Dr. Samuel Wong sat back in his white plastic lawn chair. He laced his delicate, almost feminine fingers behind his balding head and let out a big, contented sigh. This was certainly the life, he thought. The sun, the sea, the clean air—what more could anyone ask? High up in the incredibly blue sky, a bright, slivery dot moved slowly toward the east. A thin line of white vapor trailed behind it. The dot seemed to crawl ever so slowly across the heavens. Wong watched its white tail grow longer and longer as it inched its way across the blue expanse. What a luxury, he thought, to sit here watching airplanes and not worry about meetings or what time it is. He glanced down the beach to where a white-haired adolescent girl played in the surf. He waved, smiling. She did a handstand on the wet sand and waved back at him with her feet.

How Kitty loved it here, he thought. Poor kid. He hadn’t been able to giver her much of a childhood. He just didn’t know how. But she really loved the sea and the beach. He liked it, too, he decided. Two weeks were not enough. They would stay longer. Perhaps even move here permanently. Why not? He could work anywhere, couldn’t he? And Kitty deserved at least that.

He unbuttoned his brightly flowered shirt, sloughed it off and laid it on the deck beside his lawn chair, allowing the warm sun unfettered access to his sallow flesh. Ah, yes, the sun was just wonderful. There was a little breeze, but it, too, was warm. This place was perfect. He looked around for the bottle of sunscreen. It was on the other side of the deck. What the heck? A few unscreened rays wouldn’t hurt him. He’d take care not to get burned.

He retrieved a cold glass from the table beside his chair and took a long, grateful sip of cola. He could hear the surf as if he were at the water’s edge instead of on the back deck of his rented beach house. How calming the sound was. He closed his eyes and listened, relaxing more with every passing minute. Yes, this was really the life!

He glanced down at the water’s edge. Kitty was there. She bobbed up and down in the surf astride a foam board. Her white hair shone in the bright light like car headlights on a dark night. Abruptly, she slid off the board and rushed up out of the surf. She looked his way with wide, pale eyes. She cupped her hands at the corners of her mouth and shouted. Wong heard her frantic voice, but he couldn’t make out her words. He sat up, trying to see if something had happened to her.

No, she seemed to be all right. But she appeared excited about something. Then he heard a strange noise. It was a hissing sound like air escaping from a punctured tire. And his skin was feeling tight as if it were shrinking. It was getting hard to breath. Smoke was coming from his hands and arms!

* * * *

Kitty stood on the wet sand fifty yards away. She watched, horrified, as Wong burst into flame. Suddenly his body collapsed into a heap of smoldering ashes on the back porch of their rented house.

In a matter of seconds, the smoke was gone and the remaining ash swirled about in the gentle sea breeze.

* * * *

Two hours later a tall, blond man with a black patch over his left eye parked his rental car as close to the scene as he could get it, but that was nearly a block away. He cursed under his breath and slammed the door closed without locking it. Favoring his left leg, he limped up to the barricade. That one always bothered him, especially in rainy weather, and it seemed to be raining all the time in Hawaii. He stopped before the uniformed officer who barred the way.

The officer glanced at the identification tag dangling from the man’s black T-shirt and opened the barricade for him.

“Thank you,” the man said. He passed through the barricade and limped around the little beach house to the back porch. There, criminalists collected evidence, and detectives interviewed witnesses. Uniformed officers kept the growing crowd at bay. An ambulance had been driven to the back of the house and a paramedic was unfolding a rubberized body bag. Red and blue lights flashed from various emergency vehicles. Strange shadows danced about in the strobes, giving the scene a surreal ambiance and a false look of frenetic activity. But it was eerily quiet. People spoke in hushed tones as if they feared disturbing something.

The man with the patch stepped up onto the wooden porch and gently massaged his aching left hip. He looked closely at everything on the porch except the human remains. He would save those for last. Everything else was apparently where it belonged. There couldn’t have been much of a struggle. Nothing was broken or melted, unless the criminalists had already collected such things. Nor was there any sign of a fire. Nothing was charred or even singed, as far as he could see. The plastic cup on the floor beside the victim was intact and retained its original shape. The same could be said for the telephone, and even the plastic chair the victim had been seated on.

