Fire Spirit Read online

  ‘Well, that’s always one alternative,’ Val admitted. ‘But if this was deliberate, the perpetrator must have been seriously pissed. This isn’t just a homicide. This is a sacrifice.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ruth. She set down her metal case, flipped open the catches and took out a pair of latex gloves. ‘If I can have the room cleared now, please, except for Val. Jack, you want to check the utilities? Tyson – how about doing your stuff now, boy? Go on, boy. Go seek.’

  The firefighters and the detectives made their way out of the door, treading as delicately as dancers so that they didn’t disturb any latent evidence. Tyson ducked his head down and criss-crossed the living-room, enthusiastically sniffing at the floorboards and all along the skirting. Ruth took out her Leica camera and started to take flash pictures, dozens of them, not only of the incinerated body and the mattress it was lying on, but the floor all around it, and the walls, and the doors, and the windows.

  The smoke and scorch patterns would show her if the fire had been deliberately started by the use of an accelerant, and how quickly it had burned, and what its rate of heat release might have been. To Ruth’s eyes, every pattern formed part of a narrative, like a series of prehistoric cave paintings: how the fire had started, how it had become so intense. How the hot gases might have risen to the ceiling and then returned to the lower levels by thermal radiation, leaving those V-shaped plumes.

  ‘How’s Amelia?’ asked Val, as she delicately tweezered a triangular piece of crisp black skin from the victim’s shoulder and dropped it into an evidence bag.

  ‘She’s good,’ said Ruth. ‘Better than ever. Do you know something, she even cooked me breakfast this morning, and she got up at the crack of dawn to do it.’

  ‘Amelia is such a sweet girl,’ said Val, although Ruth couldn’t help hearing the unspoken words, ‘in spite of the fact that she has William’s Syndrome.’

  ‘She did great,’ Ruth lied. ‘Made me an omelet and everything. She’s really growing up.’

  Val slightly raised the body’s left hand, being careful not to break it off at the wrist. ‘You see this wedding band? What temperature does gold melt at?’

  Ruth peered at it. The ring had lost its shape and had even started to form a teardrop drip at one side. ‘Over one thousand degrees Celsius,’ she said. She took five photographs of the ring, all from different angles. Then she prodded the mattress springs. ‘See? Most of these springs have collapsed, which means that the temperature must have been well over seven hundred, but I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any gold jewelry melt before, even at that temperature. It’s a pretty good size, isn’t it? Hard to tell if it’s a man’s or a woman’s.’

  She packed away her camera. She was surprised to see that Tyson was still whuffling around the room in obvious frustration.

  ‘How’s it going, boy?’ she called out. Tyson looked across at her and gave a single sharp bark.

  ‘He’s annoyed at himself,’ she told Val. ‘If he can’t find anything, he thinks he’s let me down. He’s also worried I won’t give him his dog-choc.’

  She took her hydrocarbon detector out of her case, switched it on, and started to probe the ruins of the mattress with it. The detector was like a wand attached to a tiny vacuum-cleaner. It sucked up any residual vapors or gases and it would buzz like an irritated blowfly if it sensed the presence of any accelerants.

  All the same, she was already beginning to question whether this fire had been started with accelerants at all. If there were any traces of fuels to be found, Tyson would always head for them like a rocket and sit on the area of strongest concentration first, panting proudly, to show her where they were. Tyson’s nose was ten times more sensitive than her detector; he could locate a thousandth of a drop of half-evaporated gasoline in a room twice this volume.

  Jack Morrow came back into the living-room. ‘All of the utilities check out,’ he told her. ‘Electricity is still on, but the wiring looks sound, even the cables that run right beneath this room. Gas is still connected, too, but nobody’s tampered with the meter or any of the piping. No wrench-marks, no disconnected joints, no leaks.’

  He sniffed, and added, ‘No windows are broken, but the kitchen door could have been jimmied. Ron Magruder’s taking a look at it. There’s no damage to any other room in the house. No signs of lightning-strike. How’s Tyson doing?’

