A Killing Fire Read online

  faye snowden

  A Killing Fire

  FLAME TREE PRESS

  London & New York

  To all of the fierce women I have known, including:

  Michelle, Viv, Lupe, Amy, Peggy, Sally, Carla, Donna,

  Renee, Rose, Julie and every single one of my Jessicas.

  Keep kicking ass.

  Prologue

  Floyd Burns’ father was a black boxer who tried on his own name just like his son did. He called himself Lightning Burns because of what he thought of as the speed of his flying fists.

  But he wasn’t quick.

  Lightning – his real name was Hamlet – was slow. But once he caught up to the poor soul unlucky enough to be in the ring with him, he’d pound and pound on ’em just like he was a human spike driver fastening a railroad tie. Everybody called him Hammer because of it. Nobody called him Lightning.

  Not even his wife.

  He didn’t do much professionally, made a little money on the amateur circuit before settling down with his wife, Sarah, on a small farm where they grew corn and kept a few cows and pigs. Sarah came from one of them Okie families. Her people fled to California when the Oklahoma skies turned black and the soil became sawdust. She was as sweet and strong as a stereotype with narrow blue eyes that saw a lot but kept much of it to herself.

  Floyd worried Sarah from the minute he was born. He slipped so easily from the womb that later on she would question if there was even one pang when he came into this world. His face was flat with calm as the midwife laid him on her belly. There was no lusty cry as there would be from her other children. He just lay there for a minute or two breathing softly with his eyes closed as if he was thinking on some extremely serious matter. When he finally opened his eyes, Sarah did see that one was darker than the other, but it wouldn’t be until later that she fully understood that one eyeball would be a shimmering green and the other a blazing blue.

  There would be the kids that were too scared to play with Floyd, not because of his eyes so much as for the way he was. How he would just sit back and watch things and not say a word for hours on end with them weird light-colored eyes. And as for the kids that weren’t scared of him, Floyd found there would be a lot of pushing and shoving and a hard row to hoe.

  But from Floyd there would be no tears, only that peculiar thinking look as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind about the kind of world he had entered into or just how he would behave in it.

  One day when he was sixteen, he didn’t show up for dinner. Sarah had set his place at the table as usual on the first night he didn’t show and then just as quietly picked the dishes up one by one when he didn’t come in later. She washed and dried them as if he had eaten from them and put the plates back in the cupboard. She did this the second night too. She set Hammer’s place, her own, the twins’ places, and Floyd’s. The dishes were laid out for the final time on that third night and when he didn’t come home, Sarah once again washed the plate, the spoon, and the fork as if he had used them.

  After she had finished the dishes she stood for some time in the open door looking out over the cornfield. A breeze rustled the tips of the stalks making the silk spark gold in the quilted darkness. The roof of the open country was so full of black that it made her feel as if she were in some movie theater or some giant tent with tiny silver dots painted on the ceiling to look like stars. She stood there for a long time watching the wind playing in the corn.

  Then for an instant she let herself breathe a tiny sigh of relief at the thought of never seeing Floyd again. Hammer came and stood by her side, wondering why he couldn’t muster up enough worry to go out and search for Floyd. He gave himself the excuse that it was from taking too many hits to the head. He wasn’t in his right mind or strong enough to go and search for that boy. Besides, he couldn’t leave Sarah alone with the twins. That just wouldn’t be right. He put his hand on her shoulder, thinking that they had both just missed something terrible. But if anybody had come out and asked him what that was, he wouldn’t have quite been able to put it into words.

  Chapter One

  Detective Raven Burns didn’t know if she was asleep or awake. All she knew was that she was lying on her back with the music of Louisiana Zydeco playing loud in her ear. Eyes open, she watched the notes from the accordion swirl in neon red and green on the ceiling of her apartment in Byrd’s Landing, Louisiana.

  The nightmare was still with her, but fading. She had been dreaming about the time she had the chance to stop a serial killer but didn’t take it. How her life and the lives of everyone whose path her father crossed would’ve been different if she had. But she wasn’t brave enough.

  Never mind that she was just a kid back then. Children could be brave. She knew who and what he was even at that young age, and yet she had allowed him to go on. Worse, she had even loved him as a father while he did so.

  The Android on her nightstand played on with its Zydeco ringtone. Smooth vocals joined the accordion and before long she was wide awake. She picked the phone up and glanced at the time before pressing the answer button. The morning was barely an hour old.

  “Wake up, sleepyhead,” a voice said in her ear. “We caught one.”

  It was homicide detective Billy Ray Chastain, her Zydeco-loving partner who had been assigned the ‘Walking to New Orleans’ ringtone. She let her head fall back on the pillow and breathed heavily for a few seconds.

  Murders came to Byrd’s Landing one right after another. No sooner had she put one perp away than another one would pop up. It was like she’d been playing a macabre game of whack-a-mole ever since the Byrd’s Landing chief of police lured her away from the New Orleans Police Department several years ago. The city had just ended the police services contract with the sheriff’s department, and the chief, appointed as interim by the mayor, was trying to build the Byrd’s Landing Police Department almost from scratch. He wanted her. And she found herself back in Byrd’s Landing battling memories of both her father and depraved killers.

