Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  Tony Finney turned state’s evidence, admitting he’d been desperate for money after a succession of gambling losses. Tony had always coveted the good life, and just to make sure he never got a piece of it, he’d gambled away most of his paychecks. As had the others, he’d done it for the money, tax-free and ankle-deep, as well as the promise, initially, that nobody would get hurt. After their first major fire resulted in Bill Cordifis’s death, they all realized they might well be prosecuted for murder—that was when denial, rationalization, and justification set in.

  Gil Finney reluctantly told his son John that Sadler had visited him with theories about Monahan, and that he had breached Sadler’s confidence by telling Tony, who in turn must have told the others. Thus, the booby trap in Bowman Pork—intended to kill both Finney and Sadler.

  For a few hours after they picked his body up off the street, Marion Balitnikoff was hailed by television news reporters outside the building as the second heroic firefighter who’d fallen to his death battling the Columbia Tower fire. It was the only glory he was to squeeze out of this.

  Wrapped in a canvas tarp, Oscar Stillman’s body was found upstairs on fifty-eight. The most popular theory for why G. A. Montgomery had transported him up there was that he’d been planning to pitch him down the elevator shaft so it would look like an accident.

  Paul Lazenby was found on sixty with a badly broken ankle. Michael Lazenby was picked up two days after the fire in L.A., waiting to board a Mexican Airlines flight to Mazatlán. Currently they were both in the King County jail, charged with the murder of Gary Sadler, the attempted murder of John Finney, and conspiracy to commit arson.

  The day after the Columbia Tower fire was tapped, Charlie Reese gave a series of media interviews in which he attempted to fob off blame for the catastrophe on shady building contractors. Four days after the fire he resigned, saying he was going back to college to pursue a degree in social work, that he wanted to work with wayward teenage girls.

  Later that week, Robert Kub came out with a public statement laying out what had really happened at Leary Way when he and Reese went inside to search. When reporters tried to contact Reese for his rebuttal, he’d already left town.

  All in all, the Columbia Tower was the worst fire tragedy in Seattle history, the runner-up a 1943 plane crash in which a B-29 missed the runway at Boeing Field, crashed into the Frye Packing Plant, and killed thirty-two people.

  In addition to Barney Spritzer, Stillman, Balitnikoff, and G. A. Montgomery, twenty-eight civilians, including building owner Patterson Cole, died, most in the elevator fiasco. Only one man survived the freight elevator, Norris Radford. His was a curious case, because a week later he managed to disappear from a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, near his mother’s home, and hadn’t been heard from since. Patterson Cole’s right-hand man was now being sought by the FBI.

  Annie Sortland died in the burn ward a week after mistakenly naming Finney as her attacker.

  Although dozens of people were treated for burns, heat exhaustion, smoke inhalation, and cuts from falling glass, the rest of the wedding group upstairs made it out safely. Two were already slated to publish books on their experience.

  Though it was known that money had been funneled from Patterson Cole to finance the group of renegade firefighters, Cole was dead and his assistant missing, so nobody yet had the full story. Monahan and Tony Finney both maintained that the go-between for the money was G. A., and that he had, by his own account, dealt only with Norris Radford. Cole, desperate for cash to pay off his wife in their divorce settlement, knew he couldn’t sell off enough assets at fair market value in time, so he’d decided to get the cash in his own way.

  When all was said and done, the fire department found an abandoned engine in the street in front of the Columbia Tower, an exact duplicate of Engine 10.

  A day and a half after the fire, one of the building engineers, a man named Adolph Piacentini, drove his car across the Canadian border at Blaine, Washington, and, a few miles later, parked under some trees just off Highway 1 outside New Westminster, where he blew his brains out with a .357 revolver he’d smuggled illegally into the province. As was the case with some suicides, it had taken him two shots. He left no note, but his adult daughter said he had medical debts and had been especially troubled the past few weeks. Always safety conscious, he’d inserted ear plugs prior to the shooting.

