by Monica Hesse
Keeping up with the joke, he got out of the car. He walked through the field, into the house, and stood around for a while, wondering how far he was supposed to take the prank. She pulled away with the car, and few minutes later, she called him on his cell phone. “Have you done it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he teased back. “I done it.”
After a few minutes, the car pulled back around. When Charlie got inside, he was surprised. It didn’t seem like Tonya. It seemed like a different version of Tonya: a lighter, happier version he hadn’t seen in months. That’s when he realized she’d been serious. She wasn’t in a better mood because she’d been joking about the house. She was in a better mood because she’d been serious, and she thought he’d done as she asked. She was a beautiful, mysterious woman that he still, after several years, at some level didn’t know at all.
The realization made him worried and confused. But it was mixed with relief. After months of feeling like he was a disappointment to Tonya, like she was on the verge of leaving him, he had finally done something that made her happy.
They drove around and it was just like old times, like Tonya was imagining all the bad stuff had gone up in the smoke of that ugly house on Dennis Drive that nobody lived in anymore anyway.
After an hour, she wanted to go back and see the burning house. They did, but it wasn’t burning. Charlie made up an excuse about how it could take a while for the flames to show because he’d set the fire in a small closet. They drove past it again and again, and Tonya kept asking why she didn’t see any flames yet. Eventually, Charlie couldn’t think of any other excuses. He had to tell her he’d lied. He hadn’t actually lit anything on fire.
She didn’t seem mad, really. Just a little exasperated that she’d entrusted Charlie with a task he clearly wasn’t up to. “Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” he remembered her teasing, but almost in a friendly, flirtatious way.
They went back, and they burned that house down, Charlie says, and then they burned sixty-six more after it.
CHAPTER 15
“THEY’RE NOT HUNTERS AT ALL”
APRIL 1.
The team of criminal profilers—Isaac van Patten, Jon Cromer, Ron Tunkel, Ken Morris—had been coordinating the psychological part of the investigation from afar for too long. Five and a half months into the fires and they still hadn’t all been to Accomack at the same time. Tunkel had come down once around Christmas, but that was a period when the fires came to a stop for a couple of weeks. At the time everyone had hoped they were done for good, so Tunkel had gone back home. Isaac Van Patten hadn’t been there at all.
On this day, April Fools’ Day, they’d managed to all get there. They hoped that having their shoes on the ground would give them new insights into the man or men they were trying to catch. There were things you couldn’t know until you were there in person.
Tunkel was asked to give a presentation to some of the fire investigators who were desperate for something, anything, that could help forward their psychological understanding of the arsonist. Jon Cromer remembered sitting in the audience and being impressed with his colleague’s work, and the way he vividly described how to best embolden witnesses to come forward. “He will make a mistake,” Tunkel said. Police should trigger citizens’ memories by encouraging them to trust their instincts and be on alert for anything out of the ordinary.
One person at the meeting, a police supervisor, had a question for further down the line: When they did catch the guy or guys, how should they question him? What should be the protocol?
Tunkel demurred—he was hesitant to offer a boilerplate protocol when every situation required nuance. The questioner pressed on: “Listen,” he said, “my boys might catch him tonight, and we won’t have time to get up with you.” They needed something general they could work with if push came to shove.
Tunkel tried to formulate something general that would be of use. He talked about power. “Arson is a means of power. Fire setting is a means of demonstrating power,” he said. “Serial arsonists tend to be unempowered people. These aren’t captains of industry or successful businessmen.”
On television, police interrogations often involved an officer browbeating a suspect, or two of them ganging up until the suspect finally cracked. That wouldn’t be the way to go in this case, he explained. The person or persons lighting the fires were already having a bad year, some of the people in the room remembered him saying. The way to get him to talk wouldn’t be to berate him, but to be gentle. Make it clear the investigators understood where the arsonist was coming from. Make it feel like some of the power was being returned to him.
“We know there’s some goodness in you,” Tunkel suggested saying to the arsonist. “We know that whatever was going on in your life, there was a lot of stress. We appreciate the fact that most of the buildings were unoccupied.” Tunkel suggested reminding the arsonist of the chickens at the Gomez house. Remind him how he made sure to let them out before lighting the garage on fire. He didn’t have to do that, but when he was given the opportunity to be compassionate, he chose to be compassionate.
“Anyway,” Tunkel concluded, “these are common suggestions. If we were to write an interview strategy, we would most likely talk about these things.”
Either after or before the presentation for law enforcement—it was hard to remember—the psychological profilers all got in a few cars and took a tour of the county.
As they drove through the unfamiliar place for the first time together, Ron Tunkel’s heart began to sink. One of the concepts that he’d always held firm on was the idea of the unknowing witness—the assumption that, with this many fires, someone would have seen something. With this theory, if the police could only trigger the memory of that unintentional witness, they would have a breakthrough in solving the crime. Now that he was looking at the landscape, he realized that assumption might not hold. The landscape was more barren than he had imagined. The houses were farther apart, the streets weren’t well lit, the shops closed up earlier. There’s nobody out here at night, he thought. Had one of his premises been wrong? Suddenly, it seemed completely plausible to him that someone could light seventy or eighty fires without anyone else seeing.
