Firestorm Page 12

  Something had been removed or something added to the scene: incriminating evidence taken or misleading evidence planted. Cop-thinking, Anna realized. The obvious was more human and mundane: curiosity. Somebody just wanting to see the dead guy. Cheap thrills. The fact that she’d said the corpse was not to be visited notwithstanding. Who was she? Some lady EMT with the word “Security” typed in after her name on her red-dog, the term used to describe the pink paper firefighters’ time was recorded on. Out here the trappings of rank were stripped away. Nature was a great equalizer.

  By the look of the drift in the tracks, they were several hours old. More than that Anna couldn’t tell. Everyone but Paula wore fire boots. The tracks looked too big to be Jennifer’s but Anna wouldn’t even swear to that.

  Having learned all she could from the outside, Anna moved to unveil the body. Nims had been dead sixteen to eighteen hours. With rigor mortis and the cold, his body was stiff as a board. Where it wasn’t black, the skin was a dirty gray. Len’s right cheek was dark and mottled. Blood, no longer moved by his heart, had settled in postmortem lividity. The blue eyes were still open but the orbs had begun to dry and they no longer had that startling brightness. Anna tried to close the lids with a gentle sweep of her hand the way she’d seen it done in a thousand movies but they wouldn’t stay down. She found herself pressing too hard, felt tissue give beneath her fingers and made herself stop.

  With the cold, the hunger, the isolation, a scary edge was being neared. That place where nightmares and reality become indistinguishable. They were all somewhere in the neighborhood of that chasm. Some closer than others. Anna rocked back on her haunches, made herself look away from the body and let the peaceful desolation of the landscape calm her febrile mind.

  There were times it was not good to be too much alone, she thought, and wished she’d made Stephen come with her.

  At length her brain settled and she pushed on.

  The footprints were most plentiful behind Nims’s right shoulder and slightly to the rear. Anna moved to stand in the same place, leaned down and rolled the corpse back and toward her. It came up all of a piece and was surprisingly heavy. Sand beneath the body was compressed into the shape of chest and limbs as if Nims had tried to squeeze himself into the earth to escape the fire or his assailant. A thin layer of ice had formed where the body’s heat, leached out slowly in the hours after death, had melted blown snow. Nims should have been frozen to the ground but whoever had stood here before had rolled the corpse up just as she was doing and rifled the pockets of the shirt. The button flaps were undone and the fabric pulled away from the body where ice had once adhered it to the flesh.

  Since Anna had failed to search the corpse when they’d first found it, she could only surmise something had been taken rather than left. Cursing herself for a fool, she made a careful search of the body. Compass in the left shirt pocket. Right pocket empty. Len carried a leather knife sheath on his belt beneath his left arm. The sheath was empty. Dollars to doughnuts the knife was in his ribs, Anna thought. The handle of the weapon was of metal with holes cut out either for weight or style. By the size of the hilt and sheath, the blade was close to six inches long. Judging from the angle, the point of the weapon had been driven into the heart. There were no signs of a struggle.

  Nims’s trouser pockets yielded nothing of a telling nature: lint, ChapStick, gum, a spare handkerchief. Somewhere along the line he’d shed his yellow pack—probably as he fled the fire—but the square canvas envelope that housed his fire shelter was still on his webbed belt.

  The snap was closed and it struck Anna as peculiar. She was willing to bet there wasn’t a person among them who’d taken the time to resnap the case after deploying their shelter. She opened it and looked inside, not sure what, if anything, she expected to find. It was empty but for a handful of crumbs. On a hunch she put one on the tip of her tongue: a cookie crumb. A number of things fell into place. When Anna returned to their bivouac she would count the shelters but she knew there would be only eight.

  Nims might not share his shelter to save another’s life but not everyone was so single-minded. In the 1980s, Anna remembered, winds had snatched a fire shelter from a man’s hands. His buddy had made him lie beneath him, sharing his own shelter. Both men survived.

