1 Death Warmed Over Read online

  “Huh?”

  “Elliot’s knowledge would be invaluable to us in our investigation.” He seemed more to be talking out loud than answering Becca’s questions.

  “Okay, stop.” She wasn’t entirely sure when her interrogation had taken a left turn into the Twilight Zone, but she needed to put a stop to it now. “First all, I believe I’ve already caught the killer. No more investigation needed. Second, Elliot Newman is dead. I don’t think he’d be much help to us even if there was more to investigate.”

  “No, I really do think Elliot would be most useful indeed,” he said, ignoring her argument. “Perfect, in fact.”

  “Mr. Mot, let’s get back to the matter at hand.” She slammed her palm down on the table, breaking him from his reverie. He looked up at her, smiled, and gestured for her to continue.

  This is getting us nowhere. Time to switch gears.

  “So, we did what you asked,” she told him. “We checked the blood on our victim.”

  “I’m delighted. What did you discover?”

  “Don’t you know? After all, you’re the one who pointed it out to us.”

  The man shrugged. “I just knew it was off. Wasn’t sure how.”

  “Well, let’s talk about those markings written in the blood. Those symbols.”

  He waved the comment away. “Forget those. They were left as a misdirection. Someone wanted to give us the impression that this was ritualistic in nature. The candles prove that. There’s no way those candles could have been used in any kind of magical ceremony. Therefore, the magical glyphs mean nothing.”

  She blinked at him, trying to find anything that would challenge his assessment. But now that he’d brought it up, he made perfect sense.

  “But how did you know the ‘blood was off’, as you keep putting it?”

  “I don’t know. It just smelled different to me. And of course, the way it pooled wasn’t consistent with her position. I figured it had been placed there after she was already dead.”

  Smelled off? Huh?

  “Well, you were right. It wasn’t even human blood.”

  “Oh, then that explains the smell. Humans have such disgusting dietary habits. It affects the odor that comes from their body. Through their pores. And, yes, from their blood. It’s quite distinctive.” His smile faded for a bit as he looked back at her. “Their diet. I swear. It almost seems like their food choices are what keeps me the busiest in my line of work.”

  Humans? Their? Did this guy really think he was the Grim Reaper? Like literally the personification of Death? She scratched her head while gazing across the table at him. Seriously, Becca, don’t let this guy get to you. He’s playing some kind of game.

  “So, if it wasn’t human blood, what kind of blood was it?” Becca refused to get sidetracked. She was in control here and she needed to remind her suspect of that.

  “How on earth should I know? I’m not a hematologist.”

  “Look!” She jumped from her chair and came around the table to glare at him. “Could you just give me some straight answers, please?”

  His eyes widened at the outburst, then he relaxed again and leaned back in the chair. “Could you please stop wasting my time then?” he answered back. He remained calm, but his demeanor had turned serious. “I’ve already told you, I’m not your killer. As a matter of fact, I’m trying to find the killer myself. That’s why I called you to begin with. I needed your assistance in my investigation.”

  “‘My’ investigation? What do you mean ‘my’…”

  There was a soft triple-tap knock at the door and Sergeant Tanner cracked it open without waiting for Becca to respond.

  “Chief?” he said, holding up a file. She walked over to him and took it. “There weren’t any fingerprint matches to our suspect.” He paused, letting his head tilt to one side. “Well, that ain’t necessarily true.” He handed her a file. It was much thicker than Becca would have expected. “There were nearly ten thousand matches. And AFIS isn’t finished processing yet. It’s still finding more. This case is getting weirder and weirder by the minute.”

  She opened the file and flipped through the pages. As she did, she felt her heart thump against her chest and a lump swell in her throat. Weirder and weirder, indeed. She glanced back at her suspect, who’d already put his feet back up on the table and crossed his arms with an amused expression on his face.

  “Thanks, Jeremy.” She closed the door and returned to the table.

  “Boy, you should see the look on your face right now,” the man said.

