The Burning Season

by Jeff Mariotte

  “No!” the audience responded.

  “We’re going to call them out, aren’t we?”

  “Yes!”

  “We’re going to protest the selling of our country, aren’t we?”

  “Yes!” the crowd thundered.

  “And if we have to, we’ll get our guns and go hunting for those who would do us harm, won’t we?”

  “Yes!” The crowd was into it now, stomping and clapping, whistling and shrieking.

  Troy started making downward motions with his hands. When the audience finally quieted, he said, “That’s what we like to hear. The Free Citizens of the Republic was formed, and exists today, to save our country from those people. We want America back—the United States of America that was founded in 1776, that adhered to a Constitution, and that promises all people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That America. We thank you for your enthusiastic support. In the lobby when you go out, there’ll be tables at which you can sign up for membership. For the low, low price of fifty dollars—that’s nothing, pocket change for a couple of weeks—for only fifty American dollars you’ll get an embossed membership card and a subscription to all of our publications, so you can stay up to date on the threats facing America and how we can combat them. There’ll also be a table set up where you can exchange some of those dollars—while they’re still worth something—for diamonds, which will never lose their value no matter what. Our supplies are limited, so act today. Thank you all for coming, and God bless the USA!”

  Once more, the room erupted. The Kirklands exited through a door behind the dais, and the audience started filing out into the lobby area.

  “Sounds like a pretty good racket,” Brass said.

  “For the Kirklands,” Vartann agreed. “What do you want to bet those Free Citizens publications are just full of ads for more things to spend your money on? Things benefiting old Steven and Troy, of course.”

  “I wouldn’t take that bet, Lou. I’ve got nothing against con men fleecing suckers as long as it’s legal, and in this case it looks like the suckers are lining up to be fleeced. What bothers me is the rhetoric. They’re stirring these folks up. When you’ve got a lot of loaded guns around and a lot of fearful people, sooner or later there’s going to be trouble.”

  “I hear you,” Vartann said.

  “You want to try to catch the Kirklands, put some pressure on them to call their dogs off Catherine?” Everybody knew Lou and Catherine were dating, and he didn’t blame the detective for wanting to look after her. Brass did, too—he and the CSI team had had each other’s backs for years.

  “I think I sent that message pretty clearly this afternoon,” Vartann said. “And that’s a local deal, anyway—the Kirklands just got into town, from what I hear.”

  “Okay,” Brass said. “I still think we’d better keep an eye on them while they’re here, and stay on top of the situation with Catherine. Last thing I want is for law enforcement to be afraid that doing our jobs will make us into targets for harassment. But if you want to get out of here, I’m okay with that. I don’t think we’re exactly popular in this crowd.”

  “Definitely not,” Vartann said with a grin. “Let’s go pull our shift on that superhighway and earn some North American merits for our retirement. . . .”

  21

  “I THINK I’VE got something here,” Greg said.

  He was leaning over Alec Watson’s desk, bent almost double, aiming an alternate light source at the shiny wooden surface. “What is it?” Catherine asked.

  “I’m not sure yet. Maybe he just spilled coffee or something, but it’s pretty far back for that.” He indicated an area about sixteen inches from the back of the desk, nearly two feet from where Watson would have sat. “He’d have to have had pretty long arms to put a cup down back here. I don’t think he was part gorilla. But there are a couple of drops of some dried liquid over here.”

  “More blood?” She was almost used to the smell of it pervading the room. Every now and then she had to step outside to breathe in some fresh air.

  “Doesn’t look like it. It looks clear. And from the looks of this desk, it gets dusted and maybe polished every day, so they must be pretty recent.”

  “What do you think it is, then?” Catherine was on her knees, dusting the armrests of the two visitor chairs facing the desk, looking for friction ridge impressions. She had already dusted the edge of the desk nearest the chairs, and come up empty. The chairs were made of wood, with padded leather arms, back, and cushion. It was almost impossible to sit in a chair and not leave impressions somewhere, unless a person took great pains to sit with hands folded, or wore gloves. The difficulty was in the fact that the sealed, polished wood was a nonporous substance, and therefore easily powdered for latent prints, but since leather was porous, powders and chemical agents could backfire, hiding or erasing whatever impressions might have been left.

