He started the engine and turned the air conditioner on high. As he waited for the cab to cool off, he again studied the aging two story brick buildings with their wooden dormers peeking past the rooflines. Altogether seven stores fronted on Main Street, each business sharing a common wall with the next. Zoe’s apartment was above a tobacco and popcorn shop. City Center Antiques was its neighbor to the west. To the east a sandal emporium struggled to survive in southern Oregon’s logger country. He pulled into the sparse traffic, his thoughts more on his visit to the fire building earlier that morning than on his driving.
Summit Fire District firefighter Tom Lopez had met him outside the antique store shortly after six A.M. Lopez unlocked the barred front doors. “We had to break them open to get in. Along with the door at the rear, and that was a job.”
Pushed through the entrance by a melancholy gust of air and met by the dank odor of water-soaked plaster, they paused over the threshold, giving their eyes time to adjust to the flaccid natural light just bright enough to make their flashlights useless. Power, cut off during the fire, remained off.
McLean motioned to their right. “Zoe’s workspace?”
Lopez had looked up from replacing the keys on his belt loop. “Yeah. Actually, it was a clever idea of Firth’s — someone adept at refinishing, caning, that kind of stuff, placed right out in front where people could watch her work. As long as she was seated, the gout wasn’t a big problem. It was pretty successful. Juanita and I used to stop in just to watch her. And,” he smiled ruefully, “buy a thing or three.”
McLean nodded. Juanita Lopez was known to have a discerning eye and unerring feel for value.
A hole gaped above Zoe’s scorched workspace. With the exception of blackened ceiling tiles every few feet, it was the only flame damage on the first floor.
“Frye thinks the fire started here?” McLean sounded skeptical.
Lopez poked a pile of soggy cloth. “He blamed the fire on Mrs. Zack’s leaving oily rags in a bucket, then dropping a cigarette into it. We found the bucket, but its lid was on tight. Besides, she never smoked in the store. Looks to me like these towels were on a table directly overhead. They and the table were ignited by the fire that started on the second floor. The table collapsed, and the towels fell through a vent hole. They left a false trail, and the chief took it.”
McLean studied the ceiling tiles hanging from a frame suspended two feet beneath the original ceiling. A handy means of cutting a room down to eight foot walls instead of ten, saving considerably on heating bills. “Those tiles fire retardant?”
“I doubt it.” Lopez’s face darkened. “Firth did a rehab in here within weeks of taking over. Lowered the ceiling, painted, generally moved things around. Stupid county doesn’t keep track of stuff like that, and he put up those cheap fiberboard tiles. I’m amazed this place didn’t light off. As it is...” he motioned to the rectangular spots dotting the ceiling.
“What are those?”
“Firth cut holes in the upper floor every twelve feet, the size of vents for an air pump. We’re just lucky there weren’t more towels to fall through in other spots.”
They turned toward the only set of stairs, buried at the rear of the store. Lopez stopped and opened a flimsy door leading into a room beneath the stairs. McLean whistled softly at the flattened cardboard boxes and plastic garbage bags full of Styrofoam packing popcorn.
“The good part.” Lopez pointed up, to a hole the size of a large cupboard opening directly into the space above the false ceiling. “The heat pump duct work was to go in here. Makes sense, I suppose, but if this room had caught fire...” He shrugged, and McLean nodded. Any fire starting in the storage room would have roared through the space between the real and false ceilings in a feeding frenzy guaranteed to destroy the building. The weekend fire was nothing compared to what it could have been.
Lopez shut the door and circled left, past the buckled steel door guarding the alley entrance, and led the way upstairs. To McLean’s experienced eye the smoke pattern looked out of line with where the fire started.
“We found Firth down here.” Lopez vanished into a dark, twisting hallway that dead-ended against a brick wall. After two false turns McLean found another narrow hall with Lopez standing over a chalk outline.
“The firefighters who pulled Firth out of here must have been swallowing their hearts.”
Lopez glanced at him with a thin smile. “Thought we’d made a good rescue, too. Firth turned out to be heavier than he looked. Harvey and I busted our humps dragging him out of here.”
McLean nodded, remembering the fiftyish antique expert with a porcelain smile, taillight red hair, and iron handshake. He stopped beside Lopez and studied the chalk lines. “What were fire conditions like?”
Lopez made a small deprecating move. “The usual. Easy at first, then when we made that last turn,” he nodded at the doorway, “smoke dropped to our ankles, heat barely tolerable. Visibility about this far.” He held his thumb and first finger an inch apart. “I found Firth when I hit his head with my knee. I was tracing the wall with my left hand. Had a flashlight in my right, lot of good it was doing. Anyway, my knee hit something and I kinda fell forward and put my left hand right in the center of his chest.”
“So he was on his back.”
“Yeah.”
“What else happened?”
Lopez caught McLean’s raised eyebrows and frowned. “Chief Frye ordered a firefighter on a ladder in front of us to open up with a two and a half inch line.”
Hitting a fire from the front with a water stream while firefighters were coming up behind the blaze was inexcusably amateurish, but it explained the odd smoke pattern. It had happened to McLean and the memory never faded. Like being hit with a red-hot hammer. A physical force so immense it left no option but retreat. Chief Arnold Frye was such a bungler it was no surprise he’d missed the cause of the fire.
Lopez shrugged and moved on. His flashlight picked out the blackened remains of a door opening into a square room the size of a large bathroom. Their passage loosened some soot, and McLean let out a wall-rattling sneeze.
Lopez laughed. “I don’t get it. You’re supposed to have enough money to pay off the national debt, but here you are breathing this stuff.”
McLean flashed his light around the room. “What would you do if you won the lottery tomorrow?”
Lopez thought for a bit then laughed. “Same-o same-o, I suppose.”
McLean grunted. He stuck with fire investigation because he liked it. And from brute curiosity. Fire was a conniving, slippery foe, and he found untangling its trail a fresh puzzle every time.
“It started in here. Where they packed stuff for UPS or mailing or whatever.” Lopez let McLean past.
The small room had been loaded on Saturday night with cardboard and shipping popcorn. A fire load of considerable promise. If the blaze hadn’t been spotted early, when it broke through the window overlooking the street, the damage would have been worse. Much worse.
“What’s in there?” McLean nodded toward a half-hidden door.
“Firth’s living quarters. They’re actually above the shop next to the antique store. These buildings are so damned old and have had so many occupants.” Lopez shrugged. “Small wonder he didn’t make it.”
McLean wondered why, since Firth had to go through the fire room, he hadn’t grabbed the extinguisher by his door and tried to douse the blaze.
They continued touring the maze of short hallways, which eventually took them to the building’s other side. There a straight hall ran two-thirds the length of the building, opening onto a series of small rooms, each filled with period furniture.