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As the arsonist coolly watches from his car, a hardware store in suburban California starts to burn, with four people--two employees, a customer and her young grandson--trapped inside. The arsonist even narrates the scene, describing the thrill he gets in setting the fire, hearing the sirens, seeing people run for their lives--being the creator of chaos. He calls it "better than drama because it's real... It is the ultimate in reality entertainment." If people get hurt in his fires, he explains, "it is not my fault. They make the mistakes. They fail to get out of the way."
Several hours later, John Orr, a veteran Los Angeles arson investigator, celebrated for his uncanny ability to pinpoint the causes and points of origin of suspicious fires, studies the smoking rubble of the hardware store. Nick-named "The Professor" by his rookie partner, when Orr is given details of the event, he literally visualizes what happened. Although police believe the fire was an accident, Orr is convinced it was arson.
From this beginning, POINT OF ORIGIN tells the suspenseful story of the search for a serial arsonist. As Orr--who can locate the source of a fire just by following the stream from a fire hose--works case after case, he compiles a profile of the firebug: a white male in his mid-30s, who "has a hard-on for time delay devices" and who tends to start fires in crowded retail stores. "This is about ego, not fire," John tells his colleagues. "Your strategy should be to get under this guy's skin."
As Orr and his fellow investigators work to do just that, there are more fires--remarkably similar to a string of fires set along California's Highway 99 during a single weekend in 1987. Investigators recall that the same weekend of the '87 fires, a group of LA firefighters had traveled Highway 99 to attend a conference.
Could the firebug be a firefighter?
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