Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [88]
But the corridor to the left had had a steel gate across it. Finney knew that, because he’d run up against the gate himself on his way out. Others had spoken of it during the cleanup. Finney had seen the gate in a stack of debris in the parking lot, but he’d never examined it.
It was dark now, cooler, visibility down to a quarter mile. A boat horn sounded off in the Lake Washington Ship Canal. The cold fog penetrated his clothing.
It took twenty-five minutes to free the wrought-iron gate and drag it clear. On the left side were heavy hinges; on the right a latch and a locking throw bolt that had been cut through, probably with a circular saw. Had it been sawn through before or during the fire, the newly sliced end would have been discolored by heat and smoke. But it hadn’t been cut during the fire—it was shiny.
During the fire it had been locked.
Which meant the only avenue Reese and Kub could possibly have explored was the corridor Finney had come down.
They must have gone past the chirping PASS device and the exit hole he’d chopped. How long could they have lasted that deep in the building? It was possible they’d passed the device, each thinking the chirping was coming from his partner’s PASS. One of the troubles with the PASS was that it gave off so many false alarms, people didn’t pay attention. In any large group of working firefighters at least one of their devices was sure to be sounding off, which was the primary reason so many people broke the rules and didn’t switch them on at all.
It was thoroughly dark when Finney hid his tools. He was opening the pickup’s door when he spotted a young woman in blue jeans and a yellow raincoat stealthily threading a bouquet of asters through the Cyclone fence. “Oh,” she said, startled.
“I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m with the fire department.”
“These flowers—it’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“Are you . . . ?”
“Just doing some work.”
“I was here that night visiting my friend up the hill. The guy who died? I heard he got all burned?”
Finney nodded.
“Was he a pretty nice guy?”
“About the most decent human being I’ve ever known.”
“Wow.”
44. THE CREAKING OF CEDAR LOGS
When he sat down to examine the papers Emily Cordifis had given him, Finney heard the subtle creaking of the cedar logs under the floorboards, evidence that a large craft had plied the east side of the lake while he was in the shower.
Visiting Leary Way was invariably an ugly booster shot to the melancholy and sorrow he’d been nursing since June, and it was worse coming on top of his visit to Emily. He wouldn’t eat anything tonight and would be lucky to sleep. Hell, he didn’t need food or sleep. What he needed was absolution.
Purring, Dimitri jumped up on the recliner as Finney spilled the contents of Emily’s envelope into his lap. Finney saw his own phone number on the back of a receipt for a pair of hunting boots. Bill wasn’t in the habit of memorizing phone numbers. He knew Bill jotted messages to himself on just about anything that came to hand. Finney knew of one occasion when there was so much scribbling on the back of his paycheck that the bank refused to accept it. For a couple of weeks in May, Bill had been coming over to help on the remodeling of the houseboat, but he couldn’t recall the last time they’d spoken on the phone.
He found an outline of a battalion-wide drill Bill had been organizing, a simulated mass-casualty bus accident in the Metro bus tunnel deep under Seattle’s downtown streets. Teenagers from the SFD’s cadet program had been slated to wear moulages and pretend to be injured. It was heartbreaking to see Bill’s diligently prepared notes for a drill that never took place, the names and phone numbers of all the people he’d never called back.
On a piece of junk mail Finney found a large four-digit number scrawled across the top, along with a series of what appeared to be phone numbers down the right side. Six names, a phone number alongside each of the first three:
Montgomery
Balitnikoff
Monahan
Stillman