Firestorm Page 10

  Wants and warrants. Frederick started out of the lethargy into which the sound of engines and the small print of strangers’ lives had lulled him. Gonzales was wanted in Washoe County, Nevada, for aggravated assault, assault on a federal officer and grand theft auto. According to the map, Reno was in Washoe County. Gonzales might be dangerously nervous finding himself so close to home. Frederick set the Gonzales file aside. Before he landed, he’d have Spinks do some more checking. That in mind, he eyed the flat plastic AT&T phone outlet pressed into the seat back in front of him. He’d never used one, never seen anyone else use one. He hoped he wouldn’t make a fool of himself when the time came.

  Lindstrom, Stephen Marshal. White, male, twenty-seven, six-foot-two, one hundred eighty-seven pounds. Criminal history: arrested 1989 for obstructing traffic, fined and put on six months’ probation. BS in biology from Nevada State University, ski instructor at Tahoe winters 1989 to 1993, wilderness guide for Outward Bound summers ’89 to ’93. 1993 to the present dispatcher for the U.S. Forest Service out of Reno, Nevada.

  The two other reports were slim. Neil Page wasn’t on anybody’s computer that Tim could find. He’d been hired on locally. He had no record. The woman, Paula Mary Boggins, had two previous arrests but since they’d been when she was a juvenile, the records were sealed.

  Frederick leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes, collecting his thoughts. Newly acquired information was shuffled through his synapses like cards through the hands of a contract bridge player. Categories and cross references fell into place: LeFleur, Nims, Gonzales, Pepperdine, Short, Black Elk and Hayhurst were from the Four Corners area. Close enough they could have had contact before the fire.

  Lindstrom, Nims, Gonzales, Hayhurst, Boggins and Page, and possibly Short because of her brother, had a connection to northern California.

  Nims, Gonzales, Short and Hayhurst fell into both geographical categories. In a field where transience was a way of life—and many seasonals and firefighters led a nomadic existence—this was not in itself suspicious. It was just more information and Stanton filed it.

  There were two questions about most murders: why was the victim killed and why was he killed when he was killed? Anna might have some thoughts on that.

  Murder was such a good icebreaker.

  He opened his eyes. Anna’s file, the only one left, was on his knee. Had his legs been six inches shorter, he could have used his tray-table as a desk. With the new “efficient” seating in the 727s, he couldn’t fold it all the way down without straddling the plastic tray.

  Pigeon, Anna Louise, forty, white, female, five-foot-four, one hundred eighteen pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes. Frederick remembered her hair as more red than brown and, at a guess, would have said her eyes were blue. So much for the credibility of eyewitnesses. No wants. No warrants. No criminal history. He was relieved and laughed at himself, unsure of what he had expected. A Bachelor of Arts in communications from the University of California. Seven years with the National Park Service in Texas, Michigan and now Mesa Verde in southern Colorado. That was it: no secrets, no insights. Closing his eyes again, Stanton rested his hands on her file.

  He was a father, a government bureaucrat—albeit one with a tad of glamour still attached to his profession. He had a girlfriend of sorts—a woman he saw occasionally who would probably consider herself a girlfriend.

  Jetting halfway across a sleeping continent to save a damsel in distress struck him as impulsive and not a little bit ridiculous. Particularly a damsel who may or may not wish to be rescued by him and who would undoubtedly have the ill grace to rescue herself before he could arrive triumphantly on the scene, spurs jingling, armor flashing and whatever else men were required to jingle and flash in these cynical times.

  Still he wasn’t sorry he’d started the quest. Opportunities to be a Fool for Love didn’t come along every day.

  CHAPTER

  Ten

  ANNA’S FISTS WERE clenched on the front of Lindstrom’s brush jacket and his were clamped around her neck, their hard hats jammed together like mating turtles.

  Darkness was absolute and breath hard to come by. Soot and ash, galvanized by the rising winds, bonded with the air till it seemed a solid thing. Anna blessed LeFleur for the loan of the goggles and hoped the man wasn’t suffering too badly in their absence. The kerchief she’d tied over the lower half of her face was so impregnated with dirt it served more to slow particles than filter them out.

