“Sorry. Anyway, the whole thing looks clean as a whistle.” “Thank you.” “What’s your gut reaction?” I asked. “I hate it.” Hamilton gave me a baleful look that wasn’t neat and tidy. But his tone was utterly neutral. “You hate what?” LeMay shifted again and flopped his hand over, palm up on his “Lot of things. The bullet, the locked door, the way that body’s g on the stove, among other things. Just doesn’t look real. I don’t w… I’m stuck with a lack of evidence, but I smell a rat.” Hamilton nodded.
“Okay. That’s good. Appleby?” The one man who wouldn’t call him Apple.
Still, I was pleased at way he’d accepted what LeMay had just said. I began to hope I was ing him short, maybe his mind wasn’t as restrained and unimaginaas his exterior had led me to believe.
“We’re not getting much help from the Order on this. Churchill ed to Sarris and asked him to get his people to open up. He said wasn’t in a position to do that, gave us some crap about their dom to interact or something.” Hamilton frowned again and glanced at Churchill, but Apple n’t even pause. These weren’t his barracks; he’d be back in Derby ore too long.
Besides, he was an old-time street cop, less inclined to id crude language, and considerably less concerned with impressing superiors.
“The local who pulled the alarm outside the firehouse said he woke hearing shouts in the street, looked out his window, and saw people ning around the house. Said it didn’t look like they were doing much d, and he hadn’t heard the siren yet, so he ran off to sound the alarm self.”
“Did he recognize any of the people in the street?” Hamilton ed.
“Nope. Says they all look the same to him and it was too far away way. His house is pretty far off.” “How involved was the house when he stuck his head out the dow?” “He said he saw flames downstairs; he’s a little vague about upirs.
Says he might have seen a flickering.” Apple opened a file he’d been holding in his lap. “I got the autopback from Hillstrom. The four upstairs died of smoke inhalation.
e guy downstairs-Fox is a different matter.” He nodded in May’s direction. “Dick’s gut is right on the money: Whatever the y died of, it sure as hell wasn’t smoke. Hillstrom says she has no ubts he was dead before he hit the stove. The fire did a pretty good on him; so did moving him from the house to Burlington, for that tter. His neck was pretty well burned through; lot of bone breakage e to heat-” “Any guesses what killed him?” Hamilton interrupted. “She can’t say for sure; she’s mostly ruling stuff out, like no bullet le, no depressed fractures, no poison in the system, no bloody knife found nearby, etc…. She did find something interesting, though-a feather in the neck.” Hamilton’s brow furrowed. “Where in the neck. I thought you said it was burned through?” Apple closed the file with a small slap.
“Well, that’s what makes it iffy. I mean, we’re talking about a piece of meat that’s been cooked right down to charcoal almost. There’s a photo in here, but you can’t tell squat from it, so I drove over to see it all for myself. What she’s got is all burned and microscopic, but she swears it’s the remnants of a feather. What she can’t swear to is whether it was on the guy when he burned, or in him.” “Like swallowed by him?” LeMay asked.
“Swallowed, inhaled… You know as much as I do. Maybe the guy ate raw, unplucked chickens or something. I hear they’re pretty strange.” LeMay spoke up. “We found a feather on the landing upstairs.”
There was a pause. Nobody apparently could make much of that.
The mention of the landing, however, made me think of the four other victims. “Dick, you said the fire smoldered for quite a while before it finally took off, but Rennie and I found the four victims upstairs all huddled together on one bed. Why didn’t they open the window if they smelled smoke? Why didn’t they shove a blanket under the door?” I hadn’t meant to put Dick LeMay on the spot. He shrugged and looked over to Appleby, who shook his head. “Beats me.” “Maybe they were all huddled on that bed for some other reason.
When we first went in, and I saw them under the blanket, I thought it was there to block off the smoke. But I’ve been thinking-the blanket was around them, not over their heads. They were all crunched up like they were afraid of something.” Apple frowned thoughtfully. “You’re saying they were frightened by something before the fire even started, something that may have distracted them from smelling the smoke before it was too late.” “Right,” I said. “Like when kids get scared of lightning in the middle of the night, or they hear something creaking outside. They get together; they huddle up. Maybe the woman was playing along, lending them comfort; or maybe she was scared, too.”
“Wouldn’t the smoke have stunk the place up?” Potter asked, as if pained by the possibility this might all be more than a simple accident.
LeMay answered him. “The stove was a cob job-held together with baling wire, literally. It must have stunk all the time-they were bably used to it; if all of a sudden there was more smoke, and if they e seriously distracted like Joe thinks, they might not have noticed it was too late. Besides, depending on what’s burning, the gases can you before the smoke is even noticeable.” Hamilton nodded from his perch on the desk-the benevolent derator.
“It’s purely speculative, but we should keep it in mind. at about the hose line that went flat? I gather that turned out to be hing.” His last sentence stunned me. I’d heard with everyone else that the had been drained from the portable pump that had supplied water the river to the tanker, and thereby to Rennie and me, but that dly sounded like nothing. On the contrary, it had struck me as a cidence too great to ignore.
Apple nodded. “Apparently Buster Chartier got a little tense at time, but it turns out it was human error. One of his people forgot efill the oil pan after he serviced the pump last time.” “Definitely accidental?” Hamilton pushed.
“Anything’s possible, but in my book, the guy screwed up. He did job last month there was a bill for the oil. Another guy helped him ing the initial breakdown and cleaning of the pump, but had to leave ause it was getting late and he had to go home for dinner. I found oil, unopened, and the guy thinks that in the rush-now that he was alone and late for dinner himself-he just forgot to put the damn if in.” I thought back to Buster’s odd behavior following the fire. Now made more sense. He held himself accountable for risking my life ause he hadn’t checked the pump. His anger at Rennie had been pounded by his own guilt. I now regretted not bringing the subject at the time.
My mixed feelings were not unique. There was a perceptible sense isappointment in the room. Had the pump been sabotaged, as most had thought, then premeditation and possibly conspiracy became ts of the recipe. That meant a more organized, complicated scheme, which in turn meant more potential rocks lying around for us to look er. Apple’s report put an end to all that, and introduced the possity that the pump wasn’t the only thing that merely looked suspius. Like bloodhounds suffering cabin fever, none of us looked ward to being told the hunt was off.
As if to stem that very possibility, Apple almost cheerfully turned nother sheet in his folder. “I got the report back from the crime lab the shell casing found in the house. It is 9 mm, like we thought, from automatic, but they can’t say what kind, nor can they say how long ago the bullet was fired. But,” here he held up his hand theatrically, “it does have a nice clear, single print on it.” “Belonging to…?” I asked.
“Unknown. Hey, you can’t have it all.” Hamilton looked a little irritated. “They couldn’t match the casing to anything in their files?”