Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

Frederick scribbled down a few notes and moved on to John LeFleur.

  Valdez seemed more than happy to gossip about the crew boss and Stanton guessed either his earlier reticence sprang from a sincere attachment to Nims or his sudden forthcoming attitude bespoke a pointed dislike of LeFleur.

  According to Henry Valdez, John LeFleur was a dog in the manger. Always discontent with his lot and jealous of those around him. A dinosaur, Valdez called him, a man still crying because the college boys got promoted faster, because a man could no longer start in the mail room and become CEO. LeFleur had the firebug, he told Stanton. With some it’s like an addiction. All John wanted to do was fight fire. He was getting too old to work the line but lacked the organizational and people skills to move up into overhead and hated anybody who did.

  That smelled like the lead Stanton had been sniffing around for. “What about Nims?” he asked. “Did LeFleur hate him?”

  “Hate might be laying it on a bit thick,” Valdez said. “But they don’t get along. John thinks Len gets all the breaks—that old song and dance. John just can’t face up to the fact he’s not manager material and never will be.”

  “Were he and Nims in competition for the same jobs, promotions, any of that kind of thing?”

  “John may have thought they were for the fire management officer position we’ve got opening up, but John never had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting it.”

  “Does he have a snowball’s chance with Nims dead?” Frederick asked bluntly.

  A moment’s silence deadened the line. “A snowball’s chance,” Valdez said carefully. “But only just.”

  Frederick thanked the man and hung up. On a yellow notebook he’d begged from Time Keeping he wrote MOTIVES. LeFleur’s was weak at best but perhaps the man didn’t know that. If he believed Nims was all that stood between him and professional advancement it would suffice. Especially if a golden opportunity was dropped in his lap.

  Under MOTIVES Stanton scribbled “JL firebug bites Nims” in a galloping hand.

  Howard Black Elk’s supervisor was out sick. No one answered the phone at the number either Paula Boggins or Neil Page left and neither had filled in the box under “Previous Employer.” The head of dispatch at Forest Service headquarters in Reno, Nevada, Stephen Lindstrom’s boss, wouldn’t be in the office until after lunch. The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office couldn’t tell Frederick any more about Lawrence Gonzales than Spinks had already uncovered but promised to do some digging and call him back. No one answered the phone at all at Aztec National Monument where Hugh Pepperdine was purported to work.

  Estelle Parker, the superintendent at El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico, was only too happy to talk. She didn’t even pretend she had more pressing matters to attend to. She had been instrumental in hiring Joseph Hayhurst, she said, and was proud to have him on her staff. Words ticked out with the smooth assuredness of a paid political announcement. Superintendent Parker mentioned Hayhurst’s Apache heritage three times and Frederick began to wonder if she thought he had something to do with the Equal Opportunity Hiring Program.

  “What does he do?” he interrupted. The woman didn’t reply right away and Frederick fancied she didn’t have that answer quite so carefully scripted.

  “He runs our cultural resources program.”

  Frederick waited. “Better fill me in,” he said after a moment.

  Again Parker hesitated. Stanton wished he was sitting in her office where he could watch her face. Over the phone he had no idea whether there was something fishy about Mr. Hayhurst or the superintendent simply didn’t have the foggiest notion of what her employees did with their days.

  “Well, I know he does evening programs,” Parker said. “I hear they’re excellent. And he is the curator for our museum—does the cataloging and so forth. He’s in charge of preserving the cultural resources inside the monument’s boundaries.”

  It’s a small, small world, Frederick whistled under his breath. Leonard Nims wrote Environmental Impact Statements, the documents that, in essence, granted or denied commercial interests permission to dig, drill, ditch or otherwise disturb culturally sensitive areas in northern New Mexico. Joseph Hayhurst preserved Native American cultural resources. The two men probably knew each other.

  “Does Mr. Hayhurst do any work for the BLM in resource management?” he asked.

  “No…no. Why?”

  The superintendent sounded confused and Frederick was reminded how little communication, much less cooperation, there was between government agencies. Fighting wildland fire seemed one of the few places they worked and played together nicely. Sort of like law enforcement agencies and the War on Drugs, Stanton thought. A politically safe and extremely well-funded bandwagon to jump on.

