Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

  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-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 lovemaking 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—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-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-comparisons between fiction and reality were blurring. He believed he was burrowing into something dark, something evil.

  When Steve Patterson got back to task-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.

  And it hadn’t helped that arson profilers from the FBI Academy had made off-the-record estimates that John Orr may have committed a few thousand arsons in his lifetime, but who the hell was counting? So, thank you very much, Steve, but we don’t have time for Hollywood-type murder mysteries; if that’s what you want to do, good luck. That was more or less the message that Captain Steve Patterson of the Burbank Fire Department got from his task-force colleagues.

  One former girlfriend of John Orr didn’t square with anybody in the novel, as far as Patterson could see, but she certainly was the living embodiment of John Orr’s conflicted feelings about police in general. She was the female cop who told Cabral about John wanting to make it with her in a fire station. And how he’d always try to touch her and kiss her when she’d don her uniform. But at the same time he’d tell her how stupid cops were and how much smarter he was. There was just too much symbolism there about power and control and authority and handcuffs.

  Then Steve Patterson would have to chill and remind himself that these other guys were more experienced investigators. They were police officers, and he’d spent most of his career fighting fires. Maybe he was getting carried away. Maybe he’d seen all this in a movie sometime.

  But then he’d stop and think, No, goddamn it! I’ve never seen a movie like this. Not ever. And there was another thing: John Orr had liked to shoot nude photos of his women, just as he’d liked to shoot photos of his fires, just as most violent serial offenders have a need for mementos, to relive those moments.

  Maybe for John Orr sex and fire had fused.

  Task-force duties actually increased in 1994. They were meeting three times a week and reporting anything significant to Mike Cabral, who intended to indict John Orr not only for multiple murder in the Ole’s fire, but for the College Hills disaster, the Warner Brothers Studios fire, and the brush fires known as the Hilldale fire in La Cañada and the San Augustine fire in Glendale. However, the statute of limitations on the latter arsons would run out on November 23.

  By this time Steve Patterson was up to his eyes in murder. He needed help from police detectives, but no cop could take seriously such a half-baked idea. There is nothing that disgusts police investigators more than amateurs offering investigative advice that always sounds as though it’s from a made-for-TV movie.

  It came to a head when Steve Patterson phoned one of the detectives he knew at the Burbank Police Department and asked, “Do you have any unsolved murders on the books? Going back, oh, ten years?”

  The detective said, “Yeah, we have three.”

  “Don’t tell me about them,” Steve Patterson told the detective. “Let me take a crack at one of them. Was she a young woman? And was she tied up?”

  “Yeah, we got one just like that,” the detective said. “Her name was Mary Duggan. A 1986 case. She was found in her car, raped and suffocated.”

  Steve Patterson’s obsession grew exponentially. Thus began a years-long quest to solve the murder of Mary Susan Duggan.

  She had been the cheerleader type in high school but had gained weight after graduation, perhaps losing some self-esteem in the process. Her parents lived in the San Fernando Valley and she’d worked at a bank, which, Patterson quickly noted, was a few blocks away from the private-investigation business owned by John Orr’s former housemate and part-time employer.

  Patterson thought that she and John could’ve met in or around the bank. John had a nose for vulnerable women, and a line that prompted casual conversation which sometimes went somewhere. Moreover, in the novel, Trish’s mother had worked at a bank, which Patterson saw as another link.

  Mary Duggan had been seen last at a pizza parlor all alone, around midnight. Whether or not she’d been waiting for someone would never be known. A Burbank cop on patrol had spotted her silver Ford Mustang in a parking lot, and when he saw the car again the next night he noticed that the window was broken on the driver’s side. He got out to check, and found Mary Susan Duggan—listed that night as Jane Doe #39 by the L.A. County coroner—in the Mustang, covered by newspapers and a “tanker” jacket.

