Vertical Burn (11 page)

Across the yard two firefighters were yelling at each other playfully, some sort of joke concerning their nervous wait at the drawbridge during the drive to the fire. Finney knew if he told G. A. where he’d been that morning, he’d be in handcuffs before he finished the sentence.

“You were here, weren’t you?” G. A. asked.

“I didn’t set this fire.”

“Everybody knows that mentally you’ve been all over the map since Leary Way. Now you get turned down for lieutenant. I don’t blame you for getting a little pissy, trying to get back at the department.”

“I didn’t do this. You know me.”

“Do I? Does anybody know anybody? A serial killer gets arrested. His neighbors show up at the trial as character witnesses. Did they know him? Not any better than I know you.”

“This is a setup. Can’t you see that?” He might have told them about the phone call last night, but then he would have had to admit he’d been here this morning.

“Maybe next time you’ll listen when somebody tells you to stop poking around a fire that’s already been investigated.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means if you hadn’t had your head up your ass for the last few months, this might not have happened. Plenty of people warned you to get your act together.”

“I’m sure John has an explanation,” Kub said.

G. A. stared into Finney’s eyes for a long while and then, bored with it, turned and strode away. Chewing gum madly, Kub palmed his skull and gave Finney a worried look. “Jesus, John. What the hell’s going on?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Did you light that fire?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t see that old woman this morning?”

“I didn’t light the fire.”

“It’s beginning to look like you did.”

“What he’s got is circumstantial.”

“Hate to tell you this, John, but most arson cases are
based
on circumstantial evidence. For your sake, I hope that old woman doesn’t ID you. With the coat, the fact that you were talking about this place, your bad feelings towards the administration . . . Fact is, I could just about guarantee a conviction on that much circumstantial evidence. Unless you have a rock-solid alibi. You want my advice? Get a lawyer. Make sure he’s good. When G. A. decides he’s going to hang somebody, they usually swing.”

22. A HUG FROM THE WIDOW

Finney headed down the dock toward his Pathfinder in the last of the afternoon light and spotted Emily Cordifis bustling along on a perfect collision course. She’d already seen him, so it was too late to hide. On the water there was no place to run from widows.

For eighteen years she’d been like a mother to him. Now when he saw her, all he could think about was her dead husband. Even though he knew the possibility that she would criticize him was almost nil, he flinched every time he saw her.

The woman striding down the center of the wooden dock was thinner than he remembered, grayer, her posture neither as tall nor as straight as it had once been. Her hair was still cut into a youthful bob, though now it was shot through with gray. Her long jaw gave her a thoughtful and distinguished look. Her eyes were as steady as ever and so dark they were almost black. They looked at you and did not blink and looked some more until you thought they were reading your mind. They came across as friendly, sincere, and interested, and they were. At times Bill had jokingly said he’d caught a doe in the headlights and then married her.

When he thought of Cordifis these days, Finney’s mind flooded with Bill’s last moments. Rarely his boisterous spirits or his raucous laugh. Rarely his storytelling or the pleasure he took in a practical joke. Never about the time he caught Balitnikoff napping and tied his shoelaces together, then hit the bell. Never about his knack of turning a bad day into one big joke.

Aside from everything else rotten that had come out of Leary Way, the event had erased the living Bill Cordifis from Finney’s brain and replaced him with a corpse.

Virtually every weekend the clan had done something together—boating, camping, barbecues. The daughters with their boyfriends, and later their husbands and kids, would be there. So would Bill’s cronies from the fire department. Guys who’d been alongside Bill when he coached his daughters’ softball teams. Friends he knew from the Masons. The Cordifis household had been a clubhouse.

Bill was orphaned at an early age and afterward raised by a succession of indifferent relatives. Emily grew up with ten brothers and sisters. Coming from opposite poles, family was the one thing they both treasured above all else.

Sixty years old and as thin as a rail, built with the same wide bony hips, protruding ribs, and flat chest as her three daughters, Emily’s dark eyes entertained a limpid look this afternoon.

“Emily.”

“John, I know I should have called. I can come back if you’re leaving.”

“I was only going to the store. Nothing important. Come in. It’s good to see you.”

“I know. You, too. You don’t come around anymore.”

“No. I told you I wasn’t going to. Things are just . . .”

