At the Scene of the Crime (24 page)

Janice Crandel tried to say something then, but her broken words turned into a sob. Leopold went on, keeping his voice soft but authoritative, the
way he’d done so many times in interrogation sessions over the years. “I thought about this and suddenly it seemed to link up with the two break-ins at the warehouse. I asked myself what else had happened during those two days. And then I remembered. Your husband Sam had stayed home sick, unable to work because of a stomach bug. A terrible thought crossed my mind. Had the arson been postponed because its main motive was to kill Sam Crandel? Was there any possible verification of this? Yes, there was—the phone call that was clocked in possibly two minutes before the firebomb was timed to go off. I remembered Marshal Pedley showing me a bit of rubber from a balloon tied to an overhead pipe. Gasoline-filled balloons were a favorite technique used by Parker Oslo, and the fireball they caused was a deadly threat to firefighters. Your husband, Janice, was a nozzle man, the first into many burning buildings with his hose.”

“How could I have known about arsonists and fire balloons?” she asked, pleading for a way out that was not to come.

“Because Sam told you about them. You said yourself that Sam told you everything about his job, about the tragedies, the children, the arsonists. He was with the department twenty years ago when Oslo was operating. He might even have told you the man was on parole now.”

“Why me? Maybe someone else wanted to kill him.”

Leopold touched another finger. “Third, at the crime scene Marshal Pedley pointed out the remains of one of the burst balloons. He reached up some six feet above the floor and took it down, but I noticed a charred foot-stool just below it. It appeared the arsonist might have used it to position the balloons, implying it was a short person. You’re short, Janice, as you admitted yourself. So we have a short arsonist who could have known about Oslo’s technique and also that Sam wouldn’t be at work Monday night.”

“Why would I go to all that trouble if I wanted to be rid of him?”

“If he was killed in the line of duty, you’d receive the death benefits. They could be substantial.”

Her voice had hardened now. She’d decided to deny everything. “Go
ahead, do your damnedest! I’ll have the news media on my side. I’m the brave widow of a dead firefighter, remember?”

That was when Connie spoke. “You realize we’re taping this interview. You were read your rights. Now I’m going to require a DNA or blood sample from you.”

Janice Crandel’s face froze. “For what?”

“When the arsonist returned to the warehouse Monday night to remove the enclosure over the window and get back inside, there was a drop of blood left on the plywood. I noticed the bandage on your finger and we just want to see if your blood matches it.”

As Leopold told Molly later, that was the end of the story.

PAMELA KINNEY HEARD THE NOISE IN HER SLEEP
,
giggles, followed by the crunching of leaves. Later, she smelled smoke, faint and acrid, and realized that her neighbors were burning garbage in their fireplace again. She got up long enough to close the window and silently curse them. She hated it when they did illegal burning.

She forgot about it until the next morning. She stepped out her back door into the crisp fall morning and found charred remains of some fabric in the middle of her driveway. There’d been no wind during the night, fortunately, or all the evidence would have been gone.

Instead, there was the pile of burned fabric and a scorch on the pavement. There were even footprints outlined in leaves.

She noted all of that with a professional’s detachment—she’d eyeballed more than a thousand crime scenes—before the fabric itself caught her attention. Then the pain was sudden and swift, right above her heart, echoing through the breastbone and down her back.

Anyone else would have thought she was having a heart attack. But she wasn’t, and she knew it. She’d had this feeling twice before, first when the officers came to her house and then when the chaplain handed her the folded flag that just a moment before had draped over her daughter’s coffin.

Pamela had clung to that flag like she’d seen so many other military mothers do, and she suspected she had looked as lost as they had. Then, when she stood, that pain ran through her, dropping her back to the chair.

Her sons took her arms, and when she mentioned the pain, they dragged her to the emergency room. She had been late for her own daughter’s wake, her chest sticky with adhesive from the cardiac machines and her hair smelling faintly of disinfectant.

