Embers (5 page)

“No. DPD ran his background and got nothing.”

Anya’s eyes roved over the EMT vehicles still at the scene and a charred, human-shaped form half covered with a blanket. Her brow knitted. “You said that one of our guys got hurt.”

“Yeah.” Marsh blew out his breath. “Rather than spring for security, the owners posed a mannequin in one of the second-floor windows. Tried to make it look like someone was there, working.” He gestured to the prone form. “First ladder company on the scene mistook it for a person, broke into the window to get him. Neuman got burned pulling the mannequin out. Kid got burned bad.” Anger twitched Marsh’s mouth. She knew Marsh worked part-time at the training academy and knew most of the young firefighters.

“I’m sorry, Captain.”

“Yeah, well, me, too.”

Anya nodded. “I’ll get to work.”

Anya turned her attention to the only witness. The security guard, a Hispanic man in his early twenties with buzzed hair, sat in the back of a police car. She noted he was an unarmed guard and that his brown-and-white uniform was new enough to still have the factory creases pressed in it.

Anya opened the door and slid into the seat beside him. “Hi. I’m Lieutenant Kalinczyk, DFD.”

The young man looked up at her. She noticed that he had a backpack under his arm. “Am I in trouble?”

Anya shook her head, taking out her notebook. “No. The back of the car is just the safest place right now, since we don’t know what crud might be in the air from that burning building. Your name, please?”

“John Sandoval.”

“John, why don’t you tell me about what happened?”

“I work over at the car lot, night security. It’s a sweet gig. I go to school during the day and there’s usually nothing happening on the lot. They’ve got a tall fence with razor wire, good alarm system. . . not sure why they need a guard. Not that I’m complaining. It’s good money.” His words fell all over each other. His eyes slid sheepishly to his backpack. “I was studying for an exam, when I noticed some light across the street.”

“What kind of light? Headlights? Flashlight?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it was either one of those. It was a kind of soft light. Yellow. I noticed it disappearing around the corner of the building.”

“It was on the outside of the building?”

“Yeah. In the alley. I didn’t think much of it until about an hour later, when I smelled smoke. I got up to check and saw the first floor was on fire. I called 911.” He spread his hands. Anya noticed that they were clean, no visible evidence of accelerant under his nails or on his palms. “That’s all I saw and what I told the cops.”

“Did you see anyone hanging around? Kids, cars, anything out of the ordinary?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t see anything. I was sitting in the security van in the south edge of the car lot. No traffic.”

“Any strange smells? Gas, chemicals?”

“No. Everything seemed pretty normal.” John’s face clouded. “Um. . . are you going to tell my boss I was studying on the job?”

“No.” Anya shook her head. She gave him a half smile as she capped her pen. “I wouldn’t want to mess up your sweet gig.”

John grinned in relief. “Thanks, ma’am. Um. . . can I go now? My exam’s at eight thirty.”

“Sure.” She handed him her card. “I’ll be in touch. Give me a call if you remember anything else.”

“Sure thing.” John swung his backpack over his shoulder and scrambled out of the patrol car.

Anya climbed out of the cruiser and fished her camera out of her equipment. She paced around the perimeter of the building, camera clicking. She took note of the front and back doors from which leaking fire hoses snaked. These heavy metal doors bore the scratches of the tools the firefighters had used to enter. The ladder was still extended up to the broken second-floor window that had held the mannequin, clearly sketching the scene where the young firefighter had gotten into trouble.

But how had the firebug gotten in? The extent of the structural damage suggested to Anya that the fire had been set from inside. Without fuel for the fire, a blaze set in the alley or against an exterior wall would have burned itself out in short order. Her practiced eye roved over the boarded-over windows on the lower level, the upper windows with the glass broken out by the heat and pressure of the fire. Her firebug hadn’t gotten in up there. He would have found a way in at ground level.

She frowned. Fires set for insurance purposes usually occurred at the roofline. Fires always traveled upward. Roof-set fires caused minimal damage to the actual contents, but made spectacular blazes that compromised the structure enough to ensure a payout and airtime on the evening news. A fire set at ground level or below was a fire set to burn everything inside. The person who set this one knew about fire.

