White Fire p-13

by Douglas Preston

  Chivers, who ran a fire investigation consulting firm out of Grand Junction, had been called in at seven that morning. Most of his work was for insurance companies looking to prove arson so they didn’t have to pay claims. But once in a while he got called in by the police to determine if a fire was an accident or a crime. This was one of those times.

  It was a two-hour drive from Grand Junction, but he’d made it in ninety minutes, driving like hell in his Dodge pickup. Chivers liked traveling with the lightbar and siren going full blast, whipping past the poor speed-limit-bound schmucks on the interstate. Adding to the appeal of this case, the Roaring Fork Police Department paid well and didn’t nickel-and-dime him to death like some of the other PDs he worked for.

  But his exhilaration had been dampened by this scene of horror. Even Morris, the chief of police, seemed undone by it: stammering, inarticulate, unable to take charge. Chivers did his best to shake the feeling. The fact is, these were rich Hollywood types who used this colossal house as a second home — second home! — only a few weeks out of the year. It was hard to gin up a lot of sympathy for people like that. No doubt the homeowner could build five more just like it and barely dent his wallet. The man who owned this house, a fellow named Jordan Baker, hadn’t been heard from, and nobody had been able to reach him yet to inform him of the fire. He and his family were probably off at some posh resort. Or maybe they had a third home. It wouldn’t surprise Chivers.

  He began preparing himself for the walk-through, checking and organizing his equipment, testing his digital recorder, putting on latex gloves. One good thing about the chief’s apparent paralysis was that the fire scene hadn’t been trampled over and messed up by all the forensic specialists who were still gathering around, waiting to do their thing. Morris had pretty much kept everyone out, waiting for his arrival, and for that he was grateful. Although, as usual, there was considerable disturbance from firefighter activity — chopped-through floors and walls, shoveled and turned debris, everything soaked with water. The fire department had done a cursory structural integrity survey and had identified the areas that were unstable, taping them off.

  Chivers shouldered his bag and nodded to Chief Morris. “Ready.”

  “Good,” the chief said absently. “Fine. Rudy will take you through.”

  The fireman named Rudy lifted the tape for him, and he followed the man down the brick walkway and through where the front door had been. The fire scene stank heavily of burnt and soggy plastic, wood, and polyurethane. There was still some residual heat — despite the freezing temperature the house itself was still sending plumes of steam into the cold blue sky. While he was required to wear a hard hat, he did not wear a respirator: Chivers saw himself as an old-fashioned fire-scene investigator, tough, no-nonsense, who relied more on intuition and left the science to the lab rats. He was used to the stench — and he needed his nose to sniff out any residual accelerants.

  Inside the door, in what had been the entryway, he paused. The second floor had collapsed into the first, creating a crazy mess. A staircase ended in the sky. Puddles of glass and metal lay in the low spots, along with heaps of fire-shattered porcelain.

  He walked from the entryway into what had obviously been the kitchen, observing the burn patterns. The first order of business was to determine if this was arson — if a crime had been committed. And Chivers was already sure one had. Only accelerants could have caused a fire to burn so hot and fast. This was confirmed as he looked around the kitchen, where he could see faint pour patterns on the remains of the slate floor. He knelt, removed a portable hydrocarbon sniffer from his bag, and took some air samples, moving it about. Moderate.

  Still kneeling, he jammed a knife into the burnt, flaking floor and pried up a couple of small pieces, placing them in nylon evidence bags.

  The kitchen was a mess, everything fused, scorched, melted. A second-floor bathroom had fallen into the middle of it, with the remains of a porcelain-covered iron claw-foot tub and bits of the sink, toilet, tiled floor, and walls all heaped and scattered about.

  Using the sniffer, he got a big positive hit from the remains of the second-floor bathroom. Moving forward on hands and knees, keeping the sniffer low to the ground, Chivers swept it about, looking for a source. The hydrocarbon signature appeared to increase as he approached the tub itself. He rose, peered inside. There was a lot of stuff in the tub — and at the bottom, a layer of thick, black muck in which debris was embedded.

