Firebug: A Short Story Read online

  “How does someone force a firefly down another person’s throat?”

  “He binds their wrists and ankles behind them with barbed wire and wraps it around their jaws so they can’t close their mouths.”

  IV

  Yesterday

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  July 26th

  Behrent sat on the foot of the bed in her room and stared at the patchwork of maps affixed to the wall above the small writing desk. They depicted the American Southwest, from Southern California through New Mexico and Arizona, and north into Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Dozens of locations were marked with colored pushpins, beside which notes, names, and dates had been scribbled. Once she developed this system, the pattern jumped right out and bit her. Each pin represented an individual death matching her profile: asphyxiation by smoke and fourth-degree burns of a red-haired female in her twenties to early thirties, and each color corresponded to a different season. A blue pin indicated the victim had died during the winter; green during the spring; yellow during the summer; and red during the autumn. Each color was clustered geographically. Blue pins lined the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles. Green pins traced a line from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City. Yellow pins stretched from Denver to Santa Fe and red pins traversed the route from Las Cruces to Phoenix. And each and every one of those pins represented a different year, a single death by fire in each location every year, so few as not to stand out as a statistical anomaly, but more than enough to draw a direct correlation, if you knew what you were looking for.

  One victim for each season in an annual cycle that started on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains in the summer, headed west through the Sonoran Desert in the fall, followed the Pacific coast in the winter, and completed the circle through the Mojave in the spring.

  For six consecutive years.

  And no one might ever have made the connection had the man she had come to think of as the Firebug not incinerated a twenty-seven year-old high school teacher in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her name was Amelia Behrent and her older sister, a Special Agent working out of the field office in Denver, had dismissed her concerns that someone was stalking her three days earlier in what would be the last conversation they ever had.

  That was thirteen months ago now, in what would come to be known as the worst summer for wildfires in the history of Colorado after a blaze a month later destroyed more than one hundred and fifty homes, forced the evacuation of more than ten thousand residents, and claimed the lives of a married couple, whose remains were found in a closet where they apparently took refuge in an attempt to flee the smoke.

  It was in Amelia’s mouth—her little sister’s burnt mouth—that the presence of the lucibufagin toxin was first discovered. From the subsequent pathological assays, it was determined that the specific toxin was endemic to one particular species of firefly, Luciolinae luciola. A firefly native to Japan. One that had never been encountered on either the North or South American continent. One that could never have found its way into her sister’s mouth had someone not forced it inside.

  The Japanese firefly averaged approximately an inch in length; however, based on the thin lacerations in the soft tissue, the one that had been inside her sister’s oropharynx was closer to two inches, presumably as the result of generations of selective captive breeding. Its lantern glowed an almost fluorescent green, and in traditional Japanese lore, represented the vessel in which the souls of the dead traveled.

  The monster who murdered Amelia believed he was capturing the souls of his victims inside the fireflies and then incinerating every trace of evidence.

  Or so he thought.

  Behrent had discovered his modus operandi and had been hunting him ever since, coming closer to him with each passing season. She was slowly getting inside his head, gaining an understanding of how his mind worked, an appreciation for how he selected his victims. She’d studied the final days of each and every one of his victims in as much detail as she could find. They were all single and tended to live a more reclusive lifestyle. They were all routine-oriented, from shopping at the same grocery store on the same day to filling at the same gas station to taking the same routes to and from work at the same times every day. Theirs was a lifestyle of predictability, one that made them easy prey.

  That was why Behrent rented this house two months ago, why she’d adopted a fictitious life of her own careful design. She’d gone to great lengths to make herself the most accessible target possible. The house was in an area known as Woodmen Valley, which featured homes on large lots surrounded by a vast wilderness of pines and aspens. The only way in or out of the development by vehicle was through a bottleneck granting ready access to I-25, the main thoroughfare from Denver to Santa Fe, while one could approach invisibly on foot through the dense forest by merely straying from the public recreational trail or the railroad tracks to the east, walking overland from the Air Force Academy to the north, or wending through the newer neighborhoods to the west. She stopped at the same coffee shop at the same time every morning, drove the same stretch of highway across town to the same park where she walked around the same lake before heading to the same ground floor office where she worked at a computer in front of a window through which anyone passing her on the street could see her. She walked to lunch at the same sandwich shop at the same time every day, one clearly visible from two major downtown intersections and the highway, and drove home along the same stretch of highway at the same time, stopping only long enough at the same grocery store to shop for her evening meal, which she made in a kitchen surrounded by windows. As she had every day for the last two months.

  The house had a security system that featured views from four exterior cameras she could watch on her laptop day and night, as could the agents posted in another rental house three blocks away. The same agents took turns following her to work in different vehicles and spent their days surveilling her leased office space from another unit on the fourth floor, while she watched the same feeds on her computer and pretended to be an accountant. It was a tedious routine that became more frustrating with the passage of each uneventful day. The only thing keeping her going was the relief from opening the morning paper and discovering that there had been no fire-related fatalities in his summer hunting grounds.

