Outside the lot, between the broken chain-link fence and the street, an incinerated car was turning the night sky opaque with smoke.
I coughed into my sleeve, kept a good twelve yards between myself and the smoldering car as Chuck Hanni, our chief fire investigator, processed the scene with his crew. One of his key associates was Lacy, an ignitable-liquid-detecting K-9, a black Labrador with an excellent nose.
The last time I saw Hanni, a meth lab disguised as a school bus had exploded on Market Street during morning rush hour. There had been casualties, but none of them, thank God, were children. Hanni had detailed that horror show with his first-rate expertise, as he was doing now with the remains of a fatal fire that looked to be a triple homicide.
As I watched, the K-9 alerted Hanni. The fire investigator pulled something out of the car, shone his Maglite on it, then sealed it in a paper bag. Claire and Charlie Clapper walked over to Hanni and had a powwow with him, and then they took over the scene.
Techs were taking bodies out of the vehicle as Hanni came over to brief me on what he’d learned so far.
He massaged his scarred right hand as he crossed the lot, the result of an injury he’d gotten in a fire. He wore his everyday chinos and white shirt under a sports jacket, and although Hanni was the first to get his hands dirty metaphorically, I’d never seen him with so much as a smudge of soot on his clothing.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” Hanni said.
I wanted to know everything.
He couldn’t tell me fast enough.
Chapter 35
“THE FIRE STARTED in the passenger compartment,” Chuc
k Hanni said. “See, the engine compartment is in relatively good shape. Flames probably vented through the open window.”
“The windows were open?”
“Just the driver’s window.”
“License and registration, please,” I said. “Could have been a traffic stop. Go ahead, Chuck. I interrupted you.”
“Not a problem. So, this is what I see happening. As the interior burned, the windshield failed and the rear seats were consumed. Then the fire entered the trunk and destroyed the back of the car.”
“Yeah, the rear tires are melted,” I said. “So what caused the fire?”
“Lacy alerted on what was left of a plastic bottle that had rolled under the front seat. I think gas was inside that bottle, but anyway, some kind of accelerant. It looks to me like the passenger compartment was doused, and the fire was started with a match or a lighter.
“I doubt the lab is going to get prints or DNA off that bottle,” Hanni continued. “But they can try. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
I was taking it all in, trying to picture it.
I said, “Someone pulls the car over, throws gas inside the vehicle, sets the fire. So why are the victims still inside? When the fire started, why didn’t they get out? Were they already dead?”
“Claire is swabbing their nasal cavities now. She’ll be able to tell you in about five seconds if the victims breathed smoke in or not.”
“Okay. What else?”
Hanni grinned at me and said, “Patience, Lindsay. I’m getting there. I removed all of the debris that fell from the dashboard, headliner, and door panels, and I found a spent round for you. Twenty-two caliber.”
I got a little chill. The good kind you get when your hunches pay off. Doesn’t happen every day. There are a million .22-caliber guns on the street, and our cop shooter had used one of them on Chaz Smith. Maybe he’d used the same gun to take out a few drug dealers from the projects.
I thanked Hanni and started to call Claire to find out if she’d found soot inside the victims’ nostrils but got distracted by the loud whoop-whoop of a siren announcing that another cop car was arriving at the scene.
It was Conklin and he came toward me at a trot. He was hyperventilating and it wasn’t because of the thirty-yard sprint.
“She’s here,” he said. “We’ve got our witness.”
It felt like Christmas and my birthday and Mother’s Day all wrapped up together and tied with a bow.
A witness had seen a cop pull a car over on Schwerin just moments before that car had become a fireball.