  ‘He hasn’t found anything so far, and neither have I.’

  ‘Could’ve been a cigarette, I guess,’ Jack suggested. ‘Maybe this was a vagrant, using the house as someplace to crash. Got drunk, dropped his smoke on the mattress, Bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s old-fashioned cotton padding, this mattress, not polyfoam. If it had been smoldering for any length of time, the walls and the ceiling would have been much more heavily stained with smoke. Like, this has all the hallmarks of a Class B fire, but so far there’s absolutely no evidence to show what started it.’

  ‘Maybe it was spontaneous human combustion.’

  ‘Oh, sure it was.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so skeptical,’ said Jack. ‘Back in nineteen eighty-two I was called out to a fire up in Cassville, and I still reckon that was SHC.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘No – a fifty-seven-year-old woman was sitting in her kitchen chair and she spontaneously burst into flames. Whoomph, just like that. That’s what her husband and her son said, anyhow, at the inquest. The husband tried to put her out by dragging her over to the sink and splashing water on her but the flames were too fierce. He burned his own hands pretty bad.

  ‘I saw the woman’s body for myself. Apparently she didn’t burn for no longer than five or six minutes, but all the clothes were burned off of her and her skin was charred all over like a hamburger.’

  ‘Get out of here, Jack,’ Ruth told him. He was always telling stories about bizarre fires and she never knew whether to believe him or not. ‘Go bring me some evidence cans from the truck. And some cellophane envelopes, too.’

  She turned back to the blackened body lying on the mattress. Maybe Jack hadn’t been so far away from the truth after all. Maybe this man or woman had spontaneously caught fire. There was no conclusive evidence to support any of the six or seven alleged cases of spontaneous human combustion, but in the most recent incident, in 1980, a farmer called Henry Thomas had been so severely burned while sitting in his armchair that only his skull and the lower part of his legs had remained. Maybe something similar had happened here.

  Tyson came up to her and nudged her knee. She tugged at his ears and gave him a dog-choc. ‘I know, boy, you couldn’t find anything. It wasn’t your fault. If somebody set this fire on purpose, they must have been some kind of black magician.’

  Ruth remained at the house for the better part of the day, taking samples of fibers and ash and frizzled hair and carbonized flesh. At about three thirty in the afternoon, two technicians from the Howard County Coroner’s office arrived, wearing white Tyvek coveralls. They carefully lifted the burned cadaver into a body-bag, and carried it away to the morgue. Ruth and Jack wrapped up the mattress in plastic sheeting so that it could be taken back to their Fire and Arson Laboratory for further tests.

  ‘How about a beer?’ Bob Kowalski suggested as he and Ruth finally stepped out of the front door. The wind had dropped, and there was a high hazy covering of white cloud.

  ‘I’d love to, sir, but I have to pick up Ammy from school.’

  ‘What’s your gut feeling about this?’ he asked her, nodding back toward the house.

  ‘I’m not sure. But I don’t think that any kind of known accelerant was used. Jack suggested that it might be SHC, but frankly I don’t believe in it.’

  ‘Oh, he told you about that woman in Cassville? You don’t want to set any store by that. What happened was, that woman was wearing all nylon clothing and a spark of static set her ablaze. Very rare occurrence, but it has been known.’

  Ruth said, ‘It looks to me like the victim here was in close cont
act with an intense source of heat, but I can’t understand what it was.’

  ‘Blowtorch, maybe? Or a cutting torch? That’s at least three-and-a-half thousand degrees Celsius.’

  ‘Even so, that would have taken hours, and the pattern of burning would have been totally different. The flames would have been a different color, too, not yellow. Apart from which, whoever did the blowtorching would have left footprints.’

  ‘So what was it, do you think, this intense source of heat?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea. I’ve seen similar charring on victims who have fallen into furnaces or barbecue pits or open fires. You remember that old man last year, out on Water Works Road, who fell into that hog roaster? All of the subcutaneous fat evaporated from his head and his shoulders, just like this. But in this case the victim’s entire body surface was carbonized, head to toe, and right now I can’t think how that could have happened, not without an accelerant.’

