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“It’s okay. I’m not going in. I’ll see if he’s somewhere visible from the kitchen entry point. I need to talk to him.”
Cursing herself for letting him see the photo, Les stood, watching him uncertainly. Then she pulled out her phone and texted Brick.
Brick crouched next to the space heater. During the earlier part of the investigation, he’d had to remove pounds of debris from on top of it. When the firefighters had done the post-fire overhaul to verify it was completely out, they’d torn down portions of the wall behind it and the ceiling above it.
He could still see the cone pattern traces along the wall, though, where the smoke and fire had climbed from that ignition source. Most of the dresser was a crumbling hulk, particularly the side nearest the heater. Paper burned up fast, but the chemical residue around the heater had supported the falling magazine theory. Probably older editions of the slick-paged women’s magazines Jasmine had taken from the hair salon. Tracey said she liked to look through them.
So she’d come to tuck the kids in, and maybe her elbow had hit the stack of magazines, putting them close to the edge. They’d fallen later, after she walked out and headed to the kitchen. Or maybe while she was there. If she was angry, worked up or already high, she would have paid them little attention.
Like any crime, it was putting together a story, but it required a rigorous application of the scientific method. The aim wasn’t to prove and support a hypothesis. It was to do your best to disprove it. The hypothesis you couldn’t disprove was closest to the truth, though that could also simply mean he hadn’t found the evidence to invalidate that hypothesis. As the saying went, every fact was just a theory that hadn’t yet been disproven.
The plastic toys scattered over the floor had melted and warped. Any stuffed animals in the fire’s path would have been obliterated. Even so…
He shifted the space heater. He’d pulled samples from what was around and beneath it to get lab confirmation on the magazines. Now he used his tweezers to prod and poke through the debris. Looking for what he’d remembered seeing there.
There. The light from his head lamp reflected off a melted piece of plastic. He cleared the area around it before picking it up in the tweezers. The space heater had covered and protected it enough he could still identify it.
A plastic eye from a stuffed toy.
He’d found other things like it, which was why he’d left it. But now he was thinking about the bear Jasmine’s daughter held in the picture. Its eyes had been purple. Though soot coated it, he used the fingertip of his glove to see a glimmer of what could be that color.
He’d take it back to the lab to be sure, though his gut told him this was it. This was an eye from that bear.
He recalled the deputy’s notes from Tracey Sharone’s interview. Jasmine had the family photo tucked into the mirror at her salon station, and Tracey had gazed at it with tears in her eyes.
“Candy wouldn’t go to sleep without that bear. She’d clutch it like it was her own baby. Jasmine could come into her room in the middle of the night, and she’d be holding it as if it was the only thing she was sure of. Jasmine blamed herself for that, but said it helped her, every time she was tempted to fall off the wagon. She was sure she was going to make it this time. I believed it.”
Jasmine had kept the space heater across the room from the children, well out of range of anything falling from the bed. Maybe Candy had started to feel more secure about things, such that her hand had loosened on the bear in her sleep. Her mother, zoned out on drugs, had picked it up off of the floor and put the bear on top of the magazines after the child fell asleep.
Yet all the details were playing through his mind. We saw him leave that morning. Mom looked asleep, kids in back…
Tracey said Jasmine had moved from doing shampoos and sweeping up to getting her own station, doing coloring under Tracey’s supervision. She was gaining confidence. Had told Colin she wanted to be friends.
“She was considering a date with a guy who’d asked her, from one of her classes.”
He could have the eye tested for any accelerant traces, but they hadn’t found any anywhere else. It was why they were leaning toward an accident. That and the seemingly obvious negligence of a mother who’d been found with a syringe in her arm and traces of the drug paraphernalia around her.
A competent arsonist wouldn’t have needed an accelerant. The house had old wood floors with some termite rot beneath an even older carpet. All a good fire would have required was privacy and time—their rural location provided those—and a fast-burning ignition source. Grabbing up a pile of stuffed animals and tossing the magazines on top of an old space heater with few safety features would have qualified.
“Shit,” Brick muttered. No investigator wanted it to point toward one of their own. But all those details jumbled in his mind were sorting, revolving around a center point.
A point that turned ice-cold and speared him as he read Les’s text.
Brick swiftly put the plastic eye in an evidence bag and tucked it away. When he headed toward the exit point, he shouldered the short-handled shovel.
Colin stood silhouetted in the opening. Brick still had the face shield down, covering his expression. He had a damn good poker face, but it gave him more time to set it. Colin’s gaunt features, the tangled, sick emotions in his eyes, didn’t dissolve that cold feeling. It took it right to glacier ice.
No matter how much Brick wanted to be wrong, he wasn’t.
Colin stepped back so Brick could emerge and stand on the cracked and scorched concrete porch stoop. Les wasn’t far. She had her hips against the front bumper of Brick’s truck, and she looked worried. Though he didn’t know why, he was sure it wasn’t for the same reasons he was.
That was a good thing. As he stripped off the white coveralls, now stained black, he lifted a hand to her, the casual “give me a minute” sign. In the next few minutes, he had to do the best acting job of his life. With Les only a stone’s throw away, he had zero confusion about his priorities.
“Colin, man, you shouldn’t be here.” Removing the helmet and mask, he rumpled his hair. He injected compassion and firmness in his tone, a fellow firefighter concerned for the man’s wellbeing, and an arson investigator doing his job.
“Yeah, well, you know. I can’t seem to keep myself away.”
“You haven’t been inside, right? You know that messes with our investigation.”
