Vertical Burn (7 page)

15. NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE

Suffocating, blinded, choking on smoke, Finney crawled down the dark corridor, his right glove skimming the wall. He’d been without bottled air for some time, and his mouth tasted of blood and burnt rubber and something that might easily have been roadkill. Nothing was nastier than smoke from a building fire.

Piloting by the dim sounds of a fire engine pump somewhere outside, he made his way forward, but each time he inched ahead, it seemed as if the floor pulled him back, as if the floor were moving. When he finally looked down, he realized he was staggering through dead men tiered up like logs, each burned beyond recognition.

Then his eyes were open and it took a few seconds to decide whether he was awake or only dreaming he was awake. When he rolled his head on his pillow to check the bedside clock, a mixture of sweat and tears crackled in his ear. It was 0305 hours, almost to the minute they’d been dispatched to Leary Way five months earlier. It was uncanny how some circadian clock in his brain knew what time to bring on the dream.

Always Leary Way. Always a few minutes after three in the morning.

Finney sat up and let the air in the houseboat cool him. He knew from experience he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. Sleep would be too great a gift. In an attempt to clear the cobwebs, he climbed out of bed and walked around the boat. He undressed and stepped into the shower, languishing like a drunk trying to sober up. He felt better after he’d toweled off and climbed into sweats and a thick pair of hiking socks. He went outside to the small deck, where he gazed across the black-glass surface of the lake.

Along with seven other floating homes and a mixture of pleasure craft, his houseboat was moored to a dock just north of Crockett Street on Westlake Avenue North, the second slip from the end. To his east he could gaze out over Lake Union to the freeway and the lights of apartment buildings, condos, and vintage homes residing shoulder-to-shoulder on the western slope of Capitol Hill. To his north were the shadowy, surreal comic book shapes of the old burners and smokestacks in Gas Works Park. To the southwest the Space Needle appeared from his vantage point to be keeping watch over an ever-expanding clutch of downtown skyscrapers, their reflected lights twinkling on the surface of the lake.

The houseboat had originally belonged to his aunt Julie, who twenty-two years earlier had lost her husband, a mechanic at Boeing Field, to a freak accident, when he was sucked into a jet intake. The event had been captured by some clown with an eight-millimeter camera. The footage ended up on the national news, and it did more to destroy his aunt than the death itself. In fact, she never stopped ranting about the news footage and how cruel it had been to both her husband’s memory and her sanity. The proceeds from the insurance settlement along with a small pension allowed her to hibernate in her bedroom, drugged by soap operas, smoking three or four packs of unfiltered Camels a day, seeking final solace in the bottom of a wineglass. After twelve years of this, her body betrayed her in the same way the world had, and one morning she found she could no longer walk.

She’d been Finney’s favorite aunt, and when she started her long downhill slide, he was the only family member to stand by her. Where others saw a cynical old woman who crabbed about every little thing, Finney saw the Aunt Julie who’d taken him on pony rides when he was four, to Disneyland when he was ten, on college visits when he was seventeen. Twice a week Finney would buy her groceries, put them away in the kitchen, then sit and chat while she sipped wine. After she nodded off, he’d clean the place up and do whatever odd jobs needed doing.

She’d had no children, just a battered houseboat on Lake Union and a tailless cat named Dimitri, both bequeathed to Finney when her heart finally gave out earlier that year.

His initial plan was to neuter the cat and sell the boat, but he soon found himself living on the boat and treasuring the cat, testicles and all. The battle-scarred Manx followed him everywhere just like a dog. He was fearless, and Finney loved him for it.

Since Leary Way, Finney had been stalled out in the middle of remodeling the houseboat. It would have been embarrassing if he’d ever had any visitors. As things stood, it was possible to launch one of his kayaks from the spare bedroom by stepping out past the blue plastic tarp hanging over the unfinished outer wall. Currently, he owned three kayaks and was building another from a kit. Kayaking was his one interest that continued unabated since Leary Way.

