White Fire (12 page)

He approached the chief. Morris was sweating, despite the cold. “What did you find?” he asked, his voice quiet.

“It’s a crime scene,” said Chivers, trying to control the quaver in his voice. Faint lights were dancing in front of his eyes now. “Four victims. At least, four so far.”

“Four? Oh, my God. So they were in there. The whole family…” The chief wiped his brow with a shaking hand.

Chivers swallowed. “One of the remains is of a…a juvenile who was…tied to a bed, doused with accelerant…and set on fire. Another was burned in…in…”

As Chivers tried to get out the words, the chief’s face went slack. But Chivers barely noticed. His own world was getting darker and darker.

And then, as he was still trying to finish his sentence, Chivers folded to the ground, collapsing in a dead faint.

14

C
orrie had risen before dawn, gathered her equipment, and headed up to Roaring Fork. Now, as noon approached, she was ensconced in the warehouse at The Heights and well into her work. The remains of Emmett Bowdree were carefully arranged on a plastic folding table Corrie had bought at Walmart, under a set of strong studio lights. She had her stereo zoom in place, hooked to her laptop, the screen displaying the view from the microscope. Her Nikon stood on its tripod. It was like a little piece of heaven, being able to work carefully and thoroughly, without being half scared out of her wits and worrying about detection at any moment.

The only problem was, she was freezing her ass off. It had been below zero when she began the long drive from Basalt—having refused the free room at the Hotel Sebastian, courtesy of Pendergast. She had skipped breakfast to save money, and now she was starving as well as cold. She’d set up a cheap electric heater at her feet, but it was rattling and humming and the stream of warm air seemed to dissipate within inches of its grille. It was doing a good job of warming her shins, but that was about it.

Still, not even the cold and hunger could dampen her growing excitement at what she was finding. Almost all the bones showed trauma in the form of scrape marks, blunt cuts, and gouges. None of the marks showed signs of an osseous reaction, inflammation, or granulation—which meant the damage had been inflicted at the actual time of death. The soft, cancellous or spongy bone tissue showed unmistakable tooth marks—not bear but human, judging from the radius of the bite and the tooth profile. There were, in fact, no bear tooth or claw marks at all.

Inside the broken femur and inside the skull, she had discovered additional scraping and gouging marks, indicating that the marrow and brains had been reamed out by a metal tool. Under the stereo zoom, these defleshing marks disclosed some very faint parallel lines, close together, and what looked like iron oxide deposits—which suggested the tool was iron and, quite possibly, a worn file.

The initial blow to the cranium had definitely been inflicted by a rock. Under the microscope, she had been able to extract a few tiny fragments of it, which a cursory examination showed to be quartz.

The rib cage had been split open—also with a rock—and pulled apart, as if to get at the heart. The bones showed little evidence of trauma inflicted by a sharp edge—such as an ax or knife—nor were there any injuries consistent with a gunshot wound. This puzzled her, as most miners of the time would no doubt have been armed with either a knife or a pistol.

The contemporary newspaper account of the discovery of Emmett Bowdree’s body indicated that his bones had been found scattered on the ground a hundred yards beyond the door of a cabin; he had been “almost entirely eaten” by the so-called bear. The newspaper article, perhaps for reasons of delicacy, didn’t go into much detail on exactly what had been eaten or how the bones were disarticulated, except to note that “pieces of the heart and other viscera were discovered at a distance from the body, partially consumed.” The article made no mention of a fire or cooking, and her examination of the remains showed no evidence of heat.

Emmett Bowdree had been eaten raw.

