Firestorm Read online

  Always, there was the rub.

  Boggins stopped. “You hold the light,” she said, handing Anna the headlamp. “I’m going to squat over there. Hang my fanny over a cold rock. Yippee, skippy. This may take a while. It feels like I got a baby bear sticking its nose out my ass.”

  “Sheer poetry,” Anna commented as she took the light.

  “Yeah. Well. I dropped out of finishing school early on.” Paula retreated to her chosen spot. Anna fiddled with the light listening to the sound of a buckle being unbuckled, a zipper unzipped.

  Now was as good a time as any. Anna still had Howard’s Buck knife and Boggins’s trousers were down around her ankles. Danger was at a low ebb.

  “Nims knew you were working the camp, hooking, didn’t he?” Anna asked. She tried to make it sound as if she’d known about the prostitution all along in hopes it would be less threatening that way.

  “I’m busy over here,” Paula said irritably. “Can’t you shut the fuck up for one cotton pickin’ minute?”

  “You said he was messing with you. What did he do, threaten you with exposure?”

  No answer.

  Anna upped the stakes. “The way I figure it, Nims tried to get a piece of the action, said he’d report you if you didn’t cut him in and you clawed his face. Am I close?”

  Paula grunted. “He wanted a piece of something all right. A piece of my ass.”

  Anna played the light over the snow. All vestiges of beauty had been crushed by blackened fire boots and her own rotten attitude. “Was that the deal; you give him sex and he keeps his mouth shut?”

  “There’s one in every camp,” Paula said. Boggins sounded more like a jaded businesswoman than a murderess. Still, Anna pressed on. It was something to do. At times she felt more like an addict than an investigator. The reasons had grown muddled with the cold, the dark, the general weirdness of the world in which they’d found themselves. Now she just had to know because she had to know.

  “How much money did you get?” she asked.

  “Jesus, girl, can’t you even let me take a dump in peace?”

  Anna shined the light in Paula’s face. Boggins didn’t look guilty or scared, just annoyed.

  “Move the light, Ms. Gestapo, unless that’s how you get your kicks. Kinky shit’s extra. You can’t afford me.”

  “How much?” Anna repeated, but she moved the light.

  “Eighty bucks a trick,” Paula said, and there was pride in her voice. “Why? You thinking of going into business for yourself? Forget it. You’re too old. You couldn’t get forty.” Paula laughed while Anna did mental arithmetic.

  Five to eight hundred dollars a night for twenty nights. “Not a bad piece of change,” she said aloud. “There’s a lot of people who would kill for that kind of money.”

  “I’d kill for some toilet paper,” Boggins said. “I got a world-class case of flaming asshole.”

  Anna forbore comment. “Did you kill Nims to keep him from reporting you?”

  “Like I didn’t know that’s what you were getting at? Big surprise. Duh. If I stuck a knife in everybody put the squeeze on me half the cops in northern California’d be dead. Nims pissed me off so I scratched him. If’n he’d of kept at it, I’d’ve screwed him. Shoot, he’s only got a twenty-one-day dispatch, eight of it gone. The old fart probably couldn’t get it up often enough to cut into a day’s take. Now will you shut up and let me do my business?”

  “Sure. Page pimping for you?”

  “Yeah. Neil pimps. Shut up.”

  “I’m shut.” Anna made designs in the still-white snow of the creek bank with her light. The beam was turning a dirty brown. “I’m turning off the light to save the battery,” she warned Paula as she flicked it off.

  “Fine.”

  In the frigid dark, Anna tried to think. Paula could be lying but she doubted it. Two arrests as a juvenile; Boggins had probably been hooking most of her short life. Prostitution was vulnerable to bribes, blackmail, payoffs. The price of doing business. Murder tended to scare off the clientele.

  “What did you take off Leonard’s body?” Anna demanded just to see what kind of a reaction she’d get.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind, you know that?” Paula said.

  The obscenity had the ring of innocence to it. With Boggins out of the picture, if not with an iron-clad alibi, at least as far as Anna was concerned, that left LeFleur, Hayhurst and Short. LeFleur was a long shot. Hayhurst and Short then. Anna sighed. She was not having fun.

