Free Scenarios - A Collection of Nameless Detective Stories by Bill Pronzini Page B

cooperation in my investigation, plus five thousand dollars if I helped bring about the arrest and conviction of the guilty person or persons. There was no conflict of interest in that, as long as the guilty person or persons turned out to be someone other than a member of the Munroe Corporation, so I agreed.
    Both Barney Rivera and Raymond Treacle had given me plenty of background information, but neither had been able to provide any concrete leads. From what Treacle had told me, all sixteen Cooperville residents were backwoods cretins capable of anything, but I discounted that opinion as biased. He had a list of their names and what they did to earn a living, and I ran a background check on each of them that netted me nothing much. I also ran a background check on Treacle and Randall and the other two Munroe partners; that got me nothing much either.
    The only thing left for me to do was to drive up to Trinity County. And that was where the difficulty with Kerry lay. We had planned a nice quiet vacation for this week, down in Carmel. My financial position was not exactly stable, however, and this job—particularly after Raymond Treacle sweetened the pot with his five-thousand-dollar offer—was one I could not afford to turn down. Kerry understood that, but she was still disappointed. So in a weak moment I'd suggested that she come along to Trinity County; maybe I could wrap up my investigation in a few days, I said, and we could still get in some vacation time—Shasta Lake was real pretty this time of year. She'd agreed, but without much enthusiasm, and she had been grumpy on the drive up yesterday. Last night and this morning, too.
    Now, though, she seemed a little more pleased about things, and I had hopes that the trip would turn out all right after all, on the personal as well as the financial front. Maybe tonight I would get what I hadn't got last night. The thought made me lick my lips like a horny old hound.
    The four fire-destroyed buildings had been set apart from the others, on the left-hand side of the road. That was one reason the whole of Cooperville hadn't become an inferno; others were that there'd been no wind on the night of the blaze, the meadow grass was still green thanks to late-spring rains, and Jack Coleclaw and some of his fellow residents had spotted the fire immediately and rushed to do battle with it. Even so, there was nothing left of the four structures except a jumble of blackened timbers, with a wide swatch of scorched earth and a hastily dug firebreak ringing them.
    I stopped the car at the edge of the firebreak. Kerry said as I fumbled around in back for the old trench coat I'd brought along, "I suppose you're going to go poke around over there."
    "Yup. You can come along if you want to."
    "In all that soot and debris? No thanks. I'll go back and look at the ghosts that are still standing."
    We got out into the hot sunshine. It was quiet there, peaceful except for the distant raucous screeching of a jay, and the air was heavy with the scent of evergreens. Kerry wandered off along the road; I put the trench coat on and belted it, to protect my shirt and trousers, and then went across the firebreak to the burned-out buildings.
    The county sheriff's investigators had been over the area without finding anything; I didn't expect to find anything either. But then, I'd had some training in arson investigation myself, back when I was on the San Francisco cops, and I read the updated handbooks and manuals put out by police associations and by the insurance companies. I had also had a handful of jobs over the years involving arson. So there was a chance that I might stumble onto something that had been overlooked.
    The first thing you do on an inspection of a fire scene is to determine the point of origin. Once you've got that, you look for something to indicate how the fire started, whether it was accidental or a case of arson. If it was arson, what you're after is the corpus delicti — evidence