Out of the Ashes

by Cynthia Reese

  Rob set Daniel’s glass of milk on the table. “I thought the same thing. Of course, she pleaded guilty from the start, so there wasn’t much in the way of investigational notes or trial transcripts. These courtroom confessions usually are pretty scripted. But the confession in court was word for word the same as her statement. The convenience store owner accused her of shoplifting, so she got mad and went back and burned the building down. It was more than a little short on detail.”

  “It doesn’t say how she got the tank. And...” Daniel flipped back through the file to her arrest paperwork. “She was all of eighty pounds when she was arrested. A skinny kid. How’d she tote a full propane tank all the way to that convenience store in the middle of the night? She wasn’t driving yet—at least, she didn’t have a license and she didn’t cop to stealing her mom’s car.”

  “I know. I saw that, too. And Daniel—something more. Something even weirder. Kari is flat-out phobic of fire. I mean, cold sweats, throwing up, complete freak-out.”

  Daniel glanced up from the file. “Yeah? How do you know that?”

  Rob told him of the afternoon kitchen blaze the day before, how she’d blanketed the stove with foam. “It was fast and aggressive, but small enough to be contained. All it would have taken to put it out was a lid over the pot. But before I could get to it, she’d gone all Rambo with the fire extinguisher. Plus, I had a look at the house when I went to switch the smoke detectors off. That house? It has five smoke detectors—one in the hall off the kitchen, one in each bedroom, and one in the living room. The kitchen? Not one, but two fire extinguishers. And the bedroom that Kari is in? Her own personal baby fire extinguisher was propped up by the dresser.”

  “That’s a lot of smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. I wish we could convince everybody how important that is.”

  “Yeah, and ordinarily, I wouldn’t think anything of it. Maybe it’s part of an alarm package. Maybe a previous homeowner put them in. But...”

  “Something else?”

  “Yeah. When Chelle got in, she wasn’t mad with Kari. You’d think that if someone burned down a building and then later on started a fire in her mom’s kitchen...”

  “That Mom would be ticked, at least, or alarmed,” Daniel finished. He tapped a finger on the laminate surface of Rob’s table.

  “Not in the slightest. It was over-the-top, but not anger. It was...guilt. You know how when Taylor was little, she was petrified of thunderstorms?”

  “And DeeDee would just make it worse by going on and on about it if she’d left Taylor with Ma?” Daniel nodded, picking up the shared memory of how their sister had reinforced their niece’s fear of bad weather.

  “Right. Exactly. It was like that.” The two of them sat, silently munching on the gourmet cookies as they both considered what this might mean.

  “Not what you usually see,” Daniel conceded.

  “No. I haven’t met a teenage firebug who ever outgrew his fascination for fire—that’s how it gets started. They like to watch it. Like to play with it, even as little kids. And they get turned on by its destructive power.”

  “But not Kari?” Daniel settled back into his chair and rubbed his chin. His eyes had a faraway look.

  “No. Even after an hour or more had passed, she was still a bundle of nerves. Hypervigilant. Kept checking the stove, must have wiped down the top and the drip pan three separate times.”

  Daniel shook his head. “That’s not a firebug’s habit. A firebug is confident around fire, sure he can control it. He wants to see fire.”

  Rob nodded. “It doesn’t add up.”

  “This confession...” Daniel leaned forward and tapped the spread out contents of the file. “It doesn’t add up, either. But I tell you what it does remind me of—”

  “Dad’s fire.” Rob beat his brother to the punch. “I thought the same thing. Two big arsons that summer, both of them started with propane tanks.”

  “Did she do both?”

  “No. She was already in juvie when Dad’s fire started.”

  “But she knows. She’s got to know who started that other fire, Rob. She knows who killed Dad.”

  Rob didn’t want to think about that—it had already occurred to him, and he didn’t want to believe it. He covered his mouth with his hand and shook his head. “No. I could believe she toted that propane tank a half mile in the dead of night as a skinny fourteen-year-old before I could ever think she would stand by and let a killer go free.”

