The man exhaled: “Then I'm good. I don't know nothin' about nothin'.”
Discouraged, Lucas went back to the car, making a mental list of things to do in the morning, calls to make. He didn't want to call Lucy Coombs, because he didn't want to talk to her again. Instead, he called John Smith, who was home watching television.
“Not a thing,” Smith said. “I'll get a call as soon as anybody finds anything. Finds a shoelace. So far, we haven't found a thing.”
Heading toward home, a fire truck, siren blasting away, went by on a cross street.
He could hear more sirens to the south, not far away, and halfway home, with the windows in the car run down, he could smell the distinctive odor of a burning house.
He'd never figured out what it was, exactly-insulation, or plaster, or old wood, or some combination-but he'd encountered it a dozen times in his career, and it never smelled good.
Back at home, he found Weather in the kitchen, sitting at the counter with a notepad.
She asked, “You have time to run to the store?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. Ought to be doing something.
“I'm making a list…”
He was waiting for the list when his cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID: Flowers.
“Yeah?”
“I just got a call from Kathy Barth,” Flowers said. “Somebody just firebombed her house.”
The fire was out by the time Lucas got back. He'd driven right past it on the way home, but a block north, hadn't seen the smoke against the night sky, and the flames had been confined to the back side of the house.
Kathy and Jesse Barth were standing in the front yard talking to firemen when Lucas walked across the fire line. Jesse Barth saw him coming and pointed him out to her mother, who snapped something at her daughter, and then started toward Lucas.
“My house is burned down because of you assholes,” she shouted.
Lucas thought she was going to hit him, and put his hands up, palms out. “Wait, wait, wait… I just heard. Tell me what happened.”
“Somebody threw a firebomb through my back window, right in the kitchen, right through the window, everything's burned and screwed up and there's water…”
She suddenly went to her knees on the dirty wet grass, weeping. Jesse walked up to stand next to her, put her hand on her mother's shoulder. “Virgil said nothing would happen,” the kid said. “Virgil said you'd look out for us.”
Lucas shook his head: “We don't know what's going on here,” he said. “We can't find anybody who might have tried to pull you off the street, who killed Screw…”
“It's those fuckin' Klines, you fuckin' moron,” Kathy Barth shouted, trying to get back on her feet. The fireman caught her under one arm, and helped her get up.
Lucas said, “Ah, Jesus, I'm sorry about this…”
“It's all my pictures, all of Jesse's things from when she was a kid, all of her school papers, my wedding dress…” She took a step toward the house, and the fireman said, “Whoa. Not yet.”
Lucas asked him, “How bad is it?”
“The kitchen's a mess. Miz Barth used a fire extinguisher on it, which was pretty brave, and that held it down some, and we got here pretty quick,” the fireman said.
“The actual fire damage is confined to the kitchen, but there's smoke damage, and foam. Some of the structure under the back of the house could be in trouble.”
Lucas asked Kathy Barth, “Do you have insurance?”
“Yes. Part of the mortgage.”
“Then you'll get it fixed. Better than it was,” Lucas said. “A new kitchen. If it's only smoke, you can save a lot of your stuff, but as soon as the fire guys let you, you've got to get in, and get your photo stuff out.”
She came back at him: “Why can't you stop those guys? They're crazy.” And to Jesse: “We should never have gotten involved with them. We should never have gone to the cops. Now our house… Oh, jeez, our house…”
“Tell me what happened,” Lucas said.
“We were watching television, and there was a crash in the kitchen-” Jesse began.
Kathy interrupted: “One minute before that I was in the kitchen getting Cheez-Its.
I would have been exploded and burned up.”
Jesse, continuing: “-and we heard this window crash, this glass, and boom, there was fire all over the kitchen and I was screaming-” “I ran and got the fire extinguisher from the closet-” Kathy said.
Jesse: “I called nine-one-one and got the fire department to come-” “I squirted the fire extinguisher but there was fire all over, I could smell the gasoline and it wouldn't go out, the whole kitchen was full of fire and we had to run,” Kathy said. She was looking anxiously at the house.
Jesse: “The fire department took forever to get here…”
“Six minutes from when the call came in,” the fireman said. “Fire was out in seven.”
Lucas found the fireman in charge in the backyard. He was talking with another fireman, pointing up at the roof, broke off when Lucas came up. Lucas flashed his ID: “These folks were part of an investigation we did at the BCA.”
“The Klines-they told us,” the fireman said.
“Yeah. They say it was a bomb, came in through the window. What do you think?” Lucas asked.
“Our arson guy''' look it over when he gets here, but it could have been. There was a big flash all over the kitchen, all at once. You can still smell the propellant if you get close. Gas and oil.”
“A Molotov cocktail?”
“Something on that order,” the fireman said. “Maybe like a gallon cider jug.”
“Be pretty heavy to throw,” Lucas said.
The fireman nodded. “You ever in the Army?”
“No.”
“Well, in the Army they've got this thing in Basic Training where you try to throw a dummy grenade through a window from twenty or thirty feet. Most guys can't do it, even with three chances. You got grenades bouncing all over the place,” the fireman said. “Most guys couldn't throw a bottle any better. I'd say somebody ran up to the window, and dunked it, like a basketball.” He hesitated, then added, “If it was an outsider who did it.”
“The alternative would be…?”
The fireman shrugged. “The owner wants a vacant lot. This is a nice piece of property, and it might even be worth more if the house wasn't here. The house isn't so hot.
You take the insurance, you sell the lot… you move to Minnetonka.”
Lucas looked back at the house. He could see Kathy Barth on the front lawn, arms wrapped tight around herself.
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “She was worried about their pictures being burned, Jesse's school stuff, her wedding dress.”
“Well, that's something,” the fireman agreed. “You don't see people burning up that kind of thing, not unless it's a revenge trip. They don't burn up their own stuff that much.”
The second fireman chipped in: “There was a lot of damage right over the kitchen sink. There are dishes in the sink, and we haven't gone through it yet, but I betcha that bottle landed in the sink, and a lot of the gas wound up in the sink, instead of shooting all over the place. That helped confine it; the arson guys'll know better.”
“So who's your arson guy?”
Lucas took down the name of the head arson investigator, and thanked them for their time. Back in the front yard, he asked Kathy, “You got a credit card?”
“Why?”
“Gonna have to stay in a motel tonight,” Lucas said. “Probably for a few nights.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Got some cash, got an ATM card?”
She nodded again. “We're okay. We're just… we just…”
“We're just really scared,” Jesse finished.
Lucas called the Radisson in downtown St. Paul, got them a room. Told them not to tell anyone else where they were staying. A fireman said he would take them inside to get what they could out of the house. A neighbor volunteered space in her garage, where they temporarily could store whatever they could get out of the house.
The fireman suggested a couple of cleaning companies that could clean up the part of the house that wasn't damaged. “If you guys hadn't been home, if it'd taken another five minutes before somebody reported it, if you hadn't used that fire extinguisher to slow it down, you'd be looking at a hole in the ground. You get it cleaned up, you could be living in it again in a week,” he said. “I see it all the time.”