Fire Spirit (19 page)

‘Any guesses?' Ruth asked him.

Jack glanced at Detective Magruder. ‘Come on, boss, you know I don't go in for speculation.'

‘How about an educated hypothesis, then?'

‘OK . . . it doesn't look like an electrical fault or a fractured fuel-line or any mechanical failure like that. The fire started inside the passenger compartment of the bus, and I would estimate that it had already been burning for five or maybe ten minutes before the gas tank blew.'

Ruth climbed down and Detective Magruder hauled the tarpaulin back over the bus. ‘This was no accident,' he said. ‘I mean, what the hell were they doing here, in this bus, right in the middle of the goddamned park?'

‘Suicide pact?' Jack suggested. ‘Half-a-dozen old folks decided they wanted to go out with a bang?'

‘Well, I'm not laughing,' said Detective Magruder. ‘Right now, I'm willing to believe anything.'

A police department pick-up truck came jolting across the grass, carrying aluminum poles and sheets of folded PVC in the back. Police officers and firefighters unloaded it, and quickly began to erect a large white forensic tent around the bus, as well as laying aluminum stepping plates on the grass to preserve any footprints. The PVC flapped and rumbled in the squally wind.

Ruth stood back, holding on to Tyson's collar. He was growing increasingly restless and edgy, and he kept looking up at her and whining. ‘What is it, boy? What can you smell?'

He let out a throaty bark and Jack said, ‘Seems like he's gotten wind of something. Never seen him so jumpy.'

At first Ruth thought that Tyson might have picked up the scent of accelerant, carried on the wind from the burned-out bus. But he kept straining his head to the left, away from the bus, toward the trees. His tail was wagging furiously, and he was growling in the same way that he growled whenever strangers came up to the house.

Ruth strained her eyes. She couldn't see what might have excited his attention. It was dark beneath the trees, and dozens of people were ceaselessly passing to and fro between them like figures in a shadow-theater. But if the bus had been deliberately torched by an arsonist, maybe he had dropped his empty container of accelerant there, before making his escape, and it was the smell of that container that Tyson had picked up.

‘I'm just going to check this out,' Ruth told Jack, and let go of Tyson's collar. ‘Go on, boy! Go seek!'

Usually, when Tyson smelled accelerant, he headed for it like a bullet. But this time he stayed where he was, still growling, but seemingly reluctant to go any closer to the trees.

‘Come on, Tyson,' Ruth coaxed him. ‘Go seek. Show me what you can smell.'

Tyson took three or four paces forward, but then he stopped. He barked twice, and looked up at Ruth, and barked again. She had never heard him bark like that before.
My God, she thought, he's frightened. He's trying to tell me that he's scared.

She walked slowly toward the trees. The rain was rattling through the leaves, and behind her she could hear the clanking of aluminum couplings as the tent was put up. But underneath the trees it was strangely hushed, almost as if she had walked into a chapel and closed the door behind her.

She lifted her flashlight and looked around. There was no sign of any container that might have been used to hold accelerant. No jerry can, no soda bottle. But even if there was no container, maybe the arsonist had emptied out the last of his accelerant here, and if she could find out what kind of accelerant it was, it might help her to identify its source. The problem was, only Tyson was capable of locating it. She couldn't go around on her hands and knees, sniffing the ground herself.

‘Tyson!' she called, turning around, but Tyson was still standing where she had left him, his head lowered, his tail swinging. ‘Here, Tyson! Come here, boy! Now!'

Tyson came a little closer, but then he stopped again, and barked.

‘Tyson! Bad dog! Come here, boy! Now!'

She started to walk back toward him, but as she did so she became aware that a figure was standing between two trees, less than thirty feet to her right. She shone her flashlight toward it, and when she realized who it was, she actually shouted out in shock.

It was the Creepy Kid – the pale-faced boy in the faded black T-shirt and red jeans. The same boy she had seen on South McCann Street, but hadn't been able to catch on camera. The same boy who had been keeping watch outside her house, beside the basswood tree.

She shone her flashlight directly into his face. He raised one hand to shield his eyes, but he didn't turn away, and he didn't move.

