Hotshots (10 page)

“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 Service 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.”

“Are we talking negligence suit?” Eric asked. There was still hope in the gray eyes, but that was a fire I was about to put out.

“I think there's cause for action.” And I wasn't seeing dollar signs when I said it either. “I don't have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. We only need a preponderance of evidence in a civil suit.”

“Damn,” Eric said softly. He stared out the window. “You know what I'd like to do right now?”

“Talk it over with Nancy?”

“No. I'd like to go down to Baja, get in a boat, and drift out to sea.”

“Do it,” I said.

“I might never come back.”

“You'll come back.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you didn't raise your daughter to run away from trouble,” I said.

11

I
T WAS A
quarter to two by Anna's clock when Eric left. If I got in my car and drove over the mountain I could be at Nancy's house in Cedar Crest in an hour. I was having trouble getting back in the office groove anyway. I could have called Nancy and told her I was coming, but I didn't. Eric had already said she'd be home.

“I'm kind of tired. I think I'll take the rest of the afternoon off,” I told Anna.

“You'll be in tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I went the back way to Cedar Crest, through the village of Placitas, up the winding dirt road, past the cave where Placitas Man was found and later discovered to be a hoax. I continued through the woods and over the mountain. “Closed for the Winter” the sign said where the pavement ended; it always said that—even now in August. There were quaking aspens at the higher elevations and they were already turning yellow. About halfway up I stopped at Las Huertas picnic area, parked the Nissan, and walked to the stream that flows through the canyon. I sat on a rock wall and listened to the water rush under a downed log and over a rock. There's enough Easterner left in me that every now and then I get a craving for water. It has a way of smoothing rough edges, but after a few minutes of soothing I began to hear crying in the gurgling. New Mexico's streams, rivers, and ditches are haunted by the spirit of La Llorona, the woman who drowned her children and wanders our waterways weeping. The wide-open spaces were looking good again. I got in the Nissan and drove to the ridge top where the view stretches nearly to Texas.

The road on the east side of the Sandias is paved; it's the road the skiers, tourists, and hikers use. The weather is cooler and wetter over here, and the forest is lush. If this side of the mountain had ever been timbered, it was a long time ago. Second-growth forests tend to be monochromatic and boring. This forest had shades and levels of green from deep ponderosa to silvery blue spruce interspersed with crooked white aspen.

The Barkers lived at the base of the mountain on Aspencade Drive in Cedar Crest. My map showed Aspencade to be parallel straight lines ending in parallel dotted lines, a gravel road turning to dirt. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the gravel leaves off and the dirt begins. The bumps on Aspencade were spaced at intervals that made the Nissan rattle like a bucket of bolts whenever I exceeded fifteen miles an hour. In Santa Fe there's a cachet to living on dirt roads, but they drive Mercedes-Benz jeeps up there and
don't
have to get up every morning and go to work. That's one reason I don't live in the East Mountains; it's too big a mind change to drive from rural to urban and back every day. It's simpler to live and work in the same zone.

The Barkers' house was at the edge of the forest, where sunbeams were slipping through the branches of the pines and landing on the pine-needle floor. It was easy to see how a kid growing up here would want to protect trees. The house was wood frame with lots of east-facing windows, a pitched roof, and a large deck. A Saturn was parked at one end of the driveway. At the other was a vegetable garden with corn, tomatoes, and squash. As I got out of my car I was greeted by a squirrel screeching and dropping a pinecone to the deck. Nancy came to the door. “Neil,” she called, “what are you doing here? Come on up.”

Climbing the stairs to the deck brought on another coughing fit. “You all right?” Nancy asked with a motherly concern in her voice.

“Yeah.”

“What brings you over here?” She was very surprised to see me, and as insistent on making that point as the squirrel was on making his. Her mouth was a slash of red lipstick. Her hair was a blond helmet. She wore khaki hiking shorts, sandals that gripped her big toe, and a T-shirt. The green ribbon was pinned across her heart. It takes discipline for a grieving woman to put on lipstick and get dressed every morning. Another mother I'd known who'd lost her daughter had never gotten out of her bathrobe again.

