Point of Origin (24 page)

I HEATED UP my coffee and returned to my study. For a while, I sat in my ergonomically correct chair and went through Claire Rawley's photographs again and again. If her murder was premeditated, then why did it just so happen to occur while she was somewhere she was not supposed to be?

Even if Sparkes's enemies were to blame, wasn't it a bit too coincidental for them to strike when she just happened to have showed up, uninvited, at his house? Would even the coldest racist burn horses alive, just to punish their owner?

There were no answers, and I began going through the ATF cases again, scanning page after page as hours sped by and my vision went in and out of focus. There were church burnings, residential and business fires, and a series of bowling alleys with the point of origin always the same lane. Apartments and distilleries and chemical companies and refineries had blazed into annihilation, and in all instances, the causes were suspicious even if arson could not be proven.

As for homicides, they were more unusual and usually perpetrated by the relatively unskilled robber or spouse who did not understand that when an entire family disappears and bone fragments turn up in a pit where trash is burned in the back, the police most likely will be called. Also, people already dead don't breathe CO or have bullets in them that show up on X-ray. By ten o'clock that evening, I had, however, come across two deaths that held my attention. One had happened this past March, the other six months before that. The more recent case had occurred in Baltimore, the victim a twenty-five-year-old male named Austin Hart who was a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins when he died in a house fire not far off campus. He had been the only one home at the time because it was spring break.

According to the brief police narrative, the fire started on a Sunday evening and was fully involved by the time the fire department got there. Hart was so badly burned, he could be identified only by striking similarities of tooth root and trabecular alveolar bone points in antemortem and postmortem radiographs. The origin of fire was a bathroom on the first floor, and no electrical arcing, no accelerants were detected.

ATF had been involved in the case upon invitation by the Baltimore fire department. I found it interesting that Teun McGovern had been called in from Philadelphia to lend her expertise, and that after weeks of painstaking sifting through debris and interviewing witnesses and conducting examinations at ATF's Rockville labs, the evidence suggested the fire was incendiary, and the death, therefore, a homicide. But neither could be proven, and fire modeling could not begin to account for how such a fast-burning fire could have started in a tiny tile bathroom that had nothing in it but a porcelain sink and toilet, a window shade, and a tub enclosed in a plastic curtain.

The fire before that, in October, happened in Venice Beach, California, again at night, in an ocean front house within ten blocks of the legendary Muscle Beach gym. Marlene Farber was a twenty-three-year-old actress whose career consisted mainly of small parts on soap operas and sitcoms, with most of her income generated from television commercials. The details of the fire that burned her cedar shake house to the ground were just as sketchy and inexplicable as those of Austin Hart's.

When I read that the fire was believed to have started in the master bathroom of her spacious dwelling, adrenaline kicked in. The victim was so badly burned, she was reduced to white, calcinated fragments, and a comparison of antemortem and postmortem X-rays of her remains was made to a routine chest film taken two years before. She was identified, basically, by a rib. No accelerants were detected, nor was there any explanation of what in the bathroom could have ignited a blaze that had shot up eight feet to set fire to the second floor. A toilet, tub, sink, and countertop with cosmetics, of course, were not enough. Nor, according to the National Weather Service satellite, had lightning struck within a hundred miles of her address during the past forty-eight hours.

I was mulling over this with a glass of pinot noir when Marino called me at almost one A. M.

'You awake?' he asked.

'Does it matter?'

I had to smile, for he always asked that when he called at impolite hours.

'Sparkes owned four Mac tens with silencers that he supposedly bought for around sixteen hundred dollars apiece. He had a claymore mine he bought for eleven hundred, and an MP40 sub. And get this, ninety empty grenades.'

'I'm listening,' I said.

'Says he was into World War II shit and just collected it as he went along, like his kegs of bourbon, which came from a distillery in Kentucky that went kaput five years ago. The bourbon he gets nothing more than a slap on the hand, because in light of everything else, who gives a shit about that. As for the guns, all are registered and he's paid the taxes. So he's clean on those scores, but this cockeyed investigator in Warrenton has a notion that Sparkes's secret thing is selling arms to anti-Castro groups in South Florida.'

'Based on what?' I wanted to know.

'Shit, you got me, but the investigators in Warrenton are running after it like a dog chasing the postman. The theory is that the girl who burned up knew something, and Sparkes had no choice but to get rid of her, even if it meant torching everything he owned, including his horses.'

'If he were dealing arms,' I said impatiently, 'then he would have had a lot more than a couple old submachine guns and a bunch of empty grenades.'

'They're going after him, Doc. Because of who he is, it may take a while.'

'What about his missing Calico?'

'How the hell do you know about that?'

'A Calico is unaccounted for, am I correct?'

'That's what he says, but how do you . . .'

'He came to see me today.'

There was a long pause.

'What are you talking about?' he asked, and he was very confused. 'Came to see you where?'

'My house. Uninvited. He had photographs of Claire Rawley.'

Marino was silent so long this time I wondered if we had been disconnected.

'No offense,' he finally said. 'You sure you're not getting sucked in because of who . . .'

'No,' I cut him off.

'Well, could you tell anything from what you looked at?' He backed down.

'Only that his alleged former girlfriend was extraordinarily beautiful. The hair is consistent with the victim's, and the height and weight estimates. She wore a watch that sounds similar to the one I found and hasn't been seen by her roommates since the day before the fire. A start, but certainly not enough to go on.'

'And the only thing Wilmington P. D.'s been able to get from the university is that there is a Claire Rawley. She's been a student off and on but not since last fall.'

