Firestorm Read online

  “Home free,” Lindstrom said as he came up beside her. “Wind’s picking up.”

  A curtain of ash and grit blasted by them and they turned their backs.

  “One damn thing after another,” Anna groused.

  A dirt road had been hacked from spike to the heli-spot and the going was easier. Lindstrom took the lead and she fell in behind him, relieved only to have to step where he stepped.

  On the ridge the wind was shrieking. Without the sough of needles and leaves to soften its voice, the whistle was sharp and unkind. Stephen’s light picked out the hulk that had been Paula’s truck. The tires were burned off the hubs. One of the fenders was gone, blasted away when the gas cans exploded. The cab was gutted and the glass gone. In extremis the vehicle had been rendered black and elemental. It no longer looked out of place.

  “Maybe it’s still warm,” Anna said hopefully. Brush jackets were made of unlined canvas, designed to protect from the scrape of branches and the wind. Now that the exertion of the climb was behind them, Anna was feeling the cold.

  Using the truck shell as a windbreak, Anna dragged the radio from under her jacket. On the second try she reached Base. The line was etched by static but still readable. The two EMTs found themselves laughing from sheer relief. They weren’t alone.

  Gene Burwell, the incident commander, spoke with them and Anna sensed a hushed reverence awaiting her every word. Caught up in surviving, the rest of humanity had slipped her mind. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends were waiting by radios and telephones, the television tuned to CNN, hoping for news. The drama of what they had been through hit her and she was proud even as she mocked herself for feeling heroic. It was with sadness and an unpleasant sense of failure, slipping from her recently acquired pedestal, that she told them of Newt Hamlin, of Leonard Nims.

  News of the murder was met with a static-filled silence Anna couldn’t break. Burwell had his mike button down and, she imagined, his mouth open.

  Three times he made her repeat the information. Anna was shouting now, her face and the radio shielded by the truck’s engine block and Lindstrom’s body. Rising wind competed for air time. “What do you want us to do?” she asked.

  Burwell was quiet so long she began to be afraid they’d lost contact. Finally his voice cracked back: “Can you last out the night?”

  “I think so.” Anna had told him of injuries sustained and supplies available. It was a rhetorical question. Could rescue have been sent it would already be on its way.

  “The National Weather Service thinks this’ll break tomorrow. We’ll send the helicopters in for you. We’ve sent a crew up the road but they won’t be there anytime soon. If this sleet holds, the fire will be out by then or close to it. One way or another, we’ll get to you.”

  When the conversation was terminated, Anna felt abandoned. Lindstrom took the radio and relayed their information to LeFleur.

  From far away, through the howling of the wind, came soft thuds, the sound a giant’s footfalls might make in ash and dirt. Anna grabbed Stephen’s arm.

  “What the hell…”

  “John, do you hear that?” Lindstrom barked.

  Bile backed up in Anna’s throat. The pounding was directionless. It came in intervals of a few seconds to a minute and seemed to be on all sides.

  “Put your hard hats on and hunker down somewhere solid,” the crew boss said over the radio. “The wind’s felling snags. It’ll be like a war zone out there till it lets up.”

  Lindstrom sat down in the ash, leaned back against the engine block and spread his legs. “A little ninety-eight point six?” he offered. Anna squirmed between his knees and he held her close, retaining what body heat they had left.

  His hard hat clanked against hers as he leaned his head down. “I sure wish you were fatter. No offense.”

  “None taken. I sure wish I was home—no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  TIMMY SPINKS CALLED Stanton a little after nine P.M. Chicago time. Frederick put down a block of cottonwood and the carving knife, muted the television and answered. As Spinks relayed information he’d received of a radio call from the surviving firefighters, the windstorm and the consequent recall of the rescue crew Base had dispatched up the mountain, Stanton saw the same news marching soundlessly across the TV screen.

  He didn’t take notes while Spinks talked. Names, dates, places, all the details would be remembered. He wasn’t born with the talent. Like a waiter in a fine restaurant, over the years he’d trained himself to use his short-term memory. Later he would make lists. The lists served to make tangible his thoughts. Lists could be thumbtacked on maps, moved around, compared, rematched like puzzle pieces or decorators’ samples.