  The giant had gone mad. Footsteps melded into a cacophony of cracks and falls like thunder. The ground shook as ruined snags fell before the onslaught of wind. A dead forest, black monoliths burned by the hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands, many as tall as telephone poles, tons of charred wood and ash and cinder, was toppling. Every time the pounding came near, Anna cringed, though she knew she would never hear the one that crushed her.

  A crash came so close it shook her insides. Chunks thrown from a shattered snag rained down in a visible shower of sparks striking holes in the night. For an instant Anna thought her eyes were playing tricks until points of fire pierced her cheek.

  Ponderosas that had thrived on the flat-topped ridge, winter snows providing ample moisture and nothing between them and the sky, were being taken down. Orange fireflies swept by on the winds, battered against the metal. Pieces of burned debris, some large enough to rattle the darkness with their passage, exploded into the storm as the giants were felled.

  A convulsive clutch cracked her hard hat against Lindstrom’s as he jerked her to him. They were cuddled as close against the engine block of the truck as the laws of physics would allow, their legs pulled in, wrapped together. Anna’s feet and butt were so cold they hurt and her back ached from being crimped into a bow. Muscles in her calves had begun cramping but she was afraid to stretch her legs. Anything she stuck out was liable to get squashed.

  “It’s the end of the fucking world,” Lindstrom hollered in her ear. “We’ve got to get under this truck.”

  Again the ground shook. Anna pushed her face into the front of Lindstrom’s jacket. “You first,” she said.

  “I may be too big. You go. You’re little and scrawny. I’ll get as much of me under as will fit. Go.”

  Boggins’s truck rested on metal rims, the rubber of the tires lying in still-smoldering heaps. Clearance between the undercarriage and the ground felt like eight or nine inches—no more. Anna doubted she could squeeze beneath.

  A wrenching blow from an airborne branch striking her right shoulder convinced her to try.

  She threw herself back, shoulders on the ground, and tried to scoot along the edge of the truck’s shell. Cramped so long in one position, her legs refused to work. Her feet felt as unresponsive and heavy as wooden blocks. Lindstrom was shoving against whatever parts of her anatomy he could lay hands on in the dark, trying to stuff her beneath the chassis.

  Pushing and floundering brought pins and needles to her numbed limbs and, whining like a lost kitten, she began to thrash through the ashes.

  Running had always made her more afraid. Looking in closets and under beds for the bogeyman seemed to make it almost a surety that, one day, he would be there. Fear, kept at bay from pride or necessity, now ripped through her as she squirmed under the frame. Oblivious of the buttons on her jacket catching and bits of flesh snagged away by sharp edges of metal, Anna writhed in a frenzy of terror.

  Then she was under. The fit was tight. Something metal and round pushed down on her chest. Darkness weighed heavily, even the small frightening relief of sparks was denied her eyes. An old horror of small enclosed spaces crushed the air from her lungs. A short segment of imagination’s videotape played through her mind: her bloodied fingers clawing at a coffin lid. It was right out of a horror movie about premature burial she’d seen as a kid. Her mother had told her it would give her nightmares. Absurdity watered down panic and she willed herself to lie still and breathe deeply.

  Scrabbling at her left elbow announced Lind
strom’s attempt to join her and Anna was ashamed. She’d forgotten Stephen utterly. In her privately constructed hell she would have left him to die had that been the option. Once more she’d gotten lucky: human frailty shown, no damage done.

  With the crippling darkness and noise, it took her a moment to grasp what Stephen was doing: digging, burrowing under. She almost laughed at the obviousness of it and began pushing ash and duff, protected from the fire by the body of the vehicle, away from her. Lying on her back she felt as helpless as an upended beetle, but it wasn’t long before enough of a trench had been excavated that Stephen wormed his way in beside her.

  A jarring crash robbed her of any voiced welcome. She felt his hand close over hers and they lay together like frightened children as the remnants of a tree hailed down around the truck.

