By the time they arrived, the PFD had extinguished the fire. The acrid smell of burning vinyl and immolated flesh hung upon the already humid summer air, steaming the entire block with a thick redolence of unnatural death. The car was a blackened husk; the front tires were melted into the asphalt.
As they got closer, Jessica and Byrne could see that the figure behind the wheel was charred beyond recognition, its flesh still smoldering. The corpse's hands were fused to the steering wheel. The blackened skull offered two empty caves where eyes once were. Smoke and greasy vapor rose from seared bone.
Four sector cars ringed the crime scene. A handful of uniformed officers directed traffic, kept the growing crowd away.
The arson unit would tell them exactly what happened here eventually, at least in the physical sense. When the fire started. How the fire started. Whether an accelerant was used. The psychological canvas on which this had all been painted was going to take a lot longer to profile and analyze.
Byrne considered the boarded-up structure before him. He recalled the last time he had come here, the night they had found Angelika Butler's body in the ladies' room. He had been a different man then. He recalled how he and Phil Kessler had pulled into the lot, parking just about where Nigel Butler's ruined shell of a car stood now. The man who had found the body-a homeless man who had teetered between running, in case he would be implicated, and staying, in case there was some sort of reward-had nervously pointed to the ladies' room. Within minutes they had determined that this was probably just another overdose, another young life thrown to the wind.
Although he couldn't swear to it, Byrne would bet that he had slept well that night. The thought made him sick to his stomach.
Angelika Butler had deserved every bit of his attention, just like Gra- cie Devlin. He had let Angelika down.