“I was taking the back road to Santa Fe; I get tired of I-25. I'd thought I'd stop by to see how you were doing.” I answered, proving, if only to myself, that I could lie as well as I could cough.

“More important, how are you doing?”

“I'm okay.”

“Come on in and have some tea with honey. That'll help your cough.” I followed her into the house, which was done in a style I'd call Appalachian cabin. The furniture was made out of logs and there were quilted fabrics on the walls, the pillows, and the windows. An unfinished quilt with a red pattern on a white background lay on the sofa. Nancy must have been working on it when I showed up. The house was cozy and neat, no fuzzy film on the coffee table, no telltale dust balls under the sofa. No TV that I could see. Nancy put the water on and began banging mugs around the kitchen. “What would you like?” she called. “I have Constant Comment, Grandma's Tummy Mint, Emperor's Choice, Red Zinger.”

“Red Zinger,” I said.

She came back with a steaming ceramic mug and a jar of honey on a tray. I stirred in the honey with a plastic beehive on a stick and put the mug down on the end table. Nancy lifted the mug and placed a coaster underneath. She pushed the quilt aside and sat beside me on the sofa.

“
You're making a quilt?” I asked.

“It'll give me something to do until school starts. I have to keep busy or I'll go crazy.” It's hard enough to stay occupied alone in a house in the woods without a death to deal with. With a tragedy it would have been all too easy to pull the curtains, turn on the TV, smoke Marlboros, drink tequila, and enter the dark place looking for light. Nancy picked up a needle and threaded it. Her relentless determination made me wonder if she wasn't taking mother's latest little helper—Prozac. It's the perfect substance to keep a woman working and smiling from dawn to dusk.

“You've been on the mountain now. What do you think? Do we have a case?” Nancy asked me.

“Mike gave a convincing demonstration that dropping the packs wouldn't have saved anyone's life. It was a very steep and dangerous place to attempt to fight a fire. There should have been aerial surveillance. I can understand how hard it would have been for Ramona to see the fire. There should have been better training. There should have been better weather forecasting. The fact that that information wasn't passed on to the firefighters is gross negligence in my mind.”

Nancy's eyes had the red fire of a deer trapped in the headlights or a woman caught off guard by the camera, a woman who was far too angry to be on Prozac. She appeared to be getting by substance-free. “They never should have sent the crew in there just to save somebody's trophy home. Never!” she said jabbing the quilt with her needle.

She lived so close to the woods herself I had to wonder what she'd have done if her house had been threatened.

“It makes me so goddamn angry. Did you see how big that house was?”

“It's gone now,” I said.

“Good.”

“Do you blame Hogue for the South Canyon?”

“I blame everybody in the Forest Service. I'm mad at them for sending Joni to Thunder Mountain. I'm mad at them for not giving the firefighters any support. I'm mad at Ramona for living. I'm mad at Joni for dying. Dumb, I know, but I can't help it.”

Emotions can be like fire. Sometimes they are easily ignited, sometimes not, but once they get burning it's in their nature to get out of control. “Does the fact that Hogue died up there make any difference to you in terms of pursuing the lawsuit?”

“No. He was just a symbol. I want to get the people who made the decisions that killed my daughter.”

“I talked to Eric earlier,” I said.

“Oh? He didn't mention it.”

“It was only about an hour ago. I tried to call you first but you weren't home. The arson
investigator
has determined that the East Canyon fire was caused by arson.”

“That figures. I mean, what else could it have been?”

“They want to talk to you as part of the investigation.”

“You're our lawyer. Do you have any objection to that?”

“It's always better not to talk to investigators. Did you see or hear anything while you waited? Anybody driving or walking up the road?”

“Not really,” Nancy replied. “I think some vehicles went by, but I couldn't see them from where I sat.”

“Under the cottonwood?”

“Right.”

“When did Mike get back?”

“Around three.”

“What kind of frame of mind was he in?”

“He was very upset. He'd seen the fire. We'd smelled the smoke. As soon as Mike returned we got into his car, drove out, and called the Forest Service. That fire was terrifying to watch. It would have been even more terrifying if we'd known you were on the mountain.”