White Fire (11 page)

She swallowed. Pendergast was so damn…
closed
. “I only had a few minutes to examine the bones. But I’m sure the guy was not killed by a grizzly bear.”

“Your evidence?”

“I took some photographs, but they confiscated the memory chip. I can tell you what I saw—or at least
think
I saw.”

“Excellent.”

“First of all, the skull showed signs of having been bashed in by a rock. And the right femur had scrape marks made by some blunt tool, with no signs that I could see of an osseous reaction or infectious response.”

A slow nod.

She went on with growing confidence. “It looked to me like there were faint human tooth marks in some of the cancellous bone. They were pretty feeble and blunt, not sharp like a bear’s. I think the corpse was cannibalized.”

In her zeal she’d raised her voice, and now she realized it had carried farther than she’d intended. The diners closest to them were staring at her.

“Oops,” she said, looking down at her place setting.

“Have you told anyone of this?” Pendergast asked.

“Not yet.”

“Very good. Keep it quiet. It will only create trouble.”

“But I need access to more remains.”

“I’m working on that. Of the other miners in question, I’m hoping we might find descendants in at least a few cases. And then, naturally, we’d have to get permission.”

“Oh. Thanks, but, you know, I could really do those things myself.” She paused. “Um, how long do you plan to stay? A few days?”

“Such a lovely, self-indulgent,
rich
little town. I don’t believe I’ve seen anything quite like it. And so charming at Christmastime.”

“So you’re going to stay…a long time?”

“Ah, here’s the wine.”

It had arrived, along with two big glasses. Corrie watched as Pendergast went through the whole routine of swirling the wine around in the glass, smelling it, tasting it, tasting it again.

“Corked, I’m afraid,” he told the waiter. “Please bring another bottle. Make it an ’01, to be on the safe side.”

With profuse apologies, the waiter hurried off with the bottle and glass.

“Corked?” Corrie asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s a contaminant of wine, giving it a taste redolent of, some say, a wet dog.”

The new bottle came out and Pendergast went through the routine again, this time nodding his approval. The waiter filled his glass, motioned the bottle toward Corrie. She shrugged and the man filled her glass as well.

Corrie sipped it. It tasted like wine to her—no more, no less. She said, “This is almost as good as the Mateus we all used to drink back in Medicine Creek.”

“I see you still enjoy provoking me.”

She took another sip. It was amazing, how quickly the memory of jail was fading. “Getting back to my release,” she said. “How did you do it?”

“As it happens, I was already on my way back to New York when I received your second letter.”

“You finally got sick of traveling the world?”

“It was your first letter, in part, that prompted my return.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

Instead of answering, Pendergast peered into the dark ruby of his wineglass. “I was fortunate in locating Captain Bowdree so quickly. I explained everything to her frankly—how her ancestor had been rudely exhumed from his historic resting place to make way for a spa. I explained who you were, what your background was, how the chief promised you access and then withdrew it. I told her about your foolish break-in, how you got caught. And then I mentioned you were facing a ten-year prison sentence.”

He sipped his wine. “The captain understood the situation immediately. She was most unwilling for you to be, as she put it,
fucked over
like that. She repeated that phrase several times with remarkable emphasis, and it led me to believe she may have had some experience in that line—perhaps in the military. At any rate, together we composed a rather effective letter, which on the one hand threatened to complain to the FBI and, on the other, gave you permission to study the remains of her ancestor.”

“Oh,” said Corrie. “And that’s how you got me out?”

“There was a rather boisterous town meeting this afternoon, at which I discussed the captain’s letter.” Pendergast allowed himself the faintest of smiles. “My presentation was singularly effective. You’ll read all about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

“Well, you saved my butt. I can’t thank you enough. And please thank Captain Bowdree for me.”

“I shall.”

There was a sharp murmur in the dining room; a stir. Several patrons had begun looking toward the wall of windows, and some had stood up from their tables and were pointing. Corrie followed their gaze and saw a small, flickering yellow light on the side of a nearby ridge. As she watched, it rapidly grew in brightness and size. Now more restaurant patrons were standing, and some were walking toward the windows. The hubbub increased.

