Tasley chief Jeff Beall was still sleeping, the morning after being turned back from the fire on Airport Road. His wife, Renee, saw the 6 a.m. news, ran into their bedroom, and shook him awake. “Jeff,” she said. “It’s Charlie! It’s Charlie.”
“Where?” he asked, assuming that Charlie had come to the house for a visit. “What does he want?”
“No,” Renee said. “Charlie is the arsonist. He’s the arsonist.”
That morning for Beall was a fog. He wasn’t scheduled to work, and he didn’t have any plans. He drove to Charlie’s stepdad’s auto shop to tell him how sorry he was, and to make sure George knew that nobody would blame him for what had happened. He watched as his voice mailbox filled with numbers he didn’t recognize—acquaintances who wanted to know if Beall had suspected anything, reporters who had learned Charlie was still on the Tasley roster and wanted a comment. Beall didn’t know how to comment. He didn’t know why Charlie was still on the roster; he hadn’t run fires in a year. An aging hippie from NPR came to his front door, wearing corduroys and Crocs and carrying a giant boom mike, and Beall, still feeling raw, told the producer, “You have ten seconds to get the fuck off my lawn.” He then spent the rest of the hour thinking about how strange that was, that of all the news outlets scrambling for the story, only one had the gumption to come to his personal place of residence, and it was wimpy National Public Radio.
As the day unfolded, one thing that became clear was that profiler Ron Tunkel had been right all along. There had been unknowing witnesses. The whole county had been unknowing witnesses.
Shannon Bridges, the Tasley firefighter, remembered one night that the Tasley department had left on a call. When the engine drove past Charlie’s shop, she saw Charlie parked inside his truck out front, watching them all drive by. When they got back from the fire a little later, he was there again. It seemed explainable to Shannon—maybe he had a big job and was working late. But something about the situation made her turn to Richie and joke, “Richie—what if Charlie was the arsonist?”
Sheriff Todd Godwin had seen Charlie and Tonya out at the Royal Farms gas station on Christmas Day.
One of Godwin’s deputies had pulled them over for a routine traffic stop. The deputy asked what they were doing out so late and they told him they were trying to catch the arsonist. He’d laughed and said that’s what he was doing, too.
Scott Wade had gone to Charlie and Tonya’s house on the advice of the geographic profile created by Isaac Van Patten.
Glenn Neal had gone there to ask about a burning truck.
And hundreds of people had read Tonya Bundick’s comments on Facebook, speculating over the identity of the mastermind who was burning up the Eastern Shore.
Later, Bobby Bailey, the Fire Marshal’s Office instructor whose pride had been so wounded during the investigation that he left in the middle of it without even bothering to fully pack up his hotel room, would nurse his hurt by telling himself that they had been dealing with geniuses, in a way. “They were so freaking stupid about their fires,” he decided, “that they were smart.”
Beall, when his grief about the situation turned to anger, would express the same frustration in a different way. “The greatest arsonist in the history of all of Virginia—the one who kept us up night after night after night—and it was fucking Charlie Smith in a fucking gold minivan.”
CHAPTER 21
THE BROKEN THINGS
BY APRIL 2, THE MORNING AFTER THE ARRESTS, 2013 was shaping up to be an odd year for Gary Agar. First, the Commonwealth’s attorney had to figure out how to prosecute a Navy SEAL war veteran who randomly stole a giant boat belonging to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, hitched it to the back of his vehicle, and lugged it across the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, where he was captured on camera. Next, a young police officer got in a car accident, dialed 911, and then proceeded to pull out a knife and stab the two firefighters who showed up to help him. He claimed that demons told him to do it because the firefighters’ helmets depicted the evil number four. Later it was discovered that the officer was having a psychotic reaction to the drug Biaxin, which he had been prescribed for an upper respiratory infection. Agar prosecuted the first crime, withdrew charges for the second. And now came the arsons, the biggest crime spree in the history of Accomack County.
Agar knew who Tonya Bundick was. His ex-wife had owned a home health care business that had years ago employed Tonya. The Agars held annual company picnics at their house and it was likely Tonya would have attended them. Long before that, he’d gone to high school with Tonya’s mother. One day he’d run into Susan at the Rite Aid and she’d introduced Agar to her daughter. It was unavoidable that one would get to know everybody, after being an elected official as long as Agar had. He’d been the Commonwealth’s attorney for several terms. Agar, sixty, was short and sturdy without much neck to speak of, a fire hydrant of a man. But when he spoke in front of juries, he moved his arms in the graceful patterns of an orchestra conductor during a legato movement. This, combined with a deep, rumbling voice—constituents compared it with James Earl Jones—made him a hypnotic performer in courtrooms.
Agar learned there had been an arrest for the arsons on the night of April 1. He knew that the police and sheriff’s deputies had caught Charlie in the act of lighting the fire on Airport Road.
But he lacked the forensic evidence and witness statements for the other eighty-odd arsons. Without Charlie’s confession, he would never be able to convict. So early on the morning of April 2, Agar closed the door to his office and watched the whole six-hour taped interview to see what he had.
What he had, he decided, was good. Charlie seemed believable. There were times that Charlie had said, “No comment,” before he admitted Tonya’s involvement, but he had never asked for a deal or tried to shift the blame away from himself. And he came across, Agar thought, as a person who lacked the creativity necessary to come up with such an odd excuse—the impotence, which attacked his own manhood and revealed deeply personal information—on the spot. Charlie would be a good asset.