Anya paced around the foundation and basement windows. Most were covered with steel grates still solid to the kick. The glass behind them was embedded with chicken wire and would have deterred most attempts to enter.

Still. This was an old building, a building that wasn’t patrolled, a building that had no working alarms. . . otherwise the fire department would have been summoned automatically by the alarm company, not called by a student security guard when the flames grew too large to miss from across the street. Maintenance was not at the forefront of the owner’s mind. There would have to be a way to get in.

There. She kicked away a section of metal bars. This window was hidden in the shadow of the alley, away from view of the street. The charred grate had been screwed into the brick at one time, but the rusted screws had loosened. Anya could imagine her firebug crouched here in anonymity, working on the grate until he could pry it free. He’d also put it back into place when he left, suggesting he hadn’t panicked, that he wanted to cover his tracks. He was careful and methodical. Not a good sign.

The glass beneath had been ripped out, the tatters of chicken wire cut cleanly. Anya photographed the edges carefully. Wire cutters or tin snips would have made short work of this. She made a mental note to get the evidence technicians here to check for prints.

But now, she wanted to see what the firebug saw, what he’d done when he’d set fire to the building. Anya circled back around to the main entrance, stepping over the tentacles of fire hoses.

She clicked on her flashlight and peered into the damp blackness. The first floor was a ruin. The weight of the second and third floors groaned heavily on the remaining walls, trailing charred beams through holes open all the way up to the ruined roof. Structures of this era used wood extensively, not as much steel as modern ones. Anya could see where the fire had raced along the scarred wooden floors, fed by decades of old varnish and debris. Pieces of drywall were cracked open on the floor like bits of eggshell, shattered by the weight of walls falling. Anya expected that those bits of wall had been built much later, as Marsh had said, to accommodate rented storage space. The debris strewn above and around her was a jumble of junk: broken file cabinets, soggy black cardboard boxes, melted trash bags trailing from the ceiling like ghosts. Pieces of waterlogged furniture were stacked in massive piles, standing in ashy puddles. Water dripped down on her from above, drops suspending filthy ash in a black rain. She saw no evidence of sprinklers overhead as she picked her way through the rubble. Anya expected that this space would simply need to be bulldozed. She could see nothing salvageable.

She swept her light before her, searching for the way into the basement. She found a stairwell door beside an elevator. The elevator was old-fashioned, with a cage door now disintegrating on hinges that had melted from the heat. Patterns of smoke and carbon swirled inside the shaft, and she imagined the flames roaring up from the basement. She looked up and saw the ruins of the car dangling somewhere on the second floor. This open elevator shaft would have been a perfect conductor for the oxygen that the fire needed to move throughout the building.

The stairwell door was blocked by a mass of blackened crates. She shoved them aside, feeling the surface of the ruined wood shatter in her gloved hands. The firebug likely hadn’t made it to the first floor; he’d done his work in the basement and left. If he’d taken the elevator back down, the car would have remained in the basement.

Why hadn’t the firebug been curious about what was in the warehouse? Wouldn’t he have wanted to take a look around, see if there was anything worth stealing? He had plenty of time and opportunity—no alarm, no one watching—but apparently no motivation for theft.

Anya opened the metal door and it grated against the warped doorframe. Her flashlight picked out steps above and below, ruined and disintegrating in the fire. There was nothing left above her that would hold the weight of a person. Below her, only a decorative metal handrail remained.

She snagged a short ladder from one of the trucks and dragged it through the maze of debris. She shoved it into the doorway, braced it on the doorframe, and clambered down into the mouth of the basement. Her last step landed her in a puddle that sloshed coldly around her ankles.

This deep in the building, she was insulated from the street noise. All she could hear was her breath hissing against the respirator, the tap of water working through the structure into the puddles underfoot, and an occasional worrisome creak from the ruins above.

