The Burning Season Read online

  RAY COULDN’T SEE MUCH OF THE DOG ANYWAY, AS IT HAD TAKEN REFUGE IN THE CRAWLSPACE UNDERNEATH SOMEONE’S HOUSE.

  He and Nick and the ACO beamed flashlights in at it, but the mutt had its front legs out before it, pinning down whatever it was gnawing on. When they spoke to it, it curled back its lips and growled, defending its prize.

  “What’s it got?” Nick asked.

  “I can’t see from this angle,” Ray said. “I’m going to the other side, to try to see through that latticework.”

  “Okay.”

  Neighbors had gathered, and a couple of patrol officers worked on keeping them back. As Ray gingerly settled himself on his stomach and aimed the flashlight under the house, he heard a male voice raised in anxiety, or perhaps anger. “But I’m the one who called the cops in the first place!” Someone else answered in conciliatory tones. Ray couldn’t make out the words, but he understood the man’s response. “It was human, I’m telling you!”

  The dog’s ears perked at the shout, and it raised its muzzle. Ray could see just enough of its treasure, lying limply across the dog’s right foreleg, to make it out. “It is human, Nick.”

  “Human what?”

  “I can’t be absolutely sure, but I believe it’s a hand.”

  Original novels in the CSI series:

  CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

  Double Dealer

  Sin City

  Cold Burn

  Body of Evidence

  Grave Matters

  Binding Ties

  Killing Game

  Snake Eyes

  In Extremis

  Nevada Rose

  Headhunter

  Brass in Pocket

  The Killing Jar

  Blood Quantum

  Dark Sundays

  Skin Deep

  Shock Treatment

  The Burning Season

  Serial (graphic novel)

  CSI: Miami

  Florida Getaway

  Heat Wave

  Cult Following

  Riptide

  Harm for the Holidays: Misgivings

  Harm for the Holidays: Heart Attack

  Cut & Run

  Right to Die

  CSI: NY

  Dead of Winter

  Blood on the Sun

  Deluge

  Four Walls

  Pocket Star Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Entertainment AB Funding LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION and related marks, CBS and the CBS Eye Design TM CBS Broadcasting Inc. CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION and all elements and characters thereof. © 2000–2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. and Entertainment AB Funding LLC. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Pocket Star Books paperback edition July 2011

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Cover design and illustration by David Stevenson

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6087-9

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6931-5 (ebook)

  For Maryelizabeth, with love.

  —JM

  Content

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My greatest thanks to former CSI connection Corinne, to current CBS connection Maryann, to web guru Dianne Larson, to editor Ed, and to agent Howard. As usual, anything authentic about the science in this book probably came from the Crime Lab Project or Dr. D. P. Lyle, and anything authentic about animal control from Anita Ridlehoover. Mistakes, if any, are mine alone.

  1

  “THE POOL!” CAPTAIN Marc Fontaine shouted. He jabbed his gloved index finger toward it, underscoring his point.

  His crew understood his meaning, and responded with a minimum of delay. Chris, Jackie, Alonso, Cherie, and Vaughn—the Engine 42 crew—were professionals through and through, and watching them work always swelled his chest a little. Pride was supposed to be one of the deadly sins? He didn’t go along with that. Pride was what got a day’s work done, and when lives and property were on the line, there was not a thing wrong with it.

  Cherie and Chris hauled the portable pump from the truck through the pool gate. The pump weighed almost two hundred pounds, and its twin-cylinder, 27-horsepower engine would push out 550 gallons a minute. The others were already laying hose, so it would be in place as soon as the engine cranked up.

  The early autumn day had been hot, topping the 112 mark down in the city, Fontaine had heard. All that concrete and steel trapped the heat, radiating it out through the day and into the night and driving the readings up. Even here on Mt. Charleston, temperatures had reached the low nineties. The last rain had been more than a month ago, when summer’s monsoon storms gave up the fight. And it had been a good year for the monsoon, which meant lots of fresh growth that had spent the last several weeks drying out. Optimal conditions for a big blaze, and now they had one. Thick, bitter smoke clogged the air.

  There were eight other engines scattered throughout the mountain neighborhoods, and helicopters chattering overhead. Fontaine’s crew would make its stand on a cul-de-sac, surrounded by expensive homes. Those homes didn’t have big backyards, because they were on a ridge, and on three sides the drop-off was sudden, the ground falling away into pine-blanketed canyons. So far the fire was concentrated to the west, and their mission was to keep it there.

