Fireproof

CHAPTER 62

Maggie needed to breathe. She took her time following Racine, Ivan, and the fire chief. Just a half dozen deep breaths of clean, fresh air would help. That’s all she needed, but soot and ash still filled the damp night. The oversize boots made her feet heavy, like lifting blocks of concrete while trying to be careful.

The skull in Ling’s hands had looked so small. It had to be a baby, no more than a toddler. When Maggie got the call earlier, Racine had said this one might be bad. The shops below had closed for the evening but Racine had warned her that some of the shop owners lived in apartments above. This family had come down through the shop, hoping to escape. Why hadn’t they considered using the outside fire escape? She was about to find out why.

“There was a pile of old rags and newspapers,” the fire chief told them, pointing to a black-and-gray stack of ash now on the pavement in the alley, but then the chief was pointing up to a landing. And Maggie immediately noticed that the fire escape was pulled down.

“He probably soaked the newspapers with gasoline. He used a piece of wood to make a little platform on top of the flammables. Then he put the chemicals on the platform. It allowed him some time to climb down and just walk off. Maybe as much as five to ten minutes.”

“Do we know what the chemicals are yet?” Racine looked at Investigator Ivan.

“We sent the sample residue to the FBI lab.”

The chief continued his assessment.

“I’m thinking one’s a solid, perhaps in crystal form. The other must be a liquid. He might even place something between them so when he pours on the liquid it has to soak through that barrier before it’s absorbed by the first chemical. When the two mix, there’s an intense reaction. A white-hot flash that immediately ignites the stack of flammables underneath.”

He pointed his flashlight back up at the landing and moved the beam over the side of the building, showing a black smudge that rode up the wall from the fire escape landing to a hole that used to be a window.

“The entire windowsill was splattered with gasoline. He didn’t need to break in or enter the building at all. The fire broke in for him. There were curtains hanging in the window. After the glass broke, the curtains ignited and suddenly the fire easily spread inside. It’s similar to the warehouse fires. I don’t know much about the church fires in Arlington yesterday but I understand they were started from the outside, too.”

“I’m sorry,” Racine said, “but it seems like a lot of hocus-pocus to me. How did he know it would work?”

“Just between us, I’d say he knows what he’s doing.”

“Wait, what do you mean? Are you saying it could be a firefighter?”

The chief shot a look at Ivan like maybe he had already said too much or, worse, offended the ATF investigator.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Maggie said. “I’m thinking of Benjamin Christensen in Pennsylvania. I think he was a volunteer firefighter. No body count but at least a dozen fires, some landmarks.”

“John Orr in Southern California,” the chief said.

“That was a long time ago,” Ivan said with a scowl.

Maggie remembered the case. Although it was thirty years ago, it had come up when she began researching serial arsonists. Orr had been a fire captain and arson investigator and had even been assigned to one of the fires he started.

She wasn’t surprised Ivan didn’t like anyone bringing up the criminal behavior of a fellow arson investigator. Surely they had their own version of the thin blue line.

Maggie considered Brad Ivan. There was something about him that bothered her, but she hadn’t wasted time trying to figure it out. He hadn’t been happy about the FBI’s involvement, to the point of withholding information from her and Tully. From the beginning, Brad Ivan had struck her as someone who didn’t play well with others, nor did his confrontational manner fit in with other law enforcement officials.

He listened to the fire chief with his arms crossed over his chest and she noticed that his coat bulged tight across his midsection. She remembered his hitching up his trousers yesterday and then looking almost surprised, like a man who was used to being in shape and suddenly finding he was no longer.

He scratched at his steel-gray hair and swiped back the swatches that climbed over his ears like he was well past a haircut. She realized all the extra weight and need for a haircut could just mean he was putting in some unexpected long hours. Which would account for his irritability. But there was something that made Maggie wonder if he was disgruntled or just exhausted.

He was standing behind the fire chief when she saw him frown at something the chief was telling Racine. Maggie decided she needed to take a look into Ivan’s background. She found herself wondering whether he could have followed her down the manhole, hoping to catch a fleeing arsonist and maybe scare the crap out of her just for good measure. Teach the profiler how much she doesn’t know. Was that something he was capable of? Was he the man she’d seen outside her property? As an ATF investigator he could easily get access to federal employees’ information, including her private home address.

She was considering all this when something across the street caught her attention. An empty lot had been gouged out. Stacks of concrete and piles of dirt were all that remained except for monster yellow equipment with claws and dump wagons, all parked and quiet for the night. There were construction sites all over the city, but two of them right across from arson sites? Was it a coincidence?