Through gaping wounds of windows and doors I could see the sooty pit coiling with thousands of flat steel whiskey-barrel hoops that drifted in black water. I imagined reserve bourbon exploding from burning white oak kegs and pouring through the door in a river of fire downhill to the stables that had housed Kenneth Sparkes’s precious horses. While investigators began the task of determining where the fire had started and hopefully its cause, I stepped through puddles and climbed atop anything that looked sturdy enough to bear my weight.
Nails were everywhere, and with a Buckman tool that had been a gift from Lucy, I pulled one of them out of my left boot. I stopped inside the perfect stone rectangle of a doorway in the front of the former mansion. For minutes I stood and looked. Unlike many investigators, I did not take photographs with every inch I moved closer into a crime scene. I had learned to bide my time and let my eyes go first. As I quietly scanned around me, I was struck by many things.
The front of the house, unsurprisingly, would have afforded the most spectacular view. From upper stories no longer there, one should have seen trees and gentle hills, and the various activities of the horses that the owner bought, traded, bred, and sold. It was believed that Kenneth Sparkes had been home the night of the fire, on June seventh, and I remembered that the weather had been clear and a little warmer, with a light wind and full moon.
I surveyed the empty shell of what must have been a mansion, looking at soggy couch parts, metal, glass, the melted guts of televisions and appliances. There were hundreds of partially burned books, and paintings, mattresses, and furniture. All had fallen from upper stories and settled into soupy layers in the basement. As I imagined Sparkes in the evening when the fire alarm went off, I imagined him in the living room with its view, or in the kitchen, perhaps cooking. Yet the more I explored where he might have been, the less I understood why he had not escaped, unless he were incapacitated by alcohol or drugs, or had tried to put out the fire until carbon monoxide had overcome him.
Lucy and comrades were on the other side of the pit, prying open an electrical box that heat and water had caused to rust instantly.
‘Good luck,’ McGovern’s voice carried as she waded closer to them. ‘That’s not going to be what started this one.’
She kept talking as she slung a blackened frame of an ironing board to one side. The iron and what was left of its cord followed. She kicked more barrel hoops out of the way as if she were mad at whoever had caused this mess.
‘You notice the windows?’ she went on to them. ‘The broken glass is on the inside. Makes you think someone broke in?’
‘Not necessarily.’ It was Lucy who answered as she squatted to look. ‘You get thermal impact to the inside of the glass and it heats up and expands more and faster than the exterior, causing uneven stress and heat cracks, which are distinctively different from mechanical breakage.’
She handed a jagged piece of broken glass to McGovern, her supervisor.
‘Smoke goes out of the house,’ Lucy went on, ‘and the atmosphere comes in. Equalization of pressure. It doesn’t mean someone broke in.’
‘You get a B-plus,’ McGovern said to her.
‘No way. I get an A.’
Several of the agents laughed.
‘But I have to agree with Lucy,’ one of them said. ‘So far I’m not seeing any sign that someone broke in.’
Their team leader continued turning our disaster site into a classroom for her soon-to-be Certificated Fire Investigators, or CFIs.
‘Remember we talked about smoke coming through brick?’ she continued, pointing up to areas of stone along the roofline that looked as if they had been scrubbed with steel brushes. ‘Or is that erosion from blasts of water?’
‘No, the mortar’s partially eaten away. That’s from smoke.’
‘That’s right. From smoke pushing through the joints.’ McGovern was matter-of-fact. ‘Fire establishes its own vent paths. And low around the walls here, here and here’ — she pointed — ‘the stone is burned clean of all incomplete combustion or soot. We’ve got melted glass and melted copper pipes.’