Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [159]
Annie Sortland died in the burn ward a week after mistakenly naming Finney as her attacker.
Although dozens of people were treated for burns, heat exhaustion, smoke inhalation, and cuts from falling glass, the rest of the wedding group upstairs made it out safely. Two were already slated to publish books on their experience.
Though it was known that money had been funneled from Patterson Cole to finance the group of renegade firefighters, Cole was dead and his assistant missing, so nobody yet had the full story. Monahan and Tony Finney both maintained that the go-between for the money was G. A., and that he had, by his own account, dealt only with Norris Radford. Cole, desperate for cash to pay off his wife in their divorce settlement, knew he couldn’t sell off enough assets at fair market value in time, so he’d decided to get the cash in his own way.
When all was said and done, the fire department found an abandoned engine in the street in front of the Columbia Tower, an exact duplicate of Engine 10.
A day and a half after the fire, one of the building engineers, a man named Adolph Piacentini, drove his car across the Canadian border at Blaine, Washington, and, a few miles later, parked under some trees just off Highway 1 outside New Westminster, where he blew his brains out with a .357 revolver he’d smuggled illegally into the province. As was the case with some suicides, it had taken him two shots. He left no note, but his adult daughter said he had medical debts and had been especially troubled the past few weeks. Always safety conscious, he’d inserted ear plugs prior to the shooting.
“You expecting somebody?” Diana asked, turning her head casually toward the dock.
“What?”
“Those people coming down the gangway. Some woman. Your father. Looks like Smith, and I bet that other guy’s the senator who’s giving out the medals tonight.” Finney was already scrambling down the ladder to the lower deck. He’d called in with the excuse that he wasn’t well enough to attend the ceremony.
There were four of them: the personnel director for the city, a woman named Roetke; acting Seattle fire chief Smith; ex–battalion chief Gil Finney; and Senator Jon Stevenson, who was to present the awards at the Seattle Center in two hours. After they’d shaken hands all around—Finney remaining on the couch under a blanket—the senator said, “It’s a shame you’re not well enough to attend the ceremonies.”
“I pleaded with the doctors,” Finney lied.
“And you must be Diana Moore, the other firefighter I’ve heard so much about.”
“Yes, sir.”
A well-dressed, silver-tongued man in his sixties, the senator had spent most of his career in the state legislature before going to Washington, D.C. Neither Finney nor Diana bothered to correct his misimpressions of the Columbia Tower fire, of which there were many.
When they were ready to leave, Finney’s father approached the couch. “Both my sons are heroes. You went up and got those people. And Tony came forward and confessed. That probably took more guts than what you did.”
Once again, even though he was headed for prison, Tony had come out ahead in his father’s mind. It didn’t matter. People were screwed up. Finney smiled and said, “I love you, Dad.” His father nodded and stepped to the back of the room.
After everyone left, Finney and Diana went out onto the lower deck of the houseboat. The sun had sunk over the hill behind them, and a great shadow was quickly sweeping across the choppy waters. On the far shore, cars on the freeway sent the occasional sliver of reflected sunlight across the water.
After a while, Diana touched Finney on the cheek with the back of her hand. “Something bothering you?”
“A lot of things.”
“Me, too. But the farther we travel away from it, the smaller it gets.”
“Some philosopher say that?”
“Yeah. Me.” When he sat down, she straddled his lap, facing him. They kissed. After a few moments she said, “You coming back to the department?”
“I don’t know