”

  He could have sworn her jaw tightened a little and her disturbing eyes narrowed ever so slightly.

  “I noticed the padlock on the storage locker door. I knew that it hadn’t been there the last time I was in the house.”

  “Why call nine-one-one? Why not call a locksmith?”

  “I was almost certain it had to be a police matter. There was no legal way that padlock could have been placed on the door. The house is private property and it has been locked up for a year. No one was authorized to go inside except Ed Childers, the man who took care of the place for Aunt Vella. He worked for her for years. But he died some six or seven months ago.”

  “What made you so certain that Childers didn’t put that padlock on the storage locker before he died?” he asked.

  “I’ll admit that I couldn’t be absolutely certain but, frankly, it never occurred to me that he might have been the one who locked the door.”

  “You just leaped to the conclusion that a crime had been committed?”

  “A crime was committed,” she said drily. “Whoever entered my aunt’s house and installed that padlock had, at the very least, broken into the place.”

  He sat back, thinking about it. His cop instincts were not entirely satisfied but at least he now had a rational explanation for her actions. That was a very good thing because the detectives from Seattle and Portland as well as the media were already on their way. He had a press conference to prepare for. It was going to be a zoo. Discovering the young woman alive in the basement of the old Tallentyre house was the biggest break yet in the unsolved murders attributed to the Bonfire Killer, and he was the man in charge.

  “Thank you, Miss Tallentyre. That’s all for now. How long will you be in town?”

  “I’m going back to Oriana in the morning.” She rose and paused with an inquiring expression. “Unless I can get into the house tomorrow? I’m really anxious to put it on the market.”

  “It’s a crime scene now. Going to stay that way for a few days.” He stood. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “I understand.” She hitched the strap of her dark green purse over one shoulder.

  “Where are you staying tonight?”

  “The Shelbyville B and B.” She took her long black raincoat off a wall hook. “You have my contact information in Oriana.”

  “Right.”

  Belatedly he realized he should have helped her with the raincoat. But she already had it on. Strange how much it resembled a long black cape.

  He did manage to open the door for her. She paused before going through it. He got the feeling she had decided there was something unpleasant she had to say before she left.

  “Do you want to know what my intuition tells me about the killer?” she asked without inflection.

  Here it comes. Damn. Just when he had begun to hope that she wasn’t going to tell him she was psychic.

  “Sure,” he said, keeping his tone just as even as her own. “Tell me about the killer.”

  She seemed to draw even deeper into herself. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly but he could see that she was determined to say whatever it was she had to say.

  “He locked the woman in the basement because his mother used to punish him that way,” she said quietly. “She left him in the dark for hours and then she beat him with a belt because he had befouled himself while he was confined. She told him that there was a demon inside him and that she had to drive it out.”

  “No offense, Miss Tallentyre, but that’s the kind of useless crap every so-called profiler I’ve ever met says about the perp. Next you’ll be telling me that he’s an organized killer, right? That he’s a white male somewhere between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four. That he’s an intelligent loner with no close ties to family, church or community.”

  “I don’t know about those things,” she said very steadily, “but I can tell you that you’re looking for a man who is convinced that he has been possessed by a demon. He thinks of himself as a witch hunter.”

  He exhaled heavily. “I appreciate your insights.”

  “The first witch he ever killed was his mother. He covered up the crime by setting fire to her body. That should give you a starting point. He obviously got away with that murder, which implies that it is either a cold case or a death that was made to look like an accident.”

  He was not impressed. “They call this guy the Bonfire Killer because he kills his victims, dumps them in a field and sets fire to the bodies, destroying all the evidence. No big secret there.” He paused, intrigued in spite of himself. “What makes you think he killed his mother?”

  “Intuition,” she said coolly.

  She was really giving him the creeps now. Raine Tallentyre was either a consummate actress or a total nutcase like her aunt.

  “Right, thanks, Miss Tallentyre. I’ll be in touch.”

  Abruptly she turned on her heel, went back to the desk and picked up a pen. “I’m going to give you the name and number of someone you can call. Bradley Mitchell. He’s a detective with the Oriana Police Department. He’ll vouch for the fact that I’m not a likely suspect or a fraudulent psychic looking for publicity.”

  He frowned. “You’ve been involved in situations like this before?”

  “Yes.” She tore off the sheet of paper and handed it to him. “Call Detective Mitchell. He’ll explain. Good-bye, Chief Langdon. Good luck with the press conference.”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “There’s always a press conference,” she said, surprising him with a small, genuine smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t try to steal your thunder. In fact, I would be extremely grateful if you would avoid releasing my name and identity to the media.”

