Table of contents | Previous chapter Introduction | Cast of characters   Playing with Fire A novel by Scott Lazenby   Final Chapter very year, it seemed the airlines squeezed the seats a few inches closer together, and took out another of the plane’s restrooms. I figured the airlines should just skip the pretense about comfort and administer a drug before every flight to put the passengers into a deep stupor. I didn’t need it, though: I slept hard on the first leg of my flight back to Portland.       As the plane taxied into the gate at Denver, I thought about my night with Kate, replaying it in my mind. I could still see her in the candlelight, in the moonlight, in the light of the reflecting pond. I savored the images, knowing they would fade over the next few months.       Then my mind drifted to the coming week at work, forcing a hard reality check. Betty Sue had sent a fax to my hotel room, giving me an update. The public works union was insisting on some major increases for standby pay and shift differentials — they knew the fire department was freeing up a lot of money, and they didn’t want to miss the gravy train. All the lawsuits against the city had been dropped, except one: the personal suit against me for the alleged violation of the open-meetings law. A parting shot from the Fire Association, which had taken over the case from the now-defunct TBLC. Depositions were scheduled for next Wednesday. But, on the positive side, the Fly Creek Fire Board had suddenly dropped its opposition to the golf course project, under pressure from their own volunteer firefighters. It appeared that a lot of them hoped to get hired by Willamette Fire.       I made my connection, and got a window seat. We took off to the south and climbed to get over the Rockies. I tried to find Kate’s house below, but the city was too far away. I pushed the thought from my mind, and pulled a novel out of my briefcase. When the plane leveled off, a steward pushed a cart down the narrow aisle, passing out containers with cold salads and packets of imitation food. I washed mine down with a ginger ale. When the steward came by again, I started to ask for coffee, but changed my mind when I saw the line for the restroom.       I drifted in and out of sleep. We seemed to be flying through clear skies all the way from Denver, but we hit clouds when the plane crossed the Cascades. It was a climate pattern that I had become accustomed to. The plane descended into the white blanket, and I couldn’t see anything until the Columbia appeared in the gloom.       I found my carry-on bag and joined the herd moving up the jetway. I saw Mary waiting for me at the gate, alone in the crowd of people. Her hair fell on her white T-shirt in a cascade of gold. She grinned and moved forward to hug me. It was good being home. •      •      •       I had been back in the office for two days when Simon Garrett called. “There’s something we need to talk about,” he said cryptically. It wasn’t unusual; he was good about keeping me informed about cases in progress. But when I asked if he wanted to meet at his usual booth at the Fir Away Café, he said that it would be better to meet in his office. This piqued my curiosity.       I hadn’t spent much time in Simon’s office. Neither had he, for that matter. He was more likely to be in the squad room, skimming over his officers’ reports, or riding with one of the sergeants or officers, or sitting at his table at the café, smoking his pipe. In contrast to the luxurious mahogany of Max Oakley’s office, the walls of Simon’s office were finished in rough-hewn cedar planks that he had nailed up himself one weekend eight years ago. Commendations, photos of officers and relatives, and yellowing cartoons cut from newspapers were tacked haphazardly on the wood. Simon’s wooden swivel chair creaked when he leaned back. I pushed aside some papers on his desk to rest my coffee cup, and sat in a red vinyl chair, its padding poking out from a small tear in the front corner. I waited, knowing that Simon wouldn’t be rushed when telling a story.       “Here’s one I thought you would enjoy.” He pulled a typed report out of a stack and fished around for his reading glasses. “Yeah, here it is. Howlett wrote it when he arrested a drunk driver. It goes, ‘When the subject got out of the car, I informed him that he was under arrest and to get on the ground. The subject responded with a raised middle finger and matching expletive. I then pulled out my pepper spray and warned the subject to get on the ground or he would be sprayed. The subject refused. I sprayed him and administered several blows to the wrist with my sap. Subject finally went to his knees, at which time I was able to cuff him.’ ” Simon glanced at me over his glasses. “Now get this,” he said. “Howlett writes, ‘I noted that he had a moderate odor of alcohol and slurred his expletives.’ How do like that? ‘He slurred his expletives!’ ” Simon took off his glasses and guffawed.       “Good job. The prosecutor and a judge will get a kick out of that.” I pictured them sitting in the judge’s chambers, imitating some choice slurred expletives.       “Yeah. Most of the guys hate writing these things, but a few of them are creative.” Simon rubbed his chin, then abruptly got up and closed his office door — a first in the ten years I had known him. He sat back down and propped his elbows on the desk, peering into the bottom of his empty coffee cup. “I’ve got a, uh, delicate situation. It involves Max Oakley,” he said.       “Oh?”       “Uh huh. Remember when you mentioned that he once worked for City/County Fire?” I nodded, although I really didn’t remember telling Simon about it. “Well, it got me to thinking. I’ve been here longer than him, so I reckoned I would have known about it. And what really got me curious was why it never showed up on his résumé.”       “You’ve got a copy of his résumé?” I asked, surprised. Simon never struck me as someone who would keep that kind of thing.       “Yeah, well, your secretary sort of let me into his personnel file.”       “Really?”       “Yes. I assured her it was official police business. And that she couldn’t tell anyone. Anyway, there wasn’t any mention of it, so I went ahead and talked to some of the folks down there in Arizona, and started figuring out why it never showed up in his file.”       Simon leaned back in his chair, still serious but relishing his role as storyteller. I raised my eyebrows, willing him to continue.       “See,” he said, “it turns out that old Max was there all right. Only a couple of years, but that was enough, I guess. He was put in charge of equipment specs and procurement when they were expanding into some of the New Mexico and Nevada markets. They were buying half-million-dollar pumpers like they were goin’ out of style, mostly from American LaFrance, but from other companies too.”       With a feeling of morbid fascination, I started to guess where this was heading. “And some of the funds turned up missing, huh?”       “Yep. One of their auditors stumbled onto it when they tried to match invoices to purchase orders and payments. There were duplicate payments to vendors, and payments on a few invoices that the companies denied they had ever submitted. Somebody had to have forged signatures when they deposited the checks, but they never did figure out who did it.”       “How’s that?” I asked. “Your guys have always managed to solve embezzlement cases.” It was true: Kimberly Phelps — one of our detectives — was a genius at sorting through stacks of accounting records and seeing the patterns that led to arrests and convictions.       “Yeah, but they didn’t bring in the cops. I guess they figured that, on balance, the bad PR would outweigh the loss. They depended on their reputation as a well-run, efficient business. Compared to the value of their new contracts, a couple of million bucks wasn’t that big a deal. ’Course, they had to do something. Old Max wasn’t directly implicated, but at best, he was guilty of mismanagement. Since it happened on his watch, he took the fall for it, and moved to Roseburg.”       “How’d he cover the gap in his résumé?” I asked. I may have looked at it once, but if so, it had been a decade ago.       “It just said he was working on his master’s degree at ASU. Which is true; he was doing that, but only part time.”       “Okay. So ... ?” There had to be more to the story.       Simon leaned forward. “You know Max is sort of a type A guy? Pretty meticulous?” I nodded; compared to Simon, Oakley was downright compulsive. “Well,” he continued, “it turns out that he kept detailed records on the whole thing — how he set up the accounts, where he deposited the funds, and where he moved the money to when the audit caught up with him.”       I was speechless. Simon let the silence hang, his jaw set but with a flash of amusement in his eyes. I could hear the muffled sound of telephones ringing behind his office door, and the ticking of a cuckoo clock on the wall behind me.       “What, he had all this stuff just sitting in a file in his office?” I finally said.       “No. It is — or was — buried with a bunch of tax stuff in a desk in his house.”       “Okay. So how did you get it?”       “Got a search warrant, and just found it.”       I shook my head. “I may have been preoccupied the last few weeks, but I can’t believe all this happened without me knowing it. I mean, if nothing else, Max would have been in my office, pounding on my desk and telling me to keep you off his back.”       “Yeah, but he didn’t know about the search warrant. We just happened to get it when he was out of town somewhere. D.C. or someplace like that. Gave us plenty of time for a really thorough search.”       It seemed fitting. Simon had always been critical of Oakley’s out-of-town conferences. “He still doesn’t know?”       “Oh, he knows now. We had to leave a copy of the search warrant on his kitchen table. Pesky state law, you know. It kind of tickles me picturing him sitting there waiting for the shoe to drop. City/County seems a lot more interested in prosecuting, and the Maricopa County D.A. is eager for us to send him back there. So I’m ready to make the arrest. But I wanted to, uh, talk to you first.”       Talk to me? I wondered if he was just extending a professional courtesy, or feeling me out to see if he should follow through with it. I thought about Max’s quiet and comforting presence as we raced to the hospital on the prank call about Trixie. And the way I had publicly defended him after the union’s no-confidence vote. Then another image formed: Max sitting in a coffee shop somewhere, telling Rob Titus about the Willamette Valley Fire District proposal and making broad hints that I had instructed him to keep the information from the city council.       “You’ve gotta do what you gotta do,” I said.       “Of course. But I just wanted to let you know before the shit hit the fan.”       It would be a mess, but I couldn’t say I didn’t look forward to it. I could at least give Sabrina Chan a heads up — I owed her that much.       “So, is there anything to the inheritance story, or is this how he really got his money?”       “No, that was the first thing I checked, because I could do it on my own. I dug around in probate records here and in Arizona and everywhere else he’s lived, and couldn’t find anything about an inheritance like that. And when he worked at Roseburg, nobody figured he was independently wealthy then. It’s what got me suspicious. He must have concocted that story here, when he wanted to start using the money.”       I thought about Max’s lifestyle and the extra income someone would have if they invested two or three million dollars. It seemed to fit. “You must have put a lot of time into this, Simon.”       “Yeah. It was worth it. See, he came in one day, all friendly like, but all he was really interested in was my retirement plans. That sort of pissed me off.”       I didn’t tell Simon that I had been the one to put that idea into Oakley’s head. Unwittingly — or maybe subconsciously — I had put the investigation into motion. “Who else knows?” I asked.       “Only Sergeant Ramos and Detective Phelps. But I have to move fast on the arrest, or word will get out somehow. The City/County boys have got to know by now that I have something on this.”       “Yeah, you’re right.” I started to get up. It wouldn’t have been right for me to be anywhere near when Simon made the trip to Oakley’s office.       “One more thing, Ben.” Simon leaned back and waited for me to sit down.       “What’s that?”       “You know that fire out at your house?”       “Yeah ... ?” He had my full attention again.       “After it happened, one of the firefighters mentioned that a couple of gallons of kerosene seemed to be missing from the training tower. They wouldn’t have noticed it, except they had to do an inventory for the annual audit.”       “So?”       “So when I was out at Oakley’s place, I thought I saw a couple of those cans in his garage. I didn’t pay too much attention to them at the time, since I wasn’t looking for any connections with the fire, but I’m pretty sure I saw them.”       “Well, why don’t you send somebody out there to check it out?”       “I did. Well, it was me, actually. Last weekend, when I knew that Oakley and the missus were at a retirement banquet. It was dark and I had to use a flashlight through a side window. The shelf was empty.”       “Really?” I pictured Simon lurking around in the dark in Max’s neighborhood. The high cedar fences would have given him plenty of cover. “Well, that’s not much to go on.”       “Right. But it got me to thinking. Tell me this: did you ask Max directly if he had ever worked for City/County?”       “Yeah, I think so. I don’t remember what he said, though.”       “Okay. When, exactly, was this?”       I tried playing back our conversations, connecting them with events. But too much had been happening to keep it all straight. “Let me see. I wanted to ask him about it, but then that vote of no-confidence issue came up. We had a meeting in a restaurant, and I might have brought it up then.” It seemed so long ago, but it wasn’t, really. “It could be that I asked, but then the call from the hospital came in and I forgot about it. I just don’t know.”       “Was that before the fire?”       “Yes.” Those events were still clear in my memory, as much as I wanted to forget them.       “Hmm.” Simon absently tapped a pencil against the side of his coffee cup.       “What are you thinking?”       He looked up. “I don’t really have anything that will stick. But it might be something I can use if Max gets, uh, uncooperative.”       A thought occurred to me. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to track him down? I heard he was already moving some of his stuff into his new office in the Willamette Fire headquarters.”       Simon grinned. “I’ll find him. He was in his Station One office when you got here.” He turned serious. “Ben, I’ll do this as discreetly as I can. We can do the booking down at the county jail, and avoid stirring stuff up here. But we can’t keep it quiet.”       “Yes, I know.” The rest of my day would have to be spent in calls to council members, a carefully worded press release, and fielding questions. I could get Betty Sue to help with some of the behind-the-scenes work, and I smiled when I thought of how much she would relish the task. “What about having the D.A. and county sheriff handle all the press and public contacts?” I asked. “I don’t want this to seem like a personal grudge.”       “Makes sense. That’s how we’ve handled internal situations in the past.”       Once more, I got up to leave. “Hey, Simon, thanks for your work on this. You’re a good man.”       “It’s my pleasure. Really.” •      •      •       When I got home, Mary listened to the news with wide-eyed amazement. She wasn’t one to let resentment fester, and I was often impressed with her ability to forgive people. But she was unusually cheerful at dinner, as if her sense of balance and justice was restored.       Before she went to bed, I read to Trixie from T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. I had read it years earlier, but I couldn’t remember the details. Did Lancelot keep his love secret from Guinevere? Or if she was aware of it, did she and the hapless knight summon sheer willpower to keep from expressing their attraction, out of their love and respect for Arthur? Or was Lancelot doomed to give in to his feelings for the queen and incur a reluctant banishment by the king? I supposed that, being a legend, it could accommodate any of the variations. The one that I knew would never work, though, was for Lancelot and Guinevere to live happily ever after. The once and future conundrum.       