Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [86]
Finney came here only at night and found it looked sinister in a way that the actual fire in June had not. He rolled to a stop in a cul-de-sac, parking the old pale green pickup on the north edge of the ruins, where Engine 35 had parked that night. Over the summer, a fast-growing thicket of blackberries had woven their way into the fencing and formed a screen that obscured his parking spot from motorists.
Finney stepped into his fire department coveralls, put on a pair of Ranger Firemaster rubber boots he’d worn for years on Ladder 1, a helmet with a lamp on the front that he’d bought at Safety and Supply, and made his way through a wing in the Cyclone fencing into the labyrinth. Twenty feet inside the fence, he lifted a set of charred planks and removed a D-handle shovel and a long, steel bar. He put on a pair of work gloves and carried the tools along a well-trod path in the rubble.
He entered from the north and walked through the remains of the first three rooms, heaps of bricks, mortar, and broken boards forming irregular igloos of trash.
The crew of Engine 35 had reported the hottest part of the fire had been in the room Finney was now working in, sixty to eighty feet inside the northwest doorway. Wind had blown the flames through the complex, and then, later, through the high windows into the adjoining warehouse.
Finney scrutinized the area at his feet in the dim light from his helmet and began shoveling. A week ago he’d worked until almost three in the morning, had cleared three-quarters of the room.
Tonight he scooped up the rest, using the bar to lever out the larger chunks. Finney turned his handheld flashlight on and began searching for burn patterns on the floor. Pawing through the pile behind him, he thought he detected the faint aroma of gasoline on two boards. Oddly, when gasoline was used as an accelerant, the odor oftentimes remained long after the structure burned, especially if it had seeped into cracks in the floor or woodwork. Had they used dogs during the initial investigation, they might have found this, but G. A. Montgomery had nixed the idea of using another agency’s accelerant-sniffing dogs—Seattle had none of its own.
It was the second time he’d found the odor of gasoline. Last month he’d detected it in a room adjoining this one. It was possible the gas had been in a container that melted in the heat, that the odor had been produced after the fire started, not before, but Finney didn’t think so. Still, his findings would never hold up in a court.
G. A. would say Finney had spilled the gas himself.
Minutes later Finney found himself in the room where Bill Cordifis died. The room had been scoured down to the floor. Anything he wanted to learn from it was either in the official report or in the sixteen-foot-high debris pile they’d built alongside it, and he’d already sifted through that piece by piece. In the process he had moved it thirty feet to one side. It had taken over a month, and he’d found dozens of artifacts, including the melted remains of a drum set, a wristwatch, parts from an electric guitar, components from a sound system, and one heat-congealed condom still in its foil wrapper.
He’d been here many times since June. He knew it was a fluke the wall had trapped Bill instead of him. He also knew that had their fates been reversed, Bill wouldn’t have had the strength to chop through the wall, that the two of them would have died here together. He looked down. His hands were trembling.
Until Leary Way he’d never been afraid of death. He’d always thought of it as an event somewhere in the distant future, an event he didn’t need to contemplate. These days, he pondered death constantly. Bill’s death. His father’s death. His mother’s. The deaths of everyone he knew or had known or ever would know. It wasn’t healthy, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.
What made this gloomy meditation so ruinous was that Finney had also discovered he no longer believed in God. Heaven, he now surmised, was a human invention to alleviate the universal