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Chapter
Twelve
Scene of the Crime: The
Leeds Household Fire
While the city slept, the Leeds household had
mysteriously burst into flames.
Jetta Carlson, a camerawoman aboard Copter Three, captured the first
panoramic glimpse of the fire.
Appearing to Doug Abado, the pilot, at twelve o’clock due west, the
conflagration seemed to have erupted fortuitously for her benefit that very
moment. A gasp escaped her throat
but also a sigh. It had been a
long shift for the pilot and camerawoman in support of On-the-Sport News. After a crowded schedule this week and
an even more grueling day, Jetta was tempted to ignore her discovery and call
it quits for the night, until the helicopter passed directly over the
fire. That moment, without comprehension,
an enthusiasm gripped her, for she could literally smell the news. Below a column of acrid dark smoke, the
white-hot flames rose up that moment to an elevation, she estimated, of
approximately three hundred feet.
She had been able to tell immediately by its suddenness, color, and
altitude that it was not a typical blaze, but now she discovered something
extraordinary about the fire.
In the wind whistling and rattling through the
copter, the pungent odor of sulfur mingled with the fragrance of burning wood
in the smoky air. Sulfur, also
called brimstone, was a byproduct of volcanic activity, and seemed out of place
in a residential blaze. When they
were close enough to see the details of the inferno and catch the drama of the
first fire truck arriving on the scene, Jetta motioned excitedly to the pilot
to circle around the raging fire.
The fiery framework of the house was immediately beset with columns of
water. Time was running out. The photographic moment, Jetta was
certain, would soon pass. There
was an urgent tone in her voice, as the crackling flames rose further and
further up into the sky. Jetta
Carlson, a veteran camerawoman, had in her sights a potential scoop—one more
news story in her checkered career, sensing, with journalistic intuition,
something more sinister than a residential fire.
For Doug Abado, the exhausted pilot, it was just one
more side trip on their journey back to the station. For a few moments, his bloodshot eyes remained focused on
the night sky ahead, his only goal to park the copter, drive home and crawl
into bed alongside of his slumbering wife. He ignored, from the corner of his eye, the familiar and
annoying signals made by Jetta’s tiny brown hands. Pretending he didn’t hear her excited exclamation, “Fire and
brimstone, down below,” he held firm to the stick, accelerating instead of
decelerating as she repeated this exclamation into his ear.
“Uh-uh, no way Jetta,” he said firmly as she held her
camera up and continued to motion excitedly for him to fly over the fire.
“You’ve got enough footage. Let
someone else call this one in.”
“Come on Doug,” she begged, zooming in with her lens
on the rising flames, “there’s something unnatural about that blaze. Look how high the flames are shooting
up, not like a house would burn at all, but more like a factory blazing or
chemical fire.”
“It’s one-thirty am,” the pilot drawled
irritably. “We’ve covered a hot pursuit, two freeway pile ups, and a bunch of
silly detours that had nothing to do with the news. That’s a residential blaze down there Jetta, not a five
alarm fire. Let the guys on the
ground find one for a change!”
“But this one’s different Doug,” she implored, her
finger poised again over the camera trigger. “I smell sulfur—fire and
brimstone—in the air. What could
that mean? Have you ever smelled
sulfur from a fire? Give me one
low flyover for five minutes, before we head back—just five more, Doug, that’s
all!”
Doug groaned and gnashed his teeth but found
himself yielding reluctantly to Jetta’s pleas. His hand turned the cyclic stick gently and smoothly, though
agitation brewed in his mind. As
her petite body balanced the massive camera on her fragile shoulders, a loud
curse escaped the pilot’s mouth as the copter banked sharply and returned to
the sector above the fire.
“That’s right, Doug, just a quick fly over, a
teensy-weensy look,” she cooed, reaching in with a free hand to extract the
cell phone from her coat.
Catching sight of the gesture, Doug exclaimed
angrily “I know what you’re doing, Jetta.
You’re calling the station again.
You’re going to make a big deal out of this, like that nonsense in
Griffith Park and that ridiculous detour over the beach!” “Well, I’m not
hanging around this time,” he vowed, as the copter hovered angrily over the
fire. “You got five minutes, Jetta—five goddamn minutes, then I’m heading back
to the station!”
“Hello, this is Jetta Carlson, is this Fritz Meyers,
the swing editor?” She asked in a muted voice.
