Fire Lover (32 page)

Some of the firefighters evinced shame and anger, and would point their fingers at the cops and say, "You better be right, by God!"

Edwards reported that during one interview a veteran fire captain said, "This man you're describing isn't the John Orr I know. And if he set the Ole's fire and killed those people, then he needs help. He's a sick man if he did it, and a sick man shouldn't be in jail. And I'd still work with him today!"

Rich Edwards later said, "I thanked him for his candor after I picked my chin up off the table."

Edwards's investigation led him to believe that some of those brush fires were fashioned so that if they had been attacked properly by an engine company they could have been handled. But if the firefighters were out grocery shopping, and didn't get to the scene in a timely manner, the fire would turn out to be significant. Edwards was convinced that John Orr had set some of them so that Glendale wouldn't lose an engine for budgetary reasons.

And then there were brush fires set when he was associated with a brush-clearance company. "If you didn't clear your brush as ordered," Edwards said, "you'd get a fire. John's a very complex person."

The D. A.'s task force also discovered some possible offenses they hadn't been looking for, such as embezzlement of FIRST funds. It turned out that the funds taken in from the FIRST-sponsored classes at the Glendale Training Center were supposed to go to FIRST and the city on a sixty-forty split. John Orr, the treasurer, had signatory authority, and they suspected he'd diverted some of the money to buy Vegas World gift certificates on a FIRST credit card that nobody else knew existed.

As soon as John heard rumors that Mike Cabral's task force was investigating those activities, he phoned Cabral.

"I resent being called a thief!" he informed the prosecutor.

The alleged embezzlement amounted to no more than two thousand dollars, and Mike Cabral, who was trying to build a case of capital murder, said, "John, I think I can promise that I'll never charge you with theft."

When he'd arrived in 1993 at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, John was given a perfunctory interview by a twenty-something psychiatric intern who asked the same question he'd been asked over the years by older shrinks during preemployment interviews.

With her glasses slipping from her nose and her pen pointed at heaven, she said, "Please describe your early family life for me.

He gave the response he'd always given to the more experienced practitioners of her art: "Ozzie and Harriet."

A bit taken aback, the young woman studied the new inmate and said, "Are you referring to Ozzy Osbourne?"

John later described a feeling of utter despair. His future was being directed by some kid who'd confused Ozzie and Harriet with brainbashing rockers in Jivaro war paint who bite the heads off bats!

John Orr was only forty-four years old, but he felt old, older than fire.

Chapter
15

Terminal Island was not such a bad place as prisons go, and federal prisons at their worst were better than the hell-on-earth that is the state prison system. The cons who had done hard time in state institutions such as Folsom or San Quentin referred to facilities like Terminal Island as "Club Fed." There were no walls, just a fifteen-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. The prisoners could even see the luxury liner Queen Mary and watch power boats and Jet Skiers roaring by.

John Orr tried to avoid the chow hall, where inmates smoked, littered, and spit, prisoners who were usually sick from some virus or another. When he could afford it he preferred to live on soup and canned items from the commissary. He'd wangled the job of prison librarian, which carried a bit of prestige and comfort, and he was settling in, hoping that something would come of the appeal that had been filed by the Office of the Federal Defender. An argument on appeal was that the jury in Fresno had been allowed to hear about a series of fires in retail stores, and about "lists" of incidents beyond what were expected to be allowed as "uncharged acts." The federal defender believed this to be "impermissible bootstrapping." John considered it to be just plain confusing, but he was not a man to give up easily, and he had some confidence in his appeal. It would take time, but he had plenty of that.

A colleague to whom John Orr wrote after his confinement was Captain Steve Patterson, the Burbank Fire Department arson investigator who was part of Cabral's arson task force. The man whom Steve Patterson considered "a mentor" said in his letter that he hoped Patterson still believed in him, and didn't think that he'd started the Warner Brothers Studios fire that they'd investigated together just prior to the arrest.

Patterson had attended the Fresno arson convention, also attended by Rich Edwards and Walt Scheuerell, who'd known that John Orr was the target of the Pillow Pyro investigation when Patterson did not. John had arrived late that evening and Patterson invited him to sit at their table. He wondered if that small kindness had motivated John Orr to write to him.

Steve Patterson was five years older than John and had been a firefighter longer, but he didn't have nearly as much investigative experience, certainly not as much as all the cops on his task force. Patterson had receding gray hair and soft blue-gray eyes, usually wore a little smile, and talked slowly. He was facing his fiftieth birthday, but looked fit. This fireman had a gentle face without a trace of the cynicism that one would expect from task-force colleagues who'd served in the police service for a similar period. And even though he was an arson investigator Patterson had never aspired to be one of the cops, as John Orr had. He approached his task-force role with humility and a willingness to learn from the others.

One of the more spectacular fires in the L. A. series that Mike Cabral's task force had been looking into was Mort's Surplus in Burbank. Steve Patterson, who'd asked for and received John Orr's help with that particular investigation, was very surprised to learn that among the evidence seized during John's arrest was a video of Patterson arriving at the scene while the building was burning. John had never told Steve Patterson that he'd also been there during the blaze, videotaping it.

It may have been that all of the cops on the D. A.'s task force had decided to throw their least experienced investigator a bone. They gave Patterson the job of interviewing wives and girlfriends to see if raw gossip could be refined into usable evidence. Patterson was exactly the right guy for the job he was given. He was a quiet
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spoken family man with that guileless expression, just the ticket for John Orr's women, if they had anything to offer. And they did. Steve Patterson was about to get an education.

One of the women Patterson interviewed sat in her living room on a sunny afternoon, looking a bit apprehensively at the kindly face of Steve Patterson. This one might've been waiting for someone like Patterson. Among the first words out of her mouth were: "You don't have to ask. Yeah, I think he did it. He had a dark side. A weird side."

