The Burning Season Page 14

  As she let her gaze travel the room, mentally dividing it into sections so she would look at everything in detail, and not allow her attention to be focused on any one area to the detriment of another, it landed on what first appeared to be a scrap of paper, well away from the desk and the various bits of paperwork that had fallen from there. She moved closer to it and squatted down. “Did you see this, Greg?”

  “I got a shot of it,” he said. “Looks like there’s some blood on it.”

  She took forceps and lifted the small white shape. It was no more than a half-inch square, with ragged edges. Greg was right, a couple of brownish spots at the center of it could have been blood. “It’s gauze,” she said. “I thought it was paper at first.”

  “Like a bandage?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Well, Alec Watson could have used some bandages, but I’m not sure that one would have helped. I’m pretty sure no one tried any first aid on him, though.”

  “So it came from someone else, maybe the shooter. I’ll have one of the unis outside get it back to the lab, see if we can get a quick ID on that blood.” She dropped it into a paper envelope from her kit and opened the office door to summon Brass. He was standing within earshot, and after the uniformed officer had been dispatched to the lab, Brass stayed in Watson’s office.

  “Ms. Taylor says that Watson had been in here for a little more than an hour,” Brass said. “He was working on a speech. There were a couple of other staffers in another part of the building, but there was a lot of machinery going, computers and printers and scanners, and they wouldn’t have heard people coming and going over here.”

  “Security looks pretty lax for a relatively high-profile guy,” Catherine observed.

  “That’s just how he rolled, according to Ms. Taylor. A man of the people. Anyone who wanted his ear could come in and usually find him in his office.”

  “An admirable policy,” Catherine said. “But it obviously turned out to be a dangerous one.”

  “She’s been after him for years to put in security cameras. He finally agreed, but the installation appointment is scheduled for next week.”

  “Too little, and way too late.”

  “Somebody heard the gunfire, but by the time they got over here, the shooter was gone,” Brass continued. “Taylor says he didn’t have any appointments this afternoon or this evening. He wanted to be left alone to work on the speech, so she stayed out of his hair.”

  “Maybe she should have stayed closer,” Greg suggested.

  “But if she had, maybe they’d both be dead,” Catherine said.

  “True.” Greg stepped gingerly around the desk, touched a key and peered at Watson’s monitor. “Looks like a round penetrated the casing but didn’t hurt the guts. His speech is still up on the screen.” Greg read for a moment, then reported, “It’s a response to the bombing. He’s asking for an end to the culture of violence and personal attacks, asking for a reconsideration of the rhetorical heat going on these days. He’s afraid that extremist language might lead to a situation in which violence is not only tolerated, but inevitable.”

  “He was right about that,” Brass said.

  “Too bad he had to prove it the hard way,” Catherine added.

  Brass opened the door. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. I still have to interview a couple of the staff members who were here. Doesn’t sound like anybody saw any visitors, so I hope you two can find something.”

  “We usually do,” Catherine said.

  “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  When Brass was gone, Catherine returned her attention to the task at hand. With no security camera, an open-door policy, and the discretion of a staff that left him alone to write, Alec Watson hadn’t made things easy on her. But it wasn’t the responsibility of the dead to tell their own stories. The burden of doing that was on the CSIs, who had to take the blood and bullets and brains, the faintest tracks and traces, and compile them into a narrative that would make sense to anyone who saw it.

  “Let’s get to work, Greg,” she said. “Somewhere in this room, there’s got to be a clue.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “I know so. All we have to do is find it.”

  “That’s all,” Greg said. “Nothing to it.”

  “It won’t go any faster if you wait to get started.”

  “I know,” Greg said. “I’ll take the body.”

  “Be my guest.” She would have done it, but was just as glad to hand it off. It was going to be an unpleasant job. Not that the rest of the office would be a walk in the park.

  The job was the job, though. She knew it going in, and still she went back every night. Sometimes people asked her how she could stand it. She never had a good answer to that question.

  The truth was, though, she could no longer quite imagine life without it.

  17

  NICK AND SARA went back down the hill, to where the Forest Service investigators believed the fire had been started. The CSIs had requested that the Forest Service hold off on their investigation so they could study the scene before it was compromised.

  The fire had begun in a hollow, a small depression in the earth. The area below it was full of dry oak leaves and downed branches. If the same was true above, it wouldn’t have taken much to get a good blaze going. Sarah pointed this out to Nick.

  “You’re right,” he said. “And check the trees right around here.”

  Sara did. “They’re hardly burned at all.”

  “So it began as a surface fire,” Nick said. “Burning loose debris as it gathered strength. The burn moved uphill—”

  “As fire tends to do.”

  “That’s right. And as it did, it found ladder fuels, shrubs and low branches, that helped it climb into the crown. Some crown fires burn almost independently of surface fires, but this one seems like it covered every elevation once it got going good.”

  “And it gained strength as it went uphill,” Sara added. “Creating its own air flow. The heat must have been intense, up above.”

  “Hot enough that those firefighters never had a chance.”

