Chapter 36
Caruso had Harris and DiCicco talk to the onlookers to see if anyone had seen anything, while he assigned McTavish and Chin to canvas the other houses in the neighbourhood. Wilson and Johansson left to prepare for court while Wallace squirrelled himself away in his van and worked on the coded message. With the fire almost totally extinguished, the emergency vehicles slowly dispersed. Janssen rode back to the lab in the ambulance with Nicole Fletcher, leaving Singleton at the site.
The fire inspector informed Caruso that he'd be doing a preliminary walkthrough of the burned building shortly. He curtly let Caruso know that it was something he'd be doing on his own. He'd give the Inspector the results of his findings, but no one from the team would be allowed inside the building.
"Can we take a look around the perimeter?" Pepper asked.
"Be my guest," the fire inspector replied. "Just don't step inside. It's not safe at this point."
"Go ahead," Caruso said, nodding to Pepper.
Pepper walked around to the back of the house, the acrid smell causing him to give it a wide berth initially. The sun was climbing as he walked slowly from one side of the yard to the other, looking for anything that might catch his eye. He moved closer and moved along the back of the burnt out building, where some residual smoke was still trailing out of the now soaked interior. He stopped and looked at the remains of the back wall, and then down at a flower bed next to the back door. He spotted something and moved closer, kneeling down to get a better look. His eyes zeroed in on a shoe imprint in the soil of the flower bed. He looked around at a number of other similar imprints nearby, but they were all larger and heavily treaded-the imprints of the firefighter's boots. This imprint was very different-smooth and tapered to a point.
"Inspector," Pepper called out as he stood up and motioned to Caruso.
The tall man walked over to Pepper, who pointed at the ground in front of him. "What have you got, Tee?"
Pepper squatted down next to the imprint, Caruso kneeling next to him. "Take a look at this. Besides the firefighters, did anybody else come back here since you arrived?"
"No," Caruso replied. "The fire guys wouldn't let anybody get close. This is good. This stands out like a sore thumb compared to the boots those guys are wearing. Where's Singleton?"
Pepper called the lab tech over. Once he saw the imprint, Singleton quickly returned to their van and came back with a container of supplies. As Caruso and Pepper stepped back, he took a number of photographs before taking a cast of the shoe imprint.
"Did you find something?" Wallace asked as he walked up to them.
"It looks like our guy may have left a shoe imprint when he torched the building," Pepper replied.
"Is it just the one?"
"Yeah, it looks like he stepped in the flower bed at just that one spot." The untended flower bed was covered with loose soil, weed-strewn grass covering the rest of the yard. "There are a number of boot prints from the fire guys, but this is definitely a different shoe. The indentations were just a few millimeters deep, but you could see that it was fresh."
"That's good."
"Kyle's just finishing with the cast."
"That reminds me, I finished solving the riddle." Wallace held up the piece of paper he'd been carrying in his hand.
"What's it say?"
Wallace looked down at the piece of paper he'd been working on. "Remember what the first two said. The first one said, I WILL HURT YOU, and the second was, A DAY WILL COME. Well, it looks like he's added to that. This one says, YOU WILL FEEL MY PAIN."
"Who do you think he means by the 'you'?" Pepper asked. "Is he referring to any girl he takes, or is he addressing it to someone specific."
"It almost reads like it's someone specific," Wallace said. "But I don't have a clue who that would be. He hasn't given us any more than what we see in these notes of his." Wallace looked down at the shoe imprint as Singleton stood up. "Maybe until now."
Singleton lifted out the cast he'd made and carefully set it in a container he'd brought with him. They walked back to the front of the house and watched as the fire inspector made his way through the crumbling wreckage that had once been a house. He emerged twenty minutes later and gave Caruso his report. If this place had been used recently, whatever had been in the basement, or anywhere else in the house, appeared to have been cleaned out prior to the place being torched. He nodded to the back corner of the house where Pepper had found the imprint. "There's evidence of an accelerant in that back corner, probably tossed in through a broken window," he said.
Pepper and Wallace took a close look all around the rest of the building from the outside, but other than the shoe imprint near the back door, there were no other footprints. There was no other evidence that would have helped them determine if this might have been the place where the girls had been killed.
They were about to leave the crime scene when Harris and DiCicco walked up. McTavish and Chin returned a minute or two later.
"Any luck?" Caruso asked.
"No. Nobody saw anything until the fire was well underway," Harris reported. "A lot of them just gathered to watch it burn. They told me nobody's lived in the house since an old lady passed away about eighteen months ago."
"Take a look at the ownership. See who's responsible for the property."
"And none of the neighbours have seen anyone come near this house in months," Chin said, motioning towards the gutted ruin. "One neighbour told us that he thinks the woman's son was the executor for the place. He said he thinks the guy lives in New York or Boston."
"We may have gotten a break," Caruso said. "Our guy may have left a shoe imprint in a flower bed near the backdoor."
"A shoe imprint?"
"Yes. Tee spotted it."
"But weren't there a lot of the firefighters back there?" McTavish asked. "I remember seeing a few of them in that area when we were over looking at the girl."
"Yes, but you can definitely tell the difference between their boots and this shoe."
"That's good," Chin said. "Did Forensics get it?"
"Yeah. Kyle took photographs and a cast of it. It will be interesting to see what they come up with. All right, let's get back to the office and see what we can find out about Nicole Fletcher."
Every Breath You Take Page 61