  She gritted her teeth. His unflappable nonchalance was starting to get to her.

  “Well, Mr. Mot, it seems your fingerprints have broken the national fingerprint database.” She tried to swallow, but her throat was now almost too dry to do so.

  “Really? That’s quite intriguing.”

  “Ten thousand hits on your fingerprints and still counting,” she said. “How did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Whatever it is you did to AFIS. I highly doubt one of your names is Harisho Naguni.” She flipped through the stack of fingerprint matches.

  “You might be surprised. I’ve lots of names.”

  She ignored his comment. “Or Sergei Kersov. Or Brad Pitt!”

  He chuckled at this.

  “I really loved him in Meet Joe Black.”

  Becca pinched at the bridge of her nose. This guy was starting to give her a real headache.

  “This is all a big joke to you, isn’t it?”

  His face darkened. “On the contrary. I take this affair far more seriously than you can possibly imagine. The scales of balance are teetering on the edge of oblivion and all humanity is doomed unless we can stop it.”

  Her mouth dropped. She was dealing with a nut job. A certifiable crazy person.

  “No, Chief Cole, I’m not insane,” Silas Mot said as if reading her mind. There was another knock on the door. He pointed to it. “That’ll be a phone call. For you, if I’m not mistaken.”

  A second later, Linda poked her head into the interrogation room. Her face was ashen, as if someone had just stepped over her own grave. “Sorry to interrupt, Chief, but…but you have a phone call.” The office manager glanced over at Silas. “It’s about our suspect.”

  “Can it wait?” Becca asked. “Who is it?”

  Linda cleared her throat. “Um, it’s the governor. And he says he needs to speak to you immediately about Mr. Mot.”

  4

  Ten minutes later, Becca Cole opened the door to the interrogation room and looked at Silas Mot.

  “You’re free to go,” she said, gritting her teeth. Her face felt numb as the words oozed from her lips. The governor, however, had made himself very clear: the strange man was not Alvarez’s killer. In fact, Silas was supposedly on assignment by the governor himself to investigate hers and the other ‘strange’ deaths in the area that he’d alluded to during the interrogation. To make things even more bleak, the governor had even insisted that Chief Cole and the Summer Haven Police Department should do whatever they could to accommodate him. In other words, they were to assist him in his investigation.

  “Excellent!” He jumped up from his chair with a clap of his hands and strolled past Becca into the station’s bullpen. “Now, it’s time to get started on the real investigation.” He spun around on his heels, offered her a slight bow, and looked up at her. “Where exactly should we start?”

  “You don’t really expect me to work with you on this, do you?”

  Silas cocked his head. “Is that not what the governor told you to do?”

  “Yeah, but he couldn’t have been serious. You’re…you’re…”

  “I’m what?”

  “Crazy. Plain and simple…you’re insane.” Becca moved past him, walking toward her office. She hoped he’d take the hint and just go away. “Which means you’re a liability. Any court gets wind of your delusions and they’ll throw the case out faster than you could spit.”

  “But the gov
ernor said…”

  “I don’t care what the governor said. I’m going to figure a way around it. Something.” She stepped into her office. Realizing the discussion wasn’t over, she waited for him to enter before she closed the door. “Maybe I can find the president’s phone number around here somewhere. Someone higher up.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Silas said. His charming little grin was back. “I’m pretty high up on the food chain myself.”

  “No, you’re insane. No matter what you think, you’re not Death.” She reached into the candy jar on her desk and popped a Lifesaver in her mouth. “Like I said, in—sane.”

  “Can’t I be both?” He laughed. “But here’s the way I see it. While we argue about this, your case is growing cold.” He nodded over to the blinds covering her office window. “The sun is now up. People are heading to work. Your killer is out there somewhere, mingling among the law-abiding citizens. Perhaps, awaiting their next target to kill.”

