Burn

41

When Carver parked the Olds in front of 22 Jacaranda Lane the next morning, he found half of Marla’s house still standing. Her car remained where it had been parked in the driveway, tilting toward the house on two partly melted tires, its left side charred and blistered. No attempt had been made to board up any of the remaining windows; there would have been little point, with much of the house reduced to blackened, skeletal framework.

The police were finished there, and probably the insurance investigators, too. The tattered remains of a police-scene ribbon dangled from where it was tied in a bow around a porch rail, reminding Carver of when people put up yellow ribbons in support of political hostages. Partially protected from firefighter action by the railing, the dead potted plants on the porch looked virtually unchanged. One of the terra-cotta pots had been knocked about six inches out of line, but that was all.

Ignoring a NO TRESPASSING sign, Carver made his way along the walk to the front porch. The door was hanging open, black and alligatored from the fire. He stepped into what had been the living room. It was quite bright because that part of the roof had been burned away or removed by firefighters. Carver glanced up at a sky perfectly blue except for a very high, white vapor trail. The airliner that had left it was still visible as a slowly moving silver splinter, tracing a northerly course in a cold, pure world not at all like the one from which it had risen.

He picked his way through the blackened debris of furniture and the collapsed roof to stand near where he estimated Marla’s and Brant’s bodies had lain, then he began probing the ashes with his cane. It had rained late last night, leaving the wreckage a sodden black mess that soon saturated and darkened his socks and the cuffs of his khaki pants. The dampness kept the soot down, but it helped to create an acrid stench of ruin that stung the nostrils and back of the throat.

Half an hour of searching, widening the area to cover most of the living room, yielded nothing. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find. The police had done their work.

But he told himself the police had been under McGregor’s command, so they were hardly pressed to be thorough. He continued searching through the charred remains of the house.

After an hour, he gave up. He was satisfied that whatever clues might have been at the death site had been destroyed by flames, or by the turmoil and ruin created during the fighting of the fire.

Remembering what Beth had told him yesterday about being like a wasp at a window that kept flinging itself at the light with futile determination, he took a last look around, a part of him still unwilling to leave. Then he limped toward the door.

It was when he was out on the tiny porch that he noticed something: A faint gleam of brass among the earth and wet blackness of one of the pots containing the dead plants. The rain must have washed away enough of the ashes and soot to reveal it, as it had washed away most of the ash on the porch itself, now that the small wooden overhang was burned to nothing more than a few charred stubs.

Supporting himself carefully with his cane, Carver leaned down and picked up the object.

It was a brass casing from a fired bullet. McGregor had mentioned that the gun recovered from the scene was a revolver. They didn’t eject shells after firing rounds of ammunition; the casings remained in the cylinder. So the police probably weren’t searching very thoroughly for brass casings. And who could tell how such a tiny object had been moved around during the fire, blasted by powerful streams of water, stepped on and lacked by firefighters, swept aside with piles of debris?

There was also the possibility it had been in the terra-cotta pot for months or years and had nothing to do with the deaths of Marla and Brant. No way to prove otherwise now. Its discovery actually meant little in a case that was closed.

Carver wiped dampness and soot from the shell and held it up to the light in the manner of a man examining a rare gem. He couldn’t place the caliber until he turned the brass casing at a certain angle to the slanted rays of the morning sun. Faintly lettered on the outer rim of its base was “7.62 mm.” An uncommon-size shell ejected by an uncommon gun.

He’d dropped the casing in his pocket and was stepping down off the porch when he remembered.

He stood still for almost a full minute, frozen by realization, squeezing the brass shell through the material of his pants so hard that his fingers ached.

Then he got in the Olds and drove to see Willa Krull.