lost everything.
“Do you have renter’s insurance?” he asked.
“No.” Liz’s lower lip trembled as she swiped at her tears with the back of her hand. Dave stood by awkwardly. He wanted to be supportive but was unsure of what to say. “It’s hard to be comforting in that situation, so you try to just be there.”
It was obvious she needed him. Though they’d broken up, he couldn’t abandon her in the middle of this latest trauma and did what he could to help over the next days. While some of her possessions were charred, others were salvageable. The couches were destroyed, but some pieces of furniture just needed a little cleaning. Dave helped her drag them out onto the lawn to hose down. Liz made it clear she blamed him. “Your stalker did this to me,” she reminded him more than once. As usual, he felt guilty, and they began to spend time together, sliding back into their usual pattern. Dave’s Wednesday Girl was back.
He didn’t know Liz had moved in with Garret weeks before, and she’d left nothing she treasured behind. Nothing destroyed in the fire, including her pets, mattered much to her. In her mind, all of it was replaceable.
Two days after the fire, on Monday, August 19, Detective Paul Prencer was in his Omaha office on Harney Street, when Liz asked to speak with him. “She said she had found some sort of cleaning fluid or a bottle on a table in her house that may have been used in the arson.” She showed the detective a photograph she’d taken of the bottle in question. She told him that she was familiar with the brand of cleaning fluid, and the color was wrong, as if someone had replaced the original solution with another liquid.
“She said it didn’t quite match what it was supposed to look like, and she thought it might have been used to start the fire,” Prencer remembers. He wasn’t involved in the arson investigation “and was very hesitant to pursue that too much. I wanted to contact the arson investigator.” He called Captain McClanahan, and the two of them went to the burned house. Liz met them there, and inside pointed at the kitchen table. It was blackened with soot, but there was a round, clean spot, in the place where the suspect bottle had been. Photos taken earlier clearly showed a bottle sitting in that spot.
“That bottle was now missing,” remembers McClanahan.
Liz denied removing the bottle, and she expressed concern about the situation. Someone had come in and taken the bottle containing the very liquid she suspected had been used to start the fire. She seemed to be suggesting that the arsonist had returned to the scene to get rid of incriminating evidence. The timing was odd. No sooner had Liz discovered the suspicious liquid, photographed it, and rushed to report her findings to Detective Prencer, than the damned thing disappeared. It was almost as if the arsonist had been watching Liz and had seen her discover the evidence. In the time it took her to go see Prencer and for him to alert McClanahan and meet her at the house, the stalker had slipped in and snatched the one thing Liz hoped could convict the maniac.
Chief McClanahan was no slouch. He had thoroughly investigated the scene, gathered the appropriate evidence, and sent every potential accelerant to the lab for testing. Gasoline was the obvious choice, and he had discovered traces of it when examining the fires’ points of origin. Careful lab work would soon confirm the presence of gasoline in suspect areas. The seasoned investigator certainly did not need Liz’s help.
In the days following the fire, Dave did his best to comfort Liz. She told him she was frightened. What would the maniac do next? When Liz refused to give Dave her new address, he couldn’t really blame her. “I don’t want your stalker to know where I am!” she exclaimed. Dave wasn’t all that interested, anyway. He was just making polite conversation when he asked her where she was going. He thought she was smart to not tell him, because his tormentor seemed to have the ability to peer over his shoulder and see everything he was doing. If he jotted Liz’s new address on a slip of paper, somehow the stalker would find it.
Dave couldn’t guess Liz’s real reason for being secretive about her new place. She was living with her boyfriend—the boyfriend Dave didn’t know she had. He had heard