  Becca found herself suddenly exhausted. Back when she’d worked in Jacksonville—in a real metropolitan police department—cases like this would never happen. Sure, there were always lunatics that thought they were Edgar Allen Poe or Jesus, but they never insinuated themselves into her investigations like Silas was trying to do.

  The city was much classier that way.

  On top of it all, when she’d worked Jacksonville, she hadn’t been nearly as sleep deprived. Back then, she’d only been a cog in the greater machine. Others were there to take up some slack. She was afforded a little rest when she’d been out all night at a murder scene. She had partners to carry some of the burden of her investigation for her. So, she was typically much better equipped to handle mental hurdles like the one that was being thrown at her right now.

  But here, in tiny little Summer Haven with its population of maybe six thousand people—not including the snowbirds that popped down here every winter—she was it. Yes, she had her patrol guys, but most of them were so new their shoes hadn’t even been broken in yet. And the few veterans she had, like Sergeant Tanner, had never worked any real homicides before. Those kinds of cases had always been handled by the county’s sheriff’s office. She’d put a stop to that the moment she took over the department after her father, the former chief of police, had passed away.

  Now, she found herself wondering if that had been a mistake. It certainly would be nice to pass the buck—and the lunacy she was now having to deal with—onto Sheriff Tolbert and his major crimes unit right about now.

  Silas raised his left arm and tapped on his watch. “Tick-tock, Chief. Tick-tock.”

  She glared at him for a moment before looking up at the wall above the door where her father’s old school clock hung. Eight-forty. She sighed. The crazy man was right. Time was ticking away and her case was getting cold. She could sleep when she was dead. Heck, Silas Mot could even maybe help with that one day soon. For now, she had a killer to find and she no longer believed it was Silas who’d done Andrea Alvarez in. It was someone else. Someone out there in her quaint little beach town. And she was determined to find out just who it was…whether she employed Mot’s assistance or not.

  She sighed. “Okay,” she said, holding up her index finger. “But you have to answer something for me before we go.”

  “Ask away.” He now stared, as if mesmerized, at the colorful candy jar filled with individually wrapped Lifesavers. “Anything you want to know.”

  “Who are you? I mean, really?”

  He reached a hand into the jar, opened up the plastic wrapper of a green-colored candy, and popped it in his mouth. His lips instantly puckered and his eyes squeezed tight. “Ooooh, that’s sour!”

  “You got one of my Warheads.”

  “I like it!” He sucked on the hard candy for a moment before looking back at her. “As to your question, I’ve already told you.”

  “Tell me again. Maybe it’ll make more sense the second time around.”

  He puckered up again and shook his head as another burst of sour exploded in his mouth. “Aaaah! That’s good stuff.”

  “Who are you…really, Mr. Mot?”

  His face suddenly grew serious, then he shrugged. “I really am who I said I am. I’m Death.”

  “See? That’s where you lost me the last time.”

  He thumbed his chest. “I’m Death. Black cloak and scythe knocking on people’s doors in the dead of night, taking the souls of the dying.” He reached into the jar, grabbed a handful of the Warheads, being sure to throw out the more mundane candies like Lifesavers, and stuffed them in his blazer pockets. “The whole bit. It’s me. It’s what I do.”

  She began to smile, then thought better of it. He wasn’t joking.

  “But that’s not possible. The Grim Reaper…it’s a myth. A tale told during the medieval period to scare royal subjects into submission.”

  “Actually, that’s not historically accurate, but close enough. But I can assure you, I’m no myth.” He crossed his legs, placing his arm up on the back of his chair to relax. “Look, every religion in the world—from the smallest, unheard of cults to the ancient Egyptians and Mayans, all the way up to modern Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. They all talk about me as if I’m real. Now could all those people be wrong?”

  She stared at him. “I…um…”

  “Look, you don’t have to believe me. I’m good with that. For now, I’m simply Silas Mot,” he said, getting up from the office chair and patting his candy-laden pocket with the palm of his hand. “You can just think of me as Silas if it’d make you feel better.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel any better,” she said, rising from her own chair. “I thought you were messing with me before. Now I just think you’re certifiable.” She cocked her head. “What I don’t get is how you got the actual governor of Florida to join your little delusion.”