The blackened walls confirmed her suspicion that the basement was the source of the blaze. Only metal items remained, covered by a thick film of carbon black. Everything else had been destroyed in the heat. Her flashlight illuminated a strange collection of mechanical parts. Some looked like pieces of great clocks, gears and twisted hands in melted cases. Others were identifiable pieces of vacuum cleaners, the snouts of hoses burned away, but the metal shells and handles remaining like the carapaces of giant black beetles. A massive boiler dominated the center of the room, reaching iron tentacles up to the ceiling. She opened the door and peered into its belly, poking at its contents. Just charcoal—and very old charcoal at that. This wasn’t her ignition source: the boiler had more serious scorch marks outside than in.

Arson scenes were notoriously difficult to investigate: so much evidence could be destroyed by attempts to put out the fire that any lead was a treasure. This scene was proving to be no different; she wondered what the water swirling around her feet obscured.

Her brow knitted. With this much heat, there should be some evidence of what had started the fire. There was no obvious place where the flames had originated, no Vshaped carbon plume where the fire would have begun and spread up a wall. All the timbers above her were equally blackened with carbon, surfaces cracked like alligator skin. She took an ice pick from her tool kit and randomly stabbed the beams, trying to see how far the char went. The char would be heaviest in the area where the blaze began. . . but the char went just as deeply into the beams in the center of the room as it did at the fringes. It was physically impossible for the fire to have begun everywhere at once.

Anya picked through the rubble on the floor, finding no remains of gas cans, no evidence of flammable substances. She lifted her respirator for a moment, smelled no natural gas, no residue of gasoline. From her bag, she pulled out a portable hydrocarbon detector. The palm-sized machine could sniff out virtually any common volatile compound in the air that could have been used as an accelerant. She swept the machine twice through the perimeter of the basement, and the machine frustratingly yielded no results.

She scraped pieces of the carbon film coating the walls and beams into a sample container for analysis. Perhaps the lab would be able to identify some chemical trace that might tell her what began this fire, but the etiology of it troubled her. It seemed to ignite evenly, rising up from the ground. Yet the witness had not described an explosion, and Anya could see no signs of the outward pressurization of an explosive blast: the metal pipes and the boiler were structurally intact, and the bricks remained mortared in place. It didn’t make sense. Fire just didn’t act this way. It behaved in a predictable manner, with one or more ignition points that spread fire unevenly, in response to obstacles, wind, and oxygen. There was logic behind it. But this place had been baked as inexplicably evenly as a cake in an oven.

She wished she could say that she hadn’t seen it before, but seeing it before hadn’t improved her understanding. She suspected this was the work of the serial arsonist she’d been tracking. This same peculiarly even heat had incinerated three other buildings in the past month. The blazes had all begun in a basement, all in unoccupied buildings within city limits. At all the other sites, the firebug had left a calling card. No evidence, but just one inscrutable clue. She shined her light on the murky water of the floor, then dropped on her hands and knees to sift through the rubble. The light bounced off the surface of the water, casting moving tongues of light on the ceiling. She pulled a piece of debris from the floor drain and the dingy water began to slowly sluice away from the concrete floor. She hoped it wasn’t here, but if it was, she needed to find it.

Anya paced out the size of the basement, estimating where the center lay. She paused, squinting, scraping sludge away in the receding water. Her breath caught in her throat as she cleared the ash to reveal a symbol etched in the concrete, right where she hoped it wouldn’t be, in the exact center of the floor.

A curving, serpentine shape, like a wave, had been dug into the concrete. The end of the shape was capped with a pair of curved horns. Anya took off her gloves, felt the mark. The edges were perfectly smooth; she could think of no tool that would not leave a mark in hardened concrete. Like a huge brand, the black mark stretched for three feet on the floor.

Her arsonist had been here. This was his work.

She could feel heat radiating from the mark through the fingertips of her gloves. Hesitantly, she stripped them off, let her fingers run over the sinuous line. It tingled when she touched it. . . not unlike the feeling she’d had in her hands when she touched the Coke machine inhabited by the little girl.