American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  Nobody would realize it, but it was possible that the ghostly hand the investigators had seen reaching toward the camera wasn’t the arsonist at all; it was Matt Hart embarking on another one of his schemes.

  CHAPTER 12

  “I’VE SEEN ENOUGH ASS TO KNOW”

  THEY WERE A LITTLE EXUBERANT, the Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters. But then, how do you measure crazy behavior when it was really, perhaps, a normal reaction to a crazy situation? People turned on their friends and neighbors. They just did, it was the sort of thing you couldn’t help doing after enough sleepless nights. Matt got funny looks from people who thought that anyone that interested in the case must be trying to hide something. Seth did, too. One night he got pulled over for speeding, the same night there had been two big fires in the Fox Grove neighborhood, from which he had just come.

  “Man, I saw the truck with a FoxGrov license plate on the back and I knew it was you,” laughed the state trooper, who turned out to be a friend Seth had known since they were twelve. He questioned Seth about his comings and goings, swept his flashlight around the interior to make sure there were no gas cans, and then let him go.

  Seth had no idea that his childhood friend would privately consider him to be a person of interest until much later, after everything was over.

  One evening state police investigator Glenn Neal asked an acquaintance to come out and drive around with him. Neal wanted to explore the field where a fire had earlier been set. The acquaintance had some brushes with the law in the past, but he knew those fields really well and he was basically a decent guy. While they were out patrolling, another fire was set and Neal’s cell phone rang: a tip from a concerned citizen. The fire that had been set that night, they were sure they knew who had set it. They told him who.

  “Are you sure?” Neal asked. The caller said they were sure. “Huh,” Neal said, “because he’s sitting right next to me.”

  Everyone had a building that burned, or knew someone who did. Everyone made a 911 call, or knew someone who did. The callers couldn’t help but insert the stories of their own day into the emergency calls, as if the fires belonged to all of them, the narrative of a county and its destruction and its fear. “I was just out trying to fix my phone wire,” the callers said. Or “I had just come outside to my car.” Or “I had just met two state police going down to Saxis.” Or “I just left Evergreen Church and I’m on the road from Puncoteague to the Puncoteague School, and there’s a house, and it’s on fire, and its empty, and I’ve got cold chills.”

  “What’s the address?” the dispatcher asked the caller from the Puncoteague fire.

  “I really don’t want to go near that area,” the caller said, afraid the arsonist might still be lurking nearby.

  The dispatcher paused. “I don’t blame you.”

  On Valentine’s day, a call came through that was different from all the others, because it wasn’t an abandoned house. The house was occupied by J. D. Shreaves, a single father who ran out for twenty minutes to drop his daughters off at their grandmother’s a few miles away. When he came back, he thought he smelled smoke, but after walking from room to room, he figured there must just be a cigarette in the ashtray. But when he picked up his daughters a few hours later, his girls said they smelled something burning, too. This time he went outside and patrolled the perimeter. Under a loose siding panel, someone had stuffed a lit rag and it was still smoldering. Someone had known he’d left the house, and timed the fire accordingly. Someone had been watching. “Girls, calm down,” he told his crying daughters as he waited for the dispatcher to send the police. “Your daddy’s with you.”

  One night the arsonist burned a pickup truck carrying wood flooring that its owner hadn’t gotten around to installing. Neal was sent to investigate, and when he got there, he realized that the fire was only a few houses down from where his friend Charlie and Charlie’s girlfriend, Tonya, lived. Neal was closer with Charlie’s brother Bryan, but he knew Charlie, too. As Charlie remembered, they’d first met when Neal pulled him over for a traffic infraction. Charlie, incensed at the ticket, had stormed into Bryan’s house ready to complain about the jerk cop he’d just met only to find the cop sitting in his brother’s living room. They laughed about it and ended up occasional drinking buddies.

  “Let’s ride across the street and talk to Charlie and Tonya,” Neal suggested to the patrolman he was circling with that night. “I know they’ll talk to us.”