  “So why else confess to a crime you didn’t commit? Because that’s what you’re thinking she did, right? That she’s not good for either fire?” Daniel pressed. “What’s her payoff?”

  Rob shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest. But this file isn’t anywhere close to having the answers I need, and she won’t talk about it.”

  Daniel flipped back through the thin collection of notes and transcripts and forms. “Who investigated this? Rocky?”

  “Yeah. Rocky did. I’ve already called him.”

  Rocky Gambrell had Rob’s job before he’d retired and started doing freelance work for insurance companies. He was, in Rob’s opinion, a fine investigator, one who didn’t jump to conclusions.

  Daniel pursed his lips and drew his brows together. He drummed his fingers on the table. “Well, if it was Rocky, something besides a fourteen-year-old’s confession had to tip the balance. Maybe he can fill in the blanks, Rob. Because we both saw how agitated Franklin was yesterday, and I hear he’s just as wound up today. He’s catching some heat from somebody, and we know what that can lead to.”

  Rob sighed. He picked up another delicate cookie and snapped it in two. “Yeah. Any conviction, just as long as it is a conviction.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Rob parked his truck in the driveway of a home a couple of towns over. The arts-and-crafts bungalow bore the scars of a recent fire—soot and smoke damage covered the front and side eaves, and a blue tarp covered what had to be a sizable hole in the roof. Windows on the side of the house were broken, as was the glass inset in the home’s front door.

  He slid out from behind the wheel of the truck, Kari’s file in his hand, and slammed the door, looking around for Rocky. The investigator’s truck was there, parked beside Rob’s. But there was no sign of life coming from the house.

  “Hey, Rocky!” Rob called out a greeting.

  From the back yard, Rocky’s reply came. “Back here! Come on around.”

  Rob followed the sound and a privacy fence bordering the property line. He soon found Rocky poking through debris around the back stoop. The older man, still as long and lean and sinewy as he had been when Rob had first met him years before, straightened up and offered a hand.

  “Hey, buddy,” Rocky greeted him. “Ready for a job with good benefits for a change? I can hook you up. Not a bad gig. Mostly home every night, no 3:00 a.m. callouts.”

  Rob grimaced. “You know me. I don’t do corporate very well. But it looks like it suits you to a tee. What have you got here?” He gestured at the house and debris.

  “What I think and what I can prove, two different things. The lady of the house said she thinks the fire started when she left a flatiron on in that back bedroom. Mind taking a look with me? Just doing a walk-through? You were always good at this stuff, spotting the inconsistencies.”

  “Sure.” Together they tramped through the kitchen door and into the hall that opened onto the back bedroom. “So, wait, this is where she said the fire started?” Rob gazed around the smallish room, heavily damaged with smoke, but still structurally intact. He spotted a dressing table with a mirror and chair by a window on the farthest wall—again, with heavy smoke damage, but no direct scorch or burn damage.

  Rocky nodded. “Yep. I’ll keep my trap shut and not let anything I think mess up your conclusions.”

  “Just with
this quick look, I don’t think the flatiron is the cause of the fire. I mean, see?” Rob pointed to the door behind him. “The fire damage to this room is mostly on the hall side, like maybe it came from the room next to it. But, hey,” Rob crossed over to the dressing table for a closer inspection, “fire has been known to do crazy things.”

  “Yup.” Rocky hung back in the doorway. “That it does.”

  Rob knelt down and studied the dressing table at eye level. There was definitely heat damage to the varnished finish...and, yeah, he’d been called out to any number of fires started by a forgotten curling iron or flatiron, but...

  “Wait, Rocky, you see this?” He beckoned for the investigator to join him. “This thing here—you can just make out the words auto shutoff on the side. Even if she had left it on, it would have switched off.”

  Rocky came to stand beside him, sticking his hands in the pockets of the cotton twill pants he wore. “Yup. Saw that myself.”

