The Burning Season

by Jeff Mariotte

  “Catherine Willows?” An unfamiliar voice, male.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Evan McCandless, with the Channel Nine news team.”

  The next word caught in her throat. “Yes?”

  “I wonder if you’d like to comment on—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McCandless. I don’t comment on anything. If you want a comment, call the department’s public information office.”

  “But you’re the one—”

  “I said I’m sorry. Off the record, I’m the one who worked all night and is trying to sleep. Good-bye.”

  She hung up the phone. She knew she should play the press better than that, but she was too tired for fine diplomatic maneuvers.

  Her head had just hit the pillow when the phone rang again. She sat upright, grabbed the phone. “Look, Mr. McCandless—”

  “No, this is Cynthia Sweeney, from the Press-Enterprise,” a female voice said. “You’ve been talking to Evan McCandless?”

  “Only to tell him I wouldn’t talk to him. Or you, Ms. Sweeney. As I told him, if you want a comment from the PD, you need to talk to our public information office.”

  “You might want to change your mind about that. I’ll give you a fair hearing, Supervisor Willows.”

  “Just what is it you’re looking for a comment on? Never mind. I don’t need a fair hearing, I need about eighteen hours of sleep.” Catherine hung up again.

  The next time the phone rang, she let voicemail take it. And the time after that.

  Sleep, it appeared, would be a rare commodity today.

  Giving up, she turned on the TV, scrolled through channels until she found a local news broadcast. The second thing she saw there, after a quick glimpse at a news anchor who—true to the job title—seemingly never moved away from her chair, was her own face. “Early this morning, Las Vegas Police Department Crime Lab supervisor Catherine Willows blamed the bombing that injured media kingpin Dennis Daniels on anti-tax protesters,” the anchor said. “Officially, the department is saying there are no suspects yet, and the investigation is ongoing. But sources in the department say—”

  Catherine punched the power button on the remote. Her phone was already ringing again. She ran her fingers through her hair, buried her face in her hands. This was not good, not good at all.

  Sooo not good.

  Voicemail took that call, and she started to let the next one go that way as well, when it occurred to her that all the calls might not be from the press. There might be one from Ecklie, or even from the sheriff, calling to upbraid her for her error. She decided to nip that in the bud and dialed the department’s public information office herself. She had friends there, and they’d tell her how to play it.

  After a couple of minutes and two transfers, she was on the line with an old hand and a longtime friend. “You really screwed the pooch this time, Cath,” Charlie said. “We’ve been fielding calls all morning.”

  “Yeah, they have my home number, too. I did not talk to the press, Charlie, I swear to you.”

  “Somebody did.”

  That sloppy cop. Benny something. “Brass knows him, his name’s Benny. He overheard me say something. Maybe I was out of line, but I definitely wasn’t talking to anyone outside the department.”

  “We’re trying to put a lid on it, Catherine, trust me.”

  “What I want to know is if the department can cover me.”

  “We’ll do what we can. We’ve been trying to tell them that your statement isn’t the real story, that it was an unofficial speculation meant to be kept among colleagues.”

  “That’s true, but in a way, that makes it sound worse. More honestly my opinion. We toss around possible scenarios all the time, but they’re not for public consumption.”

  “There’s no way to put a happy face on it, Cath. We’re trying to make deals, offering people exclusive bits and pieces if they’ll bury that angle and play up the one we want played up.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is there was a horrific attack against a member of the media, an important man in this town, and his staff. That’s a story. It happened, we’re on top of it, and we won’t sleep until we find those responsible.”

  “Literally,” Catherine said, biting back a yawn.

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing. So, is it working?”

  “To a degree. I won’t lie to you, Catherine. You’re going to be a story—not the only story, but a story—for a day. Maybe two, at the outside. One thing about the press, they’ve got the collective attention span of a gnat. Two, three days from now, you’ll be forgotten.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “It’ll blow over. I’m not wrong on this. I know those people. You going to be okay?”

  “Always, Charlie,” she said. “Always.”

  She did trust Charlie. He knew his stuff.

  She just hoped he was right this time.

  Nick and Sara made it up Mt. Charleston by noon, showing their IDs at multiple checkpoints to be allowed into the fire zone. The mountain still smoldered; tendrils of smoke joined earth and sky from what seemed to be dozens of different places. The sight made Nick think of the barred door of a prison cell, and he mentioned that to Sara.

  “That’s the goal here, right? To make sure someone ends up in a cell?”

  “From what Catherine said, maybe the gas chamber. I try not to think about what sentences people might get. All I can do is help convict the guilty.”

  “Good attitude,” Sara said. “You always did have the right outlook, Nick.”

  “I try.”

  Nick was driving, as he always tried to when he went out with Sara. He was the one who had rolled his car recently, but that was a fluke: run off the road by a drunk driver. Even with that, he was more comfortable with his own hands on the wheel rather than Sara’s. For all her good traits, and there were many, driving wasn’t high on her skill set. She navigated, with a map open on her lap, supplementing the vehicle’s GPS unit’s advice. “Turn up here,” she said. “That right, up ahead.”

