Free Lying in Wait (9780061747168) by Judith A. Jance

“Nothing?” she asked.
    â€œLess than.”
    â€œAre you ready to give up and call it quits?”
    â€œI guess,” I admitted. “For the time being. We sure as hell aren’t getting anywhere doing this.”
    By the time we got back to the Isolde , the crime-scene perimeter had been narrowed. The official off-limits area was now small enough to allow people access to other boats along the dock. While crime-scene investigation is important, it wasn’t the only business that needed to be conducted on Dock 3 of Fishermen’s Terminal that cold November morning.
    We returned to the scene of the crime and learned that Audrey Cummings had already loaded Gunter Gebhardt’s body into her gray van and had taken him back to the Medical Examiner’s Officeup at Harborview Hospital to await an autopsy. Janice Morraine was busy lifting prints from the guardrail of the boat. With her glasses pushed up into her hair and with her brows furrowed in concentration, Janice was making her way along the rail of the boat, examining what she saw there under a beam of light from the wand of an Alternative Light Source box.
    An ALS, as it’s called in the trade, is an expensive but handy crime-fighting tool that allows crime-scene technicians to locate and lift prints from places and materials—tire irons, for example—where previously they would have been impossible to detect. Everything Janice did was under the watchful eye of the arson investigator, Lieutenant Marian Rockwell.
    Janice didn’t seem at all happy with that arrangement. I guess it goes with the territory. I suspect she’s like a lot of people I know who spend their lives peeling back progressively worse layers of humanity’s dark side. Most of us are loners who don’t do well when it comes to working under the scrutiny of a closely observing audience, not even an admiring one. And I knew from personal experience that Janice loses all patience with anyone or anything that gets in the way of crime-scene progress.
    When Janice glanced up and caught sight of Sue and me standing together on the dock next to the Isolde , she scowled. “Now what do you two want?” she demanded irritably.
    I knew better than to take her exasperation personally. “Just looking for a progress report,” I returned lightly.
    Janice Morraine was not amused. Without stopping what she was doing, she motioned curtly with her head in Lieutenant Rockwell’s direction. “Why don’t you ask her?” Janice suggested. “She seems to be standing around with nothing to do but watch me.”
    With a number of people working on one homicide team, it stands to reason there’ll be fireworks sooner or later, but this was much sooner than I would have expected. Marian Rockwell raised one eyebrow at Janice’s surly comment, but she didn’t rise to the bait.
    â€œI’ve already collected my samples,” Marian said reasonably. “It’ll take lab verification, of course, but I’d say this was a communicating fire with two points of ignition. One of them was in the lower bunk on the starboard side. The other was on the victim’s clothing itself. My first guess is that the accelerant was charcoal lighter, but it’s too soon to tell about that for sure.”
    â€œWhat two places?” Sue Danielson asked with a puzzled frown.
    â€œThe mattress was lit first and allowed to get a good blaze going. That’s the main source of ignition. The man was poured down with flammable liquid, probably about the same time the mattress was lit, but the victim didn’t catch fire until sometime later, until after the other fire got going good. Eventually, because of the fumes, flames flashed over from the bunk area to his clothing. When that happened, that poor bastard was history. It looks to me as though terrifying him was as important as killing him. And if whoever did it was hopingto use the fire