  She set her laptop on the nightstand beside her bed and tilted the screen so she could clearly see it with her head on the pillow. Each of the four quadrants showed the same thing they did every night: aspen trees with leaves that shivered in the breeze, pines with swaying boughs, wavering waist-high weeds, clusters of scrub oak, and the seemingly sentient shadows lurking beneath and inside them. She picked up the two-way, battery-powered transceiver from beside it and brought it to her lips.

  “Ten o’clock guys,” she said. “You know what that means.”

  “You got everything locked down for sure?” Special Agent Troy Abrams asked from three blocks away, where he watched the same feeds. His partner, SA Warren Young, took the first shift sleeping.

  “Crap. I thought you guys were going to lock up.”

  “That gets funnier every night, Behrent. Anything to report? We’re still tracking the same commuter vehicles on this end, but so far they all check out. Just ordinary folks going to and from work at the same time as you. And no one out and about in the neighborhood. You see anything we’re missing?”

  “Today was the second day in a row there was a jogger at the lake who—”

  “Davis Peele. He’s a solar engineer for Excel. Nothing about him stands out.”

  “And the guy at the coffee shop?”

  “Neal Alpert. Mortgage broker. Removes his wedding ring in his car every morning before going in. I think he’s sweet on you.”

  “Wonderful. Anything on your end?”

  “All’s quiet on the western front.”

  “Do me a favor. See if you can put together a database of car and foot traffic by day of the week. I want to see if there are any patterns there that we might not
have recognized.”

  “We’ll see what we can do. You want any company up there tonight?”

  “That gets funnier every night, Abrams.”

  “Get some sleep, princess. Tomorrow promises to be another day like every other.”

  “One of these days it won’t be.”

  Behrent set the transceiver back on the nightstand. She watched the security cameras around her house and thought about her little sister until sleep finally took her.

  V

  Nine Months Ago

  Tucson, Arizona

  October 14th

  Behrent clicked on her flashlight and stepped across the threshold where once the front door of the small stucco house had stood. Broken ceramic tiles crunched underfoot. The floorboards were still soft from the sheer quantity of water they’d absorbed. The plaster of the walls had been consumed, exposing the burnt skeletal framework through which she could see the blackened appliances in the kitchen, the remains of the furniture in the living room, the tiled bathroom, and the nearly unidentifiable furniture in the bedroom. Firefighters had found the victim, a twenty-six year-old leasing agent named Ashley Freeman, in the walk-in closet, where she appeared to have been trapped by a fire that originated in the kitchen.

  All that was left of the closet now was a soggy mess of the burnt contents of the fallen shelves toward the rear. She nudged through them with the toe of her shoe. She didn’t know what she hoped to accomplish by coming out here. Maybe a part of her hoped she might stumble upon something the firemen and the fire inspector missed. She knew deep down, though, that if anything had ever been here, if the fire hadn’t destroyed it, then the high-pressure hoses had. Or maybe she just needed the right setting to put her in the proper frame of mind to contemplate the profile Behavioral had generated for her.

  Their unknown subject was a Caucasian male in his mid- to late-thirties. There was nothing extraordinary about his appearance, one way or the other. He would have stood apart from the crowd while stalking them if he was anything other than unexceptional, which excluded his having red hair himself. He was of average height and unthreatening build, and above-average intellect. His was a white-collar job that required significant travel or lengthy periods of relocation. Behrent had initially suspected a trucker or someone in the interstate shipping business as his hunting grounds followed the course of the major highway routes: I-5 up the coast of California, I-15 and I-70 through Nevada and Utah, I-25 from Colorado to New Mexico, and I-10 and I-8 back through Arizona to Los Angeles, each chosen by the season when a death by fire would be least likely to stand out and betray his pattern.

  The sadistic nature of the barbed wire bondage suggested both sexual and emotional dysfunction. Binding their wrists and ankles behind their backs was meant to make them feel utterly helpless; his way of demonstrating his control over them when he believed he was in control of so little else in his life. The barbed wire itself was more than a means of ensuring they wouldn’t be able to move or close their mouths, it was to deliberately inflict the greatest amount of pain on a category of victim that represented a female in his life who had wronged him in some way. An ex-lover or object of his affections who spurned his advances. A person in a position of trust from his childhood who abused that relationship, possibly a teacher or family friend. Someone who manipulated his emotions and made him feel physically inadequate.

  Maybe it was that association that had drawn him subconsciously to fire in the first place, a correlation between the red hair and the flames or its indomitable will and that of the person who imposed hers upon him.

