BY MARCH 5, Bobby Bailey’s cameras, the high-tech ones that automatically sent pictures to the investigators’ phones, had amassed quite a collection. In addition to the cat chasing the mouse and the ghostly hand, there was also an assortment of birds and wildlife. But he still hadn’t caught the arsonist, and this was getting to him on a psychological level. He was supposed to be the guy. The teacher. The fire mastermind. And he hadn’t gotten any further with the investigation than his students.
One of Bailey’s advantages in this investigation had been that he wasn’t tied to it. Not personally—he had no family or friends on the shore—and not professionally, either. While the sheriff’s department and the state police all had to operate in a complicated bureaucracy and hierarchy, Bobby was the sole representative on loan from the fire marshal’s office. If he wanted to work odd hours, he could work odd hours. If he wanted to requisition extra equipment, it wasn’t hard for him to do that either. Best of all, if he wanted to move about anonymously, listen in on strangers’ conversations to see if they were talking about the arsons, he could do that without anyone realizing he was law enforcement. Eventually, Facebook began to ruin his advantage, though. Every time he took out his big white truck to examine a fire scene or for some other investigative purpose, the arson groups would immediately take note. They would go online and post the time and the location of his truck, which they’d dubbed the “White Elephant.” To mitigate this, Bailey acquired a farming license plate for the vehicle, to disguise its true purpose. It worked, but it added the complication that people now believed he was a farmer. During breakfasts at the Hardee’s, Bailey got used to being approached by laborers who heard he might be looking to hire.
“I know you. You got a big chicken farm in Northhampton?” they asked.
“Naw, I’m into small grains,” he said, having done his research into Northhampton farming.
“Are you hiring? I heard you pay good.”
“Well, now, what things can you do?”
Bailey, in jeans and a cotton shirt, hunched with purpose over his solitary biscuit breakfast, would dutifully interview laborers about their work experience and take down their phone numbers before sending them along. He felt bad about it, but he wasn’t sure what else to do. By the time he left Accomack, he figured he could have staffed a medium-sized soybean farm full of reliable workers.
He took to driving the length of the county every night before bed. Starting in Exmore, just south of the Accomack border, where he was staying at the Hampton Inn, and all the way up to the Maryland border, looking and thinking about what he saw. He’d just stepped out of the shower after one of these jaunts on March 5, when he finally caught a break. He heard the sound of a doorbell. It was coming from his phone. More accurately, it was coming from Old Church Road, where he had placed a camera high in the branches of a spindly tree. Bailey glanced at the photograph. Not a squirrel. Not a cat. A shadowy human figure, near an abandoned house.
“Son of a bitch,” Bailey yelled, pulling on his clothes even as he speed-dialed Neal. “It’s rolling, right now!” he said, grabbing his truck keys and hauling ass back up Route 13. In the truck, he got Sheriff Godwin on the radio, who was already en route himself, closing in on Church Road from the other direction. Was tonight the night? Were they finally going to catch him?
“Sheriff, the camera’s in the tree!” Bailey screamed into the radio. “In the backyard, there’s a locust tree next to a shed. Get to the shed. GET UP IN THE TREE!”
Pulling up to Old Church Road, sirens blazing, Godwin saw the tree Bailey was talking about. He also saw that it was dangerously close to being engulfed in flames from the burning house. Without hesitating, he shimmied up the tree like a spider monkey, thought the other deputies who had arrived, while Bobby Bailey, over the radio, screamed, “You got to get that camera!”
“I can’t reach the thing!” Godwin yelled back. “It’s hot as hell over here!”
“You got to!”
He finally got it down, tossing it like a hot potato, until the investigators could sit down and watch it. When they did, they learned two things.
First, investigators determined that the fire had been going for forty or fifty minutes before it was even called in to 911. They could see the tiny flame on the camera, staying tiny as minutes ticked by. That’s how slowly the flames had grown. For months, law enforcement had been breaking their necks to speed to fire sites, assuming every time that they’d just missed the arsonist driving away. But if the fires were growing that slowly, it was possible that the arsonist was already home in bed by the time the police even got to the scene. All of that neck-breaking speed had been for nothing.
They discovered something else, too. For a little while, some of the investigators and profilers had been suspecting that the arsonist could in fact be two people. There were a couple of reasons why. First, at the site where they’d found shoe prints, there had appeared to be two different sets of footwear. Second, and more importantly, some of the properties hit were pretty far back in the woods. If a single arsonist had left a car in the road while he picked through the trees to light the fire, the abandoned car would have been noticed. There were just too many officers on the lookout for suspicious-looking vehicles. But if two people were working together, one could drop the other off in a matter of seconds and arrange for a pickup later. It had to be two people with a close bond and genuine trust in each other, or one of them would have talked. Godwin thought he might be looking for two brothers, or maybe a father and son.
They looked at the photo. It was blurry and hard to tell much. The figure was facing away from the camera, and appeared to be wearing a hoodie, which made identification even more difficult. Sasquatch, Bailey thought, thinking of all those blurry photos people posted online that they claimed were of Bigfoot. The hooded thing that’s out there in the abyss but you can’t ever really see it.
And there was another thing about the photo, something all of them noticed but had a hard time putting their fingers on. Something about the tilt of the figure as they’d captured it, midstep, or maybe about the figure’s shape. As Bailey remembered, he was the first to articulate what they were struggling to put into words.
“I’ve seen enough ass to know,” Bailey said. “That’s a woman.”
Some people thought that meant they should consider—at least, consider—the possibility that the arsonist could be female. Other people thought it was only proof that the camera hadn’t captured the arsonist after all—it had just snapped a picture of a lady cutting across the field on her way home. Either way, it was the first and only real break they would receive in the case.