“You know that?” Crawford peered into her sightless eyes.
“I was with him.”
“Tell me, please.”
“He shot himself in the face. I put my hand in it. He set fire to the house. He shot himself. I put my hand in it. He was on the floor. I put my hand in it can I sit down?”
“Yes,” Crawford said. He got into the back of a police car with her. He put his arms around her and let her cry into his jowl.
Graham stood in the road and watched the flames until his face was red and sore.
The winds aloft whipped smoke across the moon.
50
The wind in the morning was warm and wet. It blew wisps of cloud over the blackened chimneys where Dolarhyde’s house had stood. Thin smoke blew flat across the fields.
A few raindrops struck coals and exploded in tiny puffs of steam and ashes.
A fire truck stood by, its light revolving.
S. F. Aynesworth, FBI section chief, Explosives, stood with Graham upwind of the ruins, pouring coffee from a thermos.
Aynesworth wi
nced as the local fire marshal reached into the ashes with a rake.
“Thank God it’s still too hot for him in there,” he said out of the side of his mouth. He had been carefully cordial to the local authorities. To Graham, he spoke his mind. “I got to wade it, hell. This place’ll look like a fucking turkey farm soon as all the special deputies and constables finish their pancakes and take a crap. They’ll be right on down to help.”
Until Aynesworth’s beloved bomb van arrived from Washington, he had to make do with what he could bring on the plane. He pulled a faded Marine Corps duffel bag out of the trunk of a patrol car and unpacked his Nomex underwear and asbestos boots and coveralls.
“What did it look like when it went up, Will?”
“A flash of intense light that died down. Then it looked darker at the base. A lot of stuff was going up, window frames, flat pieces of the roof, and chunks flying sideways, tumbling in the fields. There was a shock wave, and the wind after. It blew out and sucked back in again. It looked like it almost blew the fire out.”
“The fire was going good when it blew?”
“Yeah, it was through the roof and out the windows upstairs and down. The trees were burning.”
Aynesworth recruited two local firemen to stand by with a hose, and a third dressed in asbestos stood by with a winch line in case something fell on him.
He cleared the basement steps, now open to the sky, and went down into the tangle of black timbers. He could stay only a few minutes at a time. He made eight trips.
All he got for his effort was one flat piece of torn metal, but it seemed to make him happy.
Red-faced and wet with sweat, he stripped off his asbestos clothing and sat on the running board of the fire truck with a fireman’s raincoat over his shoulders.
He laid the flat piece of metal on the ground and blew away a film of ash.
“Dynamite,” he told Graham. “Look here, see the fern pattern in the metal? This stuff’s the right gauge for a trunk or a footlocker. That’s probably it. Dynamite in a footlocker. It didn’t go off in the basement, though. Looks like the ground floor to me. See where the tree’s cut there where that marble tabletop hit it? Blown out sideways. The dynamite was in something that kept the fire off of it for a while.”
“How about remains?”
“There may not be a lot, but there’s always something. We’ve got a lot of sifting to do. We’ll find him. I’ll give him to you in a small sack.”
A sedative had finally put Reba McClane to sleep at De-Paul Hospital shortly after dawn. She wanted the policewoman to sit close beside her bed. Several times through the morning she woke and reached out for the officer’s hand.
When she asked for breakfast, Graham brought it in.