‘This is about Lucy. You think I’m replacing you, or God knows what. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it, Kay?’
Now she was making me angry, too.
‘You and I have worked together before, right?’ she went on. ‘We’ve never had a big problem before now. So one has to ask, what’s different? I think the answer’s pretty obvious. The difference is that even as we speak, your niece is moving into her new apartment in Philadelphia, to be in my field office, under my supervision. Mine. Not yours. And you don’t like it. And guess what else? If I were in your shoes, maybe I wouldn’t like it either.’
‘It is neither the time nor the place for this discussion,’ I said firmly.
‘Fine.’
She got up and draped her jacket over her arm.
‘Then we’ll go somewhere else,’ she decided. ‘I intend to resolve this before I drive back north.’
For an instant I was stymied as I reigned from the empire of my wrap-around desk, with its foremen of files, and guards demanding the hard labor of journal articles, and legions of messages and correspondence that would never set me free. I took my glasses off and massaged my face. When McGovern was blurred, it was easier for me.
‘I’ll take you to lunch,’ I said. ‘If you’re willing to hang around three more hours. In the meantime’ — I got up from my chair — ‘I have bones in a pot that need heating up. You can come with me, if you have a strong stomach.’
‘You won’t scare me off with that.’ McGovern seemed pleased.
McGovern was not the sort to follow anyone around, and after I had turned on the burner in the decomposition room, she lingered long enough for steam to rise. Then she headed out to ATF’s Richmond field office, and reappeared suddenly within an hour. She was breathless and tense when she walked in. I was carefully stirring simmering bones.
‘We got another one,’ she said quickly.
‘Another one?’ I asked.
I set the long plastic spoon on a countertop.
‘Another fire. Another whacko one. This time in Lehigh County, about an hour from Philadelphia,’ she said. ‘Are you coming with me?’
My mind raced through all the possibilities of what might happen if I dropped everything and left with her. For one thing, I was unnerved by the thought of the two of us alone for five hours inside a car.
‘It’s residential,’ she went on. ‘It started early yesterday morning, and a body has been recovered. A woman. In the master bathroom.’
‘Oh no,’ I said.
‘It’s clear the fire was intended to conceal that she had been murdered,’ she said, and then went on to explain why it was possible the case was related to the one in Warrenton.
When the body was discovered, Pennsylvania state police had immediately requested assistance from ATF. Then ATF fire investigators at the scene had entered data on their laptops, and ESA got a hit almost instantly. By last night the Lehigh case had begun to take on huge significance, and the FBI offered agents and Benton, and the state police had accepted.
‘The house was built on a slab,’ McGovern was explaining as we got on I-95 North. ‘So no basement to worry about, thank God. Our guys have been there since three o’clock this morning, and what’s curious is in this case, the fire didn’t do the job well at all. The areas of the master suite, a guest room right above it on the second floor, and the living room downstairs are pretty badly burned, with extensive ceiling damage in the bathroom, and spalling of the concrete floor in the garage.’
Spalling occurs when rapid, intense heat causes moisture trapped in concrete to boil, fragmenting the surface.
‘The garage was located where?’ I asked as I tried to envision what she was describing.
‘On the same side of the house as the master suite. Again, a fast, hot fire. But the burning wasn’t complete, a lot of alligatoring, a lot of surface charring. As for the rest of the house, we’re talking mostly smoke and water damage. Which isn’t consistent with the work of the individual who torched the Sparkes farm. Except for one important thing. So far, it doesn’t appear that any type of accelerant was used, and there wasn’t a sufficient fuel load in the bathroom to account for the height of the flames.’