Ashes to Ashes (26 page)

“I have already stated as such,” Oscar
answered, “and we have evidence supporting it. But the exact
evidence will not be disclosed at this time.” He turned his head to
find the next question but was quickly pulled back to Sasha.

“Has a motive for the crimes been
discovered?” Sasha interrupted.

“The motives behind the crimes are still in
question,” Oscar replied, before quickly pointing to another
reporter. “Alan?”

“Alan Whitcomb, 21 Action News,” the tall man
began. “I have a source that tells me that Scott Walters is the son
of Ashe Walters, who currently works as the forensic psychologist
at Wilson Maximum Security Prison along with being a former
consultant for your homicide unit. Is that true?” The reporter
didn’t give Oscar a chance to reply before adding another question.
“And does this have any connection to the death of Susanne Walters
several years ago? A crime connected to the Eastside Slasher.”

“Your source told you that?” Oscar asked,
growing irritated. “I will say this once. There is no connection
between the Eastside Slasher and Scott Walters. The Eastside
Slasher is long gone. He or she is either rotting in some prison
for other crimes or dead and rotting in a shallow grave somewhere.
Either probability is fine by me.”

“There seems to be one connection, Detective
Harrison,” Alan insisted.

“And what might that be?”

“Ashe Walters,” the reporter replied.

“This conference is over,” Oscar declared.
“An official statement will be released later today. Thank you for
coming.” He turned and walked off the screen.

The thin phone felt like a brick in his hand.
Before the screen cut off again, Ashe looked at the wall in the
background and knew that the conference had taken place at the
police headquarters.

He took note of that fact.

Handing the phone back to Warden Chase, Ashe
didn’t know what to say to her. So he didn’t speak and let her take
the lead in the conversation.

“Was that the personal business that you had
to take care of yesterday?” the Warden asked.

Ashe nodded.

Warden Chase shook her head and said, “You
could have told me about this, you know. I would understand if you
needed a little personal time because of what is going on with your
son. I am not stone, cold and unfeeling. Besides, you’ve earned
some time off. I can’t remember the last time you missed a day,
besides yesterday that is. I should have known something serious
was going on when you left early. Anyway, I want you to leave and
deal with your personal situation. I’ve already brought in someone
else to take over your load.” She turned and called to the doorway.
“Doctor Osborne?”

A woman about the same height and weight as
the warden walked into Ashe’s cage.

“Doctor Osborne will take over your cases,”
Warden Chase stated. “We will cancel anything that does not
absolutely have to take place.”

“Sally,” Ashe said, nodding to his colleague.
“How are things in the private sector?” Dr. Sally Osborne looked
around her. “Not so…claustrophobic.” She smiled. “How are things in
prison?”

“Claustrophobic,” he replied.

Ashe knew Sally Osborne from whenever he had
the obligation to present his professional opinion to the local and
state courts. She used to work exclusively as an expert researcher
and assessment administrator for the court system, but a year or so
back she chose to leave the courts behind and go into her own
private forensic practice, where she was merely a lapdog for the
prosecution. She was good at her job and Ashe knew she would handle
his case load with care and competency.

“I would like you take some time and get the
good Doctor up to speed,” Warden Chase said. “And then I want you
out of my building,” she joked. “Call me when you can and give me
an update on what is going on.”

And with that, the warden was gone.

Through the outrage Ashe was feeling toward
his old friend, he managed to greet Sally’s smile with one of his
own. The smile originated with an internal image, Oscar’s neck with
Ashe’s hands wrapped around it.

Chapter 29

Scott dreamed.

He didn’t know why he felt so much joy in
watching the bridge above him burn, but as the ashes fell all
around him, Scott raised his face to the sky and opened his mouth.
Flecks of ash landed on his tongue and he was surprised at the
taste. It wasn’t bitter but sweet, like a fleck of sugar was
hitting his taste buds.

