Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

  Neil Page and Paula Boggins had something going but Anna had no idea what. Page treated Boggins with a contempt that smacked more of familiarity than dislike. Paula didn’t show an overabundance of respect on her part either but she put up with Page as if she was used to him. Since he’d hired her, Anna assumed they knew each other from before, their affiliation mutually gratifying on some level.

  They might lie for each other, Anna thought, and wondered why. Just a gut reaction, she decided. Page oozed sleaze and back in spike camp, Paula had come across as…Anna stopped walking and tried to find the right words while she caught her breath. They came to her in the cutting voice of Patience Bittner, a sophisticated hosteler she’d known on Isle Royale. Paula had come across as “low rent, blue collar, waitressy.” Never mind that Anna had delivered her share of hamburgers and worked with her hands. The description fit if taken in the truly mean-spirited sense it was meant.

  Who would Lindstrom lie for? Maybe Jennifer; they had the dead Joshua in common.

  Sounds of a struggle brought Anna out of her reverie and she broke into a run. Just below the ridge she blundered into a shoving match. Lawrence Gonzales had the Motorola radio in his hand and was fending off an enraged Hugh Pepperdine with it. “Give it up, Barney,” he was shouting.

  Pepperdine, his face engorged with blood, flecks of spittle at the corners of his mouth, was grabbing at the smaller man in weighty but so far ineffectual lunges. His breath came in steaming gasps and he wasn’t wasting any on words.

  “Break it up!” John LeFleur ran down from the ridge. “Break it up!” he yelled again.

  Gonzales heard and in the moment of his distraction, Hugh Pepperdine plowed into him. Both men went down.

  Anna and John reached them at the same time and began pulling. Pepperdine’s unpracticed fists were pummeling Gonzales’s face and upper body. Lawrence wasn’t fighting back but trying to protect himself from the blows with his forearms. “Get the son of a bitch off me,” he yelled.

  “Come on, Hugh. Let it go. Come on.” Anna caught hold of one of Pepperdine’s arms and tried to lever him off Gonzales. Hugh was out of shape and an inexperienced fighter but he was a big boy and she couldn’t budge him.

  “Break it up,” LeFleur hollered a third time, grabbing Pepperdine by the collar and attempting to drag him backward.

  A loose elbow clipped Anna on the chin. Her teeth cracked shut and light sparked behind her eyes. Letting go of Pepperdine, she retreated a few yards, deciding the better part of valor was to let the two idiots kill each other if they were so inclined.

  Lawrence continued in a defensive posture but Anna got the feeling of a coiled snake. Barney’d better not push his luck, she thought, as she rubbed the ache from her jaw and checked to see if any teeth had been loosened.

  “I’m gonna kill him, John,” Gonzales grunted. “Get him off me.” LeFleur jerked on Pepperdine’s shoulder but Hugh was beyond reason. Anna doubted he could even hear them. He’d gone into one of those berzerker rages seldom seen off the playground. Had he been any good at dealing destruction, Lawrence, forty pounds lighter and several inches shorter, would have been a bloody pulp. This was probably the first fight Hugh had been in since third grade; hence the schoolyard tactics.

  Recovered, Anna pulled herself together to give LeFleur a hand. Hugh, astride Gonzales now, pulled back a fist. Just as she caught it in both hers, Anna saw Lawrence’s face change. Grimacing stopped, talk stopped, a cold professional look calmed even his dark eyes. In a move as quick and precise as a snake striking, two fingers shot out, hitting Pepperdine in the throat.

  Hugh’s eyes bulged, horror locked his lips back. Breath stopped with a wet choking sob. His hand jerked free of Anna’s fists not to strike at Lawrence but to claw at his own throat as if he could pull out the dent in his pharynx.

  Fumbling at his collar, Pepperdine collapsed sideways.

  Gonzales scrambled to his feet. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” he muttered. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “You tell me,” LeFleur growled. “Anna?”

  She crawled over next to Hugh. “Take it easy,” she told him in a voice intentionally laden with calm. “You’re okay.” She wondered if he was or if the blow had broken the cricoid cartilage. “Just lay back, breathe through your nose. Atta boy.”