  Charlie seemed a little fidgety when Neal and his patrol partner knocked on the door—at least Charlie himself remembered seeming a little fidgety—but then again, to other people he often seemed that way. After he’d kicked drugs he’d acquired a caffeine habit; those who would see him at the body shop remembered him leaving every hour, on the hour, to run to the gas station for twenty-four-ounce cups of coffee until he was bouncing off the wall like a cartoon chipmunk. “All that coffee is going to kill him,” his stepdad would remark, and Neal, who knew Charlie’s backstory, once replied, “Yeah. But it’s better than what he used to do.”

  Neal stood in the living room and asked Charlie and Tonya if they were sure they hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the night the truck was burned.

  “C’mon, man—you can’t tell me you didn’t see anything,” Neal said.

  “Naw, man. I ain’t seen nothing,” Charlie said. “Damn, I wish I’d gotten some parts off of it, because I need parts for a Ford Ranger.”

  “I’m sure you could get them for cheap now,” Neal joked.

  “Maybe I should go over and talk to them.”

  Neal moved on to the next house, another friend he had on the road, and that friend hadn’t seen anything either.

  Each time a new fire was reported, the geographic profiler Isaac Van Patten plugged the location into his algorithm, hoping to generate a more specific profile. Instead of the circle getting smaller, though, it appeared to stay roughly the same size, just moving slowly southward. By the time Van Patten ran the algorithm several weeks later, the intersection at Matthews Road was no longer a part of the targeted area at all.

  BY MARCH 5, Bobby Bailey’s cameras, the high-tech ones that automatically sent pictures to the investigators’ phones, had amassed quite a collection. In addition to the cat chasing the mouse and the ghostly hand, there was also an assortment of birds and wildlife. But he still hadn’t caught the arsonist, and this was getting to him on a psychological level. He was supposed to be the guy. The teacher. The fire mastermind. And he hadn’t gotten any further with the investigation than his students.

  One of Bailey’s advantages in this investigation had been that he wasn’t tied to it. Not personally—he had no family or friends on the shore—and not professionally, either. While the sheriff’s department and the state police all had to operate in a complicated bureaucracy and hierarchy, Bobby was the sole representative on loan from the fire marshal’s office. If he wanted to work odd hours, he could work odd hours. If he wanted to requisition extra equipment, it wasn’t hard for him to do that either. Best of all, if he wanted to move about anonymously, listen in on strangers’ conversations to see if they were talking about the arsons, he could do that without anyone realizing he was law enforcement. Eventually, Facebook began to ruin his advantage, though. Every time he took out his big white truck to examine a fire scene or for some other investigative purpose, the arson groups would immediately take note. They would go online and post the time and the location of his truck, which they’d dubbed the “White Elephant.” To mitigate this, Bailey acquired a farming license plate for the vehicle, to disguise its true purpose. It worked, but it added the complication that people now believed he was a farmer. During breakfasts at the Hardee’s, Bailey got used to being approached by laborers who heard he might be looking to hire.

  “I know you. You got a big chicken farm in Northhampton?” they asked.

  “Naw, I’m into small grains,” he said, having done his research into Northhampton farming.

  “Are you hiring? I
heard you pay good.”

  “Well, now, what things can you do?”

  Bailey, in jeans and a cotton shirt, hunched with purpose over his solitary biscuit breakfast, would dutifully interview laborers about their work experience and take down their phone numbers before sending them along. He felt bad about it, but he wasn’t sure what else to do. By the time he left Accomack, he figured he could have staffed a medium-sized soybean farm full of reliable workers.

  He took to driving the length of the county every night before bed. Starting in Exmore, just south of the Accomack border, where he was staying at the Hampton Inn, and all the way up to the Maryland border, looking and thinking about what he saw. He’d just stepped out of the shower after one of these jaunts on March 5, when he finally caught a break. He heard the sound of a doorbell. It was coming from his phone. More accurately, it was coming from Old Church Road, where he had placed a camera high in the branches of a spindly tree. Bailey glanced at the photograph. Not a squirrel. Not a cat. A shadowy human figure, near an abandoned house.

