California Fire and Life (17 page)

It’s okay with me, Jack thinks.

I speak fluent fire.

Start with the bed.

Because Bentley called it the point of origin and because that’s just what it looks like.

They had to scrape her off the springs
.

In fact, Jack can see the traces of dried blood on the metal. Can smell the unmistakable smell of a burned body.

And the bedsprings themselves—twisted, congealed. It takes a hot fire to do that, Jack knows. This kind of metal only starts to melt at 2,000°F.

That’s the fire telling you,
I’m
bad,
baby. I’m a badass fire and I did her in the bed
.

Then there’s the hole in the roof. What’s known in the trade as a BLEVE, a boiling liquid evaporation explosion. Also known as a chimney
effect. The fire ignites at the point of origin, and the superheated gases rise and form a fireball. The fireball hits the ceiling and
boom
. Which certainly means that something hot and heavy happened around the bed. Fire saying,
I’m so bad you can’t even keep me in the room, Jack. I’m so big and bad I have to fly. Break out, baby. Show my stuff to the sky
.

Jack looks down and sees where Bentley dug through the ashes on the floor by the left side of the bed, and he can see the vodka stain—the spalling—literally burned into the wood floor. He can see some shards of smoked, oily glass, including the neck of the bottle.

He can see where Bentley got his theory.

But the lazy bastard just stopped there. Saw an Insta-Answer and grabbed at it so he could start packing for the big fishing trip.

So Jack keeps looking.

Not only because he thinks Bentley is a cretin, not only because of Letty’s story, but also because it’s just laziness to repeat someone else’s work. That’s where mistakes—if indeed there is a mistake here—get perpetuated. One lazy bastard after another copying each other’s work.

A circle jerk of error.

So start again.

Start from scratch with no preconceptions and listen to the fire.

The first thing that the fire is telling him is that it burned a whole lot of stuff in this room, because Jack’s standing in char up to his ankles. He clips his Dictaphone inside his shirt and starts talking notes.

“Note ankle-deep char,” Jack says. “Indicates the probability of heavy fuel load. Whether primarily live load or dead load I can’t tell at this point.”

The heavy char tells Jack something else he isn’t going to speak into the tape. Usually heavy char means a hot, fast fire, simply because it shows that fire had the chance to burn a lot of stuff—
fast
—before the Fire Department could get there and put it out.

So the next thing he looks at is the char
pattern
.

If fire has a language, then the char pattern is its grammar, its sentence structure, its subject-verb-object. And the sentences this pattern is banging out are like Kerouac on speed, because it’s like verb-verb-verb, it’s talking about a fire that was
moving
, man, not stopping for periods or commas or nothing.

Jack’s thinking that this fire was
rolling
. Because Jack’s looking at what’s known in the business as “alligator” char. It looks like what it sounds like, the skin of an alligator. What happens is that a hot fire
moves fast. It burns quickly and moves on, so it leaves sharp lines of demarcation between what it burns and what it doesn’t. Turns out looking like alligator skin.

The hotter the fire, the faster it burns, the bigger the alligator you got.

Jack’s looking at one big alligator here.

He scans the charred remains of what had been the expensive white-and-gold wallpaper, which is going to cost a bundle to replace, and he questions whether this wallpaper, pricey as it was, was sufficient fuel to feed this hungry an alligator.

He doesn’t say that into the tape recorder, though. He keeps those thoughts to himself. What he says into the recorder is, “Moving along the west wall of the bedroom, I observe large, alligator-type char.”

Observing it’s one thing, recording it’s another, because the room is black, and black photographs like nothing. So Jack hauls out his portable flash unit and starts “painting” the room with the light.

He stands in one corner and looks through the camera viewfinder as he moves the light out from one wall toward the center of the room. He observes where the light fades so he knows where he’ll need to start for the next shot. He snaps his shots—color and black-and-white—and then moves the flash in toward the center of the room. Then he moves to another corner and repeats the process and so on and so forth until he has the room covered. He jots down a note for every shot he takes and speaks what he’s doing into the tape recorder.

