American Fire Read online

  The house on Dennis Drive had been the first fire. The one on Helen Hasty’s land was the second.

  Eight minutes later, another call came into the 911 Center: “I’m down at Arthur Lane,” the caller explained. “And there’s—the woods are on fire. I was riding by, and it’s on fire, and it’s spreading. It’s two minutes down Arthur Lane at Greenbush.”

  That was the third fire.

  The members of the Tasley Volunteer Fire Department had just pulled back into their station, down on Tasley Road about half a mile from the decaying remains of the esteemed Whispering Pines resort, which hadn’t operated as a restaurant in two decades and as a hotel in even longer than that, and which loomed dark and creepy and big by the side of the road.

  The firefighters were sweaty and tired from the fire on Dennis Drive, but there were protocols to be followed. They hung up their coats on the assigned hooks lining the wall of the engine room and arranged their boots and suspendered pants on the floor directly below. Their hats went on the shelf above. All of them were yellow or black except for Shannon Bridges’s because, when she’d determined that she wanted to become a firefighter, she also determined that she would do so wearing a pink hat. Her brother Richie’s hat was the largest in the row and his coat was, too. Richie, twenty-six, had been volunteering with Tasley for seven years, and was built like a refrigerator. The company was always having to order him special-sized uniforms and then even more special sizes when the shoulders of the XXLs were still too tight. He drove a Richie-sized truck, and it was while borrowing this truck one afternoon that Shannon, twenty-eight, decided she would join the fire company like her brother. His equipment had been lying on the floorboard; she kept looking down at it and thinking, I want to do that.

  After removing their uniforms, the Tasley firefighters climbed on the red and white engine, and began repacking the hose with a precision that most of them would have deployed anyway but upon which Chief Jeff Beall absolutely insisted. Firefighting was his second career. He’d served a full five years in the Air Force and fifteen years in the Coast Guard before moving to the Eastern Shore, and while some of his volunteers thought he was a hard-ass, his military training had taught him that there were right ways to do things and wrong ways, and getting small things correct was the only way to make sure the big things worked when it mattered most.

  They had scarcely finished repacking the hoses when the air around them split with noise. It was their pagers, all of them, going off at the same time. They all looked at one another. The brush fire on Arthur Road belonged to them: they were first due.

  So it would be one of those nights, Shannon thought, as she grabbed her gear again. Two calls in one night was unusual, but not unheard of, especially in the fall when people began turning on their furnaces or holding bonfires in their backyards. For Shannon, it meant it would be a night when she wouldn’t see her husband or her three boys; by now it was after midnight and they were probably asleep. She climbed back into the trucks with everyone else, and Beall called into dispatch to figure out what Tasley was getting into next.

  “Chief 8,” he identified himself when the 911 Center responded. “Is this reported to be a large wood fire, or what?”

  “We’ve had two calls,” the dispatcher answered. “Neither one was able to tell how much woods was burning.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Notify Forestry and have them respond.”

  Eleven years before, when Beall and his wife, Renee, planned their relocation to the shore after decades of more cosmopolitan posts, Renee, a special education teacher, came in the middle of the summer with their two sons while Beall finished up work back in New York. Beall had found the house earlier, and when Renee saw it in person, she was amused. In every relocation with the Coast Guard, Beall had volunteered with fire companies. It was how he found community. In Accomack, he had yet again chosen a house less than two minutes from the local station. Within a few years he was the chief.

  The other thing that had amused Renee was how driving across the bridge felt not so much like entering a different state but entering an interruption in the time space continuum. The small towns, small roads, everyone up in one another’s business with small gossip—it felt like the 1950s to her. When Beall started with Tasley, he discovered this time warp carried over to the fire department, too. They were still running fires out of the same building they’d used in 1926, back when eighteen Tasley men had pooled $5 or $20 apiece “for the purpose of a chemical engine,” according to the handwritten records of the time. The top floor meeting room perpetually smelled like mildew, and the bottom floor truck bays—designed for hand-drawn fire engines, not motorized ones—were filled with junk. The modern equipment was kept in a newer building next door. And then there was the question of Beall’s roster. Some of the older members had been trained not at formal academies but through osmosis, watching their fathers and grandfathers. Memberships at places like Tasley’s Volunteer Fire Department went back generations. When Beall wanted something done or something changed, he communicated it in a way that was meant to be frank and direct, but which came across to some of the old heads as insulting. He said “friggin’ ” a lot, perpetuating regular debate as to whether the word should constitute a quarter in the company swear jar. There was a tiny chasm in the group, between people who appreciated the way Beall was trying to modernize and professionalize the department, and people who thought that Beall, a Come Here, had no respect for tradition.

