Another man in blue overalls was moving slabs of plaster and ing away from the middle of the floor. The air was thick with acrid smoke.
I could see already that a lot had been done to restore the room’s appearance prior to the fire. The space around the wood stove was clear down to the bare floor-or what was left of it-and of the stairs had been cleared as well. The body was gone. LeMay made the introductions from the door. “Jonathon, this is Gunther-he’s the SA’s man we were expecting. This is Detective geant Jonathon Michael; that’s Jonathon with an 011 at the end ead of an-parents were either hippies or illiterate. He’s my superout of St. Albans and he’s real sensitive about his name, so get ight in your reports.” “You can spell it any way you want; everyone else does.” Michael ed to me from across the mess.
“Glad to meet you.” Michael was the Stan Laurel to LeMay’s Oliver Hardy, thin and tall, with a narrow face and steel-rimmed granny glasses that gave a perpetually surprised look.
“So, what have you found so far?” LeMay maintained center stage. “Well, the fire started at the me burned straight up and out. You can see the V pattern clearly, g with the downburn pattern over here. All that started secondary eups, especially when the ceiling started to go, but you can tell they me all offshoots.” He guided me around the room, showing me one burned area after another. I nodded-I hoped intelligently-but I couldn’t tell one from the other. To me, the whole room looked trashed and burned to a crisp.
We all turned at the sound of someone entering the front door. A small, neat man with carefully combed brown hair and an immaculately trimmed mustache stood there watching us. His hands were buried in the pockets of his tan overcoat, giving him an oddly proprietary look, as if he were appraising the building for possible purchase. LeMay sounded surprised to see him. “Hullo, Crofter. I thought Appleby was on this.”
The small man’s face didn’t change. “He is. I just wanted to take a look.” He shifted his gaze to me. “Who are you?” “The SA’s guy-Joe Gunther.” LeMay answered for me. “What are you doing here?” There was a momentary pause. The question wasn’t harsh, but the inflection was so loaded with suspicion that even LeMay was rendered mute.
Michael cleared his throat. “Hamilton okayed it.” “He did?” LeMay regained his voice, although he kept it low-key. “Yeah.
You can check with him if you like. We’re going to be here for a while.” The small man didn’t answer, but looked at me carefully once more, turned on his heel and left. The tenseness in the room followed him out like a cloud of after-shave. I looked to the other two. “Who was that?” Jonathon Michael answered. “Crofter Smith. He’s the senior BCI man under Hamilton at the St. J. barracks. He’s a little reserved good cop, though.” “Even if he does look like a shoe clerk,” LeMay added. Michael gave a short laugh. “Better that than sanitation workers, like us.
He’s just not real fond of outside investigators; makes him a little aloof.” “I think he’s a cold fish.” Michael shrugged. Years back, SA investigators used to be state policemen on rotation. Then the legislature, for whatever reasons, broke up the marriage. It didn’t alter the basic system to any great extent, but it did affect the ease that once marked communications between State’s Attorneys and the State Police. Many of the latter, and obviously Crofter Smith among them, felt the loss of direct representation in the SA’s offices had been a major mistake. LeMay pawed at the ground for a moment, muttering, “Where was I?” He then grabbed my elbow and steered me over to where the stove had stood.
“Okay, so here we have the origin-nice and tidy. But it dumped? Was coal shoveled out of it onto the floor? Was it sed with an accelerant to make it explode?” I noticed Michael had found a seat on an evidence can and was tching LeMay’s show. I wondered what he was thinking, until I sed in his expression the simple admiration of a shy man for an berant one.
“I know there’s not much left of the floor lucky there’s any at really, or you and Hillstrom and the SA would have ended up in basement.” He peered up at me from his crouching position. “Bet never thought of that, did you? First thing we did was shore it up. “Anyway, look at the alligatoring here. See where the wood has n burned into squares? Well, we had a little debate about that, athon and me. You can get a pretty good idea from the size of those le squares whether the fire was slow and smoldering, or fast and hot. blem is, if the fire goes for long enough, then everything gets coned, and you have no way of telling whether it started fast or slow. at’s where you get into figuring out the layers of a fire, and somees you’re helped because something falls on a piece of wood, extinshes the flame, and preserves the alligatoring up to that point, so it’s dy sometimes to have the ceiling fall in.” “Gotcha,” I muttered, feeling I had to say something, even if it n’t reveal the depth of my wit.
LeMay jumped on it. “Gotcha, you say. But got what? Here’s the dence. Was it fast or slow to start?” I stared at where he was pointing, feeling my face flushing slightly. all for slow, large for fast… “Slow.” LeMay slapped his knee. “Damn. Brilliant. You were looking at wrong piece, by the way that’s fast char but you’re right anyMichael spoke up from his corner. “He guessed wrong, too, at t.”
LeMay chuckled. “That just puts you in good company.” I straightened, looking for a punch line in all this. “So what pened here? Can you reconstruct how it started?” Jonathon Michael finally got up and joined us, his voice quiet and asured compared to LeMay’s.
“We’ve taken samples for testing at crime lab-in those clean paint cans there-but we think what pened is that the man you found lying here fell up against the stove dumped it over; it wasn’t very sturdy, and it wouldn’t have taken ch.” LeMay chimed in. “The fire smoldered for a while, maybe half an r, building up a lot of smoke; that’s what killed the people upstairs.
Then, when things got hot enough, whoosh. The whole place went.
That’s why it was a little confusing telling the fast char from the slow. You have both here.” “So there’s no sign of arson?” I asked.
Michael shook his head. “Nothing blatant. There are problems, but nothing that outright says arson. “What problems?” “Oh, it’s mostly law of averages, like the position of the body.
We know he was lying on the stove-a good indicator that he fell on it to make it topple over-but we found him facing up. Usually, they face down.” Again, LeMay pitched in. “See? Unusual, but not really suspicious.” I glanced at the stairs. “What about up there?” LeMay led the way upstairs, the irrepressible tour guide, pointing to the details.
“We didn’t find anything up here. The fire spread along the ceiling, just like in a chimney. You can see on the walls how it seeks the highest spot. Then it got to the landing, had nowhere to go, spread out to all four walls, and then began to eat its way through to the attic.”
We were now standing between the two bedroom doors, opposite the bathroom, and in full daylight from the hole above. The floor had not been as carefully cleared as the one below. I pushed at a small piece of debris with my toe.
“So there were no signs of any fire being set up here?” LeMay dropped to his knees, pointing out the details. “You can see char here, just like downstairs, but that’s from fall-down, junk from the burning ceiling. See? You can see the outlines of individual pieces of wood and stuff. We took photographs before we moved it, of course, so you can see from those, too.” As he moved, his foot brushed against a small, flaky pile near the mop board at the top of the stairs. Something briefly twinkled and caught my eye. I bent over to look more closely.
“What have you got?” Michael asked, squatting next to me. “Damn,”