Fire Spirit Read Online Free PDF Page B

battalion chief, were waiting for her on the porch. Jack was a lean, serious man with a thinning white pompadour and permanently narrowed eyes. He was a much more experienced arson investigator than Ruth, with almost twenty-five years on the job, but for various unexplained reasons he had always resisted promotion. He spoke in a slow, grinding growl, so that it was always hard to tell if he was excited about what he had discovered or not.
    By complete contrast, Bob Kowalski was tall and broad-shouldered, big-bellied and bluff, with flaming-red cheeks and a gingery-white buzz cut, and every one of his sentences sounded as if it had an exclamation point after it. He liked a beer and a joke and he always played Santa at the Fire Department’s Christmas party.
    â€˜Morning, Ruthie!’ he welcomed her. ‘Sorry to drag you out at such a goddarn unsociable hour!’
    â€˜Hey, that’s OK, sir. Tyson always enjoys an early morning run, don’t you, Tyson?’
    Jack Morrow nodded to her, cleared his throat and said, ‘What we have here appears on first impression to be a Class B fire that was very limited in area and probably of very short duration, no more than five or ten minutes, but at the same time it was very intense. To tell you the truth I never saw nothing exactly like it.’
    â€˜Do we know when it happened?’ Ruth asked him.
    â€˜Round about five thirty a.m.,’ said Bob Kowalski. ‘A delivery truck driver was taking a short cut to the Top Banana Farm Market, and as he passed the house here he happened to see flames leaping up behind the drapes. We dispatched Engine Number Three and it arrived within less than seven minutes, but the fire had pretty much extinguished itself by then.’
    â€˜Did the truck driver see anybody else in the vicinity? Any other vehicles?’
    â€˜Whole street was plumb deserted, as far as he could see.’
    â€˜And what color were the flames? Did he tell you that?’
    â€˜Yellow. And real fierce! That’s what he said. Right up to the ceiling. We let him leave about twenty minutes ago to deliver his load of apples, but I took his cell number if you need to talk to him some more.’
    Ruth took off her pink-tinted Ray-Bans and took a long look at the sightseers on the sidewalk. Six-and-a-half years with the fire/arson investigation unit had given her an eye for anybody who appeared overexcited, or anybody who was trying to keep themselves hidden behind the rest of the crowd. This morning, however, nobody immediately caught her attention, except for a dark-haired boy of about twelve who should have been getting ready for school by now.
    â€˜OK,’ she said. ‘Tyson and me had better take a look.’
    Jack Morrow led her through the hallway to the living-room. There were three firefighters and two KPD detectives there already, as well as Val Minelli from the police crime lab. They all greeted her with ‘hi’s and ‘how’re you doing, Ruth?’, but they were unusually subdued.
    Ruth immediately saw why. In the center of the living-room lay a charred mattress, burned right down to the springs, and lying on the mattress was an incinerated human body. The fire that had engulfed it had been so fierce that it had been reduced to a blackened monkey, with grinning brown teeth, and it was impossible to tell if it had been a man or a woman.
    The whole room stank of burned cotton batting and that distinctive bitterness of carbonized human flesh.
    Tyson gave the body a tentative sniff. He let out a whine and looked up at Ruth with a questioning expression in his eyes. They rarely came across a cadaver as seriously burned as this, even in some of the worst fires they attended. Tyson strained at his leash, impatient to start searching the room for any lingering smell of accelerants, but Ruth said, ‘ Heel , Tyson,’ and he stayed where he was, although he didn’t stop trembling and licking his lips and