Raising his arms, Scott cried out. His howl
was long and guttural. It was more like the cry of a wild animal
than a human man. The howl rolled off his lips with power and
presence, so much that he almost expected the burning bridge above
him to collapse under the weight of his voice.

He closed his eyes and felt the heat of the
roaring flames whispering across the skin of his face. Scott
grinned. It was ecstasy. He finally understood the wants and
desires of a pyromaniac. To burn. Only to burn. It was that
simple.

A poem came to mind. One of his mother’s. One
that she had framed and hung above their stove.
Bridges
burning/fires yearning/to destroy/as the ashes fall/over us all/in
the space/build once more.

Above him, the roar of the fire ceased and
Scott was suddenly engulfed with silence. It startled him and he
quickly opened his eyes. The bridge was gone as was the falling
ash. Looking around, he saw that he was in the kitchen of his
apartment. The illumination of the massive flames was replaced by
the flicker of a florescent light. The subtle flicker of the
florescent bulb made him uneasy, causing the illusion that things
around him were moving, shifting with malice intent.

A cold chill trembled across his neck.

The apartment appeared in the exact state in
which he had left it the previous evening, including the dirty
dishes in the sink. He glanced to the floor and expected to find
the same track of dirt between each cheap pale tile. But instead he
saw a line of blood. Following the trail of crimson, Scott found
that the river lead to a red lake, which had pooled beneath the
head of a body.

Dead eyes stared up at him.

Scott’s breath caught. How was it possible?
The body should be gone? The body should not be there. It had been
taken care of. It had been stopped.

Leaning closer, he tried to get a better view
of the face. Dead hands reached out and grabbed Scott’s shirt. The
dead mouth opened and formed a moan, but the moan sounded like a
ringing, like the ringing of a…

…phone.

Jerking to attention, Scott realized that he
had dozed off and the cell phone was chirping in the center console
of Bam’s car. Sitting straight up, he sluggishly wiped a drop of
sweat away from his forehead. After fixing the crooked pair of
sunglasses, he glanced out the car windows and windshield, feeling
exposed in the daytime. He was in a low populated area, where only
a few scattered houses sat next to stretches of woodland. Even
though he could not see another person within his view, he couldn’t
shake the feeling that there were a million eyes watching him, from
the hills and from the trees. Paranoia. But that didn’t mean that
there wasn’t someone watching him.

He couldn’t believe that he had let himself
fall asleep. How stupid.

Shaking his head, Scott tried to gather his
wits before grabbing the pre-pay cell phone and flipped it open.
“Bam?” He asked the name but already knew that the person on the
other end had to be her. There was no one else that it could have
been. Bam had bought them each a burn phone, using cash which would
make it untraceable. With the throw away phones, they could safely
speak to each other without the police plugging a signal from the
air in order to follow back to its source. They were the only
people that had the two phone numbers.

“Scott?” She sounded distraught.

“Of course,” he replied.

As his head continued to clear, Scott
remembered why he was parked, exposed to the light of day, while
the cops of Youngstown hunted for his scalp. It was all about the
mansion across the street. Even though he was in the suburb of
Belle Vista, he was close enough to the city to make him nervous.
The two-story, brick mansion was massive and more luxurious than he
could ever hope of owning. From his view, he could see onto a slab
of a circular driveway. Across the driveway he could make out a row
of short, white pillars standing across a wide front porch. The
porch was larger than Scott’s entire apartment. A tall, red brick
wall surrounded the property. A thick metal gate secured the
entrance. The entrance and gate were being monitored by set of
cameras, which were perched and pointed and most likely recording
everything and everyone that tried to enter the premises.

The large house didn’t impress Scott. The
small house that he had grown up in, with his mother and father,
always suited him better. That house had been little but full,
unlike the large building across the street which was most likely
empty, at least empty where it counts.

“Where are you?” Bam asked.

“Where do you think I am?” Scott asked. “I’m
outside the house.”