  He sampled the muck, giving it a little stir with a gloved finger. The sniffer went off the charts. And then Chivers stopped cold. Among the muck and debris he could see the fragments of bones poking up — and in the area he had stirred up, some teeth. Human teeth. He carefully probed with his gloved finger, exposing a small piece of a skull, a fragment of jaw, and the rim of an orbit.

  Chivers steadied himself, lowered the sniffer. The needle shot up again.

  He took out his digital recorder and began murmuring into it. The house had not been empty, after all. Clearly, a body had been placed in the bathtub and burned with accelerant. Putting aside the recorder, he removed another nylon evidence bag and took samples of the debris and muck, including a few small bone fragments. As he poked about in the black paste he saw the gleam of something — a lump of gold, no doubt once a piece of jewelry. He left that, but took samples from the grit and muck around it, including a charred phalange.

  He stood up, breathing heavily, feeling a faint wave of nausea. This was a bit more than he was used to. But then again, this was clearly going to be a big case. A very big case. Focus on that, he told himself, taking another deep breath.

  Chivers nodded to Rudy and continued to follow the fireman through the rest of the house, working the sniffer, taking samples, and speaking his observations into the handheld digital recorder. The charred corpse of what had once been a dog was fused to the stone floor at the back door of the house. Next to it lay two long, disordered piles of gritty ashes, which Chivers recognized as the much-burnt remains of two more victims, both adults judging by the length of the piles, lying side by side. More puddles of gold and silver.

  Jesus. He took a sniffer reading but didn’t come up with anything significant. Christ, no one had told him — and now he realized they probably didn’t know — that the fire had claimed human victims.

  Another couple of deep breaths, and Chivers moved on. And then, in what had been the living room, he came upon something else. Debris from the collapsed floor above lay in sodden heaps, and sitting in the center was a set of partly melted bedsprings. As he moved toward the twisted springs, he noted loops of baling wire affixed to them, as if something had been tied to the bed. Four loops — approximately where the ankles and hands would have been. And in one of those loops, he spied a fragment of a small, juvenile tibia.

  Oh, Jesus and Mary. Chivers moved the sniffer to it, and again the needle pinned. It was all too clear what had happened. A kid had been wired to the bed, doused with accelerant, and set on fire.

  “I need some air,” he said abruptly, rising and staggering. “Air.”

  The fireman grabbed his arm. “Let me help you out, sir.”

  As Chivers exited the fire scene and reeled down the walkway, he saw — out of the corner of his eye — a pale man, dressed in black, no doubt the local coroner, standing beyond the edge of the crowd, staring at him. He made a huge effort to pull himself together.

  “I’m all right, thanks,” he said to the firefighter, shedding the embarrassing arm. He looked around, located Chief Morris at the makeshift command center, surrounded by the gathering forensic teams — photographers, hair and fiber, latent, ballistics, DNA. They were suiting up, preparing to go in.

  Take it easy, he said to himself. But he could not take it easy. His legs felt like rubber, and it was hard to walk straight.

  He approached the chief. Morris was sweating, despite the cold. “What did you find?” he asked, his voice quiet.

  “It’s a crime scene,” said Chivers, tryin
g to control the quaver in his voice. Faint lights were dancing in front of his eyes now. “Four victims. At least, four so far.”

  “Four? Oh, my God. So they were in there. The whole family…” The chief wiped his brow with a shaking hand.

  Chivers swallowed. “One of the remains is of a…a juvenile who was…tied to a bed, doused with accelerant…and set on fire. Another was burned in…in…”

  As Chivers tried to get out the words, the chief’s face went slack. But Chivers barely noticed. His own world was getting darker and darker.

  And then, as he was still trying to finish his sentence, Chivers folded to the ground, collapsing in a dead faint.