And the feeling came back now, as she stared at the massacre before her. The flag, Jenny’s flag, had been ripped from the front door and burned in her driveway.

Pamela made herself breathe. Then she rubbed that spot above her left breast, felt the pain spread throughout her body, burning her eyes and forming a lump in the back of her throat. But she held the tears back. She wouldn’t give whoever had done this awful thing the satisfaction.

Finally she reached inside her purse for her cell, called Neil—she had trouble thinking of him as the sheriff after all the years she’d known him—and then she protected the scene until he arrived.

It only took him five minutes. Halleysburg was still a small town, no matter how many Portlanders sprawled into the community, willing to make the one and a half hour each-way daily commute to the city’s edge. Pamela had told the dispatch to make sure that Neil parked across the street so that any wind from his vehicle wouldn’t move the leaves.

And she had asked for a second scene-of-the-crime kit because she didn’t want to go inside and get hers. She didn’t want to risk losing the crime scene with a moment of inattention.

Neil pulled onto the street. His car was an unwieldy Olds with a soupedup engine and a reinforced frame. It could take a lot of punishment, and often did. As a result, the paint covering the car’s sides was fresh and clean, while the hood, roof, and trunk looked like they were covered in dirt.

The sheriff was the same. Neil Karlyn was in his late fifties, balding, with a face that had seen too much sun. But his uniform was always new, always pristine, and never wrinkled. He’d been that way since college, a precise man with precise opinions about a difficult world.

He got out of the Olds and did not reach around back for a scene-of-the-crime kit. Annoyance threaded through her.

“Where’s my kit?” she asked.

“Pam,” he said gently, “it’s a low-level property crime. It’ll never go to trial and you know it.”

“It’s arson with malicious intent,” she snapped. “That’s a felony.”

He sighed and studied her for a moment. He clearly recognized her tone. She’d used it often enough on him when they were students at the University of Oregon and when they were lovers on different sides of the political fence, constantly on the verge of splitting up.

When they finally did, it had taken years for them to settle into a friendship. But settle they did. They hardly even fought any more.

He went back to the car, opened the back door and removed the kit she’d requested. She crossed her arms, waiting as he walked toward her. He stopped at the edge of the curb, holding the kit tight against his leg.

“Even if you somehow get the DA to agree that this is a cockamamie felony, you know that processing the scene yourself taints the evidence.”

“Why do you care so much?” she asked, hearing an edge in her voice that usually wasn’t there. The challenge, unspoken:
It’s my daughter’s flag. It’s like murdering her all over again.

To his credit, Neil didn’t try to soothe her with a platitude.

“It’s the eighth flag this morning,” he said. “It’s not personal, Pam.”

Her chin jutted out. “It is to me.”

Neil looked down, his cheek moving. He was clenching his jaw, trying not to speak.

He didn’t have to.

Somewhere in her pile of college paraphernalia was a badly framed newspaper clipping that had once been the front page of the Portland
Oregonian
. She’d framed the clipping so that a photo dominated, a photo of a much-younger Pamela with long hair and a tie-dye T-shirt, front and center in a group of students, holding an American flag by a stick, watching as it burned.

God, she could still remember how that felt, to hold a flag up so that the wind caught it. How fabric had its own acrid odor, and how frightened she’d been at the desecration, even though she’d been the one to set the flag on fire.

She had been protesting the Vietnam War. It was that photo and the resulting brouhaha it caused, both on campus and in the State of Oregon
itself, that had led to the final breakup with Neil.

He couldn’t believe what she had done. Sometimes she couldn’t either. But she felt her country was worth fighting for. So had he. He joined up not too many months later.

To his credit, Neil didn’t say anything about her own flag burning as he handed her the kit. Instead he watched as she took photographs of the scene, scooped up the charred bits of fabric, and made a sketch of the footprint she found in the leaves.

She found another print in the yard, and that one she made a cast of. Then she dusted her front door for prints, trying not to cry as she did so.

