The Burning Man (32 page)

“I suppose you’re right,” Olivia said, leaning heavily against her.

Junior Agent Olivia Dunham unholstered her sidearm and got out of the Crown Vic, nodding silently to her partner, Special Agent Dan Considine.

Considine was in his early fifties, lean and tough as beef jerky. What hair he had left was shaved down to silver stubble, and his eyes were an unusual shade of pale, grayish brown behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He had a humorless and taciturn disposition that made for dull company on long assignments, but he was also a patient and skilled teacher with years of knowledge and practical on-the-job experience that Olivia soaked up like a sponge.

She trusted him with her life.

Considine got out from behind the wheel and drew his own gun, aiming over the roof of the car to cover her as she moved cautiously toward the door of the cabin.

It was one of many small, seedy vacation rentals clustered around the outskirts of Sequoia National Park in central California. Built for free-range families back in the optimistic, post-World War II boom years, when a vacation didn’t have to be a 3-D, interactive, corporate-sponsored, consumer circus meticulously designed to inspire brand loyalty in jaded and entitled offspring, cabins like these were places to spend lazy summers catching fireflies and telling ghost stories.

Now, the fireflies had been driven to the brink of extinction by the undying electric glow of a jacked in modern existence, and no one could pay attention long enough to find out what happened at the end of the ghost story. As a result, rustic and quaint family cabins like these sat empty, season after season, inhabited only by the occasional tweaker misfit wearing a tin-foil hat, or bewildered foreign tourist who’d fallen for some kind of online bargain.

The owner of the property was named Lee Canliss, an older woman who could have been anywhere from sixty to a-hundred-and-six. She was tall, but deeply stooped and wore her white hair in two long braids like a little girl. Her clothes and boots were utilitarian and gender neutral, except for the quirky addition of a big glittery pendant in the shape of a stylized lion head.

She told Olivia that the occupant had given his name as Mark Mitchell, but that she recognized him from the drawing of the suspect in the Jensen case. She’d also said that the man calling himself Mitchell had a girl with him when he checked in—a blonde who “looked young.” She claimed the girl had been sitting in the passenger seat of the car the whole time, and mostly kept her face turned away, but that the hair looked kind of like the girl on TV, so she’d phoned the FBI tip line.

As soon as the call came in, Olivia came running.

This deeply personal vendetta had started out as a low-priority Jane Doe case involving two sets of unidentified female remains. The burnt skeletal fragments had been discovered in two different states more than four hundred miles apart, but they were both found to contain traces of the same brand of lighter fluid. Both had been burned elsewhere and then later dumped. Both were Caucasian females between fourteen and seventeen years of age.

Olivia wound up with the case partly because no one else wanted it. She tinkered with it in her spare time, but got nowhere until she got a blip from a small-town sheriff who had a complaint from an underage prostitute named Makayla Wayne. The girl claimed a john had tried to set her on fire, but she had escaped and provided a description of her attacker. The drawing based on her description was laughable, like an evil pirate in a kid’s cartoon, but one element of this mythical pirate stood out to Olivia.

He had a hook for a hand.

His right hand.

When she called up a mugshot that showed the victim, she felt sick to her stomach. Blond hair. Green eyes. That girl could have been her little sister.

Olivia had been overwhelmed by a flood of complex, dark, and bittersweet memories that she’d tried to leave buried in the past. Her life was good now, exactly what she wanted in every way. She had an exciting job that challenged her, and an active and carefree love life. Rachel was married and mother to a beautiful little girl of her own, and while Olivia couldn’t imagine settling down herself anytime soon, she enjoyed being an aunt to the precocious Ella.

There wasn’t a single thing Olivia wanted that she did not have.

But now this unquiet spirit from her difficult past had raised his ugly head, to remind her of things that were better off forgotten. She was angry at first, but as the pieces started to fall swiftly into place, she began to realize that this unexpected resurrection was actually a good thing. The right thing. Closure after all those years.