  “You know what I’d like?” she said.

  “What?” Boggins sounded wary and Anna smiled. Paula was probably used to bizarre requests from all manner of folk.

  “I’d like to watch TV. Hours of mindless TV with a loud obnoxious soundtrack. I’d sit in a warm room and guzzle hot tea and just watch.” Wine would have been her first choice but it seemed better not even to think about that.

  “Why don’t you wish for a million dollars while you’re at it?” There was a sound of movement and zipping. “And a roll of toilet paper.” Boggins emerged from the greater darkness of her wilderness privy. “You gotta go? I’ll stay if you want. Keep you company.”

  Anna took her up on her kind offer.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Four

  PINSON LAKE LAY dead at their backs, the raked snow ripped away from their feet to beyond where Short’s body had been found. Frederick leaned on his rake handle and stared at the empty clearing.

  “Who’d want Short dead?” he asked.

  “Nobody I know of,” Chris Landis puffed out on a cloud of aromatic smoke.

  “How about the lumber company? They’d want him out of the way, wouldn’t they?”

  “Sure they would. But killing him would be more trouble than it’s worth. Short was a pest, a gadfly. California’s got more protesters and bleeding hearts than we’ve got med flies. We don’t kill ’em, we shoo ’em away.”

  “Murder’s not as handy as it looks,” Frederick agreed.

  “Anyway, Timberlake wouldn’t want the trees burned,” Landis added. “It’s money out of their pocket.”

  “Insurance?”

  He shook his head. “Public land. Uncle Sam absorbs the losses.”

  “Mind if I talk to them anyway?” Frederick asked only as a courtesy.

  Chris Landis knew the game and appreciated the consideration. “I’ll drive you down.”

  Landis radioed ahead and his secretary set up the appointment. By the time they arrived at the Timberlake Lumber Company on the edge of Chester it was quarter past five. Quittin’ time and then some. The foreman, Pete Hollis, was not in a receptive mood. He had his coat on and sat with one haunch on the desk and one eye on the clock. Hollis was in his mid-thirties, big-boned, with the look of a man who keeps a little woman at home and expects dinner on the table when he gets there.

  Frederick took a chair just as if he’d been offered one and ostentatiously made himself comfortable, settling in for a good long chat.

  Hollis sighed, fidgeted, looked at his watch. Frederick hoped he’d want to get the interview over with badly enough he’d tell the truth right up front just to save time.

  “Are you familiar with the name Joshua Short?” he asked.

  Hollis shook his head. “No. But this is a big operation. I don’t know the names of a lot of the guys that work for us.”

  “Were you involved with the planned harvest of that forest land to the northwest of Pinson Lake?” Landis asked. Landis had pulled the pipe from his jaws and scraped the bowl with a little silver tool made for that purpose. His hands were busy, and his eyes had someplace neutral to go when he chose not to look at the interview subject. A pipe might be a good prop, Frederick thought. It gave off such an air of homey trustworthiness.

  “Yeah,” Pete replied. “That tract was on hold…” The sentence dribbled to an end. “Short. That was the guy died up there in the fire, wasn’t it? Burnt himself and half of California in the bargain?”

  “Joshua Short,”
Frederick said. “He was also the one who had the logging on hold.”

  Hollis had a pained look on his face but Frederick wasn’t at all sure it was because he had something to hide. Stanton was FBI, he’d flashed his badge, now he was asking questions about a dead man. He would have been put on his guard by anybody who didn’t squirm a little.

  “I’m just the foreman here,” Pete said carefully. “I think you’d better ask the boss. Things in that area are pretty sensitive. We’ve got loggers burning spotted owls in effigy and we’ve got do-gooders from far away as New York City out here getting lost and mosquito bit and thinking they’re striking a blow for the Amazon rain forest. All I’ll get stirring in this mess is a thick finger.”

  Frederick laughed. “You’re a wise man, Mr. Hollis. Thanks for your time.” He leapt up and pumped the foreman’s hand. “Chris and I won’t keep you from your supper any longer.”