  “Is he active in any preservation groups or movements outside the confines of his job?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. No. I wouldn’t know.” Either Superintendent Parker was a past master at stonewalling or she had no idea what went on in her park. Stanton suspected the latter. Unless she and Hayhurst were running drugs, such an elaborate show of ignorance was overkill.

  Having made sufficiently polite and grateful good-byes, Frederick set down the phone receiver and stared blankly in front of him. What was missing? A hollow unsettled feeling swelled behind his breastbone, psychological heartburn. It was the feeling he got the night he forgot and left Candice standing in a tutu outside a ballet school in a bad part of town for three hours, and once when he’d refigured his taxes and discovered he owed fifty-two hundred dollars more than he thought.

  Closing his eyes, he tried to clear his mind. One of the phones rang and someone answered it. For a second he listened to see if it was for him. It wasn’t.

  That was it.

  He checked his watch: twenty past ten. The radios had been silent but for the low-grade chatter of the dozer operator.

  Every three hours, they’d agreed. That would have been around nine-forty-five.

  Anna hadn’t called in.

  CHAPTER

  Fourteen

  ANNA REALIZED SHE’D stopped breathing and consciously drew air deep into her lungs. The others were paralyzed as well. Screams, so viciously aborted, had rooted them in the sand. Paula’s whimpering whetted the edge of the silence. Lindstrom put a protective arm around the girl’s shoulders. From the look on his face, he was almost as frightened as she.

  Black Elk gulped air only to expel it in a wet-sounding cough. Howard was in trouble: bronchitis and third-degree burns. For the first time it occurred to Anna that he might die. Injuries like his wouldn’t prove fatal in the sterile and supportive confines of a modern medical facility. In the snow, in the Cascades, the outlook wasn’t so bright. Not if they didn’t get rescued soon.

  “It’s too fucking much,” LeFleur whispered. Absently he pawed at his shirt pocket. When his fingers didn’t find the expected smokes he spat into the snow. Pepperdine had squeezed in under the shelter, his back pressed against the boulder. “Really ups the old pucker factor, doesn’t it?” LeFleur needled him.

  The crew boss’s smile was shaky but it was a start. Anna broke out of her state of suspended animation and stood up. Her legs trembled but she told herself it was due to fatigue and too little food.

  “I guess somebody ought to check it out,” she said, but she didn’t move.

  “I guess,” LeFleur agreed. He didn’t move either.

  “I’ll go if somebody’ll go with me,” Joseph Hayhurst offered. He got to his feet and carefully brushed the sand from the seat of his pants—as if anybody would care where he was going. This accomplished he looked at Anna with his strange little smile and gestured to the ruin of the forest. “Ladies first.”

  LeFleur had collected himself and, to everyone’s relief, took control. “Joseph, you and Anna follow Gonzales’s tracks out if you can. Me and Stephen’ll try and pick up Neil’s. See what we come up with. You’ve got a radio?”

  Anna did.

  Numbers seemed to reassure
Pepperdine. He stepped forward importantly. “I’d better go after Gonzales.”

  “Stay here,” Anna said curtly. Hugh would be of little use in a fight but that wasn’t why she snapped at him. He got on her nerves and they’d been stretched a little thin lately.

  “Jennifer can stay,” Hugh said.

  “Jennifer hasn’t been to FLETC.” Anna meant it unkindly but Hugh took it as a compliment.

  “Roger. I’ll be monitoring if you need backup.”

  As Pepperdine settled close to the warming embers, Anna looked past him at Jennifer Short. Her fist was still pushed against her teeth as if her brain had failed to shift gears when the alarm wound down.

  Not good. Short was not a coward. In fact, her tombstone courage had nearly gotten both of them killed in an incident at Mesa Verde. To see her so diminished scared Anna. As soon as she got back, she promised herself, she would do something. What eluded her.

  “Um, excuse me, but the trail grows cold,” Joseph said, and Anna realized she’d been woolgathering.

