by Monica Hesse
“My big worry is, of course, my people first,” Kelley said. “I mean, there’s no need to risk somebody’s life for an abandoned building. But then, how far is this going to escalate?”
“When you arrive on these scenes, what goes through your mind?” Reid asked.
“Total amazement,” Kelley said.
“Amazement?”
“Amazement. No one’s seen him. It’s like,” he paused, trying to pretend it had come to him just now, naturally. “It’s like a ghost.”
“Like a ghost?” Reid said.
“Like a ghost.”
Nobody would deny that it was an awful time to be a firefighter—relentless late nights and permanent dark circles under the eyes. But it wasn’t all bad. They’d suddenly become heroes; famous in a way people from Accomack never expected to become famous and in a way most of them never would be again.
Over at the fire department in Tasley, Jeff Beall had gone on the local broadcasts so many times it had become rote. He gave good quotes, and he had a frank, matter-of-fact speaking style that appealed to journalists. Shannon Bridges got used to turning on the morning news and seeing the recording of her work from the previous night, her sooty pink helmet, bobbing in the background of wherever was the latest burning.
For decades in this county, firehouses had been the center of social life. Fire stations held fall chili cook-offs, summer barbecues, year-round bingo tournaments. Every October, the Tasley station had taken a donated patch of woods and turned it into a haunted forest, with hay wagons full of passengers being slowly pulled past ghosts and zombies. It was the highlight of the Halloween season.
But that way of life had been hard to hold on to, not just in Accomack but all around the country. Enrollment in volunteer fire departments had declined nationwide with 11 percent fewer volunteers than in the 1980s. It was a money issue and a time issue: Volunteers who used to learn on the job alongside their fathers were now required to complete hundreds of hours of coursework before they could become certified, often at their own expense. As fire safety improved, the cost of equipment had ballooned (one self-contained breathing apparatus cost $5,000) and the time dedicated to fund-raising for that equipment had ballooned, too, with volunteer departments nationwide spending an estimated 60 percent of their time raising money. For all of the myriad reasons that young men and women set out to join fire departments—excitement, public service, community, a sense of duty—it was difficult to believe that any of them would have cited, as a primary reason, “bake sale.” One study by the U.S. Fire Administration, about retention rates among volunteer firefighters, found a few factors unique to rural places, one being the replacement of small Main Street businesses with larger department stores. It was easier to hang a “Be back soon—fire duty” sign on the front of an independent shop than it was to get spur-of-the-moment permission to leave a shift at, say, a Best Buy or Costco.
In Accomack, C. Ray Pruitt, the director of public safety, personally had several explanations for the decline of fire volunteers, all of which mirrored the national data on enrollment decline. Pruitt’s department was responsible for maintaining the volunteer firefighter rosters and organizing the annual training. He’d also been a firefighter himself, because his father was, and his grandfather was. He could remember when volunteers were so abundant that it wasn’t unusual to have twenty-five or thirty men respond to a single fire call. In his youth, people went to the firehouses the way they went to bars, as places to unwind, gossip, feel plugged into the community. The problem, as Pruitt saw it, was that people were now plugged into everything else: iPhones, iPads, Xboxes, Netflix. People got their community through Facebook and their jolts of adrenaline through World of WarCraft. They didn’t need to risk their lives, unpaid, with a fire department. And he saw people today taking on second or third jobs just to make ends meet. He saw them too busy to coach their children’s Little League games, and too busy to volunteer with the PTA, and if they were too busy for those things, they were too busy to volunteer to be roused from bed in the middle of the night to drive to the fire station. Instead of twenty-five men per company for a fire, Pruitt might see six or seven.
But now, here it was in 2012, and suddenly, firehouses were again at the center of Accomack County’s social life. Each night as the fires mounted, parades of thankful citizens stopped by with cases of Gatorade, packets of instant coffee and hot chocolate, endless boxes of Nature Valley granola bars, and, once they learned that firefighters used it to clean the hoses—endless bottles of Mr. Clean dish soap.
