Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [30]
Finney checked the run lists for the last shift he worked and found a striking increase in alarms throughout the city around the time of the Downtowner incident. A lot of them were false alarms, although there had been two fires going on and the Downtowner was genuine enough.
He went back to the night of Leary Way. In Seattle, taverns closed at two A.M., and between two and three on a Friday or Saturday night there would often be a marked increase in car accidents, stabbings, beatings, man-down calls, many of which required EMS responses from the fire department. But June 7 was a Tuesday, and the taverns didn’t have anything to do with the report of a natural gas leak at Sand Point at 0225 hours that tied up one chief, two engines, two truck companies, an aid car, and a medic unit for two and a half hours. Firefighters who’d been on that call told Finney they never found a gas leak. Nor did the taverns have anything to do with the report of smoke from a vacant house on Lake City Way that came in at 0237 hours. Nor the second house fire miles away in the 3900 block of South Othello Street, this also a vacant dwelling. The latter put virtually all of the Fifth Battalion out of service. A smoldering pier fire in West Seattle took the Seventh Battalion out of the picture. A brush fire at Fort Lawton tied up three more engine companies.
The calls were all either unsolved arsons or false alarms, yet there was no known arsonist working in Seattle during that period and the department’s activity sheets for the weeks before and after June 7 showed no abnormal flurries of activity and few arsons.
It was tempting to conclude that the alarms during both shifts were orchestrated rather than happenstance, that some unknown party or parties had engineered those fire calls so they would occur more or less at once. If so, the supposed object of that orchestration on June 7 would have presumably been to burn down Leary Way.
What discredited the theory was that, according to the department fire investigation team, Leary Way was caused accidentally by an electrical outlet in a storeroom in an area not far from where Finney and Bill Cordifis found themselves trapped. The head of Marshal 5, the department’s fire investigation unit, Captain G. A. Montgomery, even put a photo of the offending wall outlet in the department’s union newspaper, The Third Rail. For months the melted outlet sat atop his desk, a mute testament to his skills as a fire investigator.
Was the series of alarms that had occurred on June 7 and two days ago beyond the pale for their department, or did it happen once every few years? Finney began with January of that year, scanning the response records for other periods of abnormal activity. After several hours he became aware that the sun had come up, and he knew if he had any appointments that morning, he was going to miss them. By the time he’d finished, it was almost two in the afternoon; he’d pored over five years of records.
He found only one additional shift that fit the rough pattern—an extraordinary number of calls in a very short period of time, so many units out of service when new calls came in that units were responding to fires at the other end of the city. All three shifts had occurred in the past six months, the first just three weeks before Leary Way.
But it was the vacant house he’d found by the Duwamish River that troubled Finney more than anything. It fit in perfectly.
16. A CONSPIRACY OF VAST PROPORTIONS
It was after five o’clock and dark outside when Finney parked at a meter on Main Street and pushed his way through a light mist to Station 10. Inside, he skirted the watch office, where Bud Masterson was reading a newspaper, and went up the stairs to the mezzanine, where he found Robert Kub alone in the shadowy fire investigation office watching a Sonics game on a six-inch TV. The office was long and irregular, and the interior windows overlooked Station 10’s apparatus bay, like a news booth in a stadium.
Marshal 5, the fire department’s fire investigation