by Todd Borg
“If so,” I said, “he’d be responsible. But I have another motive, which will seem weak to you. Ryan hired me because someone is trying to destroy him. He’s been kidnapped and tortured. This fire may have been set just to make it look like Ryan was responsible for it. Just to try to unhinge him. From the standpoint of lighting a fire and making it appear that it came from Ryan’s fire, this is a good place. It’s even out of range from the motion lights. As long as the firestarter had his back toward Officer Vistamon, he wouldn’t be seen even if he used a lighter.”
“You’re saying Ryan Lear could have been framed.”
“Right.”
Terry shook his head. “Sounds like some kind of a conspiracy theory, like he’s a paranoid nutcase.”
“He may be paranoid. But this is my idea, not his.”
“I’m sure he’s got plenty of his own insurance.” Terry turned to look at Ryan’s house. “Big bank account, too. Being accused of negligence isn’t going to destroy him.”
“With Ryan, it might. He’s wired pretty tight.”
“This kid ever been in trouble before?”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Why would someone want to unglue the kid?”
“To get control of his company, maybe.”
“Have you considered that this idea you have that this fire was arson kind of takes you off the hook for telling Lear how much fun a campfire is?”
I looked at Terry. “If expert analysis demonstrates that the fire started from a campfire ember, then my responsibility is greater than Ryan’s. They can charge me, not him.”
Terry stood back and swept his light from the fire pit to the point of the cone where the ground fire started, and on across the grounds to the steaming, smoking wreckage of the house.
Terry looked at me. “When that guy was torching Tahoe’s forests two years ago, I hated it. I woke up every night, two, three in the morning, hating it. It was like some kind of evil had gotten into my life and I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t imagine why someone would burn the forest, burn trees, burn animals, burn houses, burn people. I suspected everyone, even my firemen. I don’t want to go through that again, McKenna.”
Terry was as hard a man as they make, but there was emotion in his eyes as he thought about what he might be facing. This was an intrusion into the sacred part of his world.
“If I’m right,” I said, “if this was an attack designed to destroy Ryan Lear, then this fire will be a one-time event. The next will be something different.”
Terry called out to one of the firemen.
“Nugent! Get Mack over here. Tell him to bring his camera and gear. And find Sergeant Martinez. This is now an arson investigation.”
TWENTY-NINE
Ryan was in full stress when I went back into the house. Diamond hadn’t charged him with anything. But the cops’ questions had scared him about as much as a person could be scared. If the fire was caused by arson in an attempt to unravel Ryan’s tenuous grip on sanity, it was working. He paced and air-washed and talked to himself. And when I got him to stop and talk to me, his right eye was twitching, and his face was blotchy red. I told him that I had a plan to figure out the cause of the fire.
He didn’t respond other than continuously shaking his head.
I called Ellie Ibsen at her dog-training ranch down in the foothills. It was only 7:00 a.m., but I knew she’d be up.
She answered with cheer as warm as sunshine in her voice.
“Ellie, darling, Owen McKenna calling.”
“Nobody calls me darling anymore,” she said.
“I’m sure you’ve heard that word a lot over the years.”
“Yes, but the ones who used to call me that are all dead.”
“Not me.”
“No. Not you. How are you? How is Street? How is his largeness? Is summer at the lake as glorious as always?”
“Fine, fine, fine, and yes. I’m calling for sage advice from a wise woman.”
She laughed. “Oh, Owen, I’m afraid you’ve reached a wrong number! When I was about fifteen years old, I knew everything. You should have called me then! When I got to twenty-five I was certain that I still knew quite a lot. At fifty, I was starting to doubt some of the basic assumptions that I’d always lived by. And when I got to eighty-five, I came to believe that I really knew only a very few things. Maybe if I live to one hundred, the progression will be complete, and I won’t know anything at all.”
“Isn’t that what Socrates said? That true wisdom comes from realizing that one doesn’t really know anything?”
