daughter was having happy dreams. Esme lowered herself into the hot, hot bathwater. Life was good, wasn’t it? She thought again about Amy Lieb. This was the high drama in her life now. Hundreds of miles away, Tom Piper was searching for a madman. She hoped he caught him. She hoped Rafe returned home soon. She clicked on her bath stereo (Joy Division this time, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), shut her eyes, and allowed her mind to finally, finally, exhale.
3
O n February 11, someone lit the Amarillo aquarium on fire.
In the days that followed the conflagration, security tapes confirmed police suspicions of arson. FBI investigators went frame by frame over footage of the night janitor, a new hire named Emmett Poole, mopping up the third floor, twenty minutes before the fire began on that floor.
It was Tom Piper who figured it out.
“That’s lighter fluid,” he said. He pointed at the freeze-frame of the mop bucket, then at the broad-shouldered back of Emmett Poole. Upon further review, they couldn’t find any footage of the janitor’s face, none at all. Employees described him as nondescript. He’d only been on the job about a week. He’d answered an ad in the paper. His references had checked out. The authorities gathered to raid the address he’d listed. But it was a church. Emmett Poole, like the aquarium he’d ignited, had gone up in a puff of ash.
Tom Piper and his task force weren’t in Amarillo, though, because of the arson.
He was there because of what had happened shortly thereafter.
Station 13 had responded to the blaze at 9:55 p.m. Most of the crew had been watching the Democratic debate between Jefferson Traynor and Bob Kellerman. Up in his home state of Ohio, Kellerman was a volunteer fireman, so the boys in the firehouse (thorough Texas Republicans one and all) were rooting for one of their own. They watched the debate up in the bunk room on a soot-smeared fifty-two-inch LCD they’d rescued back in September from the toasty remains of a Best Buy. Then the call went out, and the TV went off, and the men grumbled into their gear.
On the way to the aquarium, Lou Hopper declared, “Kellerman kicked his ass.” Lou Hopper was the shift’s resident pontificator. Every workplace in America sported (at least) one. The self-educated expert. The know-it-all. The bar in Cheers had Cliff Clavin. Station 13 had Lou Hopper. He even had a gray mustache like Clavin, although not a wisp of hair on top. He claimed it had been singed off in a fire; somehow the flames had slipped their hot tongues underneath his helmet and licked off his hair.
Three other firefighters crowded the back of the engine with Lou. The chief sat up front with Bobby Vega, who always drove the truck.
It didn’t take them long to reach the aquarium from their home base off of Third Avenue. Amarillo was a city of daylight and most businesses closed shop by six o’clock, so the chief didn’t bother to activate the engine’s blaring siren. The few still on the road at 10:00 p.m. either knew enough to get out of the way or deserved to get run over. The three boys in the back, though—they had a tradition to uphold: feline-faced Roscoe Coffey popped a well-worn cassette into a boom box (acquired in 1989 from the toasty remains of a Conn’s—which the aforementioned doomed Best Buy had replaced) and pressed Play. As they neared the aquarium, a crown of streaming smoke rising from its brick skull, Johnny Cash and his mariachi horns warbled to life.
“I fell into a burning ring of fire…”
Never let it be said Station 13 lacked a dark, dark sense of humor.
Bobby Vega navigated the engine up North Hughes toward the aquarium. His family had settled in Amarillo when he was three years old. Everyone had assumed they were originally from Mexico, so that’s what they’d claimed. Coming from Mexico meant fewer questions than coming from Colombia. They had left Colombia in the middle of a drought and the year after they came to Amarillo, the city suffered its longest dry spell in one hundred years. Even today, water conservation remained a major concern; the fire department had been chastised on more than one occasion for their “extravagant use of water.”
The same moronic bigwigs who had chastised the fire department for their extravagant use of water later funded a three-story aquarium in the heart of a parched city. Bobby’s parents, who still attributed Amarillo’s meteorological bad luck to their arrival, read the news and laughed. Bobby didn’t laugh. He never found the government’s foolish behavior all that charming. Fools endangered. Fools led to an alarm at the firehouse and his brave friends risking their lives.
Bobby Vega was an angry young man, true, but driving the rig helped him vent. There was something about controlling that wide wheel and guiding his brothers to their destination which sated his fury. The usual tightness in his jaw went away. He kept the engine on a straight line toward the aquarium and enjoyed these few minutes of solace, not even minding that asinine country song on the tape deck.
“I fell down, down, down, but the flames went higher…”
For Tom Piper and his task force, reviewing the events leading up to the second massacre, much of the information about Station 13 and its actions on February 11 was circumstantial at best (and anecdotal at worst). They had no definitive proof the six men took North Hughes to the aquarium, or even that Johnny Cash had accompanied them on their trip. All Tom Piper had to go on was what he later learned about the men’s habits. He assumed what they did that night on the way to that fire was what they did every night they went out on a job. He interviewed Station 13’s other firefighters, many of whom had served at one time or another with the boys on the night shift. He interviewed their families. He put together a composite.
It was like figuring out the universe from a handful of photographs.
Amarillo had one firehouse. Some decades back, a forgotten politician had labeled it Station 13, because Amarillo was in the Thirteenth Congressional District and the constituents should be reminded. Lucky #13. At their first charity football game vs. the local police force, way back in the early ’80s, when the firefighters had marched out onto the field at Amarillo High, rather than having individual numbers stenciled on the backs of their jerseys they had each borne the same two red digits: one and three. The crowd ate it up.
The chief had been on that inaugural team. 1982 had been his rookie year, so the vets kept him on the bench for most of the game. He knew it wasn’t a comment on his playing ability; after all, every grown man in West Texas knew how to throw a football. He just didn’t have the seniority, and in public service (even on the football field), seniority trumped everything. The chief accepted that.
They finally put him in for the last quarter. He took his position as a tailback (he lacked the size for anything else) and readied for the snap. The play called for him and the fullback (#13) to fake left while the QB (#13) readied a forward pass to the wide receiver (#13), who would charge right, hopefully receive the pass, rush forty-six yards for the touchdown, and bring the game out of its 21-21 deadlock. The cops, impatient at being on the defense, blitzed the line. So instead of charging right, the firefighters’ wide receiver got trampled.
The chief saw panic in the QB’s eyes. Hell, the crowd saw panic in the QB’s eyes. If he didn’t get rid of the ball in the next five seconds, he’d meet a fate worse than his receiver. So the chief, as he interpreted it, had two options: use his small body to run interference and get pummeled or attempt a charge through the mass of blue uglies and pray for a pass reception.
The chief charged. His minimal size helped him shuttle through a needle’s eye of a hole. He rushed past the line of scrimmage and glanced back. Had the QB noticed? Would the ball come his way?
Yes.
In
