Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [107]
“I don’t think so. Tomorrow’s day six.”
“You don’t know that for certain.”
“Tell you what, Scott. When you contract this, you take a chance on which day you’re on.”
“You’re right. Sorry. Forget I even said that. Jesus. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I set up a press conference for ten o’clock the next morning outside the fire station.
Soon after my decision, Achara took her briefcase and notes and walked the two blocks to the North Bend branch of the King County Library; she said she was looking for a place to spread out her notes and work. Donovan climbed into his Suburban and drove off without telling us where he was headed.
Stephanie and I dropped the girls off with Morgan at my house, exchanging tearful kisses with both. Morgan, who’d been all but unreachable for almost two days, was suddenly eager to baby-sit.
The most frustrating task that afternoon was locating firefighters from the Chattanooga Fire Department willing to speak candidly. Already one firefighter was being sued by one of the litigants for speaking out in public, and just about everyone and their mother had been subpoenaed to the trial.
Once again, I found myself in a long, rambling conversation with Charlie Drago, who now filled me in on the LPG disaster that happened two weeks after Southeast Travelers, the explosion he’d forgotten to tell me about during our first conversations. The fact that he’d forgotten to mention it the first time around spoke volumes about his mental acuity.
He also said there’d been a fire in his garage shortly after he began looking into the syndrome, blamed it on powerful unnamed forces, said he’d been followed by men in black for weeks, that his phone had been tapped, that they might be listening to us that very minute. The more we spoke, the more I realized Charlie was a full-blown paranoiac.
“You gotta listen to me,” Drago said. “Whatever anybody tells you about that LPG incident, it was not an accident. It was a trap. You know who responded? The same group of guys went to Travelers. It was only luck it didn’t kill more than the six of them and the two civilians. You wipe out half a battalion and you suddenly no longer have anyone who cares about Southeast Travelers. Specifically, you wipe out the guys who responded to Southeast, and you got no one left to come down with this syndrome and start suing. That was the plan all along.”
“Carl Steding told me the same thing. That it was a trap. Or at least that’s what he hinted.”
“Trouble is, we’re practically the only two people in town who think that.”
“Wasn’t the LPG incident ruled accidental?”
“Sure it was. That’s what they wanted.”
“That’s what who wanted?”
“The people who lit up my garage.”
“And who were they?”
“Whoever stands to lose their pants over Southeast Travelers. It could be any one of thirty corporations. Or their investors. Thousands of investors. In fact, investors are usually the worst. I should know. I was an investor once.”
Toward evening a battalion chief from Chattanooga named Frost called in response to messages I’d left. He told me I could cheerfully disregard anything Charlie told me, that Charlie had been spouting nonsense about Southeast Travelers for so long, nobody listened to him anymore. When I mentioned Charlie’s garage fire and his thoughts on the LPG truck accident, Chief Frost said, “Charlie started it hisself, left a sack of hot ashes from his woodstove too close to a wall. And that LPG truck driver? He reached over to change the radio station, got a bee in his briefs, whatever. Nobody but Charlie and some asshole works over at the paper ever thought there was anything odd about it.
“The tank itself must have ruptured with the crash, which would have weakened the double-wall construction. Burned real hot. We went in like we’re taught, hard and aggressive, two teams on two hose lines, each spray pattern protecting the team behind it, but the tank blew before we got it cooled. The explosion was unbelievable. Hey. Out of those eight guys,