St. Albans Fire Read Free Page B

car accident and once when a knife thrust put him in a coma for weeks—not to mention too many lesser injuries and close calls to count.
    Reacting to these thoughts, she, too, rose from her chair and crossed over to him, putting her arms around his waist and giving him a tight hug.
    He chuckled tentatively and rubbed her back, burying his nose in her hair and breathing her in as he loved to do. “You okay?” he asked. “What’s this about?”
    She pulled back and looked into his eyes, her expression serious. “Nothing. I’ll miss you. Do call.”
    · · ·
    Jonathon Michael watched as the medical examiner and the funeral home crew wrestled the gurney bearing Bobby Cutts along the narrow trench that Michael had, for safety’s sake, allowed to be cut through the debris, despite it all being a probable crime scene. The volunteer EMT/firefighters had been a huge help there—shoveling a pathway in barely twenty minutes. No surprise, of course; they were routinely reliable if you treated them right, hanging around long after their job was done, eager to assist, sometimes to a fault. Michael had pulled the leash on them more than once in the past to preserve potential evidence from being trampled or destroyed. Among cops, the inside joke was that EMT actually stood for “evidence mangling technician.” Still, he remained grateful—they were cooperative, interested, and instinctively hard workers, especially when it came to the heavy lifting he so commonly required. In his experience, few of his own law enforcement colleagues were as useful—or, to be fair, as plentiful.
    The gurney crew reached the edge of the barn’s foundation and the trampled, soiled snow field beyond, to be immediately enveloped by Bobby’s family—assuming that what they’d found was Bobby. Luckily for the medical examiner, given what was left, dental records and DNA would confirm the identity of what had taken hours to locate. Michael’s thermal imager had finally done the trick, just barely distinguishing Bobby’s curled-up form from the smoking timbers and carcasses around it. In fact, when he’d turned the machine off to confirm his discovery, he couldn’t tell the difference.
    Michael shook his head gently and returned to work. He’d allowed for the removal as soon as he’d dared, but it still had taken hours for him and the forensics crew to measure, take pictures, and make sketches and notes, all while the family anxiously hovered. He’d met with them earlier, briefly—the mother catatonic, the father stoic and helpful, identifying his son from his partially burned boots, the sister and brother-in-law emulating their elders, although the sister had also given in to occasional bouts of pain so fierce that Michael had thought they might be stomach cramps.
    No one had been able to tell him much. This was a bolt from the blue, without context or explanation. Michael hadn’t pressed for more. It was early yet. He’d really only wanted first impressions, maybe an inkling of something amiss. He’d gotten only sorrow and grief.
    The barn, by contrast, had bordered on the eloquent. From the moment he’d set eyes on it, he’d had his hopes, which is why he’d alerted his superiors. Arson investigation textbooks tell you to look for multiple sources of primary ignition—often those places that show the heaviest char, called alligatoring for obvious reasons. That’s where this building’s not having burned to the ground came in handy, the consensus being that if you burn anything long enough, it all becomes char.
    Here there was enough left standing, or enough that could be re-erected with the firefighters’ help, that Michael had been able to identify several sources of primary ignition. Not only that, but glancing about, especially in the remains of the stable, he’d discovered what looked like trailer lines—burned traces of a flammable substance used to carry fire from one spot to another. As a child, he’d seen his father