Free Sketch Me If You Can by Sharon Pape Page A

uniformed cop was sitting behind the wheel of one of them. A second cop came up to Leah’s side of the car. She opened her window and held her shield out to him. Satisfied that she was a comrade in arms, he gave his partner a thumbs-up to let them through.
    The police had evacuated the residents from the houses in closest proximity to the fire and were keeping them and their neighbors behind a second perimeter of yellow tape, well back from the dozen or so fire trucks, emergency vehicles and police cars that crowded the street. The residents stood in knots on lawns and sidewalks, watching the drama unfold, exchanging theories about what had happened and shaking their heads as bits of news and rumors trickled down the line. They had their cats in carriers at their feet, their dogs on tight leashes and their children under watchful eyes.
    Leah moved forward at a crawl, worried that at any moment someone might step out into the street without looking and add to the casualty toll. Ten minutes and barely fifty yards later, she and Rory gave up and abandoned the car. They made their way by foot through the deepening pall of smoke. Without the car as a buffer around them, the crackling of the fire was loud, almost gleeful, as it sank its sharp teeth into the wooden bones of the house. The air was gritty and foul with the odor of melting plastics and other synthetics, and Rory found herself thinking that fires must have smelled better back in simpler times.
    Shields in hand, they ducked under the crime-scene tape and were directed to the ranking police officer, a captain by the name of Joe Flagg. Flagg had a long face topped off by a gray military buzz cut and narrow lips that were pinched into a grim line. If he was pleased to see them, he did an admirable job of hiding it.
    “Good,” he grunted when Rory introduced herself as the sketch artist. He motioned for her to follow him and led her to a lawn several houses down on the far side of the fire.
    “We assembled all the witnesses over here so you wouldn’t have to waste time looking for them,” he said, yelling in order to be heard above the roar of the fire and machinery. “You need anything, I’ll be back there where you found me.”
    He turned away before Rory could tell him that he hadn’t done her any favors by corralling the four eyewitnesses where they’d no doubt been comparing what they thought they’d seen. Over time she’d discovered that most people had fairly unreliable memories, especially when they were in crisis mode. Instead of fielding several different perspectives from the group, she was probably going to wind up with one homogenized description, and it would be a happy coincidence if her rendering actually turned out to resemble the suspected arsonist.
    When she introduced herself, the three women and one man all started talking at once, adding to the general commotion. To restore some order, Rory assigned each of them a number and took them one by one onto a nearby porch, where she could sit on a rattan bench and have an actual lap on which to perch her laptop. She was just finishing with the first witness when the woman she’d dubbed witness number three rushed up the steps to them.
    “That’s him. Over there,” the woman said, gasping with excitement and gesturing madly across the street at a short, heavyset man in his thirties. He was staring at the fire, as transfixed as a teenybopper watching a rock star.
    “Are you sure?” Rory asked.
    “That’s him. I’d know him anywhere.”
    The other witnesses had joined them on the porch. Three of them were in agreement. The fourth dissented. Based on her first sketch, Rory wasn’t entirely sold. Then the suspect saw them pointing in his direction and he bolted, a picture far more telling than any thousand words.
    Rory set the laptop aside and ran down the porch steps. None of the Riverhead police nor the detectives from her own precinct were nearby or looking in her direction. She couldn’t