Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [89]
Kub?
Finney?
Staring at the tall digits at the top of the page he knew he was looking at the street number of the Leary Way complex—4400. There was no street name, just the number, the digits highlighted and underlined, adorned with curlicues and squiggles as if Bill had stared at and played with them for a good long while.
Flipping the page over, Finney saw that it was a solicitation from a refinancing lender in Reno, Nevada, the envelope postmarked June 3. Leary Way had occurred on the morning of June 9. They’d been at work all day on the eighth, so he’d probably opened the mail and used it for scratch paper on the seventh.
Montgomery, Balitnikoff, Monahan, Kub, Finney. Cordifis had hunted and fished every year with Montgomery and Balitnikoff. He’d known Jerry Monahan before they got into the department during a phase when he and Emily had entertained the notion of joining the Church of Latter-Day Saints; and they had been firefighters together twenty-five years earlier on a now-defunct Engine 19. There was no telling how well Bill had known Kub.
There were three Finneys in the department. Finney’s father worked with Cordifis when they were both lieutenants together at Station 18 in the heart of Ballard—Bill on Ladder 8, Gil Finney on Engine 18. Bill had been one of Tony’s instructors when Tony came through drill school. And, of course, John had worked with him eighteen years on Ladder 1.
Had Bill Cordifis known there was going to be a fire on Leary Way? Why else would he have written down the address? Or had the number on the paper been a coincidence? If so, it was a hell of a coincidence. And what connection did the six names have to the Leary Way address?
Finney was asleep in the chair when a light tapping at the front door woke him. At first he thought he was having a heart attack, but then he realized Dimitri had stretched out on his chest, eighteen pounds of purring weight. “Come on,” he said, lifting the cat off his torso. “Up you go.”
Finney opened the door and slowly accustomed his eyes to the blinding sunlight off the lake.
“There someone here? I thought I heard you talking to someone.” It was a woman’s voice, a husky sound from an individual who’d never smoked but who’d been hit in the throat with a baseball when she was thirteen.
“The cat. I was talking to the cat.”
“Did I wake you?” Diana asked. “I called last night and then again this morning. When you didn’t answer I thought . . .”
“Maybe I was in the slammer?”
“I thought I should check.”
“What time is it?”
“Ten.”
“Come in. God, I must look like hell.”
“You look . . .”
“Like something that’s been sitting at the bottom of Santa’s sack all summer?”
Diana laughed. He liked that she laughed at his jokes. “I admire men with rumpled hair and only one sock,” she said affectionately. Finney looked down at his feet. He had two socks on. She was kidding him. Diana walked into the interior of the houseboat and stood with her back to him. She wore blue jeans and a light blue fleece vest over a T-shirt, a baseball cap over a ponytail. The chill air off the lake blew into the houseboat and mingled with the fragrance of her perfume. He opened the drapes, and the sunlight made him wince.
“Sorry to bust in on you like this,” she said.
“I’m glad you came.”
“I wanted to explain about Gary.”
“Don’t even think about it. He was drunk.” Still, he was curious about her and Gary. Had they had a relationship? It seemed hard to believe, since by his own admission Gary specialized in women he referred to as trailer-park trash, but you never knew.
“He’s got this thing about me. We went to some movies together. The Seattle Film Festival this last spring. I usually have tickets for the festival, but this year I didn’t and he did. He told me he’d been planning to see most of those movies with his sister, but she finked out on him and went back to Minnesota to be with her ex-boyfriend. He asked me if I’d go with him.”
“You don’t have to explain any of this.”
“I want things to be out on the table with us from the start.”
Despite Friday night he hadn’t thought