  The crumbs in Len’s shelter envelope: too lazy to carry the added weight of the aluminum tent, he had probably jettisoned it in favor of extra food. Just as nature was about to cull the idiot from the gene pool, someone had taken pity and let Nims into their shake ’n’ bake. That would account for the deep depression in the sand beneath the corpse. Someone had lain on top of him.

  Why save a man’s life at the risk of one’s own just to stick a knife between his ribs? Surely it would be simpler to let him burn to death? No investigation, no prosecution; just one little secret to carry to the grave.

  Unless Len forced himself on his benefactor.

  No signs of a struggle, Anna reminded herself. With the firestorm bearing down it would have required utmost cooperation to survive.

  An impulse killing, then. Something had happened in the shelter during the storm that had caused savior to turn executioner, driving Nims’s own knife into his heart.

  Anna remembered trying to breathe, to think, not to think, to remember the pledge of allegiance and keep her pinky fingers from being roasted. She doubted she could have focused on anybody else long enough to bother killing them.

  She pulled the shelter back over the corpse. Nims’s left hand with the blood-encrusted glove protruded from beneath the covering, reaching out as if for help. Anna grabbed the thumb and pulled. The glove slipped from the dead hand. She remembered noting when he’d come to the medical tent how small his feet were. His hands, too, were delicate and well formed. On a corpse they were unpleasantly human, touching. Anna wished she could tuck the hand under the tarp but it would mean breaking the arm and she wasn’t up for that. Feeling she’d done something irreverent, she tugged the glove back in place.

  The bloody glove argued against the instantaneous death other factors pointed to. To soak the glove so completely, Nims must have grabbed at the knife as it went in. Anna tried reaching her left armpit with her left hand. It was devilishly awkward but in great pain or fear might have been accomplished.

  Having weighted the shelter with rocks once again, she followed the path of the grave robber back to where the others waited by the boulder.

  The shelter LeFleur had rigged was surprisingly cozy and Anna had a strange sense of hearth and home when she saw the familiar faces.

  Paula had been dressed in a spare fire shirt and wool trousers someone had had the foresight to stuff into their yellow pack—Black Elk, by the size of the clothes. And Anna recognized a pair of her own blue wool rag socks on the girl’s feet. Lindstrom was sitting close, jollying her, and she was laughing. Better medicine still. Howard Black Elk leaned against the boulder, eyes closed. He’d gone a bit gray around the mouth. Though he was a strong man, his injuries were taking a severe toll.

  The fire pit was well stocked with embers and Joseph Hayhurst had converted helmets into vessels to hold snowmelt. While Anna approved of the Apache’s enterprise it depressed her slightly. It was an admission they might be there awhile.

  Pepperdine was haranguing John LeFleur about posting twenty-four-hour watches. The crew boss’s mouth was clamped shut and his eyes fixed beyond the younger man’s shoulder.

  Back to the others, Jennifer sat staring out at the nothing peeling away above the creek bank. Her eyes were hooded, unseeing, and Anna knew she was at as much or more risk than the two burn victims. Most people at some time in their lives lose the will to live for a minute, a day, a week. It was possible Short’s survival instinct had chosen the wrong place and time to abandon her.

  Pepperdine saw her approach and turned from LeFleur to what he clearly hoped would be a more sympathetic ear. “Gonzales is gone.” His tone made it clear he considered Anna to be at fault. “I told you we should’
ve radioed John.”

  He hadn’t but she let that pass. “Hey, John, what’s Hugh been telling you?”

  “Gonzales went to take a dump,” LeFleur said bluntly. “Barney’s got a problem with that, I guess.”

  “He’s gone,” Pepperdine insisted.

  “Looks like Neil’s gone too,” Anna said mildly.

  “Nature calls,” Hayhurst put in, “and man answers. I kind of envy their regularity.”

  Hugh looked from Anna to John and back again. “I think somebody ought to go bring him in,” he insisted. Color had come up in his fat cheeks and he was balling his fists.

  “Suit yourself,” Anna said and, sitting down, pulled her wet gloves off to warm her fingers over the embers.

