She closed her eyes and tried to follow that elusive line of thought. If he’d taken another victim who fit the profile, she would have caught it right away. She’d searched every fire-related death across the country during the past six years so as not to see only what she wanted to see. Approximately 2,500 people died every year in residential fires, the majority of them children under four and adults over sixty-five. She opened her eyes. What if he only picked off a victim here or there, just enough to keep the demons at bay?
Behrent logged into the U.S. Fire Administration database on her laptop. What if she factored out those age groups, as well as the most common at-risk groups? Smoking was the leading cause of fire-related deaths and alcohol use was the single greatest contributing factor. African and Native Americans represented the greatest cross-section of fatalities, as did people who lived in rural areas and prefabricated homes. She limited it to the previous year, filtered out all of those factors, and initiated a search.
Still more than six hundred deaths.
She broke it down further into just the six southwestern states.
Forty-eight.
January through March. California.
Five deaths. She read the brief summaries. A fifty-six year-old female in Sherman Oaks died after improperly stored linseed oil caught fire. A seventeen year-old male in Sacramento while attempting to make a pipe bomb in his garage. Moira O’Reilly, victim number eighteen. Two twenty-four year-old males in Barstow in a meth lab.
March through June. Nevada and Utah.
Four deaths. A forty-three year-old male and twenty-six year-old female in a one-car accident that resulted in the gas tank exploding. A sixty-three year-old female in Reno who failed to put out a grease fire. Natalie Wilkins, victim number nineteen.
June through September. Colorado and Arizona.
Five deaths. Amelia Behrent—her baby sister—victim number twenty. Four fatalities associated with the Mountain Vista Fire, which burned more than a hundred and fifty homes and forced the evacuation of nearly ten thousand people: two volunteer firefighters—a fifty-one year-old male from Saguache and a twenty-eight year-old male from Lincoln, Nebraska—and a forty-eight year-old male and forty-seven year-old female, whose remains were discovered in the rubble of their home within the evacuation zone.
She looked out the window again. At the mail carrier walking down the opposite side of the street with his bag over his shoulder. At the teenage girl who managed to juggle a Starbucks cup, a cell phone, and a purse, while carrying a dog that looked more like a rodent. At the lengthening shadows of the trees stretching across the road.
A middle-age couple who stayed in their home even as the fire consumed the houses surrounding them and the air filled with smoke.
The worst summer for wildfires in the history of the state.
She tapped her nails on the desk again.
Opened a new window and initiated a search. Their names were Raymond and Carol Waldon and their remains were found in what was left of their house at 136 Ponderosa Lane, near the theorized source of the fire. All sixteen houses on their street burned to the ground before the first emergency responders arrived on the scene. The majority of their neighbors had been at work, but those who were at home when the flames swept up the slope of dry grass and shrubs claimed to have smelled the smoke with enough time to hurriedly pack and evacuate before they saw the first hint of fire. Even their retired neighbors managed to flee before their houses were gutted. Only Raymond and Carol Waldon remained to watch the fire rise up like a tsunami and crash down upon their home. Only Raymond and Carol, the local franchisee of a national insurance company and his wife, organizer of an annual 5K race to benefit breast cancer research.
Behrent stared at their pictures on the screen. Maybe Raymond was past his prime, but looked like the kind of guy who jogged in the morning and spent his weekends on the links. Carol was obviously a runner and still in the kind of shape she enjoyed flaunting in tennis shorts and spandex. These weren’t the kind of people who were generally the first to be overcome by smoke, nor were they the kind who had all of their money tied up in their physical possessions. They were undoubtedly so well insured they could have walked away from their incinerated house better off for it. So what caused them to stay in their house while those around them fled? Why were a businessman and a socialite both home on a weekday anyway?
Behrent pulled her cell phone from her purse and dialed a number she knew by heart.
“We’re knocking off early today, boys,” she said. “There are a couple of stops I want to make on the way home.”
She hung up and stared through the window. A man stood beside the thick trunk of an elm across the street, staring right back at her. The hood of his sweatshirt was drawn down low so she couldn’t see his eyes, only the smile that formed on his lips when he caught her looking.
A UPS truck emerged from the corner of her vision.
When it passed, the man was gone.
VII
“I’m telling you,” Behrent said. “He was there.”
Young flashed through a series of menus on his tablet as they hiked up the steep path between the new growth of aspens and willows and scrub oaks that were barely taller than they were. Only the occasional chunk of blackened wood or scorched earth showed through the grass and weeds as a reminder of the devastation. A year ago, this entire valley, right up through the foothills and into the Rockies, had burned for nearly two weeks straight. She remembered news footage of smoke so thick you could barely see the headlights of cars, policemen in respirators directing traffic with glowing embers settling on their shoulders, firefighters with soot-blackened faces and goggles chopping down acres of forest in a rushed effort to build a firebreak while the same violent wind that fanned the flames hurled ashes and cinders into their faces, cars lined bumper-to-bumper on all of the roads leading away from a mountain made of flames. It was the kind of nightmare that would have scarred her, were she not already completely overwhelmed by the grief of losing her sister in such a horrific manner only weeks before.
