by Earl Emerson
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.”
G. A. fixed his hazel eyes on Finney, his bushy eyebrows lowering. “I don’t buy any of this.”
“I don’t know why not. You were already looking into it yourself.”
“Examined the possibility and dismissed it. These days all companies in the city are taking more alarms than when you and I signed on. It was only a matter of time before this started happening. That’s why we have mutual aid pacts with the outlying districts. Let me try to put this delicately, John. I know how hard you took Bill’s death. Sometimes transferring the blame to someone else tracks with reality. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking.”
Finney knew there was some truth to what G. A. was saying. He also knew that if he could prove the events of June 7 had been planned, G. A.’s official interpretation would look foolish, and the investigation would be reopened. It would mean G. A. had made a bad call. With a fire that big and a fire death involved, a department death, it would be embarrassing as hell. There was a good possibility it would ruin him.
“Here’s the deal, John. The department report, the Labor and Industries report, and the NFPA reports on Leary Way are all coming out any day now. Why don’t you sit tight and see what they have to say? This was a tragedy, but don’t try to link it up to the Kennedy assassination or Area Fifty-one.”
“Is that how I sound?”
“That’s exactly how you sound.” They were quiet for a moment. “Listen, I feel as bad about Bill as you. But we have to let it go.”
Oddly enough, G. A. Montgomery had been appointed chairman of the panel preparing the SFD report on Leary Way. Finney wasn’t convinced that putting the man who’d investigated the fire in charge of the panel investigating the department’s performance in extinguishing the fire was kosher, but apparently nobody else had any problem with it.
“You’re going to keep after this no matter what I say, aren’t you, John?”
“Absolutely.”
“I can tell you right now, when all is said and done, what you’re going to find is a series of coincidences.”
“Then you’ll be right and I’ll be wrong.”
As he turned to leave, G. A. said, “You still seeing that counselor the department set you up with?” Finney looked out the beanery windows at the corona the streetlights formed in the drizzle. “I’m just thinking you can use some help. Anybody in your p
osition could.”
“I quit her. She was a little too neurotic for my taste.”
“One last thing,” G. A. said. “Give me the address of that vacant house. I’ll look at it. I can do that much.”
It was nearly midnight when Finney picked up his ringing phone. “Seven Avenue South and South Holden Street,” said a gruff voice. It sounded as though the call was coming from a phone booth alongside a busy highway, and Finney had to struggle to put the blurred syllables into words. He noticed his caller had given the streets in the standard fire department lexicon, the avenue before the street so that the designators were next to each other, the number clean and without a suffix. “You know where that is?”
“Of course I do. What about it?”
“Meet me there tomorrow morning at zero six-thirty. It’s about Leary Way.”
“Who is this?”
“I can’t say anything over the phone. Zero six-thirty. Don’t bring anybody else.”
17. BLOWING UP GRACELAND
It was early when Finney rolled over in bed and peered out his window at a single light reflected off the inky lake. A heavy fog had moved in overnight, obscuring everything except the boat next door. Power lines buzzed. The weather report said the fog would burn off by noon and that the rest of the day would be clear and sunny, but Finney, a Northwest native, knew this kind of October mist could roost on Seattle indefinitely like a large, wet hen.
At twenty minutes past six, when he drove past Station 26, the rigs were in place behind the roll-up doors, everything dark except for a glow from the beanery lights. On A-shift, Peterson generally woke up a couple of hours before everybody else, rustling around in the beanery and whistling and just generally annoying the others who were still trying to sleep.
Finney drove eleven blocks past the firehouse and parked next to the river where Seventh and Holden merged with Riverside. He saw no pedestrians and no parked vehicles. What little traffic there was came and went in the fog with startling suddenness. After fifteen minutes, he began pacing the short chunk of Riverside Drive that paralleled the water.