Snoop spoke up. “I did an online search and Allison Montrose Simonetti, the dead mother, is still listed as the owner. Apparently none of her relatives have claimed it yet.”
“In that case, maybe the house hasn’t been touched since September.”
I asked, “Captain, can we see the site of the fire?”
“Sure. I’ll see if the investigator who did this report can go with you.”
A phone call later, he turned back to us. “Sergeant Saunders will pick you up at 1:30. Gentlemen, I hate to leave you, but I have a lunch meeting.”
He handed the file to me. “Study this before Saunders picks you up.” He gestured to his left. “Take it to the conference room. Use our Wifi if you need to check your emails or anything. Susan will get you a temporary password. Saunders will need the file, so give it to him this afternoon. If you want lunch, the receptionist can recommend some places nearby. My favorite is Cocina Juanita.” He grabbed his coat and led us to the conference room.
Chapter 28
A tall black man in a navy-blue uniform stuck out his hand. “I’m Ted Saunders.”
“Chuck McCrary. This is my associate, Raymond Snopolski.”
Saunders shook our hands. “Cap’n wants you two to see the site of the Montrose fire.”
I nodded. “We appreciate your help.”
Snoop handed him the file.
“No problem. Let’s get my car.” He led us to the parking lot next door. I took the passenger seat; Snoop got in back.
Saunders checked the side mirror and pulled into the traffic. “You reviewed the file?”
“We read it before lunch.”
As he threaded through traffic out to the lakefront neighborhoods, I filled him in on our suspicions. He, in turn, explained how they investigate fires.
Twenty minutes later he turned onto Edgewater Drive. “The site’s a mile down this way.” We drove past large, waterfront estates on the left side of the street. The houses across from the lake were nice but not so grand.
Saunders pulled into the circular driveway of a burned-out mansion. “This is the Montrose house. I did a little research before I picked you up; the same family owned it for four generations.”
He opened the trunk of the car and handed each of us a hard hat, shoe covers and gloves.
The front porch floorboards had collapsed and green shoots peeked through them, life rising from death. The house was a gutted shell, its once grand double entrance doors now blackened with smoke and soot.
We followed Saunders around back and donned hard hats, shoe covers, and gloves. He picked his way down the narrow basement steps to a door in the back wall of the mansion, reappeared a minute later at the bottom step, and waved a flashlight at us. “It’s okay, but stay close.”
We made our way down to the basement. The heat from the fire had blistered the paint on the door. “Look at that, Snoop. A skeleton lock.” Any burglar with a room-temperature IQ can pick one of those. Hell, a ten-year-old kid with a paper clip can pick one.
Snoop took pictures of both sides of the door.
Slivers of light from the early afternoon sun leaked through the burned boards of the floor above, piercing the gloom of the smoke-blackened basement. “This is the remnant of the oil tank.” Saunders indicated the area with his flashlight beam. “And this is the electrical panel.” He stepped over and studied it. “Hmm. That’s funny.”
“What?”
“The short that started the fire looks like the insulation failed on the old wiring. But if you study it...” He aimed his flashlight at the wire. “Is that an abrasion on the wire?”
I studied the spot where the wire fastened to the circuit breaker. The fire had deposited soot everywhere. Faint parallel lines on the copper indicated where a file could’ve scraped through the cloth insulation.
Saunders switched on the light on his hard hat and slipped the flashlight into a coat pocket to free both hands. He held the inspection file in the beam from the hat and flipped pages. He frowned. “Chuck, I am professionally embarrassed. At the time, we had no reason to think this was anything other than an accident, so we didn’t examine it as closely as we could have. I can’t tell if it was arson, but it might be. I need to reclassify the origin of this fire as suspicious.”
“Ted, I’m no expert, but that abrasion looks easy to miss. If it was arson, how’d the fire start?”
“Every fire has an ignition source and sometimes an accelerant. The ignition source can be a space heater, a match, or a Molotov cocktail. Or, in this case, an electrical short that caused an arc. See the spot on the breaker panel where it melted?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where the current arced. Accelerants can be curtains, carpet, old newspapers, firewood—although firewood is harder to ignite than you think.” Saunders pointed at the box. “The ignition source here was a spark from this frayed wire. The first accelerant could have been a rat’s nest in the breaker box. The nest is gone now, burned up, but that looks like the remains of rat shit there. The spark created a flame. Yep.” He pointed.
“I’ll take your word for it. This is my first arson.”
“As the nest burned, the pieces fell onto this can of lacquer thinner and caught like a torch. These screw-tops are always gummy from the residue of evaporated lacquer thinner. This magazine pile spread it to the oil tank.” He shook his head. “Boom, the occupants didn’t have a chance.”
“No way for the women to escape, Ted?”
The light in the basement was dim, but I think his eyes were glistening. “Thank God, they never woke up. We found their bodies still in bed. Smoke inhalation.”
There was an awkward silence. I remembered an IED in Iraq that hit a Humvee in the days before we got the armored ones. The gas tank made an orange and black mushroom cloud fifty yards in front of me. Four of my fellow Green Berets never had a chance. We never got justice for them. Maybe I could get justice for three women I would never meet.