“Why can’t you let those sons-of-bitches find
their own stories?” Fritz could hear the pilot shout on the other end.
“Copter Three, you’re late,” the editor
responded lazily into the phone.
“I’m taping footage of a spectacular fire,” she
announced blithely, as complaints flowed out of Fritz’s mouth.
“You been freelancing again, Jetta? You know what the chief thinks about
photo journalists. We got time
limits here at the station, Jetta.
Your pilot must really be pissed!”
“I need a follow-up on the ground—a team to interview
witnesses near the fire,” she shouted over the helicopter blades that had grown
louder as they hovered over the fire.
“Witnesses?
Are you kidding? It’s
0135—graveyard hours. “Where in the hell are you, Jetta. You two were due in at midnight. That copter must be almost out of gas.”
She mumbled the location to Fritz, who turned back
suddenly to his meal. As the pilot
continued to grumble under his breath, Fritz, who seemed to be chewing on a
sandwich, looked up the schedule and came back with two names.
“Let’s see,” he muttered to himself, “Valentine
Getz, a rookie, and Milo Flores, his cameraman, are available, after holding
over for that Star Trek Convention across town. Says here that News Van Five—Stubbs and Rodgers—broke down
last night.” “Wait a minute,” he
whistled under his breath, “that’s at the Anaheim Convention Center, about thirty
miles away.” “You want I
should send them over for a look-see?” His voice took on a cavalier air.
“All right Fritz,” she sighed, looking longingly at
the scene below, “we’ll have them cover the fire. But by the time they get there, the flames will have died
down and the firefighters will have put it out. Do you think Gus would mind me grabbing footage, myself?”
“It’s just tape,” he laughed sarcastically. “It’s
the time, he minds, Jetta, not the footage. Go for it girl!”
“Thanks, Fritz, I’m going to do just that,” she
signed off quickly. “Please, Doug,” she turned pleadingly to the pilot, “stop
swearing, you want that to be on the tape?”
Doug laughed hysterically. Though dampened significantly, the fire still rose over a
hundred feet in the air as fire fighters battled the blaze.
Suddenly, with the volume on her camera turned up
and the copter directly above the inferno once again, Jetta Carlson’s crinkly
voice was recorded in the background as official footage was taken of the Leeds
household fire:
“This is Jetta Carlson for On-the-Spot News. Copter Three is overhead a fountain of
flame that sprang up just as I was ready to put my gear away for the
night. A late night news van will
be covering the scene within moments, but before the conflagration dies down, I
decided to capture these spectacular shots on their behalf. As you can see, the flames are shooting
up over a hundred feet in the air.
The commotion below, through the smoke, tells us that the fire
department’s in control. Yet I
smell sulfur and see a white hot inferno below me. I hope to God no one’s in that burning house!…”
******
Because of the late hour, most residents of Los
Angeles and Orange County would not hear or read about the Leeds household fire
until the next day. The Leeds’
neighbors, after making several 911 calls, however, stood by on the sidewalks
and lawns in their bathrobes gawking at the blaze. Company Fifty-Eight received a call at the station from the
dispatcher several moments before Copter Three’s Jetta Carlson spotted the
fire. The sound of sirens brought
out more gawkers up and down the street, until several dozen spectators
accumulated in front of the burning house. Some of them, drawn by concern or curiosity, inched in as
close as they could to the inferno before police officers cordoned off the
area, keeping the gawkers at bay until firefighters finally arrived.
After the clamorous, nerve-shattering arrival of
Company Fifty-Eight’s fire trucks, a larger than normal buffer area had been
ordered by Operation Battalion Chief Everett Sloan around the unnaturally hot
fire, forcing onlookers to wait across the street on Wallace Schoolcraft’s
lawn. By the time the news van
arrived, the firefighters, as Jetta feared, had almost put out the fire, the
dark column of smoke, seen for miles around, had disappeared, and most of the
spectators had returned home to their beds. The few witnesses, who had already gave their accounts to
the police officers, now hung in the shadows on Schoolcraft’s lawn, looking
across the street with jaundiced eyes at the amateurish attempts made by rookie
newsman Valentine Getz at covering the fire. Getz, due to his inexperience, had completely ignored the
main body of spectators, opting instead to stand with his cameraman Milo Flores
on the opposite side of the cordoned off area to editorialize on what he had
overheard so far about the fire:
“According to witnesses, the house exploded like a
Roman candle, projecting a shaft of fire three to four hundred feet into the
air. Neighbors felt the earth
trembling and smelled sulfur in the air, as if a volcano erupted beneath the
house, sending a column of black smoke miles into the night sky…”
The cameraman winced at this elaboration upon
the facts, but said nothing this time.
