The Firefly Page 6

  “Sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  Swamp blinked but nodded yes; he thought it was important to see the fire scene. “Nothing beats personal reconnaissance,” he said. Malone gave him an “if you say so” look.

  Malone then slid the heavy door to one side and they stepped into a darkened hallway. The floor was littered with debris and there was a strong stink of burned building, overlaid with just a whiff of cooked but now spoiling meat. Swamp suppressed a gag reflex when he smelled that, and White suddenly didn’t look well.

  “Sorry about that,” Malone said. “That’s why I asked. That smell tends to linger. I’ve got some Vicks in the car, you want some?”

  White nodded emphatically, holding a handkerchief to his face. Malone told him it was in the glove compartment, and White disappeared out front. Swamp examined the layout. Front door leading into a small reception area. Office area behind a counter to the right, doorway back to the clinic proper on the left. Walls, fixtures, furniture, countertop—all blackened. Carpet squishy with firefighting water. More interesting smells. Stairway going up to the next floor on the far right.

  “Mixture of heat, smoke, and water damage out here,” Malone said, shining a large flashlight around the reception area. “Office experienced severe heating. File cabinets jammed shut. Papers charred inside. Computer cases, hard drives—all melted.”

  White came back in and passed Swamp a small wad of the Vicks VapoRub, which he smeared beneath each nostril, blinking back tears at the strong camphor smell. Malone took them to the hallway door, which was off its hinges and propped up against the wall. “Back here, we have two examining rooms, two doctor’s offices, what we think was a preop/postop staging and recovery room, the OR itself, a pharmaceutical closet, a full bathroom, and two utility closets back there.”

  “The fire began in the OR?” Swamp asked. Despite the Vicks, the battlefield corpse stench was still very much in evidence.

  “Right. That’s back this way. Watch your step—the ceiling came down all along here. Don’t touch any wires. The power’s off, but you never know about wires.”

  The area near the operating room was totally devastated, right down to the walls having been burned away. The fire department had erected temporary shoring timbers to ensure the roof didn’t cave in all around, but the drooping ceiling gave a claustrophobic feel to the scene. A lone metal door frame stood detached from its surround.

  “What’s upstairs?” Swamp asked.

  “Mirror image of what’s down here, except for the OR. The daytime practice. Structurally intact, but trashed by heat, water, and smoke, of course. There’s a completely separate entrance to the day clinic, around to the side, in the alley. That stairway over there connects. No fire doors, so that’s why the day clinic took so much damage.”

  Swamp looked up at the large hole in the ceiling over what had been the operating room. Blackened fixtures, wiring, and piping drooped down into the hole from above. They could hear water dripping somewhere. They wandered around for a few minutes, then came back to stand next to the OR’s empty door frame. In the middle of the room, the steel operating table, which had drooped down at both ends, was visible.

  “What’s down that hallway?”

  “Couple of storage closets—cleaning gear, paper supplies. All pretty much black. No evidence of interest.”

  “How in the hell do you reconstruct from a mess like this?” Swamp asked.

  “We do it all the time, Special Agent,” Malone said. “I tell the new guys it’s like archaeology—the evidence gets laid down in layers as the building comes down. You just reverse the process.”

  “Sounds simple, but I’ll bet it isn’t. Where were the bodies?”

  “Right there,” Malone said, pointing into the center of the wreckage that had been the operating theater. “Three by the table, plus one just inside this door frame. Lots more debris here when we first started looking, of course. About four feet deep, plus about a foot of water underneath. There’s a basement, but it was empty—dirt floors, stone walls, remains of a coal furnace. No stairs down there that we could find. Partially flooded now.”

  “And no patient,” Swamp said, shifting his feet to avoid something sticky under his shoes. He wondered if this smell was getting into his clothes, and he certainly didn’t want to consider what might be sticking to his shoes.

  “Well, that’s the assumption we made. Ms. Wall said there would have been two women nurses, and two men, the docs, in here. She says if they were all in here, then there should have been a patient.”

