11
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.