  For now Stanton listened, his eyes on the talking head on channel 4, his fingers running absently over his carving. Emerging from the block of wood was a chimpanzee in a cowboy hat and six-guns. Stanton remembered seeing one dressed that way in an old movie. Monkeys in various activities and ensembles cavorted on the windowsill behind the sofa. Stanton had taken up carving in hopes it would do for his hands what the television did for his brain; keep it occupied in harmless pursuits from day’s end till bedtime.

  The sculptures were good. He knew it without taking much pride in his achievement. Cynicism, carefully weeded out of his daily dealings with mankind, dripped from every knife cut. His monkeys weren’t fun, not even a barrel full of them. Slyness, stupidity, greed, envy, arrogance, lust, deceit: seven sometimes deadly but certainly ubiquitous sins marred the simian faces.

  Stanton’s first carvings had been of people but they had proved unsettling. Too much disappointment was revealed. With monkeys the whimsy somewhat balanced the cruelty.

  “What’s closest to Lassen Park and the Caribou Wilderness?” he asked when Spinks had finished. “Reno?” Stanton didn’t wait for an answer. A map of northern California and Nevada had risen from some recess of his mind. “Book me a flight out of here to Reno.”

  There was no hesitation before the “yes, sir.” Spinks, deliciously damp behind the ears, wouldn’t know Stanton wasn’t godlike in his powers, that he didn’t choose his assignments nor did he prioritize them.

  Careful not to scatter wood shavings, Frederick folded up the newspaper laid across his lap. The air ticket he would put on American Express. The days on either sick leave or annual leave. He’d accrued so much of both, come December he’d be on Use or Lose status anyway. The murder was a bit of unexpected luck. Stanton might even wangle official status with pay.

  The thought of seeing Anna again gave him a thrill of adolescent proportions. The corpse was a fitting touch. He never saw Anna unless somebody died. If that wasn’t the stuff True Love was made of he’d read all those Thomas B. Costain novels for nothing.

  Setting his reading glasses down by the half-finished carving, he made squeaky sounds through pursed lips. Danny squeaked back and Stanton located him in the shadows on top of one of the bookcases. “Come, my little bird-brained friend. Time to return to solitary.” As he put the budgie back into its cage it crossed his mind that he ought to buy Danny a companion. He could never tell if baby budgerigars were male or female but perhaps it wouldn’t matter. Just somebody to pass the time with, twitter to in the dark.

  “Maybe when I get back,” Frederick promised.

  TIMMY GOT HIM on a red-eye out of O’Hare, through Salt Lake City, arriving in Reno at three forty-eight A.M. Seven hundred and twenty-three dollars. Frederick abandoned American Express at the airport counter and put it on an already overburdened MasterCard. This would have to be paid off one month at a time along with Candice’s college tuition.

  Long legs jacked up against the seat back in front of him, Stanton cinched his seat belt down, then opened the envelope of computer printouts Spinks had given him: data on the Jackknife, maps of the area and background checks on the survivors and the two deceased still up on Banyon Ridge just east of Lassen Volcanic Natio
nal Park.

  He started with the report of the fire. Not because it held the greatest interest, but because it was going to be a long flight and he was saving the best for last. Last was Anna’s background check, on the bottom of the pile. She wasn’t a suspect, he was just being nosy. Law enforcement computer networks weren’t the all-knowing, all-seeing, long, strong, electronic arm of the law that the various agencies would have the public believe, but they housed more dirt than a Hoover. A professional gossip’s dream come true. Frederick had the highest regard for gossip. It showed people still cared what their kind did or did not do. It shored up the illusion of self-importance and morality that separated man from the monkeys he carved.

  With a pleasant sense of anticipation that claimed him at the outset of most investigations, he began to read.

  The Jackknife had been spotted on the twenty-seventh of September by a fire lookout in the Lassen National Forest. The burn had originated near Pinson Lake, California. Lightning, the cause of a majority of wildland fires, was not in evidence. The first victims, Joshua Short and his dog, were suspected of starting the blaze.