Finally, he approached the human remains. There was no body, per se, just ashes—gritty gray ashes scattered about by the wind. Nor were there any intact body parts—there were no feet or even toes. There weren’t any hands or fingers, either. No head, no bones—every bit of the body had been totally incinerated. Yet the clothing that had been worn by the victim wasn’t even scorched.

A plainclothes officer, his badge hanging from his jacket pocket like a protective shield, stepped up beside the tall man with the eye patch. “It’s like when you cook an egg on a paper plate in a microwave oven,” the officer said. “The plate doesn’t burn. It doesn’t even get hot. Only the egg is cooked.”

“Yes, “the tall man said. “It’s damned peculiar.”

The officer held out a hand. “Hendron,” he said. “Homicide.”

“Oh, uh, yes. I’m Claude Jennings with the Coroner’s Office. Do you know who he was?”

“House was rented to a fella named Wong.” Hendron glanced at his notebook. “Supposed to be some kind of scientist.”

“Samuel Wong?” Jennings asked.”

“Yeah,” Hendron said. “You know him?”

“No.” Jennings shook his head. “Just heard of him is all. Anyway, I don’t think you’ll find any evidence of homicide here. It looks like a clear case of SHC to me.”

“SHC? What the hell is SHC?”

“Oh, sorry,” Jennings said. “Spontaneous Human Combustion. They call it SHC. I prefer to call it internal human combustion, because I’m not so sure it’s all that spontaneous. But this isn’t exactly a typical case. There are usually some body parts left intact. Often it’s a foot or hand that is unburned, sometimes a head. Here there is nothing.”

Hendron watched as Jennings rubbed his leg. “Gimp pin?” Hendron asked.

Jennings nodded. “An old football injury.”

Hendron took Jennings by the arm and led him to the lawn chairs across the porch from the human remains. “Here,” he said. “Take a load off, and tell me more. What do you mean when you say we won’t find any evidence of homicide, but you don’t think it was spontaneous?”

Jennings sat beside him and squirmed around, trying to find a comfortable position. He rubbed at his left thigh through his blue jeans. “What I mean is, you are not going to find any evidence of accelerants or flammable liquids. You won’t find any signs of violence, no shell casings, or bloody knives or axes. There’ll be no relative or acquaintance with a strong motive who also has means, and opportunity. In fact, you’ll probably never discover the means. Witnesses, if there are any, will tell you the victim just burst into flames and burned up. But I think there’s more to these cases than that. I think there is some outside force, some unknown ‘something,’ that triggers these cases.”

“These cases?” The detective said. “You’ve seen others?”

“Oh, yes,” Jennings told him. “I’ve made a study of SHC cases. Do you know there have been more SHC cases in the United States in the last seven years than in the previous 200?”

“Hell,” Hendron said. “I didn’t know there were any! What causes it?”

“Nobody knows,” Jennings replied. “They used to think it was evil spirits or the wrath of God. I tend to think that something throws the body’s temperature-regulating equipment out of whack. If that happens, you have to get either hot or cold. This one got hot.”

“What does regulate body temperature?” Hendron asked.

“There’s a part of the brain called the hypothalamus that monitors your temperature through sensors in the skin,” Jennings explained. “If your skin gets too hot, it cools you off by making you sweat and breathe faster. When the sweat evaporates, that cools you off. When you breathe, exhale I mean, you blow off heat with the air and that cools you off too. Blood vessels near the surface dilate, radiating more heat away into the air and allowing the wind to cool you more efficiently through convection. When your skin gets too cold, your brain causes the blood vessels in the cold area to dilate, delivering more hot blood to the cold area, warming it up.”

“I have a buddy who went hunting in Alaska and froze his feet. How does that happen if this temperature regulator works so well?”

