Where There’s Smoke, There’s the Fire Sleuth : Arson: There has been a 43% rise this year in investigations in the high desert.

Dan Watters has gotten used to the smell.

At the end of the day it sticks to you, the sheriff’s arson investigator says: the smell of ashes, sodden wood and, sometimes, death.

For five years, Watters has been the only full-time investigator in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Arson/Explosives Unit. The number of fire investigations in that area increased 43% this year, from 350 in the first six months of 1989 to 500 during the same period this year. Countywide, the increase was 28%.

Watters has handled the bulk of the workload, with other deputies being brought in as necessary. But last week, the dramatic increase spurred sheriff’s officials to form a new four-investigator arson team to be based in Lancaster, the first satellite of the 21-investigator unit. The team will begin work by the end of the year.

“June and July were the two busiest months in my career,” said Watters, 46, a 23-year Sheriff’s Department veteran who previously worked as a narcotics investigator. “I thought it was never going to end. I have never seen anything like that.”

A workday last week demonstrated why Watters welcomes the help. He has the biggest and perhaps the toughest arson beat in the county. He drives hundreds of miles through a landscape of extreme diversity, from the subdivisions of Santa Clarita to the high desert wilderness near Kern County to the Wrightwood ski country near San Bernardino County.

“You get a call and you’re an hour away,” Watters said. “It can get kind of hectic. When I was in arson school in Maryland, the guys there couldn’t believe we drive 60 miles to a call. Our area is bigger than their whole city.”

Watters contends with such exotic fare as booby-trapped drug labs, hit-and-run brush fire arsonists and desert survivalists who stockpile guns and explosives. The dry heat, strong winds and vast brushlands make the area a virtual tinderbox where a spark can mean disaster.

Watters knows the turf. He was born in Lancaster, the son of an American Indian hay hauler and an Anglo woman who migrated from Arkansas. His compact frame, mustache and the shadows beneath his gray eyes give him the tough, melancholy air of a bloodhound. He talks in a near-monotone punctuated with flashes of feeling as he discusses his work, his family and the incongruously genteel pastime he pursues off-duty: antique collecting.

“It’s great,” he said of his hobby. “I don’t bring my work home with me. It has nothing to do with the rest of my life.”

After gulping the first of many cups of coffee, Watters drove from the Lancaster sheriff’s station to the Mira Loma jail for a routine check on a sheriff’s bomb truck being repaired there. Like his fellow investigators, Watters is on 24-hour call for bomb duty.

Earlier this year Watters was called to a raid at a clandestine methamphetamine lab in Littlerock, where he dismantled a network of the booby traps that methamphetamine traffickers often use. And more recently Watters removed an explosive device that a woman’s jealous suitor wired to another man’s car. The bomb failed to go off because of a faulty connection; Watters arrested the suitor after a search of his car turned up shavings of wires used in the device.

“I prefer a bomb call to a fire,” Watters said. “Most of us when we roll to an explosives call, the only thing we’re thinking about is that package, what we’re going to do at that time. If you don’t feel confident of your abilities or your training, you shouldn’t do it.”

But when Watters left the jail last week he did not go on a high-tension bomb call. His next stop was a preliminary hearing for two men accused of possessing dynamite and machine guns discovered in a drug raid.

The suspects were brought into the Lancaster courtroom chained together in bright orange prison jumpsuits. They looked dazed and wild, one man sporting a tremendous shaggy beard. Deputies had also confiscated a defunct rocket launcher and hundreds of guns and swords at their house on the outskirts of Palmdale.

“Antelope Valley survivalist-types,” Watters said. “On this job you deal with some of the strangest individuals you ever will meet.”

The hearing dragged on and Watters had to come back after lunch.

“That’s the bottom line in being a detective,” he said, banging a sheaf of files against his leg, each of them an investigation being delayed. “Hurry up and wait.”

Watters attributes the rise in arson cases partly to rapid population growth, as well as to the number of construction sites in the area. In June a wage dispute preceded a $6-million blaze at the Marbella Villas condominiums in Lancaster, the most expensive in local history. Watters tracked down and arrested a disgruntled worker who is now awaiting trial.

The number of gun and explosives enthusiasts who gravitate to the open spaces of the high desert also helps explain the workload, Watters said. And geography and climate play a role.

“Our wind conditions are something we face that other parts of the county don’t,” Watters said. “We get these 4 o’clock breezes out here, they can be 50 or 60 m.p.h. If something gets out of hand, it gets out of hand.”