  Greg disappeared behind the desk for a moment. She heard him rummaging around in his field kit. “My guess is saliva. Maybe whoever shot him was spitting mad. I’ll test for it, see what happens.”

  “Good call,” Catherine said. “It’d be nice to get some DNA from this room that doesn’t belong to Watson. Or Dennis Daniels, who we know wasn’t here.”

  Greg brought a wet swab to the desk’s shiny surface and wiped an edge of one of the spots he had found, leaving plenty of the material behind in case other tests were needed. Then he touched the swab to an immunographic test strip he had prepared. Catherine recognized the technique, which was new but had tested well. Almost every organic compound found in plasma was also found, in trace amounts, in human saliva. The test Greg employed looked for the enzyme called human salivary alpha amylase, or hAMYI A. He had already put a drop of a detection antibody on the strip. The captured antibody, from the desktop, merged with the detection antibody, and if hAMYI A was present, the sample would move by capillary action to a test line.

  “I get a gold star,” Greg said after a couple of minutes. Catherine had stopped watching him and returned to her own work, trying to dust upside-down on the undersides of the chair arms. It was tricky work, because when she swirled the brush to lightly deposit dust without actually touching the surface, gravity interceded, and more dust fell back onto her gloved hand than stuck to the chair arm.

  “It’s positive?” she asked.

  “It’s human saliva. Don’t know whose yet, the lab will have to tell us that. But maybe it’s the killer’s.”

  “We can hope.” Catherine was glad he had persevered and identified the saliva. He was right; if it had come from the killer, then it could be analyzed for DNA and a possible identification could be made. She might still be able to make an ID, and quicker, with fingerprints.

  She poured a little more of the light gray powder she was using onto a clean sheet of paper she had spread on the floor. The gray contrasted nicely with the dark wood of the chair. She touched the very tip of her brush to the powder, picking some up, then shook the brush to release any excess. Once again, she tried to twirl it onto the underside of the chair arm, and this time, some stuck. Thinking she had turned something up, she twirled one more time, moving the brush just a little to her right.

  “I’ve got an impression here,” she said.

  “A good one?”

  She withheld judgment on that until she had finished powdering it. “Looks like.” The latent print showed up on the chair, where oils from the person’s skin had left it. It wasn’t magic, though it looked like it—she had made the invisible turn visible. She studied the whorls and arches. One loop slanting to the left was cut by scar tissue. “One full print and part of the next.”

  Her next step was to photograph the print, making sure she got good close-ups. Then she took lifting tape from her kit, placed one end beside the whole print, and smoothed it over that and the partial. She forced out a couple of tiny air bubbles, then lifted the print with one smooth, practiced motion. Because the powder was light gray, she chose a black mounting card to
adhere the tape to. When she was finished, the print was preserved.

  She would run it through IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, to see if the person who had left it was known to law enforcement. First, she had to document it—the least glamorous part of the job, but every piece of evidence had to be photographed and fully documented. On the lift card she wrote the case number, where she had taken the print, the address, the date, and her signature. She put the same information on a separate sheet of her notebook. One more step—now that she had found a latent print, she would have to take exclusionary ten-cards from everyone in the office, including the deceased, who might have sat in that chair.

  And this was only the first print she had found. She was in for a long night.

  Then again, in her business, they were all long nights.

  Her documentation done, she shot one more digital picture of the lift card, then connected the camera to a laptop and transmitted the image directly to IAFIS. While the system searched for the print, she kept working on the chairs, looking for more latents. The search was fruitless; whoever had sat there had done a good job of keeping his hands to himself, or had wiped the chair down. The latter explanation made the most sense, because on most such chairs, her problem would have been one of eliminating dozens of prints left by innocents.

