The one thing Charlie did go into, again and again, is that there had been no grand master plan with the fires. There had been no elaborate strategy for which house they would burn down. There had been no advanced surveillance or vision. Every night, they had merely gone out and burned down whatever house they happened to feel like burning. And that they really did try to stop.
The interview had lasted several hours, but mostly because it took that long just to list all the addresses of all the fires and ask if Charlie did them. Some of them he said he didn’t remember. He swore it wasn’t because he was trying to be evasive, but just that there were a lot of fires and it was hard to remember each one in particular. He suggested that he might recognize the houses if he saw them in person, and it was decided that the next step would be to pile into a patrol car and ride around to some of the sites in question.
“We’ll let you go to the sites,” Godwin said. “It’s going to be an all-day thing, Charles. It’s going to be a long day, just so you know.”
One last thing Charlie wanted to get off his chest, he told them: the graffiti. The graffiti that had been all over town, disparaging the couple, Jay Floyd and Danielle. He and Tonya had done that. They were mad because their friends had said they thought Charlie and Tonya shouldn’t be together.
The graffiti, which had until the arsons been the biggest crime in Accomack County, which had bothered Godwin for months—if law enforcement had just caught the graffiti artists, the arsons never would have happened.
Both Godwin and Barnes said how much they appreciated Charlie’s cooperation.
At one point, Charlie asked if he could smoke a cigarette. Barnes said he could, and called for somebody to bring in an ashtray. Then he called for someone to bring in a lighter.
“I got a lighter,” Charlie said.
CHAPTER 19
“I CAN’T TELL YOU SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW”
A FEW MILES AWAY, Scott Wade and his colleague Keenon Hook were not having the same luck.
Wade had been awakened at home by the sound of a ringing phone—his supervisor, hollering that two people had been caught, and that Wade needed to get his butt down to the station ASAP to conduct an interview with one of them. Wade thought it was an April Fools’ joke at first; it was just a little before midnight on April 1. But when he hung up the phone it immediately rang again with another person delivering the news. By the time he finally had his clothes on, he’d had been interrupted by at least fifteen people.
He’d been told he would be questioning Tonya Bundick. He thought he knew the name, but it wasn’t until he arrived at the Exmore police station, that he was 100 percent certain his memory had been right. Tonya was the woman who he and the sheriff had talked to along with Charles Smith on Christmas Day. The same woman whose house he had visited, the one who had told him the arsonist was probably on Facebook.
And now she was here, in a small interrogation room in Exmore, and it was Wade’s job to get her to talk. Beside him sat Keenon Hook, another investigator.
For suspect interviews, Wade liked to base his own demeanor on the behavior of the suspect, trying to match them in tone and body language. Sometimes it was better to be bold and hard-charging, sometimes to take things easy. He had seen Tonya when she walked through the station, and paid close attention to her behavior. She was crying. Not sobbing, but she did have tears in her eyes.
“Can you bring me my ChapStick?” she asked him.
“How about some water?” he suggested, making it clear that her comfort and happiness were important to him. “We have water. We’ll get you some ChapStick, too. It’s not special, is it?”
“No,” she said.
“Do have your ID on you, by any chance?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I know it’s Tonya, but what is your full name?”
“Tonya Susan Bundick.”
He asked her a few more pro forma questions, and then turned back to her well-being. “Are you all right?”
“No,” she said, “I’m not all right.”
“Look, we’re going to get through this,” he reassured her. “I know you’re upset. You have to take a deep breath. It’s over now. We need to talk to you to get everything straightened out. We want to know where everything is—it’s not the end of the world. I deal with a lot of people over here, a lot of times, and they think it’s the end of the world. It’s not. Everybody makes mistakes. Let’s just start over right now and move on with the rest of your life. All right?”
She nodded, Wade nodded. He’d left his description of what was going to happen open-ended. “Move on with the rest of your life” could be understood to mean that at the end of the evening, he expected Tonya to walk out a free woman.
“Are you living with Charlie?” he continued.
“He’s living with me.”
“We’ll get through it,” he said again. “We’ll get through it, and we will be done with it. Do you want to go see him when we’re done?”
“I guess,” she said. “I have kids at home.”
Wade asked if there was a friend or neighbor who could come over to be with them, and she gave him a name. He asked if she’d seen enough cop shows on TV to see people being read their Miranda rights. She said she had. He explained that that’s what he was going to do now—read her those rights, have her sign some forms, and ask her some more questions.
“Where do you want to start at?” he asked, when she was done with the papers.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said.
“How did this all get started?” he tried again.
“I really don’t know,” she said. “I mean, because tonight, you know, we went to go to Walmart. You know, my sons are having birthdays on Wednesday, and we were just driving around. I mean, you know, we went to Walmart. We still had that stuff in the back of the van, and I mean, Charlie asked me to drop him off, so I dropped him off, and then, you know, the rest is history. The next thing I knew, we’re being surrounded. I was shocked, you know, but I know he did set that fire tonight.”
The gears in Wade’s brain started turning. When he’d referred to “this” getting started, he’d introduced the chance for her to explain and take responsibility for five months’ worth of fires. She hadn’t. Instead, she’d talked about the Airport Road fire as if it were a singular event, one committed only by Charlie, and which she’d known nothing about. Wade noticed that Tonya wasn’t crying anymore. She was putting herself together with each passing moment. He thought it was like watching a lightbulb turn off in front of him.
“Where did you drop him off tonight?” he continued, going along with the idea that Charlie was the only arsonist.
“In Melfa.”
“And you said you were going to Walmart?”
“No,” she said. “We had gone to Walmart before this, and he wanted to ride around.”
“What did he say when he said he wanted you to drop him off?”
“He told me to drop him off and turn around and come back and get him.”
“How many times have you dropped him off?” Wade tried, again leaving the door open to discuss other fires.