by Monica Hesse
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, then I don’t know what you believe.”
“I believe Charlie,” he said.
“I don’t care. I didn’t do it. So believe it. I’m over it. I’m done talking. I’m pleading the Fifth. I want a lawyer, because I’m done.”
Cromer felt his chest constrict. It was over. He’d barely been in there for five minutes before she had ended the interview by asking for an attorney. He didn’t know whether he’d read her mood completely wrong, or whether he’d hit such a nerve that he’d made Tonya scared. Either way, his chance was over. He left the room and Wade reappeared, preparing to handcuff Tonya so she could be left alone while they figured out how to proceed next.
“Put your hands up for me,” he instructed, when it was just the two of them in the room. “Is that too tight?”
“No,” she said.
He knew they hadn’t gotten much of anything that would be useful in court. Two years later, after everything was all over, he would still feel like he hadn’t understood her at all. Later, Todd Godwin would wish he had been in the room with Tonya. He would wonder if, because he’d once asked about her sons at the Royal Farms and because she seemed to like him, he could have gotten her to talk. But Wade knew he was good at his job. He knew Keenon Hook was good at his job. He knew that Jon Cromer was one of the most skilled interviewers he’d ever encountered in his life, and none of them had been able to get her to talk. He didn’t know if anyone would ever be able to get her to say anything at all.
“We’ll be with you in just a minute,” he said now, and left the room.
CHAPTER 20
“MIDNIGHT WITHOUT MAKEUP”
THE NEWS TRAVELED THROUGHOUT THE COUNTY in messy, unpredictable ways. The idea that the suspected arsonists had been a couple was shocking. Bonnie and Clyde of the Eastern Shore.
The Facebook groups dedicated to speculating over the identity of the arsonists now dedicated themselves just as fully to analyzing Charlie and Tonya. It took seven hours, postarrest, for someone to post Tonya’s bedraggled mug shot on the site, and a few minutes after that for someone else to comment, “Midnight without makeup is not how you want to make your close-up with the mug-shot camera.”
Then someone posted a different picture, from Tonya’s personal Facebook page and with better lighting, and the narratives began to change. People recognized her from out at Shuckers, or from way back when in high school. Another person wondered if this was the same Tonya Bundick whose mother used to submit recipes to the church cookbooks.
People remembered Charlie as a volunteer firefighter, the kid their brother sat next to on the bus, the guy who fixed cars and had those drug troubles. During the course of these postings, the moderators periodically removed information that they felt held too many personal details, or too many unverified rumors. Periodically, someone interrupted the discussion to offer thoughts and prayers, prayers and thoughts, to all of the victims of all of the fires.
Off-line, a man who lived down the street from Tonya and happened to share the same last name was bombarded at work by friends wanting to know if they were related. “Yeah,” he lied, practicing a shake of the head that seemed appropriately mournful. “She was my first wife.” One coworker replied that Tonya, in her mug shot, was looking pretty rough. “Yeah,” the neighbor said again. “She took the breakup pretty hard.” Another Bundick, no relation, found himself subject to similar speculation—faraway media members who didn’t know anything about the shore had gotten their hands on a couple of phone directories and started dialing everyone with the name. This Bundick spent the morning fielding phone calls from harried junior producers of radio and TV news shows. He didn’t bother to hand the phone to his cubicle mate at work, who really was related to Tonya, a cousin, but had a different last name.
On Matthews Road, Lois Gomez woke up to see a police car parked in the driveway of her neighbor’s house, but she assumed it was nothing, maybe a domestic dispute, or maybe there had been another fire and the police were again making the rounds.
Phil Kelley, the chief of the Parksley fire station, who lived less than a mile from Charlie and Tonya, drove past their house on his way to work the next morning and assumed the same thing.
Tasley chief Jeff Beall was still sleeping, the morning after being turned back from the fire on Airport Road. His wife, Renee, saw the 6 a.m. news, ran into their bedroom, and shook him awake. “Jeff,” she said. “It’s Charlie! It’s Charlie.”