  Steve Patterson’s neck hair started swaying when he learned that she had ligature marks on her ankles and wrists, like Trish in John Orr’s novel. She hadn’t been gagged with a bathrobe as in the novel, she’d been gagged with tissue that forced her tongue back in her throat, suffocating her. Mary Duggan had been barely twenty-two years old, three months older than Steve Patterson’s daughter, Jill. Patterson drove to the place where she’d been found. Just three hundred yards from a 7-Eleven store.

  But his colleagues said, So what? There’re 7-Eleven stores everywhere. And rapists often bind their victims. So what?

  Steve Patterson returned to the novel. In Points of Origin, the owner of the 7-Eleven store, a Pakistani, spots a fire that the arsonist Aaron Stiles has set with a delay device, and he hits the store’s robbery alarm to summon help. He extinguishes the small fire and is warned by the arriving police never to use the robbery alarm as a signal to the fire department.

  Patterson’s former arson partner, a detective with the Burbank police, pulled old reports from the 7-Eleven store near the place where Mary Duggan’s body was found. The store owner, a Pakistani, had also experienced a fire and had hit the robbery alarm to summon the fire department.

  Steve Patterson contacted his colleagues, including some from the Pillow Pyro Task Force, and said, “See? John Orr was in that store! It’s not fiction!”

  The task-force cops said, So what? There’re more Pakis running 7-Eleven stores than there are milking opium poppies in Islamabad. And half of them improperly use their robbery alarm at some time or another. So what?

  Steve Patterson asked, “What’s John Orr gotta do? Send us smoke signals? He’s telling us in his book what he did!”

  Cops on the task force would roll their eyes and snicker and barely keep their sneers under control. Ditto with others on Mike Matassa’s task force when Patterson called them for moral support and encouragement.

  The attitude said it all: Firemen. You can’t make cops out of firemen.

  Steve Patterson persuaded LASD’s Rich Edwards to request information from the coroner’s office, where John Orr had yet another former girlfriend. Patterson wanted to know if John had ever ordered any reports on Jane Doe #39, Mary Susan Duggan. The coroner’s employee remembered that some years prior, he’d asked for reports on a coroner’s case, but she had no memory of the name or what it was about.

  When Steve Patterson inquired of Burbank detectives whether or not there had been DNA found, he was told that in 1986 there was no DNA analysis. So-called genetic fingerprinting was unknown to American law enforcement at that time.

  “But since then,” Steve Patterson wanted to know, “has anyone DNA’d whatever was found?”

  He couldn’t get a direct answer. It was an old case.

  “Mary Duggan just seems forgotten,” Steve Patterson complained. “A girl my daughter’s age. Just forgotte
n.”

  What he did find out was that vaginal swabs taken back in 1986 had revealed a trace amount of semen on her legs and buttocks, indicating that the killer might have ejaculated prematurely. In Points of Origin, after the arsonist goes flaccid he sets an incendiary device. Moments from flaming ignition where he might be trapped, he achieves his erection but ejaculates prematurely.

  There was no stopping Steve Patterson then. He persuaded a Burbank detective to show him other evidence found in Mary Duggan’s car, like the tanker jacket that had covered her body.

  Steve Patterson asked the detective, “Has anyone checked the pockets?” And he was given one of those do-we-look-like-idiots? snorts of disgust.

  “Can I look in the pockets?” Patterson asked, and got a let’s-get-it-over-with, shrug.

  He found in one of the pockets a toothpick and a chocolate mint. “Nobody seems able to tell me much about the lab evidence,” Patterson said, “but isn’t this toothpick something that could be sent in for a DNA test?”

  The detective told Steve Patterson to put it back in the pocket and he’d check on it if he had time.

  When Patterson got back to his task-force mates and tried to point out the importance of the toothpick for DNA analysis, he was met with more glazed expressions. They pointed out that lots of guys carry toothpicks, but when people pick their teeth they throw the toothpick away. They don’t save it as a keepsake.