The Angry Flame

By Divamercury

Enjoy Chapter 6 and please review!

Chapter 6

I nodded to Jake and we headed inside. The unmistakable stench of blood seeped out of the door and reached us feet before we stepped into the building.

Well, that's a good sign,' I thought sarcastically.

Alcott had been right about it not being pretty. In fact, "macabre" was more the word that came to my mind. Blood was everywhere: on the floor mainly, but there were spots on the ceiling and on two walls where it had reached as well with what must have been some pretty impressive spurts. The guy, apparently a rich stiff of some kind from the suit he was wearing, had been decapitated. His body was in a chair and the head on the table beside it, and from the evidence I saw, it had taken a long time to get him that way. The person hadn't been very good with sharp objects and had taken short, jagged cuts. I cringed and turned the other direction.

Don't puke, Pezzini, you see stuff like this a lot, just don't puke,' I kept telling myself. I managed to keep my stomach's contents down and then turned back to face the body. That's when I saw it.

"Jake, get me an evidence bag," I said. He dashed out of the building, glad to have an excuse for fresh air (the reek was almost overpowering) and returned with the evidence bag I'd requested in addition to rubber gloves and tweezers. I put on the gloves, took the tweezers, and reached toward the small piece of cardboard under the chair in which the body was. I grasped it and pulled my arm back. I examined the evidence, which was in fact a matchbook from the Angry Flame. My eyes widened. I glanced back at the head on the table and realized that I recognized the victim. The Witchblade made me flash back to the previous night. I distinctly remembered seeing that guy at the club, and it was up close that I'd seen him

He was the guy I'd kicked for screwing with the Witchblade.

That was probably why it remembered him. It pissed her off. Snapping out of my trance before Jake noticed, I slipped the matchbook into the evidence bag and sealed it, and we left.

"That's about all I saw, except blood and gore," I told Jake, taking off the gloves and pitching them in a nearby garbage can and returning the tweezers to a forensics investigator.

Jake and I left the scene. In the car on the way back to the precinct, I was very quiet. So now this psycho was going after not only the dancers of the Angry Flame, but the patrons as well. The murderer was playing a dangerous game, and I was right in the middle of it. I'd have to do a lot of prying at the Angry Flame.

That afternoon passed like a blur. All I remember was filling out some reports for my latest case. The victim, whose name I found out after the body had been identified through fingerprints, dental records, and what must have been a tear-jerking visual from family, was Max Oakland. I'd never seen the man before my first night at the Angry Flame, but for some reason I felt like his name was familiar. I remembered what Irons had said to me once: "Nothing is coincidence," meaning that everything was connected. I had yet to find the link to this, however.

The next thing I knew I was pulling into the parking lot a block from the Angry Flame. Nothing from about five o'clock until then, nine o'clock, had registered. I left the lot, turned the corner, and entered the club, heading straight for the dressing room. There I caught up with Ciara, and I asked her if she'd heard about Max Oakland.

"Oh, yeah. He was a regular here, anywhere from three to five nights a week. He must not have had anything better to do, but I would have thought that being a lawyer, he'd have had some case to deal with," she said.

So he was a lawyer,' I thought. Then I remembered; I'd seen him advertise on TV to try and reel in more business. Apparently, it hadn't worked very well. I'd have to check that out.

"Well, it's weird that someone killed him," I remarked.

"You're telling me. He and the boss, Gerald East, were best pals. Never went anywhere without each other. Rumor has it that East let him come free of charge all the time because they were so tight," Ciara said.

Well, now I was confused. A lawyer, the best friend of the club's owner, was killed, and so were three of the dancers at the club. Was someone after Gerald East? Interesting thoughts.

The rest of the night was uneventful. Ciara went on before me, as usual, and did a wonderful job. When she hopped down off the runway I noticed that she was muttering rhythmically to herself. Taking a deep breath and emptying my third shot out of its glass (I found that three shots worked better than two), I stepped up, performed as quickly as was humanly possible, and got off the runway so fast that to other onlookers I must have looked like a blur. I barely took time to change or to say goodbye to Ciara. She didn't seem to mind that much, though; she was absorbed in writing verbatim something that had occurred to her while performing, a poem no doubt. Apparently she got some of her best ideas for writing up on the runway. Go figure.

Anyway, the reason for my unusual rush was that I had appropriated the evidence, reports, and other pieces of information about the Oakland murder and was planning to pore over them when I got home. I was trying to find connections to something that might produce someone's motive to kill the guy. Boy, was I surprised at what I found.

I got home at about 10:45 and immediately sat down at my desk, flipping through reports and reading background information on the victim, as well as interviews of those closest to him. Most of the testimonies were the same; none of his relatives thought he had any enemies, let alone a deadly one, despite his despised profession. Blah, blah, blah.

A crash from outside brought me back down to earth.