  “Son of a bitch,” Bailey yelled, pulling on his clothes even as he speed-dialed Neal. “It’s rolling, right now!” he said, grabbing his truck keys and hauling ass back up Route 13. In the truck, he got Sheriff Godwin on the radio, who was already en route himself, closing in on Church Road from the other direction. Was tonight the night? Were they finally going to catch him?

  “Sheriff, the camera’s in the tree!” Bailey screamed into the radio. “In the backyard, there’s a locust tree next to a shed. Get to the shed. GET UP IN THE TREE!”

  Pulling up to Old Church Road, sirens blazing, Godwin saw the tree Bailey was talking about. He also saw that it was dangerously close to being engulfed in flames from the burning house. Without hesitating, he shimmied up the tree like a spider monkey, thought the other deputies who had arrived, while Bobby Bailey, over the radio, screamed, “You got to get that camera!”

  “I can’t reach the thing!” Godwin yelled back. “It’s hot as hell over here!”

  “You got to!”

  He finally got it down, tossing it like a hot potato, until the investigators could sit down and watch it. When they did, they learned two things.

  First, investigators determined that the fire had been going for forty or fifty minutes before it was even called in to 911. They could see the tiny flame on the camera, staying tiny as minutes ticked by. That’s how slowly the flames had grown. For months, law enforcement had been breaking their necks to speed to fire sites, assuming every time that they’d just missed the arsonist driving away. But if the fires were growing that slowly, it was possible that the arsonist was already home in bed by the time the police even got to the scene. All of that neck-breaking speed had been for nothing.

  They discovered something else, too. For a little while, some of the investigators and profilers had been suspecting that the arsonist could in fact be two people. There were a couple of reasons why. First, at the site where they’d found shoe prints, there had appeared to be two different sets of footwear. Second, and more importantly, some of the properties hit were pretty far back in the woods. If a single arsonist had left a car in the road while he picked through the trees to light the fire, the abandoned car would have been noticed. There were just too many officers on the lookout for suspicious-looking vehicles. But if two people were working together, one could drop the other off in a matter of seconds and arrange for a pickup later. It had to be two people with a close bond and genuine trust in each other, or one of them would have talked. Godwin thought he might be looking for two brothers, or maybe a father and son.

  They looked at the photo. It was blurry and hard to tell much. The figure was facing away from the camera, and appeared to be wearing a hoodie, which made identification even more difficult. Sasquatch, Bailey thought, thinking of all those blurry photos people posted online that they claimed were of Bigfoot. The hooded thing that’s out there in the abyss but you can’t ever really see it.

  And there was another thing about the photo, something all of them noticed but had a hard time putting their fingers on. Something about the tilt of the figure as they’d captured it, midstep, or maybe about the figure’s shape. As Bailey remembered, he was the first to articulate what they were struggling to put into words.

  “I’ve seen enough ass to know,” Bailey said. “That’s a woman.”

  Some people thought that meant they should consider—at least, consider—the possibility that the arsonist could be female. Other people thought it was only proof that the camera hadn’t captured the arsonist after all—it had just snapped a picture of a lady cutting across the field on her way home. Either way, it was the first and only real break they would receive in the case.

  THEY BARELY HAD ANY TIME to think about what this clue meant.

  Seven days later, on March 12, a call came into the 911 Center at 9:27 p.m. “Hi, how you doing?” the caller said to the 911 dispatcher. “I’m over here at the old hotel, and I think you have a fire over here at this particular building. In the rear?”

  “So, you did see fire?” the dispatcher asked.

  “I see a lot of smoke pouring out of one of the buildings.”

  “Did you see anybody around?”

  “No ma’am, I didn’t,” the caller said. “I just happened—I live down a little bit on the block, and I smelled it.”

