White Fire (14 page)
The pale hand snaked out again, poured another tot; it was tossed off in turn. There was silence. Finally, Pendergast spoke. “I came here to rescue my protégée—your term, not mine—from your incompetency. My goal—my
only
goal—is to see Miss Swanson finish her work without further meddling from Mrs. Kermode or anyone else. And then I shall leave this perverse town and fly home to New York with all possible alacrity.”
“Yet you were up at the scene of the fire this morning. You showed your badge to get inside the tape.”
Pendergast waved away these words as one might brush off a fly.
“You were there. Why?”
“I saw the fire. I was ever so faintly intrigued.”
“You said there would be more. Why did you say that?”
Another casual wave-off.
“Damn it!
What made you say that?
”
No answer.
The chief rose. “You said there would be more murders. I looked into your background and I realized that you, of all people, would know. I’m telling you, if there are more—and you refuse to help—then those murders will be on your head. I swear to God.”
This was answered by a shrug.
“Don’t you shrug at me, you son of a bitch!” the chief shouted, losing his temper at last. “You saw what they did to that family. How can you just sit there, drinking your sherry?” He gripped the side of the table and leaned forward. “I have just one thing to say to you, Pendergast—fuck you, and thanks for nothing!”
At this, the smallest hint of a smile crossed the thin lips. “Now, that is more like it.”
“More like what?” Morris roared.
“An old friend of mine in the NYPD has a colorful expression that is appropriate for this situation. What was it again? Ah, yes.” Pendergast glanced up at the chief. “I will help you, but only on the condition that you—as I believe he would put it—
grow a pair.
”
C
hief Stanley Morris stared at the ruined house. The residual heat from the previous day’s fire was now gone and a light snow had fallen the night before, covering the scene of horror with a soft white blanket. Plastic tarps had been spread over the main areas of evidence, and now his men were carefully removing them and shaking off the snow in preparation for the walk-through. It was eight o’clock in the morning, sunny, and fifteen degrees above zero. At least there was no wind.
Nothing like this had ever happened to Morris, on either a personal or a professional level, and he steeled himself for the ordeal that lay ahead. He’d hardly slept the night before, and when he finally did a dreadful nightmare had immediately awakened him again. He felt like hell and still hadn’t been able to fully process the depravity and horror of the crime.
He took a deep breath and looked around. To his left stood Chivers, the fire specialist; to his right, the figure of Pendergast, in his vicuña overcoat, incongruously pulled over an electric-blue down jacket. Puffy mittens and a hideous wool hat completed the picture. The man was so pallid he looked like he’d already been stricken by hypothermia. And yet his eyes were very much alive, moving restlessly about the scene.
Morris cleared his throat and made an effort to project the image of a chief of police firmly in control. “Ready, gentlemen?”
“You bet,” said Chivers, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. He was clearly unhappy about the presence of the FBI agent.
Tough shit
, thought Morris. He was getting fed up with the disagreements, turf squabbles, and departmental infighting this case was generating.
Pendergast inclined his head.
The chief ducked under the tape, the others following. The fresh snow covered everything save where the tarps had been laid down, and those areas were now large dark squares in an otherwise white landscape. The M.E. had not yet removed the human remains. Forensic flags of various colors dotted the ruins, giving the scene an incongruously festive air. The stench of smoke, burnt electrical wiring, rubber, and plastic still hung heavy and foul.
Now Pendergast took the lead, moving lightly despite the bulky clothing. He darted forward, knelt, and with a small brush whisked away a patch of snow, examining the burnt slate floor. He did this at several apparently random spots as they continued moving through. At one point a glass tube made an appearance from under his coat, into which he put some microscopic sample with tweezers.
Chivers hung back, saying nothing, a frown of displeasure gathering on his thick face.
They finally reached the gruesome bathtub. Morris could hardly look at it. But Pendergast went right over and knelt beside it, bowing over it almost as if he were praying. Removing one glove, he poked around with his white fingers and the pair of long tweezers, putting more samples into tubes. At last he rose and they continued making their way through the ruined house.