  “You expecting somebody?” Diana asked, turning her head casually toward the dock.

  “What?”

  “Those people coming down the gangway. Some woman. Your father. Looks like Smith, and I bet that other guy’s the senator who’s giving out the medals tonight.” Finney was already scrambling down the ladder to the lower deck. He’d called in with the excuse that he wasn’t well enough to attend the ceremony.

  There were four of them: the personnel director for the city, a woman named Roetke; acting Seattle fire chief Smith; ex–battalion chief Gil Finney; and Senator Jon Stevenson, who was to present the awards at the Seattle Center in two hours. After they’d shaken hands all around—Finney remaining on the couch under a blanket—the senator said, “It’s a shame you’re not well enough to attend the ceremonies.”

  “I pleaded with the doctors,” Finney lied.

  “And you must be Diana Moore, the other firefighter I’ve heard so much about.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A well-dressed, silver-tongued man in his sixties, the senator had spent most of his career in the state legislature before going to Washington, D.C. Neither Finney nor Diana bothered to correct his misimpressions of the Columbia Tower fire, of which there were many.

  When they were ready to leave, Finney’s father approached the couch. “Both my sons are heroes. You went up and got those people. And Tony came forward and confessed. That probably took more guts than what you did.”

  Once again, even though he was headed for prison, Tony had come out ahead in his father’s mind. It didn’t matter. People were screwed up. Finney smiled and said, “I love you, Dad.” His father nodded and stepped to the back of the room.

  After everyone left, Finney and Diana went out onto the lower deck of the houseboat. The sun had sunk over the hill behind them, and a great shadow was quickly sweeping across the choppy waters. On the far shore, cars on the freeway sent the occasional sliver of reflected sunlight across the water.

  After a while, Diana touched Finney on the cheek with the back of her hand. “Something bothering you?”

  “A lot of things.”

  “Me, too. But the farther we travel away from it, the smaller it gets.”

  “Some philosopher say that?”

  “Yeah. Me.” When he sat down, she straddled his lap, facing him. They kissed. After a few moments she said, “You coming back to the department?”

  “I don’t know what else I’m good for.”

  She looked into his eyes and kissed him again. “I can think of a couple of things you’d be good for right now.”

  “Oh, yeah? You going to show me?”

  Kissing the tip of his nose, she said, “I think I just might.”

  "EMERSON WRITES WITH THE RICHNESS AND GRACE OF A POET.”

  —Robert Crais

  "Riveting . . . Far and away his best [novel] yet . . . Guaranteed to scare the socks off us normal citizens. The firefighting setting of Vertical Burn is one that Emerson knows intimately, and he has a gift for painting it. . . . Emerson’s always had a way with spectacular climaxes, and this one, a remarkable eighty-page scene inside a towering inferno, is a doozy.”

  —The Seattle Times / Post-Intelligencer

  "Earl Emerson’s plotting is original, suspenseful, so well done that the richness of his writing seems almost a bonus. . . . [He] has taken his place in the rarefied air of the best of the best.”

  —ANN RULE

  "Filled with suspense, action, and derring-do, Earl Emerson keeps the reader thoroughly involved. . . . The characters resonate beyond the pages. . . . In addition to creating
a smart, exciting read, Emerson has written a tribute to his profession.”

  —Tulsa World

  "Catches your attention fast and keeps you all the way to the end. . . . The author turns fire into a living, breathing character.”

  —The News Tribune (Tacoma)

  "FASCINATING, FAST-PACED . . .

  The detail in the lives of firefighters and how they actually fight fires is thoroughly engrossing. This is my first novel by Earl Emerson. . . . I’ve got some catching up to do.”

  —Times Record News (Wichita Falls, TX)

  "Lightning-paced, exciting, and surefooted, Vertical Burn creates and maintains a level of suspense that will keep you on edge right to the end. . . . Emerson continues to turn out exciting and vivid mysteries and thrillers.”

