Available Darkness Season 1

retreated and found something else to occupy his time.
    According to the chief, the two bodies were Randy Webster, a club bouncer with a penchant for hard drugs and violence. The woman was his live-in girlfriend, Stacy Harrison. Their next door neighbor heard screaming, though saw nothing, and called 911. Three hours later, just before dawn, Caleb’s Special Investigative Team was on the case.
    Caleb leaned in to look closer at the ashen bodies now being examined by Agent Leslie Chang.
    “Are the burns the same?” Caleb asked the pathologist.
    “Yes,” Chang answered. “they seem to be.”
    It had been three months since his unit had been called to one of these familiar scenes, two states away.
    Caleb’s team was one of two working under Washington state’s Escalated Threat Division of the Bureau, which handled unexplained phenomena that posed a threat to society. The team served the dual function of solving crimes and removing threats, a job they performed exceedingly well.
    This particular case was proving difficult.
    Seventy-three murders in 20 years, all the victims in the same condition; not just burned completely through, but burned without any accelerant. No gas, no chemicals, nothing. And the point of origin for each fire was inside the body, not outside. Usually when a body is on fire, it stops burning when whatever fuel was used to ignite the fire was depleted. That wasn’t the case with these victims, though. They continued burning at an elevated temperature, the body using fat as its fuel, until there was nothing left but cinders.
    And unlike normal fires, the burning in these cases was limited to the victims alone and never spread to surrounding areas. Oftentimes, the victims’ clothing was only marginally burnt. The deaths were most similar to cases of spontaneous human combustion, except for the fact that these cases were anything but spontaneous.
    The murders had been occurring mostly on the west coast during the past two years. Tonight found Caleb’s team in Oakview, Washington, a small suburban town west of the Cascades.
    Caleb stared down at the corpses and examined the living room, searching for anything which the others had missed — some clue that might lead him to his killer. As he scanned the scene, he absentmindedly turned the wedding band on his finger. He couldn’t look at the corpses without thinking of his dead wife, Julia — victim number 43.
    Suddenly, an excited voice erupted from the basement, “Jackpot!”
    Caleb shouldered his way past the locals and down to the basement where Agent Harris was standing beside Agent Roberts in front of a closed circuit TV monitor. The screen was frozen on the image of a shirtless young man with dark hair caught swinging a chair at a giant bald man, one of the two victims upstairs.
    “This is our guy,” Harris almost whistling as he pointed at the screen, “We’ve got him.”
    Caleb stared at the image of the man he’d been tracking for an eternity.
    His mind’s eye had worked up hundreds of images of what the man would look like, but none resembled the picture on the screen. This man was much younger than the profile the agents had been working from. The killer seemed to be in his mid to late twenties. His hair was long, hanging in his face. Shirtless, and bloody, he looked more like a college kid who’d been on the losing end of a bar brawl, than the 40-something year old they’d profiled. This man could not possibly have been killing for as long as the man they were looking for.
    Perhaps he wasn’t tracking just one killer.
    Caleb wasn’t sure why the dead man had his house wired with security cameras in nearly every room and outside — paranoia or suspicions his girlfriend was fucking around.
    “Play it,” Caleb instructed his agents.
    “There’s nothing after this,” Roberts said. The cameras all went to shit at once.”
    It happened just as the killer and the bald man began to wrestle. The screen flickered with quick images and then went to snow.
    “Signal jammer?” Roberts asked.
    “Doubtful,” Caleb responded, “did you check the connections on the cameras?”
    Roberts nodded and clicked a button to show that all the screens were working.
    Caleb stared at nothing, tumbling the known facts in his head, trying to pull sense from insanity. Usually, his analytical mind functioned with precision, always spitting instant responses. Seeing this man, maybe the man who killed his wife, was clouding the process.
    He