He went back inside and pulled a small tape recorder off the nightstand. His hands were shaking. This was one of the hardest things he could do, but he was helpless to stop himself. In the beginning he’d listened to the tape at all hours of the day, but now it seemed to beckon only when he couldn’t sleep. The recording had been copied from the master tape the dispatch center kept of all radio transmissions made during the fire.

On tape Cordifis’s tone was surprisingly calm, almost nonchalant: “I want to say a few things while I still have a clear head. Emily, I love you. You are my life. I don’t know how I ever got so lucky thirty-four years ago. There has not been a day that I regretted meeting you. Heather, you’re the youngest, and I’m afraid we spoiled you. I’d do it again. I hope you have that child you want. Marge, you just go ahead and do whatever you think is right. I’ve always trusted your judgment. Ever since you were little, you knew what you were about. Linda, I hope you and the kids get through this divorce and come out happier on the other side. You girls and your mother are what make my life worth living. And the crew of Ladder One. You’re all great. I love you guys. I don’t think I’ve ever had a crew member I didn’t think of as family.”

(There was a sound that might have been gasping.)

“I know I’m not getting out of here tonight, so I’m telling you right now, I don’t want anyone feeling bad over this. None of us get out alive. It’s just a question of when and where and how we do it. I’m at peace with this. I knew when he left, the odds of John getting back with help were zero. God bless him, though. He really thought he was going to make it. I’m sure he’s out there busting his gut. I only hope you’re not in trouble your own self, and I pray that you make it, John. You and I both know you only strike out once in this game.”

(At this point there was a pause and then the tape grew scratchy. The next sound was Cordifis coughing. He hadn’t been wearing his mask.)

“The smoke’s been down on the floor for a while, but this is
hot
. . . . John, I want you to know something about tonight . . .”

(More coughing.)

The tape ran on for a few moments before it ended with a clicking sound. Most people figured it had simply stopped, but Finney knew from the noises in the background that the fire had been pushing in on him, that Bill had deliberately shut off his transmission to spare the feelings of his friends and loved ones—that he didn’t want anybody to hear him die.

Finney had endlessly speculated as to what Cordifis’s last words to him would have been had he been able to get them out. Probably not to feel guilty, that he knew it wasn’t Finney’s fault. Probably not to let this night ruin the rest of his life. Finney often wondered if it would have made a difference to have heard the words. Every time Finney heard that last click he felt as if his heart were trying to beat without any blood in it.

For a month after they extracted Cordifis’s body from the rubble, Finney holed up on the houseboat and pickled himself in alcohol, sobering up only long enough for infrequent visits to his doctor and sometimes not even then. It was his brother who, one afternoon, found him in a pile of dirty laundry on the floor and told him he was turning into Aunt Julie. That was what saved him—Tony’s admonition and the vision he’d carried of a drunk Aunt Julie over all those years. That was all he needed to hear. He hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since.

For months now he’d been obsessed with his own role at Leary Way, grappling with the generally accepted theory that his disorientation and failure to find an exit quickly was the cause of Cordifis’s death. He’d talked to everyone who had been at the fire, trying without success to fill in the incomplete pieces from his memory. There was nothing concerning Leary Way that was either too small or too large for him to dissect.

He had an indistinct recollection of telling Reese and Kub that Bill was twenty-eight paces back, directly along the passageway he’d come down. But was that a memory or only a dream? Reese, the self-appointed spokesperson for both himself and Kub, said the two of them had heard nothing out of his mouth but babbling. It was a fact that he’d babbled a few minutes later when Soudenbury found him standing inside a doorway in the smoke. It was a fact that he’d babbled in the medic unit, and he knew he hadn’t made much sense in the hospital.

The doctors said his confusion had been caused by a combination of smoke inhalation and heat stress, that he’d been lucky to survive. They assured him nobody would have been coherent in that condition. What they couldn’t tell him was when it was likely to have begun.

It was small comfort to Finney. Bill Cordifis remained dead, and he was taking the rap for it.

