Fire Spirit

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right, but I don’t know. Whoever started these fires, they weren’t amateurs. Let’s talk about this later, OK? Right now, we have a major arson scene to process.’

  ‘Whatever you say, boss. You’re the boss, boss. But you mark my words. That Creepy Kid of yours, you need to keep a weather eye on him. He’s creepy.’

  Jack had now reached the carbonized body of the woman next to the second row of seats. Taking care not to disturb any of her crusted flesh or her dark brown bones, he lowered his head and shone his flashlight under the seats next to her.

  ‘Boss,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Take a look at this.’

  Ruth knelt awkwardly down beside him. The woman’s hand was as fleshless and crooked as a buzzard’s claw, and several of her finger-bones had dropped off, as Ruth would have expected. But it wasn’t her hand that Jack was pointing out to her; it was the scattered heap of pale gray powder underneath it, as if a small bag of gray cement had been dropped on the floor.

  Jack said, ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Using a cardboard scoop, he took out a sample of powder, and carefully brought it out from under the seat, so that they could examine it more closely. The powder was very soft, and fine, but when Ruth rubbed it between finger and thumb she could feel through her latex gloves that there were tiny fragments of bone in it.

  ‘Cremated remains,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll have to analyze them, of course. But these look pretty much the same as the remains we found next to Julie Benfield and Tilda Frieburg.’

  Ruth looked at him seriously. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘what the hell is going on here?’

  ‘I don’t have any more idea than you do, boss. But you know what they say in the funeral ceremony. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Maybe that’s what happened on this bus – some kind of funeral ceremony. The only difference is, the people who got cremated didn’t happen to be dead.’

  THIRTEEN

  Ruth was woken up the next morning by the phone warbling.‘Craig, sweetheart?’ she said, blurrily. ‘Craig, would you answer that, please?’

  There was no reply and the phone went on warbling and warbling. ‘For God’s sake, Craig! Pick up the phone, will you, please?’

  Eventually the phone stopped. Ruth opened her eyes and sat up, blinking. The bedroom was gloomy, but the digital clock on the nightstand told her that it was ten seventeen in the morning. Craig’s side of the bed was empty, with only a punched-in pillow and a twist in the comforter to show that he had slept there.

  Ruth eased herself out of bed. She felt stiff-jointed and bruised, as if she had spent too long in the gym. She picked up her pink toweling robe from the back of the bedroom chair and went downstairs.

  ‘Craig! Jeff! Ammy!’

  The house was deserted. Through the kitchen windows she could see that the sky was charcoal gray and that it was raining hard. The kitchen smelled of coffee and toast, and there was a note on the counter. Thought you needed to sleep. I’ve taken Jeff & Ammy to school. CU l8er. XXCraig.

  Ruth sat down on one of the kitchen stools and plowed her fingers through her hair. God, she felt like death warmed over. She and Jack had spent over seven hours examining the burned-out bus, sustained only by lukewarm Dunkaccino and stale cinnamon donuts, and they hadn’t left Bon Air Park until three thirty-five a.m. She had taken over 300 photographs, as well as countless samples of fabric and plastic and human remains, but by the time they had finished she still had no clear picture in her mind of how the fire could have started, or how it had spread.

  Usually, she was able to visualize fires as soon as she arrived on the scene. She could tell almost immediately if they were accidental, or if they had been started on purpose. The nature of the premises was one of the first clues, especially now that local businesses were suffering such an economic downturn. Furniture stores, hi-fi outlets, real-estate offices, jewelers, specialist food suppliers, bookshops – they were all highly likely to have been set alight by their near-bankrupt owners. Other telltale clues were empty filing cabinets, with no business records in them, and the absence of any valuables or sentimental items, such as family photographs. Then Ruth only had to see where the blaze had actually started, and how quickly it had taken hold, and if any doors had been jammed to hamper the firefighters when they tried to gain access.