  “Unless they all ran in to fight the fire—say after an operation,” White offered. “I mean, it was close to midnight, according to the report. The patient’s gone home. Nurses are cleaning up, fire starts, the docs come running, and then the oh-two mix gets right, lets go, gets them all.”

  Malone nodded thoughtfully. “That’s certainly possible. We mapped, recovered, and inspected all the electrical plugs. Found one with a definite arc notch. According to Ms. Wall, that plug’s map location would have put it near a big green curtain. But too much damage and heat here to determine point of origin. And some of the plugs were destroyed.”

  “Wouldn’t an OR curtain like that be fireproof?”

  “By code, supposed to fire-resistant,” Malone said. “Only thing in this world that’s fireproof is the damned ocean.”

  “Sprinklers?” Swamp asked.

  “Turned off at the master valve.”

  “Why? I wonder,” Swamp said.

  “We find that more often than you’d think,” Malone said. “Somebody does an inspection of the sprinkler system, then does maintenance on the heads or the valves, forgets to reactivate the system. There was a flame sensor tied to the office security system—that’s what brought the department.”

  “And the bodies?”

  Malone pointed down to the jumble of blackened wreckage, water, and melted globs of plastic littering what had been the OR floor. “Looked just like that stuff. We knew they were in here. Used steel-rod probes to find them underneath all this shit. Like getting a skewer through a hot dog on the grill. You feel for it, punch through; then your nose will tell you what you’ve found.”

  “I’m outta here,” White said, his face an unpleasant gray in the light of Malone’s flashlight.

  Malone nodded, as if he had been expecting this. He led them back into the office reception area. White kept going right out of the building. Swamp smiled at Malone and then followed White, secretly relieved that the younger agent had been the first to break. He never thought he’d welcome the cutting January wind, but now he held his coat open to air out his clothes. Malone came next, pulling the front door closed, as much as he could.

  “That was perfectly awful,” Swamp told him. White was standing down on the sidewalk, puffing hard on a cigarette. Swamp had never smoked, but he wanted one now.

  “You should’ve seen it right after the fire,” Malone said. “That scene’s actually been cleaned up—a lot. But you can see how bad that fire was.”

  “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being perfect, how good a reconstruction will you be able to do in there?”

  “Three. Maybe.”

  “So proving that it was a deliberate fire?”

  Malone shook his head. “We can speculate all day, but there’s not much direct evidence of arson. No accelerants, other than the oh-two. First responders reported hearing the oxygen, or, technically, a gas roar, when they arrived. They used solid-stream, high-velocity fog, even tried foam, but none of that impresses a fire with its own fuel and unlimited oxidizer.”

  Swamp considered that for a moment. “Your report said two oxygen bottles melted?” he asked.

  “Probably they were nitrous-oxide bottles. But yes, they melted, which I thought was a little weird. But we’d have to run tests to see what the specs were on those gas bottles.”

  “And nitrous-oxide is flammable? Or could the two that melted have been filled with something else? Like,
I don’t know, ether?”

  “We asked Ms. Wall that. She said nobody uses ether for anesthetic anymore. They were using a mixture of NO and oh-two. They were going to convert to Sevoflurane or something like that. She said they didn’t sweat an OR fire from those gases, but that sometimes, under the right conditions, NO and oh-two can ignite in a patient’s throat, if you can feature that shit.”

  “Yow. Anybody pull the string on the day docs? The owners?”

  “I don’t believe so, Special Agent. And at least for right now, this wasn’t arson. Something went wrong in the operating room, and the sprinklers were shut off. Suspicious, maybe, but we’ve seen this scenario before. D.C. General had one, five, six years ago. Never did find out what set it off, but the presence of liquid-oxygen tanks did a number there, too.”

  There was considerably more traffic out on Kalorama Road now, and the late-afternoon sky was darkening fast. Most cars already had their lights on, but like most Washington evening traffic, they were getting nowhere fast.