“A flag is a flag is a flag,” she used to say.

Until it draped over her daughter’s coffin.

Until it became all she had left.

 

“I called the local VFW, Mom,” her son Stephen said over dinner that night. Stephen was her oldest and had been her support for thirty years, since the day his father walked out, never to return. “They’re bringing another flag.”

She stirred the mashed potatoes into the creamed corn on her plate. The meal had come from KFC. Her sons had brought a bucket with her favorite sides and told her not to argue with them about the fast food meal. She wasn’t arguing, but she didn’t have much of an appetite.

They sat in the dining room, at the table that had once held four of them. Pamela had slid the fake rose centerpiece in front of Jenny’s place, so she wouldn’t have to think about her daughter.

It wasn’t working.

“Another flag isn’t the same, dumbass,” Travis said. At thirty, he was the youngest, unmarried, still finding himself, a phrase she had come to hate.

The hell of it was, Travis was right. It wasn’t the same. That flag those people had burned, that flag had comforted her. She had clung to it on the worst afternoon of her life, her fingers holding it tight, even at the emergency room when the doctors wanted to pry it from her hands.

It had taken almost a week for her to let it go. Stephen had come over,
Stephen and his pretty wife Elaine and their teenage daughters, Mandy and Liv. They’d brought KFC then, too, and talked about everything but the war.

Until it came time to take the flag away from Pamela.

Stephen had talked to her like she was a five-year-old who wanted to take her blankie to kindergarten. In the end, she’d handed the flag over. He’d been the one to find the old flagpole, the one she’d taken down when she bought the house, and he’d been the one to place the pole in the hanger outside the front door.

“The VFW says they replace flags all the time,” Stephen said to his brother.

“Because some idiot burned one?” Travis asked.

Pamela’s cheeks flushed.

“Because people lose them. Or moths eat them. Or sometimes, they get stolen,” Stephen said.

“But not burned,” Travis persisted.

Pamela swallowed. Travis didn’t remember the newspaper photo, but Stephen probably did. It had hung over the console stereo she had gotten when her mother died, and it had been a teacher—Neil’s first grade teacher? Pamela couldn’t remember—who had seen it at a party and asked if she really wanted her children to see that before they could understand what it meant.

“I don’t want another one,” Pamela said.

“Mom,” Stephen said in his most reasonable voice.

She shook her head. “It’s been a year. I need to move on.”

“You don’t move on from that kind of loss,” Travis said, and she wondered how he knew. He didn’t have children.

Then she looked at him, a large broad-shouldered man with tears in his eyes, and remembered that Jenny had been the one who walked him to school, who bathed him at night, who usually tucked him in. Jenny had done all that because Stephen at thirteen was already working to help his mom make ends meet, and Pamela was working two jobs herself, as well as
attending community college to get her degree in forensic science and criminology. A pseudoscience degree, one of her almost-boyfriends had said. But it wasn’t. She used science every day. She needed science like she needed air.

Like she needed to find out who had destroyed her daughter’s flag.

“You don’t move on,” Pamela said.

Her boys watched her. Sometimes she could see the babies they had been in the lines of their mouths and the shape of their eyes. She still marveled at the way they had grown into men, large men who could carry her the way she used to carry them.

“But,” she added, “you don’t have to dwell on it, every moment of every day.”

And yet she was dwelling. She couldn’t stop. She never told her sons or anyone else, not even Neil, who had become a closer friend in the year since Jenny had died. Neil, a widower now, a man who understood death the way that Pamela did. Neil, whose grandson had enlisted after 9/11 and had somehow made it back.

She was dwelling and there was only one way to stop. She had to use science to solve this. She couldn’t think about it emotionally. She had to think about it clinically.

She had her evidence and she needed even more.

The next morning, the local paper ran an article on the burnings, and listed the addresses in the police log section. So Pamela visited the other crime scenes with her kit and her camera, identifying herself as an employee of the state crime lab.