Lien-hua and I nodded, Aina left, and for a few minutes Lien-hua and I looked around the room. Finally, I said, “I’m really stumped here. We have the right kind of crime, the right location, and timing that fits the escalating progression of the series, fourteen fires by the same guy, and now, suddenly, a different arsonist shows up?”
“It doesn’t fit, does it?”
“No. Either that, or I’m missing a big piece of the puzzle.” “OK. Let’s walk through it,” she suggested. “Reconstruct what happened.”
“Good,” I said. “Based on what we know, there’re two arsonists, so for now let’s just say it’s the two of us.”
“OK,” she said. “It’s just the two of us.”
The way she said those words gave me pause. I wanted to ask her something, wasn’t sure how to phrase it. “Wait,” I said. “Before we start. There was something you wanted to tell me last night.
Outside Tessa’s door.”
“Now’s not the time, Pat,” she said.
“Is it Tessa? Is something wrong?”
“No, no, no. Nothing like that. I just need to sort some things through. I shouldn’t have said anything. Let’s just forget it, OK?”
I wanted to press her, get her to tell me more, but knew it would only make her less willing to open up. “OK,” I said. “Fair enough.”
Then it was back to business. “Now,” she said. “Let’s reconstruct this crime.”
18
Lien-hua mimed splashing gasoline across the floor, then lighting it. “So we’re inexperienced, we don’t know what we’re doing. We start the fire, then what? Maybe wait a few minutes to make sure it’s burning?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Then where do we go? How do we get out?”
I studied the room. “Well, we don’t want to get caught… You can see the front door too easily from the intersection and from the tobacco store across the street. The front would be too risky.”
“So, we head for the back door.” Lien-hua led the way through the house. Really, the home was small enough so that only one route made sense. As I followed her, I carefully examined the blackened floor to see if the offender had left any shoe prints or impressions in the soot, but there were at least six different tread mark patterns visible, in addition to the ones that matched the boots I’d borrowed.
The prints must have been left by the firefighters or the MAST officers who’d processed the scene. It would take a lot of checking to figure out if one of the shoe prints didn’t really belong. I gazed at them carefully.
“What about the gas can?” I said. “Would we leave it here or take it with us?”
“We’re new to arson, so we might not have thought about that before starting the fire… Or maybe we’re careless and we tossed it outside… Of course, we might have used a plastic canister and then tossed it onto the fire… Or we might have-” “I guess we’re not ready for that question yet,” I said. “Too many mights. We need more evidence-”
“And less conjecture,” she said, finishing my thought.
“Oh. Have I said that before?”
“Once or twice.”
With my gloved hand, I eased the back door open and noticed the yellow crime scene tape hanging limp in the breezeless morning, encircling the house’s property at about a four-meter perimeter.
Lien-hua must have seen me staring at the location of the yellow tape, because she said, “Aina told me her criminalists already processed the scene, everything inside the tape. Didn’t find anything.”
Most law enforcement agencies use the terms “crime scene investigative unit,” or “forensic science technician,” but some places, and especially overseas, the term “criminalist” is more common.
Either way, I’m usually amazed not by how much evidence the teams notice but by how much they miss.
“Did they check outside the tape?” I asked.
“Outside it?”
I pointed at the yellow police tape. “Don’t you find it a little too convenient that the crime scene just happens to be exactly the same size as the area encompassed by these telephone poles?”
“They were handy.”
“Yes, they were. But a crime scene is defined by the evidentiary nature of the crime and the physical characteristics of the site itself, not the location of the nearest telephone poles.” Oops. I’d started lecturing. I needed to watch that.
“Good point.”
I peered beyond the caution tape to see if our inexperienced arsonist might have dropped the gas can on the hill. “You’d be amazed how many times I’ve found a murder weapon only a few meters outside of the police tape. But people rarely think to look there because it’s not part of ‘the crime scene.’” She joined me beyond the tape, on the dusty hill that climbed at a slow slope away from the house. “So the tape actually hinders the investigation,” she said thoughtfully. “We don’t see the evidence because we’re looking in the wrong place. It’s a blind spot.”
A blind spot.
Yes.
“Lien-hua, if we were the arsonists, where did we park?”
She pointed. “Other side of that hill?”
I jogged to the top. My mind was spinning. “Poor access. Too many streetlights, too much traffic. And we didn’t park to the west of the house over there, since that home is too close-the porch is only ten or twelve meters away. So, maybe we parked in the alley off to the east.”
“Or maybe not.” Her words caught my attention, and I saw that she was pointing to a pair of black leather gloves strewn about fifteen meters away, beside a worn footpath that led over another small hill.
I joined her beside the gloves. I didn’t have an evidence bag with me, but I leaned close to the gloves. Sniffed. “Gasoline,” I said.
“Take off your gloves,” she said.
“Why?”
“Humor me. Take them off, toss them to the ground.”
As I removed the gloves, Lien-hua watched me thoughtfully.
When both gloves were on the ground, she said, “So he pulls one glove off, then the other one, just like you did. And see how one of your gloves landed on each side of you? It’s natural. So he was on the trail here, between the leather gloves, heading north.”
“Good work,” I said. Then I thought through the way I’d taken the gloves off. “And it also means he touched the outside of the second glove with the fingertip and thumb of an ungloved hand as he pulled it off. If his hands were sweaty enough from wearing gloves or from the heat of the fire-”
“We might have some prints.” “Call it in,” I said. “Let’s have Aina get the criminalists back out here.”
Lien-hua pulled out her cell, and while she spoke with Aina, I followed the footpath over the hill and found that it ended in a long, scraggly, brush-covered ravine. I was gazing across the ravine when Lien-hua rejoined me. “I hope,” she said apprehensively, “that you’re not thinking about searching all of that.”
I shook my head. “We’d need more eyes. We’ll let Aina’s team work the ravine.”
I froze.
More eyes. A blind spot.
We’re looking in the wrong place.
I was starting to feel the juices flow. “Lien-hua, what’s different about this crime?”
“The offender. The accelerant.”
“Yes, but not the location. It fits. So our serial arsonist didn’t start the fire last night.”
She seemed surprised I was repeating what we’d already hypoth-esized. “That’s our working theory, yes.”
Facts, facts locking together. “Because someone else did.”
“What are you thinking, Pat? Where are you going with this?”
“Somehow the crimes are connected. If we can find the guy from last night, he might be able to lead us to the arsonist from the other fires. It’s like you said, we’re looking in the wrong place… What are some of the reasons crimes that are started aren’t completed?”
“Well, victim resistance, law enforcement activity, natural interruptions. I don’t see where you’re-”
“Right.” I turned toward the house. “Natural interruptions.”
She hurried to catch up to me. She was smart and I knew she’d catch on. “So,” she said, “you think maybe the serial arsonist was interrupted by John Doe’s suicide?”