Playing with Fire

Patricia Bradley Mystery Question 31 Comments

This past week I spent time at Destin with my family, so my blog post is a little short. 🙂 I had no idea the waves could get so high down there. I almost thought I was in Hawaii!

Last week’s Mystery Question. Which one of the following technologies is incorrect?
  1.  Generic property marker: a water-based solution that can be sprayed or painted to mark your property with a unique chemical code. Stolen items can be identified by the chemical barcode.
  2. Biometrics, including facial recognition software–you’ve seen it on the crime shows where the police tech matches a photo with an actual person, but is it real?
  3. Technology that alerts police to the location of gun shots as they happen. It also distinguishes between the gun shot and the echoes that follow.
  4. Satellite imaging: real-time satellite photos of specific areas where crime is likely to occur, giving police a heads-up on a crime as it happens.

And the incorrect technology is #4. We’re close but now quite there yet. Congratulations on guessing correctly Delores, Anne, Lisa, Jackie and Loraine for getting it right!

Now for this week’s Mystery Question:

A man’s house caught fire and he began unloading his most important belongings out a window and carried them to his car. A week later he was arrested for arson. Why?

  1. When asked if he’d bought any type of accelerant in the past month he said no, but a hardware store receipt found in a part of the house that didn’t burn showed he’d purchased a gallon can of paint thinner just days before the fire.
  2. A nine-year-old boy who lived in the neighborhood told his father he had seen the man pouring something from a can around the house and then throw a match on it. They reported it to the police.
  3. When the police checked his pacemaker, it showed no high heart rates that would indicate strenuous activity during the time in question.
  4. The fire marshal found copper clips and nails at the source of the fire and deduced that he had used a lemon, copper clips, nails, wire, and tissue paper to start a fire next to the cotton curtains.

 

Okay, Super Sleuths, what is the correct answer? Leave your answer in the comment box to be entered in a drawing for Justice Buried when it releases!

[tweet_box design=”default” float=”none”]What gave the arsonist away? #bookgiveaway[/tweet_box]

 

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  1. Dana Michael

    Hmmm. My first instinct is to go with number 2 for some reason, but then I like number 4. This is hard Patricia! I’ll go with number 4.

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      1. Edward Arrington

        Pat, I’m not suggesting you are sneaky. Instead, I am saying my brain seems to function different. For example, I think #3 is least likely because it seems his heart rate would have been elevated simply due to lifting things out the window. I am basing that on conversations with my mother who has a pacemaker. It seems any exertion causes her heart rate to increase.

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  2. Trixi

    My nose has been buried in some good books 🙂 So I’m a little late in answering this week’s question. I will guess #4, it kind of sounds McGyverish 🙂

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      1. Trixi

        Awww, thanks Patricia! Went out with my hubby for a nice steak dinner, we even got dessert 🙂 Took them home to eat because we were full, lol! My husband got a cinnamon roll that was the size of a dinner plate & I got a marionberry cobbler, the restaurant make all their desserts homemade.

        McGyver was my favorite show in the 80’s! Always fun to see what he came up with next! My husband discovered a new one on TV and I think it’s suppose to be his son. It’s pretty good really!

  3. Sue Parrish

    I think #1 because most 9 yr old kids would be too busy playing video games to notice anything; moving stuff out a window would be strenuous and I don’t think the police can check your pacemaker for past activity; and if he had to climb out the window to move his stuff he must not have been able to use the door and used the window.

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      Patricia Bradley

      Oh, Lisa, you could surf last weekend!In fact there were a couple of people doing just that. lol. One of the waves knocked me off the boogie board and almost drowned me. lol. I was in San Destin, actually.

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  4. Anonymous

    I did not choose 3 because it said “no high heart rates….” If it had said “it showed high heart rates”…., I would probably have picked 3.

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