  Pain and surprise had done more damage than Gonzales. As Pepperdine stopped hyperventilating he found he could breathe. Bit by bit his chest stopped heaving and some of the blood left his cheeks.

  “Sorry,” Gonzales apologized. “He got me mad.”

  Pepperdine began to sputter, trying to sit up.

  “Lawrence, go on up to the ridge,” LeFleur ordered. “When I heard you two locking horns, I dropped my pulaski. Get it for me, would you?”

  Hovering behind the crew boss’s shoulder, Lawrence stayed where he was. The sight of him looking so concerned and unscathed was having a deleterious effect on Anna’s patient. “Is he going to be okay?” Lawrence asked solicitously, and Anna felt Hugh twitch under her hands.

  “He’ll be okay,” she said. “Go get John’s pulaski.”

  Lawrence backed away half a dozen steps then turned and jogged up the slope, clods of soot-blackened snow flying off the lug soles of his boots.

  “He assaulted me” were Hugh’s first intelligible words. “You saw. He assaulted me.”

  “Looks like you were doing a lion’s share of the assaulting,” LeFleur said. “Everybody’s on edge. Nobody got hurt. But if you two go at it again somebody’s damn well going to get hurt. I’ll see to it myself. Got that?”

  “He assaulted me.” Hugh pushed himself up into a sitting position and faced Anna. “You saw. I’m a federal law enforcement officer in the line of duty and he assaulted me.”

  Anna took a breath, counted to ten in English, then again in Spanish. “Hugh, you have no jurisdiction. You’re not in the line of duty. Period. We’re all strung a little tight right now. Let it go at that. No harm done.”

  Pepperdine’s face closed down, his eyes hooded. “Fine. If that’s the way it’s going to be. I’ll take care of it myself.”

  “Drop it, Hugh,” Anna said more sharply than she’d intended.

  Hugh snorted, contempt sprayed out in a fine mist of spittle. Lumbering to his feet, he started down the hill.

  Anna thought to call after him but didn’t. Better to get some ground between him and Gonzales for the present.

  “God damn it,” LeFleur said. “Why the hell did the worm have to turn on my watch? Shit. We’re going to have to do something about that boy before he talks somebody into killing him.” He sat back against a charred stump and closed his eyes. “Wish I had a smoke.”

  “Wish I had a drink.”

  “Scotch.”

  “Red wine.”

  “Lightweight.”

  “I quit,” Anna said righteously.

  “Bully for you.”

  Conversation languished. Anna curled her knees up and hugged them trying to retain what body heat she could.

  “Tell me about Len,” she said after a while.

  “He’s dead.” LeFleur didn’t even open his eyes.

  Anna waited.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked finally.

  “Why did he take a job in Farmington at less pay than he’d had in Susanville?”

  “He got in bad odor around these parts is my guess. He’s got an ex and kids in Susanville. Maybe she ran him off.”

  “Was he fired?”

  “Nobody’s ever fired. They just sort of move on. Usually they get promoted. Bumping some bastard upstairs is the easiest way to get him out of your hair.” A lifetime of losing embittered his voice.

  “What did he do?” Anna asked.

  “Lumber leases, I think.”

  “I mean to get ‘moved on.’”

  “Beats me.”

  “What does he do in Farmington?” Anna tried another tack.

  “As little as he can get away with.”

  This
was like pulling teeth. Anna waited.

  “Oil and gas leases. He’s supposed to do the Environmental Impact Statements. As far as I can see he just rubber-stamps them NSI—no significant impact.”

  “Do you know any reason somebody might want him dead?”

  “Do you want ’em in alphabetical order or just how they come to mind?”

  “Did you see anybody getting out of their shelters after the fire?” Anna asked abruptly.

  “Just you and Howard, why?”

  “Did anybody see you?”

  LeFleur opened his eyes. “Oh, I get it. I’ve gotten a little slow on the uptake in my old age. You think I killed him?”

  Anna said nothing.

  “Fuck you, Pigeon.” LeFleur closed his eyes again. After a minute had ticked by he said: “But I would have if I’d gotten the chance. He was a slimy S.O.B.”

