Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

did.
     
    The Seattle Fire Department received the first call on the 911 line at 6:24 on the evening of December 20. The caller blurted that flames were belching from an upstairs window of a house on Thirty-first Avenue South. Firefighters from Battalion Number 5 leapt aboard their waiting engine and roared to the address with sirens keening. They arrived within a few minutes. They could see the smoke pouring from the upper windows and curling around the roof when they turned the first corner, but when they entered the house, the downstairs looked completely normal, untouched by either flames or smoke.
    Firefighter Gordon Ochs ran through the downstairs the truck driver’s wife rooms and followed wisps of smoke up the stairway. That stairwell was full of superheated air.
    As Ochs approached the bedroom on the west side of the center stairway, he saw that the door to that room was open approximately eight inches. But as he pushed on it, he felt so much resistance that he had to put his shoulder against the door with great force in order to gain entrance.
    The smoke in the room was thick and black; no one could have made it past the top of the stairs without a mask. Ochs’s eyes swept the room rapidly, and he saw that the three windows in the smoke-clogged room were unbroken. When he opened the nozzle on the inch-and-a-half hose line he carried and cold water hit the room, the windows shattered.
    He was able to extinguish the fire in the room rapidly; the flames seemed to have been most concentrated on and around the king-size bed. The fire had been intense and fast-burning, so hot that the plastic cabinet of a TV next to the bed had literally melted into a grotesque caricature of what it once was.
    The bedroom walls were blackened with clear-cut fire Vs rising above the bed’s headboard, but their lower portion was untouched.
    Now Ochs could make out the form of a woman who lay just inside the door. She was totally naked. She rested on her back with her left leg wedged between the seat and the base of a swivel chair, her face turned slightly to the right.
    There was no question that she was dead. Indeed, a postmortem examination would show that her body—particularly her full breasts—had literally been cooked by the fierce heat in the room.
    With the discovery of the woman’s nude body, the fire on Thirty-first Avenue took on new dimensions. Marshal 5, the arson squad, always responded to fire death scenes to determine whether the cause was accidental or deliberate. Now, Inspector Jim Reed and Seattle Police detective Bill Berg, who was on special assignment with Marshal 5, were alerted. They headed up Seattle’s Yesler Street toward the fire site. Seattle Police detective sergeant James Whalen of the General Assignments Unit that handled arson cases joined them.
     
    The flames were gone, but the house still reeked of smoke as Jim Reed walked through the front door. He saw that there was no fire damage at all on the first floor. The home was nicely decorated and immaculately kept. It was almost eerie; from the appearance of the downstairs rooms, it seemed that whoever lived here had stepped away for only a moment or so. The living room was very neat. Reed looked automatically for ashtrays and found them, but they had been emptied and washed. The evening paper lay unopened on a chair near the front door.
    There was a TV tray next to a recliner, and it held a familiar red-and-white sack from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Jim Reed cupped his hand around the sack and found it was still slightly warm. It couldn’t have been there for long. When he peered in, he found an order of chicken for one person.
    A set of car keys and a pair of sunglasses lay on the floor next to the staircase, and two piles of mail were stacked precisely on a side table. One pile had been opened; the other envelopes were still sealed.
    As Reed stepped into the kitchen, he felt the presence of the woman who lived in this house even more. Amazingly, there was a saucepan of corn on the stove. It had cooked down so that it had only just begun to scorch slightly on the bottom.
    The double sink was filled with water. The sink on the right held warm soapy water, and the one on the left, filled with cool water, held women’s clothing, delicates that required hand washing.
    The woman upstairs had to have come home within the hour and set down her chicken dinner to wait while she cooked some corn to go with it. She had, perhaps, run the kitchen sink