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he approached the bed, Jim saw a tangle of bones lying on it. They were scorched, like barbecued ribs, and they were so mixed up together that it would have been impossible at first glance to tell that they were the remains of two separate people – except that there were two skulls, with their foreheads poignantly touching, staring into each other’s empty eye sockets.
    All around the scattered bones lay heaps of damp gray ashes. A criminalist was scooping up samples with a spoon and dropping them into clear plastic bags.
    â€˜Harris!’ A big man with a big Roman nose and silver Roman-emperor curls came barging around the bed to greet them. He was wearing baggy blue coveralls with F ORENSICS printed across the back.
    â€˜How’s it going, Jack?’ Lieutenant Harris asked him. ‘Jack, this is Jim Rook. Mr Rook, this is Jack Billings, head of the crime scene unit.’
    Jack Billings nodded to Jim and wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his glove. ‘They were cremated,’ he said in a thick, harsh voice, as if he had a cold. ‘In fact, they were more than cremated. Your average crematorium oven burns at two thousand five hundred degrees Fahrenheit for more than four hours to reduce a human body to this condition. I would say that the temperature in this bedroom reached well over five times that, even though it happened over a very short space of time. Possibly in seconds.’
    â€˜How the hell did that happen?’ asked Lieutenant Harris.
    â€˜I was hoping that you were going to tell me. As I told you before, there’s no evidence of arson … no indication that any kind of accelerant was involved, such as gasoline or kerosene or turpentine. No spent matches, no cigarette lighter. It couldn’t have been a gas explosion, since the house isn’t fitted for natural gas or butane. An arc welding torch can reach twenty thousand degrees Celsius, but the burning would have been concentrated in a very small area – unlike here, where we have soot spread evenly all over the walls, and the carpet evenly charred all over, and the same with the bed.’
    â€˜A bomb?’ suggested Lieutenant Harris.
    Jack Billings shook his head. ‘There was plenty of heat, but there was absolutely no explosive force. Look at these remains, these ashes, they’re just lying here in a pile. Any bomb that was capable of generating this much heat would have blasted them over a five-mile radius. We would have been picking up selected bits of them in Anaheim.’
    â€˜Lightning?’
    â€˜That’s an outside possibility. But it doesn’t seem very likely that lightning could have incinerated two people who were lying on a well-insulated bed. Apart from that, there were no electric storms reported along the coast last night.’
    â€˜So that’s it? You don’t have any other ideas?’
    â€˜Not so far. But you know me. I’m not defeated yet, not by a long chalk. Oh, but there’s this to consider.’
    â€˜What’s that?’ asked Lieutenant Harris.
    Jack Billings beckoned them through to the dressing room. There were white louvred closets on the left-hand wall, which backed on to the bedroom, and a built-in dressing table on the right, with bottles of perfume and hand lotion on it. The end wall was mirrored from floor to ceiling, so that their reflections entered the room at the same time as they did. Jim thought he looked crumpled and washed-out. He needed a break. He needed the love of a good woman and three weeks on Oahu.
    â€˜OK,’ said Lieutenant Harris. ‘What’s to see in here?’
    Without a word, Jack Billings opened the closet doors. ‘We only found this because we were trying to see if any of the power cables had shorted out.’ All of the clothes that had been hanging on the rail had been pushed right over to one side, so that the back wall of the closet was exposed.
    â€˜My God,’ said Jim. He