Burn Zone - A Psion Case File

Chapter One

APD Detective Justice Monroe stood in the middle of a squadron of firemen and police. They were all about twenty feet away from a fire that was rapidly consuming one of Ashebrook's oldest apartment buildings. Justice's best friend and partner, Austin Hawke, stood next to him. As usual, his friend was wearing his tattered and faded bomber's jacket that looked like it should've been thrown away ten years ago.

Justice continued to watch the blaze consume the building, but his eyes weren't focused on the fire itself anymore. Instead, he focused on a literal army of horribly disfigured, semi-translucent shapes flitting in front of almost every window. They were the dead. All of them were victims of the fire that still chewed through the building and every last one was burned into a twisted, no-longer-human-looking creature. They looked like they just crawled out of a nightmare. If Justice wasn't already used to ghosts, he might've run away while screaming his head off in terror. Instead, he just felt the familiar pangs of sadness and grief. He knew, rationally, that he couldn't do anything to save them, but that never stopped the guilt from coming.

He sighed and looked away. It was too much. There must've been a dozen figures in those burning windows and several of them were children.

"They there?" Austin asked, his voice stern.

"Yeah. More than a dozen of them," Justice answered. He had a deep, rich voice that usually intimidated the hell out of suspects he came across. Right now, it seemed small to him. It was always like that when he saw the dead.

"Can they tell you anything?"

"They can't leave the building and it's on fire, so no, they can't. At least not right now," Justice answered, slightly irritated. He'd been over that bit of info with Austin several times, but his friend always seemed to forget. The rules when dealing with the dead were pretty solid and often unbreakable (at least as far as he'd ever seen). One of the biggest rules was that the dead were restricted to the place where they died. They couldn't leave...not until they left whatever burdens were keeping them anchored to the earthly world. More often than not, in Justice's experience as a homicide detective, the unfinished business ghosts most commonly had was finding out or getting revenge on the person (or persons) who brutally murdered them.

Justice sighed with frustration. Ever since he was a little kid, he'd been able to see ghosts. He remembered one day, when he was about ten, his father came right out and asked him if he could see them. When he told him that he could, his father just nodded with a look of sadness filling his eyes. He tried to explain things to his son, that whatever it was they had, it was in their blood. It was traced back a century or more through their line. Generation after generation had been cursed with it.

His father wasn't sure what it was about them that made them so special. His best guess was that they were just born with something special in their brains, some kind of overdeveloped region that let them perceive things other people couldn't. At the time he had that talk with his dad, all Justice could remember thinking that he didn't care. He just wished his gift would go away.

It never did.

He'd come across a lot of the dead during his life. There were some that left him alone and didn't bother him. These seemed almost as afraid of him as he was of them. There were others that went out of their way to torment and terrify him. They used to scare him so badly that he'd have nightmares for weeks afterward. Then there were the ones that asked for his help. They were the reason he became a cop. They were the reason he went searching for people's killers, because he just couldn't stand by and do nothing. It was as simple as that.

Not everyone was the same. He understood that. But other people didn't have to see the pain. Other people didn't have to look into the eyes of the dead and see the torment they suffered with.

"Let's go," Austin said, turning away from the building and heading toward the car. "There's nothing more we can do here."

Justice didn't respond, he just turned away from the building with his face a mask of familiar, bitter anger. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his leather coat and hunched his shoulders up. His mind ran through all the facts he'd been able to piece together so far. It was a bizarre case. There had already been three other fires, with all three suffering fatalities, across town. The strange thing, however, was that after CSI and fire investigators picked through the rubble, none of them had been able to find conclusive evidence of arson. Or a cause of the fire for that matter.

"It's like it just started itself. Without an accelerator or trigger or anything," one of the fire investigators, a man named Shawn Newsome, told him. "The other fires were the same way. No obvious cause."

Somebody was starting fires all over the city, but no one, not even trained professionals, could figure out how he or she was doing it. The dead he'd already talked to weren't much help either. Once he was able to get past their moans for help, all he'd gotten was a description of a shadow man outside the previous three buildings. None of them had been able to provide accurate details.

He pulled his thoughts back into the present and opened the door to the car. As he did, he took one final look at the blazing building and saw all the dead again. He was already too late to prevent their deaths, but there was no way in hell it was going to happen again.

He sat down in the passenger seat and closed the door behind him. Austin was already inside, but wouldn't start the car. Justice waited for him and gave his partner an inquisitive look.

"I'm not starting the car until you buckle up," Austin declared matter-of-factly.

"Really?" Justice asked. "I told you I hate it when you do that."

"It's the law, and you're a cop. Try setting a good example," Austin replied with a smile. It crinkled up the corners of his vibrantly blue eyes.

Justice grumbled but eventually gave in. As soon as the seatbelt clicked, Austin started the car.

"Did you get anything? I saw you scanning the crowd." He watched Austin's face to gauge a reaction. There might've been a slight irritation to his eyes, but that was it.

"Yeah, I was. I thought maybe he, or she, would be there to enjoy their handiwork. But no. I got nothing."

Austin had a gift too that wasn't exactly normal either. He couldn't see ghosts, but when he looked anybody in the eyes, he stripped away all their lies (even the lies they told themselves). The only thing left was the absolute truth. Pure and simple. He had a fairly good range on his ability and could even scan several people in as little as five minutes. It wasn't exactly mind reading but it was pretty close. Needless to say, it was a super handy ability when dealing with suspects.

"I guess we do this the old-fashioned way," Justice muttered.

Austin was forced to agree.

They drove through the city's confusing network of one-way streets to the Ashebrook Police Department's main, five-story building. Austin drove the car into the underground parking lot under the station. He drove around for ten minutes trying to find a good spot until Justice snapped at him to just pick one. Austin grumbled something under his breath and swerved into a spot that wasn't quite located in a different zip code.

Austin turned the car off and they got out. They walked for a bit until they got to a simple metal door. Austin held his badge up to a scanner, then there was a loud buzz and the door unlocked. They opened it and walked inside the building.

About two years ago, the place was looking pretty bad. Not rundown exactly. Just old. Then city officials approved a renovation and now everything was clean and ultra-modern. The front reception desk now had a faux marble counter and APD's gold seal was plastered to the front and back-lit artfully. There was a wall right behind the main counter, but off to either side of it were two hallways that opened out onto a large, round pit. Brand new desks and computers were all clustered in that pit while offices and conference rooms surrounded it.