  Rob straightened. He did a slow 360, taking in what he could tell about the bedroom in its post-fire state. There were no photos on display, no change or pocket litter on the dresser or the nightstands, no jewelry or makeup scattered. It was as bare of personal touches as a hotel room.

  “The family come through and try to salvage anything?” he asked Rocky.

  “Nope. This is just like we found it.”

  “And the fire happened...when?”

  “Middle of the day. Well, not quite the middle of the day. Lady of the house left about eleven o’clock, off to run some errands, she said.”

  “Hmm.” Rob crossed back into the hall, following the trail of fire damage as it grew worse and more obvious. He poked his head into the room next to the bedroom.

  It had been a bathroom—a tub with plastic shower doors, toilet and sink jammed into the space. The plastic shower doors were melted and in shards. The suspended ceiling, which had been added sometime in the 1970s from its appearance, had its asbestos tiles moved over to reveal gaping holes, where firefighters had obviously shoved them aside to gain access to the space above. Scorch marks shot up from the burned and blistered plastic tub surround that had been added to the original cast iron tub.

  “Whoa. This is where the fire started. Hey—you can still see something in the tub. Clothes?” Some scraps of cloth—from the looks of it, men’s pants. A sleeve of a leather jacket had escaped the worst of the flames.

  “She says she was soaking them. To get stains out.”

  Rob narrowed his eyes and studied Rocky to see if he were pulling his leg. “A leather jacket? Are you serious?”

  “Yup.”

  Rob bent over the heap and sniffed. The faintest whiff of kerosene wafted up. “You take samples?”

  “You know I did. And sketches and photographs. This is just what’s left. Nope, I did it just like I taught you, Rob, in the scientifically approved manner.” Now Rocky couldn’t quite hide the grin that threatened his poker face. “Take a look through the rest of the house, tell me what you see.”

  Rob did as Rocky suggested, noting suspicious voids where pictures, books and other items should have been. True, the television and the electronics were all there, reduced to pretty much junk between the fire and the water, but there were telltale signs that things important to the family were gone.

  Rocky followed him out onto the bungalow’s front porch. “So?”

  “Based on what your samples tell you, someone used kerosene to soak clothes in the tub and start a fire. Now I guess they could have been using kerosene to do some DIY dry cleaning, but it would have sure messed up that leather jacket.” Rob grinned at Rocky. “The fire ignited the bathroom walls and the wooden framing and spread into that atrocious suspended ceiling...where it moved up into the attic,” Rob added.

  “And you came to that conclusion how? Don’t give me bunk about V patterns on the walls or pour patterns on the floor. We know that fire leaves strange marks on a floor. I taught you better than that, Rob.”

  Rob grinned. “You did. I know better than to treat a fire scene like a fortune-teller would tea leaves. No, the main damage was to the bathroom, not to the bedroom. It had to be a fairly hot fire to melt that plastic tub surround and to leave scorch marks on that asbestos tile. And I know you’ll tell me it’s not actual physical evidence, but...where are the pictures? The photo albums? The jewelry? And I noticed that there were empty hangers in the closet, at least in the section that contained lady’s clothing. And shoes...what lady has only four pair of shoes in her closet?”

  Rocky beamed, pride evident. He clapped Rob on the shoulder. “You were my best student. Always could see in a three-minute walk-through what other guys never could see in a half hour or more. Would you be surprised if I told you that this was the husband’s house before they got married? And that the neighbors told me they’d heard loud fighting over the previous few days? Something about a woman?”

  Rob rolled his eyes. “Sheesh. He can’t keep his pants zipped up, so she throws all his clothes in the tub, soaks ’em in kerosene and tosses in a match.”

  “That’s what it’s looking like. Plus, the neighbor across the street said that the lady came back not once but twice before she left for good. And it was only after she left the last time that the neighbor happened to see smoke coming out of an attic vent.”