Isaac Van Patten felt a similar sense of frustration. Looking at the case from back home in western Virginia, the sheer number of fires had led him to believe that the arsonists were likely to be either exceptionally skilled or exceptionally audacious. Now he, like Tunkel, saw that these arsons hadn’t necessarily required smarts or bravery. The county he was looking at was isolated and dark. They’re not hunters at all, he thought to himself. They’re like a duck hunter who is sitting on his boat and the entire flock just happens to land around him.
That night, around the county, the usual arson-catching apparatus was slipping into gear like a well-oiled machine. The men in tents were settling in for the night, on an evening that felt uncommonly cold. The men in cars were refueling, making sure they had enough coffee and gas to get them through their shifts. The firefighters were getting home and getting to bed early, before dusk. Daylight savings time had begun a few weeks before and made it even harder to get enough sleep. Scott Wade, the detective who had run into Tonya in the Royal Farms and visited her house during his canvassing, was also home asleep. Rob Barnes was at the state police office in Melfa, wading through backlogged paperwork. Glenn Neal had just arrived in Atlantic City, having finally accepted a superior’s advice that he needed to get away for a long weekend and clear his head.
The psychological profilers went out to a late dinner, to talk over the day and come up with strategies. They were filled with a sense of renewed anticipation: Now that they understood the landscape, now that all of their brains were in one room, they might at last have the tools they needed to understand who the arsonist was. The anticipation was tempered by dread. What if they were even further off than they’d realized? What if they never caught him?
But they would. Sooner than they thought.
> CHAPTER 16
“I DIDN’T LIGHT THEM ALL”
STATE TROOPERS WILLIE BURKE AND TROY JOHNSON had been in position since just after sundown, in their camouflage pup tent with a tiny little space heater set up fifty yards behind the little bungalow on Airport Road. The address belonged to an older man who now lived on the mainland of Virginia but wanted a weekend house for when he came back to the shore to visit family. This owner had just put on a new roof and new windows, but the building still looked dilapidated enough that it had been placed on law enforcement’s watch list of abandoned properties. It had a little porch. To its right was a field and then some woods and then, far beyond that, a little post office, and then the little town of Melfa. To its left was a field and then the entrance to the airport the road was named after, which was small and used only by private planes. The nearest house was a quarter mile away. It was everything the arsonist seemed to like: abandoned-feeling, set back from the road, accessible from multiple access points. Burke and Johnson had been sitting behind it for two weeks. “Post 6,” the house had been dubbed, one of ten or twelve houses equipped with twenty or twenty-four sheriff’s deputies and state troopers among them.
Burke and Johnson had known each other a long time, having previously worked in neighboring counties. The two men made sure to sit next to each other at orientation when they first arrived, and had volunteered to be posted at the same house. The first day of their post, a superior joked, “Y’all gonna catch this guy this weekend or what?” and Johnson had answered that he hoped so.
But instead it had been two weeks of damp and boredom, hanging around the hotel or going to the diner during the day, folding themselves into a hunter’s tent each night, switching off responsibilities for the radio and the night-vision goggles. Other fires had been set those two weeks, but none that had been guarded by men in tents. Tonight was Burke and Johnson’s last night before they would each be returned to their respective home counties. It was also Johnson’s birthday and he was glad to be going home. It was hard to keep your eyes fresh for that many hours, staring at the same stretch of two-lane road and eyeballing every infrequent car that passed and trying to keep their voices low. They just had another couple of hours in their shift until it would all be over.
At 11:45 p.m., Burke suddenly cut off: “There’s a vehicle,” he whispered, “pulling up.” Johnson clamped his own mouth shut. The vehicle was a van. It rolled to a stop in front of the house and, in the dark, a figure leaped out of the passenger side.
Instinctively, both men reached to turn off the space heater, to dim the orange glow it produced. The figure was running at a dead sprint toward the house, and the van that had just dropped him—it appeared to be a him—pulled away.
It was Johnson’s evening for the night-vision goggles. He pulled them out now.
“He’s running, he’s running to the back side of the house,” he whispered to Burke, who had pulled out the radio. Fifty yards away, the figure sprinted to the back of Post 6 and made a series of rapid motions, stuffing what appeared to be a piece of cloth in the doorjamb. Three or four times, Johnson could make out a brief flicker that would quickly extinguish again. In the green glow of the night-vision goggles, the figure and the flames were both a sickly chartreuse.
“He’s lighting it,” Johnson told Burke. “He’s stuffing some material in and lighting it.”
The house has to catch on fire, Johnson thought, forcing himself to stay in position even while he was itching to go get the guy. If he and Burke didn’t let the arsonist try to burn down the house, all they had on their hands was a trespassing charge.
Johnson narrated everything he was seeing to his partner, who quietly radioed it into central command and to their support vehicle, a sheriff’s deputy who was circling nearby, ready to swoop in.
It seemed to Johnson like time had slowed. The adrenaline in his veins caused every second of the scene in front of him to pause and crystalize, even though he knew he couldn’t have been watching for more than a couple of minutes. Suddenly, the rag caught fire in a shower of sparks and the figure started running again, back around the house in the direction he had first come from.