“Where?” he asked, assuming that Charlie had come to the house for a visit. “What does he want?”
“No,” Renee said. “Charlie is the arsonist. He’s the arsonist.”
That morning for Beall was a fog. He wasn’t scheduled to work, and he didn’t have any plans. He drove to Charlie’s stepdad’s auto shop to tell him how sorry he was, and to make sure George knew that nobody would blame him for what had happened. He watched as his voice mailbox filled with numbers he didn’t recognize—acquaintances who wanted to know if Beall had suspected anything, reporters who had learned Charlie was still on the Tasley roster and wanted a comment. Beall didn’t know how to comment. He didn’t know why Charlie was still on the roster; he hadn’t run fires in a year. An aging hippie from NPR came to his front door, wearing corduroys and Crocs and carrying a giant boom mike, and Beall, still feeling raw, told the producer, “You have ten seconds to get the fuck off my lawn.” He then spent the rest of the hour thinking about how strange that was, that of all the news outlets scrambling for the story, only one had the gumption to come to his personal place of residence, and it was wimpy National Public Radio.
As the day unfolded, one thing that became clear was that profiler Ron Tunkel had been right all along. There had been unknowing witnesses. The whole county had been unknowing witnesses.
Shannon Bridges, the Tasley firefighter, remembered one night that the Tasley department had left on a call. When the engine drove past Charlie’s shop, she saw Charlie parked inside his truck out front, watching them all drive by. When they got back from the fire a little later, he was there again. It seemed explainable to Shannon—maybe he had a big job and was working late. But something about the situation made her turn to Richie and joke, “Richie—what if Charlie was the arsonist?”
Sheriff Todd Godwin had seen Charlie and Tonya out at the Royal Farms gas station on Christmas Day.
One of Godwin’s deputies had pulled them over for a routine traffic stop. The deputy asked what they were doing out so late and they told him they were trying to catch the arsonist. He’d laughed and said that’s what he was doing, too.
Scott Wade had gone to Charlie and Tonya’s house on the advice of the geographic profile created by Isaac Van Patten.
Glenn Neal had gone there to ask about a burning truck.
And hundreds of people had read Tonya Bundick’s comments on Facebook, speculating over the identity of the mastermind who was burning up the Eastern Shore.
Later, Bobby Bailey, the Fire Marshal’s Office instructor whose pride had been so wounded during the investigation that he left in the middle of it without even bothering to fully pack up his hotel room, would nurse his hurt by telling himself that they had been dealing with geniuses, in a way. “They were so freaking stupid about their fires,” he decided, “that they were smart.”
Beall, when his grief about the situation turned to anger, would express the same frustration in a different way. “The greatest arsonist in the history of all of Virginia—the one who kept us up night after night after night—and it was fucking Charlie Smith in a fucking gold minivan.”
CHAPTER 21
THE BROKEN THINGS
BY APRIL 2, THE MORNING AFTER THE ARRESTS, 2013 was shaping up to be an odd year for Gary Agar. First, the Commonwealth’s attorney had to figure out how to prosecute a Navy SEAL war veteran who randomly stole a giant boat belonging to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, hitched it to the back of his vehicle, and lugged it across the Bay Brid
ge-Tunnel, where he was captured on camera. Next, a young police officer got in a car accident, dialed 911, and then proceeded to pull out a knife and stab the two firefighters who showed up to help him. He claimed that demons told him to do it because the firefighters’ helmets depicted the evil number four. Later it was discovered that the officer was having a psychotic reaction to the drug Biaxin, which he had been prescribed for an upper respiratory infection. Agar prosecuted the first crime, withdrew charges for the second. And now came the arsons, the biggest crime spree in the history of Accomack County.
