by K J Kalis
Van finally spoke. “Listen, this guy set a fire that nearly burned my family to death. Sidelining us isn’t gonna work. Either way, we are in this until the end.”
Yasmin stared at Van for a moment, “All right. Let me have my guys do a record search for any property Connor or his family might own. Give me a couple of minutes.” Yasmin marched up the driveway and disappeared back into the house.
Freddie walked over to the SUV and opened the back, handing each of them a protein bar. “Have to keep your strength up.”
The three of them waited, the thoughts in Kat’s mind circling. She thought about Jack, the dogs, Mike, Theresa. She frowned, “Freddie, what more do you know about Connor’s family? How did his wife and daughter die?”
Freddie leaned on the car. Kat could tell he was keeping an eye on the front door where Yasmin had disappeared. “Funny thing, that. Apparently, the wife and daughter got involved in a church — the same church where the fire was. They went on a missions trip somewhere in Africa, the Congo is where I think the pastor said. There was an Ebola outbreak after they got there. The entire team was infected. They all died.” Freddie chewed his lip, the toothpick rolling. “There’s something else. I was going to mention it, but we were a little busy trying to get you all out…”
“What?” Van asked.
“I did a financial search on Connor Lewis when you mentioned his name. Just gave it a quick look. Sent my findings to Yasmin. We do that on potential suspects to see if it is a paid arson job. When I pulled his records, I saw a big bankruptcy and then just some work here and there. Looks like he had some jobs and then was unable to hold them down.”
Kat turned her head, thinking. “A bankruptcy? From what?”
Freddie looked down for a moment as if he was trying to remember. He snapped his fingers, “Yeah, he started a business that failed. A big flop.”
Kat felt a lump in her throat. “So, we’ve got Connor who thinks that Bart has stolen his idea for a business. He’s failed in business on his own, can’t seem to hold down a job or meet his success aspirations, loses his wife and daughter on a missions trip, and sees a guy he went to college with take his idea and profit…”
Van raised his eyebrows, “Sounds like an angry dude to me.”
Kat sighed, “And plenty of motive.”
Just as they finished their conversation, the front door cracked open. Yasmin walked out, the sides of her blazer flapping against her body. “I had one of my guys back at the office run a property search. Turns out the wife, Janet, her family owned a cabin up in the mountains. I’ve got the address.”
Freddie looked at her, his lip curled, “You planning on sharing that with us?”
“Yep, but I’m going with you.”
46
On his way out of town, the sun setting in the distance, Connor checked his phone. The program he set up to run was on the final countdown. It was going to be a long night. He knew he was running out of time. He pressed the accelerator on the truck, merging onto the highway that would take him up into the mountains.
He knew it wouldn’t take the FBI or whoever was looking for him long to find out that Janet’s family owned a cabin. It was in all of the property records. He also knew the only advantage he had was the code he had embedded deep in Palm Coast’s computer system. The way he designed it, someone would have to look in just the right place to find it. He doubted they would. That, and the flames, would be his lasting legacy.
47
Yasmin followed Van, Kat and Freddie back to the fire station so they could check on Jack before they did the four-hour drive to the cabin that Connor Lewis owned. Kat felt a knot inside of her. She leaned forward between the seats while Freddie drove, still chewing on the toothpick. Van had his arm resting on the door. “Maybe I shouldn’t go. I mean Jack, he’s been through so much.”
“I’ve taken care of that,” Freddie said as they pulled into the station. He got out of the SUV, “Follow me.”
In the common room, Jack was eating pizza with Mark. He jumped up to hug Kat and Van, the dogs trailing behind them. “I’m having so much fun!” he said, sitting back down to grab another piece of pizza.
Freddie frowned and looked at the time on his cell phone. “We have to get going. Where is he?”
“I’m here!” Chuck came into the room, gauze bandages on the back of his neck. “Had to stop for some supplies, you know?”
Kat tilted her head, “What’s going on here?”
Freddie pointed to Chuck, “He’s gonna be the nanny while we are gone. His entire career depends on returning Jack back to you safe, healthy and happy.”
“What?” Kat pulled her head back, surprised.
“Well, you kinda figured most of this out. We might need you.”
While Freddie was talking, Jack and Chuck were already digging through the bags he had brought in. There were clothes, toys, a new pillow, a sleeping bag and even a toothbrush and toothpaste. There were chew toys for the dogs and a bag of dog food. Kat stared. “Chuck, you shouldn’t have done this! It’s too much!”
He smiled. “There’s stuff for you and Van in the truck, too.”
“I don’t know how to thank you. Just tell us how much…”
Freddie held up his hands, “This is courtesy of Cal Fire. You guys have saved a lot of lives. Let us help.”
Tears started to roll down Kat’s face. If there was one thing she learned, it was that people could be kind, so very kind, when push came to shove. “I’m always going to remember this. I don’t know what to say.”
Van reached out and shook hands with the firefighters. Freddie gave his hand a good pump and said, “Chuck is on light duty until his neck heals. He’s gotta do something, so his chief said I could put him to work. He’ll be in charge.”
