Firestorm Read online

  Anna realized she held him captive as effectively as if he were locked in an interrogation room and dragged her mind back to the reason she had tracked him down. Gratitude was getting in her way. A badger and a bath: Gonzales was proving an excellent friend. Anna shelved her generous impulses.

  “You know this area pretty well?” she said for openers.

  “I grew up sixty miles south of here,” he replied.

  Anna pondered what to say next. She was acutely aware that she was unarmed and semi-naked within throwing distance of a lake she’d not only never swim out of but from which her body would probably never be recovered.

  “Susanville?” she asked, remembering a small red dot on the California road map. “You’re a hunter, camper, hiker—that sort of thing?”

  Gonzales shook his head. “A city boy without a city. I worked around here. Not up this far—down on the Plumas National Forest south of Westwood.”

  “For the Forest Service?” Anna asked. She was pushing close to potentially sensitive areas. Reluctantly, she pulled her feet out of the warm water and stepped into her pants. Maybe naked, Lawrence would be too shy to chase her if she had to make a run for it.

  “The BLM,” he said. A note of caution crept into his voice and he was looking uncomfortable. Unless a suspect was drunk or retarded, and even then about half the time, there came a moment when the conversation got too close to some core truth. Defenses went up. Anna watched for that moment with both anticipation and dread. If it came it meant she was on to something. It also meant they were on to her and getting what she was after became more difficult.

  The summer job, the BLM was a raw nerve. She filed that away and backed off for the moment. “Reno’s fairly near here, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Lawrence relaxed. The change in geography soothed him. Anna was interested. Susanville had the history of a lost summer job, Reno of assault and grand theft auto.

  “Eighty miles southeast of my hometown,” Lawrence said.

  “Get over there much? Gamble? Take in a show?”

  “I used to. I used to date a girl from Sparks. It bumps right up against Reno.” Lawrence laughed.

  “What?” Anna prodded. She was just curious. If it was funny to him it was probably of no use to her.

  “Nothing.” He poked his toes into the flame-colored slime at the bottom of the stream.

  “Come on,” Anna said. “I’m bored.”

  “Promise you won’t tell anybody?”

  He looked so charming and boyish that Anna promised. She could always break it.

  “This girl’s father was a jerk. A real jerk. I tossed him in the Truckee River. He was spitting water like a whale and he got out this badge he was always flashing to get out of traffic tickets and yelling ‘I’m a federal officer, I’m a federal officer.’” Lawrence laughed again. “The guy was a meat inspector.”

  Anna laughed with him. So much for assault on a federal officer. No wonder the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department had no intention of extraditing the perpetrator. “Did he drown?” Anna asked to keep the story going.

  “Nah. It wasn’t that deep. It was August. He didn’t even catch a cold. Me and Justine jumped in his old Thunderbird and left him there dripping and waving his meat badge.”

  That must have been the grand theft auto. Anna was relieved. There were still a lot of questions about his summer working for Nims but this wasn’t the healthiest place to ask them. Anna pulled on her boots and began lacing them up. For the first time in what seemed eons her feet were warm. “Too bad we can’t bottle this and take it back to camp,” she said. By the time they’d traversed the three-quarters of a mile to the creek bed any water they took with them in their plastic canteens would be cold.

  “Could you turn around?” Lawrence asked. “I’m going to put my pants on.”

  Anna turned her back on the boy. He’d never know what an act of faith it was.

  “We could bring Howard up here,” Lawrence suggested. “It’s warmer. Maybe he’d feel better.”

  The thought had crossed Anna’s mind but she’d discarded it. “I don’t think we’d better move Howard until we have to.”

  “It’s bad then?” Lawrence asked, and Anna respected the concern in his voice.

  “It’s bad.”

  When they were within earshot of the bivouac, Anna returned to the subject of Leonard Nims. “When you worked with the Bureau of Land Management, what did you do?”

  “Marked timber.” Gonzales was walking in front of her and Anna noted the slight hitch in his stride.

