Investigator Could Smoke Out Canniest Firebug

When you’re an arson investigator, you develop an uncanny sixth sense for knowing when your suspect is blowing smoke.

Bill Hager told me about it over lunch the other day.

“These kids--it’s amazing to watch the kids,” he said. As this 280-pound bear of a man makes small talk with them about their hobbies or girls or whatever, they show him a cool, a sang-froid worthy of James Bond. That is, until Hager asks the big one: “So, what do you know about the fire?”

Fire? What do I know about the fire? The fire? Me?

“They’re all over the place,” he said. “You can read it in their body language. They’re doing the guilty dance.”

Hager knows all the steps. Hundreds of arsonists have confessed to him in his 18 years as an investigator for the Ventura County Fire Department. He’s worked brush fires, business fires, home fires, car fires, fires started by small people trying to make themselves big.

He ran down the woman responsible for setting the dozens of fires that flared up in Oxnard’s Silver Strand neighborhood a few years ago. He spent months unsuccessfully searching for the owners of an orange pickup and a Datsun 260Z linked to the 20,000-acre Greenmeadow fire in the Santa Monica Mountains.

But all that is in the past.

At 54, Hager faced a choice: Spend who knows how many more years sifting through who knows how much more rubble, or take the retirement money and run.

So, as of last week, Hager is a happily retired arson investigator, a single, middle-aged guy on the eve of adventures that have nothing to do with dancing flames.

But he still can spin a yarn about his old cases.

An animated man, he arranges bowls and glasses on the lunch table to make a point about the direction of wind-whipped flame.

On a napkin, he sketches a cigarette to show the emptiness of a tobacco company’s claims about cooler-burning paper.

And he chuckles over the theme that runs through all the cases he’s ever handled: Human frailty.

There was the Case of the Embarrassed Tenant, for instance.

“The family was having hard times and they were about to be evicted,” he said. “But she couldn’t face it.”

The solution found in her quest for a socially acceptable reason to vacate the premises: Torch the house.

Then there was the Case of the Cocky Accountant, wherein an embezzler balanced the books at a Ventura car dealership by dousing all the files with gasoline and tossing in a match.

It happened just a day after he had been confronted by his boss about mysterious losses at the dealership. And that was two years after a similar confrontation--and a similar fire--at another dealership where the accountant had worked.

But the case that most gnaws at Hager is one of his biggest: the massive Wheeler fire that came perilously close to Ojai in July 1985.

“We investigated for six months,” he said. “We learned how it started and where it started--but we never could link a person to it.”

As with many major crimes, people called to turn themselves in for the fire. But none--with the exception of an inmate at a facility for the criminally insane in Northern California--could tell Hager the key bits of information he already knew.

Whether the inmate set it is unknown. For lack of evidence, charges were never filed, Hager said.

Hager wasn’t born into arson investigation.

After a stint in the Air Force, he set out to be a Spanish teacher. That plan was shelved after he joined the county Fire Department in 1972.

Now Hager plans to get back to languages. Not long ago, he had to quit his classes in German and Italian at Ventura College. “We were inundated with work,” he said. “Six fire deaths in one semester.”

Hager hopes to hone his Spanish by volunteering at a doctor pal’s clinic in Honduras.

And he wants to surf more, and ride his new motorcycle, and restore his old Corvette, and buy a sailboat, and cruise to the Caribbean, maybe even across the Atlantic.

And, oh sure, he’ll do a few arson investigations on the side. He and Peter Cronk, another retired investigator, have formed a company specializing in probing fires at sea, where a familiar refrain may be accompanied by the squawk of gulls and the moaning of foghorns:

Fire? what do I know about the fire? The fire? Me?

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.