Nothing stood out until I got to the wood stove.
Tyler had been the one nearest the stove. I remembered him opening it, checking its contents with a flashlight, and scribbling in his notebook. Now, in the report’s terse language, I read: “L-18: cast-iron wood-fired heating stove, found with door slightly open. Contents: small quantity cold wood ash, one partially burned wooden kitchen match.”
I began flipping through both the photographs and the rest of the report, looking for any mention of either a candle or a kerosene lamp. I found both eventually, but as stored items, far from the stove, and obviously not in current use.
I sat back and thought for a moment. I’d been brought up with a wood stove heating the home; in fact, once I was old enough, it had been my job to light it every morning before the rest of the family got up. Assembling the wood in the firebox, the kindling at the bottom, piled around a heart of tightly crumpled newspaper, had become a habit so inbred I got so I could do it while still half asleep. It had become totally automatic, including throwing the spent match onto the burgeoning flame. Never had I opened a stove in the morning to find a half-burned match waiting for me. It would have been as incongruous as a rose blooming in February.
I hit the intercom button on my phone and dialed Tyler’s extension. “Do you remember looking into Fuller’s wood stove?”
“Sure.”
“All you saw was cold wood ash and the match; no burned paper or anything else unusual?”
J.P. paused at the other end, never one to dismiss such a question without thought. “There was nothing obvious, Joe, but that’s not to say something couldn’t have been burned and then destroyed to blend into the regular ash.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
I pawed over the assorted papers on my desk and finally came up with the report from the medical examiner’s office. I flipped it open and went over the section detailing the body’s appearance. There was nothing unusual concerning Fuller’s hands or fingernails, except a small cut on his forefinger-probably the result of a blood draw at the hospital-and a note that they had obviously been exposed to a lifetime of manual labor and exposure to the soil. There was a footnote that the hospital had cleaned up the patient prior to his death.
I called Rescue, Inc. and asked to talk to John Breen, the paramedic who had initially treated Abraham Fuller. “This is Joe Gunther, from the PD. Do you remember anything unusual about Fuller’s hands when you picked him up?”
“His hands?” There was a pause. “What do you mean ‘unusual’?”
I didn’t want to plant any ideas in his head. “You tell me.”
Again he hesitated. “Well, they were workingman’s hands. Let’s see… Yeah, there was one thing. His right hand was sooty-the palm had ash stains all over it. And his fingertip was cut-pricked, actually. It wasn’t bleeding much, though. It stopped before I could do anything about it.”
So much for blood draws, not that any alternatives leapt to mind. “Did you notice the soot before or after he sent you guys outside for that five minutes?”
“After. He wouldn’t let us near him before then.”
I was a little disappointed at that. “How about an odor after you went back in?”
Breen chuckled. “There was an odor all right. He was lying in the middle of it.”
“No-I mean something else, something new.”
“No, sorry. It smelled pretty raw in there. If there’d been another odor, I doubt we would have smelled it, anyhow.”
“Okay. Thanks a lot.”
I tried to picture what must have happened: Fuller, after deciding to go on the ambulance, sends the crew outside, drags himself to where he’s hidden the money, pulls out his emergencies-only red bag, along with some sort of document. He then drags himself back to the stove, near where he was lying to begin with, and burns the document with a match he tosses into the stove. Finally, after the document has been destroyed, he crumples the ashes up in his right hand so they’ll mingle with the wood ashes in the stove, and then he crawls back to the rug near the bookcase.
I considered that Coyner, or whoever had stolen the chart, might also have burned something in the stove, maybe even the chart itself, minus the frame and glass. But the first scenario made more sense, especially with Fuller’s stained right hand.
It meant that Fuller had taken the precaution of burning the paper, either because he didn’t want someone to find it while he was recuperating in the hospital or because he suspected he wasn’t going to survive. Initially, after all, he had told Breen and his partner to let him die in peace.
If he hadn’t thought he was going to return, burning something self-incriminating wouldn’t make much sense. Unless the document-whatever it was-incriminated someone else.
After all, why live in a house for twenty years, eliminating everything that might reveal your past, and yet keep a self-incriminating document for posterity? Whatever it was he’d burned had to have pointed the finger at someone else, someone who posed a threat to him personally and yet whose secret he’d wanted to die with him if necessary.
Had that been the same person who had stolen the chart?
I began studying Tyler’s photographs one by one, focusing on every detail, hunting for anything odd. What burned in my mind now was the most banal of revelations: The person who had stolen the chart had to have known it was there to begin with. Did he, therefore, also know about the incriminating document? And if he did, then why wasn’t the place torn apart in a desperate search?
I pulled open the file containing my own photographs, the ones including both the chart and the unfocused shadow of someone lurking outside the window. I placed my shots of the building’s interior next to Tyler’s and compared them, looking for any discrepancies. The chart had vanished in the time between the taking of both sets of photographs; maybe something else had disappeared, too-something that had told the thief his secret was secure and that he had no need to conduct a frantic search.
Tyler had also taken a shot of the bookcase, straight-on, as I had. I laid them side by side and looked from one to the other, back and forth, my eyes aching with the concentration. What finally froze me wasn’t a single item but rather the absence of one; there was a small gap on the bottom shelf, near the stove, in Tyler’s picture. I squinted at my own picture, where the same gap was filled with the spine of a paperback book, the title of which had been circled with a broad band, like a felt-tip pen.
I sat back, curiously satisfied. The photos were in color, but the mark around the book’s title merely appeared brown. I was convinced, however, that had the picture been taken earlier, just after Fuller’s departure on the ambulance, the circle would have been as red as the blood from his pricked fingertip.
I stared at the now-missing book, smiling at its intended pun and admiring the mind of the man who had brought it to my attention, and to that of the chart thief. It was a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
9
Harriet poked her head around the door to say that the second metal detector was waiting for us at the rental place and that everyone except Ron was either here or would meet us at Fuller’s place.
I neatened up my paperwork and crossed over to J.P.’s desk in the middle of the squad room. “I got something extra I’d like you to do when we get to Fuller’s.”
“Shoot.”
“I want you to go over the contents of that stove with a fine-tooth comb. If my hunch is right, you should find at least some trace of newly burned paper mixed in with the wood ash, near the front of the stove door. I think Fuller destroyed a document or a letter just before he was taken to the hospital.”
Tyler quietly nodded and crossed over to the closet where he kept his forensics bag of tricks.
The trip back up to Coyner’s remote property was made largely in silence. I had Dennis and Tyler with me; Sammie and Willy Kunkle were in separate cars.