Agar knew who Tonya Bundick was. His ex-wife had owned a home health care business that had years ago employed Tonya. The Agars held annual company picnics at their house and it was likely Tonya would have attended them. Long before that, he’d gone to high school with Tonya’s mother. One day he’d run into Susan at the Rite Aid and she’d introduced Agar to her daughter. It was unavoidable that one would get to know everybody, after being an elected official as long as Agar had. He’d been the Commonwealth’s attorney for several terms. Agar, sixty, was short and sturdy without much neck to speak of, a fire hydrant of a man. But when he spoke in front of juries, he moved his arms in the graceful patterns of an orchestra conductor during a legato movement. This, combined with a deep, rumbling voice—constituents compared it with James Earl Jones—made him a hypnotic performer in courtrooms.
Agar learned there had been an arrest for the arsons on the night of April 1. He knew that the police and sheriff’s deputies had caught Charlie in the act of lighting the fire on Airport Road.
But he lacked the forensic evidence and witness statements for the other eighty-odd arsons. Without Charlie’s confession, he would never be able to convict. So early on the morning of April 2, Agar closed the door to his office and watched the whole six-hour taped interview to see what he had.
What he had, he decided, was good. Charlie seemed believable. There were times that Charlie had said, “No comment,” before he admitted Tonya’s involvement, but he had never asked for a deal or tried to shift the blame away from himself. And he came across, Agar thought, as a person who lacked the creativity necessary to come up with such an odd excuse—the impotence, which attacked his own manhood and revealed deeply personal information—on the spot. Charlie would be a good asset.
Tonya’s interview was all but useless. Just as she hadn’t revealed much factually, she hadn’t revealed much legally. One never knew what might end up being useful in the future, though. Agar found himself latching on to the phrase “riding around.” Tonya had admitted that she and Charlie spent several nights “riding around”—she’d just never admitted to any particular destinations, or to letting Charlie out of the car. Agar kept the phrase in his pocket, figuring that trying to pin down her location would be necessary in cross-examination.
While Agar was reviewing the videos, another attorney named Carl H. Bundick (no relation, just another Bundick), was walking into his own offices less than a block away. Bundick, fifty-four, with a white buzz cut and a mustache, thought of himself as a “country lawyer,” a Swiss army knife of an attorney who handled a broad manner of petty thefts, drug possessions, land disputes, and bar brawls on behalf of the citizens who walked into his law offices on any given day. He or his assistant would typically begin the morning by checking the voice mail for new cases, and on the morning of April 2, the voice on the recording belonged to a family member of Charlie’s. She knew Carl Bundick socially and wondered if Carl would again be available to help her relative out of a patch of trouble. It wasn’t the first time. Carl had been Charlie’s attorney on record for more than a decade, scrape after scrape, relapse after relapse. He also knew Tonya a little bit, and had helped the couple navigate a lien on her house.
Carl figured out that Charlie was being held at the Accomack County Jail, and immediately placed a call to his client. “Are you okay?” he remembered asking. “Did they do a Miranda warning? What evidence do they have against you?”
Charlie remembered the interaction a little differently. He remembered reaching Carl the night before, when Carl was at his house—the sheriff’s deputies had brought Charlie to the jail and given him the number to dial. In Charlie’s version, Carl had already heard from the family member by the time Charlie called, and Charlie remembered only one part of the conversation. He remembered Carl saying, “Don’t say another word.”
He didn’t know if Carl understood that, by that point, he’d already given a confession that would fill four DVDs and print out at several hundred pages.
STATE POLICE INVESTIGATOR SCOTT WADE had come home from his interview with Tonya frustrated and exhausted and wishing he understood Tonya better. But now he would get one more chance. While Gary Agar was reviewing the confession footage, and the residents of Accomack were gossiping and crying and thinking about what they should have known, Wade was putting himself to bed for a few hours and then getting on a plane to New Jersey.
He was going to see Tonya’s sister, Anjanette. She lived about two hundred miles up the Atlantic Coast, and was Tonya’s only living immediate relative. When Wade first telephoned, Anjanette, who went by Anjee, was at the grocery store. She said it would be fine if he came to interview her, but she assumed he meant later in the week. Instead, he telephoned again a few hours later and said he was already there. He asked her to meet him at the local police precinct.