Then he draws a rough sketch of the room and notes where he was standing for each shot and what part of the room the shot covered. So when the smart-ass lawyer asks him, “You don’t really
know
that you were standing in the southwest corner when you took this photograph, do you?” Jack can whip out the notebook and say, “Actually I do, counselor, because it’s my practice to make notes of my location when …”

Because the point is, Jack thinks, that you have to do it every time. Take your time, do it right, go on to the next task.

So the next thing he does is measures.

Gets out a steel tape and measures the dimensions of the room and notes certain “landmarks” from which he can triangulate. He has a number of marks to do it from, because the big furniture in the room left heat shadows.

Pale marks on the wall—reverse silhouettes, if you will—where the heavy furniture shielded the wall from the initial flashover. So he uses
two of the heat shadows as triangulation points and moves on, goes back to listening to the fire.

What else does the fire have to say?

The char on the rafters.

Same thing, alligator char on the wood, sharp lines of demarcation between the bottom edge of the rafters, which is heavily charred, and the top edge, which isn’t.

Nothing unusual there, Jack thinks. Fire burns up, so you’d expect to see the bottom edges of the rafters more heavily charred than the top. And you’d expect to see the heaviest char directly above the bed, where the fire burned the longest. What you wouldn’t necessarily expect is what Jack’s seeing, and that is that there are
several
areas of the rafters that are showing heavier char than others. One over by the opposite wall, one by the closet, another by the door that leads into the bathroom.

“Note heavy char on rafters above bed,” Jack says. “Sharp lines of demarcation. Note also, heavier char on rafters near closet and near entrance to bathroom.”

Jack takes out a steel ruler and jams it into the middle of a char blister on the rafter above the bed.

“Char is one and three-eighths inches deep on rafter above bed,” he says, and then does the same for the other two areas. “One and three-eighths on area near closet. One and three-eighths on area by entrance to bathroom.”

Then he measures two points in the rafters that look less heavily charred. The char is an inch deep.

Which is interesting, Jack thinks, because there can’t be
three
places where the fire burned the longest. Not accidentally. Of course, there could be other explanations. Depends on what was sitting
under
those charred rafters. Maybe there was something really tasty for the alligator, something that burned hot and deep and long. That could explain the apparent anomaly.

Then again, the dog was out in the yard when it wasn’t supposed to be. And the flames were the wrong color, and the smoke was the wrong color.

That, combined with three hot spots on the rafters, is starting to get Jack pissed off.

Jack knows what Bentley did. Bentley looked at the hole in the roof above the bed, looked at the heavy char on the rafters above the bed,
dug the ashes from around the bed and saw that the fire had burned into the floor. Saw the broken vodka bottle and the burned mattress and the twisted bedsprings and figured he had his point of origin.

Because there should be only one point of origin and smoking in bed is the number-one cause of fatal bedroom fires.

Which is good as far as it goes, Jack thinks, but it doesn’t go far enough.

So Jack goes looking for V-patterns.

Fire burns up and out.

Like a V.

It ignites at the base of the V and flames up—because fire burns up, where the oxygen is—and out, as the atmosphere in the room tries to equalize the heat and pressure.

It burns up and out from its point of origin and often it leaves a V-pattern mark. In which case the fire
points
to where it started.

Now, when a fire starts in the middle of the room, you’re not going to see a V-pattern, because there’s no surface for the fire to mark. When a fire starts away from a wall, what you’d expect to see instead of a V-pattern is a circular pattern on the ceiling above the point of origin.

Which there certainly is. Above the bed there’s not only a circular burn pattern, there’s a freaking
hole
blown through the roof. But there’s also ankle-deep ash and deeper char on several places on the rafters and there’s a hole in the roof and there’s a dog barking outside.

Jack starts in what used to be the closet.

The closet is a walk-in.

Or a hike-in, because this closet is maybe a little smaller than Delaware.