The already murky truth from late arrivals had now been stretched into
utter fantasy. As Doug Abado, the Copter
Three pilot, Milo Flores was saddled with an eccentric partner, who was, unlike
Jetta Carlson, inexperienced to boot.
In the case of the reporter and his cameraman, the newsmen had been
promised the day off tomorrow after substituting for News Van Five, which made
it easier for Milo to bide his time.
While young Valentine had delusions of grandeur, the veteran cameraman
had a vision of a shower, late night meal, and twelve hours of uninterrupted
sleep. Ironically, the Leeds
closest neighbors, Wallace Schoolcraft and Felicity Brown, gave the most
important details to the police, and were missed entirely during the noise and
commotion. Not one person in the
hangers-on Valentine talked to, Milo noted with irritation, even knew the
householders’ names, and yet they offered the reporters metaphors on the
elevation, color, and smell of the blaze he would use in the remainder of his
coverage of the fire. Getz loved
to hear the sound of his own voice.
Everyone, except the late arriving newsmen, had smelled sulfur emanating
from the fire, a feature the reporter overplayed at the end of his report: “It was in the words of one neighbor
‘fire and brimstone raining down upon this sinful house.’” But neither the reporter nor Jetta
Carlson of Copter Three had the slightest clue as to what might have happened
here last night. This information,
which had been provided by next-door neighbors that Valentine Getz had
overlooked, had been gathered already by Officer Bruce Gandy before the
firefighters, themselves, had even arrived on the scene.
When the reporter was satisfied with his
footage about the fire, he and his partner packed up hastily and left the
scene. Thanks to Valentine Getz,
the only facts about the fire that would be aired in the morning news were that
there had been a residential fire and that witnesses say smelled like
brimstone. The size and
destruction of the fire had been sensationalized by Getz to overcompensate for
an amateurish report. Everything
else about the portentous fire, including the names of the homeowners, would
flow into the media belatedly from the police and firefighter reports, dulling
the importance of the event to an unsuspecting world.
******
For several hours, Fire Company Fifty-Eight
under the command of captain Roscoe Hunter battled the Leeds household fire
until it was considered suppressed by Battalion Chief Sloan. Officer Gandy suspected foul play after
talking to neighbors at the scene.
There had been no appearance of Cora Leeds outside this house for
several months. Yesterday,
Felicity Brown informed Gandy, an ambulance had pulled into the Vale’s
driveway, and the attendants had raced into their home, but when the attendants
returned they brought an empty gurney out of the house. This had smacked of domestic violence
to the veteran police officer, who wrote on a new page of his notepad: Detectives
should check dispatch log for 911 calls.
That evening according to Wallace Schoolcraft, Cora
made a spectacle of herself before Adam left. At one point she unfastened her robe in order to flash a
motorist passing by. The couple
wrestled at the doorway until the reverend drug her inside. After Adam had driven away, the same
motorist returned with a bag in his hand and entered the house. At that point in his investigation,
Gandy wrote another important note below the first: Need
detective follow-up: motive corresponds to neighbor’s suspicions. The reverend had motive for domestic
violence. Perhaps he set fire to
the house.
The neighbors had seen strange goings on in this
house for quite some time. Almost
unanimously, they saw something sinister in the fire, ranging from Felicity’s
reading of brimstone as God’s judgment to Wallace’s belief that the reverend
murdered his wife. All of them
agreed that arson and homicide were afoot. Officer Bruce Gandy, however, was a patrolman, not a
detective. He had, with a
thoroughness that had earned him respect in the department, gone as far as he
could go. After submitting his
report, it was up to the homicide division to act. In accordance with current policy, he would allow chief Sloan
to see his report before sending it by remote fax machine to the Homicide
Division of the LAPD. His private
notes would be shared with the sergeant assigned to the case, including his
personal view that a homicide occurred at this address.
Based upon Officer Gandy’s report and the bizarre
nature of the fire, Hunter and Sloan also suspected a crime scene. Strangely enough, however, in spite of
the report and suspicious circumstances at the scene, there was no body found
in the burnt out frame or, for that matter, evidence of an inflammable liquid
that might have started the fire.