Chuck nodded. “Yup, go get this guy, okay?” He gave Kat a hug. “I’ll take care of Jack and the dogs. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
With Jack taken care of, Kat quickly grabbed her bag and the group got back in the Cal Fire SUV, Yasmin riding with them. While Kat had been talking to Jack and Chuck, Yasmin must have slipped off. She had changed out of her suit and was wearing jeans, hiking boots and an FBI t-shirt. She had a jacket on her arm and a backpack over her shoulder. “Everyone ready?” Freddie asked.
As the group got settled, Van programming the GPS, Kat realized how tired she was. Whether it was more the physical strain or the mental strain, she didn’t know. All she knew was that there was a long ride ahead of them. Her stomach clenched. It was a lot of time for Connor Lewis to do something he shouldn’t do. She just hoped they could stop him before someone else lost their life.
48
Connor opened the windows on the truck as soon as he got off the highway. He only had about another half hour before he got to the cabin. The Santa Ana winds started blowing again, darkness descending over the mountains. Very few people knew about the stash of cabins up near Santa Theresa. He smiled. The name was fitting. Theresa Walsh was part of the problem that needed to be solved. He thought Janet would appreciate the coincidence if she had been alive.
He turned onto a dirt road that appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as fast, putting on the truck’s fog lights to illuminate the ground as much as possible. Brush, trees and broken logs often littered the road. It was better to see them before they destroyed a tire.
He checked the time on his phone. With any luck, he’d have a few hours head start over whoever was looking for him. Even better would be if they weren’t able to get to him until the morning. The plan was to stay up all night. With the adrenaline coursing in his body, Connor doubted he’d be able to sleep.
One more turn onto a road that could barely be seen told him that he was nearly there. He remembered the first time he and Janet had come up to her family’s cabin. She told him there was something she wanted him to see. “Where are we going? he asked.
“You’ll see.”
After turns onto roads he couldn’t find without her help, t
hey arrived at sunset. Janet got out of the car, pulled a picnic basket out of the back. She spread a blanket on the ground, and they watched the sunset and then the stars unfurl before them. That was when he knew he wanted to spend his life with her.
The moment of joy he had thinking about her was pulled away by the reality that he was going to the cabin alone. It would be his last time.
49
Chief Ned Cleary wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead. It was three o’clock in the morning and he was on a conference call with California’s Governor and half of his staff. “I’m sorry, sir. I’ve just never seen anything like this before. We are completely overwhelmed.”
Ned heard the Governor clear his throat, “How many fires are we talking?”
“I’ve got nearly a million acres on fire as we speak.”
“Containment?”
“Ten percent. I’ve got twelve thousand homes that have already been destroyed, seventy-nine people dead in the last couple of hours and more than nine hundred missing. It’s a disaster, sir.”
There was silence on the phone for a moment. “Chief, call in the cavalry. I’m declaring a state of emergency. Save as many lives as you can.”
50
Kat and the team made good time up into the mountains. They arrived just after two o’clock in the morning but had gotten stalled, unable to find their way in the dark. They found a Park Ranger station and stopped there, hoping for help.
When they walked in, one park ranger was sitting with his feet up on the desk. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah. We need to find a cabin.”
After showing the ranger their ID, he shook his head. “I get you want to go there now, but there’s no way. Much of that is off an old logging trail. We don’t even attempt it in the dark.”
Yasmin pursed her lips. “This is an emergency.”
“Unless you have a helicopter, your best bet is to wait until morning. Even if you did, you’d have to pretty much rappel down to the place you want to find. Too steep to land.” The ranger shook his head. “Wish I could be of more help.” He pointed in the back. “Sun will be up in about four hours. You are welcome to use our bunk room until then. It’s small, but it does the trick.”
Kat looked at Yasmin. She was frowning. Clearly, Yasmin didn’t want to wait, but they had no choice. Freddie’s phone rang. Kat saw a look of concern on his face. He walked outside to take the call. The ranger showed the rest of them to the bunk room, and they put their gear down. Yasmin curled up on one of the beds, taking the lowest bunk on the left side of the room. She turned on her side, facing the wall, and without a word, went to sleep.
Kat knew she wasn’t going to be that lucky. She put her gear on the bunk above Yasmin’s and went back outside, worried about the call Freddie was on. She passed Van, who was having a cup of coffee with the ranger. As Kat looked for Freddie, she was sure she hadn’t seen that look on Freddie’s face before. When she opened the door, she could see his tall body silhouetted by a light overhead that brightened the parking lot, his shoulders hunched. She waited.
“Yes, sir. I understand. Just let me know what you need.” He ended the call.
“Everything okay?”
Freddie shook his head. “A rash of fires started a few hours ago. Chief is overwhelmed. They’ve got only ten percent containment.” Freddie lifted his head. “With the winds blowing, there’s no telling how bad it’s gonna get.” He looked back down at Kat. “The Governor has declared a state of emergency.” He licked his lips. “Kat, people are going to lose their lives tonight.”
“You think Connor is behind this?”
Freddie nodded. “This many fires starting at one time? Has to be him.”
