Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  Steve Patterson began to make notes, first about the 7-Eleven store. That convenience-store chain had figured prominently in John Orr's life. One of his ex-wives had worked there and so had he. In the novel, Trish spurns Aaron Stiles's advances at the 7-Eleven store. As his obsession progresses, the fictional firefighter decides to commit his first violent act apart from his fire setting. He decides to rape Trish.

  Stiles stakes out the apartment where the girl lives and sets a fire nearby at a travel agency. The fire thrills him enormously, and Trish is one of many people who leaves the apartment building to watch. Later, he knocks at her door, and when she opens it, he shoves his gun against her face and forces his way inside.

  The firefighter-arsonist rolls the girl onto her stomach and straddles her with his gun at her face, saying, "I will fucking put a bullet in your head." Aaron Stiles then rips the girl's T-shirt down, restraining her at the elbows. He grabs a nearby bathrobe and ties her wrists behind her back. He gags her and rips off her shorts and tries to mount her from the rear, but his erection dies.

  Stiles is flaccid and furious. He slaps the girl and ties her at the ankles with remnants of the bathrobe. Then, bound at the wrists and ankles, she is dragged into the kitchen and tied to the kitchen drain pipe with panty hose. He reenters the living room and sets an incendiary delay device in her sofa, one that will give him time to rape her and escape while she burns to death. The girl is saved by a passing Samaritan who phones the fire department from the 7-Eleven store. She has not died because the sofa is an old one with very little foam stuffing, and the fire has vented through an open window.

  When Patterson was finished, the cross-comparisons between fiction and reality were blurring. He believed he was burrowing into something dark, something evil.

  When Steve Patterson got back to task-force headquarters he found that his work and his theories exacted a lot of blank stares, quizzical smiles, and raised eyebrows. He received encouragement from nobody. All of the task-force cops, with their cop cynicism, sort of patted the fireman on the head and said, in effect, Nice try, but we're buried in paperwork and swamped by Cabral's need to find long-vanished witnesses and cross-eyed from looking at reports from fires that may or may not involve John Orr.

  And it hadn't helped that arson profilers from the FBI Academy had made off-the-record estimates that John Orr may have committed a few thousand arsons in his lifetime, but who the hell was counting? So, thank you very much, Steve, but we don't have time for Hollywood-type murder mysteries; if that's what you want to do, good luck. That was more or less the message that Captain Steve Patterson of the Burbank Fire Department got from his task-force colleagues.

  One former girlfriend of John Orr didn't square with anybody in the novel, as far as Patterson could see, but she certainly was the living embodiment of John Orr's conflicted feelings about police in general. She was the female cop who told Cabral about John wanting to make it with her in a fire station. And how he'd always try to touch her and kiss her when she'd don her uniform. But at the same time he'd tell her how stupid cops were and how much smarter he was. There was just too much symbolism there about power and control and authority and handcuffs.

  Then Steve Patterson would have to chill and remind himself that these other guys were more experienced investigators. They were police officers, and he'd spent most of his career fighting fires. Maybe he was getting carried away. Maybe he'd seen all this in a movie sometime.

  But then he'd stop and think, No, goddamn it! I've never seen a movie like this. Not ever. And there was another thing: John Orr had liked to shoot nude photos of his women, just as he'd liked to shoot photos of his fires, just as most violent serial offenders have a need for mementos, to relive those moments.

  Maybe for John Orr sex and fire had fused.

  Task-force duties actually increased in 1994. They were meeting three times a week and reporting anything significant to Mike Cabral, who intended to indict John Orr not only for multiple murder in the Ole's fire, but for the College Hills disaster, the Warner Brothers Studios fire, and the brush fires known as the Hilldale fire in La Canada and the San Augustine fire in Glendale. However, the statute of limitations on the latter arsons would run out on November 23.

  By this time Steve Patterson was up to his eyes in murder. He needed help from police detectives, but no cop could take seriously such a half-baked idea. There is nothing that disgusts police investigators more than amateurs offering investigative advice that always sounds as though it's from a made-for-TV movie.