  14

  Corrie had risen before dawn, gathered her equipment, and headed up to Roaring Fork. Now, as noon approached, she was ensconced in the warehouse at The Heights and well into her work. The remains of Emmett Bowdree were carefully arranged on a plastic folding table Corrie had bought at Walmart, under a set of strong studio lights. She had her stereo zoom in place, hooked to her laptop, the screen displaying the view from the microscope. Her Nikon stood on its tripod. It was like a little piece of heaven, being able to work carefully and thoroughly, without being half scared out of her wits and worrying about detection at any moment.

  The only problem was, she was freezing her ass off. It had been below zero when she began the long drive from Basalt — having refused the free room at the Hotel Sebastian, courtesy of Pendergast. She had skipped breakfast to save money, and now she was starving as well as cold. She’d set up a cheap electric heater at her feet, but it was rattling and humming and the stream of warm air seemed to dissipate within inches of its grille. It was doing a good job of warming her shins, but that was about it.

  Still, not even the cold and hunger could dampen her growing excitement at what she was finding. Almost all the bones showed trauma in the form of scrape marks, blunt cuts, and gouges. None of the marks showed signs of an osseous reaction, inflammation, or granulation — which meant the damage had been inflicted at the actual time of death. The soft, cancellous or spongy bone tissue showed unmistakable tooth marks — not bear but human, judging from the radius of the bite and the tooth profile. There were, in fact, no bear tooth or claw marks at all.

  Inside the broken femur and inside the skull, she had discovered additional scraping and gouging marks, indicating that the marrow and brains had been reamed out by a metal tool. Under the stereo zoom, these defleshing marks disclosed some very faint parallel lines, close together, and what looked like iron oxide deposits — which suggested the tool was iron and, quite possibly, a worn file.

  The initial blow to the cranium had definitely been inflicted by a rock. Under the microscope, she had been able to extract a few tiny fragments of it, which a cursory examination showed to be quartz.

  The rib cage had been split open — also with a rock — and pulled apart, as if to get at the heart. The bones showed little evidence of trauma inflicted by a sharp edge — such as an ax or knife — nor were there any injuries consistent with a gunshot wound. This puzzled her, as most miners of the time would no doubt have been armed with either a knife or a pistol.

  The contemporary newspaper account of the discovery of Emmett Bowdree’s body indicated that his bones had been found scattered on the ground a hundred yards beyond the door of a cabin; he had been “almost entirely eaten” by the so-called bear. The newspaper article, perhaps for reasons of delicacy, didn’t go into much detail on exactly what had been eaten or how the bones were disarticulated, except to note that “pieces of the heart and other viscera were discovered at a distance from the body, partially consumed.” The article made no mention of a fire or cooking, and her examination of the remains showed no evidence of heat.

  Emmett Bowdree had been eaten raw.

  As she worked, she began to see, in her mind’s eye, the sequence of injuries that had been inflicted on the body of Bowdree. He had been set upon by a group — no single person could have pulled a human body apart with such an extremity of violence. They struck him on the back of the head with a rock, causing a severe depressed fracture. While it may not have killed him instantly, it almost certainly rendered him unconscious. They gave the body a savage beating that broke almost every bone, and then proceeded to chop and pound at the body’s major articulations — there was evidence of disorganized, haphazard hacking with broken rocks, followed by separation via a strong lateral force. After breaking the joints, they pulled the arms and legs from the torso, separated the legs at the knees, broke open the skull and removed the brains, stripped the flesh from the bones, broke up the larger bones and reamed out the marrow, and removed most of the organs. The killers appeared to have only one tool, a worn-out file, which they supplemented with sharp pieces of quartz rock, their hands, and their teeth.

