Valley of Ashes (8 page)

By the time I was ready for bed, I had my word count—and at least a hint of my mojo back.

T
his has voice in
spades
,” said McNally, suede cowboy boots slung across his desk as he read through my draft the next day. “A little over the top, but I’d sure as shit rather rein you in than crowbar style into the usual flat blather.”

He looked up at me, tapping the page ends square against his thighs. “Job’s yours if you want it.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You have little kids, right?”

I nodded. “Twin girls.”

He squinted at his watch. “Any way you might have a couple of hours free this afternoon?”

Parrish and India were already at a drop-in day care center, run out of the same building that hosted the mother-and-toddler meetings I’d blown off for the last three weeks.

The allowance check would cover at least a few more hours of babysitting there.

Thank you, Mom.

“I might be able to swing that,” I finally answered McNally. “What’ve you got in mind?”

“Another fire. My pal Benny’s meeting me over there in twenty minutes, and I need a wingman to write the sidebar.”

“About?”

“Q and A with the arson investigator.”

“What’s it pay?”

“Twenty bucks.”

“Babysitting’s gonna cost me more than that, McNally.”

“Thirty,” he said, extending his hand.

I shook it. “Can I borrow your phone?”

McNally’s old Land Cruiser was splotchy-primer gray, cabbage roses of rust blooming through at the doorsills.

The thing about SUVs in Boulder is that people actually
need
four-wheel drive, especially up in the canyons. I mean, navigating Fourmile or Sunshine or Lefthand in your Camry, September-to-June? Might as well RSVP “delighted” for the Donner Party, God help you.

“Sweet ride,” I said, hauling myself up into the passenger seat.

There was a V
ISUALIZE
W
HIRLED
P
EAS
bumper sticker across the cracked door of his glove compartment and serious guy-smell: wet dog and neat’s-foot oil, maybe a hint of roll-your-own Bugler tobacco.

“I need to get the lowdown from my old pal Benny,” said McNally, belting himself in beside me. “Probably take him for coffee. He’s been on-site since the wee darks this morning. Okay if I drop you off? Mimi Neff’s going to let you shadow her at the scene.”

“She’s the investigator?”

He cranked the ignition, nodding. “She’s good. Some of these guys, you’ll get a line of crap about how the forensic aspect is ‘more art than science,’ but Mimi’s the real deal. You’ll have to glove up and stay out of her way, though.”

“No problem,” I said, as he panzered out of the parking lot.

The car’s suspension was for shit and the engine was loud enough that McNally had to yell over it. “I’ll be going for the big picture from Benny—overview of the earlier fires, whether this one fits in as a serial thing. Your sidebar is tight focus on Mimi. Concrete stuff about her process. Give me a feel for how she decodes
this
scene, detail by detail.”

“I can do that,” I said, crossing my fingers and hiding them under my thigh.

Lucky for me, Mimi was low-key but chatty.

McNally parked in front of a big old brown-shingled Craftsman place, ten blocks and just as many tax brackets up Mapleton from Dean’s and my funky rental.

Mimi was probably Mom’s age, slim-hipped and tall with thick blond hair falling dead-straight to her shoulders. She spotted McNally and waved us forward from her perch on the building’s scorched-stone front porch.

There was a very expensive camera slung around her neck, its worn leather strap studded with little silver conchas.

“You
again
, Jon?” she called out, as we ducked under the crime-scene tape at the sidewalk’s edge.

Her diction was preppy “ladies sailing” New York, and she had a smoker’s laugh.

“You know me, Mimi,” McNally replied, “I always want to hang out with the cool kids.”

He introduced the two of us, then jogged around to the backyard once she’d told him where to find his pal Benny.

I climbed up three stairs to the porch. Somebody’d axed the front door open, and everything smelled of wet soot and char with a chemical undertone—sour and astringent. I was glad I had on my boots. The porch floor was littered with broken glass.

“We need to get into some haz-mat gear,” she said. “Never know what you’re going to run into at a scene.”

We went out to her truck, and she got out a pair of crinkly beige jumpsuits and booties, then two hoods for us to put on.

“What’s this stuff made of?” I asked, fingering the material.

“Nomex,” she said. “Like Tyvek, only it’s flame-retardant. Your hair and clothes will still stink, but there’ll be less crap to scrape off when you get home.”

I put everything on and Mimi opened the lid of what looked like a giant tackle box.

“Your hands look about the same size as mine,” she said. “You can wear my spares.”

She handed me two pairs of gloves—one thin, one chunky leather.

“Thin ones are liners. Those go on first,” she said, demonstrating.

Even with the liners, the leather gloves were tough to get on, pinching a little against the skin on the backs of my hands. “Tight fit.”

“You need ’em tight for finger dexterity. Picking stuff up. And palm dexterity for grip—liners help. Always a trade-off with the gloves, and when they fit right they’re a bitch to get on and off, but you never know what’s still going to be hot, inside.”

“How ’bout I just try not to touch anything?”

She nodded, then handed me a respirator.

I must’ve looked like I was balking at the idea of putting it on, although I had total respect for her expertise.

“I worked with a guy several years ago,” she said. “Battalion chief. He went into a house the day after a fire to check out a canister someone found in a back closet.”

