Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [114]
“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 God, 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 damndest 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