I couldn’t help but laugh at her complicated explanation. Lucy had to know how everything worked and the reason why. The music, in truth, was soothing, and I felt a brightening and calm in frightening places in my mind.

“What do you think happened, Aunt Kay?” Lucy suddenly broke the spell. “I mean, in your heart of hearts.”

“Right now it’s impossible to say,” I answered her the way I would anybody else. “And we shouldn’t assume anything, including gender or who might have been staying in the house.”

“Teun is already thinking arson, and so am I,” she matter-of-factly stated. “What’s weird is Pepper didn’t alert on anything in any areas where we thought he might.”

“Like the master bathroom on the first floor,” I said.

“Nothing there. Poor Pepper worked like a dog and didn’t get fed.”

The Labrador retriever had been food-reward trained since his youth to detect hydrocarbon petroleum distillates, such as kerosene, gasoline, lighter fluid, paint thinner, solvents, lamp oil. All were possible, if not common, choices for the arsonist who wanted to start a major fire with the drop of a match. When accelerants are poured at a scene, they pool and flow as their vapors burn. The liquid soaks into fabric or bedding or carpet. It seeps under furniture and between the cracks in flooring. It is not water-soluble or easy to wash away, so if Pepper had found nothing to excite his nose, chances were good that nothing was there.

“What we got to do is find out exactly what was in the house so we can begin to calculate the fuel load,” Lucy went on as the music turned to violins, and strings and drums got sadder. “Then we can begin to get a better idea about what and how much would have been needed to get something like that going.”

“There was melted aluminum and glass, and tremendous burning of the body in the upper legs and lower arms, any areas that weren’t spared by the glass door,” I said. “That suggests to me the victim was down, possibly in the bathtub, when the fire reached her.”

“It would be bizarre to think a fire like this started in a marble bathroom,” my niece said.

“What about electrical? Any possibility of that?” I asked, and our motel’s red and yellow lighted sign floated above the highway, maybe a mile ahead.