He had a graying buzz cut, an easy tenor voice, a face that looked perpetually freshly shaved. Godwin, forty-eight, was a Born Here. He knew most people in the county by first name, always remembered to ask about people’s wives or mothers or pets, and doled out ribbing with a wink that made the teasing feel inclusive rather than mean. In return, the people of the county had voted him into office the previous year with a heavy majority, and his wife had gotten used to errands taking twice as long when Godwin was along because of the number of people who would stop to greet him. He was never off duty. He had polo shirts stitched with “Sheriff” on the chest, which he wore on evenings and weekends when he wasn’t in uniform.
He was the most visible man in Accomack County. He was also, unlike the state police employees, the only elected law enforcement official in the county. The combination of these two things often meant that he was on the hook if the public wanted someone to blame for a crime that had gone unsolved, a lesson he’d recently learned. There had already been one string of unsolved crimes in the county that year. Earlier that summer a string of graffiti had begun appearing around the area, mostly on abandoned houses and appearing to target a particular local couple, a man named Jay Floyd and his girlfriend, Danielle. The graffiti accused the pair of being police informants. The tagging ranged from straightforward and benign—“Jay Narc” sprayed on a road sign—to snide and personal: “Jay Floyd, Cops in his pocket and dicks in his bitch,” sprayed in two-foot-tall letters on the side of an empty house off a little-traveled road. It had become somewhat of a game, a countywide Where’s Waldo?, to locate the next spray-painted house. The graffiti wasn’t a violent or dangerous crime, but it was an eyesore, and Godwin sensed that people in the county wondered why it was taking so long to apprehend the artists.
Now, at least, there was one fewer of those tagged houses to worry about: the sixth house to burn down in the most recent series had been one of the graffitied structures. The caller who reported that fire had made sure to helpfully identify it when he dialed 911: “This was a Jay Floyd house—a ‘narc’ house,” he told the dispatcher when providing directions to the scene.
The graffiti was driving Godwin crazy.
The arsons wouldn’t be under his jurisdiction the way the graffiti was. Though the county used to employ a fire investigator, when that man retired back in 2007 he hadn’t been replaced. With no trained investigators on the county staff, the arson investigation would automatically be headed by the state police. But the investigation would undoubtedly end up calling on Godwin’s personnel. And it would be happening in Godwin’s county, the one he was born in, the place where the only title he’d ever wanted was “sheriff.”
Godwin wanted to be ready, and he decided the first thing they needed was a list of potential targets—a way to understand the potential scope of the problem and what, exactly, they could be dealing with here. A request was put forth to a county department for an official roster of all of the abandoned houses on record in Accomack. While they waited for that, the sheriff’s deputies and state police investigators brainstormed on their own. It wasn’t difficult. Anyone who was from the shore could list those houses for days—they were places kids had told ghost stories about, and teenagers had thrown parties in, and adults had lobbied to either be torn down or returned to their former glory. Houses off Bayside Road. Houses off Seaside Road. The house on the road nobody knew the name of but that always had a goat tied up on the corner. Little shacks. Big shacks. Whispering Pines.
A day or two later, the official list from the county came over. On it were eight hundred addresses. Eight hundred potential targets. To one investigator, that number seemed low: it included only residences that someone was still paying taxes on. It didn’t include the houses that were buried deep in the woods or marshland, covered in ivy—the houses that even the Born Heres could stumble upon, surprised. The real number, the investigator thought, was probably in the thousands.
Godwin didn’t have thousands of deputies. He thought that, between his own staff and a few borrowed officers from local police departments, he could probably get eight or ten volunteers to keep an eye on a select group of houses. His staff and the Virginia State Police tried to take those eight hundred houses and whittle them down to a few logical guesses. To be candidates for arson, the houses needed to have easy access from the road. Whoever had lit the first fires had done so quickly enough that they’d cleared the area before being spotted. For the same reason, it made sense to focus on houses with multiple access points rather than ones on dead-end roads. The police and sheriff’s deputies made their list of houses to be watched: Bayside Road. Orchard Road. Rose Cottage Road. There was a house in Keller that they went back and forth on for a while. It fit all of the criteria. In the end, it was edged out—number six on the list, just below the cutoff. Not because it necessarily seemed worse or better than numbers one through five, but because they had to start somewhere.
Godwin was a hunter, like a lot of men who spent time in the county, going all the way back to Grover Cleveland. It was hard to live here and avoid it: At twilight in these parts, groups of dozens of deer would appear on fields, grazing away at crops. Culling the herds was seen as something of a civic duty. Residents grew up doing it, most of them ate the meat they caught, and a lot of them did the butchering themselves. Here’s what deer hunters knew about catching their chosen prey: stalking was not the answer. Deer were too fast, too easily startled. They couldn’t be pursued. The way to catch a deer was to figure out where it already planned to go, and get there before it did. Choose a location that had the kind of things deer like to eat, in the kind of environment it likes to eat it in. Wait where the deer couldn’t see you. Be still. Be patient. And be certain in your convictions. If a deer didn’t show up the first time, come back to the same location again, and again, until it did.
Godwin knew what kind of thing the arsonist liked. He liked abandoned houses. So maybe the thing to do was to find the most delectable abandoned houses in the county. And then wait.
He gave one of his deputies a department credit card and told him to go to the nearest Bass Pro Outlet and buy out their stash of camouflage tents. Portable heaters, too. It was almost Thanksgiving, and the first frost had already descended.