The Gift of Illusion: A Thriller Read Online Free PDF

down in a red leather chair at the
other end of the desk and watched the chief gnaw at the eraser end
of a pencil, scanning a manila folder.
    Stevens slid the folder across the desk. “I
have something I want you to see.”
    Inside the folder were a half a dozen black
and white photographs. Isaac perused the photos and then looked up
at his superior. “Okay. What's the deal?”
    “The deal?” the chief repeated. “Doesn’t
this look strange to you?”
    Isaac flipped through the photos again. He
couldn’t tell if anything was strange or not, most of the photos
were almost entirely blackened and seemed a touch out of focus.
    Stevens slid another photo across the desk.
It was of a young girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old. A school
photo. "This is Lori Ackerman. In those photos is what's left of
her."
    “That black smudge is a little girl?”
    "Yes."
    "She burned to death. That's horrible."
    “Notice the outside edges of the bed are
still in pretty good shape and almost nothing else in the room was
even mildly damaged.”
    Isaac couldn’t believe his eyes. If Stevens
was correct, all that remained of the little girl was just ashes on
a bed. How does the famous nursery rhyme go again: ashes, ashes,
we all fall down?
    “Is that a foot draping off the bed?”
    Stevens leaned over the desk and glanced at
the bottom of the present photo. “Yes,” he said, then reclined back
in his chair.
    Isaac rubbed at the two-day stubble on his
chin and shook his head with an uncommon case of disbelief.
    “Let me ask you something.”
    “Shoot,” said Isaac.
    “What kind of fire could do something like
this?” The chief raised his eyebrows with a half excited, half
suspicious look on his face.
    Isaac didn’t answer. He had no idea.
    “A controlled one, perhaps?”
    Isaac finally looked up from the photos. “No
accident, huh?”
    “Maybe. Maybe not,” Stevens said, scratching
at the roof of his forehead. “All I know is what I see in those
photos. And it looks pretty damn hard to believe.”
    “Well, yeah,” Isaac said, trying not to seem
too surprised, if there were such a feeling. After twenty years in
law enforcement and numerous investigations little surprised him
anymore. This morning, however, these strange photos, reminded him
of the old days. Days better left forgotten.
    “So far any reasonable source from which the
fire could’ve evolved hasn’t been found, and I find that even
harder to believe.”
    Isaac set the photographs down on the desk
and took a small sip of coffee.
    “Who’s covering the investigation?”
    Stevens smiled, his black mustache widened.
“You are,” he said, pointing his finger across the desk.
    Isaac sighed. This was not what he wanted.
Today he had planned a busy schedule of sitting around and
pretending he was on vacation, like usual.
    “Take the folder with you. I want you to
start right away, you know, while the dust is still fresh.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Yeah, the parents are staying at the
Goodnight motel off Fairway. Do what you do best. You never
know.”
    As Isaac was leaving the office, Stevens
yelled, “Oh, and take Simmons with you.”
     
    2
     
    Isaac didn’t care much for the idea of
toting all two hundred and fifty sweating pounds of Daniel Simmons
around with him, while being constantly bombarded with every
goddamn obnoxious question Simmons could think to ask. He had no
idea how Simmons became a detective, but he hadn’t been one for
long. One day, like the pesky itch at the bottom of your foot that
only comes after you’ve put on your shoe, the fat man just
appeared. At first nobody questioned Simmons’s ability as an
investigator, it was only after they worked with him a couple of
times that something started to smell fishy, and it wasn’t just the
white undershirt slapped over his back.
    Daniel Simmons was forty-two years old, only
four years younger than Isaac, and yet seemed to have no experience
in the field. He knew nothing of how to search for