Horses were pitifully piled on top of each other, their legs pugilistically drawn, and skin split from the swelling and shrinking of cooking flesh. Mares, stallions, and geldings were burned down to bone with smoke still drifting from carcasses charred like wood. I hoped they had succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning before flames had touched them.
I counted nineteen bodies, including two yearlings and a foal. The miasma of burned horse hair and death was choking and enveloped me like a heavy cloak as I headed across grass back to the mansion’s shell. On the horizon, the sole survivor was watching me again, standing very still, alone and mournful.
McGovern was still sloshing and shoveling and pitching trash out of her way, and I could tell she was getting tired, and I was perversely pleased by that. It was getting late in the day. The sky had gotten darker, and the wind had a sharper edge.
‘The foal is still there,’ I said to her.
‘Wish he could talk.’ She straightened up and massaged the small of her back.
‘He’s running loose for a reason,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t make sense to think he got out on his own. I hope someone plans to take care of him?’
‘We’re working on it.’
‘Couldn’t one of the neighbors help?’ I would not stop, because the horse was really getting to me.
She gave me a long look and pointed straight up.
‘Master bedroom and bath were right up there,’ she announced as she lifted a broken square of white marble out of the filthy water. ‘Brass fixtures, a marble floor, the jets from a Jacuzzi. The frame of a skylight, which by the way, was open at the time of the fire. If you reach down six inches to your left, you’ll run right into what’s left of the tub.’
The water level continued to lower as pumps sucked and formed small rivers over grass. Nearby, agents were pulling out antique oak flooring that was deeply charred on top with very little unburned wood left. This went on, and added to mounting evidence that the origin of the fire was the second floor in the area of the master suite, where we recovered brass pulls from cabinets and mahogany furniture, and hundreds of coat hangers. We dug through burnt cedar and remnants of men’s shoes and clothing from the master closet.
By five o’clock, the water had dropped another foot, revealing a ruined landscape that looked like a burned landfill, with scorched hulls of appliances and the carcasses of couches. McGovern and I were still excavating in the area of the master bath, fishing out prescription bottles of pills, and shampoos and body lotions, when I finally discovered the first shattered edge of death. I carefully wiped soot from a jagged slab of glass.
‘I think we’ve got something,’ I said, and my voice seemed swallowed by dripping water and the sucking of pumps.
McGovern shone her flashlight on what I was doing and went still.
‘Oh Jesus,’ she said, shocked.
Milky dead eyes gleamed at us through watery broken glass.
‘A window, maybe a glass shower door fell on top of the body, preserving at least some of it from being burned to the bone,’ I said.
I moved more broken glass aside, and McGovern was momentarily stunned as she stared at a grotesque body that I instantly knew was not Kenneth Sparkes. The upper part of the face was pressed flat beneath thick cracked glass, and the eyes were a dull bluish-gray because their original color had been cooked out of them. They peered up at us from the burned bone of the brow. Strands of long blond hair had gotten free and eerily flowed as dirty water seeped, and there was no nose or mouth, only chalky, calcined bone and teeth that had been burned until there was nothing organic left in them.
The neck was partially intact, the torso covered with more broken glass, and melted into cooked flesh was a dark fabric that had been a blouse or shirt. I could still make out the weave. Buttocks and pelvis were also spared beneath glass. The victim had been wearing jeans. The legs were burned down to bone, but leather boots had protected the feet. There were no lower arms or hands, and I could not find any trace of those bones.