I shook my head to clear the phantom image. “The spark came when some appliance turned on?”
Saunders nodded. “Had to be that.”
“So what does this particular wire connect to?”
Saunders scanned the floor with his flashlight. “There it is.” He picked up the cover to the breaker panel and studied the diagram on its hinged door. “This breaker is position seven.” He directed his light at the breaker cover. “The heat damaged the diagram; I can’t read it. But this house has a knob and tube wiring system.”
“What’s that?”
“They used the knob and tube system until about 1930. The wires are exposed and wrapped around an insulated ceramic tube. Nowadays we use Romex inside walls or run exposed wires in conduit. See those wires wrapped around those exposed knobs up there on the joists?”
He swept his flashlight beam along the blackened wire up to the exposed beams and followed it around a corner to the back of the basement. Snoop and I picked our way across the cluttered floor in his wake.
“There.” He pointed the light. “The air handler for the furnace. After the insulation at the panel frayed, the next time the furnace came on, the breaker box arced and started the fire.”
He walked back the way we’d come. “This breaker box should’ve been grounded. I remember...this box’s ground wire was loose. See it? The ground wire screw must’ve worked loose over the last ninety years.”
The soot-blacked ground wire looked like a button-hook. It had been bent to wrap around a screw, but the screw hole on the breaker panel was empty. “Could this ground have been disconnected on purpose? I don’t see the ground screw.”
Saunders studied it. “Yep. No ground screw. Someone deliberately removed it. Yep. This is arson. But whoever set this fire couldn’t have known when the air handler would come on. It might’ve been days or weeks before it kicked on.”
“So this wire was sabotaged sometime before the fire. Then the arsonist hangs around until the furnace comes on so he knows that he’s succee
ded in starting the fire?”
Saunders scratched his head. “Yeah, but that doesn’t make sense. A professional arsonist wants time to get to safety, but he also wants to make sure the fire starts. Unless he’s a firebug, he doesn’t hang around the site where someone could notice him. He uses a timing device to control when the blaze starts. Could be a fuse or a punk or a small paper fire to start a larger blaze. Yep. That gives him time to escape, but he knows right then whether the fire started. This method,” He waved hand in the direction of the blackened hulk of the air handler, “Leaves too much to chance.”
The answer was obvious to me. “He wouldn’t have to hang around. He could watch local TV news or buy a newspaper every day or just drive by to see if it had burned. Ted, if you wanted to burn this house down and didn’t care how soon it happened, wouldn’t this method do it?”
“Yep.”
“What’s the weather like in Cleveland in late September? Do they run the furnace much?”
“September is funny. The highs run in the sixties and seventies, the lows in the fifties. But I once took my kids to the beach the last week in September. You never know.”
“What about this house? Is it well insulated?”
“Oh, sure. This is a brownstone house—good insulation. The furnace wouldn’t come on every night.” Saunders referred to the file. “This thermostat was set to sixty-eight degrees. It might not turn the furnace on for days after the breaker box sabotage.”
“Can you look up the hourly temperature readings for September 27th?”
“What good would that...oh, I get it.”
Chapter 29
Saunders spread the printout on the fire station conference table. “These are the hourly temperatures for the two weeks before the fire.”
I scanned them backwards from the twenty-seventh. “The cool snap on September nineteenth reached a low of forty-five degrees. The furnace came on that night, don’t you think?”
Saunders looked over my shoulder. “Yep, for sure.”
“So the sabotage was after September nineteenth.” I continued scanning. “The lows were above sixty until September twenty-seventh when it dipped below fifty at 2:00 a.m. That’s when the furnace would kick in. When was the fire reported?”
“2:34 a.m. We responded at 2:44 a.m. and the house was fully involved.”
I tapped the printout. “We have our window for the arsonist—September twentieth to twenty-sixth.”
Saunders led us into Captain Crawford’s office. “Cap’n, we’ve got an arson, sure as you’re born.” He outlined what we found. “We need to send a team out and go over the site with a fine-toothed comb.”
Crawford sighed. “Okay. It’s your case, Ted. Keep me in the loop and keep McCrary in the loop too. Call him when you have anything to report.”
###
Snoop and I went back to our hotel where we had checked our luggage that morning. I glanced at my watch. “It’s too late to get a flight to Port City today. Let’s get a hotel near the airport. We’ll catch an early flight tomorrow.”
Snoop put a hand on my arm. “We’re not going home yet.”
“Why not?”
“We haven’t interviewed the family.”
“To what purpose?”
“Chuck, who is the arsonist?”
“Snoop, this is going to be one of those ‘teaching moments,’ isn’t it?”
He laughed. “If you were a police detective and suspected arson, what would be your next move?”
“I already have a suspect—Ramon Gomez.”
“And you know what the prosecutor would say if you stopped looking as soon as you had one suspect. I repeat: What would be your next move?”
“I’d interview the family.”
“And why would you do that?”
I smacked my forehead with the palm of my hand. “To see if there are any other suspects. Duh.”