  Somehow, the Julie Benfield fire and the Tilda Frieburg fire and now the Spirit of Kokomo fire all seemed to be connected, but they were more connected by what they weren’t than what they were. There was no obvious motive for any of them – not revenge, not vandalism, not insurance fraud – and each in its own way was pyrotechnically inexplicable. The interior of the Spirit of Kokomo bus had reached a temperature of well over 1500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt steel, although there was no evidence that it had been started by any accelerant. With the exception of the near-cremated woman in the second row, every other victim had been burned very evenly, as if they were chickens roasted inside a fan oven.

  Ruth checked inside the Pasquini espresso machine and saw that Craig had already spooned out fresh coffee for her, so all she had to do was switch it on. She was hungry but she didn’t know what she felt like eating. She couldn’t face leftover chicken from yesterday evening, not after tweezing skin samples all night from those eight flaking corpses. She took out a blueberry yogurt and peeled the lid back.

  As soon as she had taken her first spoonful, the phone warbled again. She picked it up and it was Jack.

  ‘Morning, boss. The rain it raineth every goddamned day. What time do you plan on coming in?’

  ‘As soon as my pulse has restarted. Where are you?’

  ‘Here in the lab already. I just had a call from Aaron Scheinman. You’re not going to believe this. The cremated remains we retrieved from Tilda Frieburg’s bathtub were a ninety-nine-point-nine per cent match for the cremated remains from Julie Benfield’s mattress.’

  ‘What?’ Ruth had taken another spoonful of yogurt and she almost snorted it up her nose.

  ‘That’s right. Both of those two samples of remains originated from one and the same cremated individual.’

  Ruth sat down slowly. ‘I don’t understand this at all. This means that our perpetrator must have divided up somebody’s cremated remains and left them at two separate arson incidents. I mean, why? What the hell for?’

  ‘Search me, boss. Es un misterio.’

  Ruth thought for a moment, and then she said, ‘We’re not talking about a cremated child any longer, are we? We’re talking about an adult male.’

  ‘That’s my guess.’

  ‘Did you send Aaron the remains we took from the bus?’

  ‘First thing. He promised to give me an analysis early this afternoon, if not sooner.’

  ‘You’re not thinking what I’m thinking, are you?’

  ‘You mean – what if the remains from the bus match the other two? If they do, he wasn’t just an adult male, he was a very big adult male.’

  Ruth said, ‘You’re not kidding. We have at least two kilos of remains already, don’t we? And when you cremate your average adult male, what do you get? About two-point-seven kilos, depending on his skeletal structure. Only somebody who was nearly a giant would produce three kilos. We’re talking Primo Carnera.’

  ‘You know what?’ said Jack. ‘This whole thing is hurting my head.’

  ‘Come on, Jack. Think. Fires don’t start for no reason at all. You remember that fire on South Locke Street, the one that was started by the sun shining through a glass flower-vase? It took me months to work out what had happened there, but I did it in the end.’

  ‘I don’t know, boss. Something tells me these particular fires aren’t going to be as scientifically logical as that. Listen – I’m going to start testing the victims’ clothes for residue and gases. What time do you think I’ll see you?’

  ‘I’m not sure exactly. Around twelve thirty.’

  ‘OK, then. Hasta luego.’

  She put down the phone and went over to pour herse
lf a cup of espresso. As she did so, the phone warbled again.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, under her breath. She was almost tempted to ignore it, but it warbled on and on and in the end she picked up.

  ‘Ruth? Hi, hallo there. This is Doctor Beech.’

  ‘Oh, hi, Doctor Beech. I’m sorry I took so long to answer. I was up for most of the night and I haven’t really woken up yet.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you. But I’ve had a call from Martin Watchman. He’s driving down from Chicago and he should be here by mid-afternoon.’

  ‘Wow. He sure didn’t waste any time, did he?’

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you, Ruth. You understand that Watchman may be suffering from delusions, and that none of what he suggests may be real. Amelia’s anxieties, they may be delusions, too. But the point is that she and Watchman are both suffering from almost identical delusions, and that may help us to understand what’s going on here.’

