Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

I should be injured during my ride-alongs.
    Fortunately, I never got hurt, but I often came home smelling of smoke after riding a shift with Marshal 5’s arson investigators. For years, I carried a card, issued by the fire chief, that gave me blanket permission to enter any burning building I chose to. After my first experience inside a fire site that had been “tapped” (fire extinguished and situation under control), I didn’t relish entering an arson site. Even when the flames were out, the smoke was almost suffocating. The men who investigated possible arson fires had once been firefighters themselves and seemed inured to the acrid fumes as they hastened to check the premises for signs that a fire had been deliberately set.
    But I never got used to the smoke—not even after I rode with Marshal 5 for more than three hundred hours.
    The men who had spent years in the fire department sometimes tested my gullibility with anecdotes and stories that couldn’t possibly be true. I usually caught on quickly, but there were times I wasn’t sure if they were teasing or telling the truth.
    Like Homicide detectives, arson investigators look for minute clues that will give them something they can prove in a trial. They have the added challenge of sifting through burned material that is often unrecognizable. They begin at the roof and work down, removing layer after layer of what were ceilings, walls, curtains, furniture, rugs, floors, papers, trash, and—if they are lucky—gasoline cans or candles not quite burned, which mean a clumsy and stupid arsonist has been there.
    Marshal 5 investigators taught me about professional arsonists who could set up a fire that would start long after they were on a plane out of town. They explained that neophytes were often seriously burned—or even killed—when they threw a lighted match into a room doused with an accelerant, thinking they could slam the door before the inferno got to them.
    They didn’t expect the instant explosion that usually followed.
    I think the most intriguing tales involved human beings who simply caught fire for no explainable reason. Was it possible that some chemical change occurred within a living body that caused it to burst into flames without any outside cause?
    Some of the old-timers said it was, and recalled finding the remains of people who had apparently caught fire while they sat in an easy chair. They died quickly as tremendous heat was generated.
    The story of Dorothy Jones may be a case of spontaneous combustion. I have pondered it for many years, and I am still not sure what happened to her.

At the age of forty-four, Dorothy Jones was the envy of many of her friends. She was an extremely attractive African American woman with an exceptional figure that any twenty-five-year-old would have been proud of. She had a longtime husband and there were rumors that she also had an attentive lover. She had a wide circle of friends, both trusted female friends and business associates who admired her. They were loyal to her. Initially, none of them were anxious to talk about Dorothy’s private life when detectives came around asking questions.
    She had a good income, and she and her husband shared a neat and comfortable house in the south of Seattle. They had no children.
    Five days before Christmas 1976, Dorothy was busy running a number of errands. She was looking forward to a trip to San Antonio, Texas, to spend the holidays with relatives there. Her husband was an over-the-road truck driver, and her friends thought she would probably meet up with him at his mother’s house in the Alamo city. He’d been gone on a long trip—more than a month—and he was to deliver a load of furniture in Texas, and then they would reunite for a leisurely holiday.
    But that wasn’t going to happen. Dorothy never made it to Texas. Somewhere in Dorothy’s complicated life, a killer waited for her. Whether it was a human murderer who had his or her own reasons to want Dorothy dead, or a more amorphous killer—some sort of natural or unnatural phenomenon—would be the question.
    The death of Dorothy Jones was one of the strangest occurrences I ever encountered.
    There is no question at all that she was seen alive and vibrant on the evening of Monday, December 20, 1976. Less than an hour and a half later, she was dead, literally roasted, on the charred bedroom of her home.
    What happened to Dorothy seems impossible. It could not have happened.
    And yet it