“Sure. I know. But we miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“You’ve hurt yourself.” She was looking at his bandaged hand.

“It’s nothing.” One of the pension doctors had put two stitches in the web of skin between his thumb and index finger. C-shift wouldn’t be off until seven-thirty the next morning, but Finney was home on temporary disability leave.

Emily reached out and embraced him, the ribs in her back prominent under his palms. As always, she was spry and remarkably pretty.

Emily embraced him for a long time. “You are so tense, John.”

“Am I? It must be the dampness from living on the lake.”

Once they were ensconced in Finney’s living room, he offered Emily a seat and a drink, both of which she declined. Dimitri eyed her warily from across the room, prepared to bolt at any sudden move.

“You’ve done a lot with this place. It’s going to look nice,” she said.

He glanced around. He’d taken the carpet up and hadn’t replaced it, exposing a wooden floor scarred with nail holes and scratches. There were tools scattered in the corner, a skill saw on the floor behind the couch, and next to one wall, unpacked cardboard boxes. The trim had been removed from around the doorways and windows where he had yet to paint. “I’m a little behind schedule. It should look better in about . . . twenty years.” He tried to laugh. It came out as half-burp and half-chuckle.

“No. I can see it’s going to be quite nice.” They were quiet for a few moments.

It was odd to be alone with her because the Cordifis clan had always done everything in clusters, the rowdy Christmas parties and the annual spring trip to Hawaii en masse. He could count on one hand the times he’d been alone in a room with Emily, mostly this past summer when they’d fallen into a reversal of roles, she striving to console him over her husband’s death, he desperately inconsolable.

She’d aged. Her once-steady eyes had a haunted look. She’d given up whatever it was she’d done to keep her skin youthful, and her face was a skein of wrinkles, bags ballooning under her eyes. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“I still expect to hear his voice booming up from the workshop in the basement, ‘When’s the eats, Babe?’ You know what bothers me more than anything? The house is so quiet.”

“I wish—”

“I know you do, John, but he’s in the Lord’s hands.” She sighed and let the silence widen around them like oil on a pool of water. After a few moments she said, “I’ve come to ask a favor.”

“Anything you want, Emily. Anything at all. You know that.”

Her eyes had a liquid sheen, seemed almost to glow in the dim light. “As a courtesy, I suppose, I was given one of the first copies of the fire department’s report, which won’t come out officially until sometime next week. I want you to read it, see if you can spot any inconsistencies, anything that doesn’t make sense.”

“Emily, you know I’d do anything for you, but I’m not sure—”

“They’re talking about units taking lines here and there and hydrant pressure and vertical ventilation, and I try to put this together with the story you and others told me, and I just get confused.” She pulled the report out of the tote bag she was carrying and handed it to him. It was the size of a small phone book, its heading in bold, black ink:
SEATTLE FIRE, JUNE 7, 2000
. “I need to know exactly how this relates to what you saw and remember, John. I need us to talk about this.”

“Emily, I’d do anything for you, but I don’t know if I’m the person you want for this.”

“You’re the
only
person, John. Bill said you had the best natural instincts of any firefighter he’d ever worked with. He told me if anything ever happened to him, I was to come to you for the truth. He said you would know.”

“He said that?”

“Many times.”

Finney wondered if Bill had had a premonition he was going to die.

He wanted to help her, but what was she going to think after he was charged with arson? And he
would
be charged. He couldn’t tell her and he couldn’t turn her down.

“I’ll need some time.”

“Just read it and get back to me when you’ve come to a conclusion. Maybe I’m being obtuse, but it all seems so artificial, like a huge construct. It should be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and some sort of meaning, but it’s just a bunch of loosely assembled facts that don’t jibe. At least not for me.”

“I take it you discussed this with G. A. Montgomery?”

“The report or my coming to you?”

“Either.”

“We talked about the report.”

“What’d he say?”

“Well . . . I’ll be frank with you. He said it was basically your fault, but they didn’t spell it out because that wasn’t the fire department way.”

“It was basically my fault? That’s what he said?”

She nodded. “Don’t worry. I don’t believe that. If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Thank you for your confidence.”