  Beneath the undercarriage the air was more breathable. Stretched flat, muscles uncramped, blood began to flow and some of the awful cold went out of Anna’s bones. Conversation was impossible and she squeezed Lindstrom’s hand to let him know how glad she was to have his company. Not much time passed before she felt his fingers relax, go limp. He was asleep or dead. Either way there was nothing she could do about it. Exhaustion weighed down her limbs, her eyelids and the soft stuff of her brain, but sleep would not come. The adrenaline cocktail mixed in her blood held onto the edge of consciousness even as the body fought for rest.

  An idle mind is the Devil’s playground, Anna thought as she sensed renewed cavorting of demon fear. To keep evil at bay, she tried to fill her skull with nontoxic thoughts: Piedmont, her pumpkin-colored tiger cat; Molly, her sister in New York; Frederick. Frederick brought with him the baggage of her husband, Zachary, nearly eight years dead, and derailed that train. For a while she tried clothes, food, sex, raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, but they all fell away and claustrophobia returned.

  Finally she latched onto murder. Not a pleasant subject, but one sufficiently captivating to hold her attention. And, since the death wasn’t her own, heartening in its own way. Anna was surprised at how little thought she had given Nims’s slaying and at long last understood how soldiers emotionally survived a war. Human comprehension was finite. For each thing added, something had to be taken away. Sometimes that something was grief, loss or fear, its place filled by the need to take the next step, hurdle the next fence.

  Time passed, shock was worn away with busyness. Leonard Nims’s death was just a puzzle as devoid of life as the corpse in the ravine. It provided the little gray cells with something to do other than conjure horrors with which to annoy her adrenal glands.

  Why should anyone want to kill Leonard Nims? Without even reaching, Anna could think of half a dozen reasons. If this had been the Orient Express and Nims the body with the myriad wounds, the mystery would have been a lot simpler. Finding the person who didn’t want to off him would have been easier than sorting through those with good reason in hopes of finding the one who was willing to walk through fire to accomplish the task.

  Still, to crowd out the Devil, Anna listed motives. LeFleur had fought with Len. Over what, she wasn’t sure, but John had gotten a fat lip out of the deal. Nims had come in with scratches. At the time Anna’d thought they’d come from a branch. In retrospect, coupled with his surly manner, they may have been inflicted in some altercation, maybe over a woman. He had expressed his hatred of women at the time, at least those not “in their place.” That was reason enough for Anna to kill him. Maybe it was good enough for Jennifer as well. Paula Boggins would probably find it sexy.

  Stephen, John, Jennifer—any one of them might hold Hamlin’s death against Nims. Anna doubted the rest of the San Juans knew yet that Nims had dropped the boy’s stretcher and run.

  We all dropped it and ran, she reminded herself. Hamlin’s death was shared by the five of them. Unless Len had caused the accident that broke Newt’s leg. Who would have known about that before the fire blew up?

  Black Elk. He was a squad leader, LeFleur had called him down the line to help. If Anna had been able to pick up on where the blame was being laid, Howard was sure to. He was better versed in crew politics than she. Black Elk could have told Joseph Hayhurst; there would have been time before the firestorm.

  Guilt could move mountains, unhinge psyches. She, Short, Lindstrom and LeFleur must each in some way feel responsible for Hamlin’s death. Might the need to shift blame—push a perhaps intolerable weight off onto another—be enough to justify murder in someone’s mind? Lindstrom could be unforgiving of those who failed to measure up to his standards. Jennifer had been known to carry a grudge.

  Anna made a mental note to see if anyone had been special friends with Newt Hamlin.

  That vein mined out, she moved on to physical evidence. As an investigator, she’d pretty much bollixed that. The crime scene had been so thoroughly contaminated, any good defense lawyer could probably get a notarized confession found pinned to the corpse with the murder weapon suppressed.

  I’ve had a lot on my mind, she excused herself, and tried to bring the scene into focus. The darkness was so unrelenting she wasn’t sure if her eyes were open or closed and she couldn’t move her hand to her face to find out.

