‘If the fire was energetic enough to project flames to the ceiling, then we’re talking about a high radiant flux. The body was going to be severely damaged unless there was a barrier between it and the fire. Something that absorbed radiant heat and energy — the tub and shower door — which would have protected areas of the body. I also think the body was at least some small distance from the point of origin. We could be talking feet, maybe a yard or two.’
‘I don’t see any other way it could have happened,’ I agreed. ‘Clearly something protected much of it.’
‘Right.’
‘How the hell do you set off a torch like that without some sort of accelerant?’ Marino asked.
‘All we can hope is that something turns up in the labs,’ my niece said. ‘You know, since the fuel load can’t account for the observed fire pattern, then something was added or modified, indicating arson.’
‘And you guys are working on a financial audit,’ Marino said to her.
‘Naturally almost all of Sparkes’s records burned up in the fire. But his financial people and accountant have been pretty helpful, to give the guy credit. So far there’s no indication that money was a problem.’
I was relieved to hear it. Everything I knew about this case so far argued against Kenneth Sparkes being anything but a victim. But this was not an opinion that was shared by most, I felt sure.
‘Lucy,’ I said as she finished her gyro pita. ‘I think we’re all in agreement that the MO of this crime is distinctive.’
‘Definitely.’
‘Let’s just suppose,’ I went on, ‘for the sake of argument, that something similar has happened before, somewhere else. That Warrenton is simply part of a pattern of fires used to disguise homicides that are being committed by the same individual.’
‘It’s certainly possible,’ Lucy said. ‘Anything is.’
‘Can we do a search?’ I then asked. ‘Is there any database that might connect similar MOs in fires?’
She got up and threw food containers in a large trash bag in the kitchen.
‘You want to, we can,’ she said. ‘With the Arson Incident System, or AXIS.’
I was well acquainted with it and the new supersonic ATF wide area computer network called ESA, which was an acronym for Enterprise System Architecture, the result of ATF being mandated by Congress to create a national arson and explosive repository. Two hundred and twenty sites were hooked up to ESA, and any agent, no matter where he was, could access the central database, could pipe himself into AXIS with his laptop as long as he had a modem or a secure cellular line. This included my niece.
She led us back to her tiny bedroom, which was now depressingly bare save for cobwebs in corners and dust balls on the scuffed hardwood floor. The box springs were empty, the mattress still made with wrinkled peach sheets and upended against a wall, and rolled up in a corner was the colorful silk rug that I had given her for her last birthday. Empty dresser drawers were stacked on the floor. Her office was a Panasonic laptop on top of a cardboard box. The portable computer was in a shark-gray steel and magnesium case that met military specifications for being ruggedized, meaning it was vapor-proof and dust-proof and everything-proof and supposedly could be dropped and run over by a Humvee.
Lucy sat before it on the floor, Indian style, as if she were about to worship the great god of technology. She hit the enter key to turn the screen saver off, and ESA lit up rows of pixels at a time in electric blue, flashing a map of the United States on the next vivid screen. At a prompt, she typed in her user name and password, answered other secure prompts to work her way into the system, invisibly cruising through secret gateways on the Web, passing through one level at a time. When she had logged on to the case repository, she motioned for me to sit next to her.
‘I can get you a chair if you want,’ she said.
‘No, this is fine.’