“No.”
“Are you sure? He mentioned you were still groggy when you talked.”
Maybe I was then, but I was clearheaded now. “I’m sure,” I said.
“I’d like to go over a couple of points.”
“Okay.”
“Where were you when you first saw the smoke?”
“About halfway down the mountain.”
“Any idea what time that was?”
“Some time after two. The first time we saw it, Hogue thought it was road dust and we kept on hiking.”
She shook her head. “Bad mistake.” she said.
“Very.” It had cost Hogue his life. “About fifteen minutes later we saw the blowup. Then we began to run.”
She straightened her glasses. “Your clients are Joni Barker’s parents. Correct?”
“Right.”
“Where were they that afternoon?”
“They waited for us in the parking lot. Nancy Barker was too upset to go back to the scene of the previous fire.”
“I’ll want to talk to them.”
“We’ll discuss it.”
“Why didn’t Mike Marshall come down the mountain with you and Hogue?”
“He was in a hurry. Haven’t you talked to him yet?”
“Not yet. He’s on my list.”
I figured it was Mike or his lawyer’s job to tell her what he’d said and done on the mountain, but if he didn’t and that affected me or my clients, I’d have to do it for him. “Do you know what started the fire?”
“When we begin an arson investigation, first we exclude other causes such as lightning, accidents, or electrical. There were no reports of lightning. There are no electric lines in the area. There were no campfires burning that we know of. Someone might have been playing with matches, but we found a splatter pattern to the ignition points that indicates the fire was started by fusees. Someone ran through the drainage torching bushes, and it was done at a moment when winds would be gusting uphill.”
“When I first saw the smoke there were no winds. It hovered over the drainage.”
“That didn’t last long, did it?”
“No. A few minutes later it was the size of a twelve-story building.”
“Twelve stories?” She peered at me through the clear camouflage glasses.
“Something like that.”
“We’re calling this fire Thunder Mountain Two. It followed a similar pattern to Thunder Mountain One. It raced up the west side of the canyon, then jumped the drainage to the east. Once they get going, fires have a mind of their own, but there are a couple of things that are predictable about southwestern canyon fires. Piñon and juniper burn hot and fast. Winds pick up in the afternoon. There are updrafts in the daytime, downdrafts at night. Whoever started that fire either knew it was the optimum moment to torch the East Canyon or”—Sheila paused for effect—“was lucky. All firefighters carry fusees and they all know how to start fires. It’s part of their job. The only person who knows how to start fires better than a firefighter is an arson investigator.” She smiled. “There were several firefighters in the East Canyon that day. No arson investigators that I know of.”
And more than one of the firefighters was carrying fusees. I’d seen them on Eric and I’d seen them on Mike. Ramona had been carrying a fire shelter and she was probably carrying the rest of the paraphernalia, too. “Fusees aren’t that hard to come by, are they?” I asked.
“Not really. It’s possible that some had been left behind on the mountain or at the encampment of the previous fire. We’re still investigating the area and keeping it closed to the public.”
“How long will that take?”
“We should be done by the end of the week.”
“What happened to the house in the canyon?”
“It went up in smoke.”
Her eyes were bright behind the clear lenses. “An interesting fact about Thunder Two is that whoever started it didn’t go to much trouble to hide his—or her—actions. Another interesting fact is that there were people all over this mountain when it burned, and one of them died.” Which made the crime more than arson. It made it manslaughter or murder in the third, second, or possibly even first depending on what premeditation there’d been.
“Has Hogue’s autopsy been completed yet?”
“The fire killed him, we know that. But whether Hogue wandered into it, was pushed, or was incapacitated somehow and left to burn, we don’t know. The body was badly burned. When a fire is that hot the muscles contract with such force that the bones are shattered. One motive for arson is crime concealment. People will set fires to destroy a body or hide what they did to it.”
“Yeah, but burning down a mountain to incinerate a corpse is a little like torching a barn to destroy a mouse, isn’t it?”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t done. Does anybody in the business think crime is a rational act?”
Nobody that I knew. Sheila looked at the report on her desk. “It says here Ramona Franklin was carrying a fire shelter and she wrapped it around you. Why you? I have to ask. Why not Hogue?”
“I haven’t spoken to Ramona yet. I gather she heard me yelling and didn’t hear him. It was very smoky in the black. Visibility was zero.”
“Do you know Ramona well?” For me, one advantage to the thin lenses was that they didn’t soften or distort her expression. She gave me the hard-eyed look of a falcon analyzing a piece of meat.
“No.”
“I need to talk to Ramona and I haven’t been able to locate her. If you hear from her, tell her to call me.”
“Okay.”
“Another common motive for arson, maybe even the most common motive, is revenge,” she continued. “A guy’s screwing around, the girlfriend gets pissed, sets his bed on fire. Or…” She paused with an actress’s sense of dramatic timing. “Someone gets fired, torches the company store and/or the boss. In this case I consider the East Canyon the company store.”
And the boss would be Tom Hogue.
“Is there any possibility you were the object of revenge?” she asked.