She paid a visit to Makayla Wayne, and it wasn’t the slam dunk she’d hoped for. The girl was cranked to the gills during the interview, and positively identified a control photo of Dan Considine as her attacker, before changing her mind and picking out the photo of Tony Orsini.

* * *

Unwilling to let it go, Olivia started slogging through female missing person reports in which the juvenile subjects were between the ages of fourteen and seventeen and had blond hair and green eyes. Once she had eliminated the ones who didn’t look anything like her, or lived more than a thousand miles away from the dump sites, she narrowed it down to a solid dozen possibilities.

She’d had to sweet talk a lab tech into slipping her request into the forensic queue, but it still took more than six months to get results. It was worth it, though, because she got a DNA match between one of the missing juveniles and one of her charbroiled Jane Does.

The match turned out to be a hard-partying high school dropout named Amanda Lindstrom, from Omaha, Nebraska. Olivia paid a visit to Omaha to talk to Amanda’s grief-stricken parents and friends. She got lucky when one of the girl’s friends told her about a one-armed man who had bought liquor for them, and “seemed weird.” She claimed that the local cops had ignored her story, because they had been convinced that Amanda’s African-American boyfriend was responsible for her disappearance.

She positively identified the photo of Tony Orsini as the “weird guy.”

Still circumstantial and mostly based on the testimony of unreliable witnesses, Olivia’s little pet case was starting to get warmer. What she really needed was some kind of solid evidence, like surveillance footage or a credit card receipt that placed Orsini in the area on the day Amanda went missing.

When she started digging into Orsini’s recent whereabouts, she discovered that he had fallen off the grid nearly nine years ago—when he had last been released from an inpatient psychiatric facility. No bank accounts, no credit cards, no utilities, nothing.

He had become a ghost.

So with little or nothing to go on, Olivia continued to work the case in her spare time, sifting through minutia and watching hours of gas station security camera footage until her eyes crossed.

Then Jamie Jensen went missing, and Olivia’s cold case flashed white hot.

Sixteen-year-old Jamie Jensen was an all-American girl next door. The only child of Sam and Nancy Jensen from Fort Worth, Texas, Jamie was popular and athletic, She played on the girls’ basketball team and volunteered at the local animal shelter. She wasn’t a hooker, a junkie or a runaway. She was a nice girl from a nice family.

A telegenic victim, who also happened to look remarkably like a young Olivia.

Nobody cared about what happened to a white-trash tweaker like Makayla Wayne or a bad girl like Amanda Lindstrom, but when Jamie Jensen failed to come home from the library, it sparked a multi-state manhunt and a media feeding frenzy. The drawing based on her brother’s description of a suspicious one-armed man he’d seen hanging around the library looked exactly like Tony Orsini.

Because Olivia had already done so much preliminary legwork on Tony, she and Considine had taken the lead in the Jensen investigation. It was her first major case.

And now, all that legwork was paying off. A second back-up car full of muscle and bullets was prowling down the long dirt driveway, kicking up a cloud of dust in the hot, still afternoon. There was a third team heading up toward the back of the cabin via the strip of woods that separated it from its neighbor, in case Orsini decided to make a run for it.

Olivia felt sharp and confident—everything was going exactly the way she had planned. She walked slowly through the long grass, gun drawn and ready. Considine was right behind her. A startled grasshopper leapt away from their invading feet as they approached the cabin door.

There was a warm, summery scent of crushed grass and sun-bleached wood in the air, but beneath it, Olivia could detect another sharper, more unnatural odor.

Kerosene.

An alarmed look passed between her and her partner. He nodded, grim and silent.

Olivia kicked the door in.

Inside, she found Tony Orsini and Jamie Jensen, both soaked in stinking kerosene. Jamie lay on her side on the splintery floor, roughly hogtied and gagged with a knotted bandana. When she saw Olivia, she tried to scream but the sound was reduced to a muffled squeak.

Tony spun to face her, an unlit Zippo lighter in his hand.

The years had not been kind to him. He looked shrunken and worn out. In Olivia’s memory, he’d been this towering monster, all-powerful and looming over Rachel like an evil dragon. Seeing him now, he just looked like a sad old man. His hand was shaking, his yellowy, bloodshot eyes wide with disbelief.