They came to the burnt mattress with its loops of wire and bone fragments. Here Pendergast stopped again, gazing at it for the longest time. Morris began to shiver as the inactivity, cold, and a clammy sick feeling all began to penetrate. The agent removed a document from his coat and opened it, revealing a detailed plat of the house—where had he gotten that?—which he consulted at length before folding it up and putting it away. Then he knelt and examined with a magnifying glass the charred remains of the skeleton tied to the mattress, really just bone fragments, and various other things as well. Morris could feel the cold creeping deeper into his clothing. Chivers was becoming restless, moving back and forth and sometimes slapping his gloves together in an effort to keep warm—broadcasting through his body language that he considered this a waste of time.
Pendergast finally straightened up. “Shall we move on?”
“Great idea,” said Chivers.
They continued through the burnt landscape: the ghostly standing sticks covered with hoarfrost, the scorched walls, the heaps of frozen ashes, the glistering puddles of glass and metal. Now the corpse of the dog could be seen to one side, along with the two parallel, crumbled piles of ash and bone representing Jenny Baker’s mother and father.
Morris had to look away. It was too much.
Pendergast knelt and examined everything with the utmost care, taking more samples, maintaining his silence. He seemed particularly interested in the charcoaled fragments of the dog, carefully probing with his long-stemmed tweezers and a tool that looked like a dental pick. They moved into the ruins of the garage, where the burnt and fused hulks of three cars rested. The FBI agent gave them a cursory look.
And then they were done. Beyond the perimeter tape, Pendergast turned. His eyes startled Morris—they glittered so sharply in the bright winter sun.
“It is as I feared,” he said.
Morris waited for more but was greeted only with silence.
“Well,” said Chivers loudly, “this just reinforces what I reported to you earlier, Stanley. All the evidence points toward a botched robbery with at least two perps, maybe more. With a possible sex-crime component.”
“Agent Pendergast?” Morris finally said.
“I’m sorry to say that an accurate reconstruction of the sequence of the crime may be impossible. So much information was taken by the fire. But I am able to salvage a few salient details, if you wish to hear them.”
“I do. Please.”
“There was a single perpetrator. He entered through an unlocked back door. Three members of the family were at home, all upstairs and probably sleeping. The perpetrator immediately killed the dog who came to investigate. Then he—or she—ascended the front staircase to the second floor, surprised a juvenile female in her bedroom, incapacitated and gagged her before she could make significant noise, and wired her to the bed, still alive. He may have been on his way to the parents’ room when the second juvenile female arrived home.”
He turned to Morris. “This would be your intern, Jenny. She came in through the garage and went upstairs. There she was ambushed by the perpetrator, incapacitated, gagged, and placed in the bathtub. This was accomplished with utmost efficiency, but nevertheless this second assault appears to have awakened the parents. There was a short fight, which began upstairs and ended downstairs. I suspect one of the parents was killed there, on the spot, while the other was dragged down later. They may have been beaten.”
“How can you know all this?” said Chivers. “This is sheer speculation!”
Pendergast went on, ignoring this outburst. “The perpetrator returned upstairs, doused both juvenile victims with gasoline, and set them on fire. He then made a—by necessity—rapid exit from the premises, dragging the other parent down the stairs and spreading additional accelerant on his way out. He left on foot—not by car. A pity the snowy woods around the house were trampled by neighbors and firefighters.”
“No way,” said Chivers, shaking his head. “No way can you draw all those conclusions from the information we have—and the conclusions you’ve drawn, well, with all due respect, most of them are wrong.”
“I must say I share Mr. Chivers’s, ah, skepticism as to how you can learn all this from a mere walk-through,” said Morris.
Pendergast replied in the tone of someone explaining to a child. “It’s the only logical sequence that fits the facts. And the facts are these: When Jenny Baker returned home, the perpetrator was already in the house. She came in through the garage—the boyfriend confirmed that—and if the parents had already been killed she would have seen their bodies at the back door. She didn’t see the dog’s body because it was behind a counter that once existed, here.” He pulled out the plat.