When Steve Patterson asked how dark and how weird, she recalled a moment at a party when John was hitting on one of her girlfriends so she threw a drink in his face and said, "You better cool off."

Patterson thought he was going to hear a lot of ordinary complaints like this, until she said, "And he liked unusual sex. I went along, but I'd always maintain control. Until one time he got carried away, and put a pillow over my face. And he put his gun up to the pillow and said, 'I'm gonna blow your fucking head off!' "

Steve Patterson felt the hair on his neck tingling. This was close to what the fictional arsonist in John Orr's novel does to the girl named "Trish."

After that interview Steve Patterson began reading the manuscript of Points of Origin as a journal. Because the protagonist in the novel was interested in a female emergency dispatcher, Patterson made discreet inquiries to find out if John Orr had ever dated women at the dispatch center. And before long he found himself having a private chat with one of them in her home.

She started out by describing John Orr as a "gentleman" who'd liked to stay home and watch TV. But the more she talked the less gentlemanly he seemed. Soon she got to the part where he made her wear old clothes because his idea of foreplay was tearing them from her body, after which she'd have to submit to mock rape.

The bodice ripping got a little tiresome, not to mention expensive, so she'd dumped him, but he kept showing up at her job until she threatened to bring harassment charges. She also confessed to Patterson that he'd once offered to torch her car for the insurance money, but she'd declined.

When Patterson got back to the Hall of Justice he had some stories for the gang, who decided that John Orr's girlfriends probably had to shop at the Salvation Army or the Goodwill Store so they wouldn't use up their whole clothing allowance on one of those "dates."

Then there was the investigator whom John had dated for a period of time. She had definitely fallen out of love and used words like "angry, vindictive, and narcissistic" to describe him. She broke off the romance because during one of their love
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making sessions he'd handcuffed her to the bed and left her there. And he'd also given her a little of what Rich Edwards and Wally Scheuerell had come to call "tough love," by sticking a gun in her face.

Well, riding crops and monocles might be one thing, but guns and handcuffs were something else again. Steve Patterson's neck hair was putting out enough electricity to light up Burbank when he got back to the "diary." The fictional arsonist also binds Trish at gunpoint during the rape scene. So if everyone on the task force was matching the exploits of the fictional arsonist with John Orr's real-life fire setting, what about the scenes with women?

John Orr's last girlfriend was named Chris, as is a girlfriend of his fictional protagonist. In the Ole's fire, four people had died, including a two-and-a-half-year-old boy named Matthew. In the fictional "Cal's" fire, five people die, including a three-year-old boy named Matthew. Some of the task-force members wondered: Where's the fifth victim? Could he have inserted that fifth victim in an otherwise identical portrayal of a real event in order to taunt, or to fulfill a dangerous fantasy by putting himself at risk? He was a man easily bored, as are all violent serial offenders, so obviously he loved to take risks. What if the girl in the book who experiences a violent sexual attack mirrored one from John Orr's secret life? At that stage of the task-force investigation, Steve Patterson had normal blood pressure, but it was about to change.

Points of Origin was studied like a text for a promotional exam. Patterson kept turning to the passages involving Trish. Both the fictional arsonist, Aaron Stiles, and the arson investigator, Phil Langtree, are attracted to that teenager
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Langtree "uncomfortably" so, because he is the good firefighter, Stiles in an obsessive way, because he is the bad firefighter-arsonist. Stiles first encounters Trish in a 7-Eleven store when he sets an incendiary device that is spotted before much fire damage is done. The fictional arsonist can't stop thinking of her. She becomes confused in his head with his fire-setting fantasies.

Steve Patterson began to make notes, first about the 7-Eleven store. That convenience-store chain had figured prominently in John Orr's life. One of his ex
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wives had worked there and so had he. In the novel, Trish spurns Aaron Stiles's advances at the 7-Eleven store. As his obsession progresses, the fictional firefighter decides to commit his first violent act apart from his fire setting. He decides to rape Trish.

Stiles stakes out the apartment where the girl lives and sets a fire nearby at a travel agency. The fire thrills him enormously, and Trish is one of many people who leaves the apartment building to watch. Later, he knocks at her door, and when she opens it, he shoves his gun against her face and forces his way inside.

The firefighter-arsonist rolls the girl onto her stomach and straddles her with his gun at her face, saying, "I will fucking put a bullet in your head." Aaron Stiles then rips the girl's T-shirt down, restraining her at the elbows. He grabs a nearby bathrobe and ties her wrists behind her back. He gags her and rips off her shorts and tries to mount her from the rear, but his erection dies.

Stiles is flaccid and furious. He slaps the girl and ties her at the ankles with remnants of the bathrobe. Then, bound at the wrists and ankles, she is dragged into the kitchen and tied to the kitchen drain pipe with panty hose. He reenters the living room and sets an incendiary delay device in her sofa, one that will give him time to rape her and escape while she burns to death. The girl is saved by a passing Samaritan who phones the fire department from the 7-Eleven store. She has not died because the sofa is an old one with very little foam stuffing, and the fire has vented through an open window.

When Patterson was finished, the cross
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comparisons between fiction and reality were blurring. He believed he was burrowing into something dark, something evil.

When Steve Patterson got back to task
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force headquarters he found that his work and his theories exacted a lot of blank stares, quizzical smiles, and raised eyebrows. He received encouragement from nobody. All of the task-force cops, with their cop cynicism, sort of patted the fireman on the head and said, in effect, Nice try, but we're buried in paperwork and swamped by Cabral's need to find long-vanished witnesses and cross-eyed from looking at reports from fires that may or may not involve John Orr.