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Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Incident One
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Incident Two
  13. Chapter Nine
  14. Incident Three
  15. Chapter Ten
  16. Chapter Eleven
  17. Chapter Twelve
  18. Chapter Thirteen
  19. Chapter Fourteen
  20. Incident Four
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. Chapter Eighteen
  25. Chapter Nineteen
  26. Chapter Twenty
  27. Chapter Twenty-one
  28. Chapter Twenty-two
  29. Chapter Twenty-three
  30. Chapter Twenty-four
  31. Chapter Twenty-five
  32. Chapter Twenty-six
  33. Chapter Twenty-seven
  34. Chapter Twenty-eight
  35. Chapter Twenty-nine
  36. Chapter Thirty
  37. Chapter Thirty-one
  38. Chapter Thirty-two
  39. Chapter Thirty-three
  40. Incident Five
  41. Chapter Thirty-four
  42. Chapter Thirty-five
  43. Chapter Thirty-six
  44. Chapter Thirty-seven
  45. Chapter Thirty-eight
  46. Chapter Thirty-nine
  47. Chapter Forty
  48. Chapter Forty-one
  49. Chapter Forty-two
  50. Chapter Forty-three
  51. Chapter Forty-four
  52. Acknowledgments
  53. Special Thanks
  54. About the Author

“I’m saying—” Dr. Westfield shrugged and lit a thin cigarette; she blew smoke toward the stained yellowed ceiling. “I’m saying the frogs are dying, Marty. You figure it out.”

The geeks all nodded.

Of all of them, Martin thought, he was the only one who was scared. It was his name on the big door, after all. And his ticket to Washington.

The Dallas Morning News, December 14, 1994, page 26A. (shorts)

ONE DEAD IN HOTEL FIRE

An unidentified man is dead after what firefighters describe as an intense fire in the Adolphus Hotel. The fire was contained in one room of the hotel and apparently involved only the area of the bed, leading to speculation that the victim fell asleep while smoking.

“We see things like this all the time,” commented Ralph DeLawrence, spokesman for the Dallas County Volunteer Firefighters Association. “People are careless, and people get killed. They’re just lucky that the fire was small, and the hotel’s sprinkler system put it out.”

The Adolphus issued a statement saying that today’s incident is the first fire-related fatality in its sixty-eight-year history, and that the hotel’s evacuation and safety procedures worked “like a charm.”

The identity of the victim is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

Big D Gazette, December 14, 1994

MAN SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS IN FRONT OF HUNDREDS OF WITNESSES! EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF THE EERIE SCENE!

“I never seen nothing like it,” wailed Irene Perez, maid at Dallas’s historic Adolphus Hotel. “It’s just him that’s burned, not the room. It’s like they say, he just burned up!”

Irene Perez and hundreds of eye witnesses say that Burt Marshall, 47, owner of Marshall Dry Cleaners of Oak Lawn, “just burst into flames” after checking into his hotel room at 3:00 P.M. with a mysterious blond beauty. Hotel security found Mr. Marshall lying mortally wounded in his room, burned over ninety percent of his body, after responding to a fire alarm. He died on the way to Parkland Hospital.

“They’re trying to cover this up,” say informed sources at the Dallas County Fire Department. “Things like this happen all the time, and they pass it off as bad wiring or cigarettes or arson. That guy spontaneously combusted, and everybody knows it.”

Dr. Nils Hansen, noted expert at the Swedish Institute for Combustion Research, agrees.

“Yah, it happens,” he responded in an interview with this reporter. “We do not want to cause a panic, but there is no denying it, it happens all the time.”

There is no official ongoing investigation, although an unofficial search continues for the mysterious blond woman with Marshall at the time of the combustion. Anyone with information is urged to report it immediately to the Big D Spontaneous Combustion Hotline, at 1-900-555-FIRE.

Chapter Five

Velvet