by K J Kalis
Freddie’s mind ran ahead of him as he started to make a list of what he saw and what the scene would need. He jotted a few notes and then found Chief Cleary, consulting with two other local chiefs, a captain and a lieutenant. As soon as their conversation was done, Freddie approached Ned. He looked tired, black circles under his eyes that had nothing to do with the fire they were working on. Freddie knew, from the times they had shared a couple of beers after work, that the losses weighed heavily on Ned. Losing property was sad. Loss of life, whether it was a person or a pet, was devastating. Tonight, he would probably face multiples of both.
“Chief, I know you wanted me out here for the fire. Still think this is arson?”
Ned’s eyebrows raised under his helmet. “That’s kinda your call, right?”
“Yeah, right, but normally that call doesn’t come in until later and the scene has been cleared. Why did you call me in now? Something suspicious happen?”
“The initial calls reported a man in a truck just over there before the fire started. We don’t have any video. No idea if the guy was just there enjoying the sunset or if he started the blaze. With this big of a fire, we need you working now. The insurance companies will want a full investigation. Might as well get a feel for it while it’s still hot.”
Freddie nodded, the toothpick in his mouth moving to the other side. Ned was right. A blaze this size would require mountains of paperwork. The insurance investigators would have to do their own paperwork — if there was anything left to look at that wasn’t a total loss. They’d want a formal report from Cal Fire. That fell on Freddie’s shoulders.
He glanced at the area where Ned said someone had been spotted. It was a good question: Was the person that was spotted there just a coincidence or was it someone who had a reason to start a fire? Maybe it was someone who hadn’t been admitted as a member of the boat club? Maybe it was someone who had a personal or business beef with the marina owner? Or maybe the arsonist owned a boat and wanted to torch it to get the insurance money? There were so many reasons that people started fires. Some of them business, most of them personal.
Freddie’s wide beam flashlight helped him to see the area just above the fuel tanks, where Ned had pointed. He couldn’t get too close to the tanks yet — they were still being doused with a foam that would break up the gas and diesel and prevent it from burning — so he worked his way back up the hillside starting as near as the fuel tanks as he could get. The ground was covered in gravel. It didn’t look to be new gravel. Based on the color, the white haze of lime washed away, and the weeds growing up between the rocks, he could tell it had been there for a while. Freddie snapped a few pictures and kept moving. He didn’t see anything. He stopped and turned toward the tanks. If the fire didn’t start on the hillside, where could it have started? Freddie worked his way back down to the waterline, trying to stay out of the way of the crews. The charcoal smell of a doused fire filled the air, only renegade flames still burning on the clubhouse and a few of the boats. Firefighters with halligans, long crowbars with a wedge on one end and a hammer end on the other, moved in pairs carrying fire extinguishers. They would be putting out hot spots for at least another twelve hours with how hot the fire had burned. Many of the docks were completely gone, only the structural steel supports left, their dark forms protruding up out of the water. Boats that had lost their moorings were bumping against each other, low thumps he could hear in the distance. He saw the Coast Guard crews in dinghies towing the undamaged boats to a nearby marina to tie them off.
Shouts of “over here” interrupted his thoughts. A red dinghy pulled up near the edge of the water. Freddie dropped his equipment and ran over along with three other firefighters and a team of paramedics. The Coast Guard guys grabbed the side of the dock and quickly threw two lines around the cleats, securing the boat to the dock wall. In the dinghy were three “Coasties” and a man and a child huddling in the back of the dinghy. In the front, there was a body of a woman, her hair and face burned, gasping for air.
“We pulled her from the water. Burns mostly on her face, chest and hands.” Freddie leaned over to help pull her drenched body up onto the dock wall, the paramedics quickly getting to work.
“She needs to be intubated. Get the kit,” the lead paramedic said as they rolled her onto a backboard. Freddie took a step back as the paramedic team, an older woman and a younger man pulled equipment out of their bags. Within a minute, the paramedic had eased a tube down into her trachea, the young man standing by. “Okay, I’m in. Bag her.”
Freddie watched as the young man connected a bag to the tube and gently squeezed it, keeping a steady pace. How he was able to work with such calm, Freddie wasn’t sure. The woman had a stethoscope in her hands. “Good bilateral breath sounds. Let’s get an IV started and get her out of here.”
Freddie and the other firefighters surrounded the yellow plastic backboard, each grabbing one of the handgrips as soon as the woman had been strapped in. “One, two, three…” he heard and helped to lift the woman over to the gurney. The smell of burning flesh, gasoline and melted plastic surrounded him. As he let go of the backboard, he heard quiet crying from behind him. It was the little girl that had been huddled with her dad at the back of the boat. The Coast Guard guys had gotten them out of the dinghy and had pulled away from the dock while the paramedics were working on the woman.
“Dad, is she going to be okay? Why didn’t she go under the water like we did?”
“Honey, I don’t know…”
Freddie walked over to the man and the little girl. “Hey,” he said, rotating the toothpick in his mouth. “That your mom?”