  —Statesman Journal (Salem, OR)

  "Earl Emerson is a writer’s writer. In every book he tries something new, and he always comes up a winner.”

  —AARON ELKINS

  "Recommended . . . A complex tale of smoke, flame, and murder . . . Emerson vividly portrays the physical hardships of racing fire and heat while encased in cumbersome protective garments and carrying fifty pounds of gear. He develops both male and female characters well, writes with assurance, and skillfully juggles a complicated plot.”

  —Library Journal

  "A riveting story of conflict, deceit, murder, and redemption.”

  —JOHN SAUL

  "VERTICAL BURN SIZZLES WITH EXCITEMENT. . . .

  Emerson gives us a ringside seat to firefighter protocol and procedures intermingled with relentless suspense. . . . It’s a convincing tale populated with the courageous individuals who fight fires and the scoundrels who set them.”

  —BookPage

  "Reads a lot like one of Cannell’s Shane Scully potboilers . . . What’s extra-special about this book is the accuracy and breathtaking elements of the fire scenes. . . . Emerson really bumps it up a couple of notches with his vivid portrayal of the physical hardships in actual firefighting.”

  —The Toronto Sun

  "Emerson combines an intimate knowledge of fires and firefighting with an intricate plot played out by characters you can love or hate. It’s a thriller that delivers on thrills.”

  —Booklist

  "Loyalty, greed, conspiracy, and jealousy are the themes that fuel Emerson’s fire here. The result is a hot new book with an engaging main character, an incendiary plot, a sizzling romance, and several explosive action sequences.”

  —Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

  "[Emerson’s] charismatic protagonist is both believable and admirable . . . you’ll root for him.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  From the author of VERTICAL BURN . . .

  INTO THE INFERNO

  by

  EARL EMERSON

  Available in hardcover from

  Ballantine Books

  For an exciting sneak preview of INTO THE INFERNO,

  please turn the page. . . .

  1. JUNE—NEAR THE END

  I’m a mad dog. Mad. Utterly mad.

  If you knew my circumstances, you’d trust me when I tell you I’m as crazy as they come. And growing madder by the minute.

  Nobody out there in the dark doubts me. I can see a few of the uniforms in the shadows, fingers tightening on their triggers, scopes zeroed in on my heart. I can hear the whispering. Most can barely wait to begin pumping rounds into the night. Into me. Any excuse. Any little twitch on my part will provoke a bloodbath.

  You think I’m kidding?

  Consider this. . . .

  I’m standing on the roof of a police cruiser screaming at twenty police officers to keep their distance. My mouth looks like the bloody maw of hell. Several of my teeth have been loosened and quite a few others are missing entirely. I have a cell phone in one hand, a pistol in the other. The cell phone is pressed to my left ear. The gun to my right ear. During most of the last twenty minutes I’ve been threatening to put a bullet through my brain. If that’s not enough, I’m naked as a jaybird.

  I’m crazy as a shithouse rat and they know it. Destined for a jail cell, a straitjacket, or, more likely, to end up dancing the funky chicken in a fusillade of bullets.

  Don’t waste your time feeling sorry for me. You’re headed there, too. That’s what I’ve learned in the last week. Maybe not the nuthouse or a fusillade of bullets, but you’re headed for the dirt. Same as me. Same as every last one of us. Eventually everybody lands in the dirt.

  I don’t care anymore.

  You can’t fake my kind of insanity. They know I mean business. They know I’m a mad dog.

  That’s the whole point.

  All I have to do is make a move and they’ll kill me. Don’t think I’m not tempted.

  Suppose I move.

  They’d shoot.

  And they’d keep on shooting.

  Maybe I should do it and end all this. In seven days I’ve turned into a lunatic, my life expectancy dropping from years to hours to minutes.

  Running into Holly Riggs was the end for a bunch of us.