“I think I read that about six decades ago. But that’s too philosophical for me now.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “Here’s something that I know. You are the best dog trainer in the world, and I have a conundrum that I would only trust to one of your dogs.”
I told her about the fire that burned down Ryan’s neighbor’s house.
“You think someone lit the fire to make it look as if it had accidentally started from your client’s campfire?”
“That’s what I suspect. If so, the fire has succeeded in putting a really dark cloud over my client. Is Natasha still your best accelerant dog?”
“Yes, I believe so. But her hips don’t work very well anymore. We couldn’t take her on steep slopes. She’s like me, still alert, but not so spry anymore.”
“You were amazing on the mountain above Emerald Bay just last winter. And your Golden, Honey G, was amazing. You could bring him. But this is actually on a flat yard by the lake. No ascending or descending.”
“Okay,” she said. “Natasha is still more tuned to accelerant searches. So let’s use her. When do we go?!” Ellie sounded as excited as a child 80 years her junior.
“How about today? I can be there about nine this morning.”
“We’ll be ready!”
When I pulled into Ellie’s ranch in the foothills town of Coloma near the river where gold was first discovered, Ellie and the small German Shepherd named Natasha were out in the yard. Natasha looked up and trotted out to meet me.
“Where’s his largeness?” Ellie sounded concerned.
“He’s on duty, staying with Ryan and his sister Lily.”
I took Ellie’s day pack from her, she got in the Jeep, and I let Natasha into the back seat. We drove back up the American River canyon, came over Echo Summit, and dropped down the cliff-edge road into the basin.
We pulled up to Ryan’s house on the East Shore twenty-five minutes later. Smithy waved from over by the side yard.
Lily and Spot came running out of the house. I introduced Lily to Natasha. The German Shepherd wasn’t so sure she wanted to be held by a little girl, and she kept her distance.
Ryan didn’t appear. Perhaps he was too upset to come out.
Spot was excited, and he and Natasha ran in circles like the good friends they were. Natasha didn’t run as fast as she used to before she broke her hip in the forest fire, but she still moved at a good pace.
Lily was jumping with the excitement of the romping dogs, but she held still long enough to be introduced to Ellie. She asked Ellie a dozen questions in a row, and Ellie patiently explained why she was here and what her dog was going to do.
Then Ellie and I compared notes on our project. I showed her the burned mansion and walked her over to where the burn had started in the pine needles some distance from Ryan’s fire pit. Ellie shook her head at the magnitude of the loss, but she didn’t dwell on it. She’d spent her career searching for lost hikers and earthquake victims and crime suspects and arsonists. She wasn’t immune to tragedy, but she wasn’t overly emotional. She was here first and last to do a job.
The dogs ran around, sniffing this and that, including areas that were burned, but paying no particular attention to the burn.
“Let’s move downwind from the dogs,” Ellie said.
We walked away. She reached into her daypack and pulled out a little vial and a handkerchief.
“I washed t
he outside of the vial with detergent, so there should be no smell on it. Just one tiny drop into the handkerchief will be enough,” she said. “This is lighter fluid, which isn’t as aromatic as gasoline. But it will still serve as a trigger for any smell associated with VOCs.”
“Volatile Organic Compounds that a firestarter would use.”
“Correct,” Ellie said.
I told Lily to hold onto Spot, and Ellie called Natasha and held her while I went fifty yards down the road heading downwind.
I unscrewed the eye-dropper, and squeezed out the tiniest bit of fluid onto the handkerchief. I replaced the dropper, taking care not to get any lighter fluid on me or the bottle. Then I folded the handkerchief up so that the moist part with lighter fluid didn’t touch my skin. I walked back to Ellie.
“Ready?” she said.
I nodded.
“Okay, Natasha,” she said. “Are you ready to do an accelerant search? Find the scent?” Ellie bent down and put her hands on Natasha’s body, gave her a shake to get her excited. Then she reached for the handkerchief.