  Fontaine wanted to light a backfire here, to deprive the main fire of fuel so it wouldn’t run up the canyon, wouldn’t jump to these houses. But between the time he had been assigned the task and when the truck had reached its destination—slowed in its progress by fallen trees and by the vehicles of the few residents who had been slow in obeying the evacuation order—the fire had already started up that flank. A backfire was out of the question now; they needed to focus on defending homes.

  As long as it stayed to the west, they could handle it. If it ran around
the northern rim and came at them from two sides, or three?

  Then it would be time to retreat. And fast.

  Trouble with a cul-de-sac was, there was only one way out.

  Fontaine had been a wildland firefighter for most of the last two decades. He had seen it all; had seen the changes in the way people thought about fire, the way crews attacked it. He’d survived being trapped for three days in the midst of one of the west’s biggest conflagrations, armed only with his Pulaski tool and pure dumb luck. He had seen more and more houses, even huge overpriced McMansions, raised in places like this: the wildland-urban interface. People built first, and only afterward thought about what they would do in the event of a fire. Most of them, if asked, would have said, “Let the fire department put it out.” Words to that effect, anyway. Some swore they would defend their property with garden hoses.

  Standard garden hoses, they would find, only moved about four to seven gallons a minute. And they melted. It didn’t take long for even the most courageous of them to realize they had made a big mistake.

  Fontaine had a house on the mountain, too, where he lived with his wife, Marla. But he kept his property clean and safe, surrounded by a hundred feet of defensible space, mostly bare earth and a few scattered, heavily watered plants. He had visited this neighborhood at least a dozen times, trying to persuade the owners of the danger, of the need for reasonable precautions. So many of them didn’t want to spoil the view, they said. They had moved up here to be among the trees. That was fine, Fontaine thought, as long as you made sure those trees didn’t ignite your shake roof.

  There was a certain beauty to fire in wild places. Fontaine had watched it from a hillside during the night, in the brief time between when he had knocked off for the day and the few hours he’d slumbered uneasily under a tarp. Darkness consumed the mountain, as usual, but in that darkness were scattered pools of yellow-red flame throwing off silver smoke. From a distance, he could almost view them as Japanese lanterns shining through a dense fog, except he knew what they were doing to the forest and what they threatened to do to those who lived there.

  But that was last night. Now, above the racket of the helicopters and the fire’s own crackle and roar, Fontaine heard the rumble of the pump, the shouts of his crew. He allowed himself a smile. The fire was moving up the western slope, but it wasn’t a crown fire. Not yet. It was moving at ground level, and that slowed it down a bit. They had made it here in time.

  He was more intimate with fire than with any human being, with the possible exception of Marla. He had lived with it for thirty years, and with Marla for only twenty-four. He had refused to have children with her, because life with fire had taught him that death waited behind every closed door, on the far side of every wall. The only thing predictable about fire was its willfulness, its ability to thwart expectation.

  You couldn’t trust fire, and that was a larger life lesson he had taken to heart. He trusted Marla, and not a hell of a lot else.

  It was instinct, he supposed, that told him when the prevailing breeze shifted. He couldn’t feel the slight change in its direction, not in his bulky gear, with the fire below generating its own wind. But he knew it, just the same. The change wasn’t dramatic, but it was enough. Vaughn shouted, and Fontaine saw a firebrand wafting past a house: a small section of shrub, flames tonguing the air around it, trailing sparks, brilliant reds and yellows against the smoky gray sky.

  It came from the north.

  Fontaine ran that way. The fire wasn’t supposed to be there yet. They were supposed to stop it before it got there. That was the plan.

  Subject to change.

  Fire created its own air currents. A big fire generated powerful ones. This one had blown sparks, firebrands, or both, around the northern point while they had been en route, or while they’d been standing here preparing to attack the west. From the north, it had continued moving east.

  Fontaine stood at the point—he was an island, and fire was the sea.

  “Get out!” he screamed into the radio. “We’re surrounded! Go! Go!”

  His crew reacted at once, wasting not a second, not a breath.

  They dropped hoses, scrambled for the truck. Alonso was at the driver’s door when the fire hit, a wave of it, engulfing them. Fontaine could hear his anguished cry, though his earpiece and through the air. He was that close.

  He lived just long enough to shed a tear for his crew members. That single tear sizzled, boiled, burned.

  Marc Fontaine never felt it.

  2

  “SERIOUSLY? A DOG?”

  “That’s what it says.” Ray Langston was riding shotgun, Nick Stokes driving. They had come straight from another scene, a relatively straightforward domestic homicide, if that could ever be said about a situation in which a wife had opened three holes in her husband with a .22. On their way back to the Crime Lab, they had received text messages. Ray had read his out loud.

  “We’re going to meet a dog. A live dog?”