  By the time she finished with the chairs, IAFIS had a hit.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  Greg had moved on to examining the floor on her side of the desk—the side that wasn’t covered in blood. “What is?”

  She had pulled up the criminal record of the person who had left the print, and was scrolling down the page as she spoke. “My print belongs to Troy Kirkland. The son of Steven Kirkland, the founder of the Free Citizens of the Republic.”

  “That’s the group that’s been giving you a hard time, right?”

  “Yes.” She tapped a few more keys. “Looks like father and son both have pretty long sheets. Fraud convictions, assaults, stalking, various cons and scams.”

  “Are they allied with Watson’s group?”

  “Not the way Watson described it. Rivals is more like it, and not friendly ones.” Catherine stood, reached for the ceiling, stretching her arms and legs to unkink the muscles. “I’ll be right back.”

  She found Justine Marie Taylor in her office down the hall, flipping through file folders with one hand, while holding a handkerchief to her nose with the other. Her mascara was blurred around her eyes and streaked all the way down her cheeks.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Catherine said. “But do you know if Mr. Watson had an appointment with Steven and/or Troy Kirkland this afternoon?”

  “No, I don’t think . . .” She let the sentence trail off. Setting the file folders aside, she checked the calendar grid on her desk blotter. “No, no appointments at all this afternoon. He doesn’t like to have visitors when we’re on deadline.”

  “Did you know Kirkland was here?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Have you ever met him? Did Alec ever meet with him?”

  “I’m sure I’ve never heard the name,” Taylor said. “And I make a point of remembering people Alec does business with.”

  “All right, thank you. I’m hoping we’ll be out of your hair soon. Sorry to be a bother.”

  “It’s no . . . no bother,” Taylor said. “If you can find who did it, that’s all I care about.”

  “That’s the idea,” Catherine said. “And you just helped a great deal.”

  She returned to Watson’s office to find Greg dusting the individual shell casings left on the floor. “I think we got lucky,” she said.

  “Lucky enough that I don’t have to do this?”

  “Keep it up. If we get a print on one of those, it’ll help seal the deal. But Troy Kirkland was definitely not an expected visitor. His aide says Watson didn’t like setting meetings on deadline days, so Kirkland came by without an appointment.”

  “Sounds like we need to talk to this Kirkland guy,” Greg said.

  “And I think I know right where to find him.” She fished her phone out of a pocket and punched up the number for Jim Brass. He answered on the second ring. Catherine could hear the steady rush of a car engine underlying his voice. “Are you driving?”

  “Lou’s chauffeuring,” he said. “I’m enjoying being a passenger for a change.”

  “Does that mean you’re not at the seminar anymore?”

  “Seminar’s over. I guess old Steven Kirkland is an early-to-bed kind of guy.”

  “Maybe you should go back and wake him,” Catherine said. “At least wake Troy Kirkland. He was in Alec Watson’s office today, in an unscheduled, secret meeting that even Watson’s office manager didn’t know about. It looks like he did a quick wipe job, but he left a latent on the bottom of the chair arm. Some cartridges were left at the scene as well; Greg’s checking those now.”

  “I’ll wake them both,” Brass said. “They just got into town today, and I doubt they’ve been apart for more than ten minutes since they got here. From the looks of things, father and son are damn near inseparable.”

  “Both chairs have been wiped,” Catherine reported. “So it’s possible they were here together.”

  “We’re on it, Cath. Thanks.”

  “What I don’t get,” Greg said after her call, “is even if the two groups are rivals, why go after Watson? They’re both involved in that protest effort, right?”

  Catherine had a suspicion of her own on that topic. She didn’t want to think about it, because it implicated her, however indirectly, in a man’s death. “Plenty of people saw Watson leaving headquarters today, and it was all over the news,” she said. “After that, our people and ATF raided the local Free Citizens’ headquarters. If they put two and two together, they might have suspected Watson tipped us off about their weapons cache.”

  “Which he did, right?”

