Nest in the Ashes (17 page)

Eric refused to bite. “I was calling to let you know I wouldn’t be in the office today. I’ll take care of the birds at the Raptor House, but afterward I plan to do some fieldwork to get ready for the fire impact study.”

“Really. Are you sure this fieldwork doesn’t have anything to do with your fusee theory?”

Damn, how did she know about that? KEPC-TV hadn’t been on site in Bellville. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play dumb, Linenger. The news reporter interviewed Brill. He coughed up your late-night adventures and spilled the beans on your twenty-four count hypothesis. My, but you’ve been busy.” Nora chuckled. “I’m wondering, Eric, can you guess how many fusees I carry around with me?”

Eric worked to keep his voice even. “Make fun if you want, Nora. It’s a good theory.”

“Hey, we could develop an NPS game show. And now,” she intoned sarcastically, “let’s play ‘Estimate the Fusees.’”

Anger brought Eric to his feet, and he paced the length of the cord. “Can we get back to business?”

“Sure thing,” she said, amusement still lacing her voice.

“I need to map the burned areas for the impact studies,” he said. “The sooner it’s done, the sooner we can start assessing the effect of the burn.” Eric paused, then shot a dagger of his own. “Wayne would have offered, but I’d welcome your help.”

“Not a chance, Linenger,” she replied. “Take care.” Then she banged down the phone.

The day had warmed
up into the sixties by the time Eric and Lark headed out. The sun blazed down from an azure sky, and the smell of pine hung heavy on the breeze.

Passing Prospect Point, with Eagle Cliff Mountain rising above them, Eric slowed the truck and searched the side of the road for the pullout where Wayne Devlin had parked his truck.

According to Tres’description, the narrow pulloff was sheltered by trees and branched off on the right-hand side of the road. Eric shifted his gaze back and forth from the asphalt to the right-of-way while Lark kept her nose pressed to the window.

“There,” she said, pointing to a shallow opening in the trees. “Is that it?”

Eric braked and yanked the wheel. The truck bumped, straddling the shallow ditch, then came to a stop at the side of the road.

The gap in the trees opened into a small clearing, but the number of days since the truck disappeared, combined with the recent snow, worked against them. Their search for signs that Wayne’s truck had been parked there was futile. The moisture had caused any crushed vegetation to regenerate. Short grasses blanketed the earth, dotted with patches of alpine forget-me-nots and blue columbines. Giant trees towered toward the sky. Any imprints left on the land by any others had been erased.

Eric was about to abandon the search when his eye picked up nicks in the dirt near the road. Moving closer, he knelt down. Several sets of tire tracks marred the edges of the ditch.

“Over here,” he called out.

Lark walked toward him and hunkered down. Her thin-boned fingers explored the indentations in the dirt. “Are they from a pickup?”

“These are,” Eric said. He pointed to a set of tracks clearly matching those left by his NPS truck in axle width and tire size. “But these…” He broke off and studied another, smaller set. “These look like they came from an ATV.”

“Did Wayne use one?”

“He owned an ATV. He used it for packing meat when he hunted. But it’s illegal to ride them up here.”

Lark shrugged. “Maybe he bent the park rules.”

“He wouldn’t,” Eric said. “Not Wayne.”

“You’re sure?” she asked. “Even if it meant stopping a burn he didn’t believe in?”

Eric sat back on his heels. Bucking policy established to protect the land, in order to protect the land, smacked of “the end justifies the means” logic reserved for people like Forest Nettleman, not Wayne. Wayne was a man who played by the rules, even if it stacked the odds against him. He was a man of integrity.

“Even then,” Eric said.

“But didn’t you say you saw ATV tracks in the area where you found Wayne’s body?”

“I did.” His thoughts flashed to the marks in the grass this morning at the Inn on 34. “And I saw them in front of Linda Verbiscar’s cabin.”

Lark’s eyes widened. “In that case, which of the people on the suspect list own or have access to an ATV?”

Eric tugged at a blade of grass. “We don’t have too many suspects left. Between Vic and I, we’ve bumped everyone but Nora Frank, Gene Paxton, and Forest Nettleman off the list.”

Movement overhead drew his gaze. Above them, a hawk carved slow, wide arcs in the air. Dark bars marked the wings’undersides. Reddish-brown with a streaked, creamy breast, the bird sported the characteristic speckled, reddish belly band and rusty-red tail of the red-tailed hawk. He hunted with abandon. Of all the birds, except maybe the woodpecker, the birds of prey benefited most from a fire. The barren landscape exposed the smaller, weaker creatures, serving them up for the larger animals that were higher up on the food chain.

“
Keeer
! called the bird.