I handed it to her. She put it on Natasha’s nose.
“Do you smell the scent, Natasha?”
Natasha pulled her nose away.
Ellie put it back on her nose. “Do you have the scent, Natasha? Okay, find the scent!” She gave Natasha a little pat.
Natasha ran toward the burn area, moving in expanding S-curves and, here and there, in circles. She slowed to a trot, put her nose near the ground, then lifted it high in the air, trying to get a whiff of any scent that might be similar to what Ellie had scented her on with the handkerchief.
It was fascinating to watch this small shepherd who possessed a fierce intelligence. It didn’t appear that Natasha picked up any scent, but there was a breeze that would carry away any smells. She’d have to get downwind from the spot where an accelerant had been used. Without slowing, she crossed directly over the small area where the burn had started. This was an immediate disappointment, but I didn’t say anything.
Ellie and Lily and I watched the dog work. Back and forth, and up and down. Natasha stayed near the burned area, presumably because her past experience taught her that the odor she was looking for would be found there.
For a while, Spot trotted behind her, curious about her mission. Then he got distracted and stopped. I thought about scenting him on the handkerchief, as well. He’d done a range of searches for accelerants, and suspects and bodies, too. But he wasn’t a pro at it, and I didn’t want him to distract Natasha.
It was difficult to imagine how a dog can pick up a few unburned molecules of accelerant hours or days after a burn. The fire would have consumed nearly all of whatever chemical was used. And it would seem that any remaining accelerant would have evaporated. Yet, as Ellie had pointed out in the past, dogs have noses that are ten thousand times as sensitive as our own, and they can out-perform the most sophisticated electronic detectors.
I pointed to the narrow area where I believed that a person had purposely started the fire. “Do you think we should direct her to this place?”
Ellie shook her head without looking at me. She was as serious and focused as Natasha.
After several more minutes of searching, Natasha widened her search pattern, and she came back to where she started, directly downwind of the fire’s beginning point. Still, she showed no sign of picking up an accelerant.
“Nothing,” Ellie said. “I believe there are no VOCs anywhere near.”
“So it wasn’t arson,” I said.
“I didn’t say that. Just that if a person did light this fire, they didn’t use lighter fluid or gasoline or any similar VOCs. But a person could have picked up an ember from the fire pit and set it down where the fire started.”
“Ryan put it out with a hose before he went to bed. I believe he was very thorough.”
“The ember or embers could have come from a different fire and were brought to this location,” she said.
“Which would make it very difficult to tell unless the ember was from a kind of wood that we don’t have here. Like oak.”
“Or a charcoal briquette,” Ellie said. “We could scent Natasha on embers of ash from woods that wouldn’t be here naturally. But I think it would be very difficult for Natasha to tell the difference with any accuracy. It would be like distinguishing between regular gasoline and gas that was mixed with ethanol.”
“What you said once about signal-to-noise ratio.”
Ellie gave me a huge grin. “You remembered that?”
“Any other ideas before we take you and Natasha back home.”
She nodded. “There is still the simplest thing we can look for.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“If I want to start a fire with some tinder, it can be done without an accelerant.”
“Of course,” I said. “I can bunch up a bit of pine needles and a few twigs and light it directly. A cigarette lighter would probably leave a trace of accelerant that Natasha could smell. So that is unlikely. But I could also strike a match. Natasha would be able to find that, right?”
Ellie nodded. “I didn’t bring any, did you?” she said.
I shook my head. “Ryan will have something.” I walked over to his house and rang the bell. Lily let me in and yelled for Ryan.
He came, still looking nearly as blotchy as he had that morning, but he was holding a bunch of stapled sheets of paper, and he was talking on his hands-free phone, something about theoretical models. He gave me a questioning look.
“Matches?” I said.
He frowned, thinking, talking as he walked into the kitchen and found a book of matches in a drawer. It was obvious as he talked shop that he was very self-confident in the world of science, the opposite of his frightened, nervous persona the rest of the time. He handed me the matchbook.