  A high ululating wail, like a child in terrible pain or a man in an extremity of fear, cut through the bickering. Little hairs on Anna’s neck began to prickle and she could feel adrenaline pumping into her overtaxed system.

  No one spoke. Paula clutched the sleeve of Stephen’s jacket and Jennifer pushed a palm to her lips as though to stifle a scream rising in her own throat.

  Again the cry came, high and clear and cutting to the bone. Paula began to whimper.

  “Gonzales—” Pepperdine began.

  “Shut the fuck up.” Lindstrom. Silence, deep and awful, followed.

  “Want to go see what it is?” LeFleur asked, and for the first time Anna heard a quaver in the man’s voice.

  “Not particularly,” she returned.

  Again the cry.

  This time something cut it short.

  CHAPTER

  Thirteen

  DAWN NEVER BROKE. With fog and drizzling snow the quality of the light never changed. Impatience gnawed at Frederick’s innards like the Spartan boy’s stolen fox, but he bore it less heroically. Gene Burwell, a well-groomed man of Santalike girth and facial hair, was patient and understanding. Stanton realized it took a true gentleman to ignore his fidgeting.

  Incident Base was still surrounded by statuesque ponderosa and fir, the manzanita still green. Snow gave the scene a holiday feel; white drifts on evergreen needles. But for two crews with six sawyers, the camp was devoid of the one thousand souls who had called it home for the last couple of weeks.

  A low-boy with a D-8 Cat had been dispatched from the Forest Service office out of Chester, a logging town twenty miles to the south. Seven miles down highway from Base a helicopter sat at ready, fueled and loaded, with two EMTs standing by.

  Burwell, Stanton and Lester Treadwell, a lean, wiry man in his fifties who was in charge of clearing the deadfall, had taken a four-wheel drive truck up the logging road toward spike camp as soon as it had gotten light.

  The first few miles were clear, then the road turned along the side of a mountain and wound up through the black—part of the burn left by the Jackknife. There they’d had to stop. Charred snags from a foot in diameter to some grand old trees that must have measured eight or ten feet across and a hundred feet long had blown down in countless numbers. The road and the land surrounding were crosshatched with black. Logs tumbled like windblown straw lay in a tangled mat. Even a man on horseback couldn’t pick a path through the devastation.

  Cigarette dangling from his lips, Lester Treadwell stomped around muttering, his grizzled hair sticking out from beneath his hard hat where he’d pushed it back on his bony skull in a frenzy of thinking. “These’re big boys,” he said. “There’ll be fire in ’em for a couple days. Hell on saw blades. Keeps things interesting though. Six sawyers. I’ll send them up to cut anything looks like it’ll bind.” For Stanton’s benefit he explained that downed trees, piled like these were, created strange tensions. When cut there was always a danger of one of those tensions being released too suddenly and part of a tree snapping loose and killing or injuring the sawyer.

  “That’ll get us started but we need heavy metal. With that D-8 Cat we’ll push this mess aside,” Treadwell said.

  “How long?” Frederick asked.

  “A D-8’ll push a lot of weight,” Lester said, flicking a spent cigarette and pausing to light another. “It’s a hell of a machine. We can clear a mile a day easy.”

  Burwell had estimated four to six miles of the road fell within the black. Frederick rubbed his forehead, knocking the borrowed hard hat askew. He hadn’t asked Anna if she was hurt. She hadn’t reported any injuries to herself but then she might not. He found himself thinking how small she was. Though she carried herself like John Wayne, she was only five-four. No fat to keep her warm.

  Unless the weather broke, it would be four to six days until help could be gotten to the stranded firefighters, to Anna. Cloud cover kept temperatures from dropping much below the mid-twenties, but without food and shelter it would be a rugged few days. Perhaps deadly. Especially for a crew harboring a scorpion in its bosom.

  “Up higher the fuel load’s not so thick,” Burwell said kindly. “It’ll go faster the higher we get.”

  Frederick noted the man’s concern and knew he wore his heart on his sleeve. Stanton was being obvious and he didn’t like being obvious.

  “We’ll get cracking,” Treadwell said.

