Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  “I need to get the lowdown from my old pal Benny,” said McNally, belting himself in beside me. “Probably take him for coffee. He’s been on-site since the wee darks this morning. Okay if I drop you off? Mimi Neff’s going to let you shadow her at the scene.”

  “She’s the investigator?”

  He cranked the ignition, nodding. “She’s good. Some of these guys, you’ll get a line of crap about how the forensic aspect is ‘more art than science,’ but Mimi’s the real deal. You’ll have to glove up and stay out of her way, though.”

  “No problem,” I said, as he panzered out of the parking lot.

  The car’s suspension was for shit and the engine was loud enough that McNally had to yell over it. “I’ll be going for the big picture from Benny—overview of the earlier fires, whether this one fits in as a serial thing. Your sidebar is tight focus on Mimi. Concrete stuff about her process. Give me a feel for how she decodes this scene, detail by detail.”

  “I can do that,” I said, crossing my fingers and hiding them under my thigh.

  Lucky for me, Mimi was low-key but chatty.

  McNally parked in front of a big old brown-shingled Craftsman place, ten blocks and just as many tax brackets up Mapleton from Dean’s and my funky rental.

  Mimi was probably Mom’s age, slim-hipped and tall with thick blond hair falling dead-straight to her shoulders. She spotted McNally and waved us forward from her perch on the building’s scorched-stone front porch.

  There was a very expensive camera slung around her neck, its worn leather strap studded with little silver conchas.

  “You again, Jon?” she called out, as we ducked under the crime-scene tape at the sidewalk’s edge.

  Her diction was preppy “ladies sailing” New York, and she had a smoker’s laugh.

  “You know me, Mimi,” McNally replied, “I always want to hang out with the cool kids.”

  He introduced the two of us, then jogged around to the backyard once she’d told him where to find his pal Benny.

  I climbed up three stairs to the porch. Somebody’d axed the front door open, and everything smelled of wet soot and char with a chemical undertone—sour and astringent. I was glad I had on my boots. The porch floor was littered with broken glass.

  “We need to get into some haz-mat gear,” she said. “Never know what you’re going to run into at a scene.”

  We went out to her truck, and she got out a pair of crinkly beige jumpsuits and booties, then two hoods for us to put on.

  “What’s this stuff made of?” I asked, fingering the material.

  “Nomex,” she said. “Like Tyvek, only it’s flame-retardant. Your hair and clothes will still stink, but there’ll be less crap to scrape off when you get home.”

  I put everything on and Mimi opened the lid of what looked like a giant tackle box.

  “Your hands look about the same size as mine,” she said. “You can wear my spares.”

  She handed me two pairs of gloves—one thin, one chunky leather.

  “Thin ones are liners. Those go on first,” she said, demonstrating.

  Even with the liners, the leather gloves were tough to get on, pinching a little against the skin on the backs of my hands. “Tight fit.”

  “You need ’em tight for finger dexterity. Picking stuff up. And palm dexterity for grip—liners help. Always a trade-off with the gloves, and when they fit right they’re a bitch to get on and off, but you never know what’s still going to be hot, inside.”

  “How ’bout I just try not to touch anything?”

  She nodded, then handed me a respirator.

  I must’ve looked like I was balking at the idea of putting it on, although I had total respect for her expertise.

  “I worked with a guy several years ago,” she said. “Battalion chief. He went into a house the day after a fire to check out a canister someone found in a back closet.”

  “I have a feeling this is not going to be a really happy story.”

  Mimi shook her head. “He got a lungful of whatever was in the thing. Came back outside to talk to the chief and passed out. Life support for a month, dialysis after that. Early retirement and he’s still waiting for a kidney transplant.”

  I took the respirator. “Poor guy, that’s awful.”

  “We call it off-gassing. A lot of times it’s worse after the fire’s out. More toxic.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  “I’ve documented the structure’s exterior, so we’re good to go inside, all right?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll need you to keep behind me,” she continued, “and I’m going to be moving pretty slowly—collecting samples and taking a lot of photographs.”

  “Slow is fine. I’ll do my best to keep out of your way. But you can work a camera with these gloves on?”

  “It’s not great, but I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  “I’m impressed,” I said.

  “Just make sure you step pretty much where I do, all righty?” she continued. “The place looks pretty decent structurally or I wouldn’t let you in there, but there may still be hot spots. We don’t need either of us falling though to the basement.”

  I shifted my weight and crunched some glass underfoot. “McNally told me the owners were away skiing?”

  “Thank God. A neighbor called this in around three A.M. They would’ve been upstairs, asleep.”

  I shivered.

  “This fire moved fast and burned hot, too,” she said. “Flashover up front, here—very high temperatures.”

  “How can you tell?”

  She picked up a triangular blade of glass from the ground and handed it to me. “Hold that up to the light.”

  The gloves were good, but it still felt weird to hold the piece of glass in my thickened fingers.

  I turned toward the west, squinting as I raised the little shard up against the afternoon sun. It glistened, shot through with tiny spiderweb cracks that caught the yellowing light. “Crazing from the temperature?”

