His silver Jeep Cherokee was in the drive, and I waited until he was inside it before I shut the door. I could not help but wonder what my neighbors might have thought had they recognized him in my driveway. On another occasion, I might have laughed, but I found nothing the least bit amusing about his visit. Why he had come in person instead of having the photographs delivered to me was my first important question.

But he had not been inappropriate in his curiosity about the case. He had not used his power and his influence to try to manipulate me. He had not attempted to influence my opinions or even my feelings about him, at least not that I could tell.

11

I HEATED UP my coffee and returned to my study. For a while, I sat in my ergonomically correct chair and went through Claire Rawley’s photographs again and again. If her murder was premeditated, then why did it just so happen to occur while she was somewhere she was not supposed to be?

Even if Sparkes’s enemies were to blame, wasn’t it a bit too coincidental for them to strike when she just happened to have showed up, uninvited, at his house? Would even the coldest racist burn horses alive, just to punish their owner?

There were no answers, and I began going through the ATF cases again, scanning page after page as hours sped by and my vision went in and out of focus. There were church burnings, residential and business fires, and a series of bowling alleys with the point of origin always the same lane. Apartments and distilleries and chemical companies and refineries had blazed into annihilation, and in all instances, the causes were suspicious even if arson could not be proven.

As for homicides, they were more unusual and usually perpetrated by the relatively unskilled robber or spouse who did not understand that when an entire family disappears and bone fragments turn up in a pit where trash is burned in the back, the police most likely will be called. Also, people already dead don’t breathe CO or have bullets in them that show up on X ray. By ten o’clock that evening, I had, however, come across two deaths that held my attention. One had happened this past March, the other six months before that. The more recent case had occurred in Baltimore, the victim a twenty-five-year-old male named Austin Hart who was a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins when he died in a house fire not far off campus. He had been the only one home at the time because it was spring break.