They listened as a floatplane landed on the lake. Dimitri stalked across the room in the way that some cats have, walking so heavily you could hear his feet strike the floor like padded hooves. Finney caught Emily looking at a picture on the wall, a photo taken five years earlier of the crew of Ladder 1. The six of them were in their dress blacks lined up in front of the truck on the ramp at Station 10, Cordifis in the middle with a somewhat bemused look on his face and Finney to his right looking serious as all get out. “I miss him so much,” she said.

“I miss him, too. He was a tremendous guy.”

“You’d think thirty-odd years would be enough of risking your neck. Enough taking the chance of contracting hepatitis or AIDS from a patient. Or TB. Enough of getting up three and four times a night to put out a bed fire or pick up some drunk off the sidewalk. But every time I brought up the possibility of retirement, he got mad at me.”

“He made that station a great place to work, Emily. Everybody there loved him. I’ll read it and we’ll talk.”

She kissed his cheek, and he walked her down the dock to her car, gave her another hug, and watched her drive off in Bill’s old Ford Bronco, the red IAFF union sticker in the center of the rear window.

The report was in binder form with three large flat staples buttoning it together along the left edge. Three-quarters of an inch thick, it was printed on regulation typing paper, eight and a half by eleven inches.

He began skimming the report while he ate dinner.

23. THINGS THAT DID NOT GO WELL

Oversized blue pages divided the report into sections: Table of Contents, Introduction, SFD Overview, Key Issues, Building History, FIU Report, FAC Report, Incident Overview, et cetera. The fire investigation unit report, G. A.’s investigation and determination that the fire had been accidental, as well as the Fire Alarm Center report that had been generated separately were included.

Within the Conclusion section was a page labeled
THINGS THAT WENT WELL
. Another page was headed
THINGS THAT DID NOT GO WELL
. Finney thumbed to the latter.

It was noted that the incident was short on manpower from the beginning. That heavy smoke in the vicinity obscured early reconnaissance of the buildings so that the first Incident Commander reported the building as being fifty by seventy-five feet, when in fact the warehouse portion alone was double that. The buildings on the north side of the complex contained the same approximate square footage. No other incoming units corrected Captain Vaughn’s initial miscalculation, probably because they had the same visibility problems he had, so that all night calculations were based on the original figure. It was mentioned that fans were put up and then taken down, thereby wasting valuable time. Nobody mentioned the lack of visibility inside the warehouse that the fans would have cleared.

Although the wind was from the north that night, Engine 22 set up the command post on the south side of the building, so that officers and firefighters were immersed in clots of drifting smoke for almost an hour before the command post was moved.

Nobody ever did a walk-around to survey all four sides of the building. Had they done so, the IC would have known early on that there were other buildings connected to the warehouse, that those buildings were also involved, and that the crews of Engine 31 and Ladder 5 were actually fighting a fire in those smaller, older buildings while Vaughn thought they were supporting his efforts in the warehouse. After Ladder 5 opened holes in the older building, Vaughn couldn’t figure out why the smoke didn’t clear in the warehouse.

The report said Captain Cordifis shouldn’t have split his crew and made a mistake ordering fans for ventilation. Supposedly, the early introduction of fans had fed the fire and made it larger before it could be located by hose crews. Yet, by all accounts, the fire started in the older buildings to the north and only spread into the warehouse later, probably after the wall collapse. When the first units arrived, the warehouse was filled with smoke, smoke that had leaked through from the older part of the complex. Finney still thought Cordifis’s original plan was viable. Using fans, they would have cleared the warehouse in minutes. They would have searched it, realized the fire and possible victims were elsewhere, and been on their way. As it was, Ladder 1, Engine 22, and later Engines 5 and 25 lost precious minutes bumbling around in zero visibility.

Radio traffic had been problematical. Owing to confusion from the fires going on in the south end and to the fact that Leary Way was fought on channel 2 while the normal fire channel was channel 1, several units at Leary Way had been addressing the IC in the south end on channel 1 when they thought they were addressing Captain Vaughn. Quite a few of their transmissions either were not answered or were answered by the wrong IC. Even the dispatchers were confused.

Because several units had done their monitoring and broadcasting on channel 1, they missed key portions of Cordifis’s search instructions and went into the complex without any notion of where to look.

