"Hynd, Noel - The Sandler Inquiry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hynd Noel)

office?

His livelihood?

Thomas Daniels considered the hundreds of enemies his father must have
made. He wondered whom he knew who liked to play with fire.

"This was a good professional torching" said Corrigan, a lieutenant
from the New York City Fire Department.

"High-intensity, quick-spreading fire. Would have taken the whole
building if the custodian here hadn't found it." Corrigan pointed to
the filing room. The air was gray with the vestiges of smoke, and the law
offices were permeated with the sweet smell of ashes and water.

Thomas Daniels's eyes smarted. He was looking at the charred remnants
of the old wooden files.

"No one was here when it started," Corrigan continued. "That's the
usual. A good arsonist uses a fuse."

"An electricity fuse?" asked Jacobus, the janitor, in slightly
accented English.

Corrigan shook his head no.

"A timing fuse. A candle, a wire, a clock, even a cigarette sometimes.
Anything that will burn down slowly and not ignite whatever chemical,
papers, or rags are being used until the torch man is gone" He glanced
around. It was a few minutes past four A.M. "If the fire had done the
whole building we'd never have known where the flash point was. Here
we know where the blaze started. So we'll go through the debris in the
filing room, inch by inch. We'll find a fuse mechanism in there. Bank
on it. I'll show you something else Corrigan led Jacobus and Daniels
through the two adjoining rooms. He pointed to places and showed them
how the flames appeared to have traveled in a path from the flash
point.

"See?" he said.

"Tracks. Tracks made by trailers that our firebug left. If we hadn't
broke in on the fire early, we wouldn't have these, neither."

 The trailers, Corrigan explained, had been some highly flammable
substance-chemically treated rags, paper, or plastic-which had been
left by the arsonist to be triggered by the fuse. When the fuse had
burned down, the traders had been sparked. And a rapidly spreading
blaze had shot in every direction. The intense flames consuming the
traders had left the tracks.