By November 18, while Rob Barnes and Glenn Neal continued doggedly investigating every fire scene, the sheriff had assembled five teams of men in tents. They got in place and they stayed in place, through fires seven, eight, and nine. They arrived before dusk, slinking through the woods when they were sure nobody was watching, and they stayed into the early hours of the morning, when the risk of another fire seemed to die down. They stayed in place while the local paper, the Eastern Shore News, ran its first article about the arsons, and then its second, with the headline, “Suspicious Fires Probed.” They stayed through fires ten, eleven, twelve. There was no overtime pay available, so they stayed in place with the promise of comped vacation days that they knew they’d never get around to using, through fires thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
On the night of December 8, there was a fire at a commercial structure on Seaside Road. It was the one in Keller. Number six on the likely target list, the one they didn’t have the bodies to watch. It was the twenty-eighth fire.
Godwin was furious. So were Barnes and Neal, who had been examining every single fire but had, as of yet, come up with nothing in terms of clues. It was the way of fires: evidence burned itself up. The firefighters, who had now been called out nearly every night for a month straight, were exhausted. They were also beginning to wonder if they were dealing with some kind of fucking criminal mastermind.
CHAPTER 4
CHARLIE
CHARLIE SMITH’S LIFE had been a mess, though he was the first to admit it was mostly his own fault, which was one of the things people liked about him. He was perpetually screwing up, but then again, he was perpetually admitting it, too, infused with some kind of relentless honesty. His father had left when he was an infant, but people who had witnessed his parents’ marriage agreed that its dissolution might have been a boon for everyone. His mother had remarried a steady man named George Applegate, who treated his new stepchildren well enough that most people knew Charlie as Charlie Applegate and assumed that he was biologically George’s.
The public assumptions didn’t register much to Charlie, thirty-eight, who still felt like he didn’t belong—not in his family, and not in society in general. He never stopped wondering why his dad had left, he never stopped worrying he wasn’t loved as much as the kids from his mother’s second marriage. He thought a lot about those things as a kid. It was hard for him to know whether the feelings would have gone away on their own, because by the time he was thirteen, he’d found a way to make them go away. A friend gave him some marijuana. He tried it and liked it because it made him laugh and laugh, and it also made him feel like he understood the jokes that seemed to go over his head the rest of the time.
The first time Charlie tried to pass ninth grade, he was too stoned to put in much effort. The second time, he acted up and got kicked out. The third time, he went for “about a half an hour,” he estimated, before realizing he didn’t know why he was there at all and dropping out for good. He hated school. It didn’t come naturally to him and he had trouble imagining a future profession in which formal education was any kind of use.
George fixed cars for a living and taught Charlie to do the same; by the time Charlie was eight, he was spending summers sanding imperfections out of the cars people brought into the family’s shop. There were official shop hours posted on the door, but those were guidelines: Cars were worked on until they were finished, and sometimes that meant dawn hours or evening hours, until the light above Eastern Shore Auto was the only one visible on the street. George also volunteered with the Tasley Fire Department, and he taught Charlie to do that, too.
Charlie’s voice was on the slow side, his weight was on the roly-poly side, and when he got confused or embarrassed—or when he was amused or flustered or bored or sometimes for reasons even he wasn’t sure of—he would burst into a high-pitched giggle that he couldn’t control. He was of average height, 5 feet 8 inches, but seemed smaller due to a hunched, folded way of walking. He had close-cropped red hair and wide blue eyes. He was perpetually stoned and, as he got older and marijuana turned to crack, somewhat unpredictable. When people described him, they often swam around for a while in search of the right metaphor: “Not the sharpest crayon in the box.” “Not the brightest bulb in the lamp.” But even the people who thought he was lacking in book smarts would admit that Charlie knew how to do two things: fix cars and fight fires.
God, could he fix cars, especially the detail-oriented business that came with bodywork. While Charlie was still a teenager, people brought him fender benders, faded pickup trucks, or last-gasp rust heaps that owners were embarrassed to drive but not in a financial position to replace. Charlie, working out of his stepfather’s shop, would make them new again. He liked it, the immediacy of it, the fact that he could see what he’d accomplished and then get paid for it.
And firefighting—he’d joined the Tasley crew as a junior member on his twelfth birthday. Pagers didn’t exist at that time; volunteers would know there was a fire because a big siren would go off from the middle of town. It went off three times on Charlie’s first day as a junior member, and Charlie would always remember how important and vital it felt, to pull up to the scene of a car accident in the fire engine and realize that he knew the injured man inside.
The young volunteers who joined before their eighteenth birthdays got to leave school whenever they were called to a fire, and teachers couldn’t do anything about it. Which meant that in the 1980s in Accomack County, at least for the teenage set, being a firefighter was the closest thing to being a demigod.
By the early 1990s, Charlie’s drug problem had escalated and begun to interfere with his dreams. He moved in with an uncle he didn’t like much, but who at least offered him a place to stay. He then began stealing from that uncle to pay for crack. His uncle looked the other way when Charlie stole a gun, a coin collection, a bicycle—but he couldn’t look the other way when Charlie stole his checkbook and began forging checks. They weren’t for big amounts, fifty or a hundred bucks each, but there were a lot of them. When Charlie was eventually caught, he was charged with three dozen counts of forgery and sentenced to three years in prison, with most of his time suspended. He got out, relapsed, got clean, relapsed again, and got involved with a robbery in which he and a guy whose last name he wasn’t exactly sure of broke into another guy’s house and stole a cordless drill, an air compressor, a propane torch, and a battery charger. Police caught him and brought him in for an interview, at which point he confessed. When asked whether there was anything else he wanted to add about the incident, instead of trying to explain away his actions or ask for some kind of deal, he helpfully explained, “The battery charger was for the cordless drill.” He went to prison again.