  “Oh, that’s easy. I visited him this morning when I left my jail cell. Had a little chat with him.” His grin now could only be described as sinister. “Did him a favor a few years back. Put a little more time on his clock, if you know what I mean. He was very grateful.”

  Becca shook her head. “No way. I still have no idea how you got out of the cell, but Tallahassee is at least a six-hour drive from here. Another six back. No way you had time to…”

  “Hello?” He pointed at his face with both index fingers. “Death! Don’t exactly need conventional means of travel here.”

  “Uh-uh. No. I’m not buying it.”

  Silas walked over to her office door and opened it. “Doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we have a murderer to catch and the trail’s not getting any warmer. I hate to pull rank here, Chief, but you’ve been given your marching orders and it’d be a very bad career move on your part to disobey your state’s own governor.” He gestured to the open door, ushering her out. “Now wouldn’t it.”

  She bit down on her lip, searching for an argument that would get her out of this fiasco. But there wasn’t one. She was trapped. She was being forced to investigate a homicide with a deranged maniac who believed he was the incarnate form of Death and there was nothing she could do about it short of resigning her hard-fought position here as police chief.

  She squared off against the man who was about to ruin her life—if not end it altogether—and glared. She’d do this, but she wasn’t about to give Silas the satisfaction of showing any more concern for his madness.

  “Fine,” she said, walking out her office door and making her way to the parking lot. “But I’m driving.”

  5

  SAND CASTLE CONDOMINIUMS

  WEDNESDAY, 8:30 AM

  They made their way down State Road A1A, heading toward Andrea Alvarez’s apartment, in complete silence. Becca was still stewing over her situation, pondering every dwindling proposition she could think of to extricate herself and her agency from the investigation.

  Maybe it’s the work of a serial killer, she fantasized. The FBI would take jurisdiction if it was a serial killer.

 
Silas, for his part, kept his gaze fixed out the passenger window, watching the beach front scenery race by. Periodically, he would whistle or ‘ooooh’ when something particularly breathtaking would come into view. In many ways, he was almost childlike in his awe of the natural world.

  Heck, we don’t even know it is a murder yet, she continued her whirlwind rationalizations. Autopsy’s not finished yet. We already know the stab wound didn’t kill her. Maybe that was just a coincidence or something and she died from heart failure. Case closed. Mr. Death can be on his merry way.

  After a few minutes, she could take the silence no longer.

  “I’ve got a question,” she said.

  Silas seemed to snap from whatever mental world he’d escaped to and turned to her. “Shoot.”

  “What do you think is going on? I mean with Alvarez’s death. Do you really think it’s a murder or something else?”

  He seemed to think about this for a few moments. “Well, it’s highly suspicious. And I know that these unsanctioned deaths must be done by unnatural causes. Natural deaths—such as heart attacks, cancer, liver failure, those types of things—would all be predetermined and therefore, would be properly sanctioned. So, Ms. Alvarez was definitely killed by something or someone.” He paused for a second. “And the Ebo blade stuck in her back would suggest her death was intentional to some degree.”

  “Ebo blade?”

  He nodded. “It’s a ceremonial knife. Used in the Santeria religion for animal sacrifices.”

  “Oh, that’s just great.”

  Becca was aware of the presence of Santeria throughout Florida. Had even heard recent rumblings about local groups around Summer Haven, but she hadn’t paid it much heed. She had worried more about the influx of heroin and Fentanyl in her town than any group of hoodoo shenanigans and animal sacrifices.

  “Are you thinking Alvarez was some kind of human sacrifice? By these Santeria groups?”

  Silas smiled and shook his head. “Nah. Santeria doesn’t practice human sacrifice. But with the knife and those glyphs written in the blood on her back, I believe we were supposed to think she was.”