November had barely passed when the young men of the Tasley station decided that their regular way of doing things needed to be revisited. It didn’t make sense for them to all go to sleep in their own beds when they knew they would just be wakened by their pagers again a few hours later. There were fires almost every night. What would make more sense would be to just sleep at the firehouse.
There were several young men of Tasley: Bryan, who was George Applegate’s son and Charlie Smith’s half-brother, who repaired cars and coached a youth hockey league. Richie, the extra-large brother of Shannon, who hadn’t ever meant to become a firefighter. He’d only gone through the training to keep a friend company, but the friend lost interest and Richie, more and more, liked the idea of having something meaningful to do. A guy named Chris. A guy everyone called “Kitchens.”
Richie and Shannon were both born on the Eastern Shore. Their parents had been, too, but they’d moved to Massachusetts for a spell when Richie was in high school and when they moved back, it was right in the stage of life where everyone Richie had grown up with seemed to have either paired off already, or be interested primarily in going to bars to facilitate pairing off. Richie didn’t drink—he’d never been a fan of the way alcohol made him feel, and he was painfully shy around girls. He hated when people fought or didn’t get along, as they were prone to do at bars. The Tasley Fire Company seemed like a cure for all of this. Instant camaraderie, with people who wanted to volunteer to do good, and a place to go, and engines to fix, and equipment to maintain, and essentially a way of life, ready-made, that would happily suck up as much time as Richie was willing to put into it.
He lived in Onancock, about a five-minute drive away, but he volunteered with Tasley because he knew the people better. After a week of arsons, racing up Tasley Road in the middle of the night to drive the tankers and engines, Richie was the first to move in, with a laundry basket full of clothes. A few days later, Chris and Kitchens and a couple other guys started staying there, too, with their own laundry baskets.
Some of the firehouses had nice bunk rooms, with little nightstands next to twin beds with hospital corners. These were mostly the firehouses that also housed paid EMTs, with a guaranteed round-the-clock ambulance response. Tasley didn’t have EMTs, Tasley’s bunk room was a crawl space with four-foot-tall ceilings, which was mostly used for storage but into which somebody had, at one point, crammed a few camp beds in a hopeful attempt at accommodations.
The Tasley boys slept there a few nights, acquired more than a few bruises on their heads, and determined that instead of sleeping in the closet, they’d just bring sleeping bags into the main meeting space. It had mildewed blue carpeting and a heating system whose two settings were frigid or boiling, and whose walls were plastered, inch by inch, with photographs and placards of the firefighters who had been serving Tasley for eighty-five years.
They ran out of couch space and some of them started sleeping in chairs. The group would arrive together, and sleep together, and if they needed something to eat, they would try to do that together, too, so that when a call came through they would already be in the same car. Waitresses at Panzetti’s Pizza and Waffles got used to seeing large groups of tired men scramble away from the table, pies untouched, bill unpaid, promising to come back the next day to settle up. There were a few movies at the firehouse, stuffed in a filing cabinet. Someone brought over a copy of Backdraft, a movie about a serial arsonist and the firef
ighters trying to stop him, but it was decided that the 1991 Ron Howard film hadn’t held up so well. They really preferred Ladder 49, a 2004 film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a firefighter trapped in a burning building and John Travolta as the colleague trying to save him. Richie had a PlayStation that he brought in along with a selection of video games, mostly fighting related, or about war.
In the outside world, this was an era of forwarded viral videos. Particularly the Harlem Shake, in which a quiet room of people would suddenly, on a particular musical cue, erupt in Bacchanalian dancing. Versions of the Harlem Shake filmed in office buildings, swimming pools, and department stores flooded the Internet. One night the firefighters of Tasley set up a camera, put on their fire helmets, turned on all the sirens, and filmed a spirited rendition of the Tasley Shake, complete with a person wearing the company’s Dalmatian mascot suit, which was usually reserved for parades.