Jennings grinned. “You get frostbite because you’re so smart.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What I mean is that only humans get frostbite of the hands and feet,” Jennings explained. “You might see an arctic fox or wolf with frostbitten ears, but you’ll never find one with frozen feet. Animals can run around the frozen tundra barefooted without ever freezing a foot, even if they get their feet wet. But put a man in the arctic wilderness with heavy boots and gloves on and he’ll freeze his extremities in a matter of hours.”

“I thought people and animals were the same,” Hendron said.

“No, there’s a big difference in this case. Animals depend on their feet for survival. So when their feet start getting cold, their brains pull out all the stops to keep them warm. They’ll take heat away from other body parts in order to keep their feet from freezing, because if the feet freeze, the animal is a goner.”

“So, what happens with people,” Hendron asked.

“Humans use their brain to survive,” Jennings told him. “So when the extremities start to get cold, the brain at first sends extra blood there to re-warm them. However, it will keep the brain warm at all costs. So if the feet and hands continue to get colder in spite of the increased blood to them, the brain will then reduce the blood flow to the extremities and allow them to freeze rather than let the brain get cold.”

“And you think this regulator part of the brain gets out of whack and causes SHC victims to get way too hot,” Hendron concluded.

“Something like that. In heat stroke, for example, the brain loses its ability to cool the body, but the cells continue burning fuel, stoking the fire as it were, and the body just gets hotter and hotter. Of course you die somewhere between 106 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit. But who knows how hot you would get if you didn’t die.”

“But SHC victims must reach a thousand degrees!”

Jennings nodded. “More that two thousand.”

“Can you get that hot without a fire from outside?” Hendron asked.

“Oh, sure. It’s theoretically possible, atomically speaking. The human body has enough energy stored within it to blow up a good-sized building. If you could set it off, of course.”

“I never heard of such a thing.” Hendron shook his head.

“In that case, allow me to give you a little background,” Jennings said. “In the 16th and 17th centuries, the popular belief was that fiery deaths were caused by excessive boozing. After a hundred years or so, someone finally quit assuming and started investigating. That’s when it was found that many of these poor souls didn’t imbibe alcohol. That theory went out the window and has yet to be replaced with anything acceptable to all. In fact, not everyone even agrees that these cases occur. Skeptics abound, and they believe that all such cases can be explained in ordinary terms. But most of the skeptics have never seen a case with their own eyes. They come up with explanations, from a distance, based on assumptions and hearsay.”

“Kind of like an expert defense witness in a trial,” Hendron said. “He looks at a few pictures, reads a report and all of a sudden he knows the perpetrator is innocent.”

“Something like that.” Jennings nodded.

“What kind of explanations do these jokers come up with?” Hendron asked.

“Well, they think in some cases, the victims fall asleep while smoking and their cigarettes catch them on fire. These guys always come up with some mundane explanation like that. The problem is you can only accept these explanations if you ignore much of the evidence. I have yet to hear one of these ‘rational’ explanations that accounts for all the facts. Every one I’ve checked out, and I’ve checked out several, falls apart if you look at the evidence. The most infamous case of that was Jenna Westchester’s combustion in 1988. They said her fire resulted from a cigarette, and the woman didn’t even smoke.”

“That’s kind of like the government explanation for UFO sightings,” Hendron said. “Do you know what the ‘final explanation’ for the alien bodies seen at Roswell was?”

Jennings shook his head.

“The Feds said those bodies were really crash dummies that were thrown out of airplanes in 1954,” Hendron continued. “Now, how do you see something in 1947 that wasn’t there until 1954?”

“Yeah, these explanations are something like that, I guess,” Jennings said. “But I’m sorry, Detective Hendron, I just don’t have time to discuss UFO sightings. I’ve got to get back to work.”

As Jennings turned to leave, Hendron called to him. “Say, Jennings, do you know a good way to get the ‘deceased’ into that body bag? The wind has spread it all over the porch.”

“If I were you, Detective, I’d skip the body bag and find a good vacuum cleaner.”