“Thanks.”
Back outside, I held them up for Ellie to see.
She nodded. “Take them a good distance downwind, then strike a few of them and let them burn out.”
I did as she said, and brought them back.
Ellie held out a tissue, and I dropped the charred pieces onto it. She called Natasha, who immediately stopped what she was doing, ran to Ellie and sat in front of her.
Her movement caught Spot’s attention.
“You see how Natasha comes when called?” I said to him.
He ignored me.
Ellie went through the same routine with Natasha again, this time scenting her on the burned matches.
“Find the scent!” she said.
Natasha ran directly to one of the small spots where the fire had started, and pounced on it with her front paws. Her tail was up and wagging, a classic alert. She pawed at the dirt, stuck her nose in it, huffed and puffed, and pawed some more.
Ellie walked over and praised her effusively, then stepped over the area where Natasha was alerting, displacing the dog. “Natasha,” Ellie said. “Find more scent! Find the scent!”
Natasha looked up at her, wagging, staring at Ellie’s eyes.
“Go on, girl. Find the scent!”
Natasha turned, trotted a few paces over to the other place where it looked like the fire had dwindled and then been rekindled, and pounced on it, digging with her paws.
“Good girl, Natasha!” Ellie said. She looked at me, beaming.
“Helluva dog, Ellie. You just saved Ryan about ten million dollars.”
“What?!”
“You’ve demonstrated that the fire was arson. And Ryan has an alibi for the time of the fire. He was playing video games with his friend. So you’ve absolved Ryan of negligence. The fire wasn’t his fault, so he won’t have to pay.”
“Oh, my goodness! I’m so glad. No one could possibly have that kind of money in the bank, never mind a man as young as Ryan.”
I smiled at her. I went to the house. This time Ryan hadn’t locked the door. I opened it without knocking and hollered for Ryan. He came down the stairs, still talking on the phone. I made the quit s
ign by drawing my hand in front of my throat.
“Call you back,” he said, then touched a button on the phone that was clipped to his belt. He stopped halfway down the stairs and put his hand on the railing as if to support himself, assuming I was about to report bad news.
“Ellie Ibsen scented her dog Natasha on burned matches. Natasha made a strong alert on the two places where the fire was started. That means the fire was started by an arsonist in an effort to frame you for negligence. You have an alibi. You are clear.”
Ryan’s permanent frown disappeared as his face relaxed. He shut his eyes, tipped his head back and breathed long and deep.
“That is so great! I mean, it’s a terrible tragedy that my neighbor’s house burned. But it didn’t come from our campfire.”
Ryan ran down the rest of the stairs, and bolted out the door. I looked out the door just in time to see him hug Ellie, and lift her off the ground. He set her down and began bouncing in front of her the same way Lily liked to bounce.
I went out and watched Ellie closely to look for signs of broken ribs or any other internal damage. But she just grinned.
“What do we do now?” Ryan said. “Is there some affidavit or something to sign? How do we make the authorities believe it?”
“We don’t have to,” I said. “Ellie’s rep is more pure than George Washington’s. She says what happened, the fire investigator Terry Drier says okay, and he no longer considers you as he begins his arson investigation. Diamond tells the DA, and the DA also accepts it as fact.”
“Oh, I’m not that golden,” Ellie said.
“Yes, she is,” I said to Ryan.
Ryan went to hug her again, but Ellie got her palm up and in between them.
“Please, I’m still trying to breathe after the last hug.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?” Ryan looked sick.
“Don’t worry, I’m okay.”
“I didn’t mean to...”
“Ryan,” I said. “It’s okay. Go tell Lily the good news.”
He realized he was going overboard in his reaction, stopped himself, thanked Ellie again and left. I made quick phone calls to Diamond and Terry Drier. Then Ellie and I put Natasha in the Jeep, and I delivered them back down to the foothills.