Fire Spirit by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

been totally different. The flames would have been a different color, too, not yellow. Apart from which, whoever did the blowtorching would have left footprints.’
    â€˜So what was it, do you think, this intense source of heat?’
    â€˜I have absolutely no idea. I’ve seen similar charring on victims who have fallen into furnaces or barbecue pits or open fires. You remember that old man last year, out on Water Works Road, who fell into that hog roaster? All of the subcutaneous fat evaporated from his head and his shoulders, just like this. But in this case the victim’s entire body surface was carbonized, head to toe, and right now I can’t think how that could have happened, not without an accelerant.’
    They had reached the sidewalk, where a police tape had been strung across the front of the property to keep out the crowd of onlookers. As Bob lifted it up for her, Ruth saw the dark-haired boy again. He was standing by himself about twenty feet away from the rest of the crowd, with his hands in his pockets. His face was so pale that it was almost white, and his eyes were as dark as holes burned into a sheet of paper. His hair was badly cut, so that it stuck up at the back. He was wearing a faded black T-shirt and a pair of worn-out red jeans.
    â€˜See that kid?’ Ruth asked Bob. ‘He was here when I arrived this morning, and he’s still here.’
    Bob frowned in the boy’s direction. ‘He’s not wearing a Smokey Bear hat, I’ll grant you. But he doesn’t look like much of an arsonist to me.’
    â€˜Oh, come on, Bob. You know better than that. No two arsonists ever look alike. Here – hold this.’
    She handed him her metal case, opened it, and took out her camera. She took more than a dozen pictures of the crowd, panning slowly from right to left so that the boy wouldn’t think that she was focusing her camera only on him.
    â€˜There,’ she said, putting the camera away again. ‘Now I’m going to go over and ask him who he is, and what he’s doing here.’
    She said, ‘Pardon me, excuse me,’ and pushed her way through the crowd. When she reached the place where the boy had been standing, however, he had gone.
    She looked around, puzzled. The only place for him to have hidden was behind a large white oak at the side of the next-door yard, but she couldn’t understand how he could have crossed the sidewalk to reach it, not without her seeing him. She circled the oak twice, but there was nobody there. She shaded her eyes and peered along the street, but it was totally straight all the way down to West Park Avenue, a distance of more than half a mile, and there was no sign of the boy anywhere.
    She went back and rejoined Bob Kowalski, and now Jack Morrow and Detective Ron Magruder came out, too.
    Detective Magruder said, ‘We’ve made a thorough search of the yard and the woods immediately in back, but there’s no sign of any discarded cans or bottles that might have contained accelerant, or any other evidence of arson for that matter. The kitchen door was forced open, for sure, but there are no fingerprints and no fibers. No footprints, neither, apart from our own. Whoever set this fire, they left the house before any carbon deposit fell on the floor.’
    â€˜What about witnesses?’ asked Ruth.
    â€˜Apart from our fruit-truck driver, none. The elderly couple who live next door, they’re both deaf as doorposts and they didn’t see nothing, neither. The family who live right opposite, they’ve been in Muncie for three days, visiting the husband’s mother, and they got back only about two hours ago.’
    He tucked his pen into his breast-pocket and said, ‘Any of you people have any wild theories?’
    â€˜Sorry, Ron,’ Jack told him. ‘We arson investigators don’t deal in wild theories – only forensic evidence. But we’ll keep you up to date with