He was nearly shouting now, attracting even the attention of Finley and the other officer who were still keeping the press away at the mouth of the alley. Duggan was also listening more intently than ever.

"Well?" O'Malley asked.

"Yes, I suppose so," Avery said.

O'Malley was fuming, doing everything he could not to lose his cool. He paced back and forth, looking from the burned body and then back to Avery. Apparently, he noticed that he was on the verge of causing a scene and lowered his voice again.

"Why'd you go see him this time?"

It was a simple question but the answer wasn't simple at all. She also knew that it was not an answer O'Malley wanted to hear. Still, there was no sense in playing dumb or trying to throw him off. "He's a resource," she said. "My past with him makes him one of the best resources at our disposal."

"Your past with him?" O'Malley roared. "Don't even get me started on your past with him. You know what, Black? I might regret this later but right now I just don't give a s.h.i.t. I want you off of this case effective immediately. I can't stand for this sort of insubordination-especially when my orders were fairly well known throughout the A1."

"You can't be serious," Avery said.

"Oh, I am. You're d.a.m.ned good at what you do but you have to follow the rules the same as anyone else. And as a matter of fact, you've netted zero results on this one so far. I'll put Agent Duggan with Ramirez and work with them to wrap it up."

"Sir, you can't-"

But he had already turned his back to her. The only other thing he said was "Dismissed," before getting on the phone again.

She knew she could make a scene and argue her point further. But she knew O'Malley well enough to know when not to push it. So instead, she figured she'd take the high road. That way she could perhaps talk some sense into him tomorrow after things had calmed down. And she certainly didn't want to seem like a sniveling brat in front of a fed.

She turned her back on the scene and headed back for her car. When she pa.s.sed by the reporters and the officers trying to keep them back, one of them asked her for information. It took everything in her to not wheel around on them and flip them off. She made it to her car and just as she was about to get in, Ramirez came rushing past the reporters and to her car.

"That's it?" Ramirez asked. "You're going to quit just like that?"

"I'm not quitting," she pointed out. "I'm following orders."

"Well, if they're going to take you off of the case, I'll step off of it, too," he said.

She was a little surprised by the offer given the way she had spoken to him yesterday but then again, that was just the kind of man Ramirez was. She sighed and shook her head. "No," she said. "Don't. This is your time to shine. See what you can do with this without me. h.e.l.l, you're going to have a federal agent as a partner."

"Yeah, sure...but O'Malley can't just throw you out like that."

"He can. And he has a right to do it. I f.u.c.ked up. I get it and I understand it. But I know O'Malley. One more day and I'll give him a call. He'll cool down and come to his senses."

Ramirez hesitantly nodded his head and stepped back toward the alley. "Are you going to be okay?"

"Of course I am. Now get to work."

He grinned at her as she got into her car and pulled back out onto the street. Seeing him smile at her warmed her heart in spite of the way the morning had gone. She thought she might also need to give Ramirez a call tomorrow when things cooled down.

She turned around, trying to think of how to spend the rest of her day. Of course she wasn't going to just sit on her heels and do nothing. She was going to keep working on the case under the radar...but how?

Ahead of her and to the left, she saw a faint cloud of smoke drifting up into the sky. She followed it down and saw a thin smokestack, probably attached to the rear of a factory or mill on the eastern side of town.

This sparked an idea in her mind. Even before it had fully developed, she pulled up the number for the coroner. She didn't want to bother with calling anyone at A1; if O'Malley found out, he'd be livid. It would take him a little longer to figure out that she had contacted the coroner, though.

She made the call and was relieved when the receptionist didn't ask for her name. All she said was that she was calling with the A1 and she was put through. Then after two minutes or so, the phone was picked up on the other end.

"How can I help you guys?" the coroner asked in a tired voice.

"Well, as you know, we're up to our necks in trying to figure out this recent case with burned bodies," she said. "I'm putting together a list of places in the city other than morgues and crematoriums that include burning and fires in their line of work."

"Well, there's paper mills," the coroner said, "but the heat generated in those places wouldn't be nearly strong enough. There's steel mills, but there are only two in the city and one of them has such rigid security that it would be impossible for someone to get in and out. The other one has been shut down for about six months. The only other place might be a garbage-burning plant. There's one of those in town and it stays pretty busy."

"Garbage burning?" Avery asked. "Would that process generate enough heat to burn a body to ash?"

"If it was exposed long enough."

"Are we talking temperatures of one thousand degrees or more?"