  Rob shook his head. “People always underestimate the effort it takes to light kerosene or gasoline. They think it’s like they see in the movies, all they’ve got to do is pour it out and toss a match in. What they don’t know is it’s the vapor that’s flammable. It’s a pure wonder the woman didn’t blow herself up, coming back in to relight the clothes. So...what are you going to do?”

  “I’ll file a report to my bosses. And send a copy of it to the authorities here. Too bad you’re not the arson investigator in this county. I could save myself some time and trouble,” Rocky said. “But enough about this case. What’s on your mind? What was so all-fired-up important that you drove two towns over?”

  Rob extended Kari’s file toward Rocky. “I needed to pick your brains about this one.”

  Rocky flipped open the manila folder and swore. He patted his front pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. “Hate getting old. But at least this time I didn’t lose my specs. Can’t tell you the number of times the things have fallen out at a scene.” Glasses perched on his nose, he peered at the open file. “Yeah. I remember this. Weird case. Didn’t make a dab of sense at the time.”

  Rob’s heart did a double beat. He tamped down hope with a ruthlessness he hadn’t had to use on himself since he was a teenager. “It didn’t?”

  Rocky read through the file, flipping through the pages with nods and monosyllabic grunts. He said nothing until he came to the last page and then closed the file and folded his arms across his chest. Even then, he regarded Rob with a fixed, unrelenting stare.

  “What’s this about, Rob?” he asked. “You’re not thinking this is related to your dad’s fire, are you?”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “WELL, YEAH, SORT OF.” Rocky’s leap ahead took Rob by surprise. “I mean, both were started with a propane tank. Both in the same summer. But that’s not what got my interest started.”

  “Yeah?” Rocky ran the ball of his thumb along the edge of the file folder. “So what’s your interest, then?”

  “I’m going to do the same as you did a few minutes ago—not let my thinking cloud yours. What do you remember about this case?”

  Rocky closed his eyes and drew in a breath. When he opened them, he stared past Rob, his eyes fixed on a point far in the distance. “It was a kid—I remember she was a shrimpy little thing, all hair and skin and bones, and I didn’t think she’d have the strength to drag a filled propane tank five feet, much less a half mile. But...she confessed. The owner told me he’d had words with her the day before, so I natu
rally went looking for her. Her mom at first swore there was no way her kid could have done it, that she was asleep in bed at the time, and that the mom had even looked in on her.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, a couple of days later, I’m not getting anywhere, and the DA is all over me because he and the store owner are golfing buddies, see? So I go back to the one lead I had—the girl. A long shot, right? I’m thinking maybe it was her brother, because he’d had some scrapes with the law. But no. The girl answers the door, her mama standing right behind her. I don’t even get to ask where I might be able to find the brother before this little sprig of a girl takes this deep breath and blurts out that she’s the one who started the fire.”

  “And you believed her?”

  Rocky shrugged his shoulders. “At that point? Why not? She told me exactly where the propane tank had been set up, exactly how she’d started the fire. She even told me how she got into the convenience store—she’d seen the guy leave a key on the back window ledge to let himself in. The DA was happy and the owner could collect his insurance, so it was case closed.”

  “It was her first offense. How did she wind up in juvie? She’d never been in trouble before.”

  “I recommended that she get probation and some counseling—she really did seem very remorseful.” Now Rocky’s lips thinned and he shook his head in regret. “But it didn’t happen like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Judge wanted to come across tough, set an example. The papers couldn’t put the girl’s name in the paper, but they could write the case’s disposition. So he spouted off some drivel about her being unredeemable since she’d resorted to such violence and destruction at a young age and told her he wished he could try her as an adult. And then he gave her the longest sentence he could. You would have thought...that girl and her mama...man, they couldn’t have been more crushed if a dump truck of bricks had fallen on them.”

  A wave of nausea pulsed through Rob. He could imagine the scene—a girl confessing, thinking she was going to get off lightly in return for her cooperation, then being dragged off, away from everything she’d ever known.