“I have a feeling this is not going to be a really
happy
story.”

Mimi shook her head. “He got a lungful of whatever was in the thing. Came back outside to talk to the chief and passed out. Life support for a month, dialysis after that. Early retirement and he’s still waiting for a kidney transplant.”

I took the respirator. “Poor guy, that’s awful.”

“We call it off-gassing. A lot of times it’s worse after the fire’s out. More toxic.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“I’ve documented the structure’s exterior, so we’re good to go inside, all right?”

I nodded.

“I’ll need you to keep behind me,” she continued, “and I’m going to be moving pretty slowly—collecting samples and taking a lot of photographs.”

“Slow is fine. I’ll do my best to keep out of your way. But you can work a camera with these gloves on?”

“It’s not great, but I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“Just make sure you step pretty much where I do, all righty?” she continued. “The place looks pretty decent structurally or I wouldn’t let you in there, but there may still be hot spots. We don’t need either of us falling though to the basement.”

I shifted my weight and crunched some glass underfoot. “McNally told me the owners were away skiing?”

“Thank God. A neighbor called this in around three
A.M
. They would’ve been upstairs, asleep.”

I shivered.

“This fire moved fast and burned
hot
, too,” she said. “Flashover up front, here—very high temperatures.”

“How can you tell?”

She picked up a triangular blade of glass from the ground and handed it to me. “Hold that up to the light.”

The gloves were good, but it still felt weird to hold the piece of glass in my thickened fingers.

I turned toward the west, squinting as I raised the little shard up against the afternoon sun. It glistened, shot through with tiny spiderweb cracks that caught the yellowing light. “Crazing from the temperature?”

“You see that when superheated glass gets hit with cold water.”

“The fire hoses?”

“Exactly,” she said.

“But wouldn’t the water pressure have pushed the glass
inward
?”

“I talked to the crew. They’d just swept a hose across this façade once when the front windows blew. Lucky no one had gotten in closer than the sidewalk.”

“Jesus,” I said. “No kidding.”

“And look at that…”

I followed the trajectory of her pointed finger to the front door’s threshold.

“That sill’s aluminum,” she said. “It melted, so the fire was burning at twelve hundred twenty degrees Celsius at least—and the wood
under
it is charred.”

“So, what, the fire started in the basement?” I asked, squatting down beside her. “I mean, flames burn
up
, don’t they?”

She shook her head. “I’ve seen investigators claiming arson because of exactly that. They think the wood can only burn if there was accelerant running under the sill. Which is total horseshit, frankly.”

“What makes it char, then?”

“The heat of the aluminum itself.”

“Jesus.”

“But from the exterior damage, I can tell this front room is where the fire originated. The hallway door was closed…”

She motioned me over to the blackened window frames, pulling a Maglite from a front pocket and clicking it on. The room was on the eastern side of the house—and the sun was sinking westward, not to mention shaded by the deep wraparound porch.

Mimi moved the light’s beam across the far wall inside, across the remains of a sofa. Not like we had to worry about it reflecting off the window glass anymore.

She brought the beam to rest. “See that vee-mark scorched on the paint, above the couch?”

I peered in at the charred hulk of something, resting against the far wall.

Could’ve started out as a sofa, I guess, though at that point it looked more like something you’d find smoldering in a cornfield after a 747 crash.

She was right—the vee-scorch was easy to pick out, even by flashlight.

“Okay,” I said, “I see it.”

“You get those above objects that burned intensely.”

“Why the vee? What makes that shape?”

“Flames and hot gases angle outward when they hit a horizontal surface. The ceiling, a tabletop. Often indicates a point of origin, but there can be multiple marks like that throughout a structure.”

“If someone touched off different starter fires?”

“Not necessarily. You find them above pieces of furniture, anything substantial that burns hot.”

She lowered the beam to the burn-crater centered in what was left of the sofa’s seat cushions—which was nothing, basically. Springs stuck up out of the hole, tilted every which way like a bed of robotic ferns.

“The heat’s intensity turned that metal white,” she said.

“So this
isn’t
arson?”

“Might find out when we go inside,” she said. “If we’re lucky.”

She put her respirator on, then helped me with mine.

“You kind of have to yell when you’re wearing these,” she yelled.

“Okay,” I yelled back.

Very Darth Vader, the pair of us.

W
e’d stepped inside the front hallway of the burned house.

Mimi played her Maglite along the walls of the room we’d just been peering into from the porch. “Fire started here, probably
in
that sofa.”

I nodded.

“Hallway door and windows were shut,” she continued, “and it burned hot enough to hit flashover.”

“What?”

“FLASHOVER.” She yelled louder, and kept the volume up. “Superheated gases gather at the ceiling. The cloud thickens and starts banking down the walls, hotter and hotter as it gets closer to the floor. At a certain point, that cloud
becomes
fire. The whole room does.”

I caught most of that. It was weird, not seeing her lips move, but I was getting better at deciphering with every word she spoke.

“And that’s when the windows blew out?” I said.

“WHAT?”

I tried again, louder.

She nodded. “Blew the glass out, blew the door wide open, and now you’ve got a fireball with more oxygen suddenly available, so it roars into the hallway—
still
so hot it melts that aluminum sill.”