  “No problem,” he said, meaning it. The last thing he wanted to do was give the press the idea that he was working with a psychic. That kind of thing would make him look ridiculous.

  “Thank you.” She walked out the door, the long black raincoat swirling around her high-heeled boots.

  He gave her a moment to leave and then he went into the outer office. Marge was at her desk. She was gazing over the rims of her reading glasses at the door through which Raine Tallentyre had just disappeared.

  Marge was sixty-two years old. She had lived in Shelbyville all her life. She was his go-to source whenever he needed background on one of the local residents. He propped himself on the corner of her desk.

  “What do you know about her?” he asked.

  “Not much, really,” Marge admitted. “Vella Tallentyre bought the house here over twenty years ago. When Raine was a little girl, a couple of men used to drive her up here to visit Vella. Later, she came by herself. She sometimes bought groceries at the local store and filled up her gas tank but other than that, we never saw much of her. She didn’t seem to want to get to know any of us locals. I never even met her until today.”

  “What about the caretaker, Ed Childe
rs? He have anything to say about her?”

  “Ed wasn’t much of a talker. But I ran into him at the post office one day not long before he died. He told me something about Raine that day that I never forgot.”

  “What?”

  “He said he saw a photograph of Vella Tallentyre once. It was taken when Vella was younger, in her early thirties. Ed claimed that Raine Tallentyre was a dead ringer for her aunt at that age.”

  “No kidding.”

  “The only other thing I ever recall Ed saying about the Tallentyre women was that Vella had a downright obsessive fear of fire. Made him install half a dozen smoke detectors. Kept lots of fire extinguishers in the house. Had those little window emergency ladders in all the upstairs rooms. She wouldn’t even allow a fire to be built in the fireplace.”

  “Phobic.”

  “For sure.”

  Five

  Her name is Stacy Anderson,” Raine said into her cell phone. “They think she may be the latest victim of that freak the press calls the Bonfire Killer, the one that has been trolling among the prostitutes in Seattle and Portland.”

  “Damn.” Andrew Kitredge sounded more resigned than surprised. “You can’t even leave town for a day without stumbling onto a murder scene.”

  She almost smiled. Andrew was one of the few people in the world who was aware of her little eccentricity, as he called it, and took it in stride. His life partner, Gordon Salazar, was another who accepted her, voices and all.

  Aunt Vella had understood her, of course, and her father, if he was still alive, would have considered her psychic side normal. But Judson Tallentyre died in a car accident when Raine was six and now Vella was gone, as well.

  She had no other close blood relatives. Her mother died when she was a year and a half old. Judson Tallentyre, forced to surface from his precious research in order to deal with the nuisance of caring for a baby daughter, had asked his sister to move into the household. Vella agreed, taking Raine into her heart immediately.

  Childcare issues resolved, Judson immediately disappeared back into his lab.

  The day of his funeral had been a turning point in Raine’s young life. The small, sad ceremony was conducted in a gray, northwest mist. It was followed by what she had come to think of as the Night of Fire and Tears. She did not recall everything about that fateful evening but a series of frightening and disturbing snapshots had been forever etched in her mind.

  A few months after the terrible night, Vella had sunk into the first of what would prove to be a number of long and extended depressive episodes. Aware that she could no longer care for a little girl on her own and terrified that the state would take Raine away and put her into the foster system, she turned to her best friend from childhood, Andrew Kitredge, and his partner, Gordon.

  Andrew and Gordon never hesitated. They took Raine and Vella into their lives, assuming responsibility for Raine whenever Vella spiraled downward into one of her episodes. Somehow the four of them had formed a family, shielding Raine from the long arm of the state.

  “You don’t have to make it sound like I do it deliberately,” she said to Andrew, trying to lighten the mood.

  “I know you don’t,” Andrew said. “But you have to admit that your little eccentricities have a tendency to rattle nerves.”

  “Okay, I’ll grant you that much.”

  She had been rattling Andrew’s and Gordon’s nerves ever since the summer of her nineteenth year, when she stumbled onto her first crime scene: that of a woman who had been murdered by her stalker-husband.

  She settled deeper into the chair, propped her stocking-clad feet on a hassock and studied the view out the window. It wasn’t quite six o’clock but night came early in the Cascades, especially at this time of year.

  “Thank God that girl was still alive,” Andrew said. “I can’t even imagine what her family must have gone through after she disappeared.”

  “She told Langdon that she doesn’t have any family, at least not one she wants to acknowledge. Evidently she’s been living on the streets for the past couple of years. The chief says that fits the profile of the Bonfire Killer’s victims. They’ve found three bodies so far, all young women with backgrounds like Anderson’s. One was from Portland. The others were from Seattle.”