And calf-deep in ash, which Jack would expect because there’s a lot of stuff in closets. That’s the purpose of a closet, right? To put stuff in it, and because this is a humongous walk-in closet belonging to rich people you’re going to expect that the alligator had a banquet in here.

Especially if you have clothes hanging from a pole, because fabrics are tasty to eat and you also have a lot of nice oxygen underneath them.

And you’re going to have a lot of ash because you’re going to have a lot of “fall down.” Fall down is just what it sounds like; it’s stuff that burns and then falls down onto the floor.

Again, the basic principle of fire is that it burns up. It burns up, seeking oxygen and fuel. Insufficient oxygen, the fire smothers. Insufficient fuel, the fire burns out. The situation a fire
really
likes is when it can burn upward and find fuel there. Fuel like clothing. Fuel like boxes stored on shelves, and then the shelves themselves.

So the fire zooms up and consumes those things, and the carbonized material—char—falls down on the floor. A lot of times there’s enough fall down to smother the fire on the floor. That’s why you can go into a fire site and the ceiling is burned but the floor—where the fire started—isn’t.

See, sometimes fire will go up and then
across
. The fire isn’t even burning across the floor, it’s up along the ceiling, where the fuel is. It burns the nice fuel up there and gets hotter and hungrier and then you have what’s known as the convection effect. The fire up top generates so much heat that the
heat
—not the flame—ignites the material on the floor and then the floor goes up.

But it all has to start somewhere.

Which is at the base of a V, and the reason Jack’s looking in the closet is because Jack is a cynical bastard.

A cynical bastard thinks that if someone is going to start a fire, the closet is a good place to do it because it’s not immediately visible and the fall-down effect often obscures the evidence.

So Jack’s down on his knees digging away the ash at the back wall of the closet and it doesn’t take long before he finds what he’s looking for—a tall narrow V marking on the wall. Important that it’s narrow instead of wide. A wide V is the fire telling you that it spread normally, just the usual grazing on the usual feed. A narrow V is the fire telling you something else.

The fire saying,
I was hot
.

I was
fast
.

Something else with this V. The apex doesn’t come to a point. It looks like a V with the point cut off, more like V.

Which is the fire hinting to Jack,
Yo, dude, maybe I had a little help
. A little
boost
. Maybe I had me a little something to get me, you know,
started
.

In an accidental fire, the V will be pointed. But if the fire had a little help—say, if someone poured an accelerant on the floor—then the apex
of the V is going to be as wide as the pool of the accelerant. Because you don’t so much have a point of origin as you have a
pool
of origin, all of which ignites at the same moment.

So now, Jack thinks, we have not just one point of origin, we have at least two.

Which is one too many.

If there’s one thing Jack knows about an accidental fire, it’s that it has one—count them,
one
—point of origin.

An accidental fire doesn’t start accidentally in two places.

It’s not possible.

Jack pushes aside the charred remains of what appears to have been some coats on the floor by the wall at the bottom of the V.

Could swear he hears the fire laughing.

Because there’s a hole in the flooring. As wide as the base of the V.

Which makes Jack think that maybe Letty is right.

Maybe Pam was murdered.

Letty del Rio is standing in a chop shop in Garden Grove, hip deep in cut-up cars, and she’s got five Vietnamese kids against the wall with plastic ties around their wrists and not one of the jokers will tell her anything about what she wants to know.

That is, what were Tranh and Do up to when they did their duet Houdini act.

And she doesn’t really want to run these boys in for the cars, because it is a major pain in the ass for little results, but that’s what she’s going to do unless they start showing a marked improvement in their attitude.

Letty says to the interpreter, “Tell them they’ll get five to eight on the cars.”

She unwraps a stick of gum and pops the Juicy Fruit into her mouth as the interpreter translates her threat and gets a response.

“They say they’ll get probation,” he tells her.

“No,” she says. “Tell them I’ll personally fuck them with the judge. Tell them that.”