'Which would have been close to the time Sparkes broke up with her.'

'If what he said was true,' Marino pointed out.

'What about her parents?'

'The university's not telling us anything else about her. Typical. We got to get a court order. And you know how that goes. I'm thinking you could try to talk to the dean or someone, soften them up a little. People would rather deal with doctors than cops.'

'What about the owner of the Mercedes? I guess he still hasn't turned up?'

'Wilmington P. D.'s got his house under surveillance,' Marino answered. 'They've looked through windows, sniffed through the mail slot to see if anyone's decomposing in there. But so far, nothing. It's like he disappeared in thin air, and we don't have probable cause to bust in his door.'

'He's how old?'

'Forty-two. Brown hair and eyes, five-foot-eleven and weighs one-sixty.'

'Well, someone must know where he is or at least when he was seen last. You don't just walk away from a practice and not have anyone notice.'

'So far it's looking like he has. People have been driving up to his house for appointments. They haven't been called or nothing. He's a no-show. Neighbors haven't seen him or his car in at least a week. Nobody noticed him driving off, either with somebody or alone. Now apparently some old lady who lives next door spoke to him the morning of June fifth -- the Thursday before the fire. They was both picking up their newspapers at the same time, and waved and said good morning. According to her, he was in a hurry and not as friendly as usual. At the moment, that's all we got.'

'I wonder if Claire Rawley might have been his patient.'

'I just hope he's still alive,' Marino said.

'Yes,' I said with feeling. 'Me, too.'

A medical examiner is not an enforcement officer of the law, but an objective presenter of evidence, an intellectual detective whose witnesses are dead. But there were times when I did not care as much about statutes or definitions.

Justice was bigger than codes, especially when I believed that no one was listening to the facts. It was little more than intuition when I decided Sunday morning at breakfast to visit Hughey Dorr, the farrier who had shoed Sparkes's horses two days before the fire.

The bells of Grace Baptist and First Presbyterian churches tolled as I rinsed my coffee cup in the sink. I dug through my notes for the telephone number one of the ATF fire investigators had given to me. The farrier, which was a modern name for an old-world blacksmith, was not home when I called, but his wife was, and I introduced myself.

'He's in Crozier,' she said. 'Will be there all day at Red Feather Point. It's just off Lee Road, on the north side of the river. You can't miss it.'

I knew I could miss it easily. She was talking about an area of Virginia that was virtually nothing but horse farms, and quite frankly, most of them looked alike to me. I asked her to give me a few landmarks.

'Well, it's right across the river from the state penitentiary. Where the inmates work on the dairy farms, and all,' she added. 'So you probably know where that is.'

Unfortunately, I did. I had been there in the past when inmates hanged themselves in their cells or killed each other. I got a phone number and called the farm to make certain it was all right for me to come. As was the nature of privileged horse people, they did not seem the least bit interested in my business but told me I would find the farrier inside the barn, which was green. I went back to my bedroom to put on a tennis shirt, jeans, and lace-up boots, and called Marino.

'You can go with me, or I'm happy to do this on my own,' I told him.

A baseball game was playing loudly on his TV, and the phone clunked as he set it down somewhere. I could hear him breathing.

'Crap,' he said.

'I know,' I agreed. 'I'm tired, too.'

'Give me half an hour.'

'I'll pick you up to save you a little time,' I offered.

'Yeah, that will work.'

He lived south of the James in a neighborhood with wooded lots just off the strip-mall-strewn corridor called Midlothian Turnpike, where one could buy handguns or motorcycles or Bullet burgers, or indulge in a brushless carwash with or without wax. Marino's small aluminum-sided white house was on Ruthers Road, around the corner from Bon Air Cleaners and Ukrop's. He had a large American flag in his front yard and a chainlink fence around the back, and a carport for his camper.

Sunlight winked off strands of unlit Christmas lights that followed every line and angle of Marino's habitat. The multi-colored bulbs were tucked in shrubs and entwined in trees. There were thousands of them.

'I still don't think you should leave those lights up,' I said one more time when he opened the door.

'Yo. Then you take them down and put 'em back again come Thanksgiving,' he said as he always did. 'You got any idea how long that would take, especially when I keep adding to them every year?'

His obsession had reached the point where he had a separate fuse box for his Christmas decorations, which in full blaze included a Santa pulled by eight reindeer, and happy snowmen, candy canes, toys, and Elvis in the middle of the yard crooning carols through speakers. Marino's display had become so dazzling that its radiance could be seen for miles, and his residence had made it into Richmond's official Tacky Tour. It still bewildered me that someone so antisocial didn't mind endless lines of cars and limousines, and drunken people making jokes.

'I'm still trying to figure out what's gotten into you,' I said as he got into my car. 'Two years ago you would never do something like this. Then out of the blue, you turn your private residence into a carnival. I'm worried. Not to mention the threat of an electrical fire. I know I've given you my opinion before on this, but I feel strongly . . .'

'And maybe I feel strongly, too.'

He fastened his seat belt and got out a cigarette.

'How would you react if I started decorating my house like that and left lights hanging around all year round?'

'Same way I would if you bought an RV, put in an above-the-ground pool and started eating Bojangles biscuits every day. I'd think you lost your friggin' mind.'

'And you would be right,' I said.

'Look.'

He played with the unlit cigarette.

'Maybe I've reached a point in life where it's do it or lose it,' he said. 'The hell with what people think. I ain't going to live more than once, and shit, who knows how much longer I'm gonna be hanging around, anyway.'