As she worked, she began to see, in her mind’s eye, the sequence of injuries that had been inflicted on the body of Bowdree. He had been set upon by a group—no single person could have pulled a human body apart with such an extremity of violence. They struck him on the back of the head with a rock, causing a severe depressed fracture. While it may not have killed him instantly, it almost certainly rendered him unconscious. They gave the body a savage beating that broke almost every bone, and then proceeded to chop and pound at the body’s major articulations—there was evidence of disorganized, haphazard hacking with broken rocks, followed by separation via a strong lateral force. After breaking the joints, they pulled the arms and legs from the torso, separated the legs at the knees, broke open the skull and removed the brains, stripped the flesh from the bones, broke up the larger bones and reamed out the marrow, and removed most of the organs. The killers appeared to have only one tool, a worn-out file, which they supplemented with sharp pieces of quartz rock, their hands, and their teeth.

Corrie surmised that the killing started out as a product of fury and anger, then evolved into—essentially—a cannibal feast. She stepped back from the remains for a moment, thinking. Who was the gang who did this? Why? Again, it seemed exceedingly strange to her that a gang of murderers would be roaming the mountains in the 1870s without guns or knives. And why didn’t they cook the meat? It was almost as if they were a tribe of Stone Age killers, merciless and savage.

Merciless and savage.
As she warmed herself in front of the heater, rubbing her hands together, Corrie’s mind wandered once again to the terrible fire that had taken place the evening before—and the death of the girl, Jenny Baker. It was beyond horrible, the entire family perishing in the fire like that. A maintenance worker had stopped by the warehouse an hour earlier and given her the news. No wonder she’d managed to breeze through The Heights security at ten that morning with barely a nod, left to her own devices without a minder.

The horror of it, and the face of Jenny Baker—so earnest and pretty—haunted her.
Focus on your work
, she told herself, straightening up and preparing to place another bone on the stage for examination.

What she really needed was to get her hands on more sets of remains for comparison. Pendergast had said he was going to help her track down more descendants. She paused for a moment in her work, trying to figure out what it was about this that annoyed her. The force of his personality was such that he dominated any situation he was in. But this was
her
project—and she wanted to do it on her own. She didn’t want to have people back at John Jay, especially her advisor, dismissing her work because of the help of a big-time FBI agent. Even the smallest amount of assistance from him might contaminate her achievement, giving them an opening to dismiss it all.

Then Corrie shook this thought away as well. The guy had just saved her career and maybe even her life. To get so possessive, so proprietary, was churlish. Besides, Pendergast always shunned credit or publicity.

She pulled off her gloves to position a tibia on the stereo zoom stage, moving it around until the light raked over it at just the right angle. It showed the same signs as the other bones: fracture damage with plastic response, no evidence of healing, scrape marks, and the clearest set of tooth marks yet. The people who had done this were freaks. Or had they just been really, really angry?

Her hands just about froze, but she managed to get a set of photographs before she had to stop and warm herself again at the heater.

Of course, it was possible this was an isolated case. The other victims might have indeed been killed by a rogue grizzly. The news reports quoted witnesses who had seen the animal, and in one instance a miner had been found in the process of being eaten—or, at least, his bones gnawed upon. Corrie was sorely tempted to check one of the other coffins, but resisted the impulse. From now on, she was going to do everything absolutely and totally by the book.

Able to feel her hands once again, she straightened up. If the other remains did prove to be the work of a gang of killers, her thesis would have to change. She would have a hundred-and-fifty-year-old serial killing on her hands to document. And it would be very cool—and a huge boost to her nascent career—if she could actually manage to solve it.

15

L
arry Chivers stood beside his truck, sealing the nylon evidence bags with a heat sealer and finishing up his notes and observations. He had recovered from his fainting spell, but not from his sense of furious embarrassment. Such a thing had never happened to him—ever. He imagined that everyone was looking at him, whispering about him.

With a grimace, he finished working on the final evidence bag, careful to make the seal complete. Already, he’d narrated the rest of his observations into the digital recorder while they were still fresh. He had to make absolutely sure he did everything just right. This was going to be a huge case—probably even national.

There was a sound behind him, and he turned to see Chief Morris approaching. The man looked utterly undone.

“Sorry about my reaction back there,” Chivers muttered.