  It came to a head when Steve Patterson phoned one of the detectives he knew at the Burbank Police Department and asked, "Do you have any unsolved murders on the books? Going back, oh, ten years?"

  The detective said, "Yeah, we have three."

  "Don't tell me about them," Steve Patterson told the detective. "Let me take a crack at one of them. Was she a young woman? And was she tied up?"

  "Yeah, we got one just like that," the detective said. "Her name was Mary Duggan.

  A 1986 case. She was found in her car, raped and suffocated."

  Steve Patterson's obsession grew exponentially. Thus began a years-long quest to solve the murder of Mary Susan Duggan.

  She had been the cheerleader type in high school but had gained weight after graduation, perhaps losing some self-esteem in the process. Her parents lived in the San Fernando Valley and she'd worked at a bank, which, Patterson quickly noted, was a few blocks away from the private-investigation business owned by John Orr's former housemate and part-time employer.

  Patterson thought that she and John could've met in or around the bank. John had a nose for vulnerable women, and a line that prompted casual conversation which sometimes went somewhere. Moreover, in the novel, Trish's mother had worked at a bank, which Patterson saw as another link.

  Mary Duggan had been seen last at a pizza parlor all alone, around midnight. Whether or not she'd been waiting for someone would never be known. A Burbank cop on patrol had spotted her silver Ford Mustang in a parking lot, and when he saw the car again the next night he noticed that the window was broken on the driver's side. He got out to check, and found Mary Susan Duggan-listed that night as Jane Doe #39 by the L. A. County coroner-in the Mustang, covered by newspapers and a "tanker" jacket.

  Steve Patterson's neck hair started swaying when he learned that she had ligature marks on her ankles and wrists, like Trish in John Orr's novel. She hadn't been gagged with a bathrobe as in the novel, she'd been gagged with tissue that forced her tongue back in her throat, suffocating her. Mary Duggan had been barely twenty-two years old, three months older than Steve Patterson's daughter, Jill. Patterson drove to the place where she'd been found. Just three hundred yards from a 7-Eleven store.

  But his colleagues said, So what? There're 7-Eleven stores everywhere. And rapists often bind their victims. So what?

  Steve Patterson returned to the novel. In Points of Origin, the owner of the 7-Eleven store, a Pakistani, spots a fire that the arsonist Aaron Stiles has set with a delay device, and he hits the store's robbery alarm to summon help. He extinguishes the small fire and is warned by the arriving police never to use the robbery alarm as a signal to the fire department.

  Patterson's former arson partner, a detective with the Burbank police, pulled old reports from the 7-Eleven store near the place where Mary Duggan's body was found. The store owner, a Pakistani, had also experienced a fire and had hit the robbery alarm to summon the fire department.

  Steve Patterson contacted his colleagues, including some from the Pillow Pyro Task Force, and said, "See? John Orr was in that store! It's not fiction!"

  The task-force cops said, So what? There're more Pakis running 7-Eleven stores than there are milking opium poppies in Islamabad. And half of them improperly use their robbery alarm at some time or another. So what?

  Steve Patterson asked, "What's John Orr gotta do? Send us smoke signals? He's telling us in his book what he did!"

  Cops on the task force w
ould roll their eyes and snicker and barely keep their sneers under control. Ditto with others on Mike Matassa's task force when Patterson called them for moral support and encouragement.

  The attitude said it all: Firemen. You can't make cops out of firemen.

  Steve Patterson persuaded LAFD's Rich Edwards to request information from the coroner's office, where John Orr had yet another former girlfriend. Patterson wanted to know if John had ever ordered any reports on Jane Doe #39, Mary Susan Duggan. The coroner's employee remembered that some years prior, he'd asked for reports on a coroner's case, but she had no memory of the name or what it was about.

  When Steve Patterson inquired of Burbank detectives whether or not there had been DNA found, he was told that in 1986 there was no DNA analysis. So-called genetic fingerprinting was unknown to American law enforcement at that time.

  "But since then," Steve Patterson wanted to know, "has anyone DNA'd whatever was found?"

