When Eleanor Donnelly gets a call from a wealthy client asking her to look into the tragic death of their daughter, she’s initially hesitant. The Foster Fire Witch case is long cold, very public, and besides, she’s a PI, not a cop.
Then she learns that Tomarion Klinger will be her partner. Tomarion’s an ex-detective with a reputation for solving hard cases. Impossible cases. At worst she’ll learn some craft and fail. At best she’ll bust a career-making case.
The more they dig into the family history and the list of suspects, the more sinister the revelations become. Conspiracy. Jealousy. Abuse. Greed. Then, just when it seems like they have the killer, a tragic turn so violent and terrible it will change Eleanor forever…
An excerpt:
THE FOSTER FIRE WITCH
Tomarion Klinger lit his first cigarette at two in the morning after he decided he could no longer sleep. He paced and blew and opened and closed the blinds until the dull orange of the morning crept through. Nerves. With the sun came the usual comfort and dismay. No more waiting, but no more nagging brain telling him there could be at least some potential for rest.
Earlier, he tried to pass the time and get tired with a used bookstore paperback, leaning against the wall where the couch used to be, in the part where the paint hadn’t faded. All of these books felt the same. A great, if somewhat predictable plot with the strong man, the horny woman, and the bastard who couldn’t die no matter how many times you shot him. The banality of that got to him sometimes, but he never got bored.
He wanted to try a book with more weight, but ages had come and gone since he last read literature or philosophy. All the old ideas Tomarion used to find so compelling in youth blurred in the wet slurry of indefinite things that came with middle age. The exhaustion didn’t help that. He needed fuel. Stories about good and evil. Black and white. Life over death. A good punch to the throat for a man doing wrong who knew he was doing it.
As the time crept up for Eleanor to arrive, Tomarion went to the porch and lit number seventeen of the day. He couldn’t smell the morning, but he felt its cold while listening to the freeway in the near distance ramping its noise up. The road never really went quiet. At three in the morning with the window open, he still heard that dull roar. If it wasn’t that, it was the customers at the convenience store across the street. Or his own mind. What he would give for a little peace.
Eleanor’s car pulled up. That nice little black Ford Fairlane. Was it a ’58 or ’59? He couldn’t recall. He remembered it was an Interceptor, and that the top came down. It also had that weird shifter thing. Three gears. Odd, but unique. The repair costs must be monstrous. One hell of a calling card, though.
Taking one long last drag on his cigarette and giving her the polite one minute finger, he pestled the butt on his heel before pinching the cherry dead.
Tomarion hustled down the apartment stairs. Eleanor admired his dress clothes, the way he made this more formal even when he didn’t have to. The tie. The long coat. The button shirt. The slacks. Typical attire that she and everyone else might associate with what made a modern detective a detective. Even if it was just an affect, it was a good one. Not for the first time, she fretted over her own tee shirts, jeans, sweaters, the casual flair she brought to the formal occupation of private investigation. She resolved to immediately fail in a resolution to get fancier clothes, like usual.
He dropped the dead filter into his left jacket pocket and slid in, thanking her for reaching over and opening the door. After, they didn’t say much until Fifteen south. That’s how long it took for the silence to get to him, which wasn’t long at all, in truth.
“So,” he said. “Tell me about this dead girl.”
“A woman. Lauren Foster. She was twenty-three.”
“Might have seen this one online a while back. Satanic Panic kind of thing, right?”
“That’s the one.”
Tomarion smirked. “Always in style.”
“Sometimes the paranoia gets slightly quieter.”
“The beast at sea.”
She watched him do the math of how long it had been in his head.
He squinted at the conclusion he’d drawn. “Shit’s cold, isn’t it?”
“Old and cold.”
“Doesn’t that make you and me a little useless?”
“I’ll be useless,” Eleanor said. “You’ll be overqualified.”
“Great.”
“Mom doesn’t care. Her money spends.”
He grunted. “Anyone throwing money at a thing has some kind of ulterior motive, if it’s not the first time, when it comes to investigation. Is it a crusade, or is it the press? If I’ve heard about it, and I’m on the internet twice a month, it’s probably so much in the public eye they need giant tweezers to pull it out.”
“I’m still figuring it out.” Eleanor paused to beep and wave at people driving by who were pointing at the car and giving her thumbs.
“That happen a lot?”
“Too much,” she said, smiling a false smile for them and talking through her teeth while looking at the overtaking car to be polite.
“It’s a nice car.”
“It is,” she agreed. “I do wish it were more invisible sometimes.”
Tomarion reached into his inside pocket, felt the pack briefly, let his hand trail away. “We’re moss for a rolling stone, then.”
“Like as not. Yeah.”
“Can I be honest with you?”
“You better.”
“I’m wary. The money and the attention and the potential for a finicky client who will be dissatisfied with whatever we find, it’s not what you call a perk. And I don’t do what I do for the money any more, I do it for love of the thing. I didn’t think you were much different.”