  Landis had repacked his pipe and puffed it back to life as he followed Stanton out.

  “Who was handling the Short/spotted owl situation?” Frederick asked while Hollis locked the office door behind them.

  “Martha Pitt, our bookkeeper. She handles the newspapers when it’s got to be done. James Beldon owns the company. He hires jobs out. Anybody works here is too hot under the collar when it comes to owls so he leaves us out of it.” Hollis clipped his keys back on his belt and led the way through a lighted yard stacked with lumber already resembling the buildings it was destined for.

  “Who did he hire this time?” Frederick asked when they’d stopped so Hollis could lock the gates to the yard.

  There’d been too many questions and the foreman was done talking. “I think you’d better ask Mr. Beldon,” he said.

  LANDIS DROVE. FREDERICK slumped down in the passenger seat. Joshua Short had been murdered. The Jackknife fire had been set either for the usual reasons—fun or profit—or to cover up the tracks of the murderer. Arson, homicide, happened all the time. A look at the statistics or the six o’clock news attested to that. It was not inconceivable that, but for an accident of geography, Joshua Short, Len Nims and Newt Hamlin’s deaths were unrelated.

  Ruling out Hamlin’s death as strictly a casualty of the fire, Frederick tried to think who might have had reason to murder two such different men: a gay environmentalist and a redneck bureaucrat. He drew a blank. Joshua Short and Nims apparently didn’t know one another. Several of the San Juans knew both Joshua and Nims—Jennifer, Stephen Lindstrom and possibly Lawrence Gonzales simply because he’d once lived in northern California. Jennifer and Stephen might have had reason to kill Nims but surely not Joshua. Gonzales might have wanted Short dead for some obscure reason but Anna’d said he was alibied for the death of Nims.

  Detecting piecemeal and by remote control—if anyone could be said to control Anna Pigeon—was an exercise in frustration. Frederick felt as he had as a kid when the carnies lured him into fishing for surprise packages using a mirror and a pair of awkward mechanical pincers in the place of hands.

  Landis muscled the Rover onto the main street cutting through Chester. Pine trees and one-story buildings lined the road. Night had crept down through the fog. A lighted digital clock on the dash read seven-forty-nine. Frederick wouldn’t be there when Anna radioed in.

  “Is there a phone anywhere handy?” he asked. “I’ve got a call to make.”

  Landis pointed ahead and Frederick recognized the long low roof of the Forest Service headquarters.

  “Take your pick,” Chris said as he switched on the office lights.

  By the time he got through to Gene Burwell it was three minutes of eight. Frederick had the breathless sense of skidding in just under the wire though he wasn’t sure if the information he had would prove of any value to Anna. Mostly he wanted contact, even vicarious contact, with the elusive Ms. Pigeon. It even crossed his mind to ask Burwell if there was some way, any way, to patch his call through. Common sense and a healthy dislike of looking the fool saved him from putting voice to his thoughts.

  Burwell took down his information and Frederick stifled an urge to ask the incident commander to read the message back so he could check it for accuracy.

  When the conversation reached its logical conclusion Frederick found himself loath to hang up the phone. He wanted to be there, even second hand, when Anna called in. Puppy love was unbecoming in a man of his middling years, he thought.

  With bulldozers and media hounds roaring, lives and careers at stake, Burwell did not take the time to tell him what Anna had said in her radio transmission, not even the gist of it, and Stanton was hungry for every detail.

  “Have you got a place to stay tonight?” Landis dragged Frederick out of his brown study. “We’ve got two spare rooms—the boys are away at college—and Mrs. Landis orders a mean pizza.”

  “I’m fine,” Frederick said. He was tired and slightly depressed. “But thanks.” The offer of a bed and hot food hadn’t tempted him for even a second. His first thought had been of Anna. He enjoyed a moment of feeling noble. It was short-lived. He could do no more for her from a sleeping bag on the cold ground than from a soft warm bed. It was for himself he needed to be close, if not to her, then to the radio.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Five

  OUT OF HABIT, Anna sat by the wreck of Paula Boggins’s truck. On the desolate ridge its junked chassis was perversely comforting, garbage ever a reminder of civilization.

