“Any idea what set things off?”
O’Conner shook his head. “As best we can tell, the explosion came first, then the fire. The blast blew off part of the roof—you can see some pieces of burned trusses and joists over there,” he said, pointing to an area halfway between the cabin and some smoldering tree trunks. “But the fire started right away, and it built fast.” O’Conner checked his watch, then checked the sky.
“Should be sunup pretty soon now,” he said. “You want to go ahead and get started or wait for daylight?”
I looked up and thought I saw a hint of paleness. “Might as well wait,” I said. “It’s gonna be hard to see the bones in broad daylight, let alone in the dark. If Hamilton’s in there, he’s not gonna get any deader if we wait an hour.” I was recycling my jokes, I realized as I said it, but it was new to O’Conner, and the sheriff laughed—a touch ruefully, I thought, but at least he laughed.
The cabin was big, or had been, before its decimation—more like a log home than a weekend getaway. O’Conner said it had two stories aboveground, plus a basement dug into the ground. Now all that remained standing were the basement’s concrete-block walls and most of the stone chimney, whose massive fireplaces could probably have roasted a whole pig on each of the house’s three levels.
O’Conner pointed toward the basement fireplace with the beam of a four-cell flashlight. “Over there, about six feet straight out from the hearth, is where Waylon saw a skull.” I looked, and I saw broken pottery and what appeared to be a pair of charred tree branches, but the more I studied their odd symmetry, the more unlike branches they appeared—and the more like burned antlers from some hunting trophy that had hung over the mantel. Then—tucked down amid the antlers—I glimpsed a familiar rounded shape, with two dark ovals tunneling into it. A skull, unmistakably human. “Miranda?” She turned from her own survey of the floor and looked at me, as did Art. “Over there, under those antlers.” Her gaze tracked mine.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s not something you see every day. Like an interspecies hunting trophy.”
The blaze had completely consumed the staircases inside the house; to get to the basement floor, we’d need to clamber down a ladder. I asked for the ladder to be lowered into a corner near the fireplace, which was centered at one end of the building.
While waiting for full daylight, we unloaded the truck, suited up in disposable Tyvek coveralls, and staged our gear at the top of the ladder—trowels, rakes, shovels, wire screens, and paper evidence bags. Once we were ready and the light was bright, I nodded to O’Conner, and we began. One of the begrimed firemen descended first, then steadied the ladder for Miranda, Art, O’Conner, and me.
As soon as I got down, I noticed oddly bright bits of color amid the gray and black world of ashes and embers at my feet. Crouching, I sifted through the ash to extract one of the bits—a thin, ragged thread of metal, reddish orange in color, about six inches long. It had drooped up and down to follow the slight contours of the debris beneath it, but viewed from above, it ran in a straight line. Instinctively I looked up, though there was nothing to see now except the pale morning sky in place of the joists that had burned and the copper wiring that had melted and dripped.
“Any idea what the melting point of copper is?” O’Conner’s question echoed my own thoughts.
“I was just trying to remember,” I said. “Pretty hot. Somewhere around a thousand degrees, I think.”
The firefighter who had come down to hold the ladder for us spoke up. “I think it’s a lot more than that. Hell, lead melts at something like six hunnerd, and copper’s a lot tougher than lead.”
“Oh, sorry, I was talking Celsius,” I said. “A thousand Celsius would be, let’s see, close to two thousand Fahrenheit.”
The firefighter nodded. “Sounds more like it. Only other time I seen melted wiring was in a paint-store fire. Way all them solvents went up—lacquer thinner, turpentine, acetone, oil-base paints, what have you—you’d’ve thought it was the world’s biggest case of arson. Weren’t, though. Just a accident.”
“So what’s the typical temperature when a wooden building burns down?”
“Eight hundred, maybe a thousand Fahrenheit,” he said.
“More if they’s plenty of fuel and a good oxygen supply. You get a stack effect going—say, one of them old three-or four-story Victorians—you can get up to fifteen hunnerd or two thousand. Log house like this, though, would normally burn slower than a stick-built house—just like logs in a campfire burn slower than twigs. But this thing burned like it was made outta cardboard. Had to’ve been a shitload of accelerant in here.”
I laughed. “‘Shitload’—is that a technical, arson-investigation term?”