  He couldn't get a direct answer. It was an old case.

  "Mary Duggan just seems forgotten," Steve Patterson complained. "A girl my daughter's age. Just forgotten."

  What he did find out was that vaginal swabs taken back in 1986 had revealed a trace amount of semen on her legs and buttocks, indicating that the killer might have ejaculated prematurely. In Points of Origin, after the arsonist goes flaccid he sets an incendiary device. Moments from flaming ignition where he might be trapped, he achieves his erection but ejaculates prematurely.

  There was no stopping Steve Patterson then. He persuaded a Burbank detective to show him other evidence found in Mary Duggan's car, like the tanker jacket that had covered her body.

  Steve Patterson asked the detective, "Has anyone checked the pockets?" And he was given one of those do-we-look-like-idiots? snorts of disgust.

  "Can I look in the pockets?" Patterson asked, and got a let's-get-it-over-with, shrug.

  He found in one of the pockets a toothpick and a chocolate mint. "Nobody seems able to tell me much about the lab evidence," Patterson said, "but isn't this toothpick something that could be sent in for a DNA test?"

  The detective told Steve Patterson to put it back in the pocket and he'd check on it if he had time.

  When Patterson got back to his task-force mates and tried to point out the importance of the toothpick for DNA analysis, he was met with more glazed expressions. They pointed out that lots of guys carry toothpicks, but when people pick their teeth they throw the toothpick away. They don't save it as a keepsake.

  "In the book, chocolate mints're placed on their hotel pillows at the arson convention," Steve Patterson argued.

  "Chocolate mints are everywhere!" he was told. "So what?"

  It was always: So what? Steve Patterson went back to his copy of Points of Origin because he was sure there was something else. . . . And then it hit him!

  At the beginning of the terrible description of the "Cal's" fire, he read: "While standing in the parking lot sharing a chocolate mint cone, she decided to entertain Matthew further by walking through Cal's."

  If his neck hairs had swayed before, now they were break-dancing.

  There were other duties that had the potential of getting Steve Patterson into trouble, aside from his quest to solve the murder of Mary Susan Duggan. He had occasion to interview an uncle of John Orr who had a business near an area where brush fires had broken out frequently. After a routine chat, the uncle called his wife, who called the Glendale fire chief, who called the Burbank fire chief, who called Steve Patterson and said, "You leave John Orr's family alone!"

  The Glendale and Burbank fire departments had a close relationship, and there were still firefighters who did not want to believe that Captain Orr was a serial arsonist.

  Steve Patterson later said, "I was like a dog on a leash. I was constantly being jerked backwards by my masters."

  He tried working on other leads. John Orr's first wife and two daughters lived in Orange County, and John had gone to visit them for Christmas in 1990. A Thrifty Drug Store in their neighborhood burned on the very day he'd visited. Steve Patterson learned of other Thrifty Drug Store fires in Orange County, in addition to the pair of Thrifty fires in March of 1991 that they were sure he'd set. Patterson and Bill Donley went to the home office of Thrifty Drug Store in Hollywood and discovered that a secretary there knew John Orr.

  It was always sex and fire. That brought Patterson back to Mary Duggan. He discovered that her former place of employment had experienced a fire while John Orr had been doing insurance work for his PI friend, so could he have met Mary on that occasion?

  It wasn't difficult for Patterson to see that some of the cops were really getting sick and tired of his hunch and his theories. He'd hear remarks like, "We're trying to put together a capital murder case! What more do you want?"

  To which Steve Patterson had an argument: "What about Mary Duggan's family? And how about Mary Duggan herself?"

  When he'd be challenged with, "Do you think you're smarter than the detectives, Steve? Is that it?" he'd say, "I'm not smarter than the policemen. I'm not. I'm just a fireman, but ... it all seems to fit!"

  He'd unwind by working in the yard. He figured that during those days he'd mowed more grass than the grounds crew at Lakeside Country Club.

