Sutton got back to the car and told Matt and Seth what happened. “I’m not going back to get those trail cams,” he said furiously. “If you want them, you can go back and get them.”
Matt did go back, tramping through the woods. When he found the law enforcement camera Sutton had described, he tried to figure out which way it was pointing and wave his arms in front of it, mouthing, “I’m not the arsonist. I’m not the arsonist.” Then he took down his own camera and he and Sutton and Seth drove away.
Nobody would realize it, but it was possible that the ghostly hand the investigators had seen reaching toward the camera wasn’t the arsonist at all; it was Matt Hart embarking on another one of his schemes.
CHAPTER 12
“I’VE SEEN ENOUGH ASS TO KNOW”
THEY WERE A LITTLE EXUBERANT, the Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters. But then, how do you measure crazy behavior when it was really, perhaps, a normal reaction to a crazy situation? People turned on their friends and neighbors. They just did, it was the sort of thing you couldn’t help doing after enough sleepless nights. Matt got funny looks from people who thought that anyone that interested in the case must be trying to hide something. Seth did, too. One night he got pulled over for speeding, the same night there had been two big fires in the Fox Grove neighborhood, from which he had just come.
“Man, I saw the truck with a FoxGrov license plate on the back and I knew it was you,” laughed the state trooper, who turned out to be a friend Seth had known since they were twelve. He questioned Seth about his comings and goings, swept his flashlight around the interior to make sure there were no gas cans, and then let him go.
Seth had no idea that his childhood friend would privately consider him to be a person of interest until much later, after everything was over.
One evening state police investigator Glenn Neal asked an acquaintance to come out and drive around with him. Neal wanted to explore the field where a fire had earlier been set. The acquaintance had some brushes with the law in the past, but he knew those fields really well and he was basically a decent guy. While they were out patrolling, another fire was set and Neal’s cell phone rang: a tip from a concerned citizen. The fire that had been set that night, they were sure they knew who had set it. They told him who.
“Are you sure?” Neal asked. The caller said they were sure. “Huh,” Neal said, “because he’s sitting right next to me.”
Everyone had a building that burned, or knew someone who did. Everyone made a 911 call, or knew someone who did. The callers couldn’t help but insert the stories of their own day into the emergency calls, as if the fires belonged to all of them, the narrative of a county and its destruction and its fear. “I was just out trying to fix my phone wire,” the callers said. Or “I had just come outside to my car.” Or “I had just met two state police going down to Saxis.” Or “I just left Evergreen Church and I’m on the road from Puncoteague to the Puncoteague School, and there’s a house, and it’s on fire, and its empty, and I’ve got cold chills.”
“What’s the address?” the dispatcher asked the caller from the Puncoteague fire.
“I really don’t want to go near that area,” the caller said, afraid the arsonist might still be lurking nearby.
The dispatcher paused. “I don’t blame you.”
On Valentine’s day, a call came through that was different from all the others, because it wasn’t an abandoned house. The house was occupied by J. D. Shreaves, a single father who ran out for twenty minutes to drop his daughters off at their grandmother’s a few miles away. When he came back, he thought he smelled smoke, but after walking from room to room, he figured there must just be a cigarette in the ashtray. But when he picked up his daughters a few hours later, his girls said they smelled something burning, too. This time he went outside and patrolled the perimeter. Under a loose siding panel, someone had stuffed a lit rag and it was still smoldering. Someone had known he’d left the house, and timed the fire accordingly. Someone had been watching. “Girls, calm down,” he told his crying daughters as he waited for the dispatcher to send the police. “Your daddy’s with you.”
One night the arsonist burned a pickup truck carrying wood flooring that its owner hadn’t gotten around to installing. Neal was sent to investigate, and when he got there, he realized that the fire was only a few houses down from where his friend Charlie and Charlie’s girlfriend, Tonya, lived. Neal was closer with Charlie’s brother Bryan, but he knew Charlie, too. As Charlie remembered, they’d first met when Neal pulled him over for a traffic infraction. Charlie, incensed at the ticket, had stormed into Bryan’s house ready to complain about the jerk cop he’d just met only to find the cop sitting in his brother’s living room. They laughed about it and ended up occasional drinking buddies.
“Let’s ride across the street and talk to Charlie and Tonya,” Neal suggested to the patrolman he was circling with that night. “I know they’ll talk to us.”
Charlie seemed a little fidgety when Neal and his patrol partner knocked on the door—at least Charlie himself remembered seeming a little fidgety—but then again, to other people he often seemed that way. After he’d kicked drugs he’d acquired a caffeine habit; those who would see him at the body shop remembered him leaving every hour, on the hour, to run to the gas station for twenty-four-ounce cups of coffee until he was bouncing off the wall like a cartoon chipmunk. “All that coffee is going to kill him,” his stepdad would remark, and Neal, who knew Charlie’s backstory, once replied, “Yeah. But it’s better than what he used to do.”
Neal stood in the living room and asked Charlie and Tonya if they were sure they hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the night the truck was burned.
“C’mon, man—you can’t tell me you didn’t see anything,” Neal said.
“Naw, man. I ain’t seen nothing,” Charlie said. “Damn, I wish I’d gotten some parts off of it, because I need parts for a Ford Ranger.”
“I’m sure you could get them for cheap now,” Neal joked.
“Maybe I should go over and talk to them.”
Neal moved on to the next house, another friend he had on the road, and that friend hadn’t seen anything either.
Each time a new fire was reported, the geographic profiler Isaac Van Patten plugged the location into his algorithm, hoping to generate a more specific profile. Instead of the circle getting smaller, though, it appeared to stay roughly the same size, just moving slowly southward. By the time Van Patten ran the algorithm several weeks later, the intersection at Matthews Road was no longer a part of the targeted area at all.