“You need to get out of there,” Bam
insisted.

“Why? The gates are still closed and I can
see the yellow car,” Scott replied. “He is still in there.” As the
words left his mouth, he saw motion through the closed metal gates.
A group of figures was leaving by the set of front doors. “I see
something. People. It think that this is it.” His pulse sped up.
Anticipation filled him.

He reached across the passenger’s seat and
touched the dark Browning handgun, making sure that it was real.
After discarding his own gun in the park, he never wanted to touch
another. But he was once again being forced in that direction.

“Abort!” Bam voice boomed through the phone.
“Get out of there, Scott!”

“What? Wait. Why?” The desperation in her
voice confused him. Scott watched the figures enter two separate
vehicles, one being the yellow Porsche that Bam had specifically
pointed out. It was time. Why was he being screamed at? Why was he
being told to leave? “What is going on?”

“You are on the news!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your god damned face is on every television,
right now!” Bam hollered. “You need to get out of there and get
inside! It is not only the YPD that know your face, now! You are no
longer an inside secret. Do you get me?”

“I can still do this!”

“Scott! You are not going to take that
chance!”

Leaning back in the car’s seat, Scott sighed.
He clicked on the radio and immediately heard Oscar’s voice. “I
repeat,” he began, “the suspect is still at large and may still be
in the city of Youngstown or the surrounding areas. He may or may
not be armed, but I want everyone to consider him dangerous. I will
only be taking a couple questions. Sasha?”

“Shit!” She was right. He would be following
the yellow Porsche into a place more populated than his current
location. His paranoia had been correct, a million eyes were indeed
on him.

The key was already in the slot and all Scott
had to do was turn it to make the car roar to life. “We knew it
would happen, eventually. I was just hoping that we had another
day,” he said, regretfully.

“Just come home. Hurry.”

Fuck, his mind swore.

Scott knew that his proof was getting ready
to pull out into the real world, away from safety of a closed gate.
And he also knew that it had become a rare event, because the man
in the yellow Porsche remained home, within protection, more often
than not. He had to get to the man and get what the man had on
him…what the man always had on him. Proof.

It might be his only chance.

Bam had told Scott that his proof would be
vulnerable, barely guarded, which was also a rare occasion. The man
in the yellow Porsche was only bringing a single guard along for
the scheduled meeting. The meeting was crucial and those being met
did not like excessive muscle, so the man in the yellow Porsche was
forced to leave most of his protection behind.

A single guard. He could do it. Scott knew
that he could. He had to. Desperation oozed from every neuron in
Scott’s brain. The news was posting his picture all over town,
declaring him to be a killer on the loose. He was being called a
murderer. But Scott had never
murdered
anyone in his life.
Everything that happened was self-defense, even if it did not
appear to be so.

Kill or be killed.

Yet…he could not prove any of it.

Scott also realized that it had gone beyond
proving the truth to other people, to his father and to the police,
but it had become about understanding that truth for himself, as
well. Why had it happened? How did it happen? And why him? Was it
God? Was it science? Or was something else completely, something
that he could never possibly understand?

He just simply needed to understand.

More than anything.

“Just come home,” he heard Bam repeat.

But he couldn’t.

“Sorry, hun,” Scott mumbled. “I have to do
this.”

“Scott…no,” she begged. “There will be
another time. It is too dangerous.”

“I have to do this,” he said again and hung
up. He had no plan on killing the man, which means that the man
would never see him coming. Watching as the yellow Porsche pulled
through the opened gates, Scott pulled out behind and began to
follow.

Chapter 30

It took nearly an hour for Ashe to get his
colleague Sally up to speed on his urgent cases, while also
choosing which cases could wait for his return. He felt confident
and content in leaving her his load. After jotting his cell phone
number down on a sticky note and shaking her hand goodbye, Ashe
rushed away from Sally and quickly sprinted to his car. He finally
found himself on the road making his way toward the police
station.