  Frederick noted the plural and wondered what role the dog was thought to have played in arson. Maybe in the vein of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

  In eleven days the fire had grown to fourteen thousand acres of public land, thirteen thousand five hundred on National Forest land and five hundred acres in Lassen Volcanic National Park. An Incident Base camp of a thousand-plus firefighters had been established on the edge of the Caribou Wilderness east of the park and a spike camp within the wilderness area on Banyon Ridge. The fire had burned steadily but unremarkably until the cold front moved in over the Cascades. The blowup was a spectacular swan song, bringing the total acreage burned to over seventeen thousand.

  Precipitation and cooler temperatures were thought to have stopped the fire. It was still being monitored and, though the crews were being demobilized, Gene Burwell, Incident Commander, would head the rescue effort to bring the stranded squad down off the mountain.

  Chain of events, cause and effect, never ceased to fascinate Frederick. A cold front rolls over a mountain range; a brother is burned to death; a man named Nims is knifed in the back; Frederick notices he may be falling in something—“love” for lack of a better word; Joshua Short, alleged arsonist, sets a fire that overruns a spike camp where his sister has been dispatched. The world was a house of cards.

  Stanton met Jennifer Short, a seasonal law enforcement ranger, when he worked a homicide with Anna in Mesa Verde National Park. Her steel-magnolia persona delighted him. He had a secret envy for those with colorful ethnic roots. Accents and cultural eccentricities provided good cover, a touch of mystery and romance. A middle-aged, middle-class, middle-western white boy had only his expected naïveté to fall back on when the emotional roads got rough. He hoped Jennifer’s steel predominated over the magnolia for the duration. News of her brother’s death, the trauma of the fire, might be enough to render her useless to Anna.

  Through the musings and mental exercises it was never far from Frederick’s mind that somewhere on the flank of a mountain, Anna was snuggled down with a murderer. It was so like her it made him smile.

  Spreading out Timmy’s maps, he noted with approval that the area of the fire and base and spike camps had been marked with colored pens. Somewhere in the circle of fluorescent orange was Anna. It wasn’t hard to picture her in mud and trees and other uncivilized accoutrements. He’d never seen her anywhere else and wondered if he’d be disappointed should she ever turn up in Chicago in pantyhose, pumps and perfume; if the Calamity Jane aspect of the woman piqued a palate that had become slightly jaded.

  Frederick had never been handsome enough to be vamped by cheerleaders, but he was single, straight and employed. It got him enough offers that he sat home nights by choice, not necessity. Danny, the monkeys and Tom Brokaw: not a bad life if one sent out for pizza.

  He tried to picture Anna in his home and failed. Oddly, it disappointed him. He desisted and turned his attention to the background checks. The pages were run together on perforated computer paper. Stanton tore them neatly into sheets. Maybe the next generation wouldn’t require the familiar comfort of rectangular white pages, read left to right, top to bottom, but Frederick found it helped organize his thoughts.

  LeFleur, John Alvin, forty-five, white, male, five-foot-eleven, one hundred sixty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes. No wants. No warrants. Criminal history: felony draft evasion, 1971. Charges dropped. Possession for sale of Quaaludes in 1972. Two years’ probation.

  Timmy had tapped into personnel records and Frederick skimmed LeFleur’s employment history: high school education, independent contractor, carpenter, bartender. Before signing on with the Bureau of Land Management it didn’t look as if the man had ever held a job for longer than eighteen months running. Firefighting was the one constant: summer ’81, ’82 and ’83 with the Forest Service in Colorado; ’86, ’87 and ’89 on the Angeles in California; ’91 and ’93 with the National Park Service at Rocky Mountains. Since 1993 he’d been a permanent resource management technician with the BLM out of Farmington, New Mexico. A GS-5, Frederick noted. No money in that. If the man’s tastes ran to anything grander than beans and rice he needed the fires to make ends meet.

  Nims, Leonard Lynn, forty-three, white, male, five-foot-nine, one hundred fifty-eight pounds, gray hair, blue eyes. No wants. No warrants. No criminal history. Served in Vietnam in ’71 and ’72. Honorable discharge. Graduated with an AA in Forestry from Lassen Junior College in 1977. Worked for the Bureau of Land Management in Susanville, California, from ’79 to ’90. A GS-9.