Chapter 30
Westminster chimes sounded from behind the oaken door. We waited. I was about to ring again when I felt the subtle vibrations of footsteps from inside.
The oldest maid I ever saw opened the door.
“I’m Carlos McCrary, and this is Raymond Snopolski. We have an appointment with Miss Yolanda Montrose.” I handed her my card.
“She’s expecting you. I’m Emma.” She gestured us in and closed the door. “Before I take you to Miss Montrose, you need to know that she sometimes get confused. She had a stroke last year, and it affected her memory. Sometimes, she’s just fine. Other times…” She shrugged. “That’s why I live here full time.”
“Thanks for telling us, Emma. We’ll keep that in mind.”
The sitting room was paneled in mahogany that the decades had stained even darker. Yolanda Montrose sat in a chrome wheelchair with an Afghan over her lap and a knitted shawl around her shoulders. The room must have been 80 degrees even so.
Emma handed her my business card.
Montrose stared at it like she didn’t know what to do with it.
“Miss Montrose, I’m Chuck McCrary, and this is my associate, Raymond Snopolski. May we sit down?”
Montrose looked up and gestured vaguely in the direction of a burgundy over-stuffed couch from World War I.
“I’ll get you some tea,” Emma said.
“Thank you.” We sat. “We’d like to talk to you about your niece, Allison Simonetti.”
“Allison’s dead, you know.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s why we’re here. We want to find out what happened to her.”
“Are you policemen?”
“No, ma’am, private investigators. We’d like to ask you about Allison.”
“If you’re not policemen, why are you here?”
“Because we think that someone wanted to harm Allison and her daughters. We’re trying to find out who did it.”
She put her hand to her mouth. “You mean she was murdered?”
“Perhaps. That’s what we’re trying to determine.”
She considered that. “What would you like to know?”
“How well did you know Allison?”
“She was my only family, you know—her and her daughters, Melinda and…” She waved a hand in the air, as if she could conjure up the name. It didn’t work. “… the other one,” she finished.
“Yes, ma’am. I understand that you don’t have any children?”
“I never married. In my day, you had to be married to have children, you know. Not like today. Nowadays, nobody cares whether you’re married or not.”
“Did Allison have any other family?”
Montrose considered this for a few seconds. “She was married for a while. Some fellow from Florida, I think. They divorced, you know.”
“Yes, ma’am, we know. Did Allison have any other relatives?”
“Well, there was my brother Frank. He was her uncle, of course.”
“And where does Frank live?”
She looked at me as if I were the stupidest person she had ever seen. “He doesn’t live anywhere. He’s dead, you know. He died last year—in California.” Tears began to form in her eyes.
Emma arrived with the tea. Snoop and I drank our tea while Montrose composed herself. The hot tea and the hot room double-teamed me; I began to sweat beneath my suit coat.
“Did Frank have any children?”
“Yes, he had some children. They all live out West. I get Christmas cards from them. Emma has their addresses.”
She placed her tea cup on the table beside her. “Allison and Melinda and Danielle burned to death, you know.” Tears filled her eyes again. “In the prime of life, they were. Those girls had their whole lives in front of them. They were in college. And Allison was young enough, she could have remarried. She was only in her forties. She used to come see me every week. We’d have lunch on Sunday after church.”
She looked at Emma. “Who would ever want to harm them, Emma?”
Snoop and I attempted to make pleasant conversation with Miss Montrose while we waited fo
r Emma to find the information on Frank’s children. We left as soon we could. Our presence had only resurrected Montrose’s grief.
###
“Of course, Yolanda’s not competent. She shouldn’t be living in that house. Emma is not qualified physically or professionally to see that she’s properly cared for. Hell, Emma could use some assisted living herself.” Hale Stevens leaned back in his chair. “I do the best I can, but I’m just her attorney. It would traumatize Yolanda to have a competency hearing. I can’t put her through that. She’s only got a few years left. She told me last year before her stroke that she wants to die in her own home.”
“Frank’s children in California—they the only relatives she has left?”
“Unfortunately, yes. I don’t think she’s seen them in years. Yolanda was too frail to travel to California for Frank’s funeral. They didn’t even come to Cleveland for the funerals. They’re not a close-knit family—never were.”
“You have Yolanda’s power of attorney?”
He nodded. “Fortunately, she signed that a few years ago before that stroke screwed up her brain.”
“Who are Allison’s heirs?”
Stevens shrugged. “Allison was a lovely woman, but she was more decorative than useful, intellect-wise. One of my partners handled her divorce and got her a nice settlement. But she ignored our advice in estate planning, and her will left everything to her daughters. Since they died with her, she might as well have died intestate.”
“Is that why the house is sitting there in ruins?”
He nodded. “Until the probate court determines who Allison’s heirs are, no one has the authority to do anything. Of course, it’s a total tear-down, so it’s not like it’s deteriorating any further. The lot’s worth a few million, though.”
Chapter 31
Snoop dropped me off at home at 6:00 p.m. the next day.
Mrs. Parker had finished the repairs. I was about to open the door when my phone played “Georgia On My Mind.” “Hi, doll. I’m walking up to my door.”
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