  But this was all behind the scenes. When a fire came, they pulled together and ran. Tonight, all around the county, firefighters were running. The crew from Bloxom had left the fire on Dennis Drive and immediately been called to the one at Helen Hasty’s. The crew from Parksley had been called out again, too.

  At Parksley, Phil Kelley, like Shannon, was realizing that it was going to be one of those nights, a night where things went wonky; a series of tossed cigarette butts and failed cooking experiments also conspired against the firefighters of Accomack County. But as he drove to his next fire and listened to the types of incidents people were calling in, things started to seem more than regular busy. They started to seem just plain weird. The county was geographically big, but all of these fires were fairly close together. What were the chances of that?

  While Kelley crossed the railroad tracks, he kept thinking about Baghdad. When the first Gulf War began, the news kept running clip after clip of the bombing of Baghdad. On television the whole sky looked orange from the light of the buildings that had been hit and gone up in flames. He hadn’t been able to picture what that would look like in person. But now, while he was driving toward the reddened sky to get to his fire, he looked north and saw that the sky was red in a different place, too. Multiple big fires, all going at once, in a way he’d never seen before. He thought his county looked a little bit like Baghdad.

  Kelley had a friend who ran with the Bloxom Fire Department just up the road. He pulled out his cell phone to call him. “Do you have an abandoned house fire going on up there?” Kelley asked.

  “Yep,” the friend said. “What do you got going on?”

  “Two house fires,” Kelley said. When he hung up the phone he was still thinking. The other number he called was Glenn Neal. Neal was a special agent with the Virginia State Police. He was classified as general assignment, but he and his colleague Rob Barnes had both been specifically trained in fire and bomb investigations—it had been the most pressing need of the VSP at the time they each graduated. It was Neal’s and Barnes’s jobs to determine the cause of any fires set in the county. Tonight Neal was the one on duty. “Do you know about what’s going on here?” Kelley remembering asking when Neal answered his call.

  “We’re on top of it,” Neal said, and hung up the phone.

  Houses catch on fire; it doesn’t always mean anything. It wasn’t unusual for an abandoned house or two to burn down every year. But this had been three in one night. To everyone involved, it was beginning to feel off. It felt, as Jeff Beall
would later describe it to friends, like a person arriving home at the end of the day and finding windows open at his house. One open window, and a person might assume that his spouse had done it to air out the kitchen after a cooking mishap. But if all of the windows were open, it became something else, something eerie and malicious.

  Fire number four: an abandoned house in Greenbush, called into the 911 Center just twenty-three hours after the first one on Dennis Drive.

  Fire number five: an abandoned house in Parksley, called in one hour after fire number four by a man who had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and heard a bunch of crackles. He looked up and, he told the 911 dispatcher, “All I saw was orange in the sky.”

  Fire number six: an abandoned house in Hallwood, an hour after fire number five.

  At each site, there had been no reports of prowlers or unusual activity, no outward reason for the houses to catch fire. Someone had come in and gone out, and left nothing at all behind.

  Six fires.

  The first fire had been lit less than thirty hours ago. All around Accomack people were coming to the same conclusion, which they thought to themselves or said to one another.

  Kelley had said it to his friend in Bloxom, and Shannon and Richie had said it to each other, and when Neal and Barnes, the investigators, got to the scenes of the burned-out houses and began to pick through the unidentifiable chunks of old house, they would say it to each other. And now on November 13, Jeff Beall, at the end of a long stretch of fires that felt like someone had thrown open all of the windows of his home and left it naked and vulnerable to invaders—he said it, too: “We’ve got an arsonist.”

  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.”

  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 th
e 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.”