  Corrie surmised that the killing started out as a product of fury and anger, then evolved into — essentially — a cannibal feast. She stepped back from the remains for a moment, thinking. Who was the gang who did this? Why? Again, it seemed exceedingly strange to her that a gang of murderers would be roaming the mountains in the 1870s without guns or knives. And why didn’t they cook the meat? It was almost as if they were a tribe of Stone Age killers, merciless and savage.

  Merciless and savage. As she warmed herself in front of the heater, rubbing her hands together, Corrie’s mind wandered once again to the terrible fire that had taken place the evening before — and the death of the girl, Jenny Baker. It was beyond horrible, the entire family perishing in the fire like that. A maintenance worker had stopped by the warehouse an hour earlier and given her the news. No wonder she’d managed to breeze through The Heights security at ten that morning with barely a nod, left to her own devices without a minder.

  The horror of it, and the face of Jenny Baker — so earnest and pretty — haunted her. Focus on your work, she told herself, straightening up and preparing to place another bone on the stage for examination.

  What she really needed was to get her hands on more sets of remains for comparison. Pendergast had said he was going to help her track down more descendants. She paused for a moment in her work, trying to figure out what it was about this that annoyed her. The force of his personality was such that he dominated any situation he was in. But this was her project — and she wanted to do it on her own. She didn’t want to have people back at John Jay, especially her advisor, dismissing her work because of the help of a big-time FBI agent. Even the smallest amount of assistance from him might contaminate her achievement, giving them an opening to dismiss it all.

  Then Corrie shook this thought away as well. The guy had just saved her career and maybe even her life. To get so possessive, so proprietary, was churlish. Besides, Pendergast always shunned credit or publicity.

  She pulled off her gloves to position a tibia on the stereo zoom stage, moving it around until the light raked over it at just the right angle. It showed the same signs as the other bones: fracture damage with plastic response, no evidence of healing, scrape marks, and the clearest set of tooth marks yet. The people who had done this were freaks. Or had they just been really, really angry?

  Her hands just about froze, but she managed to get a set of photographs before she had to stop and warm herself again at the heater.

  Of course, it was possible this was an isolated case. The other victims might have indeed been killed by a rogue grizzly. The news reports quoted witnesses who had seen the animal, and in one instance a miner had been found in the process of being eaten — or, at least, his bones gnawed upon. Corrie was sorely tempted to check one of the other coffins, but resisted the impulse. From now on, she was going to do everything absolutely and totally by the book.

  Able to feel her hands once again, she straightened up. If the other remains did prove to be the work of a gang of killers, her thesis would have to change. She would have a hundred-and-fifty-year-old serial killing on her hands to document. And it would be very cool — and a huge boost to her nascent c
areer — if she could actually manage to solve it.

  15

  Larry Chivers stood beside his truck, sealing the nylon evidence bags with a heat sealer and finishing up his notes and observations. He had recovered from his fainting spell, but not from his sense of furious embarrassment. Such a thing had never happened to him — ever. He imagined that everyone was looking at him, whispering about him.

  With a grimace, he finished working on the final evidence bag, careful to make the seal complete. Already, he’d narrated the rest of his observations into the digital recorder while they were still fresh. He had to make absolutely sure he did everything just right. This was going to be a huge case — probably even national.

  There was a sound behind him, and he turned to see Chief Morris approaching. The man looked utterly undone.

  “Sorry about my reaction back there,” Chivers muttered.

  “I knew the family,” the chief told him. “One of the girls worked as an intern in my office.”

  Chivers shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d like to hear your reconstruction of the fire.”

  “I can give you my first impressions. The lab results may take a few days.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Chivers took a deep breath. “Point of origin of the fire, in my view, would be either the second-floor bath or the bedroom above the living room. Both areas were doused heavily with accelerant — so much so that the perp would have had to leave the house fairly quickly. Both areas contained human remains.”

  “You mean, the Bakers…the victims…were burned with accelerant?”

  “Two of them, yes.”

  “Alive?”

  What a question. “That’ll have to wait for the M.E. But I doubt it.”