He had been obsessed for the past four months with his own actions at Leary Way and it was getting him nowhere. Maybe he needed to look in a different direction. Since the last shift he’d worked, when they’d been called to the food-on-the-stove at the Downtowner, he’d been thinking about the larger picture. On the surface the call to the Downtowner couldn’t have been more dissimilar to Leary Way—a routine alarm, no loss of life or property, nothing to think twice about. But Finney noticed a disturbing similarity to the night of June 7. Because there were so many other alarms going on in the city, and because there were no other units available, Engine 26 had been first in—far outside its normal response area. Just like the night of Leary Way. Because of citywide tie-ups, Ladder 1 had been called outside its normal district. None of the first arriving units normally responded to Leary Way. None knew the layout of the buildings or what was inside. Finney couldn’t remember such involved tie-ups at any other time during his career. He had to wonder how it could have happened twice in five months.

He walked across the bedroom, fired up his computer, and logged onto the website for the Seattle Fire Department. Among other things, the site gave details of every alarm the department had fielded in the past five years, these divided into fire and medical calls for each twenty-four-hour period, all listed in chronological order.

Finney checked the run lists for the last shift he worked and found a striking increase in alarms throughout the city around the time of the Downtowner incident. A lot of them were false alarms, although there had been two fires going on and the Downtowner was genuine enough.

He went back to the night of Leary Way. In Seattle, taverns closed at two
A.M.
, and between two and three on a Friday or Saturday night there would often be a marked increase in car accidents, stabbings, beatings, man-down calls, many of which required EMS responses from the fire department. But June 7 was a Tuesday, and the taverns didn’t have anything to do with the report of a natural gas leak at Sand Point at 0225 hours that tied up one chief, two engines, two truck companies, an aid car, and a medic unit for two and a half hours. Firefighters who’d been on that call told Finney they never found a gas leak. Nor did the taverns have anything to do with the report of smoke from a vacant house on Lake City Way that came in at 0237 hours. Nor the second house fire miles away in the 3900 block of South Othello Street, this also a vacant dwelling. The latter put virtually all of the Fifth Battalion out of service. A smoldering pier fire in West Seattle took the Seventh Battalion out of the picture. A brush fire at Fort Lawton tied up three more engine companies.

The calls were all either unsolved arsons or false alarms, yet there was no known arsonist working in Seattle during that period and the department’s activity sheets for the weeks before and after June 7 showed no abnormal flurries of activity and few arsons.

It was tempting to conclude that the alarms during both shifts were orchestrated rather than happenstance, that some unknown party or parties had engineered those fire calls so they would occur more or less at once. If so, the supposed object of that orchestration on June 7 would have presumably been to burn down Leary Way.

What discredited the theory was that, according to the department fire investigation team, Leary Way was caused accidentally by an electrical outlet in a storeroom in an area not far from where Finney and Bill Cordifis found themselves trapped. The head of Marshal 5, the department’s fire investigation unit, Captain G. A. Montgomery, even put a photo of the offending wall outlet in the department’s union newspaper,
The Third Rail
. For months the melted outlet sat atop his desk, a mute testament to his skills as a fire investigator.

Was the series of alarms that had occurred on June 7 and two days ago beyond the pale for their department, or did it happen once every few years? Finney began with January of that year, scanning the response records for other periods of abnormal activity. After several hours he became aware that the sun had come up, and he knew if he had any appointments that morning, he was going to miss them. By the time he’d finished, it was almost two in the afternoon; he’d pored over five years of records.

He found only one additional shift that fit the rough pattern—an extraordinary number of calls in a very short period of time, so many units out of service when new calls came in that units were responding to fires at the other end of the city. All three shifts had occurred in the past six months, the first just three weeks before Leary Way.

But it was the vacant house he’d found by the Duwamish River that troubled Finney more than anything. It fit in perfectly.

16. A CONSPIRACY OF VAST PROPORTIONS

It was after five o’clock and dark outside when Finney parked at a meter on Main Street and pushed his way through a light mist to Station 10. Inside, he skirted the watch office, where Bud Masterson was reading a newspaper, and went up the stairs to the mezzanine, where he found Robert Kub alone in the shadowy fire investigation office watching a Sonics game on a six-inch TV. The office was long and irregular, and the interior windows overlooked Station 10’s apparatus bay, like a news booth in a stadium.