The little girl nodded. “Yes.”
“Well, she looks like a fighter to me. You know what else?”
The little girl sniffled. “What?”
“She’s got a great team of paramedics and I just heard them call the hospital. The doctors are waiting. How about if we get you a ride in a police car?”
The little girl nodded, using her wet sleeve to wipe her face. As they started to walk away, Freddie grabbed the elbow of the dad, “Listen, did you see anything before the fire started? Anything that looked strange to you?”
The man, his hair wet and sticking out at strange angles, stopped just for a moment staring at Freddie through water-spotted glasses. “It all happened so fast. I thought I saw a truck up on the hill by the fuel tanks. We’ve been staying on our boat because of the blackouts. I went down below for a second to check on my wife and daughter and by the time I came back up, everything was on fire.” He shook his head, glancing toward the ambulance where they were loading up his wife. “I’m sorry. I’ve gotta go.”
Freddie watched for a moment as the man walked away. Another firefighter, in full turnout gear and a helmet, draped blankets around the man and his daughter and helped them into the ambulance. The doors slammed shut and the ambulance left.
He turned back to the scene, his heart breaking for both the people in the water and the firefighters and paramedics doing the work. They wouldn’t easily be able to forget this night, the scene and the smell chasing them for weeks afterward. Fire department chaplains and counselors would have months of work ahead of them, not to mention the families who would have to help their firefighter cope with what they saw. The chances of PTSD from this fire were real. If the fire had been an accident, that would be bad enough. If someone had set it, that would be a tragedy. Unnecessary tragedy made him furious.
Behind him, he heard the crunch of tires on the gravel. The HAZMAT team had arrived. Freddie nodded to one of the guys when they got off their rig. He knew they were there not only to see what was in the water but to set up a decontamination station for the firefighters who were at the blaze. They’d all get a mandatory shower before they headed back to the station. Fires with large amounts of fuel were bad for everything, from skin to lungs.
It was time to get back to work. He walked back to the area where the man had pointed, picked up his flashlight, camera and
notebook where he’d dropped them on the ground. His mind was racing, anger burning in him at seeing the condition of the woman from the fire and the sadness on the faces of her family. Accidents were one thing. Arson was another.
He walked back up toward the hillside where more than one person had reported seeing a truck parked just before the fire started. The fire, mostly out by now, had plunged the area into blackness. The electricity had been turned off at the street to protect the firefighters. Darkness had covered the area.
Freddie panned the area for evidence, the beam of his flashlight washing over the ground. He found the spot where he had started, looking again at the gravel. He knelt down, positioning himself between what was left of the fuel tanks and the hillside where the man had pointed. Glancing left and right, he tried to approximate the spot where the truck would have been. The hillside was a gradual grade, nothing too steep and it led right down to the water. Freddie walked up the hill, scanning left and right with his flashlight, looking for signs of foul play.
“Need some help?” a voice called.
Freddie looked up. “Hey, Chuck. What’re you doing here?”
“Aww, nothin’. Just hanging out.”
Freddie took a close look at Chuck. He’d taken off his turnout coat and helmet off, his hair wet from sweat. Dirt and soot-covered his face, a contrast to his perfectly clean arms.
“I see your friends from Hazmat have arrived. Thought I’d come over and give you a hand before they drag me off to be scrubbed.”
Freddie laughed. “Yeah, they get a little too eager with those brushes, don’t they?”
Chuck nodded. “What’s going on? What’re you looking for?”
Freddie shook his head. “That’s the thing. I’m not sure. Had a report of someone up here in a truck right before the fire started. Don’t know if that’s connected. Guy might have been up here with his girlfriend watching the sunset.”
“Wrong direction, buddy.” Chuck pointed behind them. “That way is west. If he was here, it wasn’t for the sunset.”
“All right smarty-pants. Let’s take a look. Let’s see if we can find where this fire started.”
The two men started covering the area, their flashlights continuing to wash over the ground. Freddie was starting to wonder if they needed to look at the clubhouse as the ignition point when he heard Chuck call, “Hey, over here!”
Chuck’s voice led Freddie over to the tanks. “Take a look at this,” Chuck said, pointing to the base of one of the tanks. The tanks themselves had been split into twisted pieces of metal with the explosion. The bases of the two tanks were largely intact, telling Freddie that the explosion drove upward, not downward. That made total sense. Fuel fumes were usually combustible, not the liquid itself. The top would be the first to ignite.
“Whatcha got?”
Chuck knelt down and pointed. “You might want to get a picture of this. This valve is open. It shouldn’t be.”
Freddie frowned. “Tell me more.”
“I worked at the gas dock of my mom and dad’s boat club during the summer in high school. Great gig. Out in the sun, good tips, just had to fill up boats. No stress at all. One thing we all knew was that the relief valves had to stay shut at all times. They were only there for when the tanks were removed so the company could get all the gas and fumes out. If these were open, the gas would run out like a faucet.” Chuck pointed. “Based on the grade here, the fuel would have leaked out and run right into the water to the boats.”