“Oh, my God, that’s a house on fire!” Corrie said, standing up herself to get a better view.

“So it would seem.”

The fire blossomed with shocking rapidity. It appeared to be a huge house and the flames engulfed it with increasing violence, leaping into the night air, sending up columns of sparks and smoke. A fire siren began to go off in the town somewhere, followed by another. And now the entire dining room was on its feet, eyes glued to the mountain. A sense of horror had fallen on the diners, a hush—and then a voice rang out.

“That’s the Baker house, up in The Heights!”

13

L
arry Chivers had seen many scenes of destruction in his career as a fire investigator, but he had never seen anything like this. The house had been gigantic—fifteen-thousand-plus square feet—and built with massive timbers, beams, log walls, and soaring, cedar-shake roofs. It had burned with a ferocity that left puddles of glass where the windows had been and even warped the steel I-beam stringers. The snow had completely vanished from within a five-hundred-yard perimeter of the house, and the ruin still radiated heat and plumes of foul steam.

Chivers, who ran a fire investigation consulting firm out of Grand Junction, had been called in at seven that morning. Most of his work was for insurance companies looking to prove arson so they didn’t have to pay claims. But once in a while he got called in by the police to determine if a fire was an accident or a crime. This was one of those times.

It was a two-hour drive from Grand Junction, but he’d made it in ninety minutes, driving like hell in his Dodge pickup. Chivers liked traveling with the lightbar and siren going full blast, whipping past the poor speed-limit-bound schmucks on the interstate. Adding to the appeal of this case, the Roaring Fork Police Department paid well and didn’t nickel-and-dime him to death like some of the other PDs he worked for.

But his exhilaration had been dampened by this scene of horror. Even Morris, the chief of police, seemed undone by it: stammering, inarticulate, unable to take charge. Chivers did his best to shake the feeling. The fact is, these were rich Hollywood types who used this colossal house as a second home—second home!—only a few weeks out of the year. It was hard to gin up a lot of sympathy for people like that. No doubt the homeowner could build five more just like it and barely dent his wallet. The man who owned this house, a fellow named Jordan Baker, hadn’t been heard from, and nobody had been able to reach him yet to inform him of the fire. He and his family were probably off at some posh resort. Or maybe they had a
third
home. It wouldn’t surprise Chivers.

He began preparing himself for the walk-through, checking and organizing his equipment, testing his digital recorder, putting on latex gloves. One good thing about the chief’s apparent paralysis was that the fire scene hadn’t been trampled over and messed up by all the forensic specialists who were still gathering around, waiting to do their thing. Morris had pretty much kept everyone out, waiting for his arrival, and for that he was grateful. Although, as usual, there was considerable disturbance from firefighter activity—chopped-through floors and walls, shoveled and turned debris, everything soaked with water. The fire department had done a cursory structural integrity survey and had identified the areas that were unstable, taping them off.

Chivers shouldered his bag and nodded to Chief Morris. “Ready.”

“Good,” the chief said absently. “Fine. Rudy will take you through.”

The fireman named Rudy lifted the tape for him, and he followed the man down the brick walkway and through where the front door had been. The fire scene stank heavily of burnt and soggy plastic, wood, and polyurethane. There was still some residual heat—despite the freezing temperature the house itself was still sending plumes of steam into the cold blue sky. While he was required to wear a hard hat, he did not wear a respirator: Chivers saw himself as an old-fashioned fire-scene investigator, tough, no-nonsense, who relied more on intuition and left the science to the lab rats. He was used to the stench—and he needed his nose to sniff out any residual accelerants.

Inside the door, in what had been the entryway, he paused. The second floor had collapsed into the first, creating a crazy mess. A staircase ended in the sky. Puddles of glass and metal lay in the low spots, along with heaps of fire-shattered porcelain.