Sulfur, in itself, the captain reminded the chief, was not a flammable;
it was the result of extreme heat as in burning slag at a foundry or volcanic
eruption. It had no place in such
a common house fire. Inexplicably,
in place of a fuel odor, the police officers, firefighters, and neighbors all
claimed to have smelled sulfur (otherwise known as brimstone) in the air. Unfortunately, this evidence, if that’s
what it was, faded, along with the fire and smoke, in the morning air. After smothering the last of the flames
and miraculously preventing the fire from spreading to surrounding structures,
the captain, battalion chief, and fire fighters sniffed in vain for the
telltale odor in the air. When the
battalion chief declared that the fire was suppressed, he and the captain also
searched the burnt out frame in utter futility for suspicious cans or rags to
indicate that arson was the cause of the fire.
In spite of the utter lack of evidence, Battalion
Chief Sloan called Deputy Fire Chief Sid Barnes over his cell phone to request
a formal departmental investigation of the fire. Although he was not ready, as Gandy suggested, to bring in a
homicide team, the officer’s report convinced Barnes that an arson, perhaps a
homicide, occurred at this residence last night. The suspicious circumstances of the blaze and the claim by
witnesses that the wife had not left the house were important factors in an
arson investigation. The other
information gathered by Gandy, (the rumors that there had been strange goings
on in this house and that Adam had been arguing with his wife) were matters for
the detectives, not the fire department, to solve.
Sloan had been surprised at how quickly Barnes
responded to his request. He
didn’t know that Sid had recently joined a fundamentalist church up town, and
his mind was imbued with apocalyptic visions of the End Times. As if Sloan had said the magic word,
Sid interrupted him midway through his discussion.
“Brimstone?” he cried. “You smelled brimstone?….
Are you certain Everett?”
“We all smelled it,” Sloan replied
reassuringly. “I remember smelling it on my vacation last year in Yellowstone
National Park. That was brimstone,
Sid. I’m certain of it!”
“And you say the flames shot up hundreds of
feet?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you’re certain the house belonged to
Adam Leeds?”
“Yes, I’m certain, but you didn’t let me
finish,” Everett spoke more rapidly now. “There’s more, much more. The policeman at the scene interviewed
several neighbors who think he murdered his wife. There’s a history of domestic turmoil at that house. Right before the reverend left for the
night, he quarreled with his wife.
A stranger drove up after Adam left and entered the Leeds house—”
“What?” The deputy fire chief gasped. “This
sounds important. Give me the
address Everett. After I call
dispatch, I’m coming down there myself!”
With a element of trepidation mingled with his
excitement, Everett gave his superior the address and directions on how to
reach Adam Leeds’ house. Had he
opened some sort of Pandora’s box?
Why would the deputy fire chief get this excited over a residential
fire? Circumstances yet unknown to
the captain and battalion chief were bringing Sid Barnes to the scene and to
the core of the investigation.
Sid, who had once attended Our Lord and Savior’s
Independent Church when it was ministered by Hugh Thomas, knew the young
“heretic” pastor who replaced Hugh.
It was as if a shot of Jack Daniels registered in his blood stream as he
listened to Sloan’s voice on the phone.
Adam Leeds’ new age message had been the reason why he and his wife
Vicky quit the church and began going to another, more conservative church
uptown.
“That heretic son-of-a-bitch!” Muttered Sid, a
crafty grin sliding onto his weather beaten face.
As quickly as possible now, he did his own
“homework,” although he had no doubts that Adam murdered his wife. Not only did he call the dispatcher
but, while waiting for her verbal summary, called Sloan back and asked him to
use the patrolman’s remote fax to send him a copy of the report. Without argument, Officer Gandy, who
had been waiting to hear the deputy fire chief’s reaction, himself, took the
handwritten report back to his car and faxed a copy to Sid. Sid’s wife gave him a glass of water
and pill as he stood impatiently waiting for the fax, certain that his blood
pressure must be elevated by now.
“Calm down dear,” she cooed, patting his shaking
hand, “what’s all the dither about?”
“Calm down?
What’s all the dither? Do
you know what this means?” He looked into her naive blue eyes, as the first
page slid slowly out. “It’s another sign Vicky…. Damn, I’m getting me a new
fax. To top it off, its possible
our ex-minister murdered his wife!”