  During lulls when nothing much happened except for a bar fight or a domestic dispute, Raven knew that murderers like her father were still out there. She could feel them waiting. It’s what had drawn her father to this Louisiana town. Anchored by a lake, bracketed by swamps and cut in half by the lazy, serpentine expanse of the Red River, it was an island unto itself. The town appeared to breathe in the darkness he so loved, find nourishment in the evil Raven had spent the better part of her life trying to defeat. If she was to ever get her father out of her system, it would be in Byrd’s Landing.

  “Where?” she said into the phone.

  Billy Ray told her and she ended the call. She swung her legs over the bed and sat up. Sweating, dry-mouthed, she stayed that way for a full two minutes. She waited until the dream slid just beneath her subconscious, out of the way so she could get on with whatever business this warm July morning was about to bring her.

  When she thought she had it together she took a five-minute shower so hot that her skin stung as if it had been punished. She noticed steam covering the bathroom mirror as she stepped onto the bath rug. She wiped the mist away with the side of her fist and studied herself in the low light. Two bulbs had burned out about a month ago but she hadn’t bothered to replace them.

  That wasn’t like her.

  The place was meticulously clean: the carpets vacuumed, floors swept, every surface wiped on a regular basis. That was one thing she got from her father, a habit she couldn’t shake. Her desk at the station was the same. When her partner, Billy Ray, saw her efforts to keep the place sparkling, he’d accused her of acting as if she were cleaning up after a crime scene.

  But she had a
hard time replacing the lights in the bathroom. After all, that’s where the mirror was. She stared into the one green eye and one blue eye peering back at her. The dream, never far away, resurfaced.

  Fragments of images played slideshow fashion in her head – fire slithering along the grass, the white moon straining to send its weak light through a rare summer fog. And back inside the house, blood on the white stove, blood on the floor, and blood on the walls. That was the way she remembered the dreams, in fragments, like the letters her father used to send her from prison.

  They were never complete letters, just juvenile scrawls on slips of paper with very few words. The notes came infrequently at first, but then a couple of weeks before he was executed, they came in a flood. There were times when she received two in one day. She remembered one particular scrap that arrived in an official-looking yellow envelope while she was still at the police academy. One of her instructors brought it to her in the cafeteria. Raven shouldn’t have opened it right then but she did. She couldn’t help it.

  On a slip of paper no bigger than a Post-it note, her father had written a few sentences in cursive so small she could barely read it. Every word was spelled correctly except the word killing. He spelled that with just one L.

  I never thought of kiling you, Birdy Girl. No matter what they said or what you thought, I never thought of kiling you, not once. Kiling you would be like looking in the mirror and slicing my own throat.

  She threw all the notes away but that didn’t matter. That last note especially had been with her ever since she read it, just behind her eyes whenever she shut them.

  She gazed at her image in the mirror more intently. Her eyes didn’t mean that she was like her father. They were probably just a trait from her paternal white grandmother, just like Raven’s spirals of reddish blond hair and the gold undertones of her light brown skin. She told the face the same thing she told it every morning in case it got any ideas about who was in charge.

  She said, “There are two ‘L’s in killing, asshole. Learn to spell. There isn’t anything of you in me.” She switched out what little light there was and padded naked to her bedroom.

  She pulled on a pair of tight-fitting jeans and topped them off with a white T-shirt, smoothing it over her flat belly. She clipped her badge to her belt and stuffed her service revolver in the holster at the small of her back. Her personal weapon, a Glock 19, went into her shoulder holster. She thought about the Beretta 92FS she used to carry. It was now locked safely away in her desk drawer at work. She was glad that she replaced it with the Glock 19. Too many bad memories with that weapon, but she still didn’t have the strength to get rid of it. Maybe someday, she thought, as she lifted a pant leg and strapped on a six-inch hunting knife.

  As she shrugged into her jacket, she thought about how hard she had worked to leave behind the patrol officer’s uniform. She had given herself four years in New Orleans to advance to the level of homicide detective. It had taken her two. And she congratulated herself on how far she had distanced herself from her father even though she was now back home in Byrd’s Landing, Louisiana.

  All the while she whistled ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ until Floyd Burns – she would never call him Fire the way all the others did – pixelated into dust in her head.

  She left her apartment and walked out into the brand new morning, the buzzing from the cicadas almost as loud as Buckwheat Zydeco’s accordion. It didn’t occur to her that the hymn she had been whistling to banish Floyd from her mind was one that he had always favored.

  Chapter Two

  Raven pulled her red Mustang up to the iron gate leading to the Big Bayou Lake estate address Billy Ray had given her. The uniformed officer guarding the gate knew her, but he still checked her ID and logged her in before waving her through.

