Charlie shrugged. “She’s a lot smarter than me, and she said it wasn’t.” He giggled. “But I had never seen that many cars before.”
They took him through the actual setting of the fire—what part of the house he’d lit, whether he’d used any accelerants, what color the shop rag was that he’d stuffed in the house, whether he stood there after the fire was set to watch it. Backdoor, Charlie said. No accelerants. Plain white. No watching, he’d just run.
“We appreciate you, Charles,” Godwin encouraged him. “We appreciate you telling the truth, Bubba. Listen to this. Nobody was hurt.”
“That makes a big difference,” Barnes agreed. Nobody was hurt.
Charlie shook his head. “I never wanted to do it in the first fucking place.”
“What made you?” Barnes asked, at the same time Godwin asked, “What happened?’
“I’m not going to tell you what,” Charlie said, and then immediately apologized: “I’m not trying to be smart.”
Barnes and Godwin nodded at this. They didn’t need a motive in order for Charlie to be guilty. But some kind of reason would have made the whole thing make more sense to them.
“Everybody has a reason,” Barnes said, “for why they do things in life.”
“Trust me, I never enjoyed it.” Charlie told him.
“It’s something like, somebody did something to you? Pushed you away from something? Or—”
“Naw. It was just a problem I’ve had, and this was my way to—”
“Deal with it?” Godwin finished the sentence for him. “Was it your mom passing?”
“That don’t help,” Charlie acknowledged, “but there’s more to it.”
“Well, listen, we’ll do this interview and then we’ll do whatever you want,” Godwin reassured him. “We’ll do whatever you need to get you straight.”
“Is she here?” Charlie asked suddenly. “Tonya?”
“She’s not,” Barnes told him.
“Is she going to be here?”
“What do you need?” Godwin asked.
Charlie folded his hands, shoulders slumped. “I wanted to see her.”
Rob couldn’t let the motive go. Was the problem Charlie had mentioned having—did it have to do with the fire departments? Was he mad at the fire departments? Or at law enforcement? “In our minds, we’re trying to figure out—I don’t want to say the motive, but, is it something against us? The state police or the sheriff or county? Or is it an individual? Or just the way you’re expressing how you’re pissed off?”
“I’m not even pissed off,” Charlie insisted.
“You know, we thought you were mad at us,” Godwin said.
“Not at all. I have the utmost respect for you all.”
“That’s what I thought,” Godwin said.
Barnes looked down at the stack of papers he’d set on the table, each sheet containing descriptions of the eighty-six fires that had been set. If Charlie wasn’t ready to talk about why he’d done them, at least he might be willing to talk about which ones he’d done.
Did Charlie do a woods fire on Dennis Drive? Yes, Charlie said. A bungalow on Seaside Road? Yes, said Charlie. Metompkin Road in Bloxom? Yes. The Drummond fire from the night before? Yes. The two-story farmhouse on Church Road? Yes. Yes, yes, yes.
“What about Greenbush Road, just outside of Parksley on 316 at Wycheville? You know, where Coor’s garage is, and Associated Farms is across the street?”
“Yes,” Charlie said.
“Where did you light that one?”
“Underneath of it.”
“On the back side? Front side?”
“Right in the middle.”
“So how did you get—”
“Crawled underneath the house.”
“Okay.”
Barnes had been holding the fires in his head, the geography and details of them, and he wanted to get Charlie to remember as many of them as possible. The two men swapped their knowledge of back roads, hidden shortcuts, mossy fields, and half-drained creeks. The interview became a geography bee. “Now, back on Nocks Landing Road, basically, across from Arcadia High School,” Barnes said. “You’re taking the road like you’re heading toward Atlantic, and then it’s the house at the intersection of Page Fisher Road. If you’re taking that stoplight and hang a right like you’re going toward Atlantic. It’s a little house down there about a quarter of a mile. It’s near a little intersection?”
“Yes,” Charlie said.
“The unoccupied store on the highway in Parksley?” Barnes asked.
“I ain’t got no comment on that.”
Godwin’s and Barnes’s faces didn’t register anything; they didn’t even look at each other. But they both noticed that this was the first fire he’d refused to comment on, and they both wondered what that was about.
“Drummond Lane right down the street from the Forestry?”
“No comment.”
“Hopeton Road, a big house that was for sale?”
“No comment,” Charlie said. “Can I pee real quick?”
“Yeah,” Barnes said, and he and Godwin both got to their feet to show Charlie to the restroom.
Charlie stood up as well. “You can write ‘No comment’ for the rest of them.”
THE CONFESSION was taking a strange and winding path. Often in interviews like this, the suspect would do everything he could to avoid implicating himself—making excuses, pointing fingers at his cohorts, trying to rationalize his actions by claiming extenuating circumstances. Here, they had a man who had willingly and sheepishly put up his hands and admitted wrongdoing. He had gone over, in great detail, which fires he had set, and how, and he appeared to try his best to remember all of the circumstances behind them. But at the same time, he was refusing to offer the information that might help him receive a lighter punishment. He wouldn’t say why he’d done it. He wouldn’t say if anyone else had helped him. Sometimes he would go on in earnest detail about a how a big fire was lit, only to answer “No comment” when Barnes asked about a fire that had been smaller and more innocuous.
While Charlie peed, Godwin and Barnes each tried to puzzle through the inconsistent behavior. Charlie was the one with the firefighting experience. Charlie was the one with the criminal past. Charlie was the one who had some of the traits of a serial arsonist. But when he said he hadn’t lit them all, did he mean that some of them had been lit by Tonya?
The three men came back into the room after the bathroom break and sat in their original chairs.
“Can I ask you this?” Godwin said. “Is there a reason you don’t want to comment on some of these first fires?”
“Was there a significant change to where you started and where you ended?” Barnes offered. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Possibly,” Charlie allowed.
Godwin raised his hands, as if to frame an idea: “It sounds like to me, Charles—I’m just throwing this out there—that we originally had somebody else involved in these first fires.”
“I don’t know,” Charlie shook his head.
“If we take her out of the equation,” Barnes tried, “other than you commenting about her, was there anybody other than her to drop you off?”
“No comment.”