Vertical Burn Part 25

"Don't ever regret telling the truth."

"Just because the fire was set doesn't mean it was a trap."

"That civilian the night of the fire said there were victims inside when he knew there weren't. Then somebody locked a door behind us. They killed Gary. You don't believe me, do you?"

"Gary died. It happens to a firefighter every week somewhere in this country. Maybe every day."

"What about our victims?"

"I heard Parkhurst talking before the service, and he said the man who told him about the victims hung around for about five minutes and then disappeared. Said he was probably one of those freaks who get off on lying to the fire department."

"They torch a building in our district when I'm on s.h.i.+ft. Get somebody to report trapped victims, so we're taking chances and going deeper than necessary. I practically handed Gary to those firefighters, and still he died inside the building. You've never believed any of this, have you?"

"I can't believe two firefighters would take Gary back inside."

"It was dark. Maybe they thought they had me me."

"That's just a little paranoid, isn't it?"

Finney took a deep breath. A raindrop the size of a marble fell out of the sky and struck him in the forehead. Another fell on Diana's shoulder. Clumps of mourners on the street began to disperse. Moments later the air was electric with the smell of rain. Finney said, "You don't believe anything I've said, do you?"

Diana swung her wide-s.p.a.ced gray eyes on him and brushed back a wisp of hair over her ear. A raindrop trickled down her cheek, or was it a tear? "It's not that black and white, John. Besides, it seems to me you're standing here imagining this is all about you, when Gary's the one who's dead."

55. THE OZARK.

Five hours after Gary Sadler's funeral, Finney's father answered his doorbell in West Seattle and found his son on the porch with a hot pizza and a six-pack of beer. Stepping inside, Finney deposited the cardboard pizza box on the kitchen table, while his father popped the top on one of the beer bottles; Finney put the rest in the refrigerator. "Where's Mom?"

"She's got her ceramics cla.s.s on Fridays. Take a seat. They got some great chopper shots of the fire. Interested?"

"Yeah."

A devoted film buff, his father had thousands of still pictures chronicling his family and career. At last count, he'd cataloged over six thousand videotapes, many of which lined the shelves of four large bookcases he'd built in the family room. He'd collected hundreds of feature films, plus any television doc.u.mentary involving World War II or firefighting or any other topic that caught his eye. He had one row devoted to real-life car chases and accident footage. When he played them, it became obvious he had all the crashes memorized.

As he led Finney into the family room, his father said, "Missed you at the funeral."

"I didn't see you either."

"We were in back, old Ralph Marston and me. Marston was one of Gary's instructors in drill school. He actually tried to get him fired. Said he was c.o.c.ky. Can you imagine?" This last said sarcastically. "It was funny. I saw Gary just the other day. Sure you don't want a slice of that pizza? It smells good."

Finney noticed his father had barely sipped the Heineken. "No, thanks."

"How'd you see Gary?"

"Oh, he dropped by. A lot of people are paying their last respects to the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d. It's kind of nice, really."

"Can we take a look at the tapes?"

"Sure."

Finney senior turned on the television and put the cartridge into the VCR, while Finney sat on the sofa, trying not to exacerbate the burns on his neck. His father dropped the remote in Finney's lap and sat heavily. They were both wounded warriors, though Finney's wounds would heal, most of them. "I thought this might give you a little perspective."

By the time news cameras reached the scene, firefighters were directing two-and-a-half-inch hose lines into the building from the parking lot. The interior was raging, but because they'd committed to an exterior attack, all they could do was wait for the flames to breach the walls; one of their primary missions would be to knock down floating embers before they ignited secondary fires up the hillside in the woods.

When Finney saw an injured firefighter being half dragged to the rear of a medic unit, it took a minute to realize that injured firefighter was him. He looked bigger than he thought he would. He also looked half-dead. It was a frightening piece of film.

What frightened him more than anything was his father's running monologue, which was basically a roll call of the faces they were seeing on the footage, his father calling out names with calm regularity as they appeared on the screen. Finney was unable to conjure up any names at all. He hoped this memory impairment was temporary but had been told there was a good chance, given the extent of his carbon monoxide absorption, that it wasn't. He didn't even remember much of what the doctors had told him, only that forty percent of severe cases such as his ended up with long-term memory problems.

They'd been watching the compiled news reports for almost thirty minutes when his father said, "I don't know where he gets off standing at the command post like that."

"Who?"

"Back it up. There he is. If I was B-One, I would have kicked him a.s.s over teakettle."

Finney backed the tape up and saw a man standing five feet from Chief Smith, the picture blurred and fuzzy. It was Oscar Stillman. It took another long moment to bring up the name and remember where he knew him from.

"I didn't realize they were friends," Finney said.

"They aren't. Not that I ever heard."