  Snow around the bivouac was heavily trampled but on the far side of the boulder Joseph found a fresh set of tracks. With more faith than certainty he and Anna began to follow them up out of the creek to the north.

  Once clear of the wash the confusion of footprints thinned out to be replaced by a confusion of snow and felled snags. White humps gave way to blackened holes. What appeared to be solid ground would suddenly collapse, a pit of smoldering wood beneath. The going was slow but not impossible and Anna preferred it to sitting with too much to think about and too little to do.

  Joseph, despite his earlier invitation, led the way. He was ten years younger than Anna and his eyesight that much better. In this landscape of sharp contrasts and directionless light, he was better able to pick a trail between hazards.

  Anna was glad to leave him to it. Free from having to watch where she put her feet, she scanned the area. Snow draping over crosshatched piles of trees, unexpected open places, hummocks higher—or lower—than they seemed; she combed the broken landscape for any scrap of color or movement that would indicate life.

  On such a surreal stage, monsters didn’t seem impossible or even terribly unlikely. She and Joseph moved through a world that looked much like Anna imagined the inside of Dean Koontz’s or Stephen King’s mind might.

  Surreptitiously, she crossed herself. She wasn’t Catholic—or even necessarily Christian—but it seemed like a good idea.

  Occupied as he was by navigation, Joseph failed to see the flash of yellow when Anna did. He was a couple of yards ahead of her, pushing against a forty-foot snag that had weathered the windstorm. If it was going to fall it was healthier for him to choose when and where than wait for a capricious Mother Nature to drop it on the unwary.

  Anna slipped up behind him and touched his shoulder. With a startled gasp, he swung at her. Had she been taller and slower, his fist would have taken out several of her teeth. As it happened, a pratfall, functional if not stylish, saved her bridgework. For an art historian he was fast with his fists.

  “Sorry,” she whispered as Joseph, his face arranged in apologetic lines, helped her to her feet.

  “Likewise, I’m sure. Why are we whispering?”

  Anna was on her feet, Joseph sweeping her backside free of snow like a concerned valet. “Fire shirt,” Anna said, and pointed. “Somebody’s over there.”

  “Want me to go first?”

  Anna did but since he’d asked she couldn’t say so. “At least you didn’t scream,” she muttered out of spite.

  “Our mothers covered our mouths when we were babies so the yellow legs wouldn’t find us,” Joseph whispered at her shoulder. “Didn’t your parents let you watch Wagon Train?”

  “Shhh.”

  All she could see of their quarry was a piece of NoMex maybe six inches square—a shoulder or elbow—showing from behind a tumble of deadfall.

  Torn between the urge to hurry to a man very possibly injured and the need to go slowly lest danger still lurked, Anna repeated her early EMT training: First make sure the scene is safe. That was always a good answer on a multiple-choice test.

  Skirting a fallen snag, Anna got far enough around the piled debris so that she could see most of the man. He was seated on a downed piece of timber, his back to them. One green leg and hip, yellow arms and shoulder and the back of a head covered with a blue bandanna tied pirate-style low over the forehead were visible.

  “Neil,” Joseph whispered as Anna called: “Neil!”

  Page squeaked and turned. When he recognized them he bent over at the waist, his head and shoulders disappearing behind the burnt wood. To Anna it looked as if he were picking up a small article and hiding it. Maybe in the snow or the logs. Maybe in his pocket.

  In a few seconds it was done and Neil Page was trotting toward them, a mixture of relief and alarm on his face. “Holy shit. Did you hear that…that whatever? What was it? Somebody else killed? Fuck. A murderer’s on the loose. That’s all I need. It sounded like a girl—a kid maybe.” Incongruous as it was in this torched wilderness, Page was pumping Joseph’s hand with a grip a used-car salesman would have been proud of.

  Whatever he was up to by himself on that log, the man had definitely had a scare. If not the strange cry, then something else. He was babbling and his hands trembled. Sweat mixed with soot glistened like fine bugle beads at his temples.

  “Are those your tracks?” Anna pointed to a set of prints leading across the small clearing at a right angle to the trail she and Joseph had followed, but from the opposite direction.