  2. FEBRUARY—THE BEGINNING; OR, A YOUNG GREEN-EYED WOMAN IN TIGHT JEANS SCREAMS SHRILLY AT RELIGIOUS CHICKENS

  The first time I saw Holly Riggs, she was standing in the left lane of Interstate 90 up to her knees in Bibles. Three hundred Bibles. Eight hundred chickens. It was ten o’clock at night, and already a good many of the birds had absconded for parts unknown, others sauntering away more slowly than any animal with a brain would. Some of the chickens were frozen to the roadway like art projects in a school for the mentally challenged.

  As more emergency vehicles arrived, dozens of birds scampered off into the snow. Up the hill, teenage boys on their way home from night skiing got out of their cars and chased fryers, a shabby sport at best, for the birds were easily overtaken, even more easily bagged, and the boys had no use for their prey once captured.

  Holly Riggs. Anyone who’d come over Snoqualmie Pass in an eighteen-wheeler in the middle of February on the iciest roads the state had experienced in almost a decade—you had to give her points for spunk.

  For a week the Pacific Northwest had been dancing with a freeze-thaw cycle. The iced-over road surface on I-90 was polished and melted each day by the sun and by cars with chains and studded tires. When night fell and the roadway refroze, it became so slippery, a person could barely stand on it. Washington State wasn’t like Minnesota or North Dakota, where the roads were frozen all winter and the state knew how to deal with them; our region’s fleet of DOT sanding trucks had been swamped from the onset.

  It was a few minutes after ten when my pager went off, when Mrs. Neumann stagger-stepped through the frozen field between our houses like a stork wrapped in an afghan. She would look after my girls while I responded to the accident, was still knocking the snow out of the treads in her galoshes when I pulled out of the drive.

  The accident happened on the last downslope from the pass, prior to North Bend, just before the Truck Town exit, where a huge field lay between the eastbound and westbound lanes of I-90. It was in this field that several of the smaller vehicles and one of the big trucks had come to rest.

  Parking on the eastbound shoulder, I followed two sets of footprints across the crusted snow. I knew this meant I was only the third fire department employee on the scene.

  I could see Chief Newcastle up on the roadway speaking into his portable radio, Jackie Feldbaum beside him. We were all EMTs—emergency medical technicians.

  Even though North Bend was growing like a tumor on a nuclear facilities inspector, it was still a small town, and cleaning up road accidents was just one of the taxes shouldered by any small-town fire department situated next to a major highway.

  I-90 was unidirectional, so the impact speeds weren’t as high as they might have been, the injuries not as severe. Including the two big trucks that started it, fourteen vehicles were involved. A heap of work for a mostly volunteer department, but Chief Newcastle ran the operation like the
seasoned veteran he was.

  Having retired as a captain after thirty years of working for Portland Fire, Newcastle’s trademark at emergencies was remaining so cool and unencumbered you would think he was about to take a nap. Jackie, one of our volunteers, was already beginning to triage patients. A ten-year volunteer, she was one of those people who needed both hands while watching brain surgery on the cable medical channel, one for draining Budweiser after Budweiser and the other for taking notes just in case she might have to reenact the procedure in the field someday. We called her the Fire Plug behind her back, which wasn’t a reference to her firefighting history so much as a testament to her figure.

  Marching across the slippery road surface in her sure-grip Klondike boots, Jackie yelled like a crazed football mom. Before the night was over, she would videotape the wrecked vehicles for her home library. Her job tonight was to count up the casualties and begin assigning the injured to incoming personnel in order of priority. It was called triage, from the French word trier, to sort. Jackie might have been better at it if she hadn’t been in the tavern when her pager fired, though we didn’t find out she was half-crocked until later.

  I guess I should have been suspicious when Newcastle asked me to check out the two big rigs and their drivers. That’s when Jackie Feldbaum winked at me and said, “You might want to get the phone number of that second driver. She’s just your type.”

  “What’s my type?” I asked without stopping.