  “You see that when superheated glass gets hit with cold water.”

  “The fire hoses?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “But wouldn’t the water pressure have pushed the glass inward?”

  “I talked to the crew. They’d just swept a hose across this façade once when the front windows blew. Lucky no one had gotten in closer than the sidewalk.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “No kidding.”

  “And look at that…”

  I followed the trajectory of her pointed finger to the front door’s threshold.

  “That sill’s aluminum,” she said. “It melted, so the fire was burning at twelve hundred twenty degrees Celsius at least—and the wood under it is charred.”

  “So, what, the fire started in the basement?” I asked, squatting down beside her. “I mean, flames burn up, don’t they?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve seen investigators claiming arson because of exactly that. They think the wood can only burn if there was accelerant running under the sill. Which is total horseshit, frankly.”

  “What makes it char, then?”

  “The heat of the aluminum itself.”

  “Jesus.”

  “But from the exterior damage, I can tell this front room is where the fire originated. The hallway door was closed…”

  She motioned me over to the blackened window frames, pulling a Maglite from a front pocket and clicking it on. The room was on the eastern side of the house—and the sun was sinking westward, not to mention shaded by the deep wraparound porch.

  Mimi moved the light’s beam across the far wall inside, across the remains of a sofa. Not like we had to worry about it reflecting off the window glass anymore.

  She brought the beam to rest. “See that vee-mark scorched on the paint, above the couch?”

  I peered in at the charred hulk of something, resting against the far wall.

  Could’ve started out as a sofa, I guess, though at that point it looked more
like something you’d find smoldering in a cornfield after a 747 crash.

  She was right—the vee-scorch was easy to pick out, even by flashlight.

  “Okay,” I said, “I see it.”

  “You get those above objects that burned intensely.”

  “Why the vee? What makes that shape?”

  “Flames and hot gases angle outward when they hit a horizontal surface. The ceiling, a tabletop. Often indicates a point of origin, but there can be multiple marks like that throughout a structure.”

  “If someone touched off different starter fires?”

  “Not necessarily. You find them above pieces of furniture, anything substantial that burns hot.”

  She lowered the beam to the burn-crater centered in what was left of the sofa’s seat cushions—which was nothing, basically. Springs stuck up out of the hole, tilted every which way like a bed of robotic ferns.

  “The heat’s intensity turned that metal white,” she said.

  “So this isn’t arson?”

  “Might find out when we go inside,” she said. “If we’re lucky.”

  She put her respirator on, then helped me with mine.

  “You kind of have to yell when you’re wearing these,” she yelled.

  “Okay,” I yelled back.

  Very Darth Vader, the pair of us.

  11

  We’d stepped inside the front hallway of the burned house.

  Mimi played her Maglite along the walls of the room we’d just been peering into from the porch. “Fire started here, probably in that sofa.”

  I nodded.

  “Hallway door and windows were shut,” she continued, “and it burned hot enough to hit flashover.”

  “What?”

  “FLASHOVER.” She yelled louder, and kept the volume up. “Superheated gases gather at the ceiling. The cloud thickens and starts banking down the walls, hotter and hotter as it gets closer to the floor. At a certain point, that cloud becomes fire. The whole room does.”

  I caught most of that. It was weird, not seeing her lips move, but I was getting better at deciphering with every word she spoke.

  “And that’s when the windows blew out?” I said.

  “WHAT?”

  I tried again, louder.

  She nodded. “Blew the glass out, blew the door wide open, and now you’ve got a fireball with more oxygen suddenly available, so it roars into the hallway—still so hot it melts that aluminum sill.”

  “So what do you look for next?” I yelled.

  “Traces of accelerant. I’ll need samples from this front room, to start with. Carpet, flooring, anything left of the sofa cushions…”

  She walked back to grab her tackle box from the porch floor, snapping its latches shut and hoisting it up to her hip. It looked damn heavy.

  I reached for it. “Why don’t I carry that?”

  “Great.” She let me take it. “Okay?”

  The thing must have weighed fifty pounds, but I nodded assent.

  “Ready?”

  Another nod from me.

  She stepped over the front room’s threshold, and I was all set to follow when she looked back over her shoulder at me. “Let me go in alone first. I’m worried about the floor.”

  “No problem,” I yelled, stopping at the doorway.

  Jesus, my throat was already sore. How did these guys do this all the time?

  Her giant tackle box was digging into the side of my thigh and I thought my right hand was about to fall off, so I wrestled with the damn thing until I had it in both arms instead.

  Mimi walked toward the center of the room, slowly and carefully.

  “Okay,” she said, waving me in.

  I humped the tackle box forward and lowered it beside her, with a bit of an unbecoming groan near the end of that effort.

  “What’s in this,” I asked, “anvils and bowling balls?”

  She chuckled, the flash on her Pentax charging up with an ascending whine.

  I kept quiet while she took photographs.

  Only when she’d documented every aspect of what the room looked like untouched did she start taking actual samples.

