Firestorm Page 20

  “I got somebody I can call and lean on. I’ll see if they’ll invite you to the party. You’re on the clock but no overtime. Don’t even put in for it. And no travel. Where are you at?”

  Frederick gave him the number and listened as he read it back. “Hang on,” McGinnis said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Less than ten minutes later the phone rang. “You’re official,” Jack said. “The forest supervisor said to call Chris Landis. He’s the law enforcement officer for the Forest Service in Chester. He’ll bring you up to speed.” Jack hung up without saying good-bye but Frederick was unoffended. Over his years in the Bureau he’d come to value time saved above just about anything but life saved. Both were irreplaceable.

  Frederick dialed the number he’d been given and within twenty minutes he was on the road to Chester in a borrowed government pickup truck. The Jackknife was news and, as he threaded his way through the press vans and camera setups on his way out of camp, he blessed Burwell for placing the Communications tent out of bounds.

  CHRIS LANDIS WAS in his early fifties, a square-headed block of a man with thinning hair combed and sprayed till a moderately believable hair hat had been constructed over his bald pate. A pipe, evidently a permanent fixture, smoked in his right hand.

  “The case isn’t closed,” he said, and Frederick noticed traces of a Maine accent. “You’re welcome to what we’ve got.” He pushed a file folder across the blotter of his battered wooden desk. Frederick picked it up but didn’t open it. “Find yourself a comfortable spot and give it a read,” Landis said. “Then, if you like, we’ll take a wander up to Pinson Lake. Snow’ll cover up most of it but you can get the lay of the land.”

  “Thanks a heap.” Frederick smiled engagingly in hopes of dissipating any sting FBI interference may have caused. The folder clamped under his arm, he left Landis to his pipe and sought out a quiet corner.

  Happily ensconced in a storage closet pressed into service as an employee break room, Frederick sipped instant cocoa and perused the official history of Joshua Paul Short’s life and death.

  Thirty-three years old, Short was employed part-time as a computer programmer for Harrah’s Club in Reno, Nevada. He’d moved to the west from Memphis, Tennessee, four years prior to his death. Short had been arrested three times, all misdemeanor charges, 1991 and 1993 for trespassing and interfering with agency functions in Plumas and Lassen counties in northern California, and in 1989 in San Francisco. The charges boiled down to civil disobedience. The Plumas and Lassen arrests occurred in protest activities to save the spotted owl. The San Francisco arrest was during a gay rights march. Short had never served jail time.

  According to the information in the file, for two weeks prior to his death, Short had been camped at Pinson Lake in an ongoing wrestling match with the Timberlake Lumber Company. The Forest Service had leased them that tract of timber for harvest and the company intended to log the area.

  An Environmental Impact Statement from the Forest Service was included, either in the interest of justice or in a CYA—cover your ass—capacity, stating that there was no hard evidence of spotted owl activity in that tract of forest land.

  On September eighteenth, four days after the Jackknife had been midwifed, the corpses were discovered in the ashes of the burn. On September twenty-eighth the bodies were identified as Joshua Short and dog. As Short had not died under a doctor’s care, an autopsy had been performed.

  The immediate area of the camp was covered in flash fuels. From past conversations with Burwell, Frederick knew flash fuels were light, dry, tindery materials such as twigs and grasses that burned fast and hot. Due to the nature of the fuels, Short’s body had not been completely consumed but his face, hands, chest, belly and the front of both legs were badly burned. Although much of the remaining flesh had been eaten away by scavengers, enough of the internal organs remained intact to reveal in the autopsy that Short had not died of smoke inhalation, as was common in fires, but had burned to death. The only other indication of injury was a hairline basal fracture behind his right ear.

  Frederick thumbed through the Environmental Impact Statement with little interest and moved on to the report written by the first ranger on the scene. The burn had originated from the fire ring in Joshua Short’s camp. Best guess, working backward from the time the fire was spotted by the lookout, was that it had been ignited between one and five P.M. on September fourteenth. A mangled Peak I camping stove was found near the fire ring and there were traces of kerosene on the stones surrounding the shallow pit as well as on an unburned portion of Short’s left hiking boot.