“I knew the family,” the chief told him. “One of the girls worked as an intern in my office.”

Chivers shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“I’d like to hear your reconstruction of the fire.”

“I can give you my first impressions. The lab results may take a few days.”

“Go ahead.”

Chivers took a deep breath. “Point of origin of the fire, in my view, would be either the second-floor bath or the bedroom above the living room. Both areas were doused heavily with accelerant—so much so that the perp would have had to leave the house fairly quickly. Both areas contained human remains.”

“You mean, the Bakers…the victims…were burned with accelerant?”

“Two of them, yes.”

“Alive?”

What a question.
“That’ll have to wait for the M.E. But I doubt it.”

“Thank God.”

“Two more victims were found by the back door—probably where the perp made his exit. There was the body of a dog there, too.”

“Rex,” said the chief to himself, wiping his brow with a trembling hand.

Chivers noted the same man in the black suit he’d seen before, floating in the background, eyes on them. He frowned. Why was the undertaker allowed inside the cordon?

“Motive?” asked the chief.

“Now I’m guessing,” Chivers continued, “but from thirty years of experience I’d say pretty definitely we’re looking at a home invasion and robbery, combined with possible sex crimes. The fact that the entire family was subdued and controlled suggests to me there might have been more than one perp.”

“This was no robbery,” came a soft, drawling voice.

Chivers jerked his head around to find that the man in the black suit had somehow managed to approach without being noticed and was now standing behind them.

Chivers’s scowl deepened. “I’m talking to the chief. Do you mind?”

“Not at all. But if I may, I would like to offer a few observations for the benefit of the investigation. A mere robber would not have gone to the trouble to tie up his victims and then burn them alive.”

“
Alive?
” the chief said. “How do you know?”

“The sadism and rage evident in the arc of this crime are palpable. A sadist wishes to see his victims suffer. That is how he derives his gratification. To tie someone to a bed, douse that person with gasoline, and light them on fire—where’s the gratification in that, if the person is already dead?”

The chief’s face went as gray as putty. His mouth moved but no sound came out.

“Bullshit,” said Chivers fiercely. “This was a home invasion and robbery. I’ve seen it before. The perps break in, find a couple of pretty girls, have their way with them, load up on jewelry, and then burn down the place thinking they’ll destroy the evidence—particularly the DNA inside the girls.”

“Yet they didn’t take the jewelry, as you yourself noted in your taped observations a few minutes ago, regarding some lumps of gold you discovered.”

“Hold on, here. You were
listening
to me? Who the hell are you?” Chivers turned to the chief. “Is this guy official?”

The chief passed a sopping handkerchief across his brow. He looked indecisive and frightened. “Please. Enough.”

The man in the black suit regarded him a moment with his silver eyes, and then shrugged nonchalantly. “I have no official role here. I am merely a bystander offering his impressions. I shall leave you gentlemen to your work.”

With that he turned and began to leave. Then he paused to speak over his shoulder. “I should mention, however: there may well be…
more
.”

And with that he walked off, slipping under the tape and disappearing into the crowd of rubberneckers.

16

H
orace P. Fine III stopped, swiveled on his instep, and looked Corrie up and down, as if he had just thought of something.

“Do you have any experience house-sitting?” he asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” Corrie replied immediately. It was sort of true: she’d watched their trailer home overnight more than once when her mother went on an all-night bender. And then there was the time she’d stayed at her father’s apartment six months before, when he’d gone to that job fair in Pittsburgh.

“Never anyplace this big, though,” she added, looking around.

Fine looked at her suspiciously—but then again, maybe it was just the way his face was put together. It seemed that every syllable she’d uttered had been greeted by distrust.

“Well, I don’t have time to check your references,” he replied. “The person I’d arranged to take the position backed out at the last minute, and I’m overdue in New York.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “But I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Come on, I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Corrie, following the man down the long, echoing first-floor hallway, wondered just how Horace P. Fine planned to keep an eye on her from two thousand miles away.