Douglas Preston - White Fire

“I can give you my first impressions. The lab results may take a few days.”

“Go ahead.”

Chivers took a deep breath. “Point of origin of the fire, in my view, would be either the second-floor bath or the bedroom above the living room. Both areas were doused heavily with accelerant — so much so that the perp would have had to leave the house fairly quickly. Both areas contained human remains.”

“You mean, the Bakers…the victims…were burned with accelerant?”

“Two of them, yes.”

“Alive?”

What a question. “That’ll have to wait for the M.E. But I doubt it.”

“Thank God.”

“Two more victims were found by the back door — probably where the perp made his exit. There was the body of a dog there, too.”

“Rex,” said the chief to himself, wiping his brow with a trembling hand.

Chivers noted the same man in the black suit he’d seen before, floating in the background, eyes on them. He frowned. Why was the undertaker allowed inside the cordon?

“Motive?” asked the chief.

“Now I’m guessing,” Chivers continued, “but from thirty years of experience I’d say pretty definitely we’re looking at a home invasion and robbery, combined with possible sex crimes. The fact that the entire family was subdued and controlled suggests to me there might have been more than one perp.”

“This was no robbery,” came a soft, drawling voice.

Chivers jerked his head around to find that the man in the black suit had somehow managed to approach without being noticed and was now standing behind them.

Chivers’s scowl deepened. “I’m talking to the chief. Do you mind?”

“Not at all. But if I may, I would like to offer a few observations for the benefit of the investigation. A mere robber would not have gone to the trouble to tie up his victims and then burn them alive.”

“ Alive? ” the chief said. “How do you know?”

“The sadism and rage evident in the arc of this crime are palpable. A sadist wishes to see his victims suffer. That is how he derives his gratification. To tie someone to a bed, douse that person with gasoline, and light them on fire — where’s the gratification in that, if the person is already dead?”

The chief’s face went as gray as putty. His mouth moved but no sound came out.

“Bullshit,” said Chivers fiercely. “This was a home invasion and robbery. I’ve seen it before. The perps break in, find a couple of pretty girls, have their way with them, load up on jewelry, and then burn down the place thinking they’ll destroy the evidence — particularly the DNA inside the girls.”

“Yet they didn’t take the jewelry, as you yourself noted in your taped observations a few minutes ago, regarding some lumps of gold you discovered.”

“Hold on, here. You were listening to me? Who the hell are you?” Chivers turned to the chief. “Is this guy official?”

The chief passed a sopping handkerchief across his brow. He looked indecisive and frightened. “Please. Enough.”

The man in the black suit regarded him a moment with his silver eyes, and then shrugged nonchalantly. “I have no official role here. I am merely a bystander offering his impressions. I shall leave you gentlemen to your work.”

With that he turned and began to leave. Then he paused to speak over his shoulder. “I should mention, however: there may well be… more .”

And with that he walked off, slipping under the tape and disappearing into the crowd of rubberneckers.

Horace P. Fine III stopped, swiveled on his instep, and looked Corrie up and down, as if he had just thought of something.

“Do you have any experience house-sitting?” he asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” Corrie replied immediately. It was sort of true: she’d watched their trailer home overnight more than once when her mother went on an all-night bender. And then there was the time she’d stayed at her father’s apartment six months before, when he’d gone to that job fair in Pittsburgh.

“Never anyplace this big, though,” she added, looking around.

Fine looked at her suspiciously — but then again, maybe it was just the way his face was put together. It seemed that every syllable she’d uttered had been greeted by distrust.

“Well, I don’t have time to check your references,” he replied. “The person I’d arranged to take the position backed out at the last minute, and I’m overdue in New York.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “But I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Come on, I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Corrie, following the man down the long, echoing first-floor hallway, wondered just how Horace P. Fine planned to keep an eye on her from two thousand miles away.

At first it had seemed almost like a miracle. She’d learned of the opening by coincidence: a conversation, overheard at a coffee shop, about a house that needed looking after. A few phone calls led her to the mansion’s owner. It would be an ideal situation — in Roaring Fork no less. No more driving eighteen miles each way to her fleabag motel room. She could even move in that very day. Now she’d be earning money instead of spending it — and doing so in style.

But when she’d dropped by the mansion to meet with the owner, her enthusiasm dimmed. Although the house was technically in Roaring Fork, it was way up in the foothills, completely isolated, at the end of a narrow, winding, mile-long private road. It was huge, to be sure, but of a dreary postmodern design of glass, steel, and slate that was more reminiscent of an upscale dentist’s office than a home. Unlike most of the big houses she’d seen, which were perched on hillsides offering fantastic views, this house was built in a declivity, practically a bowl in the mountains, surrounded on three sides by tall fir trees that seemed to throw the place into perpetual gloom. On the fourth side was a deep, icy ravine that ended in a rockfall of snow-covered boulders. Ironically, most of the vast plate-glass windows of the house overlooked this “feature.” The decor was so aggressively contemporary as to be almost prison-like in austerity, all chrome and glass and marble — not a straight edge to be found anywhere save the doorways — and the walls were covered with grinning masks, hairy weavings, and other creepy-looking African art. And the place was cold, too — almost as cold as the ski warehouse where she did her work. Corrie had kept her coat on during the entire walk-through.

“This leads down to the second basement,” Fine said, pausing to point at a closed door. “The older furnace is down there. It heats the eastern quarter of the house.”

Heats. Yeah, right. “Second basement?” Corrie asked aloud.

“It’s the only part of the original house that still exists. When they demolished the lodge, the developer retained the basement for retrofitting into the new house.”

“There was a lodge here?”

Fine scoffed. “It was called Ravens Ravine Lodge, but it was just an old log cabin. A photographer used it for a home base when he went out into the mountains to take pictures. Adams, the name was. They tell me he was famous.”

Adams. Ansel Adams? Corrie could just picture it. There had probably been a cozy, rustic little cabin here once, nestled in among the pines — until it got razed for this monstrosity. She wasn’t surprised that Fine was not familiar with Adams — only a Philistine, or his soon-to-be ex-wife, could have bought all this freaky art.

Horace Fine himself was almost as cold as the house. He ran a hedge fund back in Manhattan. Or maybe it was the U.S. branch of some foreign investment bank; Corrie hadn’t really been listening when he told her. Hedge, branch — it was all so much shrubbery to her. Luckily, he seemed not to have heard of her or her recent stay in the local jail. He’d made it quite clear that he detested Roaring Fork; he hated the house; and he loathed the woman who had forced him to buy it and who was now making its disposal as difficult as she possibly could. “The virago” was the way he had named her to Corrie over the last twenty minutes. All he wanted to do was get someone in the house and get the hell back to New York, the sooner the better.