Freddie snapped a couple of quick pictures from a few different angles. His mind was racing. If Chuck was right, the gas would have just run down into the water, waiting for something to ignite it. The question was, how did the relief valves get opened? “Those valves… are they something that could have just popped open on their own?”
“Naw, not a chance. They have a screw cap on top of them. Takes a wrench to get them open. They need to have them on the tanks, it’s a regulation thing, but they aren’t easy to open, that’s for sure.”
“Let’s check the other tank.”
Freddie and Chuck walked over to the other tank, this one even more splintered than the first. There was still heat coming off the metal, a testament to how hot the fire had been even though it had been doused with foam. Freddie wiped off the area where the valve should have been, not sure if it had been damaged in the explosion. It wasn’t there. Freddie shook his head. “So, we’ve got no way of knowing if the second tank had an open valve or not, or if this was the ignition point.”
Chuck shook his head, “Seems about right.”
Freddie took pictures of it anyway, pushing his frustration back down in his chest. It’s possible he would see something on the images once he got back to his office that he missed out on the scene, but he doubted it. In any investigation, it didn’t help if he got ahead of himself. He sighed. Sure, he was upset about the fire, the property damage, not to mention the loss of life, but he couldn’t afford to let his feelings get in the way. His job was simple: figure out if it was arson or not, figure out who did it. That was it. Freddie bit down on the toothpick in his mouth. “Hey Chuck, let’s check over here.” Freddie pointed up the hill.
The men walked up the grade, their flashlights searching the area for any clues. Freddie hadn’t had a chance to finish walking the area before the dinghy with the family had come in. It was time to do that now.
Their boots crunched as they went up the hill, the lights from the HAZMAT truck spilling a red tinge over the area. Chuck was about six feet from Freddie when he heard him call, “Hey, over here!”
Freddie turned his flashlight toward where Chuck was standing. “Whatcha got?”
“A burn line.” Chuck motioned with this flashlight. “You wanted an ignition source? Look at this.”
As he moved his flashlight over the area, he saw what Chuck was looking at. A black line of soot trailed down the hillside like a snake, twisting and turning through the lumps of gravel. Freddie grunted, got on his knees and smelled the residue. “You’ve got all the luck today, man. Have to get it tested, but it smells like gas. Maybe you should think about coming over and working with me.” Before Chuck could answer, Freddie keyed up his radio. “This is Arson One. I need lights on the hillside above the fuel tanks.”
Within a few minutes, portable lights had been set up around the area so he and Chuck could see the ground better. Freddie had pulled an evidence kit out of his SUV and not only took pictures but put samples of the charred gravel into a few bags, noting where they were with yellow numbered plastic markers he put on the ground and then photographed. He followed the line up the hill while Chuck tracked the trail down toward what was left of the marina. As he moved, carefully chasing the soot line, he thought about the people who had been injured. They were all still at the hospital, he was sure. If they were lucky, they’d get away with some bumps and bruises, maybe a mild case of smoke inhalation. For families like he saw pulled off the dinghy, it would be a long road to recovery. He clenched his jaw.
Arsonists fell into two general categories: those that wanted to burn for the sheer joy of watching the fire work, and those who wanted to take lives. The first group — those who loved the flames — usually suffered from a mental condition that caused them a level of compulsion with flames. Freddie didn’t understand all the psychology behind it. He wasn’t sure that the psychologists did either. Those arsonists were much easier to find. They were like artists and not only wanted people to see their creation but wanted to watch it themselves. Frequently, those people stayed around to watch the flames and the firefighters work. In a way, Freddie had learned to feel sorry for the kind of arsonist who was obsessed with flames. Everyone had their obsessions, he thought. His included toothpicks and potato chips.
The other kind of arsonist, the kind that wanted to take lives or use fire to cover up the loss of lives, well, that was another story. Freddie walked a few more steps and shifted the toothpick in his mouth, scanning the ground with his flashlight bri
ghtening the ground the work lights covered. The kind of person who took lives was the kind that Freddie wanted to catch. Property could be replaced. Lives could not. He glanced up at what was left of the marina’s clubhouse. The back side of it was completely gone. The fire crews had only been able to save the front elevation. By the looks of it, once the pictures were taken for the insurance, he bet there would be a demolition crew out to take the remaining wall down.
Within a few minutes, he’d found the spot where the burn line started. It looked like someone had poured gasoline on the ground and then lit it on fire. He took pictures and then set his camera down, looking for any other clues. He knelt on the ground hoping there would be some sort of depression in the earth from a footprint or a gas can. No luck, he thought, standing up. The ground was too dry to make any kind of mark that would last. Mud was better for that. With the lack of rain in the area, mud wasn’t something they had a lot of. Freddie climbed up a little further, wondering if the truck and the soot line were connected. His gut told him that they had to be. How else would the arsonist get the gas to the marina? He turned and saw something in the grass. “Chuck! Up here!” Freddie shouted, starting to take pictures.
