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Robert T. White
Category:
Crime
Publisher: New Pulp Press
ISBN-10: 1951150635
Type: Fiction
Pages: 258
Copyright: Aug.19, 2020
ISBN-13: 9781951150631
Price: $14.95 (eBook)
Det. Riisa Jones of the Gallion, Rhode Island PD has a tough case on her hands for her first outing as lead investigator: someone reports the body of a girl on fire in a dumpster behind a local tavern.
Detective Riisa Jones is a new detective with her first case as lead investigator for the Gallion, Rhode Island P.D. It’s a bad one: the body of a young woman has been set ablaze in a dumpster behind a local tavern, well known to the cops. Some of her colleagues, including her own partner “Kaz,” a veteran cop nearing retirement, wouldn’t mind seeing her fail. Riisa’s first obstacle is identifying the body. Before long, she’s neck-deep in a case that twists out of her reach every time she follows a lead. Those dead ends are piling up and so is the pressure to solve this horrific case. Riisa finds herself digging past the lies of respectable people to uncover some dirty secrets, and she had better hurry because there are killers behind those liars who are watching and paying attention to her.
Excerpt
Burning Girl
DAY 1
“What do you think, Detective?”
“Looks like a homicide to me,” Riisa said.
“Maybe it’s a suicide,” her partner said in that same irksome monotone. “She could have jumped in with a lit cigarette in her hand. See that packing? Liquor bottles. Could be one broke and the fumes exploded, all that flammable junk in there, she panicked—”
“OK, Worozowski,” she replied. “Why don’t you give the M.E.’s office a call, see what’s taking them.”
“Sure,” Worozowski said, “you’re lead detective.”
“That’s right, I am,” she said.
Invoking her new policy of deadpan indifference toward her partner wasn’t proving easy and Detective Clarissa Jones knew she would have to endure six more days before his retirement. She wasn’t going to let him get her goat, although he never stopped trying to bait her. A chilly wind whipped her ponytail off her collar. Lord, hear my prayer, a half-hearted mantra invoked for help against the dark force of Kazimir Worozowski, veteran of the Gallion P.D. and, unfortunately for her, a much-beloved icon of the younger cops in the precinct. Her third murder investigation but first as lead and it had to be with Worozowski sniping in her ear.
Riisa felt a momentary pang of shame for preferring easy ones like the first two she’d worked—both domestics. In the first, the husband sat weeping in his La-Z-Boy, gun dangling from hand beside his wife’s body on the floor. The second was no less a slam dunk: a middle-aged woman in a tattered terry-cloth bathrobe smiled at her when she arrived on scene, oblivious to the handcuffs and the cop standing beside her. She’d just stabbed her husband while he slept with a steel kebob skewer; she had the good luck—or misfortune—to nick an aorta.
She turned her attention back to the body in the dumpster. Curled in the fighter’s pose as muscles contracted from the heat, it still smoked, but intact enough for Dr. Fernandez to work her magic, she so fervently hoped. As Kaz crudely put it, Fernie Fernandez had her hands inside more guts than Attila the Hun. What she didn’t know about the manner and means of assisting human beings out of their mortal coil before their time wasn’t worth knowing.
Most likely, a female or a very small male. The unburned portion didn’t reveal much from the clothing. Her flashlight probed the charred clothing, but it was difficult to discern much. The killer had doused the body and splashed fuel all around it. Much of the dumpster’s contents had melted unlike the carboard packing. She could see some Styrofoam way in the back along with unsinged plastic water bottles, and some broken glass from the bar.
The owner of The Sandbar Inn pulled into the lot in a Camaro with mufflers gurgling. James Tromboli was familiar to all the precinct cops for several code violations involving underage drinkers and bar fights over the years. A gun discharged in the parking lot last summer, she recalled, but no charges filed. The place was a borderline nuisance.
“Hey, what’s up? My bartender called me to come down here,” Tromboli demanded. He sounded angry, and he looked as if he’d been roused from sleep.
“Don’t come any closer,” she ordered. “This is a crime scene.”
“A crime scene—what are you saying? Ho-oly shit—”
She had to pull him from behind by his windbreaker to keep him from approaching the lip of the dumpster. In the damp, pre-dawn of a chilly March, his breath blew fruity, sour plumes in front of his face. Tromboli was known to drink with his customers and take sides when fights broke out in his bar.
“Get your hands off me!”
“Sir, I told you to keep back.”
“Hey, hey, Kaz, man. What gives with this woman?”
“Easy, Jimmy,” Worozowski said; “you got a dead body in your trash.”
She resented Kaz for letting the owner blunder past the tape the first officer on scene had put up. The “Kaz-Jimmy” thing irked more than this woman. Her lieutenant told her to “learn all she could from Kaz, a real pro,” when he paired them. He also mentioned that Kazimir Worozowski was “no stranger” to the bars from Gallion to Coventry. If scuttlebutt was accurate, Kaz was no stranger to any pub, tavern, or sports bar between Providence and Sakonnet.
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