Here's a thing that makes Warren Donaldson wince: a brand new Mercedes-Benz, with guillotine-clean chrome rims, kidskin seating and a walnut burl instrument panel - all burnt black. Scorched. Utterly incinerated.
Charred cars are stacked like slumped sentinels in the back corner of an auto salvage lot off Boulder Highway. Here, piled two or three high, 14 across and 10 down, the torched cars lurch around Donaldson, who is weaving his way between luxury coupe and SUV, family van and sedan - this incendiary cemetery - pausing, now, to crack a joke:
"It's the high payments that make them spontaneously combust."
Las Vegas was second in the nation for auto thefts in 2005, but Metro Police estimate that at least 25 percent of all cars reported stolen aren't. So here's the honest-to-goodness: They're ignited and abandoned.
Las Vegas loves to see itself ablaze. Or more precisely, some Las Vegans are in the habit of setting their cars on fire, particularly when browbeaten with bills, or overcome with auto-lust. It's Insurance Fraud 101: Drive into the desert, douse the interior with accelerant, strike a match, report the car stolen and collect on the claim. If it turns up, gutted and black, well, nobody knows what happened.
Walking the burn lot, where roasted cars come to rot, Donaldson wedges his hands into his pockets and wheezes, "There are too many. I'm just one guy and I'm drowning."
Delicately, Donaldson peers into a Hummer burned bone gray. The car seats are coils, sitting in remnants of their own skin. The dashboard has melted onto the steering wheel. The hulking whole of it reeks with chemical reaction, the sort of smell you'd expect from a gas hog slow-cooked at 1,700 degrees. Half-hesitant, he remarks, "I think we have a serious problem."
Donaldson, a senior investigative agent for the National Insurance Crime Bureau in Clark County, barely has time to investigate one auto arson a week, and a busy week means 10.
The insurance industry term for auto arson is "owner give up," as in, "Look, another owner give up, smoldering in that nothing desert near the state line." It's a deceptively friendly phrase, because an owner give up is a felony, punishable with up to four years behind bars, if you get caught.
Here's a thing that makes Metro Lt. Robert Duvall wince: So far, it's been pretty easy to escape punishment.
"We haven't really looked at this problem before," he said. "It's always been below our radar."
Auto arson is easy for detectives to prove. It's the whodunit that's hard. A car burning in the desert can crisp to a shell before police or firefighters arrive. By then, the best witness, the owner of the vehicle, is long gone with lips sealed, cashing an insurance check.
If Duvall's estimate is correct, the number of burnt cars fraudulently reported stolen in 2005 would total 5,616.
And owner give ups come back to haunt everyone, a second burn in the form of higher insurance premiums. Nevada drivers pay the seventh-highest premiums in the nation, according to the Nevada Insurance Council.
To investigate auto arson, detectives must scrub the car owner's history for signs of the crime in its infancy. As it happens, people with burnt vehicles seem to share a handful of indicators - namely, they can't afford their cars. More often than not, they're upside-down with payments; they owe more than the car is worth.
Or, as fraud investigators put it, they're "flipped."
"People are over their heads in debt," Donaldson says. "A significant amount of them could be desperate."
Cars in the burn lot only look old. Really, they're rather new. Gum-pasted to a passenger door, white stickers read like tombstones: Here lies a 2005 Cadillac Escalade, a 2006 Jaguar, a 2007 Nissan Murano.
In the past five years, the Nevada attorney general's Insurance Fraud Control Unit has seen a tenfold increase in auto-arson cases. That doesn't mean they get many: 74 cases between 2000 and 2006. These are the cases strong enough for police to refer for prosecution, and even then, state prosecutors have a hard time meeting the burden of proof. The solid evidence is up in smoke.
With zero-down financing plans that stretch out for years, car buyers can get behind wheels they otherwise couldn't afford. Depreciation starts the second they coast off the lot, however, and soon enough, drivers find themselves flipped. Saddled to a car payment they've come to resent.
Donaldson recently came across a Mercedes-Benz, "brand spanking new, and burned right to the ground."
There are other harbingers of auto arson, such as drivers who purchase additional insurance just before they report the car stolen. Or drivers with no job and bad debt. Or SUV drivers who are crippled by fuel costs. Or drivers who can't find keys to the car they reported hot-wired once it gets dragged out of the desert.
The simple fact is that most professional auto thieves don't steal cars to set them on fire. And when cars honestly go up in flames, investigators expect the owner to be nearby, say, pulled to the side of the road and screaming, or waiting in horror for the cops to arrive.
At the burn lot, blackened cars still contain their expensive components: car stereos, speakers, air bags - "worth a fortune," Donaldson says. Things now warped or wrecked. Stuff no self-respecting thief would leave behind.
"For the most part, auto fires in themselves are suspicious," Donaldson says.
Since November, Duvall and his detectives have been hatching a plan to cut back on the number of auto arsons.
Quickly, it has become clear they need to find a way to patrol the desert, possibly with help of Metro's helicopter team, and possibly with the all-terrain vehicle Duvall is crossing his fingers for: a $12,000 Yamaha Rhino. He'll have a hard time affording it, so Duvall is holding his breath for donations.
"We have got to act on this now," Duvall says. "Because come July, it's going to be way too hot out there."
In the coming months, auto theft detectives will be trained by experts in auto-arson investigation and lock forensics, the science of determining whether a car has been jimmied, or pried or coaxed with a shaved key.
In the meantime, the lieutenant has assigned one detective to work auto-arson investigations full time. And everyone on the unit is starting to change the way they interview people reporting stolen cars. The detectives are now fishing deeper for signs of fraud.
"People think this may be a way out of a financial situation they got themselves into," Duvall says. "My advice to them is, don't do it."
Although that advice just echoes off the sides of scalded sedans in the burn lot, where a crane is plunging into cars and coming up with parts, eating the metal like so much air. Donaldson now, makes a joke, because what else can he do?
"They crush them," he says. "They send them overseas, and they come back to us as beer cans."
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