Tin City Tinder (A Boone Childress Mystery) (10 page)

Abner discovered all of these things as he wandered through the foundation, carrying my hooligan tool.

“Stay out,” he warned me when I tried to help. “Poke around in the grass. See if you find anything interesting.”

“What qualifies as interesting?”

“Anything that’s not supposed to be there. You know, interesting. Like why an abandoned house would still be furnished? Why would the furniture be pushed to the middle of the room?”

Good questions, I thought, then caught the glint of sunshine off a windshield.
 

Two cars rolled up the driveway. The first was a navy blue Crown Vic. The second car was a white Marquis with an Allegheny County emblem on the doors.

“Doc!” A sharp pain in the ribs made me catch my breath. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to shout. “Doc, we have company.”

Abner pushed his glasses up his nose. “Fire marshal’s office. Wondered when he’d show up.””

The men from the Crown Vic wore blue and gray striped coveralls. One of them carried a tool belt, and the other was hauling a bulky evidence case.
 

The guy in the Marquis was a suit. He carried a clipboard and had a Bluetooth headset in his ear.

“Greetings and salutations,” Abner called out to the new arrivals.

They walked past me without a word.
 

The suit stopped at the lip of the foundation, where he pulled out the Bluetooth. “May I ask who you are?”

“Yes,” Abner said.

“Yes, what?”

“You can ask who I am.”

“Who are you?”

Abner carefully snaked his way through the piles of rubble to free them. “Abner Zickafoose, Ph.D.”

“Whoever you are, this—“ The suit stopped short. “
The
Abner Zickafoose?”

“I can’t imagine there are too many of us in the world.” Abner leaned on the hooligan like a farmer talking weather with a neighbor. “Have we met? My memory’s not as good as it used to be.”

“No sir,” the suit said, extending an eager hand. “Not personally, anyway. I attended several of your seminars on the collection of human remains at the AFPX conference. Your slideshows are pretty unforgettable, like the fireworks explosion you investigated. I mean, how many times do you see agents collecting body parts in cardboard flats?”

“I’ve seen it several times myself.”

“Really? What were the situations?”

“Ahem,” one of the men in the coveralls said.

“Sorry,” the suit said, getting back to business. “I’m R. L. Pickett, Loss Prevention, from the Allegheny County Clerk’s office. I’m standing in for the fire marshal while he’s at a conference. These gentlemen are Mr. Early and Mr. Stuart. They’re independent contractors specializing in site clean up and debris removal.”

My ears perked up. Loss prevention was code for arson investigation. “”Mr. Pickett, do you think the fire was set deliberately?”

Pickett twitched, as if he’d just noticed me. “I don’t think anything. Who are you?”

“The boy’s with me,” Abner said. “My research assistant. I’m investigating this fire, too.”

“Can I ask why?” Pickett said.

“Sure.”

“Sure what?”

Stuart checked his watch, and Early shook his head. They had reached consensus—Pickett wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

“You can ask why,” Abner said.

“Why are you investigating the fire, Dr. Zickafoose?”

I rolled my eyes. Pickett would make a perfect Naval officer candidate.

Abner swung the hooligan onto his shoulder. He looked perfectly at home standing in a dusty pile of debris, dressed in baggy jeans and an angler’s vest. His long beard and hair blew in a breeze that had kicked up. “There’s reasonable suspicion that an individual was killed here.”

Pickett shifted uncomfortably. His body language suggested insecurity. Fire investigations were complex and took years of training and hands-on experience.
 

Pickett had neither.
 

“That’s impossible,” he said. “There were no reports of casualties. Our records indicate the house was vacant. What are you basing your claims on?”

“Evidence.”

“What evidence?” Stuart said, almost laughing. “You’re wasting time, old fella, and time is money. If you don’t mind, just step aside and let us finish what we came to do.”

Stuart beckoned for Early. They climbed over the foundation.
 

Abner met them with the hooligan. “Actually, boys. I do mind. I’m trying to locate a body, and if you come tromping in here with those size twelves, you’re going to make my job that much harder.”
 

“You’re making our job harder, sir,” Early said.