  ‘Sure, I realize that. But so long as Ammy’s prepared to go along with it, and so long as this Martin Watchman character doesn’t scare her any more than she’s scared already, that’s all I ask.’

  ‘He said he needed to come down here as soon as possible because he considered the situation to be urgent. I don’t know how seriously we need to take him, but he said that Amelia’s feelings are indicative that something catastrophic is going to happen, and sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Something catastrophic? Something catastrophic like what? A tornado? An earthquake?’

  ‘He wouldn’t explain in any detail. He said he needed to talk to Amelia first. But let me tell you this: he was very interested in the Creepy Kid. He said the Creepy Kid could be the key that unlocks everything.’

  ‘Did he say how?’ Ruth asked her. ‘More to the point, did he say why?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, when he said that I was beginning to wonder if I was making a mistake, asking him to come down to Kokomo. He definitely sounded as if he had a couple of screws loose.’

  ‘So what changed your mind?’

  ‘He asked me if there had been any unexplained fires in the area.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He asked me point-blank. Out of the blue. We hadn’t been talking about fires and he didn’t even know that you’re an arson investigator. But not only did he ask me about unexplained fires, he specifically said fatal fires. Well, I told him then who you were.’

  Ruth could see her face reflected in the black glass of the oven door, like a ghost of herself. ‘You’re aware that I attended two fatal fires at the beginning of the week, aren’t you? And there was another one last night. A Spirit of Kokomo bus was burned out in Bon Air Park, with eight seniors still in it. All dead, and so far we have no idea how it started. So, yes, it was fatal, and yes, it’s unexplained.’

  ‘I saw it on the TV news this morning,’ said Doctor Beech. ‘That was about five minutes before Watchman called me. I guess that was what convinced me that he was worth talking to, at the very least.’

  ‘What time do you think he’ll get here?’

  ‘Three, three thirty. Maybe later, depending on the traffic on I-ninety. He said he’s made himself a reservation at the Courtyard Hotel. He’s going to call me when he arrives.’

  Jack was analyzing charred seating fabric when she arrived at the Fire & Arson Laboratory.

  ‘You look totally bushed, Jack,’ she told him. ‘You should take a couple of hours off.’

  Jack massaged his forehead with his fingertips, as if he could feel a migraine coming on. ‘You know something, the more I find out about these furshlugginer fires, the less I understand them. And the more they creep me out. Talking of that, did you talk to Ron Magruder about that Creepy Kid?’

  ‘Not yet. But I intend to. Especially if I catch him stalking me again.’

  ‘Well, I believe he might,’ said Jack. ‘I have a very strong feeling that we’re going to see more of these attacks.’

  Ruth was buttoning up her lab coat. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Nothing scientific. Nothing logical. Just a feeling, that’s all.’ Jack turned away as if he didn’t want Ruth to see the expression on his face.

  ‘Jack?’ she said. He didn’t answer at first, so she said, ‘Jack? What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘I’m tired, is all.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t have to turn around. Just tell me.’

  Jack hesitated, and she could hear him softly panting, as if he had been running upstairs. ‘I never told you. In fact I hardly told anyone. But Lois took her own life by pouring gasoline all over herself and setting herself on fire.’

  ‘Oh, Jack.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I guess however she did it, it would have been equally difficult to come to terms with it. Cutting your wrists, taking too many sleeping-pills, throwing yourself in front of a truck. What difference does it make?’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Jack turned around to face her. His eyelashes were stuck together with tears, but he was trying to smile, too. ‘I’ve gotten over it now, mostly, coming home and finding her like that. I knew what had happened even before I opened the kitchen door, because I know what an immolated human being smells like. But it’s not that. It’s what happened afterward.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She was cremated. Leastways, Bluitt and Son, the funeral directors, finished what she’d started. I took her remains home in an urn and I placed her on the window sill in the sunroom, overlooking the yard, so that she was close to her flowers and she could hear the birds singing.’