"Oscar Stillman." Finney remembered Stillman's kindness on the fire ground Tuesday morning, how Stillman had been one of the few people who'd spoken to him. He remembered being rude to Oscar, too. That was his inclination, he'd learned, to be rude to people who were kind when he was down. "What was Stillman doing at the fire? He's not on the call list for a multiple alarm. Now that I think about it, he was at Leary Way, too. I remember seeing him when we were changing bottles."

"I talked to Smith at the funeral. Oscar was the reason they switched from offensive to defensive. Oscar was the one who warned him about the LPG inside the Bowman Pork building. Of course, later on they found out he'd been mistaken. But what the h.e.l.l. Better safe than sorry."

"There was no LPG inside?"

"There was one tank outside. The fire never got close."

"You still have those tapes from Leary Way?"

"I put 'em all together on one master."

Finney stood up. "Where is it?"

"You want it now?"

"If that's all right."

The Leary Way footage seemed endless, and was just as painful to watch as it had been last summer. His father, who always came to life when playing a videotape of a fire, gave a running commentary, noting hose lays that had gone awry, rigs parked too close to the building, and naming just about everyone who came across the screen. In some ways his father was like a Little League coach, the entire fire department his team. They watched for forty minutes before Finney backed up the tape and manipulated the remote to freeze a frame on the screen. It was another shot of Oscar Stillman standing at the command post next to the incident commander. "Look," Finney said. "He's talking to Chief Smith again."

"You said you saw him."

"I didn't know he was at the command post."

"If he hadn't been there, we probably would have lost you. He knew that building from his inspection program. He's the one told Smith which side of that fire wall you guys were on. Otherwise they would have sent everybody to the wrong side. They wouldn't have found you. I heard about it when you were still in the hospital last summer."

"Everybody searched the west side of the fire wall at Leary Way."

"That's what I mean. Who do you think told Smith you guys were on the west side?"

"Dad, we were on the east side."

"You sure?"

"I've been back. I've traced the whole thing. They were all searching on the wrong side. And n.o.body found me. I was on my way to the exit when I b.u.mped into Reese and Kub. I've talked to everyone. They were the only team on that side."

"Don't that beat all? It goes to show sometimes a little information is worse than none at all."

"What it goes to show is that I've been in trouble at two fires, and for no discernible reason. Oscar Stillman was at the IC post dispensing information that could, if acted on, make things worse for me at both of them."

"I don't think he meant any harm."

"You don't think it's odd he was at both fires?"

"Does seem strange."

They sat back and watched the rest of the footage on Leary Way. When G. A. Montgomery showed up on the tape, Finney said, "You worked with G. A. What was he like?"

"Biggest p.u.s.s.y I ever worked with. George Armstrong? G.o.d, he hated combat. He worked at Thirty-four's when I was Battalion Two, and every time I said I was coming down to give them a drill, he'd have a b.l.o.o.d.y nose when I got there. People used to call him Captain Kotex. Said he should keep one up his nostril in case his period started again. I haven't thought about that in years."

"You think he might be crooked?"

"No way. I knew his uncle. Good people."

"What about Oscar Stillman?"

"Oscar used to ride Attack Ten in the days when they were getting a lot of fires. That boy could eat smoke. I swear he'd still be in operations if he hadn't hurt his back. He tried to get out on a disability, but they called it phantom back pain. Instead of handing him a pension, they ended up sticking him down at the Fire Marshal's office. For a while there, he was real bitter."

Finney got up and stood at the window of the family room looking down over the backyard. As children, they were never allowed to leave so much as a toy in the yard, but when he was ten he'd asked his father for permission to build a tree house in the apple tree behind the garage, and his father, for some reason, said yes. Finney worked on it alone for weeks, and then one overcast Sat.u.r.day afternoon while he hammered away, his father showed up and began helping. It had been uncharacteristic of him. His father worked with him all afternoon, and the memory of that day remained one of the brightest of Finney's childhood; he rarely visited home without checking to see if the faded boards of the tree house were still in place, always felt an inner warmth when he saw they were.

His father stood beside him at the window. "I ever tell you about the Ozark Hotel, John? The college basketball champions.h.i.+ps were on TV. I was on Ladder Four. We could see the column of black smoke from the station, and then we rolled up on it just as two jumpers. .h.i.t the sidewalk right smack in front of us. Smoke and flame coming out of everywhere. Every window had a head in it. Me and Samuelson, we got the thirty-five, and we put it up to the first person we came to. The guy jumped for the ladder before we even got it upright, almost knocked it out of our hands. He missed the ladder, of course, fell at our feet. Brains exploding all over our boots."

Finney knew the details by heart, but he let his father ramble, knowing the telling of it was somehow soothing to his father, perhaps in the same way that telling the tale of Leary Way would be therapeutic to him some day.

