Polar (Book 2): Polar Day Page 7

  “So either the sister wasn’t nearly as close to her brother as she thought or this killer isn’t anyone who knew Max,” Tessa said. “I’m thinking the latter.”

  “Yeah,” Danny said, sliding into the passenger seat. “We need to check out that Kris guy though. See if he knows anything the family may not have been aware of.” He grabbed his tablet and brought up the browser. “I’ll find out what station he works out of. With luck we can catch him at work.”

  Tessa nodded and backed out of the Fugate’s driveway. Cassie Fugate stood at the window and watched the detectives leave. When they had, she let the curtain fall back over the window and collapsed into a sobbing heap on the floor of her parents’ living room.

  ****

  Chapter 16

  “Well here we are again, detectives,” Jack Meyer said, sitting in his chair at the head of the conference room table. “I hope we have more going for us by now.”

  “Saw your press conference, boss,” Danny said. “You were born to be on television.”

  “Fuck off, Fitzpatrick. I don’t need your smart mouth today. Or any day for that matter but especially not today.” He waited for Tessa and Danny to take their seats. “What do you know about Max Fugate?”

  “He was gay,” Tessa said.

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “Like Torrance,” he said. “Maybe this is the link we’ve been looking for. What else?”

  “He loved his job at the hospital,” Danny said. “Loved living in Fairbanks and never considered moving anywhere else. He was close to his family and had a new boyfriend named Kris Anderson who works as a paramedic over at the Crest Street station. We just came from talking to him but he couldn’t tell us anything more than what Fugate’s sister already had. We checked in with his colleagues at the hospital too. Everyone says the same thing. Fugate was a nice mild-mannered guy and a great surgeon. Also a good athlete who prided himself on being fit.”

  “You mentioned Torrance looked fit when you saw him running before the fire.”

  Danny nodded. “He did. Ran like an athlete. So they were both gay and they were both athletes. That about sums up what we know as far as any link between the two of them.”

  “I think the gay link is the one worth pursuing,” Tessa said. “Have there been any other attacks on gays recently? Anti-gay activist meetings maybe?”

  Jack shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard about.”

  “Has there been any more from Jennifer Higgins about the letter?”

  “No. There’s nothing on that letter that can help us. She and her boss have agreed to keep it out of the news for now. But they’ll be off and running with our two victims starting tonight. In fact they’ve already got it all over their site.”

  “Well we weren’t going to be able to keep it hidden forever. The exposure might be a good thing anyway. Maybe someone who knows something about one or both of them will see the story and contact us with something that could help us out,” Danny said.

  “Why don’t you two try to see what you can find out about anti-gay groups in the city?” Jack said. “He glanced at the clock on the wall behind his two detectives. “Christ, this has been a long day. That can wait. Go home and get some rest.”

  “Where are we with the cause of the fires, sir?” Danny asked.

  “Rizzo is going over everything again with a fine-toothed comb. He can’t find shit and still doesn’t know how the fire at the game started or what may have been used to set Max Fugate on fire.”

  “You know he’s ready to kill himself, having all this happen right before he’s set to retire,” Tessa said.

  “I know he is and I don’t give a shit. He’s not retired yet and he needs to find something for us to work with.”

  “It might not be his fault, sir,” Danny said. “Maybe whoever is doing this has some way of starting fires we don’t know about yet.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? You think somebody invented a new way to start a fire?”

  “Could be.”

  “Don’t go buying trouble, Fitzpatrick. You don’t think we have enough already? I don’t want to hear any of your whacked out theories.” He held up his hand to silence Danny before he could speak. “And yes I’m aware that your theories turned out to be right up in the Arctic. We’ll all aware. But that doesn’t mean you can pull nonsense out of your ass now.” Jack shook his head. “A new way to start a fire that nobody’s ever heard of? Are you serious with this shit?”

  “Just an idea,” Danny said. “We can’t find any traditional cause so….”

  “So Rizzo will keep working on it and he’ll find a cause soon enough. You two please, just go home and get some rest. You're booked on a flight to Anchorage in the morning so you can meet with Nick Torrance's partner. Maybe for once we'll get lucky and this guy can give us the magic link between Torrance and Fugate. But odds are it’s just going to be yet another shitty day so you might as well get some rest while you can.”

  Danny gave a mock salute as he walked to the door of the conference room. “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said, ducking out of the room before the wadded up ball of paper his boss threw his way could hit him in the head.

  ****

  Chapter 17

  Jamie sat at his desk and impatiently clicked through the local news sites to read all he could about the reactions to his fires. The night shift couldn’t have suited him more since he could now count on even more solitude. He could find out all he wanted to without having to worry about interruptions from his supervisor or colleagues. Everything he was finding out so far was even more entertaining than he expected.

  His victims had both been identified and while the name Max Fugate was nothing new to him the identity of his second victim was intriguing. For one, he couldn't believe his luck that he'd managed to pick a visitor to the city while searching for someone to burn at the baseball game. The fact that Nick Torrance was from Anchorage would surely help confound the police more than he had dared hope. But the truly fun revelation about Nick Torrance was that he was gay.