‘Hey, you –
kid
!' she called out. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?' She tried to sound stern and authoritative, but her words came out much shriller than she had intended them to.

The boy didn't answer. He stayed where he was, between the trees, his hand half-covering his face. Ruth lowered her flashlight and he slowly lowered his hand, too.

‘Who are you?' she repeated. ‘What are you doing here? Have you been
stalking
me?'

Still the boy said nothing. Ruth walked up to him, until she was standing close enough to touch him. He looked up at her with an expression that Ruth could only think of as infinitely weary, tired of life. She had seen old people with that expression, but never a child. He was shivering slightly, too.

He was an odd-looking boy. His head was elongated, as if she were viewing a picture of him from a very acute angle. His hair was thick and dark and wiry, and it had been cut so badly that Ruth could only guess that his mother had done it for him, or he had tried to do it himself. His eyes were wide apart, like a flatfish, and his lips were unusually red, and bow-shaped – a girl's lips, rather than a boy's.

‘What's your name, kid?' Ruth asked him, much more gently this time.

The boy said nothing for almost twenty seconds, although the pupils of his eyes kept darting upward and to the left.

Ruth was just about to ask him again, when he suddenly said, in a croaky voice, ‘Don't you
get
it? Don't you
get
it? You hafta leave me
alone
.'

‘What? What do you mean?'

Again, there was a long pause and more eye-darting before the boy spoke again. ‘If you don't leave me alone, there's gonna be trouble.'

‘What are you talking about? What kind of trouble?'

‘If you don't leave me alone, I'm telling you, there'll be
helltapay
.'

Ruth heard Jack call out, ‘Boss! Boss? The tent's up and ready! You want to come inside and take a look?'

She didn't reply. Instead, she said to the boy, ‘How can you ask me to leave you alone when I'm not doing anything to you? I don't even know who you are. As far as I can make out, it's
you
who's been following
me
.'

‘I won't warn you again,' the boy told her. ‘Less'n you want something rilly
hawble
to happen.'

‘Boss!' Jack shouted.

Ruth turned and waved her flashlight. ‘Won't be a minute, Jack!'

She turned back, but the Creepy Kid was gone.

‘Hey!' she called out. ‘
Boy
, whatever your name is! Where are you? I need to talk to you!'

She shone her flashlight between the trees, but the boy had vanished. She listened, but all she could hear was the rain, and the blustering sound of the wind, and the shouts of the rescue workers as they set up floodlights inside the tent. Then a portable generator started throbbing and drowned out everything else. She waited for a few moments longer, and then she switched off her flashlight and walked back to rejoin Jack. Tyson trotted beside her, looking up at her as if he were trying to say sorry. She bent over and tugged at his ears to show him that he was forgiven. ‘It's OK, boy. I know that you were frightened. I was pretty frightened myself, to tell you the God's honest truth.'

They climbed up into the starkly-lit interior of the bus. The tent billowed all around them in the wind, and rain continued to lash against the PVC. They counted eight cadavers altogether – four of them sitting in seats and four of them lying on the floor – all burned beyond recognition. But Ruth's attention was immediately caught by the heaps of charred clothing that were strewn across the seats.

She picked up the shriveled remains of Mrs Petersen's pink corset. ‘Look at this. And look at this skirt. And these corduroy pants. And this bra. Before the fire started, they all undressed.'

Val Minelli held up some scorched tatters of blue cotton, with a lavender floral print on them. ‘When they were burned, they were wearing only these, by the look of it. Hospital gowns. This is a standard pattern from BMH Supplies. All the local hospitals use them.'

‘Now why the hell would they take off their clothes?' said Detective Magruder. ‘These are seniors, for Christ's sakes, seventy and eighty years old. Not your average orgy-goers.'

‘I can only guess that they were
forced
to,' said Val. She knelt down to focus her camera on a grinning, bristly-haired skull, which was still wearing a pair of spectacles, their lenses black with soot. Then she took a picture of another skull with a melted pink hearing-aid in its ear cavity. ‘The Lord alone knows why.'