  “You worked for Leonard Nims?” Anna gave up pussyfooting. There wasn’t time and Lawrence was already on his guard.

  He stopped and turned to face her. Anna stopped as well, keeping ten feet of trail between them. “Checking up on me?”

  Anna made no reply. The answer was obvious.

  Behind Lawrence’s dark eyes decisions were being made. Anna could see them working across his even features. None of the early warning signs of impending violence—tensing, changing the center of gravity, fist clenching, eyes skittering—manifested itself, so Anna stood her ground.

  “There was a wildfire,” Lawrence said finally. “Somebody lit it on purpose. Len said he was going to say I did it.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. Len told me to but I didn’t. He must’ve got somebody else to do it for him.”

  “Len told you to light it?” Anna was just confirming what she’d heard. The information was too new to process.

  “Yeah. It was a bad summer. Everybody was out of work. Fire fighting’s good money. It happens all the time.”

  “Len wasn’t out of work.”

  Lawrence shrugged. “You think I’m making it up. Len said everybody would. So I lit out.”

  “I don’t think you’re making it up,” Anna said slowly. She didn’t know if he had all the facts straight, but she didn’t doubt that he believed his own version. “That must have been hard to take.”

  “You’re going to pin his murder on me, aren’t you.” Gonzales wasn’t asking. His eyes narrowed, weight shifted, fists balled. Fear tuned up Anna’s muscles, readying to fight or run.

  “I’m not pinning anything on anybody,” she said evenly. “I’m just asking questions. Did you see Hugh getting out of his shelter?” More than an answer, Anna needed to change the subject.

  “He was already out. He helped peel the damn thing off me.”

  Gonzales didn’t strike Anna as a thinker. He was a doer. She doubted he’d wasted much time figuring out the importance of fire shelters: how many, who was where, who could prove they had one. Pepperdine, on the other hand, was a thinking man, an educated man. He would have figured it out.

  Somebody was lying. Given the choice of who, Anna tended to lean toward the man clever enough to come up with a reason he thought he needed to.

  CHAPTER

  Nineteen

  ANNA COULDN’T REMEMBER ever having been so tired. Her wristwatch told her it was close to one in the afternoon. Her stomach reminded her it was way past lunchtime. The gray skies told her nothing. It could be dawn or dusk or anywhere in between. The brief respite from the cold the hot springs had afforded was just a memory. The chill had returned, sunk back into her bones. It would have been worth the walk back up the hill to be warm again but Jennifer and Stephen had gone and Anna stayed to watch Howard.

  Soon after she’d relieved Stephen, Howard had fallen into an uneasy sleep. Paula Boggins, faithful to the job Anna had given her, took the opportunity to slip off to the “ladies’ room.” Anna smiled, the superfluous trappings of civilization suddenly striking her as dear, precious; humankind touching and admirable in its usually futile attempts to rise above a less than divine nature.

  John, with Hugh trailing officiously after, had gone to make the call to Base. Anna was just as glad. She needed time to think. Then she needed to talk with Frederick in private. Or what passed for private over the airwaves.

  Leaning against the bo
ulder in the semidarkness of the makeshift tent, she closed her eyes and hoped for rest if not sleep. Both eluded her. Fragments of conversations, images, ideas, drifted through her mind.

  Gonzales, boyish and earnest, chucking a meat inspector into the Truckee. Gonzales leaving the summer job because he was suspected, accused of, or framed for arson.

  Either Len had falsely accused Lawrence or he had known of the arson. Six years ago: it seemed a little late in the game for revenge but grudges had been held longer and with less provocation.

  Nims might have been blackmailing Lawrence, threatening to report the arson.

  No. Anna shuffled that card to the bottom of her mental deck. Nims would be in just as much hot water for not reporting it when it happened. Besides, Lawrence didn’t have anything but youth and good looks. Sex? Could Nims have been blackmailing Lawrence for sexual favors? Anna could easily see Lawrence killing a man for that. But not six years later in a firestorm. He’d have beat him to death with his fists the first time the subject came up.