  A moment later, the GPS offered the same suggestion. “One of you is plenty,” Nick said. “Someone’s gotta go.”

  Sara turned off the GPS. “We’re almost there. One more left.”

  Nick made the right, then the left. They were deep in it, now. Huge trees had been whittled down to little more than blackened toothpicks. The under-story was gone, nothing but black scorch marks on bare earth remaining. The stink of char was everywhere, overwhelming all other aromas. Instead of the usual refreshing fragrance of mountain air, this place smelled like a barbecue gone bad.

  He knew Catherine had given them this assignment as a kind of favor. He had been, as she put it, shot and blown up recently, and Sara had injured her hand punching a guy. The guy had undoubtedly deserved it, and Sara had been hoping for someone to punch, but still. Ray was the one who really needed to get away, to take time off, but there was no convincing him of that.

  “There,” Sara said. “That trailer. That’s got to be the place.”

  Nick parked outside, next to a handful of other vehicles, all bearing government tags of various sorts. By the time they were out of the lab’s Yukon, the trailer’s door had opened and a man in a dark suit emerged. “You must be from the crime lab,” he said.

  “We are,” Sara replied. “Mr. Castillo?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Sara Sidle. This is Nick Stokes.”

  “Supervisor Willows said she was sending me her best. I trust you two are up to the challenge.”

  “We’ll do what we can.”

  “And you,” Castillo said, addressing Nick. “She said you have experience with wildland fires.”

  “A bit,” Nick said. He and Catherine had once had to figure out how a scuba diver got into a treetop, when he was found there after a forest fire.

  “I’ve been studying the problem for months, now,” Castillo said. “We were afraid something like this would happen, and we wanted
to be ready when it did. I’m afraid that this case is the perfect one to apply our new policy to, tragic though it may be.”

  “You mean prosecuting for murder?” Sara said.

  “Yes. You drove through the fire damage on your way here.”

  “We did, yes,” Sara answered.

  “We have the blaze mostly contained, but it’s not out yet. So far, more than eleven thousand acres have burned. Twenty-one homes, and counting, are destroyed. Six people dead, that we know of. There might be more, but we won’t know that until we sift through the ashes and the residents are allowed to return. The combined cost to the government, at a state and federal level, is already well in excess of three quarters of a million dollars. That number is going up every minute.”

  “It’s an awful thing,” Nick said.

  “It’s a tragic thing, but what it isn’t is an accident. This fire was set with intent. Someone had to actively decide to burn a forest, and then follow through on that decision. Come, walk with me.”

  “Okay,” Sara said.

  Castillo led them away from the trailer and through burned trees. The smell here was even sharper. Ahead, Nick could see blue sky where the trees ended, presumably where the slope fell away. “For a hundred years, the Forest Service’s official response to any fire, however small, was to put it out. A lightning-caused fire in the middle of five million acres of undeveloped forest? Put it out. Because of this policy, we have forests throughout the country, but especially here in the West, that have not burned in more than a century. Do you know the end result of that?”

  “I would guess,” Sara said, “a lot of area ready to burn.”

  “More than ready,” Castillo corrected. “Anxious to burn. Fire is part of the natural life cycle of forests. It allows the germination of new seeds, clears away brush and dead trees. It’s the way things are supposed to be. By preventing burns for so long, the unintended result was a huge increase in the available fuel. Then we have a year like this one, with a heavy monsoon season, lots of rain, followed by a hot, dry season—and yes, before you ask, experts believe that climate change is causing hotter, drier conditions that only exacerbate the situation.”

  “The rain grows more underbrush, grasses and shrubs,” Nick suggested. “Which then dry out.”

  “And feed the fire. Forest fires tend to ladder. They start out burning low, but they’ll climb, if there are rungs to climb on. Brush of varying heights, low branches—those are just what it needs.”

  They pushed past the final row of black trees and came to a drop-off. The ground sloped away at a nineteen- or twenty-degree angle, and below, for miles and miles, they looked down upon more blackened landscape. “This fire burned hot and fast. There are whole neighborhoods on this mountain that had to be evacuated with an hour to spare, sometimes less. Lives were saved, make no mistake about that. But homes were destroyed with everything in them. Irreplaceable things. Family photographs, videos. Things that had been in families for generations. Not to mention pets and livestock. There isn’t always time, in a quick evacuation, to save them.”

  “That’s hard,” Sara said.

  “It’s terrible. Terrible. Let’s go for a ride, I want to show you where those firefighters died.”

  “We do need to see that,” Nick said. They’d been given a file to study, which included maps of the fire’s progress, diagrams showing the positions of the different firefighting teams, and photographs—awful photos, hard to look at—of the dead firefighters.

  “It’s not far. Come on.”

  They walked back through the scorched forest, to the trailer, and got into the Yukon. This time, Castillo gave directions while Sara drove. They wound up the mountain for about ten minutes, then took a twisty side road into a neighborhood of buildings that were called cabins but were the size of small mansions. The fire seemed to have hopscotched around; some houses were intact while others had been reduced to nothing but ash and stone. Sara drove slowly down the road, weaving through mounds of debris.