This, for a group of twentysomething men, became their own personal arson schedule: come to the fire house, play video games, get called for a fire, play more video games, post something on Facebook or YouTube, get called for another fire. It was easier not to sleep sometimes, to instead remain in a perpetual state of wiry adrenaline. They played video games in teams, in which the group of guys from Tasley could challenge a group of guys from somewhere else in the country. It got to the point where nobody wanted to play them because nobody could beat them because nobody else’s minds had melded like theirs. In war-themed games, Bryan Applegate became known for always carrying a Bouncing Betty, a landmine that launched into the air and detonated three feet off the ground, killing his adversaries. The other players would hear the telltale click and say, “GodDAMN it!”
So one offshoot of the arsons was that the firefighters in town came the closest they ever would to an exalted state of holy heroism; the other offshoot was that the men of Tasley became singularly good at playing Call of Duty.
IN THE MIDDLE OF ALL OF THIS, there were fires. There was the fire that was two fires, across the street from each other, one a raging beast that the firemen put out only to realize that the second had been quietly burning the whole time, too. There was the fire where the engine Jeff Beall was driving got there first and Beall, having a fire hose but no way to fill it with water, left the back end of the hose tied around the tree, awaiting a tanker for it to attach to. “I wrapped my hose around a tree!” he kept bellowing into the radio to the men from Onancock, who were a few miles behind and who broke into giggles when they got to the scene and saw the tree tied up like a birthday present. There was the fire where the chief from the Onley Department finished dinner with his family, looked at the clock, picked up his pager and jokingly declared, “Now’s the time!” and the pager went off in his hand.
The stockpiles of Gatorade got bigger, and the sense of community outrage and pride got larger, and the firefighters became intimately acquainted with the baking skills of every sympathetic household on the Eastern Shore. And an airplane hangar burned down, and a big pile of tires burned down, and an old empty restaurant burned down, and abandoned house after abandoned house, and there was always something burning.
There was only one thing to be grateful for, and that was that the arsonist hadn’t tried to burn down Whispering Pines. That old resort complex was just down the street from the Tasley Fire Department, and over the years it had gone from being an abandoned eyesore to a bona fide structural hazard and the ghost of Accomack’s past, symbolizing everything the county once had. The original owners had sold it in the early 1970s. It had changed hands several times until it closed, and the most recent owner had accrued more than $10,000 in back taxes. A church held services in one of the meeting halls, but the sewage system was declared unsafe. Finally, a few months before the arsons began, a small cluster of people had gathered near the steps of the courthouse. Two county employees set up a folding card table in the crisp early spring air. It was a public auction. Whispering Pines was the only item on the auction block. The place that had once hosted the Glenn Miller orchestra, where Diana Ross of the Supremes had once ordered a Chinese dish in the dining room, where a generation of Accomack teenagers earned their first paychecks as dishwashers in the back, now sold at auction for $28,000. The whole hotel, all of the land, sold for pennies on the dollar to a man who did not have an Eastern Shore name.
Now, the townspeople joked about Whispering Pines: “One of these days, they should burn down that shit heap.” Put it out of its misery. But the firefighters knew that the actuality of that fire would be monstrous. Bigger than anything any of them had ever seen, in all their combined years of work. Awesome and terrible and biblical, almost.
Christmas Eve came and there was a big fire in a garage that happened to have a propane tank in it, and that fire lit the sky. Christmas Day came, and Sheriff Todd Godwin had encouraged most of his deputies to take the day off. He spent the evening riding around with Scott Wade, a special agent with the Virginia State Police who normally worked with the drug task force. Godwin and Wade stopped at a Royal Farms gas station for a cup of coffee and when they got inside it was mostly empty but for a few people.
Two of the people were Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick. Godwin and Wade slid into the booth across from them, shooting the breeze, idling away a lonely Christmas. Godwin asked about Tonya’s boys and Wade asked about Charlie’s family, and they talked a little about the arsons.
“Y’all must be busy, with all the fires going on,” Charlie said.
“Yes,” Godwin and Wade said with weariness. They were busy and exhausted. The two pairs finished their coffee and went back out into the dark, empty county, but there was no fire that night and Christmas was, mercifully, quiet.
