Freeman is smug about his superior education, as though the nature of fire is by far the most important knowledge in the world. Calaphas is in particular offended by the word “ohhhh,” which seems to have been drawn out and delivered with a note of mockery, and by the words “you must understand,” which he suspects carry the same meaning as if Freeman had said you ignorant fool. His antipathy toward the marshal has become so intense that he will kill the bastard just as a matter of principle, not here and now, but in a week or a month, when the Michael Mace matter has been resolved and there is time to plan and execute a richly satisfying end to the wizard of fire.
“In this blaze,” Freeman continues, “the house was actively ventilated immediately prior to ignition.”
It galls Calaphas that the marshal pauses to wait for his student to request further enlightenment. Repressing his hostility, he says, “I’m sorry. What is ‘actively ventilated’？”
“The Mace house had four exterior doors. Three on the ground floor—one at the front, one at the rear, and another on the east side. The fourth was in the master bedroom and opened to a balcony above the back patio. Immediately prior to ignition, those four doors were unlocked and thrown open simultaneously.”
“How can you know simultaneously?”
The marshal adopts a sage expression and nods as if accepting praise for the thoroughness of his investigation. “According to the background we’ve been able to put together, Mr. Mace is a longtime security expert. His house featured electronic locks that could be monitored from his smartphone, engaged and disengaged as he wished. According to his housekeeper, he preferred not to entrust anyone with a key, though she had her own code to open the front door. The security company he founded nineteen years ago, which he sold but in which he still holds an interest, monitored and archived all system activity at that house. Their records show the doors were opened remotely and simultaneously one minute before fire broke out.”
“You said the doors were ‘thrown open.’”
“They were burglarproof, with concealed pneumatic hinges that allowed them to be operated remotely, closed against an intruder or opened to police if someone somehow gained entrance and barricaded himself in there.”
“‘Remotely.’ So Mace wasn’t in the house for any of this.”
“Evidently not.”
“Then how did the fire start? Who started it?”
“Evidence indicates three primary ignition points. Fireplaces. One in the master bedroom upstairs. Two downstairs, living room and family room. All featured ceramic logs, natural gas, and electronic starters. The valve regulating the flow of gas to the house failed to restrict the pressure to a safe level, and once the fireplaces ignited, the flow appears to have increased in a measured but rapid manner until flames would have been gushing out of those three fireboxes, across the floors and up the walls.”
“How could the valve fail?”
Freeman raises his eyebrows. “When you arrest Mr. Mace, we’d like to have a chance to ask him that and a few other questions.”
“The house—wasn’t it large enough to require fire sprinklers?”
“Yes, but the sprinkler system didn’t function. We believe the standpipe responded to a maintenance command and drained itself—and all the smaller pipes—of water.”
“Shortly before the fire?”
“Nothing I can prove in court.”
Calaphas becomes aware of the roaring of the rain on the roof, a sound that for a time entirely faded from his awareness. He looks toward a window, beyond which the world appears to be deliquescing, as if he might walk outside into the melt of this civilization—or simulation—into a gray nullity that provides no material with which to craft the simplest item. In childhood, until he was fifteen, he had experienced nights when, unable to sleep, he was overcome by the perception that the darkness beyond the windows was a void, that he was—and always had been—the only real person in the drama of his life, that all the rest of it had been a product of his imagination, which now began to fail him. On those occasions, perception at times hardened into conviction, and he lay trapped in a paralytic panic, until exhaustion overcame him and the deeper darkness outside flooded into the dark bedroom and poured into his eyes and spiraled him into the refuge of blind, dreamless sleep. However, the belief that you’re the only real person on Earth is a condition called solipsism, and he has come to understand that his situation is not so bleak as that. His situation is more amazing than that, and his destiny is magnificent.
“Are you all right?” Freeman asks.
Calaphas turns his attention from the rainy day. “Excuse me?”
Freeman looks at the window and then at Calaphas again. “You’ve gone as pale as a ghost.”
After taking a moment to collect himself, Calaphas says, “It almost seems as if Michael Mace performed a remote-control high-tech torching of his own home.”
“Yes, doesn’t it? But why? Given his background as a security expert, he would know that he’d come under suspicion. Considering the circumstances, whatever insurance company issued a policy on that house would take extreme measures to avoid paying up.”
“He’s on the run from the law,” Calaphas says. “There’s no way he could collect the insurance anyway. Mace started the fire to destroy evidence.”
“If that was his intention,” Freeman says, “he did a damn fine job of it.”
OUT OF HERE
With window shades closed and lamplight low and rain rumbling, the small house feels like a claustrophobic bombproof warren beneath a city under attack. Nina and John hurry on their appointed tasks with heads thrust forward and shoulders bent as though worried that the ceiling might collapse on them.
She can imagine only one reason why Aleem didn’t take the boy with him. To commit a kidnapping, even of his own son, he needs the approval of someone above him or equal to him on the ladder of gang authority. He could receive that dispensation tonight. Chafing at any restraint, which is his nature, he might decide to snatch the boy without gaining consent.
The law offers Nina no assistance. The police are underfunded and demoralized. Key figures in the government are patrons of the gangs and get their cut of the drug trade.
Her pistol was once her father’s. It came with a belt holster. Her dad had no concealed-carry permit, but sometimes he carried the gun anyway. Because criminals respect no legitimate authority, the law often restricts only the law-abiding, who are expected to go defenseless in the name of social order. She fits the holster on her belt and slips the pistol into it.
When the luggage is loaded into her well-used Ford Explorer, after she and John put on rain jackets, she takes the duffel bag from the pantry and puts it on the kitchen table. She withdraws four packets of hundred-dollar bills, forty thousand dollars, and pushes two of them toward John.
“Twenty thousand each. It’s our desperation money in case something happens to the duffel bag or it gets taken away from us.”
“Forty thousand.”
“My son the math whiz.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Not when we have to build a whole new life.”