“I’m not,” she said. “Something smells foul. We agree. But it’s a consultation. And it’s paid.”
“Fair enough. Thank you for the reference, by the by.”
“It wasn’t a favor. You earned it. The work was fantastic last time.”
“It was competent. Not fantastic. We elevate mediocrity a bit too much.”
“Sometimes we elevate humility too much,” she said.
He laughed. “Fair. Where’s the file? I don’t want to go in blind if I can help it.”
“Back seat. Laptop bag. It’s open. Can’t miss it.”
Tomarion struggled the folder over the seat after plucking it. He could barely keep the width of the thing in his fingers, and his hands weren’t small. “Christ. Thick enough?”
“Lots of moss.”
He flipped around, skimming.
Eleanor threaded through the inevitable morning traffic while he read. Cars, mountains, the desert. From here to Montana and forever, a great empty expansive sky. Her fingers drummed the steering wheel. “In case you’re worrying, Cheryl already said she won’t expect you to know all the details when we get there. She expressly said I didn’t even have to read it before we came.”
He closed the file. “I hate being ambushed. I like to do my homework.”
“You’re not alone. I spent far too much time last night reading and researching when I should have been sleeping.”
“Damn. I was up half the night myself. I should have texted you.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you should have slept, and I should have slept.”
“Not always an option with me, sadly,” he said. “But anyway, if you don’t mind, hit me with what you’ve got, while we still have time. The short version.”
“It’s not so short.”
“Start the long short version, then. When did Lauren disappear?”
“Two years ago. Valentine’s Day.”
“Abducted, right?”
“The news thought abduction,” she said. “The reality might be murkier. No one’s really sure.”
“Like unsure like maybe she ran away?”
“Or went willingly. Or tried to fake her own disappearance. The news has all kinds of theories.”
“The kind of theories where they blame the victim, right?”
“If it’s a woman,” Eleanor said.
“What’s the murk?”
“Mostly the scene. The window to the room was broken. They found glass on the ground outside and inside. Depending on the source, that means someone broke it inward, someone broke it outward, or someone staged it. There were suspiciously large pieces on the floor, but they were randomized fairly well. Lots of online analysis.”
“The window have an alarm?”
“A deactivated motion detector that went off a few times back in October the year before. False alarms. They found it moved to above the window after she disappeared. No one could say when it was moved though. Almost no one ever went into Lauren’s room but Lauren.”
“Any witnesses or people in proximity?”
“The family lived in the mansion with her, and there’s an extensive staff, but no one said they heard anything. I checked the layout of the house, and that’s not implausible. It’s massive. Like, garishly so.”
“Any signs of struggle?”
“A broken glass lamp. Covers pulled off the bed. Someone knocked over all the cameras.”
“There were cameras in her room?”
“Yeah. But not surveillance. Lauren streamed. That’s the real reason the abduction got so much attention. The Fosters are rich, but state rich, not national rich. She had over a million followers when she disappeared.”
“That’s new shit to me. How does streaming work?”
“Mostly it’s people playing video games on camera while other people watch.”
“Why?”
Eleanor shrugged.
“That’s what she did?”
“Not exactly. She did other things.”
“Like what?”
“Rituals. Spiritual ceremonies. Tarot card readings. Mostly just talks about the nature of God and how to be a good person from what I can gather. I watched a few. They seemed benign and more about talking than indoctrination. Like a social group.”
“But the news only saw the rituals, right? Thus the Satanic Panic.”
“Mostly. She’d dress up for her followers, take requests. The closet inventory is bonkers. Fancy dresses. Fetish gear. Wigs. Comic book costumes. Makeup.”
“Was it sexual?”
“Hard to say. I only watched an hour or so. I don’t think she was trading on sex so much as sex positive.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Just a kind of online way of saying you don’t shame people for being sexual.”
“But she was? Sexual, I mean.”
Eleanor chewed on that. Considered. “She wore low-cut clothes. She wore fetish gear. And sex sells. But I didn’t see much intent to use sex to sell in the clip that I watched. It seemed far more innocent than prurient. I enjoyed it.”
“Not insinuating, just probing for motive.”
“Caught that. No aspersion cast.”
“What kind of spiritual ceremonies are we talking here? Any particular brand?”
“Home brewed. Fire as a transitory element, in the style of the Greeks. That’s less from me watching the streams, more from me reading the file.”
“Fire as a transitory what?”
“Old cultures believed, and some still believe, that flames can move something from this world to the next. Lauren wrote a lot about it and talked a lot about it. It’s why the tabloids called her the Foster Fire Witch.”
“So you’re saying she burned shit up on the stream?”
“Stuff people sent in. Yeah.”
“There’s the sensor right there,” Tomarion said.