“But how do you know he was already upstairs when Jenny arrived home?”
“Because Jenny was ambushed upstairs.”
“She could have been attacked in the garage and forced upstairs.”
“If she was the first victim, and was attacked in the garage, the dog would be alive and would have barked, awakening the parents. No—the very first victim was the dog, killed at the back door, probably with a blow to the head by something like a baseball bat.”
“A
bat
?” Chivers said in disbelief. “How do you know he didn’t use a knife? Or gun?”
“The neighbors heard no shots. Have you ever tried to kill a German shepherd with a knife? And finally, the dog’s burnt cranium showed green-bone fracture patterns.” He paused. “One needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to analyze a few simple details like these, Mr. Chivers.”
Chivers fell silent.
“Therefore, when Jenny arrived home, the perpetrator was already upstairs and had already incapacitated the sister, as he would not have been able to subdue two at once.”
“Unless there were two perps,” said Chivers.
“Go on,” Morris told Pendergast.
“Using the bat or some other method, he immediately subdued Jenny.”
“Which is exactly why there must have been two perps!” said Chivers. “It was a robbery gone bad. They broke into the house, but things spiraled out of control before they could commence the robbery. Happens all the time.”
“No. The sequence was well planned and the perpetrator had everything under control at all times. The psychological hallmarks of the crime—the savagery of it—suggests a lone perpetrator who had a motive other than robbery.”
Chivers rolled his eyes at Morris.
“And as for your theory about a burglary gone wrong, the perpetrator was well aware there were at least three people at home. An organized burglar doesn’t break into an occupied house.”
“Unless there are a couple of girls they might want to…” Chivers swallowed, glanced at the chief.
“The girls were not molested. If he intended to rape the girls he would have removed the threat of the parents by killing them first. And a rape fits neither the time line nor the sequence. I might point out that the elapsed time between the boyfriend dropping Jenny off and the fire appearing on the mountain was ten minutes or less.”
“And how do you know one of the parents was killed downstairs and the other dragged down later?”
“That is, admittedly, an assumption. But it is the only one that matches the evidence. We are dealing with a lone killer, and it seems unlikely he would have fought both parents, downstairs, simultaneously. This arranging of the parents is another staged element of the attack—a grisly detail, intended to sow additional fear and unrest.”
Chivers shook his head in disgust and disbelief.
“So.” The chief could hardly bring himself to ask the question he knew he had to. “What makes you think there might be more killings like this?”
“This was a crime of hatred, sadism, and brutality, committed by a person who, while probably insane, was still in possession of his faculties. Fire is often the weapon of choice for the insane.”
“A revenge killing?”
“Doubtful. The Baker family was not well known in Roaring Fork. You yourself told me they appear to have no enemies in town and only spend a couple of weeks here a year. So if not revenge, what is the motive? Hard to say definitively, but it may not be one directed at this family specifically—but rather,
at what this family represents
.”
A silence. “And what does this family represent?” Morris asked.
“Perhaps what this entire town represents.”
“Which is?”
Pendergast paused, and then said: “Money.”
C
orrie entered the history section of the Roaring Fork Library. The beautiful, wood-paneled space was once again empty save for Ted Roman, who was reading a book at his desk. He looked up as Corrie entered, his lean face lighting up.
“Well, well!” he said, rising. “Roaring Fork’s most infamous girl returns in triumph!”
“Jeez. What kind of a welcome is that?”
“A sincere one. I mean it. You and that FBI agent really nailed Kermode. God, it was one of the best things I’ve ever seen in this town.”
“You were at the town meeting?”
“Sure as hell was. It’s about time someone took down that…well, I hope you won’t be offended if I use the word, but here goes: that
bitch
.”
“No offense here.”
“And not only did the man in black cut Kermode off at the knees, but he took on that cozy little triumvirate, her, the police chief, and the mayor. Your friend just about had the three of them soiling their drawers—Montebello, too!” He almost cackled with glee, and his laugh was so infectious Corrie had to join in.