This investigation had put me in an interesting position. I was a witness, a victim, and possibly even a perp. Not only that, I represented two other possible perps and knew two more. But an object for revenge? From who? Brink? He’d left of his own volition, and besides, he was happier where he was. As for Anna, she’d rather comb her hair than play with matches. “I only have one employee and she was back at the office.” I said.
“How about ex-lovers? Jealous wives?”
“Nah.” I’d been clean on that score for a long time. “Besides, I wasn’t supposed to be there. The original plan had been for the helicopter to pick me up.”
“Why’d you change that plan?”
“Hogue wanted to walk out. I decided to go with him.”
“Did he radio the helicopter?”
“Yes.”
“People with radios were all over that mountain. Any one of them could have picked up that conversation.”
“What are the other motives?” I asked.
“There are people who like to play with fire and watch it burn. Thunder One was close to town; a lot of people saw it. One of them might have been a latent pyro who liked what he saw so much he wanted to watch another canyon go up in smoke. A fire can be pretty thrilling to watch. Then there’s arson for profit. That was a large and expensive house that burned in the fire. Maybe the arsonist wanted the insurance money more than the house. There’s civil disorder. A judge in Arizona just closed forests all over the Southwest to logging to protect the habitat of the endangered spotted owl. Someone—a logger, a spotted owl lover or hater—could have been protesting Forest Service policy. There are people out there who don’t believe in the Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression, who believe we should just let forests and adjacent houses burn. Firefighters have been known to start fires to get work. When that happens near an Indian reservation they call it a powwow fire. And don’t forget arson
by stupidity. Arsonists aren’t the brightest people in the world. We had one of those recently right here in town.”
“Melloy Dodge?”
“Right. That place was an OSHA nightmare. The paints were stored in a room with no ventilation where guys were playing with firecrackers.” She shook her head. Her glasses slid down her nose and she pushed them back up. “You’ll set up the appointment with your clients?”
“I’ll talk to them.” That was as far as I was willing to go. It seemed to me that the interview was over and I was getting ready to leave, but Sheila wasn’t done yet.
“I have a question for you,” she said.
“Shoot.”
“How’d you get a guy’s name?”
“From my uncle who was with the Tenth Mountain Division in World War II. He died near Cortina, Italy.”
“Do people ask you about it a lot?”
“All the time.”
“I had an unusual name myself. I got tired of explaining it, so I changed it.”
“What was it?”
“Singing Arrow.”
That’s what the S.A. stood for. There was one advantage to being a postwar baby, you got a war hero’s name. It could be a burden, but it wasn’t a joke. “Your parents named you Singing Arrow McGraw?”
“Do you believe it? They were hippies.” The hippie gene seems to skip a generation. When the parents are hippies, the kids are yuppies, but the grandchildren might turn out to be hippies all over again. There was nothing hippie about Sheila. Although she did have an offroad sense of humor, she was all brains and business. There was a time when intelligence in a woman was a fierce dog on a short leash constantly held in check, but Sheila McGraw’s intelligence seemed more like a semi-trained falcon, a kestrel that kept escaping from her, flying off and doing rollovers or zeroing in on something it wanted to inspect.
“How’d you get into arson investigation?” I asked her.
“I was a chemistry major. I wanted some security in my life. I was planning to go to med school, but this job came along. I liked it and I stayed.”
I had one more question: How old are you, Sheila McGraw? But I knew better than to ask.
10
ON MY WAY back to Hamel & Harrison I stopped and bought some Ricola throat lozenges. There was a hole in my life I was hoping herbs and menthol would fill.
“You don’t look too good,” Anna greeted me when I entered the office.
“Pleasure to see you, too, Anna.”
“You look like you’ve been through…”
“Hell?” I’d been in a fire, which is as close as you can come to the hell most of us know.
“Kind of tired.”
“I’m tired of coughing. I’m tired of feeling like I’m full of smoke.”
“You gonna quit?” she asked.
“Quit what?”
“Smoking.”
“Maybe,” I said. The desire was gone, but who knew how long it would stay that way. At least as long as I was full of smoke. There were people who’d light their last cigarette in an oxygen tent. There was still a possibility I wouldn’t be one. I went into my office, popped a Ricola, and wondered who I ought to call first: Eric or Nancy Barker. Nancy, I decided; she was the one who’d made the initial contact. She wasn’t home, so I tried Eric at UNM.
“Neil,” he said, “when did you get back?”
“Saturday. I was at the arson investigator’s office this morning,” I said. “She wants to talk to you and Nancy. I think we ought to get together and discuss it. I tried Nancy, but she wasn’t home.”
“She was in town this morning. She’ll be back after lunch. When would you like to get together?”
“The sooner the better.”
“I have some free time this afternoon.”
“How about one o’clock?”
“See you then,” he said.
It’s easier to evaluate people when you meet them on their own turf, one reason clients prefer to have their initial meeting with a lawyer in the lawyer’s office. I would have preferred to have met Eric in his house or his classroom, or even a piñon-juniper forest, but I couldn’t think of any way to set it up. When he showed up in his cotton shirt and khakis looking like an unmade bed, I realized it wouldn’t have mattered where I’d met Eric Barker. He’d be the same wherever he was.