  Ruth said nothing. She had never heard Jack speak like this before, and she didn’t want to interrupt him in case he decided not to carry on.

  ‘About a month later I looked out of the window and, holy Jesus, there she was, standing in the yard. She was looking at the house. She was wearing the same purple dress she died in. Her hair was tied back and she was just looking at the house.’ Jack paused for a few moments, and then he said, ‘Strange – but I wasn’t scared. It was only Lois, after all, and somehow I didn’t register that she was dead and there was no possible way that she could be standing out there in the yard. It didn’t even occur to me that I might be going out of my mind.’

  He paused again, and wiped the tears away from his eyes with his knuckles, like a small boy.

  ‘What did you do?’ Ruth asked him at last.

  ‘I went outside to talk to her. I guess I felt angry with her for leaving me. At the same time, I wanted to put my arms around her and tell her how much I’d missed her. When somebody you love kills themselves, there’s so many questions that you don’t know the answers to, and never will. That’s what really makes it unbearable. You’re forever asking yourself why they did it. You’re forever thinking, was it my fault?’

  ‘What happened when you went outside?’

  Jack pulled a face. ‘She wasn’t there. Well, what did I expect? I walked around the house but there was no sign of her. But I couldn’t believe that she was only some kind of mirage. The sun had been shining on her hair and she had cast a shadow across the decking. A mirage can’t do that.’

  Ruth said, ‘Did you tell anyone that you’d seen her?’

  ‘How could I? I’m supposed to be Mr Pragmatic. If the chief had gotten to hear about it, he probably would have suspended me and sent me off to the nuthouse.’

  ‘Jack – lots of people think they see their loved ones after they’ve been bereaved. After my father died, I kept seeing men who looked exactly like him. In the street, in the supermarket. Once or twice I even called out to them, but then they’d turn around and they weren’t him at all.’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Unh-hunh. This was different, believe me. This wasn’t a woman who looked like Lois. This was Lois. Besides, there’s no way in and out of my back yard except through the sunroom.’

  ‘So what are you trying to tell me? How is this relevant to the Creepy Kid?’

  ‘I saw her again,’
Jack told her. ‘It was, what, about a week later. She was standing in the same place, wearing the same dress, looking at the house in just the same way. It was foggy that morning, so she looked pretty ghostly. This time I didn’t go outside as soon as I saw her. I stood there watching her to see what she would do. After about five minutes she walked off, crossed the grass and disappeared behind the yew tree. When I went out, she was gone. Vanished. Desaparecido. Same way you told me that the Creepy Kid had vanished.

  ‘Two days after that, she turned up one more time. I came into the sunroom and she was outside the window, right up close, staring at the urn on the window sill – staring at her own remains as if she couldn’t believe it was her. I could even see her breath on the glass, that’s how close she was. I went up to the window and looked out at her, but she didn’t look back at me, didn’t lift her eyes toward me even once. Then she walked off again, like she had before, and disappeared behind the yew tree. I didn’t follow her. What was the use?’

  ‘So what did you do?’ Ruth asked him.

  ‘You won’t believe this, but the first thing I did was talk to a pastor – Mike McConnell at St Luke’s. Mike – well, he was very understanding, very sympathetic, even though he probably thought that I was bananas. But he said that I should forgive myself for Lois taking her own life, and that instead of keeping her remains in an urn, I should set her free. He said that was why most people commit suicide. Whatever it is about life that’s getting them down, they want to be free of it.

  ‘So, the same afternoon I took the urn to the community garden at Ivy Tech. Before she got sick, Lois used to love it there, growing her own fruit and vegetables. I walked around and emptied out the urn as I went. Discreetly, you know, between the rows of potatoes. I said a kind of a prayer for her, too, commending her soul to God. Lois was never religious, no more than I am, but I didn’t want to limit my options – just in case there is a God and He was happy to take care of her for me.’