  Stringing together the evidence, the ranger had drawn up a possible sequence of events:

  While in use, the camping stove had either fallen into the campfire or malfunctioned. The resultant explosion splattered kerosene on nearby grass and needles. Burned or blinded by the explosion, Joshua Short had fallen, struck his head and lost consciousness. Dry fuels ignited quickly and burned at high temperatures. Before Short regained consciousness, the flames killed him.

  Never having been camping, Frederick had no experience with portable stoves, but the sketch seemed plausible enough.

  He removed an envelope of photographs taken at the scene. Fire had left the site clean. Ash, swept smooth by the wind, coated the earth, the fire pit, the remnants of the stove, Joshua’s pack and the tent he’d been staying in. A few feet from the fire pit a four-legged corpse marked the last moments of the dog’s life. About thirty feet away, in the direction the fire had taken, was the body of Joshua Short. Animals had tracked up the ground around the carcasses and, judging from the photos, dined rather well. Other than that, there were no marks in the ash. A refreshingly untainted scene. Whoever had found them was to be commended for resisting the urge to charge in and flail about.

  Frederick laid the photographs out in a cross that resembled the pattern used by readers of tarot cards. The table in the tiny break room was round and less than three feet across. Photos used up all available space. Knees pinched together in a maidenly manner, Stanton held the folder in his lap while he stared down at the grisly collection.

  Smooth gray ash, polished by the wind, two corpses, pack, tent and twisted chunks of the stove. The trackless space between the disparate pieces in this tragic puzzle niggled at Frederick’s mind. Maybe it was just that he was unused to viewing scenes of wildland fire. But it felt like more than that.

  Slurping his cocoa, he kept staring. To find out what was missing, he began piecing together what was there, hoping then he would see the holes. The fire had been started between one and five P.M. by a stove accident. Perhaps Joshua had been making himself lunch or a cup of coffee and either the stove malfunctioned and exploded or fell in the fire and exploded.

  Smooth polished gray.

  “No utensils,” Frederick murmured into his cocoa. “You cook with utensils.” In the unbroken field of ash there was no sign of pans or cups or plates; no spoons—nothing.

  Joshua Short was not cooking, not even boiling water. And he wouldn’t use the stove for heat; he had a fire.

  Frederick adjusted his storyline. Short takes out his stove to prepare something and discovers it’s broken. While he’s attempting to fix it, the stove explodes or tumbles into the fire and explodes. Stanton scribbled a note on the fire folder to ask if any tools had been found at the scene. Something small—a wrench or a file—could be completely concealed by the covering ash.

  Field repairs ending in a tragic accident. That made sense. The stove blows up, Short is knocked on his keister—or in this case the back of his head—and loses consciousness.

  Better, Frederick thought, but not yet complete. There were still holes in the plot. The dog for one. Also knocked senseless by the explosion? Not terribly likely but explosions were unpredictable. Shrapnel from the body of the Peak I or shards of stone blasted from the rocks surrounding the fire pit could have taken out the dog, killed him outright or stunned him enough the fire got him. Too bad no one had
thought to autopsy the pooch.

  Frederick returned his attention to the ex–Mr. Short. Thirty feet from the fire ring, the report read. That looked about right. The body was facedown, feet toward the fire pit.

  Stanton wrote a second note on Landis’s file folder. “Ballistics: how far could two cups of kerosene under pressure throw a grown man?” Frederick doubted it would be thirty feet, not leaving all of his body parts still attached.

  Facing away from the fire ring, almost as if he were fleeing. That might account for both the distance and the positioning. The stove falls in the fire, Joshua figures it’s going to explode and begins to run. Boom. Down he goes, cracks his head.

  Frederick liked that scenario. It was both tidy and rational. Only with reluctance did he abandon it. The basal fracture was at the back of Short’s skull. Being knocked face forward wouldn’t account for it.

  Shrapnel got both the dog and his master.

  Unlikely, Stanton thought, but dutifully added “Cuts to the back of skull?” to his list. No chunk large enough to strike a man senseless was visible in the photos. Anything smaller, delivered with body-stopping force, would have broken the skin.

