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had been scorched and then drenched into unrecognizable mounds.
    Hank listened to Sam’s tirade while he collected first impressions. Including the strange feelings that seeing Lil Campbell had kicked up; she still looked good in that I’m-drawing-no-attention-to-myself sort of way. Of course she shouldn’t be here, but that hadn’t been it. They were close in age, had been friends for decades – always as one married couple doing stuff with another, or the rare golf foursome when the workaholic Bradley would join in. It was more, and not the kind of thing he’d share with anyone, not even her.
What’s the harm?
he’d thought.
You’re alone
,
she’s alone . . . albeit always with that cute little friend of hers.
And you’re thinking about asking her on a date in the midst of this? Get a grip.
And he’d followed Sam in tracking down the fire’s point of origin. Little doubt that it had started in this unit where the flames had blazed the hottest. The smell hit them first as they’d made their way into the apartment, the door demolished by axes. Acrid fumes with notes of petrol and burned plastic and rubber. And everywhere he’d looked, clocks and jumbled rubbish in boxes and black plastic bags. Solid walls of pure crap that obscured everything from the floor up to the ceiling in places. The first door off the long narrow hall was a galley kitchen, the hoard reducing the small space to less than a square yard of cluttered floor where someone could stand. The bottom cabinets probably not opened in years because of the mounds in front of them, the top ones unable to close, their contents forming an avalanche that spilled on to the buried counter and from there to the floor. And the stove was dangerously obscured by stacks of forms – this was an accident waiting to happen – but not where the fire had started.
    â€˜Solvents, not gas . . .’ The experienced Marshall sniffed, like a connoisseur swilling a Pinot Noir. ‘Definitely turpentine . . . alcohol, some kind of lacquer, and oil, too. I knew it from the dark gray smoke when I got here. There should be laws against having this kind of stuff in a nursing home . . . there are. This should have been reported. Someone knew about this, and if word gets out . . .’
    â€˜It’s not a nursing home.’ Hank corrected him as he examined the forms on the one semi-clear area of counter space – all medical in nature, and neatly stacked; like the guy who’d been living here was using it as a desk. ‘These are apartments.’ And, careful to leave things as he’d found them, he focused his camera on the top three forms and snapped close ups. At the bottom of each page was a signature line, below which was printed, Norman Trask, MD. From there he systematically took shots of each surface in the kitchen, getting a couple extra of the weird pyramid of jumbo coffee cans in front of the room’s only window. As an afterthought he pulled a random envelope from the bottom of a mail stack – it was an advertising package filled with coupons for local businesses; the postmark was June 2001, not long after Nillewaug opened over ten years ago. ‘Jesus, why would somebody keep this kind of crap?’
    As they’d climbed over tumbled and drenched stacks of boxes, clock gears, and papers they came to what had once been a bright and spacious living and dining area. With the exception of a small cleared area, in front of which sat a melted computer and flat-screen monitor that now looked like odd pieces of modern art, the room was packed. Blackened shelves lined three walls, but only the very tops of those, filled with incinerated old clocks and books, could be glimpsed. The bank of windows on the fourth wall had all been broken, and the floor was a drenched swamp with thick puddles. The only other slightly passable space was in front of a cluttered table to the left of the