  Don’t think about that, she cautioned as panic reared its ugly head. She squeezed her lids shut on the off chance they weren’t.

  She was lamentably bad about remembering names and faces but she was good with scenery. Nims’s murder scene fell into this category. Background came into focus first: low hanging clouds, smoke, ragged black fingers poking at the sky, a manzanita bush burned so fast and hot the perfect shapes of the leaves were still embossed on the ash. The creek bank where a bit had fallen away, the simple brown of earth looking alive and colorful in the gray landscape. Around the shelter ash smoothed by the wind, no tracks but hers, LeFleur’s and Lindstrom’s. Sand. The silver shelter so carefully erect and tidy.

  Anna stopped the film there.

  The shelter was textbook perfect, like the drawings of how a shelter should be deployed. She remembered noting that at the time, being bothered. But events rushed on and she’d not had time to analyze why. Nothing was textbook perfect. Though she’d not had the opportunity to view her shelter from the outside, she expected it was crushed and rumpled, not creased neatly along its little pup-tent spine, corners all aligned. She’d seen Black Elk in his shelter. He looked like a baked potato somebody had been using for a soccer ball.

  Ergo, whoever killed Nims had neatly put the shelter up around the corpse after the firestorm. Had it been earlier, the classic lines would have been mashed by the elements. The murderer knifed Nims during the firestorm and exited the shelter after the firestorm.

  A very mortal human thing to do, Anna was relieved to note. Visions of a demonic creature of flame and smoke darting about with a knife in its paws during the blowup were exorcised. Considered in the light of reality, a commodity Anna felt had been sorely compromised by nature over the past hours, the murderer had therefore to enter the tent before the burn, remain inside with Nims, murder him, wait out the storm with the corpse, then exit and reconstruct the tent.

  Cozy.

  Why would Nims let anyone in his tiny shelter? He wouldn’t, not even if their life depended on it. He’d let them die as he had let Hamlin die.

  As they had all let Hamlin die.

  Give it a rest, Anna told herself sharply.

  Physical evidence. Screwing her thoughts down tightly against stray emotions, she contemplated blood: good, tangible, necessary blood. With a knifing there was often an impressive amount of the stuff. She’d seen it on Nims and where else? Page: Neil Page’s shirtfront. He’d claimed nosebleed. Worth looking into.

  Jennifer. Her left glove had been bloodied. She said she’d cut her hand. Something in Anna was loath to consider Jennifer a suspect and she had to remind herself murder was an equal opportunity employer. Jennifer was there when Len dumped Hamlin. Jennifer had a brother just killed by fire. Under duress could she have slipped a mental cog and
plunged a knife between Nims’s ribs?

  Literally if not metaphorically the woman had blood on her hands. Worth looking into.

  Anna switched on the mental video again and watched herself lift the edge of the shelter: Nims’s arm, the gloved hands; LeFleur shaking the tent like a housewife with a dusty rug; Nims’s body, tangled in the straps, tumbling into view. Anna stopped the action there and tried to concentrate on the picture.

  At a crime scene in a normal place she would have had at least the rudimentary investigative tools at her disposal. A camera, for one. There were a number of reasons to photograph a crime scene, not the least of which was that often, after the dust had cleared and one viewed the event through the perspective of the camera lens, details not noticed at the time became apparent.

  Holding the image behind her eyes, Anna tried to do that now. Nims had been poured out of the shelter on his side, left hand above his head, the right palm up near his face. Anna tried to see if there was any expression but the soot that blackened all their faces masked his as well. All she could recall was the startling opalescence of his eyes.

  She tried to see the entirety of the body: the right hand, the left—glove caked with blood—hard hat knocked askew, yellow shirt, drab trousers, blood, brown and crumbly on his back and left side beneath his arm.

  The picture wavered, disintegrating under so much scrutiny. There was something wrong but Anna wasn’t seeing it. Tomorrow—or today, she had lost all sense of time—she would make a proper study of the scene. At the moment the adrenaline had been reabsorbed and her body was claiming its right to rest. She drifted into sleep so deep and hard even dreams were shut out.