  Night had mixed with fog and settled ink-black around her. Anna experimented with palms and fingers. Truly, she could not see her hand in front of her face. She pulled off her glove with her teeth, grimacing to keep lips and tongue off the filthy leather. Squeezing the tiny silver buttons on her watch, she squinted at the numbers. Eight-oh-two. That was fashionably late enough.

  Thumbing down the mike button, she called Stanton. The incident commander responded and only twenty years of consuming Emily Post with her breakfast cereal kept Anna from demanding Frederick. When Gene Burwell told her Stanton was in Chester, Anna found her mind echoing the childish refrain “but he promised…”

  Pride mixed with exhaustion in Burwell’s voice as he told her two and a half miles of road had been cleared of deadfall. Anna was impressed. She’d cut and swamped enough timber to know in their efforts to reach the San Juans they had managed something close to a miracle. Girding up the loins, she culled every bit of weariness and disappointment from her voice and heaped on the well-deserved praise.

  “God willing and the river don’t rise, we’ll get to you sometime late tomorrow,” Burwell promised.

  “We’ll be here with bells on.” Anna’s radio was indulging in the staccato static of a dying battery. John’s was in no better shape and the one Howard used for a security blanket was dead as the proverbial doornail. “My radio’s going,” she said. “Anything else?” She knew she sounded abrupt and she knew Burwell wouldn’t hold it against her.

  “Yes. I’ll make it quick. You’ve got a message from Frederick Stanton.”

  Anna’s heart lurched like a girl with her first valentine. “Shoot,” she said evenly.

  Burwell related the findings of the arson investigation. When he’d finished, Anna said: “I’m going to save what juice I can. I won’t call unless something comes up. Are you okay with that?”

  “I guess I’ll have to be,” Burwell said, and: “Hang in there.”

  In its wake, the conversation left a silence so deep Anna’s ears rang with it. Seldom in wilderness did one experience dead quiet. Life in all its minute rustlings, pipings and exhalations created a cushion of sound as comforting as the murmuring of a brook. Dead quiet was reserved for abandoned buildings, alleys, vacant lots. Without light, total absence of sound was disorienting. Time and space became as relative as the physicists always insisted they were.

  For a second Anna felt as if she were falling and her finger twitched near the headlamp’s power switch. Then the soaking cold and a nagging ache in the small of her back reassured her she was still in the world.
Rescued by life’s ubiquitous slings and arrows, she left the headlamp dark.

  This suffocating night lacked the comforting touches of many backcounty nights she’d enjoyed but Anna knew there was safety in its squid-ink cloaking. No one could find her, not without giving their own location away. After being spied on by Pepperdine, her natural wariness had blossomed into healthy paranoia. Hugh was a tenderfoot, an oaf, yet she’d not heard him tracking her to the hot-springs lake. Somebody with more guts and experience could have killed her at any time.

  If Burwell was correct in his estimate, within twenty-four hours rescue would reach them; rescue with all its modern technology and color of law. Anna’d been nosing around, asking questions. No one knew how much or how little she knew, how much or how little she’d shared with Frederick Stanton. She couldn’t avoid the possibility that whoever had killed Nims and possibly Jennifer’s brother wouldn’t want her to be among those carried off the mountain.

  Joshua Short murdered. Anna thought about that awhile. The news had come as a shock. Usually she was quick to suspect accidental deaths but the Jackknife had proved such an indiscriminate adversary she’d accepted that first life taken as had everyone else. Nature was a killer that had always been with mankind. Her choices went unquestioned, acts of God.

  Josh’s murder cast a new light on Nims’s death without illuminating anything. The murders could be unrelated. Of those with no alibi for the time of Nims’s death—John, Jennifer and Joseph—Anna could think of no one who would want Joshua Short dead. Clearly not Jennifer. She’d loved her brother. Besides, she and Anna worked together at Mesa Verde; Anna knew Jen had been nowhere near California at the time Joshua had died. Joseph and John she couldn’t vouch for but she had no reason to believe either one of them had even been acquainted with Josh.