  “It says an animal control officer will meet us there. So I’m assuming it’s alive.” Ray chuckled. “You know as much as I do, Nick.”

  Nick made a right at the next corner. They were closer to the scene—the dog scene—than they were to the lab, but not by much. “Yeah, but . . . a dog.”

  “Apparently the dog is a crime scene.”

  “That had better be one heck of a crime,” Nick said. “Or one heck of a dog.”

  * * *

  The dog, it turned out, was a mutt. Brown and white with splotches of black, maybe part shepherd, part Labrador, part something else. Ray couldn’t see much of it anyway, as it had taken refuge in the crawlspace underneath someone’s house. He and Nick and the ACO beamed flashlights in at it, but the mutt had its front legs out before it, pinning down whatever it was gnawing on. When they spoke to it, it curled back its lips and growled, defending its prize.

  “What’s it got?” Nick asked.

  “I can’t see from this angle,” Ray said. “I’m going to the other side, to try to see through that latticework.”

  “Okay.”

  Neighbors had gathered, and a couple of patrol officers worked on keeping them back. As Ray gingerly settled himself on his stomach and aimed the flashlight under the house, he heard a male voice raised in anxiety, or perhaps anger. “But I’m the one who called the cops in the first place!” Someone else answered in conciliatory tones. Ray couldn’t make out the words, but he understood the man’s response. “It was human, I’m telling you!”

  The dog’s ears perked at the shout, and it raised its muzzle. Ray could see just enough of its treasure, lying limply across the dog’s right foreleg, to make it out. “It is human, Nick.”

  “Human what?”

  “I can’t be absolutely sure, but I believe it’s a hand.”

  “A hand?”

  “That’s how it looks from here.”

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Who owns this dog?”

  “Dog lives here,” the ACO said. He jerked a thumb toward the gathered onlookers. “Owner’s over there. That woman in the green.”

  Ray looked at the audience. “Officer, please bring the homeowner here.”

  “What about me?” a man called. “I’m the one who called you guys.”

  “And we appreciate that, sir. But please stay right where you are.”

  One of the officers, a slender young woman with a brown ponytail, led the homeowner under the hastily erected barrier of yellow tape. “That’s your dog?” Ray asked her.

  She nodded grimly. “That’s Booger. Booger, you’re a bad boy!”

  “Do you know where he got that hand?”

  “I have no earthly idea.”

  “Unless you can get him to come out, we’re going to have to tranquilize him.” Ray couldn’t bring himself to use the dog’s name.

  “I was trying, before everybody got here. Then when the sirens came, and all the people, he went even farther back. He won’t come.”

  “Do you want to try
again, just in case?”

  She bent down in front of the opening to the crawlspace. “Come here, Booger! Here, boy! Momma has a treat!”

  Booger eyed her and snarled. Maybe he knew she didn’t really have a treat.

  “It’s no use,” the woman said. “He’s never been very well trained.”

  Ray addressed the ACO. “Can you knock him out?”

  “Of course.”

  “It won’t hurt him, will it?”

  “He might have a headache when he wakes up,” the ACO said. “If dogs get headaches. Won’t kill him is all I know.”

  “You might not want to watch,” Ray suggested.

  “My ex bought the damn dog in the first place,” the woman said. “Then left him here when he moved in with some bimbo. You can do whatever you want to him.”

  “We don’t want to hurt him.”

  She offered a slight shrug.

  “Do it,” Ray said.

  “Coming up,” the ACO said. He hustled over to his truck. When he returned, he was snapping the sections of a long pole into place. A needle gleamed on the end. “You know the old joke? Wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole?”

  “I’ve heard it,” Ray said.

  The ACO brandished his fully extended pole. “I get paid to do that.” He laughed at his own joke as he fitted a syringe into the pole’s tip. “Ten-foot pole,” he said, laughing again.

  It wasn’t that funny, but Ray didn’t say anything. They needed the man, and his ten-foot pole.

  The ACO went to where Ray had been, and extended the pole through the latticework. The dog snapped at the pole, but the man jabbed the needle into its haunch. Once the pole was withdrawn, Booger whimpered a little, then turned his attention back to his gnawing. A few minutes passed, and the dog relaxed, finally going limp. Ray could hear it snoring. “I’ll bring him out,” the ACO said. He was a hefty guy. Although the day’s heat had lessened after the sun set, he had sweat running out of his hair and soaking his collar. Ray hoped he could fit in the crawlspace.

  The man broke down his pole, then got onto his belly and slithered under the house. “So much for that scene,” Nick said softly, standing beside Ray. “If he’s dropped bits of tissue or blood under there . . .”