  “Are we convinced that it was human-caused?”

  “The Forest Service people were. No reported lightning strikes in the area. No other reason for a fire to start on its own. Either it was accident or arson.”

  “Let’s find out which,” she said. “Because if it’s arson, then someone’s got a lot to answer for.”

  They gloved up and went to hands and knees, inspecting the transition area between burned and not-burned. After about thirty minutes, during which Nick began to suspect he would never breathe freely again, so caked with soot were his nasal passages, he heard Sara’s voice.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Take a look at this.”

  He rose, a little creaky from having been down for so long, and walked over to her. She had brushed a circle in the ash about fifteen feet in from the edge of the burned area, revealing a bundle of tiny, pale sticks in the center of the circle. “Matches?”

  “Matches,” she said. “But they’re stuck together, and they didn’t burn all the way.”

  “I guess that’s our good luck and the firebug’s bad luck. I wonder why, though.”

  “From the size of these matchsticks,” Sara said, “I’m guessing they’re the strike-anywhere type. These days most matches have to be struck on a special surface.”

  “That strip on the matchbook,” Nick said.

  “Because the strip contains red phosphorous. The friction converts it to white phosphorous, for a fraction of a second.”

  “White phosphorus, that’s bad stuff.” Because it generated a lot of smoke, it was commonly used in battle to make smokescreens. But it was also highly incendiary, and it had a tendency to cling to surfaces, resulting in a lasting, extremely destructive burn. Most civilized nations didn’t use it in that way anymore—at least, not officially. That didn’t stop ot
hers from claiming that they did. What the truth was, Nick couldn’t know.

  “You’re not kidding. Early matchboxes were made of metal, because matches had a habit of igniting themselves whenever they wanted. Now they’re more stable, but the strike-anywhere kind, like these, have the red phosphorus added to the match head instead of on the striking surface. They’re still not stable enough to be allowed on airplanes.” She picked one of them up with a gloved hand. “There’s something on them.” She rubbed the wooden matchstick. “Feels like wax.”

  Nick tried to envision what had happened. “Someone bunched them together and dipped them in melted wax? Then after it cooled, brought them here and lit the fire. The wax melted again, smothering the wooden matchsticks, so they didn’t burn all the way. And the fire was racing up, away from the matches, so even if the wax had completely run off them, the matches still might not have burned.”

  “The firestarter thought the evidence would go up in smoke, but it didn’t.” Sara put her head close to the ground and felt around in the soft earth. “Match heads often survive fire as well,” she said. “If we can find some of those . . .”

  “Then we’ll be able to narrow the suspect pool to anyone who has ever bought a box of kitchen matches,” Nick said. “Don’t get me wrong, if you can find any, do it. We can use everything we get. But it won’t exclude many people.”

  Sara held something up, her expression triumphant. Nick couldn’t even see the tiny object between her fingers. “Got one! Now we just have to check every convenience store, supermarket, drugstore and camping supply place in a three-hundred mile radius, and we’ve got him.”

  “You know,” Nick said. “I remember reading about an old-fashioned fire-starting device. You’d take a few matches, tie them together with string, and dip them in paraffin wax. Everything but the heads. That way, they were waterproof. You’d strike one of them and they’d all burn, including the paraffin wax, which is very flammable. These days there are plenty of better ways to light a fire, but the wax on these—”

  Sara held the matches close to her nose. “Smells like candle wax to me. It’s been melted more than once, but there’s still a little bit of a floral scent. Berries, maybe.”

  “And candle wax is more likely to melt than to burn. Maybe the person didn’t have access to paraffin wax. It’s not exactly commonplace these days.”

  “Or maybe it was someone who didn’t know the difference.”

  “Nobody ever said your average criminal was any kind of genius.”

  “Let’s get these couriered down to the lab,” Sara suggested. “Maybe identifying the wax will pay more dividends than identifying the matches.”

  “We should send both,” Nick said.

  “Right.” Sara started packing the matchsticks and a couple of match heads for transport. “Might as well keep them busy—they’re probably in for a boring night without us around.”

  While she did that, Nick cut a wide circle around the spot where she had found the matches. The forest floor was different than paved surfaces or hard floors. Although people could leave tracks in those places, too, it was far harder to walk on dirt without leaving a sign.

  Someone, however, had done a good job of it. Possibly the wind created by the fire had blown dirt and leaves and ash around, obscuring the trail. Nick managed to find one toe-print, very close to where Sara had been kneeling when she found the matches. His guess was that the arsonist had gone down on one knee, and by putting most of his weight on the other toe, had embedded that track more deeply into the ground. But there wasn’t much to it—not enough tread to identify a shoe or boot brand, or tell the size for sure. What it did have were distinctive wear patterns and cuts on the tread, making it as distinctive as a fingerprint.

  “It’s better than nothing,” Sara said. “When we have a suspect it’ll help confirm, and it might exclude some others.”

  “Yeah,” Nick agreed. “I was just hoping for more. Whoever this is, he’s pretty light on his feet.”