Marshal 5, the fire department’s fire investigation unit, was comprised of eight firefighters cross-trained as law enforcement officers, along with two cops from SPD, the unit overseen by Captain G. A. Montgomery.

“So, what’s up?” Kub said. “You look like something’s bothering you.”

John Finney and Robert Kub had connections that extended as far back as drill school, not the least of which was that Robert Kub had been Charlie Reese’s partner at Leary Way. Unlike Charlie Reese, though, Kub didn’t look back on Leary Way as a triumph. Finney found it endeared Kub to him in a way nobody would have guessed.

Kub was tall and lean, four inches taller than Finney, with a dark, nearly black complexion and jaws that stood out like chestnuts when he chewed gum, which he did incessantly. His hair was cropped close, and he had a habit of absentmindedly palming the top of his head. He spoke in a mellifluous baritone and was so deliberate in what he said and did that at times he gave the impression of being dim-witted, though he was anything but. In fact, Finney admired the perceptive way Kub’s mind worked, and it was because of this and because he wanted some perspective that he’d come to see him. Kub was one of the few friends he hadn’t distanced himself from after Leary Way.

Kub leaned forward in his chair, the long fingers of his hands interlocked. “What’s up?”

It took only a few minutes to outline it: the fact that there’d been a plethora of alarms the night of Leary Way, alarms that contributed to the loss of the building and to the death of Captain Cordifis because there was too little help; that two days ago there’d been a similar rash of alarms with a corresponding number of units out of service; and that three weeks before Leary Way there’d been a smaller but nearly identical event with no major fires, but an unusually high percentage of alarms all at the same time; the fact that in the past five years nothing even remotely similar had happened. As with the first event in May, two days ago there had been no major fire losses. Finney figured it for a practice run.

“I don’t know,” Kub said. “I don’t know what to think about this.”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? Somebody orchestrating this? They burned down Leary Way and made sure we didn’t have any help by lighting a bunch of little nuisance fires.”

“I wouldn’t call the other ones nuisance fires. We lost two houses in the south end.”

“Okay. But they were set, right?”

“Right.”

“And you haven’t found the arsonist, have you?”

“Lots of times we don’t find the bad guys.”

“This is organized, Bob. It has to be. That house I found. It’s going to be another nuisance fire. It’s all primed and ready.”

“I still think this is a little off the wall.”

“It is off the wall. That’s why they think they can get away with it. It’s too crazy for anybody to catch on to.”

“I don’t know. How about you and me go up and talk to G. A.? See what he thinks about it. He’s upstairs eating dinner with the crew.”

“But I wanted to bounce this off of you.”

“I told you what I thought. Let’s go talk to G. A.”

“G. A.’s the one who declared Leary Way an accident, and he’s never changed his mind about anything in his life. You know how proud he was about that investigation. He’s not going to reverse himself. He’s still got the melted electrical socket from Leary Way sitting on his desk like some sort of bobcat he shot and stuffed.”

“Maybe he made a good call. Maybe he’s proud of it. Look, a lot of people don’t like G. A., but he’s dedicated to this unit like no officer I’ve seen. If you’re really on to something here, I think he can hear you out objectively. G. A. looks pigheaded to people who don’t know him, but believe me, he can admit his mistakes like anyone else. If what you’re saying has any validity, who better to take back his call than him? He’ll appreciate that you brought it to him first.”

Finney stared into Robert Kub’s brown eyes. Although one wouldn’t guess it from his implacable exterior, Kub was an intensely emotional man, and having been on the fire ground the night Bill Cordifis died had changed him more than he cared to admit. From Kub’s point of view, it didn’t matter that he and Reese had almost been incinerated. His guilt over not finding Cordifis was overwhelming. Maybe that was why Finney had remained close to him—their shared guilt.