“I can access the security footage from here and you can see for yourself,” Young said. He was as broad as he was tall and wore his blond hair buzzed short. He’d left his cap and windbreaker in the car, but his physique and bearing still screamed law enforcement, if his sunglasses didn’t give him away first. Abrams waited with the cars at the foot of the trail, simultaneously scrutinizing the traffic wending upward into the neighborhood and filing his report for the day’s surveillance. “Right about quarter to one, you say?”
“12:43. I made sure to note the time.”
He passed her the tablet and she selected the quadrant that gave her the best chance of seeing the man she positively knew had been there. The camera was positioned in such a way as to focus on the sidewalk in front of the office building and anyone who so much as slowed to look at her through the window. The cars parked at the meters along the curb were clearly visible, as was the asphalt beyond them. Traffic passed in colored blurs. She could read the license plates of the cars parked diagonally across the street and hints of the opposite sidewalk between them. She saw just the thinnest strip of grass at the top of the screen, the very bottoms of the trunks of the elms, and the uneven earth from which their thick roots snaked. She located the tree behind which the man had stood and watched it clear up until the brown blur of the UPS truck eclipsed it.
“I’m sorry, Behrent. If he was there, we didn’t get him.”
“What do you mean ‘if’?”
He held up his hands when she rounded on him.
“No offense. It’s just that we’ve been running through this same routine for so long we’re starting to look for things that might not be there, you know? All of us, Behrent. Abrams and I both feel like we’re projecting what we want to see rather than observing what we actually do see.”
Behrent backed up the recording and played it again. She watched the very top edge of the screen and nothing else. A shadow appeared on the grass.
It moved ever so slightly, but not in time with those of the branches of the trees. A brown blur. When it passed, the shadow was gone.
“Watch the very top of the recording.” She passed the tablet back to him. “Then tell me I’m seeing things.”
“Emma…”
She tried to recreate his image in her mind, but the harder she concentrated, the more elusive he became. All she clearly remembered was the hood of his sweatshirt drawn low over his brow so that his eyes remained in shadow. She remembered a lower face like any other and a smile unlike any she’d ever seen before. It was the kind of smile that belied the expression, the kind that would haunt her until her dying breath.
It was predatory.
Evil.
The trail wound back to the north and granted her a magnificent view of the valley. A dry streambed lined with saplings cut through the bottom. It was clogged with charcoaled chunks of trees that had run downward from the higher country. Grasses that shimmered golden in the afternoon sun lined the northeastern slope. With each gust of wind, ripples raced upward toward the houses perched on the crest.
The fire started somewhere down there and ran uphill through the dry grass, growing taller as it gained momentum. In a matter of minutes, it crowned the knoll, consumed the hedges, and sped across the lawns. By the time all was said and done, one hundred and fifty-three houses had burned to the ground and there was a great black stain upon the mountains large enough to be seen from space. As no source of the fire had been identified, the investigation had turned to arson. The case remained open.
Behrent imagined a man with his hood drawn over his eyes standing downhill in the shadows of the mature pines. He held something silver in his hand. A flick of his wrist and it produced flame. He smiled at her and touched the flame to the crisp mat of dead leaves and pine needles and vanished into the smoke as the wind accelerated the flames up the hillside toward the conspicuous gap amid the new construction.
She broke away from the trail and ascended through the spear grass and yuccas and cacti. The topsoil was crisp with windswept charcoal and crunched underfoot. She stopped in what had once been the back yard of the Waldon house and stared downhill. The way the wind blew, she could almost see the exact path the fire had taken. A total distance of maybe a hundred yards and it would have been visible the entire time. It looked like it would have reached the neighboring house to the north first, then followed the topography right across the back of Raymond and Carol Waldon’s.
“Abrams just received the coroner’s report,” Young said. “He’s forwarding it now.”
Behrent nodded as she surveyed the neighborhood. The houses to either side of her were brand new and composed of brick and stone with ceramic-tiled roofs. Same with the ones across the street. Only this one lot had yet to be built upon, presumably because the insurance guarantor was tied up in court battling being held to the full payout for an expensive home that was only going to be inherited by the Waldons’s children and resold for a profit while the company was stuck with the tab.
The house had been razed, but the foundation remained intact. She could see where the garden level main floor opened onto the yard. There would have been a door and windows giving right onto the yard. The fire would have been clearly visible through any of them. The black nubs of the posts that once supported a balcony framed the patio. There’d been a fireplace off of the family room and a door accessing the three-car garage, now a cracked apron collecting puddles of water. Another concrete pad spread across the leveled hillside where the kitchen and formal living room had once been. She walked around to the front steps and tried to find where the foyer closet in which the Waldons died had been. She stood inside what remained of the frame and turned in a circle.
