Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [82]
“Yeah.”
“Why the hell’d you do that?”
“I was trying to understand.”
“Jesus H. I was thinking about asking you if I could stay the night, but maybe I should crawl into a cab. This is spooky.”
41. EMILY CORDIFIS
It was a modest little house in Wedgwood, a quiet neighborhood north of the University of Washington. Erected on a small hillock in a neighborhood of identical houses on similar hillocks, it consisted of a tiny living room, a tinier kitchen, two small bedrooms, and a single bath. Finney had been here so many times he knew where the girls had buried their pet turtles in the backyard.
Bill Cordifis and his bride had purchased the home the year after he’d joined the fire department, which meant they had been there thirty-five years at the time of Bill’s death. The thought precipitated a sudden picture of Bill Cordifis’s charred body, his arms stumps, the fat on his torso boiled off, his face blackened to the bone, Nomex bunking coat burned as brittle as tissue paper. Finney hated that these images of Bill’s last few minutes ambushed him everywhere: in line at the grocery store, driving on the freeway, dancing last night with Diana.
“Hello?” Emily Cordifis gazed at him like a wobbly animal that had been grazed by a car, her elegant outline blurred by the screen door. “Oh, it’s you, John. I guess I forgot you were coming. I’ve been cleaning.”
“May I come in?”
“Of course.” She unlatched the screen door and swung it open. “I don’t know where my manners are. You’ve read the report, you said?”
“I’ve read it.”
“Good. I’d like to hear your thoughts.”
She led him around the corner into the small kitchen. He set the report on the table. “Coffee?” she asked.
“Thank you, but no.”
The phone rang and she spoke over her shoulder as she moved toward it. “Have a seat. This won’t take a minute.”
Finney sat at the chrome-and-Formica kitchen table, the pale light from the window cascading in over his shoulder. The house had always been filled with the smell of coffee and nicotine, though now that Bill was gone, the odor of cigarettes had faded.
Hanging up the phone, Emily Cordifis turned to him and said, “Sure you won’t have some coffee?”
“Okay. It smells wonderful.”
Emily wore a simple black pullover and trousers that ended at mid-calf. She filled two cups and sat across from Finney, folding her hands on the tabletop. The afternoon light from the window emphasized the lines in her face.
“G. A. has been good about this. I know Bill had high regard for him. He’s answered all my questions and been patient, but for some reason I still can’t grasp what happened. Bill went here. Bill did this. I hear the words, but I can’t see the picture.”
She was lucky, Finney thought; he could see the picture.
“The bottom line is I’m to blame. I tried to get him out. I failed.”
“But you had a broken shoulder.”
“Collarbone. Doesn’t matter. I should have saved him.”
Her unblinking eyes stared at him. He could tell she was determined to be the best listener she could be, and that she’d vowed not to cry. He could tell she didn’t blame him. It was the immediate and unquestioning nature of her unspoken blessing that made it worthless to him. She gave it not as if she’d carefully considered all the opposing arguments and come down on his side, but as if she had no choice.
“To understand what happened at Leary Way, you need to understand how Seattle fights fires. You probably know most of this already, but I’ll start at the beginning.”
He told her that less than ten years earlier the department had adopted an incident command system that had been and still was in widespread use across the country. The idea was that no matter what the emergency, large or small, the structure of command for handling it would be the same. Instead of having everyone on the fire ground swamp the IC with information, division and sector commanders would be appointed so no one person had more than seven people reporting to him, optimally no more than five. The incident commander would label himself so