  Anna had gotten all she was going to. She changed the subject to one closer to her heart. “What did Incident Base have to say?”

  “They’ve got a helicopter standing by and nearly three-quarters of a mile of road cleared. If the weather lifts, we’ll be home in time for supper. If not…”

  “Did you tell them about Howard?”

  “I told ’em.”

  Both of them knew it was meaningless. What could be done was being done. They couldn’t clear deadfall any faster because Black Elk was losing ground.

  “I almost forgot,” LeFleur said. “You’re supposed to radio that FBI agent. Secret squirrel stuff. He wouldn’t talk to me.”

  Frederick Stanton wanted her to call. Anna felt an excitement all out of proportion to the event. What was she hoping for? Some clue to the secrets of the people she was marooned with? A key to unlock the murder? Or sweet words broadcast over high band radio for the world to eavesdrop on?

  That was it and she mocked herself. People fell in love during disasters. It was provable if one considered statistics as fact. Plane crashes, boat wrecks, plagues, wars—all hotbeds of romance. Something to do with keeping the species going or reaffirming life.

  It’s the firestorm, the murder, she told herself. Anybody with a clean warm bed was bound to look good.

  “Give me your radio,” she demanded of LeFleur. Anna was damned if she was going to forswear all her addictions.

  CHAPTER

  Seventeen

  FREDERICK SAT INSIDE the Communications tent, his feet planted in front of the space heater. Four long metal folding tables were pushed against the canvas walls. Another had been placed directly under the one light bulb, bisecting the fifteen-by-twenty-foot space. Radio equipment and packing cases obscured the tabletops. More, along with manuals, clipboards and myriad forms, were jammed beneath. Idly, Frederick wondered how many acres of trees a crew had to save to make up for those cut down to provide the forms that fed the government’s firefighting machine.

  Between his hands, Stanton held a chunk of pine—white pine, Burwell had told him. It was lumpy and knotted where the branch had grown up against an unforgiving surface and been forced to make a ninety-degree turn. Bark still clung to it in places and it smelled pleasantly of pitch. Frederick turned it round and round, feeling for the monkeys within. The carving was clear in his mind: two monkeys tied together by a telephone line trying desperately to move in opposite directions. He just needed to find the picture in the wood grain.

  Whittling helped to pass the time while he waited for the phone to ring, the radio to come to life.

  Investigation was a waiting game: waiting for calls, reports, evidence; waiting in offices, parked cars, restaurants. Waiting in the brush and in alleyways. Frederick was good at it. Waiting was when he unfettered his mind, let the known and unknown tumble around without any imposed order. Intuition, that moment where the whole exceeded the sum of the parts, only came when he let go of his lists and his plans.

  Whatever Anna Pigeon’s virtues were, he suspected patience—waiting—wasn’t one of them. As far as he knew she’d only worked three homicides in her career. Over the course of twenty-four years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he had been involved with so many cases he couldn’t readily put a number to them. In the early years he assisted, in the middle he ran them. More and more lately he found himself assigning cases. Experience had given him a strong mistrust of people.

  Coming to view the world as divided into two groups, Us and The Assholes, was an occupational hazard in law enforcement. Frederick wasn’t quite that far gone, but he knew murder led to more murder. Maybe the killers discovered how easy it was. Or how little life really mattered. Some of them liked the power. Some got scared. But somewhere along the line every single one of them had come to the conclusion that the taking of another’s life was the solution to their problems. If it worked—and in the short run it usually did—the next time they ran into difficulties they were apt to apply the same remedy.

  Anna was first and foremost a park ranger. Stanton had nothing against park rangers. As a group he rather liked them. But they’d never struck him as the cutting edge of law enforcement. Most were too ready to believe the best of people. Not about the little stuff—they knew everybody littered and fed the animals—but they didn’t seem to grasp the concept of true malice. Rangers worked on the premise that evil stemmed from ignorance; that John Q. Public could be educated out of his wicked ways.

  Anna wouldn’t be careful enough. She wouldn’t watch her back. Unless she knew who the killer was. Most killers were opportunistic. If Anna knew who it was she could see to it no opportunity presented itself.