The fire had rushed uphill toward the back of the house. There would have been no hope if fleeing in that direction. That left the garage door and the front door, both of which opened on the complete opposite side of the house from the flames. Why had they not gone out either, and instead chosen to hide where she stood now? Raymond had underwritten enough insurance policies to know that there was absolutely no percentage in trying to save his physical possessions and that the most important thing for anyone to do in case of a fire was get the hell out of the building.
“Here we go. You want the husband or the wife first?”
“The husband.”
“Decedent: Raymond Leonard Waldon. Autopsy: ECCS070113-06C. Autopsy authorized by Dr. William Gustafson for the El Paso County Coroner’s Office. Identified by dental records. Rigor: absent. Livor: purple to black. Distribution: left ankle, hip, and shoulder. Age: forty-eight. Race—”
“Skip ahead to the findings.”
“External Examination: Fourth-degree burns with significant eschar development cover ninety to ninety-five percent of the surface area. The remaining five to ten percent have second- to third-degree burns and represent the points of contact with the ground. No pustule formation. The third through fifth digits on the right hand and the lateral four digits on each foot are absent. No indication of traumatic amputation.”
Bahrent listened as she walked through what was left of the house. She kicked at detritus that had blown into corners and inspected anything left of the original construction, no matter how small or burnt.
“X-rays: Total body x-rays demonstrate heat-induced patina fractures of the calvarium and skull base and transverse fractures of bilateral scapulae and ilia. A fracture of the right ulnar styloid process appears perimortem. As do the penetrating injuries to the cortices and cancellous bony surfaces of the bilateral radii and ulnae, and tibiae and fibulae, and, to a lesser degree, the occipital bones.”
“Son of a bitch,” Behrent said. “This was our guy, all right. But what made him break his pattern to go after these people?”
“Do you want me to keep going?”
“Skip ahead to cause of death.”
“Asphyxiation.”
“Manner of death?”
“Accidental.”
“Disposition of the remains?”
“Cremation.”
“Damn it. Any further mention of the non-heat-induced fractures?”
“They found them buried under the second story of the house, Behrent.”
She knelt, brushed through a pile of detritus that had accumulated in a corner of the foundation on the main floor, and extricated a twisted length of rusted metal. Rolled it over in her palm. Wiped it off with her shirt. Held it up to the sun and inspected it. It was maybe an inch long, all told. Coiled twice in the center and sharp on either end. No doubt about it.
It was a barb from a length of barbed wire fencing.
VIII
“I’m Douglas Waldon.” The twenty-five year-old broker extended his hand. He was the eldest child of Raymond and Carol and looked like a miniature version of his father. “How can I help you?”
Behrent shook his hand and used it to guide him away from the assistant who’d fetched him from his office.
“Can we talk in private?”
His expression was one of confusion, but he gestured toward the office door and allowed her to lead the way. She was already seated when he closed the door and took his seat on the opposite side of the desk from her.
“What can I do for you, Miss…”
“Behrent.” She flashed her badge. “Special Agent Behrent. I have some questions I hope you’ll be able to answer for me.”
“Sure. If I can.”
His face and posture were both open. No sign of deception in either. He was a recent graduate of the business school at the University of Northern Colorado and had been in process of completing his training at the corporate headquarters of the agency franchisor when his parents died. Now he was the inheritor of more than just his father’s job.
The office had obviously belonged to his father, as well. While the framed picture of his desk was of an attractive brunette about Douglas’s age and his diplomas and certifications adorned the walls, the remaining framed
pictures on the wall were of his father with various people Behrent didn’t recognize.
She’d learned on the drive over that the fire had nearly crippled Douglas on a personal level. The loss of his parents was compounded by the financial losses of his clients. Having to deal with so many families whose entire lives had gone up in smoke inside their burnt homes, all of their tears, and all of their condolences had driven him to the point of discreetly trying to sell the office and seeking psychiatric care.
The last thing she wanted to do was to tell him that she believed his parents’ deaths hadn’t been accidental.
“This is a regional office,” Behrent said. “Is that right?”
“Yes, this is the base of operations for the southwestern region. We handle the insurance needs of roughly two million people out of offices in six different states, including the southern half of California.”
“Who runs those offices?”
“Managing partners who essentially enter into a subcontract agreement. Our overall percentage is relatively small compared to what the parent company makes, especially considering we bear the brunt of the risk.” He paused. “Can I ask what this is all about?”
She’d come prepared with a story.
“We’re investigating fraud in an industry with a similar organizational structure and we’re looking for a better understanding of the overall functionality and accountability.” He nodded as though the explanation made a certain amount of sense. “So what I want to know is how you oversee all of these managing partners, how you make sure they toe your line.”
“We have weekly managerial meetings via FaceTime and bi-annual organizational retreats.”
“That doesn’t sound like a whole lot of supervision.”
“We invest a lot of time into researching our prospective partners and limit our appointments to only those agencies we’ve identified as having long-term growth and profit potential. We’re not only accountable to our partners and our clients, but to our parent company and its shareholders. As such, we also employ a regional supervisor who serves as our proxy and performs monthly physical and financial audits to ensure that both image and accountability are in compliance with corporate standards.”
Firebug: A Short Story Page 3