"Too bad." Abner handed me a digital camera. “Take a shot every six seconds until we find something, and then every three. The memory chip’s big enough to hold a thousand pictures, so you won’t fill it up. Got it? Good.”

Pickett, realizing the situation was getting out of hand, stepped in front of Early and Stuart. “Let’s not do anything hasty, gentlemen.” He turned back to Abner. “Dr. Zickafoose, I respect your expertise, but the fire captain went over this site earlier. He found no evidence of human remains.”

“I’m not surprised. Firefighters don’t get much training in human identification.” Abner made his way through the piles again. He stopped in the back corner of the house. “That’s no fault of his own. Most people don’t know what to look for. Mr. Stuart, do you think we should be searching for a skull?”

Stuart scratched the back of his neck. “Well, yeah. I guess so.”

“You’re not going to find one. Temperatures in a house fire can get so hot, the victim’s cerebral fluid boils and the skull explodes. The mandible and most of the alveolar process usually survive, along with a few teeth. The other fragments are usually scattered. Mr. Early, where would you look for a body?”

“No place special.” Early shrugged. “Sort of all over.”

“Mistake number two. Anybody know where the bedrooms were?”

Pickett consulted his clipboard. “There were two. One on the second floor on the east side of the house.”

Abner pointed at the queen-sized box springs they had found earlier. “Confirmed.”

I snapped three pictures.

“The second,” Pickett said, reorienting the floor plan map, “was a developed attic space on the south side of the house.”

“Exactly where I’m standing,” Abner said. “Y’all care to join me? You, too, Boone.”

We stomped through the sticky, black mixture of ash and water. I took it easy. Although I was anxious to see what Abner had found, my ribs were killing me.

Abner followed a swarm of blowflies to a mound of debris. “Don’t forget. Pictures in, pictures out.”
 

There was something off-key in Abner’s voice. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m making double sure that this scene is preserved.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m about to disturb it.”

“Hope you know what you’re doing,” I said. “Lamar says that you need a warrant to investigate a fire after the crews leave the site.”

“He’s right,” Abner said. “But I’m not a cop. I’m a senile old man, according to my former dean. One good thing about senility, you don’t have to stand on ceremony just to make politicians and bureaucrats happy. If anybody asks, I’m just following the flies.”

 
We stopped next to a shape that resembled a small hill.

Abner looked at the sun. “Any of you gentlemen ever cleaned up a site after an old house burned?”

They all shook their heads.

“Plaster acts different from gypsum board in a fire. The lathing behind it burns, and sheets of the stuff collapse. Super heated plaster behaves almost like modeling clay, forming around whatever it hits. Like a box springs, for instance.”

Abner shoved the hooligan under the mound and used an unburned rafter as a fulcrum. The mound lifted up, revealing a twin bed box springs.

“You boys mind pushing this over? It’s a might heavy for an old man.”
 

Early and Stuart shoved it to the side. It landed on the ashes and sent up a cloud of dust.
 

“Don’t breathe that,” Abner said. “It’s toxic.”

We quickly covered our noses with our shirts.

Abner poked at the box springs under the mattress. “Hmm. Interesting.” He carefully pulled the twisted metal out of the soot. “And voila! There she is.”

The body was a lump of roasted tissue. It reminded me of a marshmallow dropped into a charcoal fire. The skin was toasted brown in places and charred black in others. There were also maggots. Thousands of them. Coating the eye socket, the nasal cavity, and the mouth.
 

I picked a maggot up with a fingernail. “Blowfly larvae. Note the yellowish color and pointed heads. Takes them less than a day to hatch.”

The men turned away and promptly lost their lunches.

What a bunch of wimps.

With Abner’s camera, I clicked one photo after another. I’d grown up helping him catalog evidence and even helped boil bones. It felt like I had been training for this moment for years. From the moment that Abner pulled the mangled box springs aside, I knew there was no going back.

My first body.

No, not a body, a person, a dead woman whose life had been ended by a fire.

I bent over for a closer look. As Abner predicted, the top of the skull had exploded, and the hair had melted.
 

“You said
she,
Doc. How do you know it’s a she?”

Abner pointed at the base of the skull. “Two reasons. First, see that area of exposed bone? The occipital protuberance is not pronounced.”