“Cora?
That dreadful woman!” Vicki stood reflecting upon the reverend’s
troublesome wife.
“Yes, Cora Leeds,” he made a face. “It’s a
wonder he didn’t do her in a long time ago!”
As his wife made them a cup of tea, he
listened with pencil and pad in hand as the dispatcher read back all of the 911
calls for the Leeds fire made last night.
After several moments of writing down the same complaints that were
merely worded differently, Sid thanked her for her efforts and hung up. The information given to him by the
dispatcher and the report sent by Officer Gandy were mere technicalities
necessary to make a case. As he
would tell Vicky at dinner tonight, “I feel it in the marrow of my bones!” He would never admit this to anyone but
his wife, but he was certain that they were living in the End Times; the Leeds
Fire was but one more omen or sign.
According to the current police report, the Reverend
Adam Leeds’ neighbors had been suspicious of him and his wife for quite some
time. There were no telephone
calls logged in by the emergency dispatcher and only hearsay evidence that
marital problems existed in the Reverend Vale’s house. Sid and Vicky, however, had heard
Adam’s heretical sermons and seen Cora’s deplorable behavior in church. Sid called his old friend Dwight
Higgins and learned that Adam, who had fallen out of favor with members of the
church, had not shown up for a meeting with the elders that evening at Dwight’s
house. That’s enough
evidence, he told himself, his mind reeling with this news. Moving from his pajamas to his uniform
in what Vicky thought was record-breaking time, Sid slurped a mouthful of tea
to please his wife, kissed her chubby check, then sprinted out-of-breath to his
car.
******
As he drove from the suburbs, dimly lit silhouettes
of distant skyscrapers against the subdued lights of the city reminded him of
the late hour. It was nearly three
am, he noted, as he followed Everett’s directions over the phone. Several more hours of darkness, the
worst time to investigate a fire, lie ahead of the LAFD.
Where has the heretic minister gone? He asked himself, as he
raced across town. Where is his
troublesome wife, if she wasn’t cremated in that house? After mentally piecing all the hearsay
and circumstantial evidence together, Sid realized that a mere fire
investigation for arson was not enough.
This, his bone marrow told him, was a homicide. As he approached his destination, Sid
called Deputy Chief Randall Walker of the LAPD Homicide Division to request an
official police investigation of the case. It was a bold move awakening Randall and his wife at this
hour. At this stage in the
investigation, it was impossible to talk Walker into sending a homicide squad
to the scene. Randall wanted more
than Sid’s instincts before committing his men. For the time being, the lack of a body as well as physical
evidence of arson threw a roadblock in front of Sid’s plans. Walker promised to send a homicide
squad to the scene when the fire investigator had proven that arson was the
cause of the fire. This
requirement, in effect, before Sid even arrived at the scene, amounted to a
refusal of his request.
Unfortunately for him this time, other than the witnesses’ unfounded
opinions, no such evidence had been found.
To make matters worse that morning, the fire
investigator and his team who arrived shortly before Barnes, quickly lost Sid’s
confidence when they told him that there was, in fact, no evidence of arson for
the fire. In spite of the earlier
assessment by the fire captain and battalion chief that it might be a crime
scene, there was also disagreement now between Deputy Fire Chief Barnes and the
other fire officials at the scene as to the necessity of bringing in detectives
and a homicide team from the LAPD.
Without the remains of a dead body or at least physical evidence of
arson causing the fire, Captain Roscoe Hunter and Battalion Chief Everett
Sloan, the original advocates of an investigation, were not interested in
bringing in the police.
There was, Barnes was acutely aware, a certain awkwardness between firefighters and the police when the fire was out and the jurisdiction hinged on whether or not a body had been found after suppression of the fire or if there was at least arson involved in the fire. In the case of the Leeds fire there appeared to be neither, and yet for Sid Barnes the suspicious nature of the Leeds fire seemed obvious. Not only did Adam Leeds’ neighbors claim that Cora Leeds had caused an embarrassing scene before he left last night, but a stranger visited her right afterwards and did not leave until later that evening. Now, after talking to Dwight Higgins, Sid could add to his list Adam’s failure to show up for an important meeting that night. There was, Barnes recalled from experience, both motive and opportunity, the prime indicators in a murder but no evidence and no body…. In the eyes of law enforcement there was therefore no case.
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