  “I would have thought that the oxygen bottles themselves would not be in the operating room. That there would be a supply line of some kind, with a safety valve that would cut off the oh-two if there was a leak or a sudden huge demand, like in a fire.”

  “That’s how they do it in the big hospital operating rooms. But this was a private clinic. Maybe money was tight, or the docs were cheap.”

  “Was this place inspected?”

  “We have just two guys who are qualified to inspect medical facilities for the whole city. You may have heard about our budget problems.”

  “Yes indeed. Plus, hospitals don’t vote.”

  Malone gave an elaborate shrug. “We do what we can. Unlike firefighting, fire prevention isn’t sexy.”

  “I really appreciate the tour,” Swamp said. “And I really never want to do that again. My hat’s off to you and your people. That must have been some tough sledding in there.”

  Malone accepted the compliment. “Fire is an impressive enemy,” he said.

  “We’ll be in touch. Probably with more questions. And if you come up with something interesting, please call me.” He gave Malone his card. The inspector asked if he could give them a ride, but Swamp thanked him and said they were using the Metro. “This time of day, we’ll get back to our office before you get to yours, I suspect.”

  Heismann climbed through the damp winter underbrush, following a narrow but recognizable game trail. It was 2:30 P.M., and the January sun, while losing its battle with the bank of clouds over the western part of the city, was shooting yellow rays of light, which made it hard to see. He’d parked his car down in Rock Creek Park in one of the scenic-view lots and was now approaching the nurse’s house on Quebec Street, which sat up on a bluff overlooking the park. He could just see the top of the house, a white Victorian surrounded by old oaks, their bare black limbs seeming to wrap the house in a votive web. Someone had planted a line of spiky cedars all along the bluff, and they’d propagated down the slope over the years. A dog was barking somewhere in the neighborhood, but he didn’t think it had sensed him.

  He paused when he got to the top of the bluff. He had spotted the evergreen slope on a previous reconnaissance. Now he was dressed accordingly in his loden hat and coat, with dark wool trousers and insulated boots. He turned around to survey the ground below and behind him to make sure there weren’t any joggers down in the park watching him. His oversized sunglasses were polarized, or he wouldn’t have been able to see much of anything in the yellow glare.

  Two bicyclists were visible across a small ravine, whizzing down Tilden Road into the park. He planted his walking stick into the needle-covered ground, tipped his hat forward to hide his face, and watched and listened for five minutes. Standing still among the man-high cedars, dressed in dark green, he knew he’d be invisible until he moved. The sunglasses were the only reflective thing about him.

  Connie Wall’s antique car was parked up by the garage, but he thought she used the Metro system to get around town, based on the fact that he had seen her walking up the block one morning, the last time he’d come up here. He’d been into her house once before, and he knew from the calendar on the dining room table that she should be out at a job interview at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this afternoon. The Medical Center Metro stop served NIH, so that would be the easy way to do it.

  He looked at his watch. Two-forty-five. Time to go.

  He pushed on up through the last ten feet of cedar trees and stepped over a dilapidated waist-high split-rail fence at the top. A driveway led from the street on his right back to a single-car garage on his left, positioned partially behind the house. A large blue spruce tree at the edge of the driveway would block the view of anyone out on or across the street, but he didn’t dally. He walked across the driveway, bearing left, aiming to get behind the house, and then went directly up a rear sidewalk and onto the steps leading to a screened back porch. The outer screen door was unlocked, so he let himself onto the porch. He went directly to the back door, which had a large window in the top half. He could see a pantry inside, and beyond that was the kitchen. There was a doorbell, which he pressed. The bell was in the kitchen and seemed to work just fine. He had no idea of what he’d do if she appeared at the door, but there was always the Walther in his coat pocket. He’d looked around for alarm-system decals or wires the last time but had seen nothing, and there’d been no signs out front, either. He propped his walking stick against the back wall, fished out the spare key he’d taken the last time, and, after wiping his boots on the mat, let himself in.

