The Rook by Steven James Page B

this crime.”

 

     

    18
     
    Lien-hua mimed splashing gasoline across the floor, then lighting it. “So we’re inexperienced, we don’t know what we’re doing. We start the fire, then what? Maybe wait a few minutes to make sure it’s burning?”
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “Then where do we go? How do we get out?”
    I studied the room. “Well, we don’t want to get caught … You can see the front door too easily from the intersection and from the tobacco store across the street. The front would be too risky.”
    “So, we head for the back door.” Lien-hua led the way through the house. Really, the home was small enough so that only one route made sense. As I followed her, I carefully examined the blackened floor to see if the offender had left any shoe prints or impressions in the soot, but there were at least six different tread mark patterns visible, in addition to the ones that matched the boots I’d borrowed.
    The prints must have been left by the firefighters or the MAST officers who’d processed the scene. It would take a lot of checking to figure out if one of the shoe prints didn’t really belong. I gazed at them carefully.
    “What about the gas can?” I said. “Would we leave it here or take it with us?”
    “We’re new to arson, so we might not have thought about that before starting the fire … Or maybe we’re careless and we tossed it outside … Of course, we might have used a plastic canister and then tossed it onto the fire … Or we might have—”“I guess we’re not ready for that question yet,” I said. “Too many mights. We need more evidence—”
    “And less conjecture,” she said, finishing my thought.
    “Oh. Have I said that before?”
    “Once or twice.”
    With my gloved hand, I eased the back door open and noticed the yellow crime scene tape hanging limp in the breezeless morning, encircling the house’s property at about a four-meter perimeter.
    Lien-hua must have seen me staring at the location of the yellow tape, because she said, “Aina told me her criminalists already processed the scene, everything inside the tape. Didn’t find anything.”
    Most law enforcement agencies use the terms “crime scene investigative unit,” or “forensic science technician,” but some places, and especially overseas, the term “criminalist” is more common.
    Either way, I’m usually amazed not by how much evidence the teams notice but by how much they miss.
    “Did they check outside the tape?” I asked.
    “Outside it?”
    I pointed at the yellow police tape. “Don’t you find it a little too convenient that the crime scene just happens to be exactly the same size as the area encompassed by these telephone poles?”
    “They were handy.”
    “Yes, they were. But a crime scene is defined by the evidentiary nature of the crime and the physical characteristics of the site itself, not the location of the nearest telephone poles.” Oops. I’d started lecturing. I needed to watch that.
    “Good point.”
    I peered beyond the caution tape to see if our inexperienced arsonist might have dropped the gas can on the hill. “You’d be amazed how many times I’ve found a murder weapon only a few meters outside of the police tape. But people rarely think to look there because it’s not part of ‘the crime scene.’”She joined me beyond the tape, on the dusty hill that climbed at a slow slope away from the house. “So the tape actually hinders the investigation,” she said thoughtfully. “We don’t see the evidence because we’re looking in the wrong place. It’s a blind spot.”
    A blind spot.
    Yes.
    “Lien-hua, if we were the arsonists, where did we park?”
    She pointed. “Other side of that hill?”
    I jogged to the top. My mind was spinning. “Poor access. Too many streetlights, too much traffic. And we didn’t park to the west of the house over there, since that home is too close—the porch is only ten or twelve meters away. So, maybe we parked in the alley