Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

McLean nodded, remembering the fiftyish antique expert with a porcelain smile, taillight red hair, and iron handshake. He stopped beside Lopez and studied the chalk lines. “What were fire conditions like?”

Lopez made a small deprecating move. “The usual. Easy at first, then when we made that last turn,” he nodded at the doorway, “smoke dropped to our ankles, heat barely tolerable. Visibility about this far.” He held his thumb and first finger an inch apart. “I found Firth when I hit his head with my knee. I was tracing the wall with my left hand. Had a flashlight in my right, lot of good it was doing. Anyway, my knee hit something and I kinda fell forward and put my left hand right in the center of his chest.”

“So he was on his back.”

“Yeah.”

“What else happened?”

Lopez caught McLean’s raised eyebrows and frowned. “Chief Frye ordered a firefighter on a ladder in front of us to open up with a two and a half inch line.”

Hitting a fire from the front with a water stream while firefighters were coming up behind the blaze was inexcusably amateurish, but it explained the odd smoke pattern. It had happened to McLean and the memory never faded. Like being hit with a red-hot hammer. A physical force so immense it left no option but retreat. Chief Arnold Frye was such a bungler it was no surprise he’d missed the cause of the fire.

Lopez shrugged and moved on. His flashlight picked out the blackened remains of a door opening into a square room the size of a large bathroom. Their passage loosened some soot, and McLean let out a wall-rattling sneeze.

Lopez laughed. “I don’t get it. You’re supposed to have enough money to pay off the national debt, but here you are breathing this stuff.”

McLean flashed his light around the room. “What would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow?”

Lopez thought for a bit then laughed. “Same-o same-o, I suppose.”

McLean grunted. He stuck with fire investigation because he liked it. And from brute curiosity. Fire was a conniving, slippery foe, and he found untangling its trail a fresh puzzle every time.

“It started in here. Where they packed stuff for UPS or mailing or whatever.” Lopez let McLean past.

The small room had been loaded on Saturday night with cardboard and shipping popcorn. A fire load of considerable promise. If the blaze hadn’t been spotted early, when it broke through the window overlooking the street, the damage would have been worse. Much worse.

“What’s in there?” McLean nodded toward a half-hidden door.

“Firth’s living quarters. They’re actually above the shop next to the antique store. These buildings are so damned old and have had so many occupants.” Lopez shrugged. “Small wonder he didn’t make it.”

McLean wondered why, since Firth had to go through the fire room, he hadn’t grabbed the extinguisher by his door and tried to douse the blaze.

They continued touring the maze of short hallways, which eventually took them to the building’s other side. There a straight hall ran two-thirds the length of the building, opening onto a series of small rooms, each filled with period furniture.

Lopez turned into a room dominated by a four-poster bed, a chin-high chest of drawers, a secretary, and two chairs. Everything in the room, like everything else on the second floor that wasn’t charred, was heavily sooted. “Thought this would interest you.” He ran a finger down the secretary. “I don’t think this is the same piece I looked at several weeks ago, but it’s supposed to be.” He wiped off an engraved card saying the secretary had been built in Pennsylvania about 1804.

Lopez left shortly after seven. Like all volunteer firefighters, he had to work for a living. The fire department provided action, a sense of well-being, and good deeds, but it didn’t pay the bills.

McLean photographed and sketched, starting in the street and working back to the packaging room where the fire had started. The floorplan sketches he faxed to Mort Reed, who redid them on his Macintosh and faxed them back. That done, McLean returned to the shipping room and stood in the center of its blackened shell, willing the fire to speak to him. To brag about its direction, its fury and force. About where it started and about its devious ways of spreading. About its deadly intentions.

Finally he knelt before a metal ring, all that remained of a cardboard shipping drum, and scraped gently through the ashes and a tangle of wires. The possibilities were narrowing.

The truck slammed into a pothole, bringing up the possibility of a broken spring. McLean concentrated on his driving and steered into a one-hour photo processing shop where he dropped off the morning’s work. He then drove the six remaining blocks to a leafy neighborhood and Regina Thom’s Victorian, where he parked behind a cobalt blue Miata.

“Who’s there, Eric?” The female voice from deep within the house carried a note of exasperation.