“I don’t follow.”
“Can’t burn anything in a house, especially a big expensive house, without a fan and an open window. You’ll set off a fire alarm.”
“Ah,” she said. “That does make sense.”
“What else?”
“She also collected things for use in spells, or things like spells, that’s not really clear. Fetishes, items of power over others.”
“Pagan shit?”
“No, she expressly said she wasn’t pagan. That we know.”
“Like a Christian says they’re spiritual but not religious? Or like a prejudice against witches?”
“I didn’t see enough to know.”
“Items of power.”
“Yeah. She collected items to make into concoctions, or bury.”
“What kind of things?”
“Semen. Blood. Vomit. Hair. Spit. Urine. Feces. Animal parts.”
“Jesus.”
“There were other things. I only remember that much because it was so strange, at least from my perspective. And I don’t squick easily.”
“You’re saying people sent her all that stuff?”
Eleanor sook her head. “The things they sent were more benign. Money. Letters. Messages to the dead. The more explicit stuff was hers, or acquired personally. She labeled it all and kept it organized in her closet.”
“Right. Anything else go missing?”
“That, actually, is one of the clearer parts of this whole scenario. Because of the streams, the detectives and our predecessors were able to compare what was there and what wasn’t quite well. Apparently Lauren was very demonstrative about showing what was and wasn’t in her room. Props were a thing.”
“Helpful.”
“Yeah. It does seem a little convenient to have such an inventory if it’s a scenario where she kidnapped herself.”
“Any money missing?”
“There was sixteen thousand dollars in a shoebox, and still is, so far as I know. No one took that. The suitcase filled with fetish gear went. The body fluids stayed, but three journals disappeared.”
“Sounds random.”
“Perhaps. It’s not three in a row, it was three out of sequence. It’s hard to say. Maybe she took her favorites with her. That’s a point toward faking a disappearance.”
Their exit came up. Eleanor wound the Fairlane up through Highland into the hills. She let the scenery take her and stopped talking. Tomarion gave her a little silence before the hard part. He was about to prompt her when she started in again on her own.
“Hunters found her body six months later, in August. The hot part of summer. It hadn’t been there for long. You can imagine what the sun did to the remains all the same. The killer gutted her, then sewed her back together before he crucified her and hung the upside-down body between two trees. Whoever murdered her took the time to put another cross in her own blood, nipple to nipple, clavicle to belly button, mimicking a symbol that Lauren would draw on figures in her art. She also had some pictures of people with their bellies spilled out. Vintage prints. The captions she wrote on them were always about emptying oneself before the transference, or something to that like. In other words, it was like the killer was trying to enact her will through his will, or so the shrinks wrote.”
“Maybe she had someone do it to her. Maybe it was her idea. You think?”
Eleanor shrugged. “Could be anything.”
“What else?”
“The top of the cross was staked into the ground fairly deep, then surrounded by fresh wood and kindling.”
“Burning the witch?”
“Maybe.”
“Why the upside-down body?”
“Her head was tilted slightly to look down, almost like the killer wanted her looking at the pyre, or so the detectives put it. The report indicated her positioning might be in reference to the Cross of Saint Peter, because an upside-down cross was once, apparently, a Christian symbol. I only know it myself from how kids in high school used to say that a cross turned upside down meant a Satanic thing, which the report also mentions as a possibility.”
“How was evidence from the scene?”
“The site is a gentle slope uphill from a road. The road ends in a quarry about an eighth of a mile further on. It’s popular for weekend shooters. People still go there.”
“So tons of evidence, but none distinct and apart.”
“You got it.”
Tomarion grunted again. “She was naked?”
“Naked. And the killer shaved her head,” Eleanor said. “I’m told we’ll have permission to examine photos of the scene in the presence of Mrs. Foster.”
“After we sign some pretty heavy documents, no doubt.”
“Presumably.”
“There goes my little side hustle selling photos.”
Eleanor smirked. “I know, right?”
“What’s the bounty?”
“Forty thousand a picture.”
“Expensive even for a tabloid.”
“That’s her fans. The tabloids are offering sixty.”
“Well, we know the fans are obsessed at least.”
“Obsessed doesn’t quite cover it. The reason Cheryl called on me was because I worked with her before on that very problem. A few years ago, before the disappearance, a few of her more avid fans wanted to climb the trellis and play fair Romeo in that way only deluded men on the internet can. I managed to catch a few of the bastards, and that made Cheryl happy.”
“So we have a wide field of suspects.”
“The widest.”
“A million can be narrowed down. I’m good. I’m patient. Especially when I’m getting paid.”
“A million and one,” Eleanor said. “Don’t forget, it might be me.”
“You do look like a vicious killer.”
“It’s the red hair, isn’t it?”
“It’s the car. Who drives a black car? Evil people.”
Eleanor arched an eyebrow and began curving up the private drive.