The units that did hear Cordifis’s transmission knew from what he reported that opening the door to his room would jeopardize his life, so these hastily organized rescue teams did not open any doors unless they swung out. Instead, using chain saws, they cut small holes in each door they encountered, a procedure that slowed the search to a snail’s pace.

The older complex had a fire wall running along the spine of the building, north to south, with only two doorways in it. For reasons Finney had yet to discover, most of the searchers had been told to remain on the west side of the fire wall in the older complex; in reality, he and Cordifis had been on the east side. Only Reese and Kirby entered from the east.

The report said Finney was in the final stages of exhaustion by the time he tried to fight his way out of the building, that he and Cordifis should have taken a rest break after changing bottles, as if his exhaustion derived from not taking a break. What the report didn’t indicate was how much criticism they would have drawn for taking a rest break while victims may have been dying inside.

Nowhere did the report implicate Finney in Bill’s death.

Nowhere did it suggest that if he’d reacted differently Bill Cordifis would be alive.

Dozens of firefighters had told him it wasn’t his fault, that he should consider his own escape and Cordifis’s death as acts of God. Yet the unofficial accusation lingered in the air. G. A. had passed it along to Emily, and Finney knew others were uttering it.

After some minutes of skimming the report, he curled up on the sofa under a waterside window and, reading from page one, he used up the last of the afternoon light reflecting off the lake.

The part that disgruntled him most was Reese’s statement, the same statement that had been clipped from newspapers, highlighted with yellow grease markers, and tacked to the beanery bulletin board in almost every fire station in the city: “We went in and within a minute we’d found one firefighter wandering around alone. He was in a panic and wasn’t any help as far as indicating where his partner was. We guided him outside and then went back down the direction he’d come from, but there wasn’t anything there. We searched as long as we could but were finally forced out by the heat.”

The way Finney remembered it, they’d pointed him in the direction he was already headed and then turned their backs without even knowing if he could get up from his squat. Had Finney taken a misstep or collapsed in that last two dozen paces, Reese and Kub would hardly have seen him as they were chased out of the building by flame.

But he thought he also remembered counting exactly twenty-eight paces straight down the corridor from the small hole he’d hacked into the wall with his service axe. And he thought he told them as much, yet Reese said he hadn’t been able to give them any help. If it was true that Cordifis was only twenty-eight steps away, they should have reached Bill in less than a minute with or without Finney’s directions. He’d left his chirping PASS device outside the hole as a beacon. But maybe nothing Finney remembered after he left Cordifis was true. Maybe he’d been hallucinating the entire time.

The doctors said people with very high body core temperatures suffered debilitating weakness, hallucinations, seizures, and coma, roughly in that order. Finney had not escaped the hallucinations, which he knew he’d entertained in the medic unit and later in the hospital. But he could have sworn he was thinking straight when he spoke to Reese and Kub.

God, he wished he could keep from thinking about Leary Way.

Robert Kub was uneasy talking about the subject with Finney, obviously wanting to spare his feelings. The most Finney could get him to say was, “As far as I’m concerned, we all did our best. You could barely stand, and we were lucky to get out of there alive.”

“If they’d only asked me in that medic unit I could have told them where to look,” Finney told his brother, Tony, weeks after the fire.

“Not when I saw you,” replied his brother. “When I saw you, you weren’t making any sense at all.”

In addition to a broken collarbone, heat exhaustion, and burns, Finney had so much carbon monoxide circulating in his system that one of the doctors at the Harborview ER told Tony he wasn’t going to survive. And everyone knew one of the first effects of CO poisoning was confusion.

He’d still been confused at the funeral three days later.

When Finney was released from the hospital long enough to attend the funeral service, of which he recalled next to nothing, he remembered people saying they were sorry, which somehow was the last thing he wanted to hear. By the time Diana Moore approached, he had reached some sort of limit. “How are you doing?” she had asked.

“How the hell do you think? I’ve got enough Demerol on board to knock down a football team. I can’t feel my fingertips. My neck hurts like hell, and I killed my partner.”

“You didn’t kill him,” Diana replied quietly.

“Why don’t you get out of my face?”

“You know you don’t—”

“Just get the fuck away from me. And tell your shit-eating friends to stay away, too.” The words had come out of a generic anger that picked targets at random, Diana the luckless target that day.

The next time they spoke was the day of his appointment with Reese, when he was turned down for promotion.