As they left Kub’s office, the house bells rang. Less than a minute later the apparatus bay doors slammed shut on a cloud of blue-gray diesel smoke, the building like a tomb, Engine 10, Ladder 1, Aid 5, and Battalion 1 all roaring down Second Avenue in a ragged parade of red lights and sirens. Finney couldn’t help wishing he were with them.

Taking the stairs two at a time, they went up one flight and punched in the lock box code on the door to the crews’ private quarters.

The TV in the great room was playing a local news show to no audience. In the enormous kitchen area, steam was coming off half a dozen abandoned plates of food set out on the long table. Dinner would be cold by the time they got back; they were accustomed to it. They’d line up and one by one put their plates in the microwave and try again. For a split second Finney found himself looking for Cordifis’s plate, but of course, Bill’s favorite Harley-Davidson commemorative platter had been returned to his widow along with his Mickey Mouse sheets, his Waterpik, his Bible, the pictures of his daughters, and the six hundred pennies they’d found in the bottom of his office drawer.

Alone in the room, G. A. Montgomery hunkered over a bowl of chili with a moon of margarine in it.

Montgomery had been a member of AA for ten years, could give his sobriety time in months and days. He liked to boast, only a little facetiously, that he would be chief of the department by now if he hadn’t become enamored with the taste of bourbon. As a drunk he’d been as cocksure as a man could be, and sobriety hadn’t changed that. People were intimidated by G. A., not just firefighters but other captains and chiefs. He was fifty-two years old, with a ruddy face and puffy tea bags of flesh under his eyes. His head was so large it scared small children. He had a shock of pale brown hair he clipped himself and combed straight back, though by mid-morning most of it stuck straight up. G. A. Montgomery put on a suit each morning, but by late afternoon the jacket was rumpled, discarded, or misplaced. This evening he wore a sweater vest over a dress shirt, his tie having lost its battle to hold a knot.

G. A. had been at the helm of the fire investigation unit for fourteen months, not long enough to know what he was doing, although that didn’t dissuade him from running it with an iron hand or from taking charge of certain pet investigations. He had taken the requisite courses, read the textbooks, gone through the state police training, traveled to Maryland to the National Fire Academy—and returned feeling he knew everything. But then, he’d known everything before he left. G. A. had always known everything. His rigid policies had caused at least one fire investigator to transfer back to an engine company. Since Cordifis’s death he had twice cautioned Finney to stop interfering in the investigation.

“Hey,” said Captain Montgomery, speaking around a mouthful of corn bread. “That was a rotten deal you were handed the other day. Charlie should have promoted you.” He stood and they shook hands. “So, what’s going on? You two look like you just caught the Sears deliveryman banging the old lady.”

Finney reiterated the theory he’d outlined for Kub downstairs.

G. A. pushed his bowl away and sat back, evaluating the two men in front of him. “I thought you said you were going to give up snooping around in all this Leary Way nonsense.”

“That’s not what I said. That’s what you said.”

G. A. stared hard at Finney, as if he could get him to relent by sheer force of will, then swiveled his eyes to Kub. “So where was the big fire last C-shift? What was the target?”

“It was a practice run,” said Finney.

“A practice run?”

“Yeah. It was just like the tie-ups three weeks before Leary Way. Somebody was getting ready, practicing. All of which points to another sizable event on the horizon. What clinched it for me was the vacant house next to the river. It’s just sitting there, all prepped for arson.”

“Seems strange to me that of all the occupancies in the city, you walked into one that was ready to be torched. You’re sure it’s set to burn?” G. A. asked. “That house you saw?”

“Absolutely.”

“Not just some kids playing around?”

“It was a professional setup.”

“You’ve seen professional setups before?”

“Not before they were lit. But this looked professional.”

“Convince me. Not of the setup, but the whole thing.”

“If you wanted to cause a lot of distraction for the fire department and you had limited manpower, you’d prepare in advance. I’m guessing there are other buildings ready to burn. I’m betting somebody can drive quickly from one to the other and with a Zippo lighter divert most of our manpower from the real target.”

“And what would that be? The real target.”

“All I know is that on June seventh it was Leary Way.”

