STATE TROOPERS WILLIE BURKE AND TROY JOHNSON had been in position since just after sundown, in their camouflage pup tent with a tiny little space heater set up fifty yards behind the little bungalow on Airport Road. The address belonged to an older man who now lived on the mainland of Virginia but wanted a weekend house for when he came back to the shore to visit family. This owner had just put on a new roof and new windows, but the building still looked dilapidated enough that it had been placed on law enforcement’s watch list of abandoned properties. It had a little porch. To its right was a field and then some woods and then, far beyond that, a little post office, and then the little town of Melfa. To its left was a field and then the entrance to the airport the road was named after, which was small and used only by private planes. The nearest house was a quarter mile away. It was everything the arsonist seemed to like: abandoned-feeling, set back from the road, accessible from multiple access points. Burke and Johnson had been sitting behind it for two weeks. “Post 6,” the house had been dubbed, one of ten or twelve houses equipped with twenty or twenty-four sheriff’s deputies and state troopers among them.
Burke and Johnson had known each other a long time, having previously worked in neighboring counties. The two men made sure to sit next to each other at orientation when they first arrived, and had volunteered to be posted at the same house. The first day of their post, a superior joked, “Y’all gonna catch this guy this weekend or what?” and Johnson had answered that he hoped so.
But instead it had been two weeks of damp and boredom, hanging around the hotel or going to the diner during the day, folding themselves into a hunter’s tent each night, switching off responsibilities for the radio and the night-vision goggles. Other fires had been set those two weeks, but none that had been guarded by men in tents. Tonight was Burke and Johnson’s last night before they would each be returned to their respective home counties. It was also Johnson’s birthday and he was glad to be going home. It was hard to keep your eyes fresh for that many hours, staring at the same stretch of two-lane road and eyeballing every infrequent car that passed and trying to keep their voices low. They just had another couple of hours in their shift until it would all be over.
At 11:45 p.m., Burke suddenly cut off: “There’s a vehicle,” he whispered, “pulling up.” Johnson clamped his own mouth shut. The vehicle was a van. It rolled to a stop in front of the house and, in the dark, a figure leaped out of the passenger side.
Instinctively, both men reached to turn off the space heater, to dim the orange glow it produced. The figure was running at a dead sprint toward the house, and the van that had just dropped him—it appeared to be a him—pulled away.
It was Johnson’s evening for the night-vision goggles. He pulled them out now.
“He’s running, he’s running to the back side of the house,” he whispered to Burke, who had pulled out the radio. Fifty yards away, the figure sprinted to the back of Post 6 and made a series of rapid motions, stuffing what appeared to be a piece of cloth in the doorjamb. Three or four times, Johnson could make out a brief flicker that would quickly extinguish again. In the green glow of the night-vision goggles, the figure and the flames were both a sickly chartreuse.
“He’s lighting it,” Johnson told Burke. “He’s stuffing some material in and lighting it.”
The house has to catch on fire, Johnson thought, forcing himself to stay in position even while he was itching to go get the guy. If he and Burke didn’t let the arsonist try to burn down the house, all they had on their hands was a trespassing charge.
Johnson narrated everything he was seeing to his partner, who quietly radioed it into central command and to their support vehicle, a sheriff’s deputy who was circling nearby, ready to swoop in.
It seemed to Johnson like time had slowed. The adrenaline in his veins caused every second of the scene in front of him to pause and crystalize, even though he knew he couldn’t have been watching for more than a couple of minutes. Suddenly, the rag caught fire in a shower of sparks and the figure started running again, back around the house in the direction he had first come from.
Johnson and Burke threw the tent off, running toward the clearing through a patch of woods so rocky and pitted they would later be surprised one of them hadn’t twisted something in the process. “State police, stop!” Johnson yelled. “Stop!”
The man didn’t even seem to realize he’d been spotted. He appeared to be talking to somebody, maybe through a cell phone they couldn’t make out in the dark. The two officers had barely cleared the woods when, in what seemed to Johnson like perfect timing, the minivan reappeared and the man jumped into it, speeding off toward the county’s only main road, Route 13.
The two men stared helplessly after the van. They’d been dropped off and didn’t have a vehicle at the ready, but they kept their eyes on it as long as they could, while Burke narrated the receding van’s location to the support vehicles in their vicinity. The van had gotten a good distance, maybe a mile, down the road. But the street was straight and they could see it stop at the intersection of Route 13. A second later a marked Dodge Charger—the sheriff’s deputy who had picked up Burke’s radio for help—appeared behind the van and quietly waited.
The driver of that car was a sergeant who had heard the words “Location 6” and “van” on his radio and immediately began scanning the road for the car in question. It wasn’t hard. When the vehicle appeared, it was the only one on the road besides him. The light turned green and the van started to pull through it. He knew other deputies had been alerted and that backup was on the way, but for now he was alone. He turned on his siren. The van in front of him stopped and the passenger door opened. The sergeant, afraid that his suspect was about to run, immediately got out of his own vehicle. In the dark, the passenger raised his hands in a position of surrender and stepped into the light of the squad car’s headlamps.
And it was Charlie Smith.
Charlie Smith. A man the sergeant had known for fifteen years and seen most mornings getting coffee at The Wine Rack.
Charlie.
Another vehicle pulled up. Inside was a young state trooper named Martin Kriz. When Kriz saw that the sheriff’s deputy had turned on his blue lights and parked near the passenger’s side, Kriz put on his own lights and pulled near the driver’s. He drew his weapon as he slowly approached the car. Behind the wheel was Tonya Bundick, hair messy, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know Charlie, either. Like the other two state troopers a half mile down the road, Kriz had never laid eyes on Accomack before that week when he’d been loaned out from his home base in Goochland County near the center of the state.
“Do you have any weapons?” Kriz asked.
“There’s a ChapStick in my bra,” Tonya told him, and he removed it from the strap and escorted Tonya to his squad car.
There were maybe twenty cars around by that point: troopers and deputies who had been assigned to the Airport Road jurisdiction, troopers and deputies who were on duty elsewhere but had heard the arsonists had been caught, troopers and deputies who weren’t on duty at all. Everyone who had access to a police scanner had come, from all around the county, to offer assistance or just to look, at the ghost they’d been chasing since the middle of November.
Between December 1, when the Virginia State Police began collecting data on its arson investigation, and mid-April, police personnel dedicated 26,378 work hours and 14,924 overtime hours to solving the arsons.