  He went immediately through the kitchen, then down a central hallway to the front, where he looked out a side-panel window for little old ladies lurking on neighborhood watch. Those and dogs were the most dangerous threats to a burglar, and fortunately, Connie Wall did not have a dog. A cat, perhaps, but no damned dog. All was quiet out front. He checked his watch again and gave himself a five-minute stay time. Whenever he broke into a house or office, he always assumed that someone had seen him and called the police. The typical response time for a prowler call in Washington was fifteen minutes, so that was a satisfactory margin. Not likely in this sleepy little neighborhood, but still…Rules were rules.

  Keeping his expensive leather gloves on, he went back to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. He found an opened half-gallon plastic container of skim milk. Perfect. He took it out, setting it on the kitchen table. He removed a steel cigar-shaped tube from his left-hand coat pocket, unscrewed the top, and pulled out the syringe. Then he unscrewed the milk container’s cap and pressed the contents of the syringe into the milk. He sniffed the spout, but there was no discernible odor. He closed it back up, shook it gently to mix the contents, returned it to the refrigerator, and shut the door. Then he went over to the wall telephone; where he removed the receiver and then the cover and backed off one of the line wires. He then replaced the cover.

  He went back to the front door and again scanned the front yard and street. Still nothing. He then went quickly up the stairs to her bedroom, which was just beyond the top of the landing. Up here, the house smelled faintly of old age, lavender, and mildew. She might be a surgical-team nurse, he thought, but she’s no housekeeper. He pushed open her bedroom door and wrinkled his nose at the mess of clothes strewn about—dirty laundry piled in a hamper, clean laundry stacked in a chair. The bed was unmade. He went to the low bureau, whose top was covered with makeup bottles and jars. He found her lingerie drawer and began to paw through it. He found the items he needed, panties and a half-slip, closed that drawer, and then took an unopened pair of dark panty hose from the left-hand bottom drawer. He stuffed the underwear into his coat pocket and closed the drawers. The bottom one jammed an inch from fully closing, so he had to kick it shut. He made a quick survey of her clothes closet, but didn’t see anything of use there.

  He made a cursory check of the rug to see that he hadn’t left footprints or dirt from his boo
ts, found one piece of mud, and pocketed it. From the looks of the bedroom, he doubted this woman would ever notice a little dirt. He went back downstairs, checked out the front windows again, then let himself out the back door, making sure it locked behind him, and retrieved his stick. Ten minutes later, he emerged from the wooded slope down in the park and walked casually down the creekside path toward his car. Two joggers puffed by him, an older man with a much younger companion. For some reason, perhaps the way they were sticking close to each other, they looked like a couple to him. More queers, he thought. This fat country was full of degenerates. He’d resisted the urge to trip them both with his walking stick as they passed him.

  He got into his car, a three-year-old minivan, and backed out of the lot. As he drove back up Tilden, he looked across the ravine toward the ugly white house at the end of the block on the other side for signs of blue police lights, but all was still quiet.

  So, all the nosy old ladies had been taking their naps this time. Very good. He felt for the nylon underwear in his coat pocket. This was so much less embarrassing than going into some department store and buying it. He knew exactly what the clerks would think, and then he would feel obliged to do something about that. Plus, she wasn’t going to need underwear once she had a nice glass of milk.

  The light was red at the intersection of Tilden and Connecticut Avenue. He’d laced the milk container with ten cc’s of a boiled concentrate solution of ant poison and water. The boiling had evaporated the foul smell the manufacturer put in to keep humans and animals from ingesting it. The poison would hit Connie Wall in minutes, rendering her helpless as she cramped into a retching, effluvial ball on the kitchen floor before she quite knew what had happened. Then she would stiffen into a paralytic stupor. Ant poison was a cholinesterase inhibitor, otherwise known as a nerve agent. The diluted paste he’d injected would float to the top of the milk, so she’d get the full dose. No smell, no taste. And if she did manage to crawl to the kitchen phone, well, it wasn’t going to work.