Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [119]
When anybody blocked my view of the smoldering house, I stared through them. I’d been helped off with my bunking clothes, my Nomex hood, my heavy coat, the thick trousers and suspenders along with the knee-high rubber boots. The jeans and T-shirt I’d worn underneath were still wet with sweat. Somebody found my civilian shoes and put them on me—Stephanie, I guess.
It was cool now, that middle-of-the-summer, nighttime chill that descends on towns near the mountains, yet I remained sopping, sweat trickling along my brow and off the tip of my nose.
In the next few days there would be four funerals. Allyson. Britney. Morgan. Me. My friends at the firehouse could arrange ours. God knows Wes and Lillian weren’t up to the task. Besides the alcohol problem, Wes had already suffered a myocardial infarction and Lillian a minor stroke, precipitated, she said, by a visit from an FBI agent with a bad hairpiece, who’d talked endlessly about her daughter’s check-kiting scams in the Midwest and in Florida.
The fire department put up a portable generator in the front yard, a light string plugged into it, so that the black guts of what remained of my house were lit up like a picture shoot, while the investigators continued to poke around the periphery. They still hadn’t gone into the bedroom area.
Both my kids had been emotionally traumatized today, and in hindsight I could see I typically had bungled it. Six months earlier I’d found Britney playing with matches, as it happened, not long after one of her mother’s erratic phone calls. We’d talked about it, and I’d made it clear how dangerous playing with matches was.
What if she had started this, lit a book of matches in the closet, lost control of the flames, closed the door, and tried to pretend it didn’t happen? She wouldn’t be the first kid to play out that scenario.
Or maybe Morgan had been smoking on the sofa and fell asleep, dropped a lighted cigarette into the cushions. I’d seen Morgan sneak cigarettes behind her mother’s house.
And then it struck me.
My ex was the one with the hidden agendas. She’d been gone three years, but what if she’d chosen tonight to return? Was it possible Lorie held enough of a grudge against me to do this? Was it possible she’d sneaked inside using her key, which still fit the locks, and torched the place? I’d spoken to her on the phone as recently as Easter and believed we were on amicable terms, but I thought we were on amicable terms when she scrammed out of town with the original Mayor Haston.
One of my greatest weaknesses was not knowing when people were pissed at me.
Was Lorie angry enough to have done this?
Generally, an amateur torch uses an accelerant, most often gasoline. I’d never seen that much heat in a house that hadn’t been torched. Two winters ago we’d responded to a stubborn house fire that turned out to be fed by five gallons of high-octane gasoline splashed around liberally by the ex-husband of the resident. The resident survived; her canaries, pet llama, and house didn’t. Neither did the ex, who lit a match while he was still enveloped in the fumes. Blown into the backyard by the initial blast, he died in the hospital four days later. Burned all to hell. Poetic justice, we thought.
Two shadows stopped in front of me. “Need to ask a few questions,” said Shad, the shorter of the shadows, the one I didn’t like. What am I saying? I had no use for either of them.
Without averting my gaze from the house, I said, “You find any trace of my daughters?”
“We were just working in the living-room area. But we came up with a few questions.”
“I answered your questions.”
“We got more.”
“When are you going to start digging for my daughters?”
“Where were you tonight?”
“I already told you. When are you going to dig?”
“Listen,” Shad said. “We’re going to cool the place off and go in carefully. We don’t want