With 2,100 Square Miles to Cover, He Still Gets His Man : Law enforcement: Sheriff’s arson investigator has worked the beat alone for five years. But an increase in cases has brought him some help.

Dan Watters has gotten used to the smell.

At the end of the day it sticks to you: the stench of ashes, sodden wood, and sometimes death.

For five years, Deputy 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. With more than 2,100 square miles to cover, he has the biggest and perhaps the toughest arson beat in the county.

In his territory, the number of fire investigations 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 handles the bulk of the workload, with other deputies brought in as necessary. But last week, the dramatic increase spurred a decision by sheriff’s officials to form a new four-member arson team based in Lancaster, establishing the county’s first satellite unit.

“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.”

Watters 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.”

He deals with such challenges 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 region a virtual tinderbox where a spark can mean disaster.

The rise in arson cases can be attributed partly to rapid population growth, Watters said, as well as a proliferation of construction sites. 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 adds to the workload, Watters said. Geography and climate play a role, too.

“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 miles an hour. If something gets out of hand, it gets out of hand.”

Watters knows the territory. He was born in Lancaster. 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, family and the incongruously genteel hobby he pursues off duty: antique collecting.

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

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

“I don’t know what a psychologist would call it,” Watters said. “Santa Barbara and Glendale were in the media, and there were fires all over the place . . . it’s like with the freeway shootings a while back, the more you heard about them, the more there were.”

About 300 of this year’s fires in the northern part of the county proved to be arson, officials said. Sgt. Dale Underwood said the percentage of convictions for the region was about the same as the unit’s 26% average.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ronald Smalstig, 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.

One of the most gruesome cases Watters has run across in recent years occurred in 1986 in Palmdale. A street gang member named James Scott had broken 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 to death last year.

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