THE NEXT DAY, Barnes and Neal got in Neal’s car and set out to examine the scenes of the fires from the two previous nights. Arson inspections were careful business. Investigators began the inspection before they even got out of their vehicles, and then circled methodically inward toward the fire’s point of origin. As Barnes and Neal approached the site of the Dennis Drive fire, they paid attention to wind direction and to the vegetation in the area. They noted that there were no sources of power in the house, and confirmed with neighbors that no one had been living there.
In truth, neither of them needed the confirmation, since they were both from the shore. Barnes—tall, broad, dark haired, with the earnest, straight-nosed profile of the former military man he was—drove by the house all the time. He knew nobody had been living in it. The same went for Neal, who was equally tall and whose belly had just the slightest of paunches to indicate that he might be a fun fellow to have a beer with. Barnes’s demeanor was the kind of methodical seriousness that demanded respect; Neal’s had a jokeyness that caused people to forget, sometimes to his advantage, that he was law enforcement at all.
Today, they asked neighbors whether any intruders had been spotted prowling around the house. None had. They interviewed the firefighters who had put the fire out, asking if they had any information about which direction the fire had been traveling, or which areas of the house were damaged first—anything that would help them determine where and how it might have started to begin with.
They moved closer into the scene and stood in the ruins of the house, which was still smoldering from the night before. At the academy where Neal and Barnes had received their 1033 certification—the state-level course required to become a licensed fire investigator in Virginia—the lead instructor, Bobby Bailey, called this part of the process “sitting on a bucket.” It didn’t matter if all the furniture in the house had been burned up. Investigators had to find something they could sit on, in the middle of the wreckage, and take it all in. Sit on a bucket. Sit on a shovel. More times than he could count, Bailey liked to tell his students, he’d found himself sitting on a charred toilet seat in the middle of a demolished house, letting the fire talk to him: Where was the V—the smoke pattern that could likely be traced back to the fire’s point of origin? How high was the soot line, which could indicate how long and how slow the fire had been burning? What kind of siding was on the house? Wood and vinyl burned at different rates. In what direction do the weather reports say the wind was blowing? Did the fire pattern reflect that? If the two accounts didn’t match up, did the homeowner have a fan running, which might have displaced the wind direction inside?
But at the house on Dennis Drive, there was no bucket, not even the toilet seat variety. The house was a pile of ashes. No footprints, no tire treads, no V, no fans, no clues.
Barnes had noticed that the county seemed to draw in firebugs of several different varieties. It wasn’t out of the question, for example, that a group of teenagers could seek entertainment by building homemade bottle rockets and lobbing them at a beat-up shack. This was a county with one movie theater that played one showing of one movie one time per day, and only on the weekends. The VFW held bingo games, the library had a monthly lecture series, and high school sporting events were well attended—but the opportunities for stir-crazy teens were limited, and bottle rockets were as good as anything.
Nor was it out of the realm of possibility that some farmer might get tired of paying taxes on a bedraggled grain shed that nobody had used in three decades and decide to take care of the problem himself with some makeshift kindling and a match.
So the question was, Were these fires, the ones set on November 12 and 13, like that? A tiny spree that would stop now that the perpetrators had it out of their systems? Or were these fires something else?
There had already been one arsonist in Accomack, David Clifton Parks, a volunteer firefighter who people agreed was as gregarious and likeable a fellow as one could meet, unless he was drinking. When he drank, his instinct was either to punch people or set fires. He’d only lit a few fires in Accomack, though, before spreading his work up to Maryland, which is where he was eventually caught. Now he was in prison, and unless he’d found a way to engineer an out-of-body crime spree from the Jessup Correctional Institute, he wasn’t responsible for the latest string. They wouldn’t have fit his profile anyway—these houses seemed to have been selected for the fact that they were abandoned; Parks would just light whatever was close by.
Barnes and Neal finished their examination of the house and set to completing the necessary paperwork. There were only certain ways a fire could be coded. This one wasn’t nature-made, and it didn’t appear to be an accident, like a toppled candle. Eventually, Barnes determined that the fire was “incendiary” in nature. Incendiary meant that someone had probably lit it on purpose, and right now that’s all they knew.
A FEW MILES down the road, Todd Godwin, the sheriff of Accomack County, was waking up and looking at his phone. He had a computer-aided dispatch app downloaded onto it, which he checked every morning to see what the 911 traffic had looked like the night before. After the three fires the first night, he had been on alert. Now, with three more, he was full-on alarmed. He was protective of his county. People liked that about him, and the fact that he worked hard, pitched in, rolled up his sleeves. Godwin was “a cross between Walking Tall and Andy Griffith,” as one outsider would think of him the first time they met: “Throw them both in a bag, toss them around a little bit, and Godwin is what you’d get.”