“So what you’re talking about is a conspiracy,” said Kub, “a conspiracy of relatively vast proportions.”

G. A. scratched under his armpit. “It’s just a little far-fetched, isn’t it?”

“That’s the beauty of it. It’s totally outrageous. If I was doing this, I would figure no one was ever going to catch me.”

“There’s one big problem here, John. In order for your theory to hold up, Leary Way would have had to be arson.”

“It
was
arson.” Finney could see G. A.’s face begin to turn red. “I think you made a mistake.”

G. A.’s face took on more and more color.

“I investigated it myself,” G. A. said. “For days I worked that place with a camera and a shovel and a team of firefighters to help me. I took it apart a layer at a time. It was accidental. Everyone knows it was. Much as you want someone else to take the rap for your captain’s death, you have to accept the fact that the fire was not set.”

“This is going to happen again,” Finney said, “and when it does, everyone will know I’m right. This is too much of a pattern to be accidental. I’m not just talking about one arsonist setting a fire and running off into the night. I’m talking about a bunch of people working together to take the punch out of the department at exactly the right point in time, take most everybody out of service, then light up their target. It’s like setting a fire in a city that doesn’t have a fire department. Hell, they could burn down anything they wanted.”

Kub palmed his shorn scalp. Popping a fresh stick of gum into his mouth, he glanced at Finney without moving his head from G. A. and said, “To my way of thinking, John’s got a point about those alarms. Where did they come from?”

The room was silent for fifteen seconds. Finally G. A. pushed a pile of computer paper that had been sitting beside him across the table. “Take a look.”

Kub riffled through the half-inch stack and said, “These are run sheets from two days ago on C-shift. The stuff John is talking about. You’ve already been looking into this?”

“Similar situation to June seventh,” G. A. said. “A bunch of bad calls at the same time as a couple of full responses. We were shorthanded. It’s the damndest coincidence.”

Finney said, “No way it’s a coincidence.”

“I don’t know what else to call it.”

“Call it murder.”

“Let’s not go off the deep end here. He was a friend of mine, too. But it was an accidental fire.
Accidental
.”

“Explain those alarms.”

“I can’t, but I can’t explain the aurora borealis either. I can’t explain how the butterflies make it back to Monterey every year. That doesn’t mean somebody’s deliberately doing this. There’s no way to connect Leary Way with any of this other, and you know it. And as far as connecting the dots to that vacant house . . . that’s a leap even Michael Jordan couldn’t make. You guys were shorthanded at Leary Way. You went in too deep with a very nice old man who should have retired years ago. It’s the kind of shit that happens when you stay in this job too long. Don’t try to make it into something it’s not.”

“Okay,” Kub said. “Let’s just say these incidents
were
choreographed. What would be the purpose? Somebody wanted to burn down Leary Way, they could have done it without going to the trouble of starting other fires.”

“They were practicing,” said Finney. “Leary Way? Sure, they could have burned that down anyway. They’re practicing for something they couldn’t burn down anyway.”

“Let me reiterate,” G. A. said, visibly angry. “The fire was accidental. You think somebody knew an electrical short was going to occur at three in the morning? There were no signs of flammable liquid. No witnesses. No threats against the building. No disputes between tenants and landlord. It was a goddamned accident. And if it wasn’t, what the hell were they practicing
for
?”

“That’s the big question, isn’t it?”

“No, the question is: Why don’t you leave this alone and try to put your life back together? That’s the question.”

Kub’s pager went off. An engine company in Wedgwood had a juvenile fire-setter in custody and was asking for a fire investigator.

G. A. looked at Kub and said, “Go ahead. I’ll take care of this.”

“They can wait.”

“No, you go ahead.”

After Kub left, G. A. leaned on the tabletop, the thick muscles of his forearms swelling as he pressed down. “You checked the alarm records for all the shifts between June and now?”

“I checked the alarm records for the past five years. We’ve all seen it happen in wildland firefighting. Somebody’ll start a fire and then drive down the highway and start another one until they have fire crews running around like cats trying to bury shit on a tin roof.”