  There was, however, a bit of task-force work done on Steve Patterson's Mary Duggan theory. Rich Edwards and Walt Scheuerell did look at car fires where women's bodies had been found. The victims were hookers, a few in Los Angeles and one in Pasadena, but nothing matched up with the murder of Mary Duggan.

  Steve Patterson wanted more. He was frustrated to learn that nobody had ever checked with the cab companies to see if they'd picked up anyone in the vicinity of the 7-Eleven store on the night that her car and body had been left there. And he wanted very much to talk to the Duggan family.

  Because of his badgering, a detective did call her family to ask: "Did she ever date a lawyer? Did she ever date a policeman? Did she ever date a fireman?"

  But they had no answers. Steve Patterson wanted to come right out and ask it: "Did you ever hear Mary mention the name 'John Orr'?"

  Finally, Steve Patterson could not contain himself. He had to interview the family of Mary Duggan, and that request found its way to the Burbank detectives. Patterson was called into the office of his boss at the Burbank Fire Department, and there waiting for him was not his boss but a detective lieutenant.

  There was no debate, no explanation, no desire to know what Steve Patterson had learned. The detective lieutenant said, "Take your fucking nose out of police business and stick it somewhere else!"

  The "discussion" was over. The detective left him there, fuming. But now his chain had been jerked and cinched up tight.

  Mike Cabral told Steve Patterson that being a young prosecutor he did not have the gravitas to take on the Burbank Police Department, that maybe Patterson better just forget Mary Duggan for now and get on with the work they must do.

  But just when Steve Patterson knew that he could go no further with his pursuit of the murderer of this girl who was his daughter's age, this girl who'd suffered such a cruel death-just as he was talking himself into getting over it now that it had turned into a pissing contest between the Burbank PD and an upstart fireman-Wally Scheuerell, the elder statesman of the task force, asked Patterson if he'd ever noticed what John Orr had written on of his novel in regard to one of the book's leading characters.

  When Steve Patterson turned to the page in question, he found a discussion in a Fresno hotel during an arson conference, between the protagonist, arson investigator Phil Langtree, and his lady love, Chris. Phil Langtree describes to Chris the arsonist's attack on Trish, how he'd tied her up and tried to murder her, and that he must go back and investigate. Chris picks up the hotel phone to arrange a flight from Fresno to Burbank Airport, and for the first and only time in the novel, Chris gives her surname, which Steve Patterson hadn't noticed before:

  "This is Chris Kilmary, room 432, would you please call the airpor
t . . "

  For an old movie buff it felt as though every hair was standing electrified, like the Bride of Frankenstein!

  Before he could say anything, the old detective said to him, "I already checked with DMV. There's not a single last name like that in all of California's motor vehicle records. Why would he choose that name?"

  All that Steve Patterson could do was repeat it: "Kilmary. Kilmary. Kill Mary."

  There was one day remaining before the statute of limitations was to expire on the brush-fire arsons when Deputy District Attorney Michael J. Cabral presented a twenty-five-count indictment of John Leonard Orr before a Los Angeles grand jury on Monday, November 21, 1994. It charged four counts of murder and one count of arson for the Ole's fire; one count of arson for the fire at Warner Brothers Studios; three counts of arson for the brush fires that burned homes on Kennington Drive in Glendale, Hilldale Drive in La Canada, and San Augustine Drive in Glendale; and sixteen counts of arson for some of the homes burned in the College Hills fire of 1990.

  That was a moment in time that John Orr would never forget. He was in his cell at Terminal Island listening to the radio when the program was interrupted by a commercial sponsored by the ABC affiliate, inviting the radio audience to tune in to the five o'clock news.

  "The top story tonight," the announcer promised, "involves a fire captain indicted for murder."

  Peter Giannini, the attorney for John Orr, told reporters that he was stunned, particularly in reference to the Ole's disaster.

  John stayed away from the television all that evening, and phoned his wife as soon as he could.

  Wanda Orr was contacted by Peter Giannini, who offered his services, explaining that they would not have to pay for the defense, which he knew would be impossible. He said that he could represent her husband and be paid by the state of California through a court appointment.