  It was that fascination with fire that stood out most. Something about its destructive and irresistible nature spoke to him on a primal level. Perhaps it was the way that fire killed in an almost merciful manner before violently consuming its victims; a dichotomous aspect of its nature that reminded him of himself. He knew it intimately, respected it to a degree that could almost be classified as worship. And he understood its actions under various environmental conditions and how to control it to such a degree as to make its origin appear accidental, how to bend the flames to his will. The profile suggested his affinity dawned at an early age and he’d chosen a career path that allowed him to work with it from a distance, in potentially some form of research or investigatory capacity, some job that allowed him to further develop his relationship with it, to hone his ability to control it, rather than putting him in a position of having to destroy it. On some level he resented and abhorred firefighters, which would make him want to spend as little time in their presence as possible and his interactions with them strained, if not downright hostile.

  And then there were the fireflies, which he had somehow romanticized. Theirs was a fire of their own creation that they could turn on and off at will, one that could only be extinguished in death, one that it used to attract its most suitable mate. Perhaps that was what he was trying to do on some level, attempting to win over the woman who rebuked him or to catch the eye of the one who never noticed him. Or maybe he really believed he was capturing the souls of his victims inside their abdominal lanterns. Whatever the case, his use of the Japanese species reflected a westernized, literal interpretation of the mythology that suggested his knowledge came from books rather than from firsthand experience.

  Yet none of that knowledge brought Behrent any closer to finding the man who murdered her sister.

  She kicked the moldering pile of debris and screamed in frustration.

  A light snapped on in the window of the house next door. Its fence was scored with carbon and the bushes lining it were brown and wilted.

  She clicked off her flashlight and stared up into the night sky. The stars made her feel even more insignificant than she already felt. She’d discounted her sister’s fears and allowed her to be killed and then let another innocent woman die because she couldn’t catch the man who did it. At this point, she didn’t even know where to begin. He’d been doing this for so long now that he had it down to a science and she had only just figured out that he existed at all.

  Behrent stepped out of the scorched wooden framework of the closet, no better off than she’d been when she arrived. She caught movement from the back yard.

  Stopped.

  Her right hand found the butt of her Glock.

  At first she thought she’d seen flashlights at a distance, but that couldn’t possibly be the case with the fence less than thirty feet away. She walked across the cracked pavestones and the flooded ornamental rock garden to where a half-dozen blinking golden lights swirled around a bird fountain.

  It was the same kind she and her sister used to catch when they were children. They hadn’t called them fireflies in Colorado back then.

  They’d called them firebugs.

  VI

  Today

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  July 27th

  Behrent surreptitiously watched the passersby on the sidewalk over her computer monitor. She recognized the regulars by now, but not well enough to feel confident that one of them wasn’t her guy. Even the dogs they walked could be props. In a neighborhood like this, a man fitting the Firebug’s profile would blend in just about perfectly. Assuming she’d even done enough to attract his attention. And there was still the chance that after spending so much time stalking her sister he’d recognized her right off the bat. She and Amelia hadn’t looked as similar as a lot of sisters she knew, but they did look enough alike that there was no mistaking the resemblance if they stood side-by-side.

  Amelia.

  There were so many things Behrent wished she’d done differently. So many things she wished she’d had the chance to say. Most of all, she wished she could hear her sister’s voice, her laugh, if only one last time. All she could do now was make sure that this monster didn’t kill again, and even that was starting to feel like a hopeless proposition.

  She’d gone through every case file so many times she could almost recite them by heart. She knew the names of all twenty-three o
f his victims, knew nearly as much about them as their mothers did. There was nothing to link them together outside of their physical similarities and their geographical locations. She’d pulled on every possible string she could think to pull, from first boyfriends to jilted lovers to coworkers and neighbors with criminal records. She’d looked into nearly every interstate sales and distribution firm and thousands of their employees. She’d beaten her head against every possible wall in hopes of making the breakthrough that eluded her. If she hadn’t done enough to attract him, then he was just going to keep on killing until she figured out another way to stop him. And the blame for every death hereafter would fall squarely on her shoulders.

  This was her best chance and she knew it. If he’d seen her here and then saw her three months from now outside of Phoenix, he’d make her in a heartbeat. And if he went to ground, there would be nothing they could do about it until he popped back up on their radar.

  If he ever did.

  He was nothing if not patient, which in many ways marked him as unique among serial killers. Most enjoyed periods of escalation, during which their bloodlust became so insatiable they accelerated their timetables and took risks they might not ordinarily take. This was when they were most likely to be caught. Yet not once had her unsub—unknown subject—given in to his primal urges and broken from his pattern. Not once had he taken a victim out of season. His restraint bordered on superhuman. To think that not once had he slipped...

  Behrent tapped her fingernails on her desk as she stared out the window. A woman in spandex jogged past behind a stroller.

  What if he had slipped and they simply hadn’t noticed?