51
By the time dawn arrived, a cloud of smoke covered the ranger station. The fire was coming up below them, crawling up the side of Santa Theresa. Many of the roads were already closed. Freddie had been on the phone for a good hour, trying to determine if they could leave. “We’re stuck either way. Roads below us are closed. Gotta go, but we need to know the fire is coming up the side of the mountain in record time right behind us.”
Yasmin, who had appeared out of the bunk room looking the same as when she went in, a new coat of lipstick on, looked at the group. “We need to stop him. If Connor Lewis is here, we can’t just sit and wait.”
The ranger, who had been nervously pacing behind the counter, looked at them. “Listen, I gotta get out of here.” He handed them a couple of radios. “We use channel five. Give me a call if you need anything. I’ll do what I can.”
They grabbed their gear and went out to the SUV, the ranger following, his keys jingling. He locked the door behind them and trotted to his pickup truck, slamming it into gear and throwing gravel back their direction as he escaped. The smell of smoke and the haze surrounding the area sent a choking feeling down into Kat’s lungs. “It’s now or never, people,” Freddie said.
Van sat in the front seat, using a map that the ranger had drawn for them. A mixture of a printed map from the station, plus black markered notes from the young man, showed the approximate location of the roads they’d need to take. It was all they had to go on. The ranger said with all the fires, the GPS wouldn’t work. The satellite feeds were blocked by the smoke.
Kat braced herself in the back of the SUV as they headed out on the barely graded roads. It was so smoky that Freddie turned the headlights on. Even in daylight, it was difficult to see where they were going. Yasmin had been on the phone with her team until the signal cut out. “This is not good. Signal is out. I think we’re on our own.”
Any hope Kat had that they could get help if they needed it evaporated. She felt a knot form in her gut. They were alone. From the look on Freddie’s face and his grip on the wheel, she knew the fire was progressing, chasing them. She gripped the side of her seat tighter as the SUV lurched forward.
“I think this is the first turn,” Van said, pointing to a large rock in front of what looked to be a turnoff. We’ve got about a mile on this road and then one more turn to get to the cabin.
“Hope Connor is actually here,” Freddie muttered, his knuckles white on the wheel.
Kat looked to her right. The side of the mountain dropped off below them, plumes of smoke rising in columns from below, the trees bending in the wind. She looked at the ground as the SUV made its way slowly forward. There was a lot of dry ground cover, fallen trees and brush. Unlike where she lived, there was no mandate to clear the areas to keep the fire away. If the fire made its way up the mountainside, it wouldn’t stop until it ran out of fuel. She swallowed, trying to get her heart to go back to where it was supposed to be, rather than lodged in her throat.
Picking their way along the dirt road took another twenty minutes. Kat glanced at Yasmin, who checked her phone on a regular basis. “No signal?” Kat asked.
“Nothing.” Yasmin turned back to look out her window.
A few minutes later, Van looked at the map. “Wait. I think we might have missed the last turn.”
The SUV stopped. Kat looked at Freddie and Van. They were hovering over the handmade map. If they couldn’t find their way to the cabin, they’d lose their chance to find Connor and maybe their lives.
52
Connor hadn’t slept inside the cabin, instead opting to bring a blanket out to the porch. He sat in the same rocking chair he’d sat in every time he visited with Janet’s family. He’d stayed up all night, using a satellite link to see if his program was working and make tweaks. If the people at Palm Coast Electric & Power were paying attention, they’d see their screens lit up like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
The final component in his program caused a surge that covered nearly the entire service area, blackout or no blackout. Since he discovered that passing power through groups of transformers worked better than just scattered ones, he’d designed a new program that would search out the most ideal locations for a surge with the best chances of starting a fire. From what he saw, it was working.
At first, he had sat on the porch in the darkness, wrapped in a blanket that he and Janet had cuddled under the first time they came to the cabin. He had his tablet in hand, watching the blue dots scattered all over the area, popping up like fireflies in the summer, one after another. His link gave him access to the news, too. He saw his picture on the local broadcasts as a “person of interest.” Whatever that meant. The news didn’t even say what he did, just that the FBI wanted to talk to him. Apparently, the idea he had control over the power system wasn’t something they wanted to let out of the bag.
He’d nodded off briefly at about four o’clock in the morning, waking to the scent of smoke. He smiled, got up from the chair and walked to the edge of the yard. The drop off was steep. It was something they had to be so careful of when Grace came to the cabin as a toddler. One wrong step and she would have been over the edge. Janet fixed that problem by buying a body harness for her that they could lash to themselves, taking turns following the precocious child as she examined the yard for bugs, animals and plants.
Over the cliff’s edge, Connor could see the trails of smoke rising as the fast-moving fire started picking up steam. He checked his watch and his tablet and sat back down, sipping on a cold bottle of water he’d brought from the refrigerator inside the house.
By five AM, the Governor of California had issued a state of emergency. Connor smiled.
53
Shortly after Ned’s call with the Governor, he sent a flash traffic message to fire departments all over the United States asking for help. “Massive wildfires. Need equipment and firefighters.”