  The tackle box had those stacking trays inside that accordioned up and out until it was the size of a small desk. Mimi knew the contents blind—X-Acto knives, chisels, needle-nose pliers, a box cutter, tweezers… zippered plastic bags in a bazillion sizes, with an equivalent number of manila envelopes. Glass slides that looked like they were for a microscope. Little tiny jars. Wide transparent tape and squares of card stock to stick it to.

  “A Thousand Clowns,” I said, thinking of the miniature circus car filled with same that Jason Robards referred to, during the course of my favorite early-1960s anti-establishment flick.

  “Great movie,” yelled Mimi, scissoring a chunk of singed foam rubber from the arm of the ruined sofa. “ ‘Good morning, campers, I’m disappointed in the very sorry turnout for last night’s volleyball game—’ ”

  I understood every word of that, and laughed.

  She turned around and looked across the floor of the room again. “The problem with flashover… wipes out evidence. You lose the ‘pour pattern.’ ”

  “Yeah?”

  “Splash accelerant around and light it, burn pattern’s uneven. Flooring, carpeting…”

  “Okay,” I yelled back.

  “Usually fire burns up, pattern’s intact. Not with flashover.”

  I nodded for her to continue.

  “Extreme temperatures down low in a room? Pour pattern’s obliterated. No differentiation.”

  “Bummer,” I yelled, looking at the evenly scorched flooring. “So how do you check?”

  “Gimme that hammer,” said Mimi, pointing to an upper tray of her tackle box.

  I picked it up and held it out toward her.

  “Chisel,” she yelled, so I gave her that, too.

  She walked over to the corner of the room closest to the sofa. “See? Floor dips down?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Liquid accelerant runs downhill and pools. So if it’s near a wall…”

  She knelt. I watched her angle the chisel’s tip to rest against what looked like a join in the baseboard, about eight inches away from the corner of the room.

  Mimi gave the handle a good whack and the chisel bit into this seam. She pulled the tool free, then brought the narrow tip to rest at the topmost juncture of baseboard and wall.

  One more hard tap popped the entire piece of wood free. She picked this up, twisting at the waist so I could see it.

  “Accelerant pools next to a wall,” she yelled, “the baseboard gets charred up the back.”

  She turned the wood over.

  Goddamn if that side wasn’t charred to shit.

  I gave her a thumbs-up and watched her eyes crinkle into a smile, above the respirator.

  I checked my watch. We’d been here over an hour.

  “Babysitter?” she asked.

  “Half an hour left.”

  “I’ll show you the big room at the back.”

  “You are a total goddess,” I yelled.

  “What?”

  I gave up. “Thank you.”

  “Need to check one more thing,” said Mimi.

  “Sure.”

  She moved back over to the sofa, shining her flashlight down into the oddly white springs, angling it toward the arm of the thing.

  “Ha!” yelled Mimi, plunging her gloved hand down into the furniture guts.

  “What?”

  She raised her hand so I could see the little yellowy tube of fluff pincered between her thumb and index finger.

  “Cigarette filter,” she said. “Simplest fuse going—Marlboro stuck in a matchbook. Light it, stick it between the cushions, leave…”

  She bagged it up for evidence, then got to her feet, waving a thumb toward the back of the house.

  I nodded and followed her out of the room.

  We moved down the hallway, slowly.

  When she passed an o
pen door on the left, Mimi stopped and played her flashlight slowly over the small room beyond its threshold.

  “See that?” she asked, as the beam of light came to rest on a scorched metal cup resting on a waist-high countertop.

  Downward-pointing spikes of multicolored plastic were hanging from all around the cup’s lip. It looked like a houseplant from Mars, but I nodded anyway.

  “Toothbrushes,” she yelled.

  I watched the light swing to the left, down a blackened rod a little higher than my head, draped with more plastic stalactites at regular intervals. “Shower-curtain rings?”

  She nodded at me.

  The curtain itself had joined the choir eternal, leaving not so much as a grommet in the wake of its cindery demise.

  Mimi dropped the tip of the flashlight lower, playing its beam across the tub surround. “Flame-retardant eats into marble, see that?”

  “Okay.”

  She turned away from the door frame, walking carefully toward the rear of the house.

  Stopping between some half-opened pocket doors at the end of the hall, Mimi whistled softly, a descending note of dismay. “I feel sorry for the claims adjustor…”

  She stepped into the room and I followed.

  “From the insurance company?” I asked.

  She nodded. “What I used to do. Horrible—you have to count up everything for depreciation. Down to the number of Q-tips and tampons.”

  I shook my head.

  We were in a west-facing large room at the back of the house, and Mimi turned off her flashlight. The place was filled with golden late-afternoon sunlight, and the sour chemical smell was much stronger.

  There were scummy puddles of water on the Saltillo-tile floor.

  The fire hadn’t been as intense in this part of the house—even I could tell that.

  There were more shards of glass everywhere. I wondered whether the windows had been bashed manually by firefighters, or just blown inward by the intense pressure of hose-water.

  Mimi had knelt down to take a sample of the oily water. “The worst part, you’ve gotta quantify personal things. Like those…”

  I turned toward where she was pointing, at a row of five antique quilts hanging along the wall behind us.