  They had reached the sidewalk, where a police tape had been strung across the front of the property to keep out the crowd of onlookers. As Bob lifted it up for her, Ruth saw the dark-haired boy again. He was standing by himself about twenty feet away from the rest of the crowd, with his hands in his pockets. His face was so pale that it was almost white, and his eyes were as dark as holes burned into a sheet of paper. His hair was badly cut, so that it stuck up at the back. He was wearing a faded black T-shirt and a pair of worn-out red jeans.

  ‘See that kid?’ Ruth asked Bob. ‘He was here when I arrived this morning, and he’s still here.’

  Bob frowned in the boy’s direction. ‘He’s not wearing a Smokey Bear hat, I’ll grant you. But he doesn’t look like much of an arsonist to me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Bob. You know better than that. No two arsonists ever look alike. Here – hold this.’

  She handed him her metal case, opened it, and took out her camera. She took more than a dozen pictures of the crowd, panning slowly from right to left so that the boy wouldn’t think that she was focusing her camera only on him.

  ‘There,’ she said, putting the camera away again. ‘Now I’m going to go over and ask him who he is, and what he’s doing here.’

  She said, ‘Pardon me, excuse me,’ and pushed her way through the crowd. When she reached the place where the boy had been standing, however, he had gone.

  She looked around, puzzled. The only place for him to have hidden was behind a large white oak at the side of the next-door yard, but she couldn’t understand how he could have crossed the sidewalk to reach it, not without her seeing him. She circled the oak twice, but there was nobody there. She shaded her eyes and peered along the street, but it was totally straight all the way down to West Park Avenue, a distance of more than half a mile, and there was no sign of the boy anywhere.

  She went back and rejoined Bob Kowalski, and now Jack Morrow and Detective Ron Magruder came out, too.

  Detective Magruder said, ‘We’ve made a thorough search of the yard and the woods immediately in back, but there’s no sign of any discarded cans or bottles that might have contained accelerant, or any other evidence of arson for that matter. The kitchen door was forced open, for sure, but there are no fingerprints and no fibers. No footprints, neither, apart from our own. Whoever set this fire, they left the house before any carbon deposit fell on the floor.’

  ‘What about witnesses?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘Apart from our fruit-truck driver, none. The elderly couple who live next door, they’re both deaf as doorposts and they didn’t see nothing, neither. The family who live right opposite, they’ve been in Muncie for three days, visiting the husband’s mother, and they got back only about two hours ago.’

  He tucked his pen into his breast-pocket and said, ‘Any of you people have any wild theories?’

  ‘Sorry, Ron,’ Jack told him. ‘We arson investigators don’t deal in wild theories – only forensic evidence. But we’ll keep you up to date with how things are progressing.’

  Jack walked Ruth back to her car. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Ruth told him. ‘Maybe we’ll know the victim’s identity by then.’

  Jack said, ‘Maybe. But I have a strange feeling that’s not going to help much. There’s something real weird about this fire.’

  ‘Hey, I thought we arson investigators only dealt in forensic evidence. Where do strange feelings come into it?’

  ‘I only said that for Ron Magruder’s benefit, because I don’t have the least notion how this fire was started, or how it reached such a high RHR so rapidly, or why it suddenly extinguished itself before the rest of the house went up in flames. We’re missing something here. It’s probably going to be downright obvious when we find out what it is, but right now it’s making me feel like there’s a gaggle of geese walking up and down on my grave.’

  ‘You still think that it might have been spontaneous human combustion? Bob said that woman in Cassville caught fire because of her nylon clothing. You know, static.’

  ‘That’s what Bob likes to think, because Bob doesn’t want to acknowledge that some fires can’t be completely explained by scientific facts. Listen, Ruth, I’ve been investigating fires for half of my life, and if I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that every fire is a hungry beast with a will of its own. This here was no ordinary fire, believe me. This fire had an appetite for this particular victim, for some reason or another. It ate this person, like a wild animal, but it didn’t eat nothing else, because once it had done that, it was satisfied and it snuffed itself out. Before anything else, we need to find out what this particular fire wanted, and why it wanted it. Until we do, we won’t understand what happened here, or if it might happen again.’

