Somewhere under sheets of frozen water are clues to the truth of two fires.
It redefines the term "cold case" when a crime scene starts with fire that has to be doused before investigators even arrive. Simultaneously at a downtown business and an uptown residence, Prince George police are chipping through the forensic ice after two suspicious fires in as many days.
"It is much more difficult. Evidence gets burned, evidence gets destroyed by water, things get frozen in," said Const. Theresa Oelke of the Prince George RCMP's Forensic Identification Unit. She was on-scene at the Foster Road home that was destroyed by, apparently, a gangland home hit early Wednesday morning that bore chilling hallmarks to a fire at the Twisted Souls tattoo and body piercing shop that caught fire early Tuesday morning.
"Preservation of evidence is key," said Prince George RCMP spokeswoman Const. Lesley Smith. "If the evidence can be washed away, it can be difficult, but we have used heaters in the past to make it able to be examined, but if that heating process destroys the evidence that would need to be taken into account.
"We could take an entire ice block of the evidence area and place it in a container as a block, and as it melts it is still secured and isolated so that can be done, sometimes.
"We can wait for nature's co-operation, too."
Oelke was also one of the investigators who sifted through the rubble of the NT Air hangar fire in December, 2009. It took months to sift through that enormous expanse of burned debris.
"With NT Air, it was so hot, and that needed a lot of water which froze hard, so you had a thick layer of ice frozen across a thick layer of material that was still holding heat down underneath that," she said. "Here, there is a layer of ice from the firefighters but you see that smoke still?," as dark puffs still drifted from the Foster scene more than 10 hours after the blaze was called in. "There is still active heat under there."
The basement of the burning home is where water from firefighting efforts often pools. The Foster Road home has about three feet of water, ice and slush in the subterranean room. And there is another problem.
"The floor of this house is unstable," said Oelke. "We just can't go in until it is stabilized, it is just not safe to go in there."
Investigators are not saying if the two fires appear to be linked in any material way. Smith said there have been investigations in recent years of Molotov cocktails, of accelerants, and of fires that appeared suspicious at first but turned out to be started without foul play. Both these fires will be checked for similarities, she said, but each investigation would also stand on its own.
Investigation personnel from the Prince George Fire Rescue Service are also involved in the investigation but were unavailable for comment by deadline.