  Frederick had never handled a chainsaw in his life and Treadwell wasn’t going to let him start now. Stanton knew Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations as well as anyone; still he chafed at the enforced inaction till Treadwell took pity and signed him on as a swamper.

  For two hours he dragged and rolled chunks of burned timber bucked up small enough it could be muscled clear of the road. Stanton’s office-softened hands blistered. His back and shoulders ached. Time and again he had to leave a log for the other swamper because he hadn’t the strength to shift it without help.

  It had been years since he had felt like a ninety-eight-pound weakling. As he’d moved up in the organization, his mind and what amounted to a passion for detail had brought him honors. Brain over brawn, the pen over the sword. He couldn’t even bench press his I.Q.

  Shortly after nine A.M. Stanton’s impatience, though still alive and well, had been tempered by hard physical labor. Nearly three hours of it had cleared less than fifty yards of road. Exhaustion brought with it some clarity of thought and he knew he would prove more useful in the less manly pursuits and wondered at himself for waxing so hormonal over a woman he’d known only a short while and kissed only twice.

  Making his excuses, he borrowed an all-terrain vehicle from the incident commander and followed the logging road down to Base. The Command tent, Communications and Time Keeping kept the home fires burning. Portable space heaters powered by a generator in the back of a semi-truck trailer held winter at bay. Frederick was doubly glad of the warmth and fresh coffee. Glad for his chilled and tired body and glad, in a moment of pure unreflective selfishness, that it was not he who huddled hungry in a wash.

  While he drank his coffee, thick with Cremora and three spoons of sugar, he allowed himself a small pleasant fantasy: warming Anna’s square capable hands between his own, massaging feeling gently back into her little feet. Residual hormones kicked in, heating the dream too rapidly, and he shelved it. The time would come, he promised himself, when he could afford the luxury of distraction.

  Four phones were hooked up in the Communications tent. Frederick took over one line to begin a series of calls. A spark of envy burned him as he thought of the wide-shouldered men with leathered faces running chainsaws and bulldozers and he quashed a sophomoric image of himself, newly Paul Bunyan–like, scooping a grateful Anna from the jaws of death.

  Think, Frederick, he told himself. Think. It’s what you’re good at.

  Nine-forty California time. Ten-forty in New Mexico; he would start with the Bureau of Land Management in Farmington.

  One receptionist and one bum steer later he was talking with Henry Valdez, the head of the gas and oil leasing program for the three million acres of federal gas and oil reserves in New Mexico and southern Colorado.

  Stanton was winging it. Without visiting the murde
r scene, viewing the corpse, interviewing the suspects or examining the physical evidence, he was at a distinct disadvantage. Anna would have to find out how it was done, who had means and opportunity. Motive was the only angle he could pursue. Until something that smelled like a lead turned up, he decided on the simple expedient of gathering information. As much as he could get.

  Valdez sounded genuinely sorry to hear of Nims’s death. Whether he personally liked the man or whether because the wheels of the Office of Personnel Management ground so painstakingly slow Nims’s position would go unfilled for six months, Frederick couldn’t tell.

  Henry Valdez was disappointing, at least in terms of giving up personal information on his employees. Clearly the man disliked gossip and had little imagination where his fellow mortals were concerned. Nims was a good worker, well liked by most of the Bureau’s oil and gas lessees. He was an avid hunter and fisherman and on good terms both professionally and personally with his clients.

  Valdez was more forthcoming about the nuts-and-bolts aspects of Nims’s job. Nims did the Environmental Impact Statements for proposed wells or the extension of leases on already existing wells. His background was in forestry but he’d acquired a solid understanding of geology.

  Whether Nims was liked by his co-workers, Valdez didn’t feel he was in a position to say. He was also not in a position to say why Nims had left the BLM in Susanville, California, to accept a position three years later at a lower pay grade. He did volunteer that, though it wasn’t common practice, neither was it rare. Often government employees left to try their hand in the private sector or transferred because of personality conflicts.

  What personality conflicts?

  Valdez wasn’t in a position to say.