"They had transom windows above all the doors to the rooms, so the fire went down the hallways and burned through these simple-a.s.s windows and got into each of the rooms before the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds knew what hit them. We put up every G.o.dd.a.m.n ladder we had and then moved them as fast as we could. I never worked so hard in my life."

"The Ozark drill," Finney said. It had been a staple of ladder company evolutions in Seattle for years, a race to put up every ladder from the truck as quickly as humanly possible and then to move them from window to window even faster.

"When we put up the fifty-five, some old man started down before we could get the tormentor poles out. His weight made the ladder start to creep along the side of the building. Then a woman came out and climbed right over him. We thought they were both goners, but that ladder slid down the side of the building, and by G.o.d, the two of them rode it down without a scratch. When it was all over, we lined up twenty-one bodies under tarps in the alley."

As his father escorted him to the door, Finney found himself crying. It was the d.a.m.ndest thing; the tears wouldn't stop. "John, you know if I was hard on you boys, it was because I loved you. You know that, don't you?" His father had tears in his eyes, too.

"Of course I do. I love you, too."

"John, all I want from you after I'm gone is a kind word. Can you do that for me?" It was an old family joke, something John's grandfather had said.

"Don't worry, Dad. You'll get plenty of kind words."

56. SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY.

The less imposing of the two plainclothesmen and the one who did most of the questioning, Rosemont, was one of those people who, for whatever reason, made a habit of pretending to be smarter than he was. They were almost polar opposites, because his partner pretended to be dumber than he was.

It was Thursday, the sixth of November, and early that morning while surfing the Internet, Finney had found a business news article that said, "Due to concern among building occupants, Cole Properties has agreed to increase its insurance coverage on the Columbia Tower in Seattle to an amount commensurate with industry standards for a building of its size, this to take effect as of November 2. Morganchild Insurance has-" Et cetera, et cetera. The article convinced Finney to see the cops.

The police would have his testimony, his suspicions, a videotape of the Bowman Pork fire with Oscar Stillman loitering near the incident commander, and not much else. He explained that there was a cabal of conspirators intimately connected to the fire service whose goal was another major arson. That he suspected D-day was tomorrow, November 7, primarily because Monahan had been so sneaky about getting it off, that other than Monahan, he wasn't sure who was in the group but suspected the individuals on the list Cordifis's wife had found among his effects. He didn't mention that his own name had been on that list. He still didn't know why it was there.

He knew this group had built a fire engine worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars, that they killed Gary Sadler, that they were probably responsible for Leary Way. What he hadn't known until this morning was the upcoming target; and now that the insurance coverage on the Columbia Tower had been raised, he thought he knew why the prefire book for the Columbia Tower had been in the copycat fire apparatus.

The second plainclothesman, Freeman, a big man with a flat nose and a prominent jaw that had a blue, stubbled look, took notes. He looked like an old-time cop, a strong contrast to Rosemont, who seemed almost prissy, a college professor type-eighteenth-century French poetry.

Rosemont had short, greasy hair that he parted meticulously down one side and small, manicured hands he waved in front of his face as he spoke. "Okay," he said. "You think there's going to be a fire tomorrow. Let's hear your reasoning again."

It had been three days since Gary Sadler's death, and at times he still felt as if his head were spinning. He had to think through his sentences painstakingly before he uttered them, because he had a tendency to jumble the order of the words. "I told you. The Columbia Tower was underinsured. Now it's fully insured."

"My house is fully insured," said Rosemont. "That doesn't mean I'm going to burn it down."

"Leary Way was some kind of practice run."

"I read in the paper that Leary Way thing was an accident. You can prove it wasn't?"

"Not so it would hold up in court."

"But you think Patterson Cole is trying to convert the Columbia Tower into cash?"

Finney nodded.

"He'd have to be awful desperate."

"He's getting divorced. And he's a skinflint. My guess is his wife is taking him to the cleaners and he doesn't have the ready cash to buy her off. He gets a large insurance settlement, he'll have the cash."

Freeman swiveled his dark eyes onto Finney and said, "Look, we're trying to keep this on a friendly basis, but when a firefighter comes in saying he knows there's going to be an arson at a specific place on a specific date, we get a little worried. Why don't you read back your notes, Stu?"

"The Columbia Tower. Oscar Stillman, Gerald Monahan, G. A. Montgomery, and Marion Balitnikoff. He any relation to the football player?"

"I don't know."

"G.o.d, he could hit. You ever see him play?"

"A few times." He'd been one of his father's favorites, his father, who always admired the toughest players on the field. Finney was not planning to mention his own surname had been on the list, or that he had a brother in the department, or a father who'd retired just weeks after Leary Way. He didn't mention Kub either. There had been a question mark after Kub's name.

"Why didn't you take this to your fire investigation unit?" Rosemont asked.

"Politics."

Rosemont gave Freeman a dubious look, not his first.