  While the caller gave his name and phone number in case they got disconnected, the dispatcher was already typing an address into her automated system, to send as many firemen as she could get toward Tasley Road. Whispering Pines was fully involved.

  CHAPTER 13

  ”LIKE HELL WAS COMING UP THROUGH THE GROUND”

  OVER IN TASLEY, the firehouse sprang into action. There was no need to wait for volunteers to get to the station—they had been sleeping there for months, in their tangles of sleeping bags and PlayStation controllers. By 9:28, one minute after the 911 call, they were already rolling the engine out of the bay. Bryan Applegate radioed in with their progress as they sped toward the sprawling, abandoned Whispering Pines resort complex, less than a mile away. “Engine eight-five responding,” Bryan said. “Engine eight-five par five.”

  “Flames are showing,” the dispatcher warned the crew. “All units responding—another caller advised structure fully involved.”

  “Eight-five on scene,” Bryan radioed in again a moment later as the engine pulled in front of the hotel. “I have command.”

  At his home three quarters of a mile away, Tasley chief Jeff Beall had just fallen asleep in his recliner when he heard the two-toned alert of his pager. The 911 dispatcher repeating the location of the fire turned out to be completely unnecessary; by the time Beall got to his driveway, he could already see the flames shooting into the sky. “Fuck,” he said.

  As he barreled down the road toward Whispering Pines, he tried to think of a particular word, a word that meant something was one’s destiny, an ultimate goal that one would eventually reach whether they wanted to or not. Nirvana, he thought. Later he would realize that it wasn’t quite the word he was looking for. Destiny, fate, Everest—all of those would have been more appropriate. But right then, as the firefighter drove to the biggest fire of his career, that was the phrase that kept coming to mind. This is my Nirvana.

  Whispering Pines was his company’s first due. They would be in charge, or more specifically, Beall would. He passed his own team’s fire engine on the way to the station, changed into his gear, hopped into a smaller truck, and drove himself to the scene. His heart dropped into his stomach. In front of him, more than half of the Whispering Pines outbuildings had all caught on fire. Darkness had turned to daylight. Embers the size of softballs were leaping off the buildings, toward the front lawns of the little bungalows across the street. Those yards were guarded by pine trees, and the roofs of the houses were covered in four inches of dry pine needles. It would take only one unlucky fireball before the whole neighborhood burst into flames.

  Beall scan
ned the other buildings, the ones that hadn’t yet caught fire. Normal protocol would have been to send firefighters into or around those buildings—the closest access point to the active flames. But they were hazardous, on the verge of collapsing even when their structural integrity hadn’t been threatened by the presence of nearby flames. Sending volunteers in there meant putting lives in certain danger.

  “Chief 8 to central,” he radioed in. “We’re going to be setting up a defensive system here.” He paused. “We’re obviously going to be here for a while. Give me two more tankers and have them stage north of the scene.”

  “Eleven and twelve, bring in your tankers,” the dispatcher radioed to Wachapreague and Painter, two stations from farther south in the county, which were on their way with support vehicles.

  “And go ahead and have electric respond up here,” Beall said, worried about the power lines that crossed Tasley Road.

  “We’re getting them up here,” dispatch said.

  “Might want to send two trucks. It’s going to be a big operation.”

  More tankers and engines were arriving on the scene. In addition to the ones from Painter and Wachapreague, there were ones from Onancock, Parksley, and Melfa. The neighbors across the street were all awake, standing in their yards and watching the embers pop out of the hotel’s second floor and lob toward their houses.

  Beall sent the Wachapreague volunteers, who had just pulled up in their pale yellow truck, across the road to douse the Tasley homes with water. “Have them get out their garden hoses,” he called out. It was mostly precautionary, and to give the terrified homeowners a sense of control, but there it was: the homeowners of Tasley were frantically pulling their garden hoses out of summer storage and using them to defend their own homes.