Still, she felt relaxed. The funeral home was empty, and she had the rest of the afternoon to herself.
The crematorium had three separate ovens. She pushed the gurney up against the middle door. Rico’s carcass had been wrapped and stored inside one of the long, cardboard boxes the funeral home used to put corpses awaiting cremation. She opened the door and slid the box inside the chamber. After she locked the door, she ignited the burners. The process would take thirty minutes.
Marie left for her office, aware of a new feeling worming its way through her: sorrow. She felt a sense of loss, always, at this stage. Each death brought her one step closer to the completion of her life’s purpose — her life’s mission.
Fortunately, she had discovered a way to remember each child and parent. To keep them alive in her heart and mind until the moment she gasped her last, dying breath.
She unlocked the office safe and from the top shelf removed a large velvet jewellery box. It contained the necklace she’d worn while visiting Theresa Herrera. She never wore it here at work, just at home and when she visited the grieving parents.
The gold necklace was very elaborate, made up of eleven diamonds of various colours, each one a different shape and carat size. There were three empty settings. She wondered where she should put Rico.
The funeral-home business had brought her into contact with a vast array of companies offering specialized services for honouring the dead. The last decade had produced a rush of companies that created certified, high- quality diamonds from cremated remains, or a lock of hair. These lab-created diamonds had the same molecular identity, brilliance, lustre and hardness as the natural stones sold at any posh jewellery store. She had done business with several of these companies over the years, all under different names, and yet each and every time she visited their websites she was overwhelmed by the choice. There were cuts, degrees of clarity and sizes to consider — and colours. She had five to choose from: colourless, blue, red, yellow and green. Which colour was Rico?
The answer came to her immediately: red. It had taken a long time to break his fiery resolve — and that temper! He had fought her at nearly every turn.
Now she had to choose the cut and the clarity. She turned to her computer and logged on to one of the websites. She scrolled through the pages, thinking.
When she couldn’t come to a decision, she checked her watch. Twenty-two minutes had passed. She rose from her chair, and on her way back to the oven ducked inside a room to put on a face shield and apron to protect her from the intense heat.
Opening the crematorium door, she saw Rico’s skull in the blaze of fire. She used a T-shaped iron rod to break it down into smaller fragments. She did the same with other, larger bones and then returned to the computer.
An hour passed and she still couldn’t come to a decision.
No matter. The inspiration would come to her eventually. When it did, she would fill out the paperwork and put eight ounces of Rico’s ashes, along with a money order, into the post. Another packet of ashes would be mailed out to the exciting new company she had just discovered. Sacred Ashes specialized in placing cremated remains inside rifle cartridges, shotgun shells and handgun ammunition, custom-made to any calibre.
Marie carried a 9-mm handgun in her handbag when she visited the parents. Until Colorado, she had never fired it inside a home. She did, however, use it frequently inside the printing press.
The moment she’d discovered Sacred Ashes, the idea of incorporating the cremated remains of her previous guests inside her handgun had struck her with such intensity that she shook for nearly an hour. It was as though she had been granted a dark and magical power to summon the dead from their graves (or, more appropriately, their incinerated ashes, all of which she had kept) to carry out an execution.
And it had given her a power. Approaching the cages with the handgun raised, she could recall, even now, the thrill of watching the look of terror in each parent’s eyes as she rattled off the names of the dead loaded in her gun clip. Each time she fired a round, she felt lighter. Better.
Marie had placed three orders, with many more to come. The boxes of ammo were tucked inside the safe.
Marie had one regret: she wished Theresa Herrera had known the name associated with the bullet that had killed her. Wished the woman could have died with the knowledge.
Marie returned to the oven. The bone fragments had cooled. She picked up a long, metal broom with a brush made of high-carbon stainless-steel bristles and hummed a Spanish lullaby as she carefully swept Rico into a steel catcher at the front of the crematorium door. She switched to a normal paintbrush with a wide head to collect the finer fragments and then transferred everything into a crematorium pan.
Marie inspected the debris and, finding no metal, carefully dumped the fragments into a special processor. As the motorized blades pulverized Rico’s bones to ash, she decided to honour Rico with a 1.5-carat, emerald-cut red stone. The $25,000 diamond would be the centrepiece of her necklace.
23
Ali Karim’s plane touched down at an airport located near the southeastern corner of Alabama. Established in 1941 by the US Army Corps to train additional airport personnel for the Second World War, the Dothan Regional Airport was still used primarily by the military, but it also serviced one major commercial airline carrier and accepted all types of general aviation aircraft.
Airport operations were conducted inside a wide, ranch-shaped building with a brick face and a sloping grey roof. The interior was immaculately clean and accommodated a fair number of local retail and dining options. Fletcher stepped up to the Hertz counter and presented Robert Pepin’s driver’s licence and credit card to the clerk. Half an hour later he was seated behind the wheel of his rental — a Ford Explorer with its own GPS system. The town of Dunbar was an hour’s drive.
He had visited Alabama once, when the FBI’s Birmingham field office had asked the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit for assistance in the case of a fifteen-year-old girl who had been abducted from her bike. While reviewing the case details and working up a profile to give to local law enforcement, the girl’s mother had confessed to murdering her only child. Her new husband had been lavishing too much attention on his comely stepdaughter. The mother had killed her daughter out of jealousy.
Birmingham acted as the state’s cultural capital, and was stocked with historic buildings, museums, botanical gardens, art galleries, ballet companies and symphony orchestras; the town of Dunbar, however, consisted of small, practical homes sprinkled between rambling meadows and dense forests. Despite the bright sunshine, the area had a haunted feel, as though the homes had been deserted. He passed no cars and saw no people.
Sacred Ashes, the company that specialized in adding cremated remains to shotgun and firearm cartridges, operated out of a brown-painted ranch with a sagging front porch. It was nearly identical in size and structure to the handful of ramshackle homes built haphazardly along Old Gracey Road, a long, meandering street carved through a seemingly never-ending maze of brown fields populated with ancient longleaf pines and spruces. The only advertisement for the company came in the form of adhesive gold letters placed on a new black mailbox mounted near the front door. The house contained no garage or carport. A pair of dirt roads wrapped around each side of the house and ended in an ample and currently empty dirt lot covered by a mat of brown pine needles.
Fletcher parked his Ford Escape rental on a trail in the woods where it wouldn’t be seen from the main road. He collected the backpack holding his equipment and set off to find a place to conduct surveillance.
The edge of the woods led into a wide-open field of tall yellow grass that bent and swayed in the cooling afternoon wind. Hidden behind a tree, Fletcher unzipped the backpack and pulled out a laser mike. His broken ribs prevented him from lying on his stomach. Wearing a pair of headphones, he sat near an area of thick brush and aimed the laser mike at the windows.
Twenty minutes passed, without any sound or movement of any kind.
Then a phone rang inside the house. The company’s answering machine picked up, and a woman with a thick, backwoods accent left a message. She had two sons, and, while both were avid outdoorsmen, they used different firearms. The mother was hoping it was possible to have their daddy’s ashes split between shotgun shells and pistol rounds. She wanted to negotiate a price.