  “The ground’s been dry for a long time,” Sara pointed out. “It’s packed almost as hard as cement.”

  Nick was about to answer when he heard something crashing through the burned forest. Bear, he thought, or maybe deer. He drew a weapon, in case of the former—not that he wanted to shoot a bear, but if he had to warn it off, a gunshot might be more effective than shouting and waving his arms.

  It was not a bear, however, but Harley Givens.

  “Mr. Givens,” Sara said, “didn’t we ask you to stay out of the woods?”

  “I believe what you said was that I should go back down the mountain until the evacuation order was lifted. Well, it’s lifted.”

  “I think maybe you got the letter of that without the spirit,” Nick pointed out. “We’re trying to investigate a crime, and having you barging around could make that more difficult.” He holstered his sidearm. At least Givens hadn’t brought the shotgun this time. “Not to mention dangerous.”

  “I just wanted to see if you’d found any sign of them yet.”

  “Who, the campers?” Sara asked.

  “Of course!”

  “No sign of them.”

  “And we still don’t know that they started the fire,” Nick reminded him.

  Givens stood with his hands on his hips, frowning. “I guess if you two were smarter, you’d be real cops instead of whatever it is you are. Some sort of errand runners, it looks like.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, holding in a laugh. “That’s right. We have this job because we’re the stupid ones. Show me your boots, Mr. Givens. The bottoms of them, please.”

  Givens raised one, then the other. Nick got a quick glance, enough to see that the tread on them didn’t match what he had found.

  “Mr. Givens, I’ll ask you nicely one more time,” Sara said. Count on her to try to defuse the tension. “Go home. Deal with your house as best you can, and let us do our jobs.”

  “Is there an ‘or else’ there, missy?”

  “Or else, we’ll put you under arrest for obstructing our investigation. By the time you get back home, there’s no telling what’ll be left of your house—or what woodland creatures will have decided to move in.”

  Givens caught Nick’s gaze. “You might just be dumb, mister,” he said, tilting his head toward Sara. “But that one? She’s downright mean!”

  18

  THE RAID ON the Free Citizens netted a handful of automatic weapons of uncertain provenance, and the arrests of a couple of people who objected overly strenuously to the search. While Vartann was there, Catherine called and told him that Alec Watson had taken about a dozen 7.62x39-mm rounds. The ATF agents had found a stash of AK-47 knock-offs, which fired that ammunition, so those were confiscated as well. They would be returned to their rightful owners after ballistics testing. No traces of ammonium nitrate had turned up, and neither had any of the other items that had gone into the construction of the bomb used against Dennis Daniels.

  For as much flak as Vartann took from the Free Citizens, the ATF people had it far worse. They kept telling the Citizens that they weren’t there to abridge their Second Amendment rights—they weren’t looking for legal guns, just ones that hadn’t been rightfully purchased or, after Catherine’s phone call, ones that might be a murder weapon. They said it in a monotone, by rote, and Vartann had the feeling that they probably repeated those words as often as he did the Miranda warning.

  He was on his way out when he got another phone call, also from Catherine. “Twice in one evening,” he said. “I must have done something right.”

  “You always do,” she said. “But did you ever stop to think that maybe I’m just calling because I wanted to hear your voice? Maybe it’s got nothing to do with what you do.”

  “That’s okay, too.”

  “Then again,” she said, all flirtation gone from her voice in a split second. She sounded tired, now. “Maybe I’m calling on business.”

  “That would be a shame.”

  “I know. W
e’ll just have to make it up to each other later.”

  “That works for me. What’s up?”

  “We found a fragment of bloody bandage at the Watson scene,” she said. “I had a quick test run. You’ll never guess whose blood it is.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “It belongs to Dennis Daniels.”

  Vartann was quiet for a moment, taking that in. “Isn’t he still in the hospital?”

  “As far as I know,” Catherine said. “I’m still here at Watson’s office. I was hoping maybe you could swing by the hospital and make sure Daniels is there.”

  “I can make a phone call . . .”

  “Louis . . .”

  “I know. In person is better. I’m on my way, Cath. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “Good. Whoever shot Alec Watson is bad news. Guy’s got more holes in him than a whole room full of bowling balls.”

  “I’ll check it out,” Vartann promised. “You finish up there. Maybe you can get some rest tonight.”

  “Somehow,” Catherine said, “that doesn’t seem very likely.”

  Dennis Daniels was indeed still in the hospital, and according to the nursing staff, he was a gigantic pain about it.

  “He won’t stay in bed for ten minutes,” one of the nurses told Vartann, practically as soon as he flashed his badge. “I must have told him fifty times, he’ll pop his stitches, he keeps roaming around like he does. Thinks he can run his whole business from here.”

  “Has he left the building at any point?”

  The nurse shook her head vigorously. “Hells, no. He’s stupid, not crazy. No, I take that back, he’s a smart guy, he’s just got too much energy for his own good.”

  “Probably why he’s so successful.”

  “You could be right.”

  “I’ll see if I can get him to calm down a little,” Vartann promised.