As we followed Jimenez into the fire-ravaged shell, I thought about how some cops and firefighters use jargon to show that they’re tough — when in fact they’re horrified. Others do it because they get off on it. What kind of guy was Jimenez?
“Was the front door locked?” I asked him.
“No, and a neighbor called the fire in. Lots of people don’t bother to set their alarms around here.”
Broken glass crunched under my shoes and water lapped over the tops of them as I slogged through the open space, trying to get a sense of the victims’ lives from the remains and residue of their home. But my knack for fitting puzzle pieces together was blunted by the extent of the destruction. First the fire, then the water and the mop-up, left the worst kind of crime scene.
If there had been fingerprints, they were gone. Hair, fiber, blood spatter, footprints, receipts, notes — forget all of that. Unless a bomb trigger or trace of an accelerant was found, we couldn’t even be sure that this fire and the others we were investigating had been set by the same person.
The most conclusive evidence we had was the similarity of the circumstances surrounding this fire and those at the Malones’ and Meachams’ homes.
“The vics were a married couple, George and Nancy Chu,” Jimenez told us. “She was a middle school teacher. He was some kind of financial planner. They paid their taxes, were law-abiding, good neighbors, and so forth. No known connections with any bad guys. I can fax you the detectives’ notes from the canvass of the neighborhood.”
“What about the ME’s report?” I asked.
Conklin was splashing through the ruins behind me. He started up the skeletal staircase that still clung to the rear wall.
“The ME wasn’t called. Uh, the chief ruled the fire accidental. Nancy Chu’s sister had the funeral home pick up the bodies, ASAP.”
“The chief didn’t see cause to call the ME?” I shouted. “We’re looking at a string of fire-related, probable homicides in San Francisco.”
“Like I told you,” Jimenez said, staring me down with his dark eyes. “I wasn’t called either. By the time I got here, the bodies were gone and the house was boarded up. Now everyone’s yelling at me.”
“Who else is yelling?”
“You know him. Chuck Hanni.”
“Chuck was here?”
“This morning. We called him in to consult. He said you were working a couple of similar cases. And before you say I didn’t tell you, we might have a witness.”
Had I heard Jimenez right? There was a witness? I stared up at Jimenez and pinned some hope on the thought of a break in the case.
“Firefighters found the Chus’ daughter unconscious out on the lawn. She’s at St. Anne’s Children’s Hospital with an admitting carbon monoxide of seventeen percent.”
“She’s going to make it?”
Jimenez nodded, said, “She’s conscious now, but pretty traumatized. So far she hasn’t said a word.”
Chapter 57
A TELEPHONE RANG repeatedly in some corner of the second floor of George and Nancy Chu’s house. I waited out the sad, echoing bell tones before asking Jimenez the name and age of the Chus’ daughter.
“Molly Chu. She’s ten.”
I scribbled in my notebook, stepped around a mound of water-soaked rubble, and headed for the stairs. I called out to Rich, who was already starting down. Before I could tell him about Molly Chu, he showed
me a paperback book that he held by the charred edges.
Enough of the book cover remained so that I could read the title: Fire Lover, by Joseph Wambaugh.
I knew the book.
This was a nonfiction account of a serial arsonist who’d terrorized the state of California in the 1980s and ’90s. The blurb on the back cover recounted a scene of horror, a fire that had demolished a huge home improvement center, killing four people, including a little boy of two. While the fire burned, a man sat in his car, videotaping the images in his rearview mirror — the rigs pulling up, the firefighters boiling out, trying to do the dangerous and impossible, to knock down the inferno even as two other suspicious fires burned only blocks away.
The man in the car was an arson investigator, John Leonard Orr, a captain of the Glendale Fire Department.
Orr was well known and respected. He toured the state giving lectures to firefighters, helping law enforcement read the clues and understand the pathology of arsonists. And while he was traveling, John Orr set fires. He set the fire that had killed those four people. And because of his pattern of setting fires in towns where he was attending fire conferences, he was eventually caught.