The county sheriff’s investigators had been over the area without finding anything; I didn’t expect to have better luck, any more than I had at the remains of Munroe Randall’s house. But then, I’d had some training in arson investigation myself, back when I was on the San Francisco cops, and I read the updated handbooks and manuals put out by police associations and insurance companies. I had also had a handful of jobs over the years involving arson. You have to keep checking and double-checking: that’s what detective work is all about.
The first thing you do on an inspection of a fire scene is to determine the point of origin. Once you’ve got that, you look for something to indicate how the fire started, whether it was accidental or a case of arson. If it was arson, what you’re after is the corpus delicti-evidence of the method or device used by the arsonist.
One of the ways to locate point of origin is to check the “alligatoring,” or charring, of the surface of the burned wood. This can tell you in which direction the fire spread, where it was the hottest, and if you’re fortunate you can trace it straight to the origin. I was fortunate, as it turned out. And not just once-twice. I not only found the point of origin, I found the corpus delicti as well.
It was arson, and no mistake. The fire had been set at the rear of the building farthest to the north, whatever that one might once have been; and what had been used to ignite it was a candle. I found the residue of it, a wax deposit inside a small cup-shaped piece of stone that was hidden under a pile of rubble. It took me ten minutes of sifting around and getting my hands and the trenchcoat completely blackened to dredge up the stone. Which was no doubt why the sheriff’s men hadn’t been as thorough as they should have been; not everybody is willing to turn himself into the likeness of a chimney sweep, particularly on a minor fire out in the middle of nowhere.
As near as I could determine, the candle had been made of purple-colored tallow. Which told me nothing much; purple candles were not uncommon. It had probably been stuck inside the cup-shaped stone to keep it from toppling over and starting the fire before it was intended to.
I was peering at the stone, and it wasn’t telling me much either, when I heard and then saw the jeep come up. It rattled to a stop behind my car, and a guy about six-four unfolded from behind the wheel and plunked himself down on the road. He stared over at me for a couple of seconds, shading his eyes against the sun. Then he yelled, “Hey! You there! What do you think you’re doing?”
I saw no point in yelling back at him. Instead I put the stone into my trenchcoat pocket, swatted some of the soot off my hands, then made my way through the rubble and across to where the guy stood alongside his jeep. He was in his forties, beanpole thin, with a shock of fiery red hair and a belligerent expression to match it. Behind him in the jeep I could see a folded easel, a couple of blank three-foot-square canvases, and a box that probably contained brushes and oil paints.
When I stopped in front of him he scowled down at me and said, “What’s the idea of messing around over there? You a scavenger or something?”
“No,” I said, “I’m a detective.”
“A what?”
“A detective.” I told him who I was and where I was from and that I had been hired to investigate the death of Munroe Randall.
He didn’t like hearing it. His expression got even more belligerent; his eyes were flat and shiny-black, like circlets of onyx. “Who hired you? Northern Development?”
“No. The insurance company that carries the policy on Randall’s life.”
“So what the hell are you doing here? Randall died in a fire in Redding.”
“You had a fire here too,” I said.
“Coincidence.”
“Maybe not, Mr. Robideaux.”
“How do you know my name?”
“I know the names of everybody who lives here. The Northern people supplied them.”
“I’ll bet they did.”
“The list includes an artist named Paul Robideaux.” I nodded toward the paraphernalia in the jeep. “I get paid to observe things and make educated guesses.”
Robideaux grunted and screwed up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. He didn’t say anything.
I said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the fire.”
“Which fire?”
“This one. Unless you know something about the one in Redding too.”
“I don’t know anything about either one. I wasn’t in Redding when Randall’s place burned. And I wasn’t here when those old shacks went up.”
“No? That isn’t what you told the county sheriffs men. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig the firebreak.”
“Is that so?” Robideaux said. “Well, I had to talk to the law. I don’t have to talk to you.”
“That’s right, you don’t. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?”
His eyes got narrow. “How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?”
“Maybe.”
“What is it?”
“I have to tell that to the law,” I said. “I don’t have to tell it to you.”
He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he’d had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He turned abruptly and stalked around to the driver’s side of the jeep.
Only he didn’t get in right away. Instead he pointed a finger in my direction and said, “You think Randall was murdered, is that it? Well, why don’t you go sniff around those partners of his? One of them killed him if anybody did.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because nobody here did it, that’s why. There’s nothing for you in Musket Creek.”
“Nothing but trouble, you mean?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
He got into the jeep. Fifteen seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.
I stood staring after him. And wondering, not for the first time in the past two days, if there wasn’t a lot more going on in this business than I’d first thought.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Kerry still hadn’t come back. Between my search of the fire wreckage and my conversation with Robideaux, over an hour had passed since she’d wandered off. I looked over at the ghosts, but there was no sign of her. Now what’s she up to? I wondered. I shed my trenchcoat, locked it and the wax-laden stone cup into the trunk, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.
She wasn’t anywhere on the south side of the street. I crossed over, went down a weed-choked alleyway between two of the derelicts. The grass was high back there, a field of it extending thirty yards or so to the creek. A railed footbridge spanned the shallow but swift-moving stream; on the other side, a pair of half-obliterated ruts led up one of the hillocks to a collapsed building at its crest-what had once been a church or a schoolhouse, judging from the remains of a belltower. Pieces of machinery, the segments of a sluicebox, and other broken and rusted mining equipment littered the grass on both sides of the creek. Some of it was so badly weathered and busted up that you couldn’t tell what it had been used for.
An irregular path led through the grass from the footbridge and intersected another path that paralleled the rear of the buildings. I got onto the parallel one and went along calling Kerry’s name. She finally answered me from inside one of the ghosts-the two-storied hotel or saloon. The back entrance wasn’t boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge; I went inside.
She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated, through chinks where the wall boards had warped away from the studs, to let me see what the room had to offer. Not much. A balcony ran around three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways sans doors opening off it on the left side and three more on the right; the balcony sagged badly in places and looked as though it might topple at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down at this level. The floor looked like what was left of a junk shop that had gone out of business. Some old broken chairs and tables; the rusty skeleton of a sheet-iron stove and its piping; the door to a steel safe, circa 1880, with faded gold lettering on it that said Diebold, Norris amp; Co., Chicago; a native-stone fireplace with most of the stones lying mounded on the hearth; a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a pigeonhole shelf that had collapsed on top of it; and random piles of dirt and other detritus.