Free Fire Lover by Joseph Wambaugh

incendiary fires, but John said it may have been that it only seemed that way because he worked harder at defining them. He was building a reputation among arson investigators in neighboring jurisdictions, and it got enhanced when he received permission from the California Conference of Arson Investigators to host their five-day fire - fighting examinations.
    He choreographed a live burn of a derelict building, a big one involving forty helpers, role players, and coordinators. Everyone thought it was spectacular. They got to watch a building fire from inception through all stages, and it was easy to see how people described fires in anthropomorphic terms. It did lick and dance and leap, after which it growled and roared and devoured everything, including the air that fed it.
    A Love Machine was loosed upon the San Gabriel Valley. John Orr chronicled some of his adventures:
    During my single years in the early - mid 1980s, I simultaneously dated Glendale and Pasadena lady friends.
    My love life was no secret. I couldn't leave my pager on all night without a charger if I slept somewhere other than my home base. I had to let Verdugo Dispatch know my overnight phone number. If I called after 10:00 p. M., the dispatcher, no matter who answered, would say, "Hi, John. Who is it tonight? Miss 242 or Miss 795?" For the Glendale or Pasadena prefixes.
    Women weren't drinking so much anymore. A lot of them were doing the twelve - step tango and the carefree bachelor decided that the ones he was meeting in gin joints weren't cutting it. He began answering singles ads but didn't share this secret with anyone. During that year he answered eleven ads and dated ten women. Most of them were worth a second date or even a third, a pretty good average.
    His first date, though, might've discouraged some singles. After answering her ad, he agreed to meet the woman at a Chinese restaurant for lunch, but just as he was in the middle of a formal introduction, he got paged to an accidental fire where a homeowner, who'd been cleaning the gas range with a flammable liquid, ignited gas fumes that burned her to death.
    He explained his predicament, that he'd have to hurry to the fire scene to meet the coroner's people, and she said, "Cool! Can I go with you? I've never seen a burned body!"
    The women he dated from the singles ads were of a higher caliber than those he met in the bars, he said.
    And then in the autumn of 1984, on October 10, he attended the most monumental fire of his career, the disastrous blaze in South Pasadena at Ole's Home Center. The morning after that fire, when they were sifting through the rubble for clues, the South Pasadena fire chief, who'd heard about the photos John Orr had snapped the night before, asked to see them. So John put down his shovel, headed for a one-hour photo mart, and returned just before noon.
    He couldn't believe what was happening then, what with the L. A. County sheriffs clearing out debris on a D-9 Caterpillar tractor instead of crawling the scene on hands and knees. Even the cadaver dogs they'd brought in couldn't find a scent in all that mess.
    John quit the scene in disgust. "I decided I had better things to do than lean on a shovel until some cop snapped his fingers," he reported. "The condescending cop attitude toward fire department investigators was never more pronounced than at that scene."
    By 5:00 p. M., Sergeant Palmer of the L. A. County Sheriff's Department attended a press conference and the fire was declared accidental.
    John later contacted the coroner's office and was stunned to learn that no law - enforcement officer was even present during the autopsies. He talked with a pathologist and learned that the bodies had very high concentrations of carbon monoxide. He later wrote, "They were dead before the fire trucks ever left the station. I considered quietly pursuing the case, but my partner warned me off."
    In 1985, they celebrated the fifth anniversary of the arson unit, but John knew that