Earlier this summer, Watters said, television coverage of the devastation in Glendale and Santa Barbara contributed to a kind of collective frenzy. Suspicious fires multiplied. A man was arrested on charges of setting three early morning grass fires after calling authorities to say he had spotted the fires and stomped them out. Another man set fire to his Lancaster apartment and watched it burn, explaining later that he was a “pyro.”

“I don’t know what a psychologist would call it,” Watters said. “It’s like with the freeway shootings a while back, the more you heard about them, the more there were.”

During the same period, a string of roadside brush fires burned hundreds of acres and threatened residences in Leona Valley, Green Valley and other mountain communities. Although he had identified a potential suspect, Watters said, there was not enough evidence for an arrest.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ronald Smalstig, who is based in Lancaster, said arson is difficult to prosecute if a suspect is not caught in the act, especially with brush fires. At best the evidence comes in slivers: a tiny staple from a matchbook, the remnants of a flare.

“Arson in the field is almost impossible to prove,” Smalstig said.

About 300 of this year’s fires in the northern part of the county proved to be arson, officials said. They do not keep area statistics, but Sgt. Dale Underwood said the percentage of convictions was about the same as the unit’s 26% countywide average.

After lunch, Watters took the stand in the explosives case. He testified in flat, confident tones that the dynamite had been found to be authentic and therefore illegal. Then he hurried out of the courtroom, made several phone calls while refueling on coffee, and drove to a fire scene in Palmdale.

Years of experience in interrogation techniques and cultivation of informants are particularly useful in arson work, Watters said as he pulled into a shabby apartment complex on Avenue Q.

He described an arson murder four years earlier at the same address. In 1986, a gang member named James Scott broke into a 24-year-old woman’s apartment, raped her, beat her with a baseball bat and set her bed on fire. Wanda Jensen, who staggered out of the apartment carrying her 5-year-old daughter, died nine months later.

Watters learned of Scott’s involvement from informants he had used in narcotics work. Through them he advised Scott to surrender. Scott, now 28, surrendered, was convicted and is on Death Row in San Quentin after being sentenced last year.

“He is an animal,” Watters said. “As far as I’m concerned he’s right where he belongs.”

The case that brought Watters to Avenue Q last week was more mundane. He changed into a pair of old running shoes before going to a second-floor apartment that burned two nights earlier.

“You go in with an open mind,” Watters said. “You can’t rule out an accidental fire.”

Rosalinda Olmedo, a plump 26-year-old with heavily painted eyes, led him past a smoke-blackened wall tapestry bearing a Christ image, past a shattered television set, stuffed animals lying face down in muck, a forlorn feather duster.

Olmedo, who was away the night of the fire, said she suspected an ex-boyfriend who had threatened to get even after she kicked him out a month earlier.

“He was using crack and all that,” she said. “I told him you can’t do that, I’ve got kids here.”

At a major fire scene, Watters divides the area into a grid and does a meticulous search of the debris. In this case that was not necessary. He inspected the living room and worked his way toward the charred bedroom, where he determined the fire had started at the bed.

“You start at the area of least damage and work your way in to the origin point,” he said. “You look for the V-pattern that a fire makes. It grows upward and outward from the origin point, seeking oxygen.”

Watters eliminated accidental causes such as an electrical malfunction. The fire was intentional and had the signs of a classic “spite and revenge” arson. The ex-boyfriend, 20-year-old Fidel Ortiz, had a motive. He resembled a witness’s description of one of two people seen running from the fire. The locked door had not been forced and Ortiz had a key.

Olmedo said Ortiz planned to go to Mexico, so Watters decided to pick him up immediately for questioning. He strapped on his bulletproof vest and met two uniformed deputies at the auto garage where Ortiz worked. As they stalked into the work area, three mechanics looked up in surprise.

Watters confronted a curly haired youth. “Felipe?” he said, getting the name wrong.

“No, Fidel,” the startled youth answered, and Watters quickly said, “Fidel, yeah, don’t move.”

Moments later, Ortiz sat handcuffed in the squad car. In Spanish, he asked his co-workers to ask the deputies what was going on.

It’s about a fire on Avenue Q, came the response. One of the mechanics grinned.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?” Watters said.

On the way back to the station, Watters said: “You read about the brush fires, the million-dollar construction sites burning down. But this is basic. This is what we do every day.”

Ortiz has pleaded innocent to arson and vandalism and is being held on $20,000 bail.