"No idea, lady. You'd have to talk to someone at the plant. Sorry, but I never got your name...what did you say it was?"

She killed the call and looked back to the rising cloud of smoke in the distance. She pulled up the address to Boston's single garbage-burning plant and when she viewed it on the map, she studied it carefully. From first glance, the plant appeared to be exactly in the middle of the triangle of where the bodies had been discovered.

She pulled an illegal U-turn at the next light and was following the GPS directions within thirty seconds.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

The stink of the garbage-burning plant was awful but not nearly as bad as she had expected. By the time she had parked her car, walked across the lot and into the central office, she had almost gotten used to it. It smelled more like burning plastic than anything else, with a sort of spoiled and rotten undertone to it.

She'd called ahead to speed things up so when she stepped into the front office, there was an older gentleman waiting for her. His name was Ned Armstrong and he worked as the shift director. When he smiled at her when she entered, he looked very happy to be doing something other than his usual job.

"Thanks for meeting with me," Avery said.

"Of course," Ned said. "This is actually the perfect time to give you a quick tour of the place if you'd like. The peak burn time is about two hours from now, when most of the trucks have come back from their routes."

"Perfect," Avery said. "Lead the way."

"On the phone, you said you were more interested in the area where we burn material, correct?"

"Yes. Or, more directly, we're looking to see if this facility has the capacity to burn bodies without the knowledge of supervisors."

"Well, I can a.s.sure you there's nothing like that going on around here," he said. "Come on and I'll take you to the compacting and burn center. You'll see what I mean."

Being something of an information junkie, Avery was rather glad to find that the compacting and burn center was at the back of the building. Along the way, she was able to see most of the day-to day-operations of the plant. Ned pointed things out here and there but Avery was able to get the gist of just about everything on her own.

They pa.s.sed by a large concrete square of a room where trucks backed in and out. From there, the garbage was sorted and then carried further into the facility on a series of forklifts. There were other rooms where some heavily soiled materials such as heavy plastics, metals, and aluminum were cleansed and re-sorted. All of this then led to the back of the building, where Ned finally showed her the compacting and burning quarters.

"I think this is what you'd be most interested to see," Ned said as he led her inside the room.

To the right, there were three machines that Ned called balers. They were short and long, all capped with a large iron door. She and Ned watched as a worker filled one of the balers with an a.s.sortment of materials that were all unrecyclable. This included what looked like ripped couch cushions, badly damaged plastic, some sort of old molded wood, and sc.r.a.ps of chicken wire among other unnamable things.

The worker shoved all of this material into the baler, using a simple tool that looked almost like a shovel with a flat head to cram it all in. When it was packed in, he closed the iron door and locked it with a large bolt. He then ran a series of three large wires through the balers, using small holes drilled into the side. With these wires in place, he then turned on a hydraulic press that pushed all of the material inside up against the bolted door. Avery could not see the effect of the press but she could hear the rending and tearing of the materials inside.

Thirty seconds later, the press was done and retracted. When it was over, the worker popped the door open and pressed a green b.u.t.ton along the side of the baler. A loud beeping sounded out as a mechanism inside the baler pushed out a nearly perfectly square-shaped bale of material. It was about three feet high and six feet wide-all of the detritus that had just been shoved in pressed down and tied with wires in a neat bundle.

"We then take these bales to the burn center," Ned said. "We recycle everything we can but as you might imagine, not everything that comes through here is able to be recycled."

He led her through a large garage-type door beside them, leading them into another concrete room. Several bales similar to the one she had just seen were sitting to the far right of the room. The back of the room consisted of what looked like a very large baler. But the fact that she could feel the heat of it and smell the burning scent of plastic and other materials clued her in to what she was really seeing.

"This is where it's all burned?" she asked.

"Yes. Every now and then we'll get a piece of metal or something that is too big to go in there. We put those to the side and ship them off to the steel mill. We don't get a lot of it, though. We gather them all up in shipments and send them off. We might get enough to send out a single shipment every year."

"And do you ever get anything...unusual?"

"Oh yeah. We get dead animals all the time. Cats, dogs, racc.o.o.ns. It's gross."

"And what do you do with them?"

"It's annoying, actually. We burn them separately, so it can really slow a shift down."

"Have you ever found a body in the garbage?" Avery asked.

"No. But last year we did find two toes and a finger. Called the police in and everything, but nothing ever came of it."

