The Marble Orchard by Fay

About the book

The Marble Orchard is the story of Jenny Hall, a San Antonio Police Department detective in her mid-thirties living alone and working hard to prove herself, despite harassment from a woman-hating supervisor determined to drive her out of police work. In the course of investigating a series of apparently unconnected murders, she meets Frank Burke, a forensic expert from Boston. Burke, whose expertise is in serial killer cases, helps Jenny discover that the murders are the work of a single killer, a blonde female known only as Donna.

Jenny does not know that Burke is in San Antonio on a personal mission -- to find the adult son he has never seen. Burke, a quiet type, has not told Jenny that the young police officer he has made friends with is his son, Kenneth, born out of wedlock to Elena, a woman Burke had met and loved when he had been in San Antonio on military duty twenty-five years earlier. Burke had not known of Elena's pregnancy when they split up, and it wasn't until many years later that he learned she had died giving birth to his son. Burke has returned to San Antonio hoping in some way to make things right with Kenneth, but before revealing the truth to anyone he must first make sure that the chemistry is right.

When Burke is having burgers and beer at Kenneth's home, intending while there to tell the younger man of their biological connection, he falls to the floor and begins to lose consciousness. Just before passing out, Burke sees Donna kneeling beside him, and cannot understand why Donna looks so much like his son.

Burke regains consciousness handcuffed to a pole inside a room in the cellar of Kenneth's home. The room is Donna's sanctuary, a place where she speaks to a portrait of Elena. Burke realizes that Donna is a secondary personality within Kenneth's psyche, and her motive in the string of killings has been to avenge Burke's abandonment of Elena. Each of the victims had been unfaithful to a woman, and in Burke, Donna has found the original sinner.

Burke's disappearance coincides with Jenny's discovery that Kenneth is somehow connected to Donna. She goes to Kenneth's home and finds the cellar on fire with Burke inside. She manages to push a drugged Burke to safety through a cellar window. As Jenny climbs out of the window after him, an enraged Donna attacks her from the rear with a knife. Jenny kicks back with her foot, causing Donna's overhead swing of the knife to rupture a gasoline-filled balloon that Donna had suspended from the cellar ceiling to ensure that she and Burke would be incinerated together. The gasoline spray showers Donna and initiates a fireball that kills her at the instant Jenny crawls out.