anything either. But then, I'd had some training in arson investigation myself, back when I was on the San Francisco cops, and I read the updated handbooks and manuals put out by police associations and by the insurance companies. I had also had a handful of jobs over the years involving arson. So there was a chance that I might stumble onto something that had been overlooked.
The first thing you do on an inspection of a fire scene is to determine the point of origin. Once you've got that, you look for something to indicate how the fire started, whether it was accidental or a case of arson. If it was arson, what you're after is the corpus delicti- evidence of the method or device used by the arsonist.
One of the ways to locate point of origin is to check the 'alligatoring,' or charring, of the surface of the burned wood. This can tell you in which direction the fire spread, where it was the hottest, and if you're lucky you can trace it straight to the origin. I was lucky, as it turned out. And not just once-twice. I not only found the point of origin, I found the corpus delicti as well.
It was arson, all right. The fire had been set at the rear of the building farthest to the north, whatever that one might once have been; and what had been used to ignite it was a candle. I found the residue of it, a wax deposit inside a small cup-shaped piece of stone that was hidden under a pile of rubble. It took me ten minutes of sifting around and getting my hands and the trench coat leopard-spotted with soot to dredge up the stone. Which was probably why the county sheriff's people hadn't been as thorough as they should have been; not everybody is willing to turn himself into the likeness of a chimney-sweep, even in the name of the law.
As near as I could tell, the candle had been made of purple-colored tallow. Which told me nothing much; purple candles were not uncommon. It had probably been anchored inside the cup-shaped stone to keep it from toppling over and starting the fire before it was intended to.
I was peering at the stone, and it wasn't telling me much, when I heard and then saw the jeep come up. It rattled to a stop behind my car, and a guy about six-four unfolded from behind the wheel and plunked himself down on the road.
He stared over at me for a couple of seconds, shading his eyes against the sun; then he yelled, 'Hey! You there! What do you think you're doing?'
I saw no point in yelling back at him. Instead I put the stone into my trench coat pocket, swatted some of the soot off my hands, and then made my way through the rubble and across to where the guy stood alongside his jeep. He was in his forties, beanpole thin, with a shock of fiery red hair and a belligerent expression. Behind him in the jeep I could see a folded easel, a couple of blank three-foot-square canvases, and a box that would probably contain oil paints.
When I stopped in front of him he scowled down at me and said, 'What's the idea of messing around in that debris? You a scavenger or something?'
'No,' I said, 'I'm a detective.'
'A what?'
'A detective.' I told him who I was and where I was from and that I had been hired to investigate the death of Allan Randall.
He didn't like hearing it. His expression got even more belligerent; his eyes were flat and shiny-black, like pieces of onyx. 'Who hired you? Those Munroe bastards?'
'No. The insurance company that carries the policy on Randall's life.'
'So what the hell are you doing here? Randall died in a fire in Redding.'
'You had a fire here too,' I said.
'Coincidence.'
'Maybe not, Mr. Thatcher.'
'How do you know my name?'
'I know the names of everybody who lives here. The Munroe people supplied them.'
'I'll bet they did.'
'The list includes one Paul Thatcher, an artist who works primarily in oils.' I nodded toward the paraphernalia in the jeep. 'I get paid to observe things and to make educated guesses.'
Thatcher grunted and screwed up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. He didn't say anything.
I said, 'I'd like to ask you a few questions about the fire, if you don't mind.'
'Which fire?'
'The one here. Unless you know something about the one in Redding, too.'
'I don't know anything about either one. I wasn't in Redding when Randall's place burned. And I wasn't here when those old shacks went up.'
'No? That isn't what you told the county sheriff's investigators. According to their report, you were one of the residents who helped dig that firebreak to keep the blaze from spreading.'
'Is that so,' Thatcher said. 'Well, I had to talk to the law. I don't have to talk to you.'
'That's right, you don't. But suppose I told you I can prove this fire was deliberately set. Would you want to talk to me then?'
His eyes narrowed down to slits. 'How could you prove that? You find something in the debris?'
'Maybe.'
'What was it?'
'I have to tell that to the law,' I said. 'I don't have to tell it to you.'
He took a jerky half-step toward me, the menacing kind. I stayed where I was, setting myself; he was not big enough for me to be intimidated. But if he'd had any ideas about mixing it up, he thought better of them. He said something under his breath that sounded like 'The hell with you,' and turned and stalked around to the driver's side of the jeep. Thirty seconds later he was barreling off down the road, trailing dust, headed toward the pines to the west.
Mr. Thatcher, I thought, the hell with you, too.
3
When I looked back at the ghost town there was still no sign of Kerry. I wondered where she was. Between my search of the burned-out buildings and my conversation with Thatcher, some forty-five minutes had passed since she'd wandered off. I shed my blackened trench coat, locked it and the waxy stone cup in the trunk of the car, used a rag to wipe off my hands, and set out looking for her.
It took me another ten minutes to find her. She was at the two-story hotel or saloon building; the back entrance wasn't boarded up the way the front was and the door hung open on one hinge, and when I called her name she answered me from inside. So I went in to see what she was up to.
She was standing in the middle of a big, gloomy, high-ceilinged room. Enough sunlight penetrated through cracks in the outer walls to let me see a balcony on three sides at the second-floor level, with three doorways opening off it on the left side and three more on the right; the balcony sagged badly in places and looked as though it might collapse at any time. So did the crooked staircase leaning in one corner down here. As far as I could tell, the only things the room itself contained were a crudely made hotel reception desk, part of which was hidden by a fallen pigeonhole shelf, and piles of dirt and splintered wood and other detritus on the whipsawed floor.
'What'd you do?' I asked Kerry. 'Bust in here?'
'No. The back door was ajar. Isn't this place wonderful?'
'Uh-huh. If you like dust, decay, and rats.'
'Rats? There aren't any rats in here.'
'Want to bet?'
Rats didn't scare her much, though. She shrugged and said, 'Somebody lives in this building.'
'What?'
'Well, maybe not lives here, but spends a lot of time here. That's how come the back door isn't boarded up.'
'How did you find this out?'
'The same way you find things out,' she said. 'By snooping around. Come on, I'll show you.'
She led me over behind the hotel desk, to where a closed door was half-concealed by the fallen pigeonhole