“Olivia?” he said, voice cracking and barely a whisper.

She held out her arm to keep Considine back, squinting against the fumes. One wrong move and Orsini would spark that lighter and engulf them all in flames.

“Yes, Tony,” she said, gun pointed down and her free hand up, palm out. “It’s me. What are you doing?”

“I...” He looked from the lighter in his hand to the bound girl on the kerosene-drenched floor. “I thought...” He looked back up at Olivia. “I thought you were dead.”

“I came back for you,” she said, holding out her hand. “Now give me the lighter, Tony. We don’t need it. Or her.”

He looked down at the lighter, and then very slowly held it out to her.

She snatched the lighter, tossed it away and immediately slammed him up against the wall, gun pressed against his neck as she slapped her cuffs around his left wrist. Then she paused, non-plussed. How was she supposed to handcuff that hook?

Considine saw her dilemma and tossed her a flex cuff. Then he ran to Jamie and went to work freeing her from the kerosene-soaked rope that bound her. As soon as her arms were free, she threw them around Considine’s neck, clinging to him and sobbing hysterically.

He shot Olivia a baffled look over the top of the girl’s head. He was never any good at dealing with crying females.

Thank god you’re not like this,
his eyes said.

Olivia smiled and used the flex cuff to cinch the solid links at the center of the cuffs to the metal “wrist” of Orsini’s prosthetic. Walking him out of the cabin and putting him into the back of the car, she felt a tremendous sense of relief... and closure.

Like she’d slain her childhood demon, and salted his grave so he could never hurt anyone else again.

As Considine drove them back to the local command center, she found herself thinking again of Kieran, for the first time in years. Finally bringing Orsini to justice made her realize how much weight and significance she had placed on the events of that strange winter. It made her realize that she was still harboring a sense of guilt over what had happened to her first lover, and her inability to save him.

Now that she had conquered her lingering fear of Orsini, it was time to let go of that other baggage, too.

Olivia was sitting at her desk and looking at a drawing that her niece Ella had done. The girl had drawn herself, holding hands with Olivia and Rachel.

It would have been hard to tell Olivia apart from her sister in the drawing if Ella hadn’t given Olivia a giant badge the size of a gladiator’s shield. She smiled and pinned the drawing up on her cork board. The jaunty, colorful picture looked totally out of place amid the crime scene photos, autopsy reports, and maps showing the locations where murder victims had been found.

Considine put down his phone and looked over from his desk.

“Fitterman wants to see you,” he said.

“Right,” Olivia replied. “I just need to finish up some paperwork.”

“Go now,” Considine said, with a slight rise in one corner of his thin lips. “It was nice working with you, kid.”

Olivia’s head snapped up.

“What?” She frowned. “What’s this about?”

He didn’t answer, just tipped his head in the direction of their superior’s office.

Olivia shrugged, still frowning, and got up from her desk. Her curiosity was piqued.

* * *

Lieutenant James Fitterman was beaming like a new father when Olivia walked into his office. He was a handsome older man with perfectly styled salt and pepper hair and bright blue eyes. The kind of man who would be cast as a kindly doctor in a commercial for antacid.

He was generally well dressed, but his taste in ties was deplorable. He almost seemed to take a kind of perverse joy in choosing the most eye-wateringly jarring and tacky patterns. That day, it was a delirious swirl of hot pink and lime green, accented with yellow crescents that looked like macaroni elbows glued to a child’s art project.

Ties notwithstanding, he’d always been a good boss.

“Great job on the Orsini case,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” she replied.

“I think you’re ready to have your training wheels taken off,” he added. “I’m promoting you to special agent, and assigning you a new partner.”

“But I like working with Dan,” she said.

“I need Considine to break in another rookie,” he said. “You’re beyond that now. Besides, I think this will be a good match up for you. Oh, hey, here’s your new partner now.”

He stood up behind his desk and gestured toward the open door.

“Olivia Dunham,” he said. “This is John Scott.”