‘It started low, on the first floor,’ Lucy said. ‘The main living area.’
‘Looks like that to me.’
‘And flames went up as high as ten feet to engage the second floor and roof.’
‘Which would take a pretty decent fuel load.’
‘Accelerants. But forget finding a pour pattern in this shit.’
‘Don’t forget anything,’ McGovern told her team. ‘And we don’t know if an accelerant was necessary because we don’t know what kind of fuel load was on that floor.’
They were splashing and working as they talked, and all around was the constant sound of dripping water and rumbling of the pumps. I got interested in box springs caught in my rake and squatted to pull out rocks and charred wood with my hands. One always had to consider that a fire victim might have died in bed, and I peered up at what once had been the upper floors. I continued excavating, producing nothing remotely human, only the sodden, sour trash of all that had been ruined in Kenneth Sparkes’s fine estate. Some of his former possessions still smoldered on tops of piles that were not submerged, but most of what I raked was cold and permeated with the nauseating smell of scorched bourbon.
Our sifting went on throughout the morning, and as I moved from one square of muck to the next, I did what I knew how to do best. I groped and probed with my hands, and when I felt a shape that worried me, I took off my heavy fire gloves and felt some more with fingers barely sheathed by latex. McGovern’s troops were scattered and lost in their own hunches, and at almost noon she waded back to me.
‘You holding up?’ she asked.
‘Still standing.’
‘Not bad for an armchair detective.’ She smiled.
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘You see how even everything is?’ She pointed a sooty gloved finger. ‘High-temperature fire, constant from one corner of the house to the other. Flames so hot and high they burned up the upper two floors and pretty near everything in them. We’re not talking some electrical arc here, not some curling iron left on or grease that caught fire. Something big and smart’s behind this.’
I had noticed over the years that people who battled fire spoke of it as if it were alive and possessed a will and personality of its own. McGovern began working by my side, and what she couldn’t sling out of the way, she piled into a wheelbarrow. I polished what turned out to be a stone that could have passed for a finger bone, and she pointed the wooden butt of her rake up at an empty overcast sky.
‘The top level’s gonna be the last one to fall,’ she told me. ‘In other words, debris from the roof and second floor should be on top down here. So I’m assuming that’s what we’re rooting around in right now.’ She stabbed the rake at a twisted steel I-beam that once had supported the roof. ‘Yes sir,’ she went on, ‘that’s why there’s all this insulation and slate everywhere.’
This went on and on, with no one taking breaks that were longer than fifteen minutes. The local fire station kept us supplied in coffee, sodas, and sandwiches, and had set up quartz lights so we could see as we worked in our wet hole. At each end a Prosser pump sucked water through its hose and disgorged it outside granite walls, and after thousands of gallons were gone, our conditions did not seem much better. It was hours before the level dipped perceptibly.
At half past two I could stand it no longer and went outside again. I scanned for the most inconspicuous spot, which was beneath the sweeping boughs of a large fir tree near the smoking stables. My hands and feet were numb, but beneath heavy protective clothing I was sweating as I squatted and kept a nervous watch for anyone who might wander this way. Then I steeled myself to walk past every charred stall. The stench of death pushed itself up into my nostrils and seemed to cling to spaces inside my skull.