Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Cabral's District Attorney's Arson Task Force, as it was called, had officially been up and running since February 1992. Cabral had set it up in a conference room on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts building but eventually was given space in the Hall of Justice, the old court and jail facility that was soon to be shut down permanently. Most Americans had seen that ancient block of granite in films and TV shows. Nothing in Los Angeles looked so foreboding and grim. It had housed many notorious criminals, including Charles Manson and his followers.

  Cabral's task-force "headquarters" was a room barely large enough for a conference table and six chairs. There was one phone, a few maps on the wall, and boxes full of evidence and reports, including ten thousand photos and more than one hundred thousand pages of discovery that would be provided to the defense if the task force could get a case together.

  Cabral's investigators were Walt Scheuerell, a sergeant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Arson/ Explosives Detail; Rich Edwards, the deputy sheriff who'd monitored the Teletrac at the Warner Brothers Studios fire; Tom Campuzano, the L. A. Fire Department arson investigator who'd also worked with the Pillow Pyro Task Force; and Bill Donley and Chris Loop, of the Glendale Police Department. A short while after the task force was formed, they were joined by Steve Patterson, the arson investigator from the Burbank Fire Department who had called John Orr for assistance with the Warner Brothers fire.

  Everyone except Cabral wore very casual clothes: polo shirts, T-shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes. This task force was not working under the same pressure as the last one, since their quarry was in prison and no longer a danger to the public, but they had other pressures. If they were going to go to trial they had to stay ahead of the statute of limitations that was running out on the Kennington, Hilldale, and San Augustine fires. Ole's Home Center-if indeed they could ever prove it was an arson-posed no time problem, since there is no statute of limitations on murder.

  After John Orr's conviction in Fresno and his guilty plea, Mike Matassa had phoned Mike Cabral to kid him by saying, "We served you a softball, now hit it over the fence."

  But Cabral knew that this softball was a dancing knuckler that maybe nobody could hit, particularly in regard to the Ole's "accidental" fire, where the insurance companies had shelled out four million dollars to the families of victims and their lawyers. It was a wound that nobody was eager to reopen, including the L. A.

  County Sheriffs Department, which had called it an accident and was now facing inquiries from its own people, Scheuerell and Edwards, who were trying to prove it was not.

  From the beginning there was a feeling of competition between this task force, who'd felt nearly excluded on the periphery at John Orr's arrest, and the Pillow Pyro gang. And Cabral confessed to having been upset with the U. S. attorneys who'd allowed John Orr to plea bargain on the L. A. arson series. He thought that guilty verdicts on most or all of those would have been enormously important with his own attempts to convict solely on circumstantial evidence and modus operandi. But after Cabral had heard from the U. S. Attorney's Office that a concurrent sentence was probably in the cards whether or not they'd gone to trial, Cabral called their decision "justifiable."

  And when John Orr and his lawyer chose the Builder's Emporium arson attempt for the plea bargain-a fire where a "signature" incendiary device had been found, a hardware store that was exactly like Ole's-Deputy District Attorney Mike Cabral was more than content with the plea bargain.

  "They pled right into my case," he said of John Orr and his lawyer. "Right into the Ole's fire. And it'll burn them."

  There was an inescapable fact confronting the District Attorney's Arson Task Force. They were not looking at months of work, they were looking at years of work. The Ole's fire alone presented staggering problems. Ole's corporation had been bought out by another hardware retailer and that one was no longer in business either. Finding all of the former-employee witnesses was nearly impossible.

  Trying to legally reconstruct Ole's was daunting. The building that had housed Ole's Home Center had formerly been a Thrifty Drug Store that had shared the space with a food market. Escrow information didn't even exist anymore, but they had to secure blueprints from the original building as well as from the major remodeling for the drugstore chain, especially concerning work that had been done when they'd installed a dropped, T-bar ceiling. That meant that they must find the people who'd actually done the work.

  Mike Cabral had to thoroughly study this attic in order to prove that a fire originally called an "undetermined fire" probably originating from faulty wiring in the attic could not have happened that way. The task force had to demonstrate that the Ole's conflagration, which had moved so fast that people could not outrun it, was not consistent with any sort of attic fire that had dropped smoldering material down into the main store.

  One of the less arduous jobs, but still enough to keep an investigative team busy for a year or so, was the need to look at incidents of brush fires, potato-chip fires, and arson fires in retail establishments during business hours over the ten-year period preceding John Orr's arrest. They found only seventy-eight in retail stores in all of California, and they believed that most of those had been set by John Orr.

  Of the brush fires, they determined that in the foothill communities of Glendale, Pasadena, and La Crescenta-as well as portions of Los Angeles near John Orr's home-there had been hundreds during the period they were studying. Rich Edwards had personally done some work on those arsons before John Orr's arrest, and at one point had been trying to put together a kind of arson task force called "Firestorm." He'd had the idea to install pole cameras to see if he could get photos of the areas where the fires occurred repeatedly, hoping to snap a photo of a suspect.

  Edwards recalled that while his first pole camera was being installed, Captain John Orr just happened to be cruising by and spoke with the deputy sheriff who was monitoring the installation. There were no more fires in that area, but multiple fires broke out on the same day in other canyon locations where there were no cameras.

  Mike Cabral's task force came to believe that John Orr was responsible for the vast majority of all the arsons they were studying, and by way of unverifiable proof, they pointed to the astounding statistic that showed a 90 percent drop in brush-fire activity since his arrest. In the county foothill area, brush fires had averaged sixty-seven a year clear back to 1981. After his arrest the average had dropped to one per year.

  For the career law-enforcement people on the task force, like LASD's Scheuerell and Edwards, their next assignment was an eye-opener. Mike Cabral instructed them to interview all of the Glendale firefighters who'd worked with John Orr at any time in their careers. The lawmen reported that they'd had no idea how close and insulated was this fire-fighting band of brothers.

  They set up interview teams and divided the workload into groups. Rich Edwards found the experience fascinating, especially the emotional swings in the men he interviewed. It varied, he said, from those who offered complete cooperation to the others still in denial that their former colleague could have committed the offenses for which he'd been convicted.

  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 convince
d 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

  MARY DUGGAN

  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-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. S
he broke off the romance because during one of their love-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-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.