  Page looked around as if the question taxed his cognitive powers, then nodded. Yes, they were his.

  “We’d better keep going,” Anna said to Joseph. “Since nobody has doubled back on the trail we were following, there’s a good chance it’s Gonzales.”

  “You can’t leave me here by myself.” Page was dangerously close to whining.

  “Come on then,” Anna said.

  He liked that only a little better but fell in step behind Anna as Joseph led the way up the track they’d recently abandoned. Neil Page was a careful man. He hung back far enough he wouldn’t lose them but too far to be of much assistance should the need arise.

  The short burst of strength lent by fright had worn away and Anna was running on empty. Without food to restore strength and proper rest to restore sanity, she could feel muscle and nerve being drained with each log they climbed over, each stump hole they avoided.

  Vision narrowed and concentration wavered. Soon she was just putting one foot in front of the other, seeing only the prints Joseph Hayhurst left in the snow. When he came to a stop, she almost tread on his heels before she realized it.

  “Listen,” he said.

  Anna could hear her own breathing and his, the faint crunch of boots in the snow from where Page walked behind them.

  “There,” Joseph said.

  A thump, something pounding into the snow, the dirt, a body—something soft enough to absorb most of the sound of the blow. Then a shout, a whoop, joyous, victorious.

  “Wherever we’re going, I think we just got there,” the Apache said softly.

  Ahead was a clutter of downed trees blanketed with snow. Beyond, as best as Anna could tell with the fog and the vague light, was a ditch or ravine backed by a steep hill. In places trees had blown down, pulling root systems out of the hillside. Great gouts of brown, living dirt spilled down over the apron of white.

  The track they followed circled the piled timber and vanished down into the ravine. The scene was picture-perfect for a trap. All that was missing was a nice little bit of cheese set in the trail.

  Anna looked behind her. Page had stopped twenty yards back. Waiting to see which way to run, she guessed.

  “Let’s do it,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  Fifteen

  A SECOND SHOUT galvanized Anna. She moved past Joseph and down the trail. Mobility restored courage and she was surprised that she’d let the heebie
-jeebies soak so deeply into her soul. Still, when yet another cry came she flinched and her step faltered. Lest Joseph notice, she walked faster.

  A minute brought her to the end of the pile screening the ravine. She looked over her shoulder. Hayhurst was right behind her. She nodded and he raised his hand, slowing and falling back slightly. There were those with whom communication was effortless, even without words. Maybe especially without words. And then there were the Pages, the Pepperdines, the Bogginses who seemed impervious to all the words in the world. Like lovers, Anna thought. Some understood the merest touch, others even Dr. Ruth couldn’t get through to.

  Careful to step only in existing tracks so the noise of her footsteps wouldn’t broadcast their approach, Anna moved into the crook where the trail hooked around the timber: the place the cheese would be were this indeed a better mousetrap.

  From that vantage point she could see into the wash, a shallow creek, five or six feet wide and half that deep, carved by spring runoff. Black snags had fallen across, creating fragile bridges dusted with snow. Beneath were the tracks they’d been following.

  Crabbing down the steep bank Anna lost her footing and slid the last few feet. So much for the element of surprise.

  “Are you okay?” Joseph whispered from the top of the bank.

  Anna made the “okay” symbol with thumb and forefinger.

  “Can you see anything?”

  Crouching, she looked under the burnt timber spanning the creek bed. For several yards the snow was crushed and trampled. Drops of red, startling in a landscape devoid of color, were spattered in a wedge-shaped pattern.

  “Blood.”

  “No kidding?” Joseph slid down the bank, squatted in the snow beside her and shouted: “Hey, Lawrence! Are you in there?” Maybe it was a tactical error but Anna was glad to have the tension broken.

  Footfalls crunched toward them, slow and labored as somebody frog-walked under the downed pines.

  “Lawrence?” Anna echoed because she needed to do something.

  Another whoop and Lawrence Gonzales crawled from beneath the tree trunks on hands and knees. Blood stained the cuff of his NoMex shirt and he pushed a shovel ahead of him. The blade left a red trail on the snow where it passed.