Ashes, Ashes, They All Fall Dead (15 page)

The concern in his voice both surprised and confused her. Did he really think she was in danger? And when had he started to genuinely care about what happened to her? Or was she reading him wrong? She shied away from that question, not sure she really wanted the answer. Instead she focused on the rest of his argument, mainly that she needed to take control of her own fate, go on the offensive. That rang true with her more than anything else. If the killer was someone from her past, someone who wanted to hurt her, she’d be damned if she was going to sit around and wait for permission from her boss to see to her own safety.

Working with Matt was the only way she could effectively go on the offensive. She didn’t have the resources to do it by herself. She didn’t want to be beholden to him, though. So she’d just have to get a loan after this was over and reimburse him for any expenses he incurred on her behalf.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Matt’s intense look relaxed into a look of relief. His easy grin returned and he shook hands with her to seal the deal.

“Bring me up to speed,” Alex insisted.

Matt told his father what they’d done and found out so far.

“Did your tests come back yet on the particulates?” Alex asked.

“Actually, yes. I just got an e-mail a few minutes ago but haven’t had a chance to read the full report.” He pulled out his phone and pressed the screen to bring up his e-mail. He scanned it and shot Tessa an apologetic glance. “Not much here. The particulates do help explain why the prints were still detectable on the paper after all these years, if we go with the theory that Tessa touched the paper before the killer sent the notes. There are equal parts of pine tree sap, various rocks and minerals, and coal dust. The amounts are incredibly small, but enough to have trapped and preserved a print.”

“Coal dust?” Tessa echoed. “That should be helpful, right? Maybe the suspect lives in a coal-mining region.”

“Not as helpful as you might think,” Alex said. “Over half the states have coal-mining operations, from here in the South all the way out to Montana and Wyoming. Unless the particulates are specific to one state, you still have an enormous geographical area to consider.”

“I can get the lab to perform additional tests to narrow down an area,” Matt said. “But I don’t think this is the big break we were hoping for.”

Which meant it wasn’t worth the steep price she’d paid.

“What about the tree sap? Can that narrow the area down?”

“Maybe,” Matt said. “Pine trees are certainly common, but if we can identify a specific kind of pine that’s indigenous to a particular region, that might help.” He shrugged. “I’m not a botanist, so I have no idea how likely that is.”

“It’s still worth a shot,” she said.

He nodded his agreement.

Tessa pushed her chair back. Both men stood, making her smile at their old-world manners.

“Thank you for your hospitality, Alex. But it’s been a long day and I’d like to go home.” She glanced at Matt. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

They moved into the foyer.

“Miss James, would you mind giving me a moment with my son? You can wait in the family room if you’d like.”

The thought of facing the mountain of testosterone waiting in the family room had her mentally exhausted.

“Thank you, but I’d prefer to wait in Matt’s car. I’m really tired.”

“Of course. It was a pleasure having you here.”

She smiled her appreciation and made her second escape of the evening.

A
LEX LEANED AGAINST
the wall. “Casey is a fool to dismiss Tessa’s prints on those letters just because they’re from that fancy, non-FBI approved scanner you designed. He’s letting his anger over Tessa’s rule-breaking cloud his judgment. He’s ignoring the most important evidence, right in front of him. You know what you need to do next, don’t you?”

“Focus on how the killer is linked to Tessa. Do a deep dive into her past. She won’t like it.”

“Probably not. But she’s sharp. She’ll realize it’s necessary. Shoot straight with her and you’ll get the best results. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Good night, son.” He straightened away from the wall and headed down the foyer.

“Dad?”

Alex turned, his brows raised in question.

“Do you ever think about her, about Mom?” At the startled look on his father’s face, he rushed to explain. “It’s this case, talking about the past. It’s got me thinking.” He shook his head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

Alex walked back to him. “You have every right to ask. You just . . . surprised me. In all these years, you’ve never asked me that. The answer is yes, I still think about her. Not a day goes by that I
don’t
think about her.”

The unexpected anguish in his father’s voice had Matt staring at him in surprise. “But she left us. Austin and I were only four years old when she ran off.”

Alex’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “She left all of us that day. But that doesn’t change the fact that I loved her. That’s not something that fades in time, even if you want it to. But that’s not why I think about her. I think about her because I’m grateful that she gave me five wonderful sons. No matter what she took from me, she gave me far more by leaving all of you with me.” He turned away again, and headed toward the family room. At the archway he paused. “Matthew?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Don’t forget to take that hairy beast back home with you. He’s destroyed half my house.”

Matt grinned. “Yes, sir.” He headed down the hallway to his right to retrieve Ginger from the back bedroom.

Chapter Eight

Day Four

T
ESSA TOOK ONE
last sip of her diet soda, then set her glass down on the table. She glanced around the busy café and leaned closer so Matt could hear her.

“Okay, lunch is over. Did you find out any new information this morning?” She pulled out a pen and one of the spiral notebooks she was never without.

Matt eyed her notebook as if it was something offensive. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled out a black, flat rectangle that resembled a phone but was a few inches larger. He pressed his thumb on the side and the screen lit up. “This is
my
notebook.”

She rolled her eyes. “I prefer old-fashioned paper. You never have to worry about batteries or new technology making it obsolete in a few months.”

He pointed to a row of dark cells on the top of the device. “The batteries are solar, never need replacing. It can run for days without recharging, with the screen on. It even has an LED light that can be used as a flashlight.”

“Like a virtual Swiss Army knife. One of your inventions, I suppose?”

“You suppose right. It’s a small computer that can do everything you’d want a regular computer to do, as well as a phone, all rolled into one, but smaller and lighter than a tablet.”

She shrugged. “Sounds like more than I’d ever need. And it’s way too bulky. I prefer a smartphone.”