  FOUR

  Amelia was late coming out of school, so Ruth had to wait outside for over ten minutes. As she sat in her car, watching the last few stragglers emerge, she suddenly felt very tired, and isolated, as if she couldn’t carry on any longer.

  She felt as if everybody depended on her: Ammy, and Jeff, and Craig, and now the anonymous blackened victim who had been burned to death on that mattress. Why me? she thought. Why can’t they all take care of themselves, and sort out their own problems? But she knew the answer to that. They needed her, and they had nobody else.

  When Amelia eventually appeared, in her red beret and her red plaid coat, she stopped on the steps outside the school’s main entrance to send a text message on her cellphone. Ruth gave her an impatient toot on her horn.

  ‘Hey, don’t worry about me,’ she said, as Amelia climbed into the passenger seat. ‘I have all the time in the world.’

  Amelia said, ‘I had to text Sandra. I’m going round to her place this evening, so that we can do our homework together.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Who says?’

  ‘Me. I say. Somebody has to help me, don’t they?’

  ‘I always help you.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to bother any more. Sandra said she can do it.’

  ‘Sandra knows how to deal with William’s Syndrome? I don’t think so.’

  ‘At least Sandra doesn’t treat me like a retard.’

  Ruth pulled away from the curb and drove toward Jefferson Street. ‘Ammy, you’re not still mad at me about breakfast, are you?’

  ‘Of course not. I wish I hadn’t bothered, that’s all.’

  ‘It was a lovely thought. You don’t know how much I appreciated it.’

  ‘Don’t lie. You hated it.’

  They stopped at the next red traffic signal. Ruth turned to Amelia and said, ‘Listen, sometimes you can try to do nice things for people and for one reason or another it doesn’t work out. Once I organized a surprise party for Dad’s birthday, and I invited some of his old classmates from school, but what I didn’t realize was that he couldn’t stand the sight of them – any of them. What a disaster that was! Ten men with their arms folded, glaring at each other for four hours. They almost came to blows.’

  Amelia said nothing, but sat with her arms tightly folded and her lips pouting. Ruth reached
across and stroked a stray lock of her hair, winding it around her finger.

  ‘Ammy, you know you’re different. But that’s what makes you who you are, and I love who you are. I wouldn’t want you any other way.’

  ‘Signal’s green,’ said Ammy. The car behind them blew its horn and Ruth lifted her hand in apology.

  While their meat feast pizzas were heating up in the oven, Ruth took her camera out of its case and looked through the photographs she had taken at the house on South McCann Street. She skipped quickly past the flash-lit images of the victim lying on the mattress, and the victim’s black-charred hand with its wedding-band, and the smoke-stained walls, until she reached the series of pictures she had taken of the crowd outside.

  The very last photograph should have shown the dark-haired boy in the faded T-shirt and the worn-out red jeans, standing in the middle of the sidewalk. But there was nobody there, only the empty street, lined with trees.

  She frowned, and went through the pictures again to see if she had missed one. She was sure that she had caught the boy in her viewfinder, but he simply wasn’t there. She switched off her camera and put it away.

  Amelia came into the kitchen. ‘You look serious,’ she said, in a high-pitched voice. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Supper’s going to be ready in a minute.’

  ‘That fire you went to today . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did somebody die?’

  Ruth nodded. ‘Yes. We don’t know who yet. It was probably some down-and-out.’

  ‘I had such a horrible feeling about it.’

  ‘Yes. I was going to ask you about that. What kind of horrible feeling?’

  Ammy thought for a moment, and then she made a pulling gesture with her right hand as if she were opening an invisible door. ‘I don’t know. I felt like people were coming in. People who should have stayed where they were.’

  ‘What people? I don’t really understand what you mean.’

  ‘There’s lots of them. Some of them are very faint so you can hardly see them. But others have very white faces.’