“Where did they find them?”
“Hiding in the basement. Wounded. Pretty badly. At least the fire hadn’t gotten to them.”
“Any idea what caused it?”
“Hot rounds striking combustibles in the house would be my guess. You should talk to the young man from the sheriff’s department. Denzil Atkins. He’s the official county fire expert. I’m sure he’s bursting to reveal his expertise.” She pointed toward two Tyvek-clad figures on the charred side of the house. “He’s the one making notes on his iPad. Do not ask him if he was named after Denzel Washington. It’s a touchy point.”
“He wouldn’t by any chance be one of your former forensic science students?”
There was a spark of humor in those gray eyes. “You have a talent for detection.”
One of Barstow’s techs walked past them, eyes to the ground, following the same type of spiral search route around the house that Gurney had followed around his barn.
“Any more?” asked Barstow.
“Five on the last rotation.” Without stopping, he held up a plastic bag containing five brass casings.
“We may get to four hundred before the night is over,” she said to Gurney. “You ever have a crime scene with more shots fired?”
“A few. Gang shoot-outs over drug territories. Arm the bangers with Uzis, and it’s the Fourth of July. How about you?”
“Not up here. But I can recall some major fireworks down in Kingston. Drug gangs tend to be well armed.”
“I better go talk to Denzil.”
“See you later, boss.”
Gurney made his way over to the young man with the iPad and introduced himself.
“I know who you are, sir. I’m Officer Atkins, sheriff’s department. What can I do for you?” His tone was as crisp and efficient as his blond crew cut.
“Do you know yet how the fire started?”
“Yes, sir—with a reasonable degree of certitude.”
Gurney recognized the witness-stand phrase. He wondered for a moment if it carried a hint of irony, but the young man didn’t seem to be the ironic type.
Atkins indicated an area of the wall where the siding was partially burned through. “Ignition point was on the interior side of that wall. There’s a shattered kerosene lamp on what’s left of a table, approximately sixteen inches from the interior surface. Our on-site petrochemical residue test indicated kerosene combustion consistent with the lamp capacity. A bullet hole in the partly shattered lamp reservoir and in the opposite wall is consistent with a bullet trajectory beginning outside the house.”
Gurney smiled at the young man’s attention to detail. “You examined the whole interior?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No other ignition points?”
“No, sir.”
“And the wind direction is the reason that the entire house wasn’t consumed?”
“That, plus a burst pipe on the second floor. The heat from the fire caused a solder joint to give way, and the water spreading over the floor and down through the wall structure acted as a partial barrier. They’re off the grid here, but their generator kept working and the well pump kept pumping. If the fire got to the main breaker panel, we’d have had a different outcome. Some people are blind to the risks of a location like this.”
Gurney thought about the location of his own house. “Price of privacy, I guess.”
Atkins shook his head, as if to say that any clear-thinking adult would see that the price was unacceptably high.
Gurney thanked him and made his way to the porch side of the house—the side saved by a benign wind and a broken pipe.
The front door was open, and he entered a wood-paneled foyer, facing a carpeted staircase to the second floor. The acrid stink of smoke and wet ashes was much stronger here than outside. A surprising amount of light was coming in through the windows from the halogen stands surrounding the house, illuminating the smoky haze hanging in the air.
The photographer was panning with his camera around the walls of the parlor to Gurney’s right, pausing at each group of bullet holes.
A woman in coveralls and gloves was using a razor knife and tweezers to probe a bullet hole in the staircase newel post. He recognized her as the hardscrabble patrol officer who’d been keeping an eye on Lorinda Russell the day after Angus’s murder. She’d apparently been drafted by Barstow into helping with the massive task of bullet retrieval.
He watched as she extracted the slug, placed it in a pre-labeled envelope, then proceeded to another hole, this one in the staircase stringer board. He assumed she’d been instructed to collect as many slugs as she could, not only as pieces of evidence that could be linked ballistically to specific firearms in future legal proceedings, but as a way of determining the number of firearms used in the attack.
“Are they coming out clean?” he asked, meaning suitable for ballistics.
“Yes, sir. They’re all FMJs.”
There was something military in the tone of her voice that reinforced a thought he’d had at their first meeting, that she was probably one of the many police officers who found their way into law enforcement via the armed forces, having discovered a comfort zone in a world of rules, lines of command, and secure employment.
He headed up the stairs to a broad landing with a wet carpet and five open doorways leading to three partially destroyed bedrooms, a bathroom, and an enclosed staircase to the third floor. Deciding to check the third floor first, he found that it was just a large unfinished attic. The halogen light coming through the windows was weaker here, but he could see that the space was empty, apart from a gauzy lacework of cobwebs.
Returning to the second floor, he spent the next hour going through the bedrooms and bathroom. The first bedroom was the one used by Billy Tate, or at least by a male with a fondness for gray hoodies and black jeans. It exhibited a disarray familiar to him from his own son’s teenage years—socks, underwear, and tee shirts on the floor, one sneaker on a chair and one under it, an open bureau drawer, a lamp with its shade askew, gum wrappers on the floor.
A heavy-metal band poster was taped to one of the walls. On another wall there were several eight-by-ten nude photographs of a woman. Looking closer, Gurney recognized the face of the black-haired beauty with three silver studs in her lower lip who he’d spoken to at the opening in the fence the day before.
“Love to my Billy forever, forever, forever, from Lena” was scrawled in girlish handwriting across the bottom of one of the photos.
On a nightstand by the unmade bed, there was a superhero comic book and a printout of the sideways figure eight symbol for sulfur and hellfire.
In the nightstand drawer, there was a flashlight, a jackknife, a box of condoms, a small plastic bag containing some pot, a pack of rolling papers, and three more comic books.
One of the room’s three windows was open. Its curtain had been reduced by the fire to blackened strands of melted polyester fabric. There was ashy water on the floor and on the table under the window.
The next bedroom was more severely damaged, but enough of its contents were recognizable to identify it as Selena’s. A bureau with a buckled top and scorched drawer fronts had remained intact inside—preserving an assortment of black lipsticks, black nail polishes, black panties, silky black gowns like the one he’d seen her in, and silver jewelry in the shapes of common Wiccan symbols. In the bottom drawer there were four books—The Pagan Path to Saving the Earth, The Yogic Path to Beauty, and biographies of Joan of Arc and Madonna.
In place of a closet, there was a tall armoire whose doors had been mostly burned away and whose contents were unrecognizable. The inside of the bedroom door was covered with heat-discolored photos of a young man with a smirky mouth and brooding eyes, wearing a gray hoodie and black jeans. He struck Gurney as an aging juvenile delinquent, trying to look dangerous.