Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [79]
“Patterson Cole owned Leary Way. He also owns the building where I found the engine. That’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.”
“Patterson Cole owns property all over town. He owns vacant lots in Medina that the city’s been trying to get hold of for twenty years. He owns this place.”
“The Columbia Tower?”
“Bought it over a year ago. He has an entire floor on forty-two.”
“I knew about the office, but I didn’t realize he owned the building. I guess it stands to reason.”
Diana said, “An engine has to cost close to three hundred grand. Why would anybody invest that kind of money?”
“I can’t even guess what they’re planning to do with the engine. But they want to tie up the fire department bad. They want to get us running around until we’re so busy they can set fire to whatever they want and nobody will be there to stop it. They want a conflagration. You know as well as I do, once you get a block or two going, you get a firestorm—and nobody and nothing can stop one of those. They’re going to burn down something, and it’s going to be big. The phony engine was carrying a prefire for this place.”
“There are four or five thousand people here in the daytime,” Diana said. “Knock out the elevators, which the alarm system does automatically, and there are only two exits, both down narrow stairwells. One of those stairwells would be reserved for firefighting. Can you picture five thousand panicky people trying to get down the other one, walking forty or fifty stories probably in the dark?”
“This place will be full of smoke as soon as somebody opens a door onto the fire floor, which you know will happen.”
“We did a prefire here a few months ago,” Diana said. “The system has backups out the ying-yang. Television cameras. Sprinklers. Fire walls. Fire pumps to assist the department in raising water to the upper levels. It even has a water tank upstairs that holds thousands of gallons for fire suppression. This wouldn’t be like Leary Way, where they didn’t even have a night watchman. They’d be tangling with the best in technology here.”
“The First-Interstate Bank building in L.A. had the best in technology, too,” Finney said. “And that fire took rotating crews and four hundred firefighters to tap. Even so, it almost got away from them. Seattle’s only got two hundred firefighters on duty at a time.”
“So we’d start out with half as many people as needed, and the rest of the city wouldn’t have any coverage at all.”
“No. The Columbia Tower wouldn’t have any coverage at all.”
They both thought about that for a moment. She said, “I read something recently about this place, but I don’t remember what. It didn’t have anything to do with what we’re talking about though.”
He took her white-gloved hand as the band began playing again, and they danced. He couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of a fire in this building. Once in the stairs, anybody who was handicapped or elderly or infirm would be in serious trouble. Seattle’s aerial ladders might reach to the sixth or seventh floor, but no higher. They didn’t have air bags for people to jump onto, and even if they did, a seventy-story jump onto an air bag would be lethal.
40. THE MAKE-OUT ARTIST
It was after one A.M. when Finney spotted Charlie Reese and his wife entering together on the heels of several Supersonics still high from a squeaker at Key Arena: Sonics, 101; Utah Jazz, 100.
Chief Reese began working the room, shaking hands with firefighters, politicians, and anyone else who might be useful. His wife seemed a reluctant participant. Finney remembered having thought when he first met the two, eighteen years before, that they were a strange couple—Reese particularly handsome and she notably unattractive in a way that she had to work at, letting the hair on a mole on her chin grow an inch long, not shaving her legs, wearing ill-fitting, unflattering clothes. Finney noticed her once at the department picnic, where she sat alone all day, immersed in a romance novel. Charlie had alluded to the murky origins of their relationship during