  Toward the end of a cul-de-sac, they stopped. A fire engine blocked the roadway. It was black, its tires gone, glass shattered, paint blistered and peeling.

  “There it is,” Castillo said. “Engine number forty-two. They were trying to get back in it, to escape, when the fire caught them. It came in a wall. They had no time for anything, not even time to pray. When the fire approached, the superheated air was probably fifteen hundred degrees or higher. Just fried them where they stood.”

  He waved toward the houses scattered around the cul-de-sac. “This is what they died for,” he said. “Trying to protect these homes. Probably, these people shouldn’t have built here. We call this the wild-land-urban interface, and it’s very dangerous. These homes are in the most fire-prone areas imaginable, in terrain where fighting fires is very difficult and sources of water can be hard to come by. We try to educate people, to get them to keep the brush trimmed back around their houses, to keep defensible space. But they like the trees up close to their homes, for shade and for the scenery. Fire rises, as I said, and it climbs hills as well as trees. When it does, houses burn. People need to understand that.”

  “I guess these people will, now,” Nick said.

  “Some of them. Some of the ones whose homes burned probably won’t rebuild, not here. But the ones who were spared? They’ll just think they’re immune. That’s how it usually goes.”

  “They’re not immune, though,” Sara said. “Safer for a while, maybe, because this fire burned off the accumulated fuel.”

  “That’s right,” Castillo said. “But it’ll grow back. The forest restores itself. And in the meantime, this is only one community, on one mountain. We’re faced with this in every wildland-urban interface around the state. That’s why we have to not only preach safety and prevention, but we have to prosecute the arsonists.”

  “I get it,” Nick said. “We’ll do whatever we can.”

  “Thank you,” Castillo said. He looked like he meant it, like he took the loss of those firefighters very personally. He blinked back moisture, sniffled once, touched the end of his nose. “Your work here will save a lot of lives.”

  Later, after Castillo had told them how to find the area where Forest Service investigators believed the fire had begun, Nick and Sara stood outside the Yukon. “I didn’t think we’d be back up here so soon, Nick.”

  A recent case had brought them to a different part of the mountain, closer to the city. “Let’s just hope there aren’t any werewolves around.”

  “Or any bloodsuckers bigger than a mosquito. But you know what’s missing?”

  “What?”

  “Listen.”

  He did. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly. When’s the last time you heard a forest without birds?”

  6

  CATHERINE WAS WIDE awake, and getting back to sleep didn’t seem like a winning proposition. She decided to shower and go in early. There was always plenty to do, and if she was busy in the lab, maybe she wouldn’t be dwelling on the fact that her name was being blabbed all over the local news.

  When she got there, the lab was still crawling with day shift people. She always felt a little like an intruder at such times, though her office was her own and her fellow criminalists never acted as if she were unwelcome. She returned the favor on those rare occasions that they showed up during night shift. Still, there was a definite sense of being a stranger in a foreign land.

  She went into her office and dug into the paperwork that she typically ignored, in favor of fieldwork and lab work, until Ecklie started harassing her for it. Her overheard comment might have landed her in hot water with him and the department brass, so she would make sure they didn’t have anything else to complain about.

  She had been at it for most of an hour when a familiar, gruff voice roused her from her forms. “What the hell are you doing here, Cath?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, Earl,” Catherine said. She saved the document she was working on.
“You did work the scene with us last night, right? Why aren’t you home in bed?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “I knew the pieces of this bomb were sitting here waiting for me and I had to get back to it.”

  “You really have a thing about bombs, don’t you?”

  “They’re fascinating objects. The people who plant them tend to be interesting, too. Loners, often. Meticulous. Some of the finest craftsmanship I’ve ever seen has been put into devices intended to be used only once and destroyed by that single use. Takes a certain mindset to do that.”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “I’m not saying I admire the whole person, just the dedication to the craft.”

  “Well,” Catherine said. “As long as you draw a line.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Can you tell me anything about this one yet?”

  “Come with me.”

  Catherine left her paperwork behind, delighted at the intrusion. Earl led her to a layout room where he had assembled bits and pieces taken from the scene into something roughly tubular, about eight or nine inches long. Beside it were shards of black plastic, melted and twisted into unrecognizable shapes. “That’s our bomb?” Catherine asked.

  “What’s left of it,” Earl replied. “It was originally a piece of aluminum pipe. Could have been used for all sorts of purposes, but our guy found his own use for it. He packed it full of ammonium nitrate—”

  “Fertilizer.”

  “Not when it’s used like this, but yes, that’s its most common commercial use. He added diesel oil. Together, the two are a very unstable, explosive mixture.”

  “Similar to what that guy McCann planted at Officer Clark’s funeral. The bomb that almost killed Nicky.”

  “And the same stuff Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City, although he used a lot more of it.”

  “So it’s the explosive substance of choice for domestic terrorists.”