“Eight and a half.”
“I only say one thing to you right now, and that is me and Scott Wade and everybody else in this county are truly thankful to you. Because you clearly exercised self-restraint, and you were careful. Not a single person got hurt, and I cannot tell you how happy I am to hear that. This really was a victimless situation, and these buildings were unattended, and they don’t matter much anymore, and you guys were just being very careful about what you chose and where you chose it.”
As Hook was describing them, the fires were a minor blip, something everyone would easily get over. He didn’t mention police overtime, late night meetings, tedious roadblocks, exhausted firemen, insurance claims, men in tents, burning landmarks, and a whole county white-knuckling it through five months and dozens of fires.
Tonya stopped responding to Hook’s statements, but he kept talking—offering explanations for what could have happened and what might have gone wrong. Hell, he said, she and Charlie probably hadn’t even set them all. There were probably copycats who set some of them. Maybe she and Charlie were, themselves, copycats. But if she didn’t talk about the ones they were responsible for, they might end up getting blamed for more than their fair share.
“Hey, I’m not the Eastern Shore Arsonist,” he offered, suggesting an “out”—a way Tonya could confess to some of the fires without necessarily taking blame for all of them. “I’m somebody out here just relieving stress. You don’t know what we have going on in our lives. I had to quit my job to take care of my son—and believe me, I know what it’s like to reorganize your life around a child—and maybe things aren’t going the way I wish they would, and I’m frustrated. That’s an explanation that people can understand.”
He waited.
“I can’t tell you something I don’t know,” she said.
Wade, who had been sitting silently for several minutes, now broke in again.
“You need to start looking out for Tonya,” he told her. “What would you say if I were to tell you that Charlie told us—just listen to me—what would you say if I told you that Charlie told us that you dropped him off for, like, twenty-five fires?”
“I don’t know why he would say that,” Tonya said.
Wade didn’t know either. Though he’d stopped by the task force where Charlie was being questioned earlier, at this point he didn’t know the extent of what Charlie had said; he’d spent the rest of the night sitting in a room with Tonya.
The two men had tried appealing to both her vanity and her humanity—providing her with “outs” that would present her in a flattering light. They had walked her up to the same questions again and again, hoping that her story might change or elaborate. They both had tried to present themselves as full of admiration and understanding. In response, she’d barely spoken more than a sentence at a time. Wade decided it was time to up the ante.
“I’m a very patient person, but I’ve got some other things to do,” he said, feigning irritation. In fact, he was accustomed to spending hours on end with suspects, letting stories unspool and then unravel. Sometimes confessions took time. He wasn’t being impatient now, he was being strategic. His presence seemed to be shutting her down, and they were running out of things to try. “If he”—meaning Hook—“wants to sit here and talk to you, he’s more than welcome.” As a final tactic, he would leave.
As Hook’s final tactic, he would invite in the profiler Jon Cromer, who was currently waiting outside the interview room door, and who, just a few hours earlier had been wondering, along with the other psychological profilers, whether they would ever catch the arsonist at all.
Like Scott Wade, Cromer had assumed that the arrest of the arsonists was an April Fools’ joke. He had been in his room at the Holiday Inn when he got the call from one of the investigators. “Nice try, I’m not buying it,” he’d said. It was only when he saw the blue lights of a marked vehicle pull up in the parking lot that he believed it wasn’t a prank and grabbed his wallet and keys. Nobody had planned on him interjecting into Tonya’s interview, but at this point it couldn’t hurt.
He entered the room and addressed Hook first. “The guys that are meeting with Charlie called, and I’m waiting on the situation,” he said, before turning to Tonya.
“I’m Jon Cromer. I’m with the state police,” he told her.
A few times during the interview, Wade and Hook had alluded to the fact that Charlie was being questioned at another station. Cromer was the first person who had been in steady contact with the police interrogating Charlie, and who could attest to what Charlie had said or not said. And he’d made that clear to Tonya, with his first statement to Hook upon entering the room.
Cromer knew it was a common technique for officers to tell suspects that their accomplices were tattling on them, whether or not that was true. He sensed Tonya would be smart enough to know this, too. He wanted her to understand that this conversation wasn’t just a ploy. He decided to put all of his cards on the table.
“I’ve been in with Charlie,” he told her. “He’s been going through them one by one. I want you to understand. You are going to stand in front of a judge regarding these fires, in one of two ways. Number one, you are going to deny it. Or you are going to say, ‘I made a mistake.’ Listen to me. Charlie told us at 2:34 a.m., he told us that you lit the church fire. He also said you lit twelve of the first fifteen. He said he never got out of the car, because you did it.
“Now I wouldn’t lie to you, but what has me worried is that you are going to be standing there in front of that judge, the only one in the mix who is denying that they were there. And I’m thinking, I would not want to stand there. We don’t need a confession from anybody to take them to court. We need evidence, and trust me, there’s plenty of evidence. Ma’am, I am going to tell you, when the evidence is brought through the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office to court, it is going to be overwhelming.”