  Stanton pulled the map across his knees and looked up Susanville. On the edge of the desert sixty or seventy miles south of Lassen Volcanic National Park was a small town of that name. Lots of public lands surrounding it. Either a logging or mining town, Stanton guessed.

  Since ’93 Nims had worked on oil and gas leases for the BLM in Farmington, New Mexico. A GS-7’s pay grade.

  There was a story there. Frederick could smell it. Three years with no employment history, then another job halfway across the country at a lower pay scale. It could be as simple as moving home to care for an aging parent or a love affair that tore up roots. But something.

  Nims was the man with the knife in his ribs, Frederick reminded himself, and he reread the file to cement it in memory. Unless Nims had been killed by a psychotic, something he had seen, done, said, been or tried for had gotten him killed. If the reason wasn’t too obscure or too bizarre, Frederick would probably find it. Professionally, he only struck out about fourteen percent of the time. In baseball he’d have been a star. In law enforcement he was just a good cop, better than most, not as good as some.

  But I’m not above asking for help, he thought with a smile that was only a little bit bitter. That’s part of my charm.

  Pepperdine, Hugh Clarence. Age twenty-three, white, male, six feet, two hundred fourteen pounds. No wants. No warrants. No criminal history. Graduated cum laude from New York University with a degree in Environmental Studies. New-hire law enforcement ranger out of Aztec National Monument near Farmington, New Mexico.

  Frederick had been to Aztec sightseeing after the Mesa Verde assignment. An Indian ruin and a visitors’ center on a small plot of land constituted the whole of it. Delightful as it was to visit, he didn’t imagine Hugh got much hands-on law enforcement experience. Chipmunks in the garbage would constitute a crime wave at the sleepy little ruin. Unless there was something that didn’t show up on his records, Pepperdine would probably be of little help to Anna.

  Short, Jennifer Katherine. Stanton started to move her to the bottom of the pile because he knew and liked her. Law officers had an aversion to believing someone they thought well of could commit murder, wanting to believe that somewhere in their heart of hearts they would know a murderer when they met one. Gut instinct, training, intuition, insight—something would tip them off.

  Sometimes it did.
Sometimes it didn’t. In a former incarnation—one he was none too proud of—Frederick had invited a murderer to Thanksgiving dinner with his kids. Since then he’d learned to bake the turkey himself.

  Shoving his reading glasses closer to the tip of his nose, he studied Short’s file. No wants. No warrants. No criminal history. Graduated from Memphis State in accounting, 1985. From ’85 to ’94 she worked as a computer programmer for a local firm. Summer of ’94, having completed a one-semester course in law enforcement at Memphis State, she was hired on as a seasonal law enforcement ranger at Mesa Verde.

  Ran away with the Park Circus, Frederick thought, and envied her slightly. Should wild urges knock on his door, child support, alimony and tuition would see to it he sent them packing.

  Black Elk, Howard Lawrence. Thirty-one, Native American, male, six-foot-one, two hundred ten pounds. No wants. No warrants. Criminal history: two driving under the influences and one drunk and disorderly in 1986. Nothing since. Undergraduate degree in archaeology from the University of New Mexico in 1989, master’s degree in history from the same institution in 1991. Black Elk had worked in cultural resources for the Bureau of Land Management in Dove Creek, Colorado, until the present time.

  Hayhurst, Joseph Charles. Thirty-three, Native American, male, five-foot-seven, one hundred fifty-two pounds. Black hair and eyes. No wants. No warrants. No criminal history. Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State in Renaissance art history. Employment record: 1988–1990, high school art teacher in Los Gatos, California. Summers with the NPS in Yosemite. 1990 to the present, Interpreter, GS-7, for the National Park Service at El Malpais in New Mexico.

  Gonzales, Lawrence David, Hispanic, male, twenty-two, five-foot-nine, one hundred sixty pounds, black hair, brown eyes, high school graduate, A.D. Durango. Frederick frowned in annoyance, then looked to the bottom of the page. Timmy, bless his thorough and ambitious little heart, had penned in an explanation. An A.D. was a direct hire, not through any agency, that was often used when fires were bad and extra personnel were called for.