  Again Frederick rewrote Short’s story. During repairs the stove falls in the fire. Short flees. In haste he trips and cracks his head. Disoriented, he staggers a ways and collapses facedown. Fire overtakes him.

  Do-able, Frederick conceded. Not graceful or poetic, but definitely possible.

  Smooth ash, polished.

  “Hit his head on what?” Frederick mumbled. The campsite was flat, no stones, no logs. “Look under ash” he added to the end of his list. A flat rock could be concealed, one large enough a man could fracture his skull against it were he so inclined.

  THE SAME FOG that held Anna and the San Juans captive on the ridge smothered Pinson Lake. The water was as flat as glass and the color of lead. Frederick was used to the cold. He liked it. It helped his mind work. Snuggling his hands into the pockets of his down jacket, he whistled “California Dreaming” under his breath while his eyes roamed the unbroken expanse of white.

  An inch of snow had taken the place of ash and the scene was amazingly unchanged from what Stanton had seen in the pictures. Joshua was gone as was the dog, the tent and the pack, but the fire ring remained.

  Chris Landis, shivering in Forest Service green, stood beside him, bareheaded, his coiffure too fragile to support a hat, his pipe clamped in his teeth. Between the fog and the snow his smoke was invisible but Frederick could smell the pleasant aroma of tobacco.

  “This investigation drew the short straw, I’m afraid. The Jackknife’s been taking up our time and attention for the last little while.” Landis puffed on his pipe as it threatened to go out. When he’d produced a good head of steam, he said: “Day’s not getting any younger. We may as well get to it.”

  They unloaded two rakes from the back of his Land Rover. Frederick started several yards above where Short had fallen. Landis began at the fire pit. In less than an hour they’d raked the area. No stones. No tools.

  Landis puffed. Frederick leaned on his rake handle and thought.

  “He could’ve hit his head on one of the rocks in the fire ring,” Landis suggested. They looked at the small, charred stones. Neither was sold on the idea. The physics of the scene didn’t fit. The rocks were too small, the location wrong, the injury wrong.

  Whatever struck down Joshua Short had come from behind and been removed from the scene before the area burned. Short may have started the fire but someone else made sure he stayed to enjoy it.

  “Looks like we’ve come across a bit of a snarl,” Landis said.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Three

  NO GOOD NEWS; call at eight. They were going to spend another night on the mountain. Tears of self-pity wormed their way through the muck on Anna’s face. Lest they leave evidence of weakness the others might read, she smeared them away. Mountain fogs never lasted, she lied to herself with feeling, not like valley fogs. She’d look at it like Christmas Eve. A long night waiting for a morning that would produce treats hitherto only dreamed of. Come morning Santa would have brought clear skies and helicopters and food.

  You’re just tired, she excused herself. And hungry. Hungry enough to eat a badger. Again. She smiled at the rustic image of the nine of them chowing down on charred rodent. LeFleur had saved the pelt. Somewhere along the line he’d picked up the art of tanning and was going to tan the hide for Lawrence. How to Win Friends and Influence People; badger breakfasts deserved a chapter in any new editions.

  Using the bumper for leverage, she pulled herself to her feet. Joints cracked in protest. Muscles strained while frolicking with Mr. Pepperdine had stiffened from sitting so long. Movement pried them apart and aches were renewed with a vengeance. Viewed from the vantage of a warm house and civilized pursuits, forty wasn’t old. On a mountain in the snow every year gone by made itself felt. Gonzales and even the lumpy Pepperdine still possessed reserves of energy.

  On principle, Anna cursed everyone under thirty.

  Walking back to camp, she went over what she needed to do. She missed Stanton and his ubiquitous lists. Her brain kept short-circuiting and it was hard to keep her metaphorical ducks in a row.

  Whatever had been removed from Nims’s corpse troubled her, though she had little hope of solving that particular mystery. Since she’d not seen fit to search the body when they’d first discovered it, whoever had taken the missing item could be wearing it around their neck for all she knew.