After a chapter, I tucked Trixie in, then sat next to Mary on the living room couch. I handed her an envelope.       “What’s this?” she asked.       “Tickets for a four-day weekend at Cabo San Lucas.”       “Really? When?”       “The weekend after next. I figured you could get away easier once classes were out.”       “Sure, and Trixie too.”       “No, just the two of us. I made arrangements for Trixie to stay with Abbie while we’re gone.”       “Ah,” she murmured. “A romantic getaway, huh?”       “Yep. That okay with you?”       Instead of answering, she just hugged me and pressed her cheek to my chest. •      •      •       A month later, I found myself back in Fire Station One, having been invited to attend the celebration of the handover of our fire department to the Willamette Valley Fire District. It was in the middle of the day, to avoid paying overtime to the assistant chiefs and others on a five-day work week. I hadn’t looked forward to it, and thought that I would, at best, feel awkward surrounded by individuals who had only months earlier tried to get me fired. But they were all cordial, greeting me warmly and acting like nothing had happened.       I wandered through the crowd, holding a plate of meatballs on sticks. A callout was signaled on a loudspeaker, dozens of pagers sounded, and four of the firefighters hustled out of the room with self-important expressions on their faces. I looked around, but didn’t see any sign of Brian Gallagher. I approached Phil Tucker, who had been a captain with our department, and was now a battalion chief with Willamette Valley. I hadn’t seen him since he had lent me his coat and fetched a hot cup of coffee as we sat on the porch after the fire.       “Hey, Phil, congratulations on your promotion.”       “Thanks, Ben. It was good of you to come over for this.”       I shrugged. “It’s no problem.” We talked about the changes that the fire district was making, and how it had affected some of our mutual acquaintances. We were standing by a window, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the fire truck returning to the station. Must have been a false alarm. “So where’s Gallagher?” I asked.       Tucker glanced at my eyes, trying to gauge if it was just an innocent question. “Didn’t you hear? He’s in California. Or, he will be in a month or two. He got a job as a contract negotiator for a bunch of the bargaining units in the Bay area.”       “Is that so?” I said. “I would have thought he would have wanted to stay through the transition.”       “Uh, I’m not sure he was offered a job with Willamette,” Tucker said quietly.       I considered that for a moment. The fire district was completely dominated by current and former firefighters, from the entry-level recruits to the chairman of the fire board itself. But the executive staff wouldn’t be any more enthusiastic about union strife than I was. It made sense that they would want to keep him off the payroll.       “Well, I’ll be darned,” I said.       “Yeah. You’ve probably figured this out, but the troops will often push a guy like Gallagher to the front and let him do their battle for them. Then they just stand back and watch. It’s entertainment for them, like watching a gladiator fight. Most of them are sort of — what’s the word? — appalled by the tactics their fighter uses, but hey, if they all make out better in the end, they’re glad to put up with it. For Gallagher, though, it was a suicide mission.”       “Hmm. Can’t say I’m too sympathetic, though.”       “Yeah, and the funny thing is, Gallagher didn’t really care much either. He lives for the fight, and he probably reckoned that things were going to get pretty dull around here.” Tucker scanned the crowd and spotted one of the Willamette Valley assistant chiefs. “Well, it’s been good talking to you, Ben, but I’ve got to go over there and suck up for a while.”       I laughed. “Good luck to you, Phil.”       The speeches were mercifully brief, and I was able to leave the party soon after. It occurred to me as I walked back to city hall that Max Oakley’s name had never come up. The arrest had stirred things up enough, but Oakley was out on bail, waiting for a grand jury hearing. There hadn’t been much more juice for conversation in a while. The sun warmed me as I walked, and I took off my coat and slung it over my shoulder. Mount Hood dominated the eastern horizon, its snow cover retreating to the glaciers.       I returned a few calls, and had just put the phone down when my intercom buzzed. It was Marie in the downstairs lobby.       “Ben, there’s someone heading up to your office to see you.”       “Oh? Who?”       “Scarlet!”       I groaned. “Great.” For an instant I thought of hiding. “Was she carrying anything?”       “Yeah, but I couldn’t see it too clearly. Looked like maybe a dead goldfish in a jar or something. Oh, and there’s a guy with her.”       “You’re kidding. Who?”       “Lenny Fiala, and he looked just as mad as the last time he came storming in here.”       “Oh, man. Thanks for the warning, Marie.” I moved as quickly as I could into the reception area, shutting my door behind me. I leaned on Terri’s desk, and waited. Copyright © 2001, Scott D. Lazenby. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the author is prohibited. Illustration: Paul Salmon