Ruth walked slowly up and down the aisle. Jack had been right: the fire appeared to have started in the second row of seats, where they found a cadaver that was much more seriously burned than all of the rest, at least CGS level three. Even though the lower part of its skeleton had fallen apart, Val was confident from the shape of its pelvis that it was a woman. ‘Probably seventy-five to eighty years old, if this osteoporosis is anything to go by.'

Tyson trotted up and down the bus, too. It took him only seconds to sniff out the gasoline residue from the vehicle's own tank, but he could find no trace of any accelerants where the fire had first started. He looked up at Ruth as if he could guess what had happened here but couldn't explain it. Ruth said, ‘Come on, Tyson. You've done your stuff. If you can't find anything more, that's OK.'

She helped him to jump back down the stepladder and led him into a corner of the tent. She reached into the pocket of her squall and gave him a Grrriller to chew, and affectionately slapped his flanks. ‘Good dog,' she told him. ‘I'm proud of you.' But when she climbed back up into the bus he sat with the untouched treat at his feet, looking deeply disconsolate, as if he felt that he had let her down.

‘What's wrong with Tyson?' asked Jack, as he crawled along the floor of the bus on his hands and knees, taking samples of ash. ‘He looks kind of depressed. I mean, do dogs get depressed? I had a macaw once, and he used to get so depressed that he dropped off his perch.'

‘I was going to talk to you later,' said Ruth. She hesitated, and then she said, ‘I just saw that Creepy Kid again.'

Jack sat up on his heels. ‘You mean
here
?'

‘Yes, here. In the trees. Tyson must have picked up his scent, but for some reason he wouldn't go near him. I think he was frightened.'

‘
Frightened
? What of?'

‘I don't know. But you know how sensitive Tyson is. Anyhow, I went up to the kid myself and asked him what he was doing here.'

‘OK . . . what did he say?'

‘He said we should leave him alone, or else there'd be trouble.'

‘We should leave
him
alone? It's more like he's following
us
around.'

‘That's what I told him. But he said that if we didn't leave him alone, there'd be hell to pay. Those were his exact words. “There'll be hell to pay.”'

‘Hey – you need to tell Ron Magruder about this. Like, what's he doing, this kid? This is the second fire he's turned up at. That's not a very healthy pastime for anybody, let alone somebody of his age.'

‘I didn't tell you, but I've seen him outside my house a couple of times, too.'

Jack said, ‘Your own home? That
is
serious. Like I say, tell Ron about it. It may be nothing, but on the other hand, who knows? Just because he's a kid, that doesn't mean he's no kind of threat. Remember that old guy out at Studebaker Park last year? Got himself stabbed to death by an eight-year-old because he wouldn't throw the kid's baseball back.'

‘Don't worry. I'll tell Ron. But I don't want to get paranoid about it.'

Jack said, ‘Paranoid? You're kidding me. I'd be plenty paranoid, if I were you. We have three separate cases of people being lighted on fire without any apparent use of accelerant – and at two of those fires, this kid shows up. Like I told you before, there's something really weird going on here, and maybe this kid could be involved. You know what they say about firebugs. They always like to come along and relish what they've done.'

‘Well, maybe you're right, but I don't know. Whoever started these fires, they weren't amateurs. Let's talk about this later, OK? Right now, we have a major arson scene to process.'

‘Whatever you say, boss. You're the boss, boss. But you mark my words. That Creepy Kid of yours, you need to keep a weather eye on him. He's creepy.'

Jack had now reached the carbonized body of the woman next to the second row of seats. Taking care not to disturb any of her crusted flesh or her dark brown bones, he lowered his head and shone his flashlight under the seats next to her.

‘Boss,' he said, after a moment. ‘Take a look at this.'

Ruth knelt awkwardly down beside him. The woman's hand was as fleshless and crooked as a buzzard's claw, and several of her finger-bones had dropped off, as Ruth would have expected. But it wasn't her hand that Jack was pointing out to her; it was the scattered heap of pale gray powder underneath it, as if a small bag of gray cement had been dropped on the floor.