  She followed the driveway for more than a half a mile with nothing but her headlights to guide her. The way was paved, but winding, and for a brief second Raven imagined herself lost in the pressing darkness of a predawn morning. She focused on what she knew about this part of town. She had been in the neighborhood before but never to this address. If she had her bearings straight, the lake would be visible from the back of the house at the end of the driveway. She had spent many childhood days on the shores of Big Bayou, and remembered the strands of Spanish moss trailing from cypress trees rising out of the flat water.

  As she rounded the next bend, light coming from a massive brick house spread over her. Every window blazed with light. Someone, most likely the responding officer, had staked police tape all around the immense front lawn to delineate the crime scene. A double row of orange cones led to the back gate. The coroner’s blue van was in the circular driveway, both back doors opened wide. A thin woman in work boots and a windbreaker peered inside. The only other vehicle was the department’s lone, antiquated CSI van. Vehicles from the Byrd’s Landing PD were parallel parked across the street from the residence. Raven slid the Mustang behind her partner Billy Ray’s ’67 Buick Skylark.

  As she stepped from the car, her head filled with the constant hum she always experienced when entering a fresh crime scene. Her senses were on fire, ablaze with the yellow light coming from the house. The brackish smell wafting from the lake and the heat of the July morning darkness caressing her face made her feel as if she were all nerve endings. All cop now, nothing about the scene escaped her. She considered the cones leading to the back gate, and surmised that the primary scene with the body was on the other side of the redwood fence. She noted the boundaries of the crime scene – at least in the front yard – and didn’t think that she would have expanded it any wider. The people on scene were all from the department. No civilians – not unusual for this time so early in the morning. She looked to the right and left of the house. Even the closest neighbor would not have been close enough to witness the murder.

  “I’m guessing the chief isn’t here?” Raven asked Billy Ray, who was walking across the paved road toward her with long, purposeful strides.

  “No,” Billy Ray answered. “It’s just you and me, baby. I was the highest ranking on scene until you decided to grace us with your presence.”

  She looked at him then. Billy Ray was a tall man, about six four with rich, dark brown skin and features that were model-perfect. At first glance, he looked as wholesome as homemade ice cream, but he had searing brown eyes that could cleave a person in two. His intense gaze gave him a dangerous air. Raven often wondered if his fondness for bowling shirts and expensive pork pie hats, the one he had on now pushed back on his head, were Billy Ray’s attempts to appear less edgy.

  He had been her partner in New Orleans before she answered the chief’s call to come back home to Byrd’s Landing. But the town was more than she could handle alone. With one phone call from her, Billy Ray was by her side once again.

  “You ready for the walk-through?” she asked.

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” he answered.

  She cocked her head toward him as he began. “The sister found the body, female, around midnight and alerted the father. He goes out and checks before calling 911. Officers Hardy and Vernell responded.” He waved his hand toward the back gate, where a lone officer guarded the entrance.

  “Where’s Officer Vernell?” she asked.

  “Got her sitting with the family, making sure they don’t talk to each other before we can get their statements. Not enough uniforms on scene to guard each one of them in a separate location. Didn’t have the heart to put them in separate squad cars.”

  “Sister and father touch anything?” she asked.

  “Said they didn’t,” Billy Ray answered. “Said they knew she was dead by the way she was lying there. I think they were too scared to touch her.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Wait till you see,” was all he said.

  “Witnesses aside from the father and sister?” she asked.

 
“Maybe about three dozen or so but clueless as hell and they ain’t here,” he said. “They were having a Fourth of July barbecue, fireworks, lots of booze, the whole nine yards. By the time the sister found the body, everybody had jetted.”

  “What was the sister doing out at midnight?” Raven asked.

  “Said she couldn’t sleep. My guess is she was smoking something. Girl seems high as hell.”

  Raven nodded as Billy Ray went on. As she listened to his voice, which was both rhythmic and deep, she remembered when they became partners back in New Orleans. During their first week together, she had taken Billy Ray to dinner at the creole restaurant Dooky Chase. She winced at the impact to her cop’s salary, but thought it was worth it to take him some place where they were unlikely to run into other cops. Besides, she had heard through the grapevine that Billy Ray liked to cook, and she was looking to score some brownie points. Dooky Chase was so famous for its food that it was once frequented by lions of the Civil Rights Movement. Everyone from Thurgood Marshall to Martin Luther King had been there. Even Barack Obama had sat at one of the tables with a bowl of gumbo in front of him. She thought herself lucky as hell to even get a reservation.

  Over her double cut pork chops, and Billy Ray’s redfish and eggplant, she said, “My father was the serial killer Floyd Burns, but you probably already know that. I watched him kill my mother. I was only five, don’t remember much. And if it wasn’t for the police reports that I’ve looked at since, sometimes I’d even question if it were real.”

  She watched him. He brought the rim of his beer glass to his lips, opened his mouth and emptied most of the contents down his throat. Raven went on. “I’m telling you this because there has to be an understanding between you and me. My other partner was so scared of me I couldn’t walk in the room without him jumping out of his skin. It was annoying as hell. I need to know if you are going to be that way, because if you are, you probably want to ask the chief to hook you up with somebody else.”