A shiver coursed along Eric’s spine.

“You know, it could have been a tourist,” Lark said.

From the tone of her voice, Eric knew she hated suggesting the obvious.

“An opportunist,” he said, trying on the idea. Ruling out the Youth Camp boys, why would anyone bash Wayne over the head, light the forest on fire, and steal a psychrometer? The humidity gauge was the only thing missing. He pushed himself to his feet. “No, I think it’s someone more cunning and devious.”

Lark stood up too. “How about Nora, then? Would she have had access to an ATV?”

“It’s possible.” Eric moved toward the truck. “The NPS owns several. Sort of a dichotomy of philosophy, but they’re used for moving stuff around in certain areas of the park. There is—or should I say
was
—a maintenance shed near the fire line. There might have been one there.”

“How about Forest?”

“I have no idea.” He doubted it, knowing Nettleman. Forest was more the limo type. “But Paxton had one. He kept it parked next to the Shangri-La office with the keys in the ignition.”

“Which means anyone could have borrowed it,” Lark said.

Another wrinkle Eric hadn’t considered.

He grabbed their gear from the truck, pitching Lark her day pack. In place of the heavy firefighter equipment, they had both gone smaller, packing only the bare essentials: bandana, granola bars, bottled water, sunscreen, lip balm, and binoculars.

Eric stuffed his sweater inside his pack and slung it over his shoulder. Lark cinched her sweatshirt around her waist.

It felt good to climb, and Eric set a brisk pace up the mountain. They headed south, hiking along the narrow deer trail that led away from the clearing. The well-trodden path wound in and around the pine trees dotting the hillside and through fields of columbines blooming in the mountain sunshine. Far below them, the Big Thompson River rumbled toward town, swollen with the runoff from an early spring.

The hillside grew steeper. As the deer path veered away toward the valley floor, Eric wormed his way through the tightly packed lodgepoles on the north slope. Lark stayed close behind, and they climbed until the steep ground forced them to use the trees for handholds and pull themselves hand-over-hand toward the top of the mountain.

Cresting the first ridge, Eric could see the burn area one ridge ahead. He was awed by the stark contrast between the unburned and the burned—like someone had drawn a line across a canvas, then painted the lower half of the canvas in color and the top half in black and white. Below the burn line, the trees grew tall and birds flitted from branch to branch. Above the burn line, stick-figure trees, wearing ash-colored uniforms, marched like an army across the mountainside, storming the summit of Eagle Cliff Mountain.

“How are you doing?” he Lark asked, pulling out his water bottle and taking a swig. The cool liquid bathed his throat, dry from exertion.

“I’m hanging in there,” Lark said, bending over and clutching her waist. Her single braid swung close to the ground. “This is brutal.”

“But I can see our destination.”

To get there, they simply had to work their way down the back face of the ridge they’d just climbed and hike up the north face of the next.

The back face was a gentle-sloping south face with a more open landscape of ponderosa pines and Douglas firs, and the going was easy until they crashed into a gully full of shrubs and bushes. There the vegetation grew so dense in places they were forced to backtrack and search for another route. More than once, Eric wished he’d brought his Pulaski. Then the vegetation morphed again, back to stands of densely packed lodgepole.

When they reached the edge of the burn, Eric stopped. The forest spread before them, stripped of life, the ground denuded of all but charred soil and charred vegetation. Once-majestic trees stood like skeletons against a gray backdrop of ash. No squirrels scampered or chattered. No birds sang. Only the call of the hawk hunting broke the silence.

The moonscape stretched to the left and right, and Eric struggled to get his bearings. “I remember rounding a large boulder near the bottom of a gully just before I found his body,” Eric said. “I think we’re still too far north.”

Lark agreed, and they traced the lower edge of the burn. One hundred yards to the south, they found what they’d been looking for. The boulder rose like a ship out of a gray ocean and signaled another border. Below the rock, shrubs singed by the fire still grew in profusion. Above the rock, the charred, sepia-toned landscape stretched to the horizon.

On the other side of the boulder was where Wayne had died. With the thought came a shortness of breath, and Eric forced himself to inhale.

“This is it all right,” Lark said, pointing to a piece of yellow crime scene ribbon still anchored to a nearby tree.

Eric stepped around the chunk of granite and stared at the small square of land where he’d found Wayne’s body. The ash and earth had been churned into waves of mud by the rescue workers, then frozen into stiff peaks of dirt. Eric had to close his eyes to remember the scene.

Wayne had been lying on the ground a few feet from the boulder. The pack leaned against a tree slightly uphill and to the left of his body.