  Lawrence said Nims ordered the fire set. Could he have been blackmailing Len? That made as little sense as the other way around. Nims was right: nobody would have believed the kid then and even less so now. Unless Lawrence had found proof.

  Still, it was Nims who’d wound up dead. Blackmailers didn’t tend to kill their victims. No profit in it.

  Then there were the lies. Either Lawrence had lied about Hugh seeing him exit his shelter or Pepperdine had lied. Since Anna put her money on Pepperdine, she decided to grant Lawrence Gonzales at least temporary amnesty and moved on.

  Hugh Pepperdine had known Nims was dead before he should have. Hugh had, Anna was convinced, lied about Lawrence seeing him get out of his fire shelter. Pepperdine was a veritable casserole of modern-day neuroses. Anna wished she could turn him loose in Molly’s Park Avenue clinic for an hour or two and get a psychiatric profile on him. Insecurity teamed up with conceit, braggadocio with cowardice, selfishness with a need to be admired. Pepperdine was dysfunctional—to put it politely—and he was lying, but Anna couldn’t figure out why. So far she’d heard nothing that connected him in any way with Leonard Nims. He didn’t appear to have done anything sufficiently interesting in his short life to make him a candidate for blackmail. And Anna doubted he had the muscle memory to shove a knife into another man’s ribs.

  Violence is learned. She remembered practicing kicking till her back ached, swinging a baton until she could no longer lift her arms. Practicing technique was part of it but just as important was teaching the body to respond without having to wait for orders from a mind that might be otherwise engaged.

  Women—and momma’s boys like Hugh Pepperdine—had a harder time of it. Movies, books, television, myths and wives’ tales taught little girls to shriek and throw up their hands in despair. Mind and body had to be taught to overcome programmed helplessness.

  Lawrence Gonzales had the muscle memory. So did Joseph, Anna realized. When she’d startled him, he’d swung on her with a movement so ingrained it was not precipitated by conscious thought. He’d not learned that in art history class.

  Stanton said Joseph Hayhurst was working to block an oil lease on what he believed to be a culturally significant site. Surely that wouldn’t be grounds for murder. Not that one Leonard Nims more or less was equal in value to an irreplaceable historical artifact, but because Nims was a bureaucrat, a cog in a very large machine. He’d be replaced. There was no way one could kill them all, though Anna suspected activists often fantasized about it.

  Removing Len would be, at best, a temporary solution. Unless it was a foregone conclusion that Len would okay the lease where another would not. What had LeFleur said? Nims rubber-stamped oil lease applications “NSI,” No Significant Impact. The oil drillers must have been grateful. How grateful? What would it be worth to them in cold, hard cash?

  Lawrence said Nims ordered him to light a wildfire, people needed the work. How much? In Susanville Nims had been in a position to hire local firefighters. What would it be worth to a man out of work, trying to feed a family?

  Anna opened her eyes. She had a couple of homework assignments for Frederick Stanton next time they made contact. If Nims was in the business of taking kickbacks for favors rendered, Joseph might want him dead.

  Who else? LeFleur would be better off professionally exposing Nims than killing him.

  Neither Stephen nor Jennifer had motive as far as Anna knew but they didn’t have alibis either. Out of necessity Anna had granted Jennifer temporary amnesty. Much as she would like it to, that couldn’t include Stephen. Stephen had the knowledge to pierce Len’s heart at one go. Anna believed he had the strength of character to share his fire shelter when the chips were down. Odd that in this murder she must first find the person kind enough to save the victim’s life—unless the murderer recognized the situation as a dream-come-true from the beginning. Unlikely, Anna thought. Too much going on for detailed plotting.

  Black Elk moaned and jerked in his sleep. Anna laid her hand on his chest hoping to comfort him. He opened his eyes and looked into hers but she doubted he was seeing her.

  “How’re you doing, Howard? Can I get you anything?”

  The big man didn’t answer. Anna moved and his eyes didn’t follow. Whatever he saw, it was not of this world. “Len shouldn’t have done it,” he said clearly. “Paula wasn’t hurting anybody.”