Johnson and Burke threw the tent off, running toward the clearing through a patch of woods so rocky and pitted they would later be surprised one of them hadn’t twisted something in the process. “State police, stop!” Johnson yelled. “Stop!”
The man didn’t even seem to realize he’d been spotted. He appeared to be talking to somebody, maybe through a cell phone they couldn’t make out in the dark. The two officers had barely cleared the woods when, in what seemed to Johnson like perfect timing, the minivan reappeared and the man jumped into it, speeding off toward the county’s only main road, Route 13.
The two men stared helplessly after the van. They’d been dropped off and didn’t have a vehicle at the ready, but they kept their eyes on it as long as they could, while Burke narrated the receding van’s location to the support vehicles in their vicinity. The van had gotten a good distance, maybe a mile, down the road. But the street was straight and they could see it stop at the intersection of Route 13. A second later a marked Dodge Charger—the sheriff’s deputy who had picked up Burke’s radio for help—appeared behind the van and quietly waited.
The driver of that car was a sergeant who had heard the words “Location 6” and “van” on his radio and immediately began scanning the road for the car in question. It wasn’t hard. When the vehicle appeared, it was the only one on the road besides him. The light turned green and the van started to pull through it. He knew other deputies had been alerted and that backup was on the way, but for now he was alone. He turned on his siren. The van in front of him stopped and the passenger door opened. The sergeant, afraid that his suspect was about to run, immediately got out of his own vehicle. In the dark, the passenger raised his hands in a position of surrender and stepped into the light of the squad car’s headlamps.
And it was Charlie Smith.
Charlie Smith. A man the sergeant had known for fifteen years and seen most mornings getting coffee at The Wine Rack.
Charlie.
Another vehicle pulled up. Inside was a young state trooper named Martin Kriz. When Kriz saw that the sheriff’s deputy had turned on his blue lights and parked near the passenger’s side, Kriz put on his own lights and pulled near the driver’s. He drew his weapon as he slowly approached the car. Behind the wheel was Tonya Bundick, hair messy, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know Charlie, either. Like the other two state troopers a half mile down the road, Kriz had never laid eyes on Accomack before that week when he’d been loaned out from his home base in Goochland County near the center of the state.
“Do you have any weapons?” Kriz asked.
“There’s a ChapStick in my bra,” Tonya told him, and he removed it from the strap and escorted Tonya to his squad car.
There were maybe twenty cars around by that point: troopers and deputies who had been assigned to the Airport Road jurisdiction, troopers and deputies who were on duty elsewhere but had heard the arsonists had been caught, troopers and deputies who weren’t on duty at all. Everyone who had access to a police scanner had come, from all around the county, to offer assistance or just to look, at the ghost they’d been chasing since the middle of November.
Between December 1, when the Virginia State Police began collecting data on its arson investigation, and mid-April, police personnel dedicated 26,378 work hours and 14,924 overtime hours to solving the arsons.
All of the cameras they’d placed. All of the forensic evidence they had submitted. All of those rumors about the police closing in on a suspect. All of that meant nothing. Until Charles Smith wandered onto the property of Airport Road with a lighter, law enforcement had been no closer to catching him than they were five and a half months ago.
The firefighters of the Tasley department were called out for the fire, but then called back at the last minute. The flames hadn’
t fully involved the house, and the Melfa and Onley departments were already on the way and thought they could handle it. The Tasley members got close enough to the scene only to register that there seemed to be more police cars than usual, then Jeff Beall turned the engine around and most of the firefighters went home, grateful for the night off.
One of the firefighters from Tasley, Bryan Applegate, didn’t immediately go back to the station when the call was canceled. The scene commander at the burning house decided he still needed a tanker. Bryan was driving one, with another volunteer next to him, so he continued to the scene. As they got closer to the fire, Bryan noticed that all of the cop cars seemed to be clustered around a particular vehicle. At the same time Bryan realized the cops might have finally caught the arsonist, he also realized that the surrounded vehicle looked just like his brother Charlie’s new minivan.
“Did I just see what I thought I saw?” he asked the friend sitting next to him.
“I don’t know,” the friend said, but his voice sounded like he knew.
Once they got to the burning house, Bryan recognized the chief in command as a friend. “You got an airpack?” the chief asked him. “I need another firefighter after all.”
This house was going to be different, Bryan learned. The fire companies couldn’t just let it burn to the ground because it might be used for evidence in a trial. Someone needed to actually go inside and put the fire out, and the chief was asking that one of those people be Bryan. He suited up. Inside the smoky, half-redone house there were wood pilings and construction beams, flammable renovation materials that needed to be cleared away. The few firemen present attacked the flames with an inch and three-quarter water line, spraying water up into the rafters, an attack that lasted eight minutes, from 11:54 p.m. to 12:02 a.m. Afterward, a police officer asked Bryan if he could stay around for a few more minutes. He needed Bryan to sign a statement saying what he’d done in the house, so it could be incorporated as evidence. Bryan paced and waited for the form. There were a lot of minivans in Accomack.