Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [106]
It was that type of focus that worried Monahan. In fact, it was Jerry who’d paid some drunk he’d found at a bar out on Pacific Highway South to make the phone call about Riverside Drive. G. A. had done his part, too, although by rights he should have arrested Finney a week ago. Had he been in the slammer, last night wouldn’t have been necessary.
Finney’s discovery of the engine had made all this inevitable. And of course, he never would have looked for the engine if that idiot Paul hadn’t tried to run him down in it. Nobody had okayed that. He’d done it on his own. It didn’t matter now. Dead or alive Finney would no longer be the loose cannon. Jailing him would erode his credibility.
By now everybody knew Finney thought he’d spoken to two firefighters inside the Bowman Pork building, even though nobody else had been in that part of the building. They’d heard about his screaming, too. Everybody’d heard about his screaming.
Just after four o’clock word percolated through the ranks that the search teams had located a body. Blind luck, Oscar thought, having privately figured it would take three or four days to ferret out the corpse from under those massive chunks of concrete and ceiling beams.
The state investigators, along with a federal team from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, spent almost an hour excavating the area and snapping pictures of the corpse. During the wait small bits of trivia were passed down the line like buckets of water along a fire brigade: his body was unrecognizable; both hands were burned off; he’d been found under a piece of machinery; the gold in his teeth had melted out of his head and had wrapped around his skull like strands of a spiderweb. A second PASS device had been found several feet from Sadler. ATF quickly identified this as the missing PASS from Finney’s backpack. It was easy for those with no imagination to guess what had happened. Sadler had gotten into trouble and Finney had left his PASS with him and gone for help, just as he had with Cordifis. Of course, that didn’t match anything Finney said. Oscar knew it didn’t match what happened either.
Oscar smiled. It almost didn’t matter that Paul and Michael Lazenby hadn’t been able to kill him last night. Anything Finney said now would be discredited before it was out of his mouth.
52. PARANOIA IN BED
At seven-thirty that evening Diana put John into bed, then took a shower and changed into fresh clothing she’d brought in her gym bag. All day she’d been posing as nurse and nanny. The doctors had told her to call if he showed signs of irrational behavior, ischemic attacks, a loss of consciousness, or anything else that wasn’t normal. They were clearly scared to death that he was going to collapse outside their care.
When someone was exposed to smoke, the carbon monoxide in the smoke bonded with the hemoglobin at a rate two hundred times faster than oxygen did, displacing oxygen in the heart, lungs, vital organs, and brain. To make matters worse, the half-life for CO in the blood was five to six hours, which meant concentrations took a long time to dissipate.
The carbon monoxide in Finney’s blood had been measured at a level that could easily have proven fatal. Several hours in the hyperbaric chamber on one hundred percent oxygen had brought it down, but the doctors were still worried.
Against medical advice, John had found some scrubs to wear, signed the release form, and walked out of the hospital into the cool morning air as if he actually knew where he was headed. Outside the hospital, where Diana caught up with him, he looked disoriented and helpless.
“You know where you are?” Diana asked.
“I guess I don’t.”
“Let me drive you home.”
“They find Gary?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s go there.”
“Come on. I’ll show you where my Jeep is.”
Diana knew smoke inhalation produced various side