I knew, of course, that one of the several ways to determine the sex of skeletal remains was the occipital protuberance, a small notch of bone at the base of the skull. It was generally large in males. In females, it was almost absent. Any grad student could find it in a dry skull, which I had often done myself, but to spot that one characteristic out of a blackened mass was nothing short of amazing.

“Second reason?” I asked.

“She was wearing a synthetic house dress.”

The victim wore a housedress and one sock. Fire had burned off most of the floral patterned fabric, except for a patch on her trunk. Her unburned skin had a glossy look to it, like she had been lacquered down, and her face had crumpled up, the lips curling away from the teeth and the lids peeling away from the red sockets where the eyeballs had melted. Her arms were drawn up in what was termed the “pugilist position,” the fingers formed into tight black balls.

“You’re right.”

“Not bad for a senile old cuss, huh?”

This is what death looks like, I thought. I felt the color drain from my face. I handed the camera to Abner and slowly walked away.

“You all right, Boone?”

“Just need some air.” But what I really needed was to tell somebody.
 

“We found a body,” I said as soon as Cedar answered her cell.

“Come again?” Her voice was drowned out by other students in the lab. “Wait, let me stick my head out in the hallway. Say that again.”

 
“Abner and I found a body at the Nagswood property. I was right. There
was
someone inside the house.”

“That’s awful! I mean, it’s cool that you’re right and everything, but that’s awful! Someone’s….somebody’s…”

Dead.

“I know.” My voice dropped lower. “Look, I have to call 911 to alert the sheriff. I’ll talk to you later. Okay?”

“Okay.” Her voice echoed in the metal locker. “Text me. I’ll be in class.”

I ended the call. Cedar was right. It wasn’t cool to find a dead person. It was awful. It was even worse if the person is dying in the belly of an aircraft carrier, and you were on the fire crew that wasn't able to save him.

I dialed 911 and waited for the operator to pick up.

3

There’s something about the finding a human body that draws law enforcement like rubberneckers to a highway wreck. Fifteen minutes after I called it in, the cops came en masse to Nagswood. The routine fire that had been nothing more than the burning of the leftovers of a life suddenly became fascinating to ninety percent of the Allegheny County Sheriff’s department.

The first officer to arrive was Deputy Mercer. He parked on the west side of the property, apart from the other cars. His front tires sank several inches into the clay soil. Mercer was taller than I remembered, with cropped hair, a boxed chin, and shoulders that tapered to his waist. A swimmer’s build.

Abner and I waited near the foundation. We had left the evidence where we had found it. I was leaning on the hooligan tool. Pickett and the others were smoking cigarettes and trying to get a signal on their old flip phones.

“Stand where you are.” Mercer swung himself out of the prowler. The Taser was clipped to his gun belt. His radio was flipped over his left shoulder, dangling by its twisted cord. “Which one of y’all called 911?”

“Does it matter?” Pickett said. “Dr. Zickafoose is the one who discovered the corpse.”

“I’d rather use the term individual, if you don’t mind,” Abner said. “Abner Doubleday Zickafoose, Ph.D. My grandson, Daniel Boone Childress.”

The deputy glared at me. I wasn’t surprised. Mercer looked like a guy who held grudges.

“Where’s the corpse?” Mercer pulled a pair of wraparounds out of a pocket and put them on. The effect, I had to admit, made him look a lot more intimidating. Too bad he needed sunglasses to scare people. “I need to examine it.”

“This way.” Pickett led him to the body. “Don’t you need a warrant to do a search, Deputy?”

Mercer ignored him. He jumped onto a rafter, then crossed over the ruins of the woman’s bedroom. He had excellent balance and hopped nimbly from one spot to the next until he stood atop the mound of plaster.

“We came in through the front, initially,” Pickett said.

Mercer wrinkled his nose. “And destroyed valuable evidence in the process.”
 

“Which is what he’s doing,” I whispered to my grandfather. “The more they investigate, the less evidence there will be.”

Abner patted the breast pocket that stored his camera. “Pictures in, pictures out.”

His habit of taking photographs of every step of an investigation allowed him to revisit a crime scene as many times as he wanted, no matter how many cops had stomped the evidence into oblivion.