He gave her a regal look that a king might give a peasant. “It’s far more powerful than a mere smartphone. It’s like having a portable midrange computer.” He winked. “And a Swiss Army knife.”

That wink had her stomach fluttering. She cleared her throat. “Midrange?”

“Between a laptop and a mainframe. Ever heard of an AS/400?”

“Nope. And I don’t care to either. Boring.”

He shook his head. “Much to learn, the girl still has.”

“Let’s leave Yoda at home today, shall we? I’ll share my findings first.” She flipped through her notebook, trying to ignore how devastatingly appealing Matt looked while she searched for the notes she’d made that morning. Now that she’d had that sexy mouth of his against hers and knew exactly what she was missing, it was monumentally more difficult not to melt into a puddle every time he aimed his lethal grin at her.

Or climb across the table and demand he finish what he’d started.

She felt the heat rise in her cheeks and quickly flipped through the notebook, hoping Matt wouldn’t notice her pathetic state. She located the page she wanted and cleared her throat.

“Okay, I called a couple of fellow agents I trust and got the scoop on the investigation. Casey’s going to lead the task force from here in Savannah. He’ll be back in town tomorrow morning. He’s heading up five teams, each focusing on one of the victims your program found, with the last team working both the Crawford and Johnson angles since they were so close together geographically and happened just a few days apart. Fire pretty much destroyed any forensic evidence at all of the murder scenes.” As she talked, she turned her notebook around so Matt could review the details she’d gathered on some of the murders.

“No fingerprints,” she continued. “No obvious DNA sources, although they’re still looking. No obvious links yet between victims to explain how the killer chose them.”

Matt tapped the last page of notes. “One of the vics had a dog who was injured in the same fire that killed the owner. I wonder why the killer would go to so much trouble to save Sharon Johnson’s dog, but not this vic’s dog.”

“No idea. Do you really think that’s significant?”

“No detail is too—”

“I know, I know. No detail is too small or insignificant. We never know what’s going to be important later.” She pulled the notebook back and scribbled a note about the dog. “The one thing in common with all the crime scenes is the use of gasoline and kerosene to ignite the fires, and sometimes the use of a Molotov cocktail.” She flipped a page. “Oh, and your theory about the crimes being in small, rural areas where the cops didn’t have linkups to the FBI is correct.”

“That might imply the killer lives in a small, rural area. He sticks to places that feel comfortable.”

Tessa jotted that down in her notebook. “Either that or he knows small police forces are less likely to have the budget for a searchable database that links up with other law-enforcement agencies.”

“What about links between Sharon Johnson and John Crawford?”

“No one’s been able to link them so far.” She tapped her pen on her notebook. “Has your computer search come up with more possible victims to match against the remaining letters?”

“Not yet. I performed an image search for the curlicue at the bottom of each letter to see if it matched any kind of famous picture or might even be some kind of code, but the search came up empty. As for the geographical search to find more real victims to match to the names on the letters, the program had a glitch overnight. I fixed it and restarted the search this morning. Hopefully it will come up with something later today.”

“Or maybe the remaining victims haven’t been killed yet. Maybe he’s only killed the six victims you already discovered. Maybe the rest are still alive.”

“If that’s true, we need to solve this as quickly as possible. There’s no other way to save these people.”

He was right. Without a reported murder, they had no way of finding and warning the killer’s potential victims, or even knowing which ones were still alive. They couldn’t exactly search the tax rolls of every state in the South for the same names as in the letters. They’d end up with thousands of hits, with no way of knowing which ones were the killer’s targets.

She rested her chin in her palm. “I think we need to build a dossier on each of the six known victims, look into their pasts and figure out how the killer is choosing his victims. But I’m sure the task force is already doing that, so I’m not sure what value we’re adding.”

He pursed his lips and studied her. “Our value is in focusing on the angle Casey is ignoring—how your prints ended up on the letters. To that end, I spoke to Henry at the lab this morning. He told me something interesting about the paper the letters were printed on. Since you and I handled it with gloves on, we couldn’t tell the texture was softer than your average, cheap printer paper. Part of Henry’s test was to simply feel the paper, and he realized it was much softer than it should have been.”

“Softer? Like it’s not designed for a printer?”

“Exactly. Someone took drawing paper and cut it down to size so it would work in a printer. Using that information, along with the chemical makeup of the paper, Henry was able to figure out the manufacturer. The company that made that paper went out of business. Over twenty-five years ago.”

Tessa sat back in her chair, stunned. “
Twenty-five
years?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, that paper was stocked in most large chain stores all around the South, so we can’t narrow it to a specific search area. But it does lead to one rather interesting possibility. Maybe you didn’t touch that paper in the past few years, right before the letters started arriving. Maybe you touched it much farther back, when you were just a child. That would explain why you can’t come up with any possible suspects from your more recent past. The killer is someone you met when you were very young.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t sound plausible. How could my prints still be on the paper from that long ago?”

“Tree sap and coal dust. In small-enough quantities it wasn’t obvious and wouldn’t have been detected if we hadn’t performed chemical tests on the paper. That mixture preserved your prints, along with several other partial prints we discarded because they were too degraded to use. While all the partials we found could have been yours, it’s also possible some of them belonged to the killer, or other people. But your print is the only one my program could construct into a solid, usable print. Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t know. I’m not following where you’re going with this.”

“I’m saying that picking up usable partial prints from so many years ago requires that the person leaving the prints touched the paper many, many times. Enough times, with that sap coal dust mixture on their hands, so my computer could construct a full fingerprint. If someone touched the paper just a few times here and there, it’s unlikely I’d end up with enough data to build a usable print.”

“Meaning what?”

“The odds are extremely high that the print I constructed belongs to the person who touched the paper the most.”