“LIKE A GHOST”
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT on December 15, 2012, Lois Gomez sat up in bed. She thought she heard something. She listened. Nothing. Maybe she was wrong, maybe she hadn’t heard anything. She went to the kitchen for a drink of water. It was two or three in the morning, only a few hours before her shift at Perdue and her husband’s shift at Tyson. Now she definitely heard something. A banging on her front door—which in itself was odd; friends and family knew they always used the side entrance—and someone yelling: “Your garage is on fire! I’ve already called 911!”
She stood frozen in the kitchen trying to process the information. Christmas lights, she thought. Her outdoor Christmas lights were halfway up, but she and her husband had recently decided to visit his family in Texas for the holiday and she’d been trying to figure out whether to bother with the rest of the decorations, which were meanwhile stored in the family’s detached garage, which was now on fire. Christmas lights, along with the expensive music equipment for her son’s rock band.
It had been a rough couple of months. For one thing, she wasn’t getting along with her next-door neighbors. She’d been close with the woman who’d owned that house before, Susan Bundick. They brought each other dinner sometimes, or stood and chatted in their backyards. But one Sunday afternoon, Lois was outside emptying the aboveground backyard pool to close out the summer season, and she saw the police were at Susan’s house. They told Lois her neighbor had died. Now, Susan’s daughter lived in her mother’s old house and things weren’t as pleasant. Tonya was fine, kept to herself, but Lois had a few run-ins with Tonya’s new boyfriend, a squirrelly redheaded guy whose name she didn’t know. He’d done a few little things, like dumping a bunch of branches on their lawn instead of disposing of them like he was supposed to. Once he’d accused her of making racial slurs against Tonya’s kids. The accusation was ridiculous. Lois’s husband was from Mexico, and her four grandchildren were partly black.
She’d also been having nightmares about the arsonist. In one dream, she went into her kitchen late at night and saw someone racing through the yard, an intruder wearing dark-colored sweatpants and hoodie. “What are you doing?” she called. The figure turned and looked at her but she still couldn’t see his face, and he eventually disappeared behind her detached garage. She woke up and realized it wasn’t real.
This night wasn’t a dream, though.
She went outside, where flames were leaping from the garage. She watched the dissolution of her Christmas ornaments, and her son’s band equipment, and all the other things people stick in garages and toolsheds when they don’t want to get rid of something but aren’t ready to say good-bye. Numbly, she realized that whoever had lit the garage on fire had also taken the time to let out the chickens. They had been kept in a pen attached to the building and they were now running all over the lawn at three in the morning.
It was the thirtieth fire.
By now, it was a strange time to live in the neighborhood.
Reports of arsons were appearing almost daily on the local TV news as reporters strained their thesauruses looking for new words to describe fire, and ended up just saying “blazed” a lot. The newspapers, the Eastern Shore News and the Eastern Shore Post, operated with shoestring staffs, a handful of reporters apiece who covered everything from local politics to local basketball games in print editions that had been reduced to twice a week. Now they were covering the biggest news of the decade.
By the time Lois and Miguel’s garage lit up, they already had friends whose properties had burned, in what was becoming a real fear for anyone who owned a structure that looked even slightly decrepit. People were filled with—well, “paranoia” wasn’t the right word for it, not exactly, because paranoia meant that the thing you feared wasn’t likely to actually happen. These fires could happen, did happen, every night, all the time.
It was hard to pinpoint one moment when people realized what a big deal the serial arsonist was. Was it fire number seventeen, a big rental house worth $95,000, a lot of money for the Eastern Shore? Was it fire number thirty-four, the house on Front Street? That one was abandoned, but it wasn’t isolated like the others. It was right in downtown Accomac, just a few blocks from the courthouse. If the wind had gone the wrong way, that fire could have taken out the whole town.
Maybe it was fire number fifteen, a little house directly across the street from state police investigators Rob Barnes’s and Glenn Neal’s offices. That fire wasn’t even called into 911—Neal saw it himself as he was driving back from an interdepartmental meeting about the arsons. He was on his cell phone, talking to the director of the 911 Center about how the meeting had gone, and said, “Well, shit, man, the house is on fire. I gotta go.” It was so blatant. fire fifteen had a message, and the message seemed like it was Screw you.
After a little while, watching the fires was akin to seeing a set of china stacked precariously on the edge of a table and knowing it would fall but not knowing when. Or watching someone squeeze and squeeze a balloon and trying to prepare for the inevitable pop. Every single place people shopped or worked or went for coffee or got the car repaired, they would wonder if the arsonist was standing next to them in line. Facebook pages developed: “Who is trying to burn down Accomack County?” and “Arson in Accomack” and “Who is setting these fires? And how will they be stopped?”
On one of those pages, somebody reported that there was a scanner app that could be downloaded onto smartphones, so that listeners could hear about 911 calls at the same time the cops did. Everybody took that advice, and shortly after, somebody else noticed a different thing: one of the features of the app was that it showed users which cities it was most popular in, a top ten list. There was a period of time in late 2012 and early 2013 when number three was New York City and number two was Los Angeles, and the number one place where people were listening for crime data on their phones was Accomack County, Virginia.