  With Page and Pepperdine off the suspect list some of the fun had gone from the investigation. Personally, Anna rather liked all of her remaining suspects. Even Paula Boggins had begun to grow on her. The girl was a bit on the obvious side, a tad snippy, but Anna admired her fighting spirit and the gentle way in which she nursed Howard Black Elk.

  Still, Paula Boggins needed talking to. At present she was a promising candidate for the position of murderer. She had the means—as they all did—a functional left arm and Len’s knife ready at hand. The opportunity: she’d been through the firestorm in a shelter no one had seen her get out of. And, now, a motive: attempted rape or blackmail.

  Joseph Hayhurst was next with all of the above. His motive was more highbrow but sufficient—the saving of an historic site.

  LeFleur was still in the running but Anna wasn’t putting her money on him. His motive was weak. John had knocked around government service long enough to know how the system worked. The line of promotion was indistinct. The Office of Personnel Management was an unpredictable beast with a heavy political agenda that, in the present social climate, did not include white males.

  Jennifer Short had means and opportunity but, as far as Anna could see, no motive.

  By the time she reached the wash, daylight was fading from the sky as if the sun was on a slowly dimming rheostat. She had more of a sense of going blind than of coming night.

  Everybody but Neil and Joseph were crowded into the shelter. Howard was propped up on the packs, his breathing shallow and wet. His eyes were open but he didn’t look as if he saw. Paula sat near him singing a lullaby in a voice just above a whisper. Anna recognized the tune, a song from childhood: “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” Paula sang it in Spanish, the way Anna remembered learning it in Mrs. White’s first-grade class.

  Jennifer was curled up in the fetal position, her head resting on John LeFleur’s thigh. Both had their eyes closed. Anna hoped Jen was sleeping. Lawrence and Stephen sat side by side, their backs against the rock, their feet stretched toward the fire pit, newly heaped with coals. Lawrence pretended to be absorbed in cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife.

  Pepperdine was squashed in a corner with only the thin shelter at his back instead of stone. Tension clogged the air, Lawrence’s face was crimped in irritation and Anna suspected LeFleur’s sleep was feigned. On close examination she saw a faint tic high on his cheek under his left eye.

  Hugh had been sniping, she guessed. Indulgi
ng himself in words in an attempt to shore up a damaged ego. She’d rather thought his recent comeuppance would have left him subdued. But a man of Hugh’s habits must get brought up short at fairly regular intervals. Clearly his response hadn’t been deep introspection followed by the turning over of new leaves. With each failure he dug in deeper, till he’d entrenched himself behind a wall of self-justification years thick. For an educated man, Pepperdine was apparently not a quick learner. Anna was glad they worked in different parks. He struck her as the type who would find ways—small miserable ways—of getting back at those who crossed him.

  Hugh’s pack was tucked under his arm like a security blanket. With a flash of anger so vicious it scared her, Anna wondered if he still had food.

  “I gotta pee,” Paula announced suddenly.

  “Thank you for sharing,” Lindstrom said.

  Paula laughed and cuffed him on the head as, stoop-shouldered, she threaded her way through the tangle of legs.

  “I’ll go with you.” Anna creaked to her feet.

  “What is it with women?” she heard Lindstrom asking the general public as she followed Paula out. “Urinating is not a spectator sport.”

  A smear of gray silhouetted the blackened horizon to the west but the rest of the world was cloaked in lightless, heatless, featureless night.

  Headlamp in hand, Boggins stumped up the creek bed. Since she hadn’t made any rude comments, Anna guessed she was welcome to tag along. Muffled, fog-shrouded, the gully was creepy during the day; at night it was enough to give a vampire bat the heebie-jeebies.

  Watching Paula’s dim outline and the yellowing light that led the way, Anna wondered how to broach the subject of blackmail and murder while they relieved themselves.

  Cold had soaked so deep into Anna’s bones, she felt it more as an abiding fatigue than a physical sensation. Both mind and body were benumbed. Even the aches and bruises from her flight from the Jackknife and her fight with Hugh had melded into a general feeling of ennui. She could easily understand the temptation to lie down in the snow and let the last vestiges of heat peacefully leave the body in the fashion that purportedly seduced victims of hypothermia. It would be so good simply to rest for all eternity. To sleep. Perchance to dream…