  Jamie had known Max Fugate was gay when he'd chosen him, as everyone at the hospital did, but that hadn't had anything to do with his selection. He'd merely wanted a jogger who enjoyed jogging at night while relatively few people were around. He’d started following Fugate after he’d been on the same elevator as the surgeon and heard him talking to a colleague about how much he loved jogging in Griffin Park at night. So it was merely a delightful coincidence that Nick Torrance turned out to be gay as well. Jamie loved coincidences. And this unexpected link convinced him even more that his plan was meant to be carried it out.

  To his dismay, there was nothing in the news about his letters. He figured the police would keep their letter under wraps, but he had obviously guessed wrong about Jennifer Higgins. He'd been certain she would jump on the letter and use it for one of her crime features. He wondered how the police had convinced her to keep it to herself. Regardless, he was angry that he'd misjudged her, but that wasn't what he wanted to focus on now. There was too much to be happy about.

  The police were sure to jump on the gay connection between his two victims. Jamie tried to imagine their conversations about the issue and chuckled a bit as he thought of the various detectives and investigators he had seen at the baseball game. He remembered the clueless cop who had questioned him and asked if he’d noticed anything suspicious at the park before the fire started.

  He imagined that cop and his colleagues wondering if Jamie was an anti-gay zealot out to spread his message that homosexuality was a sin. Jamie could have some fun with this. The opportunity was too good to pass up.

  ****

  Chapter 18

  It only took an hour to fly from Fairbanks to Anchorage, but even that short round-trip flight felt like a waste of two hours to Danny. He and Tessa had met with Andrew Cushings and discussed Nick Torrance but found absolutely nothing to link the man to Max Fugate, an outcome which surprised neither of them. They also found nothing in Torrance's pre
sent or past to suggest he had any enemies willing to burn him alive.

  “I don't think our guy even knew Torrance,” Danny said as he cracked his window to blow out smoke from his newly-lit cigarette. A blast of the steamy hot air outside the car greeted him immediately. He hated opening the window when he had the air conditioning on full-blast, but he knew Tessa hated the cigarette smoke. She wouldn't let him smoke in her car and he actually felt guilty about smoking now while she was in his, but after the irritation of the airport he needed a cigarette.

  “I don't think so either,” Tessa said, wrinkling her nose. “Why the hell did you have to take up smoking just when you became my partner?”

  “I actually took it back up before I became your partner. You're the one who kept saying I needed to cut back on my drinking. And I did. But I need some kind of vice. Come on.”

  “If you quit smoking once before you can do it again.”

  “I quit because Caroline hated it and I wanted to marry her more than I wanted to keep smoking.” Danny inhaled a long drag from the cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. “But she's not around to care anymore, is she?”

  “She'd be disappointed if she was, I'm sure.”

  “I can't worry all that much about disappointing dead people. Let's get back to Torrance,” Danny said. “You know if there's one thing I hate talking about it's Caroline.”

  Tessa thought to herself that as far as she could tell there were plenty of things Danny hated talking about beyond his murdered wife, including everything about his previous life in Chicago. Not to mention his near murder at the hands of Aleksei Nechayev. And Nechayev himself, for that matter. Danny had consistently clammed up at even the mention of his name ever since his rescue from Nechayev's Arctic house of horrors.

  “Earth to Tessa.”

  Tessa heard her partner's voice and turned to look at him. “Sorry. I was just lost in thought for a minute I guess.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “How Nick Torrance was a victim of colossal bad luck. This is the worst case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time I've ever seen,” Tessa said, lying.

  “Yeah, I agree there.” Danny paused as he waited for the red light in front of him to turn green. “You think the killer knew Max Fugate?”

  “Possible. I wouldn't be surprised. You?”

  “My gut tells me he did,” Danny said. “But I have nothing but my gut to back that up. I just feel like he started with someone he knew and was watching. Then he moved on to a random stranger for his big coming out party.”

  “I have the same feeling.”

  “So what now?” Danny asked.

  “There's still the gay link.”

  “Yeah.” Danny glanced at the clock on his dashboard. In spite of what felt like days in the airport, it was still only 2:00 in the afternoon. “You want to go check out that reverend with the church that has its members standing on street corners carrying signs about gays burning in hell? What's his name again?

  “Richard Phillips.”

  “Right. From all I read he’s a real fire and brimstone kind of guy and he hates gays above all else. Why don't we run by his church and see if he's available to chat with us?”

  “I guess so. But this whole line of thinking doesn’t ring true to me.”

  “Honestly I don’t disagree with you. It’s shoddy police work and we’re grasping at a very thin straw.”

  “If we’re operating on the assumption that Nick Torrance was a stranger to our killer then how would he have known the man was gay? It doesn’t add up.”

  “It doesn’t. But maybe we’re wrong that Torrance was a stranger. And besides, we don’t have anything else, do we?”