He walked from the entryway into what had obviously been the kitchen, observing the burn patterns. The first order of business was to determine if this was arson—if a crime had been committed. And Chivers was already sure one had. Only accelerants could have caused a fire to burn so hot and fast. This was confirmed as he looked around the kitchen, where he could see faint pour patterns on the remains of the slate floor. He knelt, removed a portable hydrocarbon sniffer from his bag, and took some air samples, moving it about. Moderate.

Still kneeling, he jammed a knife into the burnt, flaking floor and pried up a couple of small pieces, placing them in nylon evidence bags.

The kitchen was a mess, everything fused, scorched, melted. A second-floor bathroom had fallen into the middle of it, with the remains of a porcelain-covered iron claw-foot tub and bits of the sink, toilet, tiled floor, and walls all heaped and scattered about.

Using the sniffer, he got a big positive hit from the remains of the second-floor bathroom. Moving forward on hands and knees, keeping the sniffer low to the ground, Chivers swept it about, looking for a source. The hydrocarbon signature appeared to increase as he approached the tub itself. He rose, peered inside. There was a lot of stuff in the tub—and at the bottom, a layer of thick, black muck in which debris was embedded.

He sampled the muck, giving it a little stir with a gloved finger. The sniffer went off the charts. And then Chivers stopped cold. Among the muck and debris he could see the fragments of bones poking up—and in the area he had stirred up, some teeth. Human teeth. He carefully probed with his gloved finger, exposing a small piece of a skull, a fragment of jaw, and the rim of an orbit.

Chivers steadied himself, lowered the sniffer. The needle shot up again.

He took out his digital recorder and began murmuring into it. The house had not been empty, after all. Clearly, a body had been placed in the bathtub and burned with accelerant. Putting aside the recorder, he removed another nylon evidence bag and took samples of the debris and muck, including a few small bone fragments. As he poked about in the black paste he saw the gleam of something—a lump of gold, no doubt once a piece of jewelry. He left that, but took samples from the grit and muck around it, including a charred phalange.

He stood up, breathing heavily, feeling a faint wave of nausea. This was a bit more than he was used to. But then again, this was clearly going to be a big case. A very big case.
Focus on that
, he told himself, taking another deep breath.

Chivers nodded to Rudy and continued to follow the fireman through the rest of the house, working the sniffer, taking samples, and speaking his observations into the handheld digital recorder. The charred corpse of what had once been a dog was fused to the stone floor at the back door of the house. Next to it lay two long, disordered piles of gritty ashes, which Chivers recognized as the much-burnt remains of two more victims, both adults judging by the length of the piles, lying side by side. More puddles of gold and silver.

Jesus. He took a sniffer reading but didn’t come up with anything significant. Christ, no one had told him—and now he realized they probably didn’t know—that the fire had claimed human victims.

Another couple of deep breaths, and Chivers moved on. And then, in what had been the living room, he came upon something else. Debris from the collapsed floor above lay in sodden heaps, and sitting in the center was a set of partly melted bedsprings. As he moved toward the twisted springs, he noted loops of baling wire affixed to them, as if something had been tied to the bed. Four loops—approximately where the ankles and hands would have been. And in one of those loops, he spied a fragment of a small, juvenile tibia.

Oh, Jesus and Mary.
Chivers moved the sniffer to it, and again the needle pinned. It was all too clear what had happened. A kid had been wired to the bed, doused with accelerant, and set on fire.

“I need some air,” he said abruptly, rising and staggering. “Air.”

The fireman grabbed his arm. “Let me help you out, sir.”

As Chivers exited the fire scene and reeled down the walkway, he saw—out of the corner of his eye—a pale man, dressed in black, no doubt the local coroner, standing beyond the edge of the crowd, staring at him. He made a huge effort to pull himself together.

“I’m all right, thanks,” he said to the firefighter, shedding the embarrassing arm. He looked around, located Chief Morris at the makeshift command center, surrounded by the gathering forensic teams—photographers, hair and fiber, latent, ballistics, DNA. They were suiting up, preparing to go in.

Take it easy
, he said to himself. But he could not take it easy. His legs felt like rubber, and it was hard to walk straight.