Douglas Preston - White Fire

Chivers hung back, saying nothing, a frown of displeasure gathering on his thick face.

They finally reached the gruesome bathtub. Morris could hardly look at it. But Pendergast went right over and knelt beside it, bowing over it almost as if he were praying. Removing one glove, he poked around with his white fingers and the pair of long tweezers, putting more samples into tubes. At last he rose and they continued making their way through the ruined house.

They came to the burnt mattress with its loops of wire and bone fragments. Here Pendergast stopped again, gazing at it for the longest time. Morris began to shiver as the inactivity, cold, and a clammy sick feeling all began to penetrate. The agent removed a document from his coat and opened it, revealing a detailed plat of the house — where had he gotten that? — which he consulted at length before folding it up and putting it away. Then he knelt and examined with a magnifying glass the charred remains of the skeleton tied to the mattress, really just bone fragments, and various other things as well. Morris could feel the cold creeping deeper into his clothing. Chivers was becoming restless, moving back and forth and sometimes slapping his gloves together in an effort to keep warm — broadcasting through his body language that he considered this a waste of time.

Pendergast finally straightened up. “Shall we move on?”

“Great idea,” said Chivers.

They continued through the burnt landscape: the ghostly standing sticks covered with hoarfrost, the scorched walls, the heaps of frozen ashes, the glistering puddles of glass and metal. Now the corpse of the dog could be seen to one side, along with the two parallel, crumbled piles of ash and bone representing Jenny Baker’s mother and father.

Morris had to look away. It was too much.

Pendergast knelt and examined everything with the utmost care, taking more samples, maintaining his silence. He seemed particularly interested in the charcoaled fragments of the dog, carefully probing with his long-stemmed tweezers and a tool that looked like a dental pick. They moved into the ruins of the garage, where the burnt and fused hulks of three cars rested. The FBI agent gave them a cursory look.

And then they were done. Beyond the perimeter tape, Pendergast turned. His eyes startled Morris — they glittered so sharply in the bright winter sun.

“It is as I feared,” he said.

Morris waited for more but was greeted only with silence.

“Well,” said Chivers loudly, “this just reinforces what I reported to you earlier, Stanley. All the evidence points toward a botched robbery with at least two perps, maybe more. With a possible sex-crime component.”

“Agent Pendergast?” Morris finally said.

“I’m sorry to say that an accurate reconstruction of the sequence of the crime may be impossible. So much information was taken by the fire. But I am able to salvage a few salient details, if you wish to hear them.”

“I do. Please.”

“There was a single perpetrator. He entered through an unlocked back door. Three members of the family were at home, all upstairs and probably sleeping. The perpetrator immediately killed the dog who came to investigate. Then he — or she — ascended the front staircase to the second floor, surprised a juvenile female in her bedroom, incapacitated and gagged her before she could make significant noise, and wired her to the bed, still alive. He may have been on his way to the parents’ room when the second juvenile female arrived home.”

He turned to Morris. “This would be your intern, Jenny. She came in through the garage and went upstairs. There she was ambushed by the perpetrator, incapacitated, gagged, and placed in the bathtub. This was accomplished with utmost efficiency, but nevertheless this second assault appears to have awakened the parents. There was a short fight, which began upstairs and ended downstairs. I suspect one of the parents was killed there, on the spot, while the other was dragged down later. They may have been beaten.”

“How can you know all this?” said Chivers. “This is sheer speculation!”

Pendergast went on, ignoring this outburst. “The perpetrator returned upstairs, doused both juvenile victims with gasoline, and set them on fire. He then made a — by necessity — rapid exit from the premises, dragging the other parent down the stairs and spreading additional accelerant on his way out. He left on foot — not by car. A pity the snowy woods around the house were trampled by neighbors and firefighters.”

“No way,” said Chivers, shaking his head. “No way can you draw all those conclusions from the information we have — and the conclusions you’ve drawn, well, with all due respect, most of them are wrong.”

“I must say I share Mr. Chivers’s, ah, skepticism as to how you can learn all this from a mere walk-through,” said Morris.

Pendergast replied in the tone of someone explaining to a child. “It’s the only logical sequence that fits the facts. And the facts are these: When Jenny Baker returned home, the perpetrator was already in the house. She came in through the garage — the boyfriend confirmed that — and if the parents had already been killed she would have seen their bodies at the back door. She didn’t see the dog’s body because it was behind a counter that once existed, here.” He pulled out the plat.

“But how do you know he was already upstairs when Jenny arrived home?”

“Because Jenny was ambushed upstairs.”

“She could have been attacked in the garage and forced upstairs.”

“If she was the first victim, and was attacked in the garage, the dog would be alive and would have barked, awakening the parents. No — the very first victim was the dog, killed at the back door, probably with a blow to the head by something like a baseball bat.”

“A bat ?” Chivers said in disbelief. “How do you know he didn’t use a knife? Or gun?”

“The neighbors heard no shots. Have you ever tried to kill a German shepherd with a knife? And finally, the dog’s burnt cranium showed green-bone fracture patterns.” He paused. “One needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to analyze a few simple details like these, Mr. Chivers.”

Chivers fell silent.

“Therefore, when Jenny arrived home, the perpetrator was already upstairs and had already incapacitated the sister, as he would not have been able to subdue two at once.”

“Unless there were two perps,” said Chivers.

“Go on,” Morris told Pendergast.

“Using the bat or some other method, he immediately subdued Jenny.”

“Which is exactly why there must have been two perps!” said Chivers. “It was a robbery gone bad. They broke into the house, but things spiraled out of control before they could commence the robbery. Happens all the time.”

“No. The sequence was well planned and the perpetrator had everything under control at all times. The psychological hallmarks of the crime — the savagery of it — suggests a lone perpetrator who had a motive other than robbery.”

Chivers rolled his eyes at Morris.

“And as for your theory about a burglary gone wrong, the perpetrator was well aware there were at least three people at home. An organized burglar doesn’t break into an occupied house.”

“Unless there are a couple of girls they might want to…” Chivers swallowed, glanced at the chief.

“The girls were not molested. If he intended to rape the girls he would have removed the threat of the parents by killing them first. And a rape fits neither the time line nor the sequence. I might point out that the elapsed time between the boyfriend dropping Jenny off and the fire appearing on the mountain was ten minutes or less.”

“And how do you know one of the parents was killed downstairs and the other dragged down later?”