  Tessa shrugged. “True enough. You know where the church is?”

  “I know it's on Merrill Street. But if you're asking if I know how to get there I know you're being a smartass.”

  Tessa laughed. “I admit it, I am. But I think you should know your way around our city better by now.”

  “Why when I've got your as my personal GPS? Tell me where to go. And I don't mean hell.”

  Tessa chuckled again and gestured towards the windshield. “Turn left at the light,” she said. “It's only about ten minutes from here.”

  “Great. I can't wait to meet the Reverend Phillips.”

  ****

  Chapter 19

  The Reverend Richard Phillips slumped in his chair at his New Church of God office and groaned at the stack of paperwork in front of him on his desk. Getting a new church up and running was a time-consuming endeavor and he longed for enough funding to hire an assistant. But that wasn’t going to happen for quite a while at this rate, so for now he needed to keep trudging along himself. At least he had a volunteer willing to work as his secretary. He wondered how long Linda would be willing to do that but quickly pushed the thought from his mind. No need to borrow trouble.

  He’d left Seward back in March and decided to move his church here to Fairbanks instead. He wanted to minister in a bigger city and the frontier atmosphere of Fairbanks appealed to him. It felt like the last stop in civilization before the long trek to the Arctic. His goal was the same as it has always been. He wanted to improve upon that civilization and convert others to his cause.

  Phillips had come of age during the era of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and had been inspired by the melding of religion and politics during the Reagan years. He believed strongly that the country had lost its way in the decades since and that religion needed a more prominent voice in politics. While he did not condone violence and felt a policy of civil disobedience was the best way to achieve his goals, he also didn’t believe in rolling over and letting what he saw as moral decay take a stronger hold in the country. Or at least not in his beloved home state of Alaska.

  He had moved to Fairbanks with the express purpose of growing his church and agitating for the cause of religious liberty in the face of the homosexual agenda. He wasn’t about to sit still while the gays allowed their perverse lifestyle to take over Christian society. He’d had some success at advancing his cause in the months since he’d moved here, but he knew he still had a long road ahead of him. No rest for the righteous was his motto.

  One thing Phillips hadn’t planned on when he’d moved to Fairbanks was being confronted with the worst heat he’d ever experienced. He wondered how those in the lower 48 handled these types of temperatures every year. He grabbed a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow before settling back down to work. Unfortunately, he didn’t have more than a minute to work before he was interrupted.

  “Reverend? There are two police detectives here to see you.”

  Phillips looked up from his paperwork to see Linda standing at the door of his office.

  “Police detectives? What do they want?”

  “I don’t know. They just said they’d like to talk to you.”

  “Send them in then,” he said with a scowl. He didn’t have time for this. “Thank you, Linda.”

  “Reverend? I’m Detective Tessa Washington and this is my partner Danny Fitzpatrick. Thanks for meeting with us.”

  Phillips got up from his chair and walked to the door where the petite woman stood with her tall partner. He extended his hand to both of them and shook hands politely.

  “I doubt I had much of a choice. But I certainly don’t mind.” He gestured for both Danny and Tessa to take the seats across from his desk. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”

  Phillips returned to his own chair. “What can I help you with?”

  “We’re investigating two crimes,” Danny answered. “Homicides, actually.” He paused and waited for Phillips’ reaction to the word. He knew he’d get one.

  “Homicides? Goodness, I don’t know what I could help you with on something like that. Has something happened to our church members?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Danny said. “At least we have no reason to believe they were members of your church and every reaso
n to believe they weren’t.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  “The two men murdered were both gay, Reverend,” Tessa said.

  Phillips sat back in his chair. “Oh. Well I’m sorry to hear that but again I don’t see how I could help you.”

  “You preach a great deal about gays, don’t you?” Danny asked.

  “I do. But I certainly don’t preach violence.”

  “You’ve talked a lot about gays burning in hell though, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I have. That’s what I believe.”

  “Do you think any of your preaching might drive someone to get things moving here on earth? Maybe someone who doesn’t think we need to wait for hell. Have you ever thought about that yourself?”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You heard about the fire at the baseball game I’m sure,” Tessa said, taking over the questioning.

  “I did, yes.” Phillips paused. “Wait a minute, are you talking about the man who was killed there?”

  “The man who was burned alive, yes we are.”

  “Dear God. Do you think I had something to do with that?”

  “Well we’ve just noticed that you’re very new to our city,” Danny said. “And your entire message seems to be wrapped up in anti-gay rhetoric that regularly employs the fires of hell. So we can’t help but find it a little strange when two gay men turn up burned alive not long after you set up shop here.”

  Phillips grabbed his handkerchief and mopped his brow as the color drained from his beefy red face. He muttered a prayer and put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

  “I’d never condone such atrocities.”

  “But you preach about the fires of hell on a regular basis.”

  “Hell is God’s punishment, not mine. It’s not for us here on earth to inflict his punishments. We can only try to preach the word so that as many as possible are spared.”

  “But what if they don’t agree with your word? What then?” Danny asked.