  Frederick set aside his unborn monkeys and picked up the notepad beside the telephone. His morning had not been wasted and he was forming a colorful police sketch of the personalities Anna contended with. The eclectic nature of fire camp had brought together strange bedfellows. Because of the small-world nature of fire fighting and the regionalism for both local hires and interagency crews, there was a good deal of cross-pollination.

  As a young agent Frederick remembered being surprised at how often and successfully the “do you know…” game was played. Professional circles were tight. Digging down a layer or two invariably somebody knew somebody who knew you. The same had held true when he’d pursued his investigation of the fire camp personnel.

  Gonzales, Lawrence. The Washoe County Sheriff had returned Frederick’s call shortly before eleven A.M. The case was before his time but the charges weren’t being pursued. There was little interest in hauling Gonzales back to Nevada to stand trial. Gonzales was known to have a quick and violent temper, the sheriff said—he knew the boy’s family—but there was no real harm in him. Reading between the lines, Stanton guessed the sheriff believed Gonzales could knife somebody but hoped it wasn’t true.

  The Bureau of Land Management in Susanville had supplied the tidbit of information Frederick had underlined in his notes. When Gonzales was in high school in Susanville, California, six years previously, Nims had been in charge of the lumber leasing for BLM forest lands. Gonzales, along with a dozen other high school kids, had worked for Leonard Nims marking timber. For reasons nobody knew, Gonzales had dropped out or been asked to leave the project halfway through the summer.

  Frederick had pressed the woman in charge of personnel to tell him why Nims had left the Bureau for three years. She dug out Nims’s file. It said only that he’d resigned for “Personal Reasons” but she’d been a clerk then and remembered a good deal of tension at the time of his resignation. When Nims worked in Susanville, Duncan Foley had been the BLM forester. He’d since retired. Stanton had the man’s phone number scribbled on his pad. It was one of the return calls he waited for.

  Frederick had gleaned a little additional information on the Boggins woman. She lived in Westwood, a logging town in the mountains between Chester and Susanville. She had a two-year-old daughter and, though she didn’t hold down a job, with the exception of occasional work during fire season, she appeared to live fairly comfortably without welfare or food stamps.

  Frederic
k had tracked down Paula’s two juvenile offenses to Chico, California, a valley town about two hours’ drive from Westwood. The Chico county officials couldn’t release information from sealed records over the phone but they could tell him who bailed her out after both arrests: Neil Page.

  There was no background on Page and no connection Stanton could find between Page, Boggins and the murdered man prior to their work on the Jackknife fire.

  Two more calls to New Mexico had uncovered some promising information on Joseph Hayhurst. Tandy Oil and Gas was trying to get leasing rights to fifty-seven hundred acres of BLM land near the Bisti Wilderness. Hayhurst was working with the Navajo to get the lease stopped. The Navajo held that the drilling would desecrate an important buffer area as well as sections of the Great North Road left by the Anasazi. The BLM had put the project on hold pending an Environmental Impact Statement. Leonard Nims had been on vacation, then dispatched on the Jackknife, but he was scheduled to write that EIS as soon as he returned.

  Stephen Lindstrom’s supervisor returned Frederick’s earlier call. He had nothing but praise for Lindstrom’s work but it was couched in such careful terms Frederick knew there was an undercurrent of personal distaste. Lindstrom was from the Bay Area and some of his co-workers didn’t care for his big-city ways, was all Frederick could gather from the mixture of fulsome praise and oblique snipes.

  Lindstrom’s supervisor had mentioned that Stephen knew Joshua Short, the man credited with starting the Jackknife. He seemed to be implicating Lindstrom in the arson but when pressed he reluctantly admitted that Stephen Lindstrom had been in the middle of a five-day training seminar in Las Vegas when the fire had started and couldn’t have had any “hands on” involvement with the incident.

  Stanton would pass it on to Anna for what it was worth. Lindstrom was big and strong and he was an EMT. He’d have no trouble finding the heart in one sure stab.

  Hugh Pepperdine and Neil Page were still just headings in Frederick’s notebook and he waited for the calls that would help him fill in the blanks.