11th hour

Chapter 35

“The fire started in the passenger compartment,” Chuck Hanni said. “See, the engine compartment is in relatively good shape. Flames probably vented through the open window.”

“The windows were open?”

“Just the driver’s window.”

“License and registration, please,” I said. “Could have been a traffic stop. Go ahead, Chuck. I interrupted you.”

“Not a problem. So, this is what I see happening. As the interior burned, the windshield failed and the rear seats were consumed. Then the fire entered the trunk and destroyed the back of the car.”

“Yeah, the rear tires are melted,” I said. “So what caused the fire?”

“Lacy alerted on what was left of a plastic bottle that had rolled under the front seat. I think gas was inside that bottle, but anyway, some kind of accelerant. It looks to me like the passenger compartment was doused, and the fire was started with a match or a lighter.

“I doubt the lab is going to get prints or DNA off that bottle,” Hanni continued. “But they can try. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

I was taking it all in, trying to picture it.

I said, “Someone pulls the car over, throws gas inside the vehicle, sets the fire. So why are the victims still inside? When the fire started, why didn’t they get out? Were they already dead?”

“Claire is swabbing their nasal cavities now. She’ll be able to tell you in about five seconds if the victims breathed smoke in or not.”

“Okay. What else?”

Hanni grinned at me and said, “Patience, Lindsay. I’m getting there. I removed all of the debris that fell from the dashboard, headliner, and door panels, and I found a spent round for you. Twenty-two caliber.”

I got a little chill. The good kind you get when your hunches pay off. Doesn’t happen every day. There are a million. 22-caliber guns on the street, and our cop shooter had used one of them on Chaz Smith. Maybe he’d used the same gun to take out a few drug dealers from the projects.

I thanked Hanni and started to call Claire to find out if she’d found soot inside the victims’ nostrils but got distracted by the loud whoop-whoop of a siren announcing that another cop car was arriving at the scene.

It was Conklin and he came toward me at a trot. He was hyperventilating and it wasn’t because of the thirty-yard sprint.

“She’s here,” he said. “We’ve got our witness.”

It felt like Christmas and my birthday and Mother’s Day all wrapped up together and tied with a bow.

A witness had seen a cop pull a car over on Schwerin just moments before that car had become a fireball.

The witness had given her name and number to the 911 operator. She wanted to talk.