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By Root 1343 0

years, his reluctance stemming from family dynamics. His father had started browbeating him about becoming an officer the minute he entered the department, and falling into a lifelong pattern, Finney automatically resisted. At thirty-nine he finally saw his extended adolescent rebellion for what it was and realized that his refusal to accede to his father was keeping him from doing the very thing he wanted. Once he’d decided, it was a simple matter to follow through with the requisite studying. Coming out first on the list hadn’t been difficult. The difficulty had been the initial resolve. After Leary Way he went through a period where he regretted having taken the test, wanting to keep as low a profile as possible. But his attitude was slowly shifting, and he now saw making lieutenant as partial redemption.

While Sadler and Monahan were across the street inspecting buildings, Finney waited alone in the rig parked on Riverside Drive, the Duwamish Waterway a stone’s throw to his right. Somewhere nearby a metal grinder shrieked. It was a sad neighborhood, Finney thought. After World War II these lazy streets had been taken over by industry and commerce, children and families chased away by the screech of trucks and the thump of heavy machinery. Before the war it had been a community of Italian truck farmers, some of whom still resided in tiny houses dwarfed by tall warehouse walls. It seemed to Finney that everywhere he looked, industry, commerce, and the need for a profit were overtaking humanity.

With nothing else to occupy his time, Finney picked up his portable radio and made a circuit of a two-story vacant house just this side of the waterway. Wind, time, and dust had abraded most of the paint from the outer walls and the boarded-over windows. Long-neglected azaleas and rhododendrons still thrived in the yard. A sepia swoosh marked the front porch, where it looked as if the boards had recently been swept clean of the neighborhood grit. Finney wondered who’d been here.

Stepping past an old wringer washer on the slanted back porch, he found the door had been forced recently. His small yellow department-issue flashlight in one hand, portable radio in the other, he stepped inside.

The house was at least a hundred years old, its wood floors scarred from generations of shoes. Mold and the smell of old apples permeated the rooms. The only piece of furniture on the main floor, a couch in the sitting room, was cancerous with black industrial grime that had infiltrated the structure. To the left of the front door a set of stairs led to the second floor, where Finney found three small bedrooms and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. One bedroom was almost bare, but the others were cluttered with empty Corn Flakes boxes, Pepto-Bismol bottles, crushed Pepsi cans, prescription containers, crumpled newspapers, and filthy bedding. A vagrant must have set up camp here years ago and left after the disorder defeated him.

Throughout the house the grimy floors were dappled with fresh boot prints. Somebody had been here recently. Not a lot had been disturbed, but it was all to one purpose, and Finney gleaned that purpose quickly.

Outside in the sunshine Lieutenant Sadler and Monahan showed up at the apparatus just as Finney did.

“Come on,” said Sadler. “We gotta get you back so you can see the chief.”

“This place needs to be on the dangerous buildings list,” Finney said.

Sadler put his clipboard and Notice of Violation pad inside the rig. “You went inside?”

“Somebody’s got it all set to burn.”

“This old wreck?” said Monahan dubiously. “Who would bother?”

“I don’t know, but the wallboard is kicked out around the stairs. There are combustibles stacked in all the right places. It’s balloon construction, too, so the walls don’t have any fire stops in them.”

“Heck,” said Monahan. “Half the places around here are like that. How about that double-wide trailer down the street? We going to put everything on the list?”

“We should put this on it. I’ll fill out the form when we get back.”

“Don’t bother,” said Monahan. “I’ve got a building