Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [33]
“Seems strange to me that of all the occupancies in the city, you walked into one that was ready to be torched. You’re sure it’s set to burn?” G. A. asked. “That house you saw?”
“Absolutely.”
“Not just some kids playing around?”
“It was a professional setup.”
“You’ve seen professional setups before?”
“Not before they were lit. But this looked professional.”
“Convince me. Not of the setup, but the whole thing.”
“If you wanted to cause a lot of distraction for the fire department and you had limited manpower, you’d prepare in advance. I’m guessing there are other buildings ready to burn. I’m betting somebody can drive quickly from one to the other and with a Zippo lighter divert most of our manpower from the real target.”
“And what would that be? The real target.”
“All I know is that on June seventh it was Leary Way.”
“So what you’re talking about is a conspiracy,” said Kub, “a conspiracy of relatively vast proportions.”
G. A. scratched under his armpit. “It’s just a little far-fetched, isn’t it?”
“That’s the beauty of it. It’s totally outrageous. If I was doing this, I would figure no one was ever going to catch me.”
“There’s one big problem here, John. In order for your theory to hold up, Leary Way would have had to be arson.”
“It was arson.” Finney could see G. A.’s face begin to turn red. “I think you made a mistake.”
G. A.’s face took on more and more color.
“I investigated it myself,” G. A. said. “For days I worked that place with a camera and a shovel and a team of firefighters to help me. I took it apart a layer at a time. It was accidental. Everyone knows it was. Much as you want someone else to take the rap for your captain’s death, you have to accept the fact that the fire was not set.”
“This is going to happen again,” Finney said, “and when it does, everyone will know I’m right. This is too much of a pattern to be accidental. I’m not just talking about one arsonist setting a fire and running off into the night. I’m talking about a bunch of people working together to take the punch out of the department at exactly the right point in time, take most everybody out of service, then light up their target. It’s like setting a fire in a city that doesn’t have a fire department. Hell, they could burn down anything they wanted.”
Kub palmed his shorn scalp. Popping a fresh stick of gum into his mouth, he glanced at Finney without moving his head from G. A. and said, “To my way of thinking, John’s got a point about those alarms. Where did they come from?”
The room was silent for fifteen seconds. Finally G. A. pushed a pile of computer paper that had been sitting beside him across the table. “Take a look.”
Kub riffled through the half-inch stack and said, “These are run sheets from two days ago on C-shift. The stuff John is talking about. You’ve already been looking into this?”
“Similar situation to June seventh,” G. A. said. “A bunch of bad calls at the same time as a couple of full responses. We were shorthanded. It’s the damndest coincidence.”
Finney said, “No way it’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Call it murder.”
“Let’s not go off the deep end here. He was a friend of mine, too. But it was an accidental fire. Accidental.”
“Explain those alarms.”
“I can’t, but I can’t explain the aurora borealis either. I can’t explain how the butterflies make it back to Monterey every year. That doesn’t mean somebody’s deliberately doing this. There’s no way to connect Leary Way with any of this other, and you know it. And as far as connecting the dots to that vacant house . . . that’s a leap even Michael Jordan couldn’t make. You guys were shorthanded at Leary Way. You went in too deep with a very nice old man who should have retired years ago. It’s the kind of shit that happens when you stay in this job too long. Don’t try to make it into something it’s not.”
“Okay,” Kub said. “Let’s just say these incidents were choreographed. What would be the purpose? Somebody wanted to burn down