CHAPTER 8
“TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT”
DISCREETLY, SO AS NOT TO STIR RUMORS OR GOSSIP, the police began developing an initial list of suspects. State police investigators Rob Barnes and Glenn Neal had started with a few criteria: people who had previously set fires, people who had previously been in jail and released within the past year, and—the intersection of the Venn diagram—everyone who had done both.
For a spare set of hands, they called in Bobby Bailey. Bailey was a division chief in the Virginia Fire Marshal Academy. He was also the man who had taught and certified both Barnes and Neal as fire inspectors, in a four-week intensive course that culminated with Bailey decorating a large trailer like an apartment—sofa, coffee table, Christmas tree, stuffed animal—then putting on a flame-retardant space suit and going inside to light the whole thing on fire. The students’ job was to figure out how and where the fire had begun; Bailey would video the whole thing with thermal-protected cameras to show them whether they’d gotten it right.
In addition to heading the Fire Marshal Academy in Richmond, Bailey also taught classes on arson investigation at the local university, and coauthored papers with titles like, “The Use of Liquid Latex for Soot Removal from Fire Scenes and Attempted Fingerprint Development with Ninhydrin.” He was both boastful and dismissive of his academic accomplishments, his personality being less fusty arson professor and more Marlboro arson poet. He was short, muscular, with a wiry mustache and a low, deep drawl. He’d been a cop and a firefighter, and because of those experiences he looked at fire scenes holistically.
For example, were there dead bodies in the room where the fire was? “You walk into a scene and you find a person facedown, that’s normal,” he would explain to his students. “They’re trying to breathe. They’d be crawling on their hands and knees and eventually they’d pass out, and when they did they’d be on their stomachs.” But if there was a body lying faceup, that would be suspicious. That would indicate that the person hadn’t died from smoke inhalation, but rather a heart attack, or foul play.
Essentially, his continued fascination with fire boiled down to this. Other kinds of crimes left evidence: fingerprints, stab wounds, footprints. They were, as police called them, “behavior-rich crime scenes.” Arson wasn’t. It washe
d all of the behavior and evidence away. It was ultimately unknowable. He believed fire was a living, breathing thing, and he said that to students: “Fire is a living, breathing thing. It pushes. It pulses.”
He was a little intense. But this was, people allowed, to be expected of someone who loved a job about fire as much as Bailey.
And now that he was on board with the Accomack fire investigations, Neal and Barnes had a spare set of eyes to conduct the inspections, and also to help with the other things they had decided were necessary to an investigation.
Bailey had arranged to bring an armful of motion-sensored wildlife cameras over the bridge with him from Richmond. One night he went out with Sheriff Todd Godwin and one of Godwin’s deputies to put them up around the county. The trim, agile Godwin balanced on his deputy’s shoulders as they positioned the equipment high in trees, trained on houses they suspected would be targets.
Occasionally, if the house was across the street from an occupied dwelling, they might ask the dwelling’s owner for assistance.
“How would you like to help?” Bailey asked. “I want to put one of those cameras in your mailbox. But you can’t tell nobody, because we don’t know who the arsonist is.”
“Oh, this is going to be cool—I’m CSI!” the resident agreed, promising secrecy and then promptly telling enough people that the story flew around the county: The police are putting surveillance equipment in your neighbor’s mailboxes.
Meanwhile, Neal had begun pursuing a different line of investigation. Aside from Bobby, he had another friend in Richmond, named Kenneth Morris. Morris also worked for the Virginia State Police, and Neal asked if he minded coming out to the shore for a few days to have a look around. Morris said he wouldn’t mind at all, and thus kicked off the beginning of a psychological exploration into the arsonist’s mind.
Morris was a criminal profiler. He’d worked arson cases with Neal in the past, and before he became a profiler, he was an arson investigator himself. Though he wouldn’t ultimately be the lead profiler on the Accomack arsons—he was approaching retirement and beginning to wind down his career—Neal knew and trusted him and wanted his opinion.
