“I can’t confirm anything until next of kin are notified.”
“It is Polly! Oh, my God!”
The earth shifted under Emma; the world swirled around her.
“My baby’s files are in there. My baby was saved from a fire!”
Concern registered on the captain’s face.
“Your baby’s in there?”
The captain seized his microphone, called for assistance then got out.
“Ma’am, are you aware of other people in the residence?”
“No, no! I’ve come here from Wyoming. My husband was killed. My baby was rescued from a fire. Polly knew! Are you sure she’s dead?”
Incomprehension flooded the captain’s eyes.
“Ma’am, you’re losing me. Are you all right?”
“What am I going to do now? She knew about my baby, she knew everything!”
Emma covered her mouth with her hands and gazed at the remnants of Polly Larenski’s home as a circle of faces emerged around her-firefighters, police officers and paramedics. An officer with the Santa Ana police touched her shoulder.
“Do you have any identification, ma’am?”
Emma fumbled in her bag. The officer studied her Wyoming driver’s license. “Will you come this way, please? These folks just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Emma sat in the back of an ambulance.
While paramedics observed her, she told the officer her story. He listened, then went to his patrol car beside the ambulance. The door was open. Emma saw him checking her name through the car’s small dash-mounted computer and talking on his radio.
At one point she heard him say, “Not a relative, a bystander. Wyoming DL. Right. Seems disoriented, overcome. Then it goes to OCSD?”
Some fifteen minutes later, a black-and-white cruiser with a six-point gold star on the door arrived. The new officer took Emma’s license from the Santa Ana officer, then they both approached her.
“Emma, I’m Deputy Holbrooke with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department,” the new officer said. “I’m going to take your information.”
Emma sat in the deputy’s car. Again, she told her story while he entered information into his computer. Then he left the car to make a call on his cell phone, pacing near the trunk where she overheard him say, “Right, not ours. Thanks, Lou.”
In the time since she’d arrived at the fire, Emma had pinballed from the fire department to the Santa Ana Police Department to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and through a maze of police bureaucracy until she landed in the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Now here she was in the office of the FBI’s Santa Ana Resident Agency on the top floor of the bronze three- story building on Civic Center Drive. For nearly forty-five minutes, special agent Randy Sikes had listened to her. Occasionally, he’d excused himself to take a phone call on the status of an ongoing identity theft investigation.
Before Emma had arrived at Sikes’s desk, he’d been briefed on the phone by the Santa Ana Police and Orange County.
Sikes was a quiet, cerebral agent in his mid-forties. He wore a suit with a white shirt, conservative tie, and his hair was combed neatly. He said little as Emma spoke, but from time to time he paused to study his computer monitor and the results of his query to the National Crime Information Center, the FBI’s major database known as
NCIC.
It contained records on a range of files submitted by every law enforcement agency across the country. NCIC contained records on subjects such as guns, fugitives, warrants, stolen vehicles, sex offenders, license plates, gangs, terrorist organizations and missing persons.
After Emma had left her home in Big Cloud, her worried aunt and uncle went to the County Sheriff’s Office to report her missing. The sheriff’s office submitted a report to NCIC that contained all the background about the accident: Emma’s reaction, her claims about the phone call. The Big Cloud County Sheriff’s Office had characterized Emma as a traumatized, grief-stricken accident victim who’d refused to accept the deaths of her husband and son.
NCIC security forbade police from sharing the file with unauthorized people. Emma never saw it. After Sikes read it, he said, “You’ve been through a lot lately, haven’t you, Emma?”
“Yes.”
“There are people in Big Cloud worried about you. Why don’t you think about going home?”
“But what about everything I’ve told you about my baby? What about what I told you about Polly, that she said my baby was ‘chosen’? She said someone was planning some kind of action and they chose my baby! Please help me!”
“Yes, it’s quite a story,” Sikes said. “And I understand you’ve been under tremendous stress lately. The tragedy of the house fire today must have subjected you to more anguish.”
“What about what I told you about Polly?”
“We’ll follow that up with authorities here in California and Wyoming, but our first concern is your well-being and getting you home. It might be the best thing, don’t you think?”
She stared at the wall.
“I could call someone for you, if you like,” Sikes said.
Emma shook her head.
He thinks I’m crazy. They all think I’m crazy.
Emma collected her things and left.
47
Santa Ana, California
A smoky haze rose from the blackened remains of Polly Larenski’s house.
Two men in blue coveralls, wearing gloves and surgical masks, used shovels and crowbars to probe the debris. Another man stepped carefully through the aftermath, accompanied by a German shepherd that sniffed the bits and pieces.
It was late afternoon and Emma watched from the yellow plastic tape protecting the site. Much of the commotion had subsided; nearly all of the fire, police and other emergency vehicles were gone. The street was still sealed. A funereal calm had descended upon the scene, scored by the crack-twist-tear of the investigators shifting and lifting pieces.
And there was the eager chink of the panting dog’s collar.
Somewhere in that charred heap was the key to Emma’s search for her baby and she prayed that somehow she’d find it. She noticed one of the men in blue coveralls walking to a van marked Arson Unit.
She followed him.
“Can you help me? Was this arson? I thought this was an accident.”
He shoved his mask down.
“Are you with the press?”
“My name is Emma Lane. My friend died in the fire.”
“Sorry to hear that,” he said. “It’s no secret what we do. Whenever there’s a fatality fire, Arson investigates. The dog is sniffing for accelerants.”
“Accelerants?”