Avery watched as two bales were placed into the burner. There was nothing fancy about it at all. It served very much as a furnace; a large front door was opened, clanging open much like the baler door. The bales were inserted via a miniature forklift and then the door was closed. An operator hit two switches and they could all hear the roaring of the fire as it blasted what had been placed inside.

"What's the temperature get to in there?" she asked.

"Around eight hundred degrees. Sometimes it'll get as high as one thousand, but that comes down to what's inside the bale that we put in."

"And I a.s.sume there's a certain amount of background checks and training that goes into hiring someone for this job?" Avery asked.

"Absolutely...especially for the baler and the burner. You've got to be a quick thinker when operating these things. If something were to go wrong with the burner, for instance, it has to be shut down and fixed pretty quickly. If that fire keeps going for more than forty-five minutes, it can start doing internal damage."

"Have you ever had to fire anyone that worked back here?"

"Me personally, no. But there's a pretty widespread story from about seven years ago. I was working in sorting then. Apparently, the guy that was working the baler and the guy working the burner got into a little accident with the lifts. This was right before the burner was cleaned, so all of the cleaning supplies were out, you know? One of the lifts knocked some of them over and one of the guys fell right in it."

"What were the chemicals?" Avery asked. "Were they harmful?"

"All I can remember for sure are acetone, amine, and oxide. Stuff that's hard to p.r.o.nounce, much less memorize. He got some chemical burns on his face and hands and a few days later started to act sort of odd. I think there was always speculation that it was because of the chemicals. But no one ever really fussed much about it. Still, after a month or so of him acting irrational and weird, he was fired."

"Weird how?"

"I don't know myself," he said. "From what I hear, he would just lash out at people. He started to get a little too interested in cleaning the burner. He loved the chemicals used for cleaning it...really started to get obsessed with it."

"Are his records in human resources?" Avery asked.

"Sure thing. I can fetch them for you if you like."

Ned led her back out of the burner room but before she left back through the large door, she looked back at the burner. She tried to think about a person being trapped in something like that as fire leaped up around them.

Trapped...the heat growing more intense...no escape.

Despite the visions of fire and heat within her head, Avery couldn't help but shudder.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

Avery pulled up in front of the residence of George Lutz a little over an hour later. Without an official capacity to use A1 resources at her own disposal, she'd had to call Ramirez and have him hunt down more information based on the records HR had given her at the trash plant. All in all, she knew that Lutz had been fired four years ago and since then had managed to work as a fry cook at Wendy's before being let go from there as well. Medical tests and psych evaluations had deemed him fit for society but unable to hold a steady job; he was therefore living on government a.s.sistance in a low-income house that had been paid for by his aunt.

The house was surprisingly well maintained. The small square of a porch looked to have been freshly painted and the windows were so clean they were sparkling. The gra.s.s was mown almost exquisitely-but that was also where Avery saw the first signs of just how far George Lutz had fallen since the days of his accident at the trash-firing plant.

There was a huge a.s.sortment of lawn ornaments surrounding the house. There were pink flamingos, garden gnomes, and ceramic mushrooms. And they were everywhere. In fact, as Avery stepped out of her car, she saw a man sitting on the edge of the lawn, facing one of the gnomes. He was holding a small canister of paint and touching up a red pair of suspenders on the gnome's ceramic body.

"Excuse me," Avery said. "Are you George Lutz?"

The man froze for a moment and then finished his current swab of paint before turning to face her. He had a thick unkempt beard and scraggly hair that was mostly tucked under a driver's cap. He looked a little off his rocker but in an almost childlike way.

"Sure am," he said. "Who are you?"

"My name is Avery Black," she said. "I work for the police."

"Oh," he said, dropping his paintbrush and turning to face her.

She saw that she had guessed right. Whatever was wrong with him made him seem very much like a child. It was her a.s.sumption of this that had made her keep her description very basic. I work for the police was going to be a lot more interesting to a child than I'm a detective with the Boston A1 Homicide division.

"Am I in trouble?" Lutz asked.

"No," she said. "But I've been looking into some things going on down at the trash plant you used to work at. I was wondering if you could answer some questions about it."

Lutz nodded, but frowned. "I don't really like that place. They were mean to me there."

"How so?"

"They fired me because of the accident. They said I wasn't doing my job right anymore."

Avery had read all about the incidents that had occurred after the accident. George had complained of headaches and missed quite a few days. And when he had reported for work, he'd goofed off most of the time and had created an unsafe working environment for everyone he came in contact with. He'd also been caught starting fires in the burner that had absolutely nothing to do with his work. That had been the final straw that had lost him his job.