Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [63]
After I set up a perimeter to keep out neighbors and passersby, who were already showing up on foot, after I had assigned a team to check nearby residences for casualties and damage, Ben Arden and I walked across the road.
Aside from burning brush and two large maples that had been knocked half over so that their branches were knuckling the ground like football players waiting for the snap, the first thing we spotted was the still-burning hulk of the maroon Chevrolet. On the far side of it sat Engine 1, stripped down to the frame and six metal wheels, most of the rubber vaporized or blown off: no hose, no tank, no motor, no cab. The engine had been in a perfect line with Caputo’s now-vaporized trailer, as well as with the motor home two hundred yards away. Combined with the small hillock, it had probably saved our lives.
On the far side of the decimated engine, Caputo’s double-wide trailer had been replaced by a giant hole in the ground. As if a bulldozer had flattened them, the brush and trees surrounding the trailer were leveled for a distance of sixty feet in all directions. The oil drums and paper sacks I’d seen behind the trailer were gone. As were the blackberries. Not even the dog collar remained to convince me I had seen a dog.
Spot fires continued to smolder in the trees and brush around us.
After Snoqualmie and our second engine from the Wilderness Rim satellite station arrived and began lobbing water high into the firs, the Snoqualmie officer sent a runner to tell me they’d found an object wedged into the fork of a tree approximately a quarter mile from ground zero, that they’d tentatively identified the object as a human head.
Everybody at the scene remained on pins and needles, looking for more body parts, but all we found was a mangled hand—Caputo’s—the hospital dressing still in place. Just as I thought, they hadn’t sewn his fingers back on.
It took an hour to get loose of the scene. I fielded questions, gave orders, explained what had happened to at least twenty different individuals, all the while promising my girls we would have lunch soon.
Morgan seemed more distraught than anyone, and after a while I began to suspect she might be overreacting to garner attention from me.
Just after the media arrived, two Eastside Fire and Rescue investigators showed up and began snapping pictures, focusing their questions on Ian, Ben, myself, and Karrie—the four who’d gotten closest to the trailer.
They were particularly curious about the fact that we’d visited Caputo yesterday.
My personal theory was that, under the influence of prescription medication and alcohol, Caputo had left food burning on the stove. After all, his mother had been in the process of bringing over part of a meal. I figured the dog had gotten into rat poison or eaten some tainted roadkill. The ammonium nitrate, which Caputo probably kept around for removing stumps, had been stored inside and premixed with the fuel oil, although I didn’t recall seeing it yesterday when we were cleaning up. The fire set it off. My theory held water until Caputo’s mother insisted Max had never blasted a stump in his life.
Oddly enough, a volunteer had parked his extended-cab pickup truck in front of my new Lexus, so that the Lexus received no damage whatsoever, while the volunteer’s truck lost three windows, a tire, and most of the grille. I put my bunking clothes in the trunk and left my knee-high rubber boots on. My civilian shoes had disappeared along with everything else on Engine 1. Either that or they were in a tree with Caputo’s head.
28. GOING TO THE BANK IN A DIAPER
As I drove the four of us back into town, I couldn’t help thinking about Charlie Drago’s warning that we would be blown to smithereens. Had to be a coincidence. Charlie Drago was paranoid. Our explosion had been caused by Caputo, who’d been one of our resident nutcases ever since I was in the department. The only thing that bothered me