Ridley Pearson: Beyond Recognition

“Time or heat?” Boldt asked.

“The rate of destruction is a product of both.”

“This was hot,” Boldt informed him. As suggested, he had spoken with air traffic control. The initial spike of flame had stretched eleven hundred feet into the night sky. No house fire had ever caused such a phenomenon. It was the kind of record setting of which Boldt wanted no part.

“We’re hoping for some bone frags to come out of the lab work. We sent off a garbage can of ash and debris. Some metals hold up pretty well in fire. We might get something there. Quite honestly, it’s unusual to come away with only that.” He indicated the contents of the plastic evidence bag. “Highly unusual, one might even say. If an assistant had performed the site work for us, I’d send him or her back to try again. But I did this one myself, Lou. There just wasn’t anything to work with.” He paused. “You okay?”

“I wouldn’t want to die like that.”

“No.” Dixie added, “You wouldn’t like the autopsy either. Toasters and floaters, the two worst bodies in the business.”

“So I’m working a homicide,” Boldt confirmed.

“‘Circumstances of discovery raise a suspicion that this was a violent death.’ That’s how I’ll write it up. Are there circumstances of disappearance? That’s your bailiwick.”

“There are,” Boldt confirmed. “One Dorothy Elaine Enwright went missing the night of the fire. An eyewitness saw a woman fitting Enwright’s description in the house just prior to the fire.”

“Well, there you are,” Dixie said.

“There I am,” Boldt replied.

The medical examiner’s determination of a body present in the rubble threw the investigation into high gear and even higher profile. Local news agencies clamored for information. Boldt assigned two of his squad’s detectives to the investigation, John LaMoia and Bobbie Gaynes, to be joined by two probationary firemen, Sidney Fidler and Neil Bahan, loaned to the Seattle Police Department as arson investigators. Boldt would act as case supervisor, reporting, as always, directly to Phil Shoswitz.

A coordinating meeting, arranged for the SPD fifth floor conference room, came off on time, as scheduled on Monday at 10 A.M., six days after the Enwright fire. It included Boldt’s team and four members of the King County Arson Task Force, an alliance formed of Marshal Five fire inspectors representing various fire districts within the county.

Boldt had never been fond of meetings involving more than three people; to him, they seemed exercises in tongue wagging. But this meeting went differently. The four fire inspectors worked well with their brethren assigned to police duty, Fidler and Bahan. Boldt, LaMoia, and Gaynes participated primarily as onlookers while the technical details of the fire were discussed. A burn pattern on wood known as “alligatoring” had steered the inspectors toward the center of the structure, where destruction was so severe there was literally no evidence to be gathered. The area of origin-an essential starting point for any arson investigation-was therefore impossible to pinpoint.

The longer the meeting went, the more anxious Boldt became. Reading between the spoken words, he experienced a sinking feeling that the fire’s intense heat had destroyed any and all indication of its origin. Worse, all six experts seemed both intimidated and surprised by the severity of the heat.

With everyone still present, Neil Bahan summed up the discussion for the sake of Boldt and his detectives. “It goes like this, Sergeant. We have the initial plume reported as a flash. Not an explosion. That’s worrisome, because it excludes a hell of a lot of known accelerants. Add to that the eyewitness reports of the height of the plume, and the flame itself being a distinct purple in color, and we figure we’re looking at liquid accelerants. We could make some guesses, but we’re not going to. The prudent thing to do is send our samples off to the state crime lab and test for hydrocarbons. That will point us to the specific fuel used, which in turn may give John and Bobbie a retail or wholesale source to check out.” LaMoia and Gaynes nodded. Gaynes scribbled down a note. “As it is, we’ll put it out to every snitch we got. This guy brags about it-as they love to do-and we nip him. Meanwhile, we go about trying to make sense of the rest of the evidence.”

“Which is?” Boldt questioned.

Bahan eye-checked his buddies and said, “I would rather wait and see what the lab tells us, but the deal is this: We’ve got some popcorn in the foundation’s concrete, some spalling. Fire suppression washed a lot of this evidence away and may have affected the rest of it, but what we don’t have is slag or heavy metals-both of which we would expect to see with liquid accelerants. But added to that we have some blue concrete right beneath the center of the house-quite possibly the area of origin. That’s bad shit, blue concrete. That’s something we don’t want to find, because it means this thing went off somewhere above two thousand degrees. If that’s right, it lops off another whole shitload of known accelerants and, quite frankly, gets out of our area of expertise.”

“ATF, maybe,” another of the fire inspectors suggested.

Bahan agreed. “Yeah, maybe we bring in the Feds or send some of the stuff down to Chestnut Grove, their Sacramento lab. See what they have to say.”

“So what you’re saying,” Boldt suggested, “is that the origin of the fire is unusual.”

Two of the Marshal Fives laughed aloud.

Bahan said, “You could say that, yes.”

“And you’re suggesting that we stick by the ruling of suspicious origin.”

“Most definitely. This sucker was torched, Sergeant.”

“We’re checking out her ex-husband, any boyfriends, employer, insurance policies, neighbors,” Boldt informed the visitors. “We’ll turn up a suspect, and when we do, maybe we send one of you guys into his garage to have a look-see at his workbench?”

“No shortage of volunteers for that assignment,” Bahan answered for the others. “This guy is good,” he explained. The others nodded.

Boldt bristled at the idea of an arsonist being considered talented. “She was a mom. Did you know? Seven-year-old boy.”

“He was in the fire?” one of the fire inspectors gasped, his face draining of color. It wasn’t difficult to spot the parents in this group.

“No. Home with his father, thank God,” Boldt answered. He imagined his own son Miles in a fire like that. “Thank God,” he muttered again.

Bahan said, “We turn it over to the lab and we see what we see. It’s really too early to make a decent appraisal. For the time being, it’s in the hands of the chemists.”

“We’ll continue the questioning,” Boldt told them. “Maybe something shakes out.”

The members of the Arson Task Force nodded, but Boldt’s own detective, John LaMoia, did not looked impressed. “John?” Boldt asked, wondering if he wanted to contribute.

“Nothing,” LaMoia replied.

It wasn’t nothing, and Boldt knew it. A feeling of impending dread accompanied him on his return to his office, where a blanket of telephone messages had collected like the falling leaves outside.

“Lieutenant Boldt?” a deep male voice asked at the door, misquoting his rank.

“Enough with the jokes,” Boldt complained, assuming LaMoia had put another rookie to work.

It wasn’t another rookie he faced. It was one of the four Marshal Fives from the meeting. He didn’t remember the name. He was a tall, handsome man with wide shoulders and dark brown eyes. He wore a full beard. He had big teeth. Scandinavian, Boldt decided. The sergeant came out of his chair and corrected his rank. The two shook hands. The other’s right hand was hard and callused. He wore his visitor’s badge crooked, clipped on hastily. A pager hung at his belt, and his boots were heavy leather. His hair was cut short, his sleeves rolled up. He reintroduced himself as Steven Garman.