Burning Girl by Robb T. White
Release date: August 22, 2020
Subgenre: Crime thriller
About Burning Girl:
Detective Riisa Jones is a new detective with her first case as lead
investigator for the Gallion, Rhode Island P.D. It’s a bad one: the body
of a young woman has been set ablaze in a dumpster behind a local
tavern, well known to the cops. Some of her colleagues, including her
own partner “Kaz,” a veteran cop nearing retirement, wouldn’t mind
seeing her fail. Riisa’s first obstacle is identifying the body. Before
long, she’s neck-deep in a case that twists out of her reach every time
she follows a lead. Those dead ends are piling up and so is the
pressure to solve this horrific case. Riisa finds herself digging past
the lies of respectable people to uncover some dirty secrets, and she
had better hurry because there are killers behind those liars who are
watching and paying attention to her.
Excerpt:
DAY
1
“What do you think, Detective?”
“Looks like a homicide to me,” Riisa
said.
“Maybe it’s a suicide,” her partner
said in that same irksome monotone. “She could have jumped in with a lit
cigarette in her hand. See that packing? Liquor bottles. Could be one broke and
the fumes exploded, all that flammable junk in there, she panicked—”
“OK, Worozowski,” she replied. “Why
don’t you give the M.E.’s office a call, see what’s taking them.”
“Sure,” Worozowski said, “you’re lead
detective.”
“That’s right, I am,” she said.
Invoking her new policy of deadpan
indifference toward her partner wasn’t proving easy and Detective Clarissa
Jones knew she would have to endure six more days before his retirement. She
wasn’t going to let him get her goat, although he never stopped trying to bait
her. A chilly wind whipped her ponytail off her collar. Lord, hear my prayer, a half-hearted mantra invoked for help
against the dark force of Kazimir Worozowski, veteran of the Gallion P.D. and,
unfortunately for her, a much-beloved icon of the younger cops in the precinct.
Her third murder investigation but first as lead and it had to be with
Worozowski sniping in her ear.
Riisa felt a momentary pang of shame
for preferring easy ones like the first two she’d worked—both domestics. In the first, the husband sat weeping in his
La-Z-Boy, gun dangling from hand beside his wife’s body on the floor. The second
was no less a slam dunk: a middle-aged woman in a tattered terry-cloth bathrobe
smiled at her when she arrived on scene, oblivious to the handcuffs and the cop
standing beside her. She’d just stabbed her husband while he slept with a steel
kebob skewer; she had the good luck—or misfortune—to nick an aorta.
She turned her attention back to the
body in the dumpster. Curled in the fighter’s pose as muscles contracted from
the heat, it still smoked, but intact enough for Dr. Fernandez to work her
magic, she so fervently hoped. As Kaz crudely put it, Fernie Fernandez had her
hands inside more guts than Attila the Hun. What she didn’t know about the
manner and means of assisting human beings out of their mortal coil before
their time wasn’t worth knowing.
Most likely, a female or a very small
male. The unburned portion didn’t reveal much from the clothing. Her flashlight
probed the charred clothing, but it was difficult to discern much. The killer
had doused the body and splashed fuel all around it. Much of the dumpster’s
contents had melted unlike the carboard packing. She could see some Styrofoam
way in the back along with unsinged plastic water bottles, and some broken
glass from the bar.
The owner of The Sandbar Inn pulled
into the lot in a Camaro with mufflers gurgling. James Tromboli was familiar to
all the precinct cops for several code violations involving underage drinkers
and bar fights over the years. A gun discharged in the parking lot last summer,
she recalled, but no charges filed. The place was a borderline nuisance.
“Hey, what’s up? My bartender called me
to come down here,” Tromboli demanded. He sounded angry, and he looked as if
he’d been roused from sleep.
“Don’t come any closer,” she ordered. “This
is a crime scene.”
“A crime scene—what are you saying? Ho-oly shit—”
She had to pull him from behind by his
windbreaker to keep him from approaching the lip of the dumpster. In the damp,
pre-dawn of a chilly March, his breath blew fruity, sour plumes in front of his
face. Tromboli was known to drink with his customers and take sides when fights
broke out in his bar.
“Get your hands off me!”
“Sir, I told you to keep back.”
“Hey, hey, Kaz, man. What gives with
this woman?”
“Easy, Jimmy,” Worozowski said; “you
got a dead body in your trash.”
She resented Kaz for letting the owner
blunder past the tape the first officer on scene had put up. The “Kaz-Jimmy”
thing irked more than this woman. Her
lieutenant told her to “learn all she could from Kaz, a real pro,” when he
paired them. He also mentioned that Kazimir Worozowski was “no stranger” to the
bars from Gallion to Coventry. If scuttlebutt was accurate, Kaz was no stranger
to any pub, tavern, or sports bar between Providence and Sakonnet.
The forensics van and another cruiser
pulled up with lights flashing. Dr. Fernandez’s medical investigator arrived
shortly after and she spoke with him. The smoking corpse in the dumpster became
the silent centerpiece of movement all around it, dictated the familiar process
of how to deal with it by established rules and procedures, as if grotesquerie
controlled order, darkness ruled light.
“Unless you’re planning a weenie roast
for us, Jones,” Worozowski said, shambling up, clearly bored, “I suggest we go
inside and start interviewing witnesses.”
Amazon
About Robb T. White:
Robert White lives in Northeastern Ohio. Many of his stories and
novels feature private investigator Thomas Haftmann: Haftmann’s Rules (2011), Saraband for a Runaway (2013), Nocturne for Madness (2015), and Doggerel for Dead Whores (New Pulp, 2019). Thomas Haftmann, Private Eye (2017) is a collection of 15 stories. Raimo Jarvi, a new series
private eye, is featured in Northtown Eclipse (2018) and here in Northtown Blitz. His latest noir fiction is Dead Cat Bounce (Fahrenheit, 2019). In 2019, he was nominated for a Derringer for
“God’s Own Avenger” and “Inside Man” was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2019.
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