  Howard was dreaming or delirious and Anna felt a stab of alarm. Curiosity overcame it. Feeling like a heel even as she did it, she pressed him: “What shouldn’t Len have done?”

  Black Elk hadn’t heard her. He closed his eyes and his body relaxed. Whatever alarm had gone off in his fevered brain had been answered and he fell into a doze.

  Leaning back again, Anna closed her eyes as well. Unless Howard was totally lost in dreams, Len had done something to Paula Boggins. Perhaps the something over which Paula had clawed his face. Jennifer had been questioning Paula; probably some of the conversation had soaked into Howard’s consciousness, hence the outburst.

  According to Stanton, Paula had been arrested twice. Page had bailed her out twice. She lived fairly comfortably with no visible means of support. Boggins might be living off an inheritance or alimony but if not she was getting paid for something that went unrecorded. Odds were it was illegal. That being the case, it was possible Len had been blackmailing her and/or Neil if he was in partnership with her. She and Neil had a relationship that spoke of familiarity and tolerance without affection. That smacked of a business relationship based on mutual need or profit.

  It made more sense to Anna than the Gonzales/Nims scenario. Boggins could knife someone if she had to, Anna would lay money on it. Paula would do whatever she had to to get by. Page didn’t seem an unlikely source of violence either.

  Anna had a hunch Paula’s means of support might be illuminating. She added to her list of things a suggestion she needed Frederick to track down.

  More out of habit than because there was anything she could do for him, Anna checked Howard’s pulse and breathing, then settled down to ponder Neil Page. Page acted suspicious, if that counted for anything. He was always creeping off by himself, anxious to cast any particles of blame, however small, on someone else. He’d been quick to deflect interest from himself by telling Jennifer Paula and Nims had quarreled and Paula had scratched Len.

  Page also insisted Paula had seen him getting out of his shake ’n’ bake. Should that turn out to be true, it effectively let him off the hook. Too bad, Anna thought. So far it was a tossup between him and Pepperdine as to who she’d most like to pin a homicide on.

  Scooting as close to Howard as she could, Anna laid her arm across his chest to share her warmth with him. As soon as Jennifer returned they could compare notes. Till then she would try and get some rest.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty

  SLEEP HAD FINALLY overtaken Anna and in her dreams she was warm and fed and unafraid. When the sound of fabric rubbing against itself intru
ded, her mind, loath to desert the comfort it had found, attributed it first to window curtains floating in a gentle breeze, then to the swish of starched petticoats, a sound dredged from so deep in her subconscious all she could come up with to account for it were the ruffled squaw dresses she and Molly had been given for Sunday school when they were children. The picture was so alien it woke her and she found herself slumped under the fire shelters. The arm she’d draped across Black Elk’s chest tingled from being too long in one position and her lungs hurt from trying to soak up oxygen around the smoke-borne debris lodged in the tissues.

  Jennifer Short had returned. She stunk of sulphur and the top layer of grime on her face had been sluiced to a translucent gray.

  “What time is it?” Anna asked, as if it mattered.

  Short looked at her wristwatch. “Coming on two.”

  Anna had slept less than an hour but she felt better for it. Carefully, so she wouldn’t wake Howard, she pinched up the sleeve of her shirt and hauled her arm off his chest. He didn’t stir but the sleep that claimed him was more akin to trauma-induced unconsciousness than true rest. At least he was still breathing, though ragged gurgling sounds attested to the effort. Anna laid the back of her hand against his neck. He was hot to the touch. Fever boded ill but the over-warm skin felt good and she left her hand there in hopes an exchange would benefit both of them.

  Jennifer settled down in the gloom near Black Elk’s knees and stretched her hands toward one of the metal hard hats Joseph had filled with coals. Her fingers trembled.

  “What did you think of that weird lake?” Anna asked.

  Jennifer didn’t reply. She didn’t even raise her eyes. The yoke of depression Anna had thought thrown off was back, pressing down on her shoulders, bowing them till it looked as if it must be causing physical pain.