  “Classic serial killer victims,” Andrew mused. “The kind of people no one misses when they disappear. I wonder why Stacy Anderson was still alive when you found her.”

  “She said the freak told her that she needed to be punished first by being locked up in the basement. She thinks he intended to finish the job tonight. It was just pure luck that I happened to go through the house today with the real estate agent.”

  “Do they think any of the previous victims were stashed in Vella’s basement, too?”

  “I don’t know what the cops will conclude,” Raine said, “but I didn’t pick up traces of any other victims. I’m almost positive that Stacy Anderson was the first one the freak stashed in Aunt Vella’s house.”

  “I don’t suppose the local cops paid any attention to what you told them.”

  “No. I think I made Chief Langdon nervous.”

  Andrew’s chuckle was dry. “You do have that effect on cops.”

  “What can I say? It’s a gift.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  Raine crossed one ankle over the other on the hassock. “I’ll stay overnight, as planned, because Langdon said the detectives from Portland and Seattle might want to talk to me. But I can’t do anything about putting the house on the market until the police take down the crime-scene tape so I’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “I stopped by your condo this afternoon and fed Batman and Robin. Played with them for a while. They’re doing fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  The cats tended to get anxious if they were left alone for too long. Anxious cats could do a lot of damage in a small condo. That was especially true with Batman and Robin because Raine had refused to declaw them. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to deprive them of their only natural defense just for the sake of her very expensive woven wood window treatments. She knew all too well how important it was to have some defense mechanisms.

  “I suppose Chief Langdon is going to take all the credit for the big break in the case?” Andrew asked. “The way Bradley always did?”

  Andrew and Gordon had never entirely approved of her arrangement with Bradley Mitchell.

  “As it happens, Langdon is very photogenic,” Raine said, amused. “He’s the rugged outdoor type. He’ll look good on the evening news.”

  “Bradley always looked good standing in front of a camera, too. Going to be interesting to see how many more interviews he gives now that you’re no longer solving his cold cases for him.”

  “Mmm.” She kept her tone deliberately noncommittal.

  As hurt and pissed off as she was, she had not yet decided what to do about her working relationship with Bradley. Their personal relationship—what there was of it—was finished but she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to stop assisting him on certain cases. In some way that she could not explain to Andrew and Gordon or even to herself, she needed to use the psychic side of her nature. Denying it was like trying to deny that she could see and hear and taste and touch and smell.

  “Do you want Gordon or me to drive up to Shelbyville?” Andrew asked.

  “No, don’t worry, I’m not a suspect,” she said quickly. “I spent an hour answering questions for Chief Langdon and I told him to call Bradley if he wants a character reference. He seemed satisfied. Glad to get rid of me, actually.”

  “You told Langdon to call the bastard?” Andrew demanded, outraged.

  “Bradley’s a professional when it comes to police work. He’ll vouch for me.”

  “What about the real estate agent? What was his name? Spicer? How’s he taking this?”

  “He was pretty shaken. Got a hunch that after he gave his statement to Langdon, he went back to his office and had an attack of th
e vapors. One thing’s for sure: if Aunt Vella’s house was a tough sell before this, it’s going to be almost impossible to move now.”

  “Maybe you can dump it on some unsuspecting buyer on eBay.”

  “You know, that’s not a bad idea. But first I’m going to have to clean out the place. I’d forgotten how many crates of paintings are stashed in the basement. Aunt Vella always painted like mad when she was here in Shelbyville.”

  “It was her own personal form of therapy,” Andrew said.

  “I know.”

  The room phone rang.

  “Sounds like you’re getting another call,” Andrew said.

  “Probably Langdon with a few more questions.”

  “Better take it. We’ll see you tomorrow. Love you.”

  “Love you. Bye.”

  She cut the connection and reached for the room phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Tallentyre, this is Burton down at the front desk. There’s a man here to see you. Says his name is Jones. Want me to send him up?”

  The delicate cup she was holding, with its yellow-and-green floral motif, froze in midair.

  “Jones?” she repeated, very carefully. There were a lot of Joneses in the world, but within her own private, tightly controlled and contained sphere the name stood out like the ominous light of an oncoming train.

  “A cop?” she asked, hoping against hope that coincidences did, in fact, happen occasionally.

  There was a low murmur of masculine voices. Burton came back on the line.

  “Says he’s a private investigator.”

  That gave her pause. Maybe the name really was a coincidence. Maybe one of the families of the Bonfire Killer’s victims had hired a PI named Jones to look into a daughter’s disappearance and somehow Mr. Jones had heard about the day’s events and managed to track her down tonight.

  And maybe she could hop on a broomstick and fly.