gone right here, burned completely through to ash.”
He danced his light around the edges of the structure, where the floor butted up against the concrete foundation. “See, there’s still some floor left up against the foundation. So I’m thinking the fire started in the middle of the room and took off from there in all directions. Probably caught some curtains or the walls and climbed up to the ceiling, and then spread across the inside top of the ceiling. With fire burning the floor and all four walls and the ceiling, it was like an incinerator in the room. A fire like that sucks all the oxygen out, so our vic could have died from smoke inhalation before he barbecued-but that’s for the autopsy guys in Missoula to tell us. My guess from working a few of these fire cases is he was dead before he burned, and way dead before the roof came down on him.”
“Okay,” Cody said, “why’d the victim leave the stove door open and crash on the couch?”
“The question at hand,” Larry said, playing it like a game, “the question we must answer in order to declare it a suicide and go home and climb into our dry beds with our hot mamas.”
Cody snorted. He had no hot mama at home, and neither did Larry.
Larry stepped carefully over the exposed foundation and sank ankle deep into the black muck, cursing. He shuffled toward the couch frame and the body, the beam of his flashlight bouncing all over until it settled on a black stalk jutting up from the surface a few feet from the couch.
“You got pictures of this, right?” Larry asked, hesitating before he reached out.
“Yeah.”
“Okay then,” he said, leaning forward and grasping the black stalk and pulling it free. He held the bottle by the neck. “Here’s our answer. Judging by the shape of it, I’d guess Wild Turkey. One hundred proof.”
Cody concurred. He knew the bottle, even though the fire had puckered in the sides of it.
Said Larry, “No way to tell if it was empty, half full, or full. If there was any left when the fire burned this hot it would have boiled anything inside into vapor, which is a sad loss of pretty good bourbon. But it appears there wasn’t a cap on it. Does Wild Turkey have a metal screw cap?”
“Nope,” Cody said. “It has a cork plug kind of thing.”
“Hmmm, then we’ll have to get it analyzed to see if there’s any cork or plastic residue inside the neck of the bottle. But I’d guess our victim opened this baby up and didn’t cap it. Which means serious drinking to me. I mean, when a guy doesn’t bother to put the cap back on between drinks, he’s on a good toot. Right, Cody?”
Cody grunted with recognition.
“So the way I see it,” Larry said, moving the flashlight to the blackened arm and hand sticking out from the couch and debris, “is our victim was feeding the fire and getting pounded at the same time. Except maybe toward the end of the toot he didn’t latch the handle on the stove completely. He staggered back to the couch with his bottle of Wild Turkey and had another drink and likely fell asleep. When the logs in the stove shifted they pushed open the door.
“Of course,” Larry said, raising his flashlight to illuminate his face so Cody could see Larry’s index finger posing pensively alongside his cheek, “first impressions can be wrong, especially in these conditions, and I’m never one to jump to conclusions no matter how much I want to will them to be what I want them to be. For starters, this isn’t an optimal crime scene. In fact, it’s a fucking horrible crime scene, which is why I don’t want it to be anything other than a suicide. The rain changes everything, as we know. There’s both bad and good aspects of this scene because of this goddamned weather.”
Cody could tell Larry was at his best and wanted to be prompted.
“Like what?” Cody said.
“Well, the bad aspects are legion. It’s been two or three days since the fire occurred, for one, so the scene isn’t fresh. Rainwater has contaminated it if we try and look for trace evidence of any kind. Animals have been in here.”
“They have?” Cody said, genuinely surprised he’d missed it.
Larry squatted and trained his beam so it shone from a lower angle into the tangle of debris around the body, illuminating a swatch of dark red striped with white. Bone white: ribs.
“Yeah,” Larry said. “A badger or something got in here and fed through the meat to the bone. So that’s just gross.”
He stood, and said, “Continuing, the slop of ash and water within this foundation is wet enough not to retain any prints or tracks. So we can’t tell if anyone besides us and the hikers were in here. Not that it makes that much difference, since dead is dead. But if there was someone else here with the victim we have no evidence of that. No empty glasses, or cigarette butts, or anything like that. If there were tire tracks out in the parking area or footprints in the dirt they’re gone. We’ve only got what we’ve got. And if anything was left in this part of the cabin before the place burned down it’s literally in the soup now.
“If an accelerant was used as part of a suicide I doubt there would be any trace of it left. Of course, hundred- proof whiskey might have had the same effect.”
Cody nodded.
“But there’s some good things,” Larry said.
“Which are?”
Larry shined his light on the unburned half of the cabin. “The rain put the fire out before it took the whole place down. We might find something in there. That’s where the kitchen and dining room are, and a bedroom. There’s a lot of smoke damage, but who knows? We might find something.
“And the rain and cold might work a little in our favor,” he said. “If the rain hadn’t come no doubt the body would have been subject to the wick effect, because our victim was big and had plenty of fuel.”
The wick effect was when fat smoldered-sometimes for days-and rendered the carcass a mass of black gelatinous goo.
“So because we have a great deal of the body left, the autopsy boys might be able to determine cause of death.”
Cody centered his light on the frame of a metal desk and the black melted hulk on top of it. “We might even be able to recover something from the hard drive of the computer, I just don’t know. I don’t know if data on a hard drive can survive that kind of heat and this damned rain. But we might be able to recover something, if it’s even worth trying.”
Larry said, “And there you have it, folks,” bowing and sweeping his hand toward the body like a performer done with his act, “an accidental death in a remote mountain cabin.”
Cody said nothing. The rain drummed.
“What?” Larry asked, finally. “Are you thinking something else?”
“Let’s take a look inside the rest of the cabin,” Cody said. “Let me grab my gear.”
“You’re thinking something else,” Larry said, his disappointment palpable.
All the walls were black with smoke, but the kitchen was neat and uncluttered. The table was cleared except for salt and pepper shakers designed to look like rising trout. It felt good to get out of the rain.
There were no dishes in the sink. There were unopened packages of meat and vegetables still in the plastic bags from the store in the refrigerator.
“Looks like he’d just been shopping,” Larry said. “There’s no old stuff in here at all, like maybe he’d been gone and just came back with groceries. And there’s plenty here-two big steaks, some potatoes, salad in a bag. Like he was expecting someone or maybe just eating for two. I bet these steaks are still okay, considering how cold it’s been.”
Cody opened the dishwasher, hoping there would be dirty glasses or dishes inside.
“Shit,” Cody said. “He ran the dishwasher before the place burned down, so we won’t pull any prints from the glasses or plates.”
“He was a clean drunk,” Larry said, rooting through cupboards. “I’ll leave all these doors open so you can shoot ’em if you want. It might be better in the daylight, though.”
Cody checked under the sink. Cleaning supplies, garbage bags, the usual. He shined his flashlight into the garbage can, which was lined with white plastic. Garbage cans often held good stuff, he knew.