“How are you feeling?” he asked me.
“Not great. I keep coughing up black stuff.”
“It takes awhile to get it out of your system.” I’d become one of a select group, I realized—those who’d survived fire. It was a bond he’d shared with Joni and now with me.
“A forest fire’s a pretty terrifying experience,” he said.
“It is.”
“Everybody’s afraid on a fire, all the time.”
“What I was feeling went beyond fear. It was another dimension.”
“You must have been dehydrated. That can cause hallucinations.”
“Did that ever happen to you?”
“I never actually hallucinated on a fire, but I have gotten kind of dingy. I thought I could talk to the animals and the trees.”
“Did they answer?”
“Sometimes.” His smile was quick and slight, but it was a pleasure to see.
“My experience was more like a dream than an hallucination,” I said. “I was skiing in New England. It was a perfect day, the best day I ever had skiing.”
“I taught Joni to ski,” Eric said.
“Mike showed me a video. She was fantastic.”
“I raised her to be a skier and a firefighter.” A light came on in his eyes when he talked about Joni. It was a light I’d seen in my own father’s eyes. It was unprofessional to be looking into Eric Barker’s eyes, I knew, but I was drawn to the light. He was a teacher, however, who’d worked for years with younger women. He knew when too deep went too far, when too personal was unprofessional. He straightened up and changed the subject.
“What did the investigator have to say?” he asked.
“That the fire was caused by arson.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“She wants to talk to you and Nancy as witnesses.” And maybe even as perps, but I didn’t get into that yet.
“I don’t have a problem with that.” He was staring at his hands, looking at traces of the fires he’d been on, maybe, seeing memories in the ashes. “What do you think?”
I gave him a lawyer’s answer. “It would be better not to. Talking to investigators can be a risky business.”
“I’ll discuss it with Nancy,” he replied.
“What did you and Nancy do while you waited?” I asked.
“I took a walk.”
“How long were you gone?”
“An hour.”
“Did you take your pack?”
“Yes.”
“What did Nancy do while you were gone?”
“Sat under the tree.”
“Did you see or hear anything suspicious on your walk?”
“No. Nothing. It was very quiet. Around three I began to smell smoke.”
“When did Mike get back?”
“Three-fifteen.”
“Did he seem angry or upset?”
“He was agitated. He’d seen the fire.”
“Was he concerned about Ramona?”
“He didn’t mention it.”
I’d been circling, but it was time to get to the point. “Sheila McGraw, the chief investigator, believes the fire was started by a professional.”
Eric shrugged. “Firefighters are trained to start backfires, but it doesn’t take that much skill to start a forest fire.”
“She said there was a splatter pattern to the ignition points that indicated the fire was started by fusees and that it was set at a time when the blaze would have maximum effect.”
Eric’s eyes headed for my open window.
“What do you think could have been the arsonist’s motive? To kill me? To kill Hogue? To make a statement about Forest Servi
ce policy?”
“Why would anybody would want to kill you?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“There could well have been people with a grudge against Hogue. He’s their P.R. man and a symbol of the Forest Service just as much as Smokey the Bear is. Someone might have borne a grudge against the whole department and taken it out on him. On the other hand, people will light fires just to watch them burn. The fact that you and Hogue and Mike and Ramona were on the mountain may have had nothing to do with it. The arsonist might have not even known you were on the mountain. We heard the helicopter and we thought the pilot had come back to pick you up. Wasn’t that the plan?”
“Yeah, but that plan changed. Hogue decided to walk out and I went with him,” I said. “Did you see Ramona anywhere on the mountain that day?”
“No.”
“Apparently she tied a wet bandanna over my nose and mouth, wrapped me in her fire shelter, and split. I was barely conscious at the time. I knew someone was helping me, but I didn’t know who. Henry Ortega, the arson investigator, told me it was Ramona.”
“Firefighters have been using wet bandannas since 1910. You’d think there’d be some new technology by now, wouldn’t you?”
“You’d think so. Ramona told Henry Ortega she rescued me because she heard me calling for help. She said she didn’t hear Hogue.”
“Firefighters only carry one shelter,” Eric said, which meant she could only save one person. “Have you talked to her yet?”
“No. She’s not answering her phone. Do you think that to a Navajo saving one person’s life would in any way compensate for causing another person’s death?”
“You were at the fire scene. Do you think she was the cause of anyone’s death?”
“The South Canyon looked like bare skin with razor burn and trees for stubble the day I was there. It was hard to tell what Ramona could or couldn’t have seen when the canyon was full of brush and trees. Hogue and I didn’t see the fire until we were right on top of it.”
“Sometimes bad things just happen, Neil. Sometimes conditions are so severe there’s nothing anyone can do.”
Those were the words that got him through the day, but if I believed them I’d have to take down my license to practice law. “Whether Ramona saw the fire or she didn’t, the government should have provided aerial surveillance,” I said. “The government should have done a lot of things to protect the firefighters that it didn’t do.”
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