"Name rings a bell," Bentley says.
"Save the Strands," Jack says.
"What the what?"
"Save the Strands," Jack says. "She's been in the papers. She and her husband are big fund-raisers for Save the Strands."
A community group fighting the Great Sunsets Ltd. corporation to prevent them from putting a condo complex on Dana Strands, the last undeveloped stretch of the south coast.
Dana Strands, Jack's beloved Dana Strands, a swatch of grass and trees that sits high on a bluff above Dana Strand Beach. Years ago, it was a trailer park, and then that failed, and then nature reclaimed it and grew over and around it, and is still holding on to it against all the forces of progress.
Just holding on, Jack thinks.
"Whatever," Bentley says.
Jack says, "There's a husband and two kids."
"We're looking for them."
"Shit."
"They ain't in the house," Bentley says. "I mean we're looking for notification purposes. How'd you get here so soon?"
"Billy picked it off the scanner, ran the address, had it waiting for me when I got in."
"You insurance bastards," Bentley says. "You just can't wait to get in there and start chiseling, can you?"
Jack hears a little dog barking from somewhere behind the house.
It bothers him.
"You name a cause?" Jack asks.
Bentley shakes his head and laughs this laugh he has, which sounds more like steam coming out of a radiator. He says, "Just get out your checkbook, Jack."
"You mind if I go in and have a look?" Jack asks.
"Yeah, I do mind," Bentley says. "Except I can't stop you, right?"
"Right."
It's in the insurance contract. If you have a loss and you make a claim, the insurance company gets to inspect the loss.
"So knock yourself out," Bentley says. He leans way in, trying to get into Jack's face. "Only – Jack? Don't bust chops here. I pull the pin in two weeks. I plan to spend my retirement annoying bass on Lake Havasu, not giving depositions. What you got here is you got a woman drinking vodka and smoking, and she passes out, spills the booze, drops the cigarette and barbecues herself, and that's what you got here."
"You're retiring, Bentley?" Jack asks.
"Thirty years."
"It's about time you made it official."
One reason – out of a veritable smorgasbord of reasons – that Jack hates Accidentally Bentley is that Bentley's a lazy son of a bitch who doesn't like to do his job. Bentley could find an accidental cause for virtually any fire. If Bentley had been at Dresden he'd have looked around the ashes and found a faulty electric-blanket control. Cuts down on paperwork and court appearances.
As a fire investigator, Bentley makes a great fisherman.
"Hey, Jack," Bentley says. He's smiling but he's definitely pissed. "At least I didn't get thrown out."
Like me, Jack thinks. He says, "That's probably because they don't realize you're even there."
"Fuck you," Bentley says.
"Hop in the back."
The smile disappears from Bentley's face. He's like serious now.
"Accidental fire, accidental death," Bentley says. "Don't dick around in there."
Jack waits until Bentley leaves before he gets out of the car.
To go dick around in there.
6
Before the scene gets cold.
Literally.
The colder the scene, the less chance there is of finding out what happened.
In jargon, the "C amp;O" – the cause and origin – of the fire.
The C amp;O is important for an insurance company because there are accidents and there are accidents. If the insured negligently caused the accident then the insurance company is on the hook for the whole bill. But if it's a faulty electric blanket, or a bad switch, or if some appliance malfunctions and sets off a spark, then the company has a shot at something called subrogation, which basically means that the insurance company pays the policyholder and then sues the manufacturer of the faulty item.
So Jack has to dick around in there, but he thinks of it as dicking around with a purpose.
He pops open the trunk of his car.
What he's got in there is a folding ladder, a couple of different flashlights, a shovel, a heavy-duty Stanley tape measure, two 35-mm Minoltas, a Sony Hi8 camcorder, a small clip-on Dictaphone, a notebook, three floodlights, three folding metal stands for the lights, and a fire kit.
The fire kit consists of yellow rubber gloves, a yellow hardhat, and a pair of white paper overalls that slip over your feet like kids' pajamas.
The trunk is like full.
Jack keeps all this stuff in his trunk because Jack is basically a Dalmatian – when a fire happens he's there.
Jack slips into the overalls and feels like some sort of geek from a cheap sci-fi movie, but it's worth it. The first fire you inspect you don't do it, and the soot ruins your clothes or at least totally messes up your laundry schedule.
So he puts on the overalls.
Likewise the hardhat, which he doesn't really need, but Goddamn Billy will fine you a hundred bucks if he comes to a loss site and catches you without the hat. ("I don't want any goddamn workmen's comp claims," he says.) Jack clips the Dictaphone inside his shirt – if you clip it outside and get it full of soot, you buy a new Dictaphone – slings the cameras over his shoulder and heads for the house.
Which in insurance parlance is called "the risk."
Actually, that's before something happens.
After something happens it's called "the loss."
When a risk becomes a loss – when what could happen does happen – is where Jack comes in.
This is what he does for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company – he adjusts claims. He's been adjusting claims for twelve years now, and as gigs go Jack figures it's a decent one. He works mostly alone; no one gives him a lot of shit as long as he gets the job done, and he always gets the job done. Ergo, it's a relatively shit-free environment.
Some of his fellow adjusters seem to think that they take a lot of shit from the policyholders but Jack doesn't get it. "It's a simple job," he'll tell them when he's heard enough whining. "The insurance policy is a contract. It spells out exactly what you pay for and what you don't. What you owe, you pay. What you don't, you don't."
So there's no reason to take any shit or dish any out.
You don't get personal, you don't get emotional. Whatever you do, you don't get involved. You do the job and the rest of the time you surf.
This is Jack's philosophy and it works for him. Works for Goddamn Billy, too, because whenever he gets a big fire, he assigns it to Jack. Which only makes sense because that's what Jack did for the Sheriff's Department before they kicked him out – he investigated fires.
So Jack knows that the first thing you do when you investigate a house fire is you walk around the house.
SOP – standard operating procedure – in a fire inspection: you work from the outside in. What you observe on the outside can tell you a lot about what happened on the inside.
He lets himself in through the wrought-iron gate, being careful to shut it behind him because there's that barking dog.
Two little kids lose their mother, Jack thinks, least I can do is not lose their dog for them.
The gate opens into an interior courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall. A winding, crushed gravel path snakes around a Zen garden on the right and a little koi pond on the left.
Or former koi pond, Jack thinks.
The pond is sodden with ashes.
Dead koi – once gold and orange, now black with soot – float on the top.
"Note," Jack says into the Dictaphone. "Inquire about value of koi."
He walks through the garden to the house itself. Takes one look and thinks, Oh shit.
7
He's seen the house maybe a million times from the water but he hadn't recognized the address.