  “He did, yes. And one purpose of the raid was to persuade the Free Citizens to leave me alone.”

  Greg looked stricken. In other words, exactly how she felt. “Catherine, no. You can’t . . . don’t think that. Any credible tip that they were stockpiling illegal weapons had to be checked out. Whether or not you were in the picture.”

  “I get that, Greg. I do. But I also can’t deny that Lou Vartann was the one who went to ATF with the tip, and the one who led the raid. And Lou and I are . . .” She left the rest unsaid, not certain who knew and who didn’t.

  “Just don’t blame yourself, Catherine. Watson didn’t have to come in. He could have lawyered up. He could have kept quiet. But he said his piece—intentionally steering us toward the Free Citizens. Maybe he was trying to settle an old grudge his way, and they responded their way. The issues between them have nothing to do with you, though. And from the job they did on him, if they couldn’t use this excuse, they’d have found another.”

  “I hope you’re right, Greg.” Even as she said it, Catherine knew that he probably was, that it was an act of egotism to assume that any part of their longstanding feud, or the violent climax it reached, had anything to do with her. She had a healthy opinion of herself—she was smart, capable, and tougher than she had ever dreamed she would be, in younger days. But she didn’t believe the sun rose and set for her, and she didn’t believe, in the long run, that the actions of the morally deranged needed her to set them off. At worst, she was an excuse for Watson’s murder, but not a reason.

  The best contribution she could make, at this point, would be to make sure she amassed the evidence necessary to convict his killer. She returned to the task at hand, determined to do just that.

  22

  HARLEY GIVENS OBJECTED to having his home searched without a warrant, but when Nick announced that he’d be glad to stand by the front door while Sara drove down the mountain, found a judge, got a warrant issued and signed, then drove back up, Givens relented.

  “We just want to see your boots,” Sara explained. “And your candles. K
itchen matches, too, if you have any.”

  “What about my collection of fishing lures?” Givens asked. “Science fiction novels? Chainsaw?”

  “If you think those are germane to the case.”

  “You can’t possibly still be working on the fire,” Givens said. “Because if you were, you wouldn’t be wasting your time with me.”

  “I think we’ll decide what’s a waste of our time,” Nick said. He was fed up with Givens’s obstruction and his general attitude, and he wouldn’t mind finding evidence in his house if only so he could slap handcuffs on those pudgy wrists. “If that’s okay with you.”

  Givens simply shrugged and admitted them into the house. “I got nothing to hide,” he said. “If you find anything juicy, I’d love to see it.”

  The invitation was all-encompassing enough to allow Nick and Sara to search every inch of his house. But that really would be a waste of time. So far, the clues they had found were few—some matches, wax, and a boot print. They shouldn’t have to spend more than a few minutes in Givens’s house, and that was more than enough time for Nick.

  Givens wasn’t quite a hoarder, but he apparently had a hard time throwing anything away. His two-story house was overloaded with junk: things he might have found on the mountain, like old, rusted pieces of mining equipment, books that had been read and reread so many times their covers were frayed and falling apart, and tourist pamphlets from places as far afield as Disney World, a Louisiana alligator farm, a rodeo museum in Canada, and other unlikely spots. He probably really did have a collection of fishing lures, but Nick couldn’t see it amid the clutter. The predominant smell was left over from the fire, but it had a different tone than the charred odor of the forest. Oilier. There had probably been plastic burning in the house, in addition to wood. Those fumes could be one of a fire’s deadliest weapons.

  In his bedroom closet, Givens had at least a dozen pairs of shoes and boots. Nick turned each one over and compared the toe to the photo he had taken of the print found near the fire’s point of origin. None matched it. He checked every other room, looking for stray boots or signs of melted wax, without success. In a walk-in pantry off the kitchen, he found Sara. An overflowing, open wastebasket gave the pantry a sour, spoiled stink that overpowered even the burned smell. “Well, he’s got safety matches,” she said, showing him a box. “I’ve bagged some for comparison. But they’re a common brand, so that doesn’t get us far.”