“Do you think your sister did these?” he asked her, when they sat down together.
“I don’t know,” she said. She still had friends in Accomack and had followed the arsons along with them. All that time, she had never suspected her sister—not of burning down so many strangers’ houses.
But then she started to tell him a story. A different night. A different fire.
In the middle of the night about a year ago, she’d woken up to a text message on her phone from a number she didn’t recognize. No words, just one picture of a burning house. The image was small but she thought it looked like her grandmother’s house down in Accomack. “Who is this?” she wrote to the sender, who wrote back a little later: “It’s your sister.”
Tonya and Anjee didn’t talk much and had been in only sporadic contact since their grandmother died a few years before. The estrangement was complicated, but it had to do partly with the house, which is why some murky intuition prompted Anjee to write back the way she did: “Why are you sending me a picture of the house burning? I know you burned it.”
“No,” Tonya replied, “you were the one who said you were going to come here and burn it.”
The reply had baffled Anjee. She’d never threatened anything like that—Why would she drive four hours in the middle of the night just to burn down the family homestead?—but it scared her to see the accusation in writing. Unsettled, she made a quick decision. “Don’t e-mail me,” she wrote to her sister. “Don’t call me, don’t message me, don’t contact me.”
She kept the photo, because it was the last picture she would ever have of her grandmother’s house, but she otherwise tried to forget about the incident and move on. She told herself she couldn’t really know what had happened. And also that it was just one house. One little house that nobody lived in anymore.
It was the last time she and her sister had spoken. She didn’t even know Tonya was engaged, she told Wade. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever met Charlie. She didn’t know anything about the other fires in Accomack, but if she were being honest with herself, she thought Tonya had lit the fire at their grandmother’s. It had never been solved.
Wade had asked Anjee the questions he’d come for, but found he wasn’t ready to leave. He asked whether she could add anything else. Not anything related to the investigation. Not anything that would be used in court—not anything that would help prosecute Tonya. But was there anything Anjee could tell him that might help them to understand her?
Anjee wasn’t sure how much to say. Their house had been full of secrets, the kind that Tonya had never wanted to tell Charli
e. But now two of the secret keepers were dead, and one was arrested, and she alone was the person who could explain how her sister wasn’t the evil person that the rest of the county might soon claim she was.
She told Wade that they hadn’t just been Accomack poor growing up, but cripplingly poor. There was no money in the house. Not for toys, not for clothes, sometimes not even for food. After holidays, they would dread going back to school, because the other kids would all be talking about their presents and would want to know what they got. Anjee learned to tell stories, inventing dollhouses and other presents that she would say were too big to be carried into school. Occasionally, their mother would be able to secret away a quarter from the grocery money so they could each buy an ice cream at school. She would quietly slip it in their hands as they were leaving for school in the mornings. This was the happiest memory that Anjee could conjure when she thought of her childhood, and it was tinted with sadness because she also remembered her mother saying, “Don’t tell your father.”
She told Wade that their father had been more than mean. He wasn’t an ornery coot, like some of the other townspeople thought. He was scary, she said. Beatings were daily, sometimes with his hands, more often with the buckle end of a belt when the girls failed to follow an arbitrary order, like picking up a piece of lint from the floor. Anjee would look and look for the piece of lint but not be able to find anything. Their mother’s best advice was to try not to make their father mad, but she didn’t know how to stop it; he hit her, too. Tonya wasn’t targeted as much, partly because Anjee set to taking the blame for some of the things her father perceived as infractions. “Who did this?” he would ask about something he’d decided was unacceptable that day, and Anjee would say, “I did,” even though she knew it had been Tonya. She thought it was her duty; Tonya was so much tinier than she was.
They weren’t allowed to sit at the table during dinner; they had to eat in their room. Sometimes they weren’t allowed to eat at all, and Anjee never knew whether it was because there was no money for food that night or if it was because she and Tonya were being punished for something else they had done wrong. He would eat. They could hear their father eating at the table.