“Let’s start here,” he said, pointing to a spot that best matched his memory of the area that had surrounded Wayne’s body. “We’ll work our way up the hill. Keep your eyes open for anything out of the ordinary.”

The two of them combed the hillside, traversing the area back and forth, covering every square inch of ground. They found nothing.

Finally, after they backtracked to the boulder and shrugged off their packs, Lark slumped to the ground and rested her back against the rock. Eric flopped down beside her.

“I was so sure we’d missed something,” he told her. “Something to do with the—

“I know, I know. The extra fusee. You are obsessed with the fusee.”

She’s right, thought Eric. He was obsessed. But Wayne had been anal, and Eric couldn’t shake the feeling they were missing something. Some key piece of evidence. He stared at the base of the tree where Wayne’s body had been found, willing his ghost to reveal its secrets. He had held the fusee in his right hand, slightly extended above his head.

Eric twisted around and laid on the ground, positioning himself like the corpse.

“He’s losing it,” Lark remarked, toying with the end of her braid.

“No,” Eric said, excitement driving him to his feet. “From where he fell, he couldn’t have lit the pile of slash. The fusee in his hand would have touched somewhere in here, and the pile of slash is there.” He pointed to the spot where the ash piled into a mound. “Going by the investigation team’s scenario, he set the blaze, then scrambled downhill, slipped, hit his head on a rock, and was caught in the fire.”

“I can see that happening,” Lark said, sounding somewhat apologetic.

“Except, based on the ash, the fusee in his hand was whole.”

Lark sat up straight. “And you don’t just throw a spark on a pile of slash and start a fire.”

“Exactly. Without a propellant of some sort, the fire would likely smolder awhile.”

“The investigation team didn’t mention any accelerant,” Lark said.

“So, now we’re looking at more than one extra fusee.” Eric paced the clearing. “Nora would be the only one who’d routinely carry fusees with her. Or another firefighter. Unless…”

Eric retraced his footsteps to where Wayne’s hand had rested on the ground. If he was right, they would find it here. He kicked the dirt with his boot, loosening the packed soil.

Lark scrambled to her feet. “What? What are you looking for?

“A nail.”

Most flares had one. Firefighters used special fusees, ones that linked together in chains making it easier to light a fire. The average motorist or police officer just wanted to signal trouble. They needed to be able to jam the fusee into the ground and make it stand up, hence the small spike at the bottom. A nail would be rock solid evidence that someone other than Wayne had started the blaze.

It took them a few minutes to find what they were looking for. The small, shiny object had been pounded into the ground beneath the boots of the firefighters.

Bending down, Eric pried the nail free of the ground and held it up, end to end, between his finger and thumb. “I’ll lay odds if we look, we’ll find more.”

“I guess this clears Nora Frank,” Lark said.

“Bummer,” Eric said, drawing a laugh from Lark, though deep inside he was glad. He couldn’t deny that Nora was ambitious. Or that her drive had clouded her judgment at times. But he hadn’t wanted to believe her capable of murder. He hadn’t wanted to believe he was that bad a judge of character. “That leaves us with Gene Paxton and Forest Nettleman.”

The idea Nettleman might have murdered Wayne wasn’t much more palatable than believing Nora Frank responsible. While Eric didn’t know Paxton well enough to form an opinion, he knew Forest Nettleman. The onetime powerful U.S. Representative held a passion for the environment. A passion that had clouded his judgment in the past.

The sunlight receded, and Eric glanced up. The afternoon clouds carried no threat of rain, but at this altitude, without the sun’s rays, it grew instantly colder. The shadows deepened, and the trees seemed to close in.

He heard a click. It took a moment for his brain to register, to process the sound.
Metal striking metal
. The sound of a gun hammer striking an empty chamber.

Diving for Lark, he knocked her to the ground before the second pull of the trigger drove a bullet into the granite above their heads. A section of the stone splintered, showering them with fragments. He hovered over Lark, ignoring the tiny shards of granite nipping at his skin, aware of her trembling. Where was the shooter?

His eyes swept the hillside above them.

“Eric?” Lark whispered, as though believing her whisper somehow offered protection. The fear in her voice penetrated his calm, and he pushed her closer to the ground. The shot had come from the north.

“Hey, hold your fire,” he shouted, urging Lark to move around to the back side of the boulder.

Another bullet whizzed over his head in defiance of his order. This was no small game hunter, and these weren’t random bullets. Someone out there was shooting at them. But who? And with what type of gun?

“Stay low,” he told Lark, urging her forward.

“Don’t worry,” she replied. “Can you see anyone? Who’s shooting?”

Their eyes met. It had to be either Nettleman or Paxton.

“Forest, is that you?” yelled Eric.