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keening in the back of his throat.
    Ruth hunkered down and inspected the body more closely. ‘You’re not wrong, Jack. This is one very unusual fire. Like you say, it must have been very short-lived, but while it lasted it must have burned hotter than hell.’
    Jack said, in his expressionless voice, ‘Your average commercial crematorium runs at more than a thousand degrees Celsius. Even then, it would usually take over a half-hour to reduce a cadaver to this condition.’
    â€˜Was the front door locked when the firefighters arrived?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Jack told her. ‘But only with the regular mortise lock. It wasn’t bolted, or obstructed in any other way. They were able to break in right away.’
    â€˜OK.’ Preventing firefighters from gaining easy access to a fire was a tell-tale indication of arson, but it didn’t appear to Ruth as if that had happened here.
    She circled the room. The walls were decorated with a frieze of V-shaped plumes of soot, from which grayish-yellow runnels of human fat had slid down to the floor. In spite of the intensity of the fire, however, the upholstery of the four armchairs that were arranged around the mattress had only been slightly scorched. If the fire had been hot enough to reduce a human body to bones and ashes in only a matter of minutes, she would have expected a flameover, and the air temperature to have risen so high that everything in it would have ignited spontaneously: chairs, cushions, carpet and drapes. And yet there was a plastic snow-dome from Chicago on top of the fireplace, and that had only been dimpled by the heat.
    â€˜Do we know the victim’s identity?’ she asked.
    Detective Ron Magruder shook his head. He had a bristly little brown moustache and a cheap tan three-piece suit, with three cheap ballpens in his breast pocket. ‘The house is currently unoccupied. The owner is a Mrs Evaline Van Kley, but she moved into the Paradise Valley sunset home about three months ago and the property has been up for sale ever since.’
    â€˜Who has access?’
    â€˜Apart from the realtors, both Mrs Van Kley’s son and daughter have keys, but the son lives and works in Gary and the daughter works for some investment bank in London, England. The state police are double-checking the son’s whereabouts for us, and we’ve already contacted all the staff at Sycamore Realty. But so far, zip.’
    Val Minelli came over. She was a petite girl, with a long dark ponytail and an oval face like an Italian Madonna, and she did everything gracefully, even taking samples of burned human flesh. ‘Whoever this is, man or woman, they were probably married, because they were wearing a gold wedding band. So it’s possible that we’ll get a missing persons call within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.’
    â€˜Unless, of course, it was their spouse who set them on fire,’ said Ruth.
    â€˜Well, that’s always one alternative,’ Val admitted. ‘But if this was deliberate, the perpetrator must have been seriously pissed. This isn’t just a homicide. This is a sacrifice .’
    â€˜OK,’ said Ruth. She set down her metal case, flipped open the catches and took out a pair of latex gloves. ‘If I can have the room cleared now, please, except for Val. Jack, you want to check the utilities? Tyson – how about doing your stuff now, boy? Go on, boy. Go seek.’
    The firefighters and the detectives made their way out of the door, treading as delicately as dancers so that they didn’t disturb any latent evidence. Tyson ducked his head down and criss-crossed the living-room, enthusiastically sniffing at the floorboards and all along the skirting. Ruth took out her Leica camera and started to take flash pictures, dozens of them, not only of the incinerated body and the mattress it was lying on, but the floor all around it, and the walls, and the doors, and the