The Burning Season

by Jeff Mariotte

  “What’s your name?” Nick asked.

  “Kevin.”

  “Kevin what?”

  “Cox.”

  “You have any idea how the fire started, Kevin?”

  Kevin wiggled his shoulders. “I don’t know. Lightning?”

  “There hasn’t been a storm up here in more than a month,” Nick said.

  Kevin gave another shrug, sucked on his smoke. The end glowed bright orange.

  “Do you know anything about those people who were camping down the hill there?” Sara asked. “The ones who’ve been there for a couple of months?”

  “Seen ’em a few times.”

  “That’s not really an answer.”

  Kevin took another king drag on the cigarette. “Best I can do. Seen ’em, don’t know ’em.”

  “Do you know where they went, after the fire started?” Sara asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, Kevin,” Nick said. “You think of anything that might help us, you let us know. Think you can do that?”

  Kevin dropped the cigarette, half-smoked, to the ground. “Guess so.” As if just realizing that the CSIs were paying attention, he pressed his hiking boot onto the cigarette, crushing it into the ground with an exaggerated motion. When he had thoroughly pulverized it, he moved his foot and examined his work. “It’s out.”

  “That’s good,” Sara said. “Living up here, you should make sure they all are.”

  She and Nick left Kevin staring over the edge, and went toward the largest knot of local residents. Harley Givens was there with his shotgun resting against his shoulder. There were about twenty-five people in all, Nick judged. One woman sat on the ground near the group, her face buried in her hands, softly weeping. Others had marks on their faces where tears had tracked through dust or ash. All around were grim expressions and clenched fists. Even those who had fared the best had little reason to celebrate.

  “You ask me,” Givens was saying, “it’s those damn hippies. Cops wouldn’t let me hunt ’em down.”

  “We’re not cops,” Nick interrupted. “We’re CSIs. Crime scene investigators.”

  “Whatever,” Givens shot back. “You work for the cops. And you’re way out of your jurisdiction.”

  “Gee, Nick,” Sara said. “Do you suppose everyone we meet up here will remind us of that?”

  “We’re on special assignment for the state attorney general’s office,” Nick explained. “So there are no jurisdictional issues with us being here.”

  “Well, I hope they were burned to a crisp,” Givens said. “There a law against that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Harley’s right,” another man said. He was thin and reedy as a sapling, tanned to a tree bark-brown, and he wore white tennis shorts, a T-shirt, and a gray cardigan. “Just about all of us have had some sort of run-in with that pair.”

  “What kind of run-ins?” Sara asked.

  “I caught ’em using my hot tub one night,” the thin man replied. “Janey over there had ’em picking from one of her fruit trees a couple months ago.”

  “And someone stole my bicycle,” another resident added. “A ten-speed. Never saw it again.”

  “I didn’t see a bike down at the campsite,” Nick said. “Anybody else ever see them with it?”

  “Maybe they sold it in the city.”

  “The thing is,” the thin man went on, “they just plain don’t belong here. I mean, how is it right? We pay hefty mortgages to live here, and they come along and mooch off the land, steal from us.”

  “I see your point, Mr.—” Sara said.

  “Collin Gardner.” He pointed to a house that was mostly intact, except for a black patch in the shake roof. Nick was pretty sure the roof was a goner, and it would have to be replaced before winter came along. “That’s my place there.”

  “I think I understand how you feel, Mr. Gardner,” Sara said. “But if you had complaints about them, I’m sure there are appropriate mechanisms for that around here. You could have called the sheriff if you suspected them of crimes.”

  “We’re not all mountain folk,” Givens said. “Some of us are, I am, others retired up here. We’re from all over. But we all got something in common with mountain folk. We see a problem and we want to handle it ourselves.”

  “I did call the sheriff,” the woman Gardner had called Janey said. “He said if I hadn’t seen anyone at the fruit trees, how did I know it wasn’t birds, or raccoons?”

  That seemed like a legitimate question to Nick, but he decided to let it lie.

  “I’d like to get my hands on those two,” Gardner said. “Show them how we feel about them around here.”

  Some of the others shouted their support for his attitude. The whole scene made Nick uncomfortable, as mobs promising frontier justice always did. He supposed that most of the neighbors genuinely believed the campers had started the fire, but he had serious doubts. For one thing, it appeared that they had still been at their campsite after the fire started, and had fled as it came toward them. If they had started it, they wouldn’t have done so in a place where it was sure to burn directly toward their camp. And they wouldn’t have sat there waiting for it.

  Given the nature of the complaints, he thought it was much more likely that someone else had started it to burn them out. They seemed to have a good thing going, and little motivation to ruin it. If anything, the campers seemed more like targets to Nick than villains. He knew he had to keep an open mind, to let the evidence dictate the theories, but so far, the idea that the campers were at fault seemed a stretch.

  They were still standing there, one person expressing an opinion, then another, sometimes talking over one another, when a forest-green Suburban pulled into a driveway. A woman got out from behind the wheel with a ferocious look on her face. “Mrs. Fontaine,” someone said. “I’m so sorry about Ty.”

  Nick recognized the name—Marc Fontaine had been the fire captain who had died.

  “Are you okay, Marla?” someone else asked. “Do you need anything?”

  Marla Fontaine ignored the words of concern. She strode directly to where Givens stood, and tilted her face toward his. She was about eight inches shorter, but she didn’t look like someone to take lightly. “This is your fault, Harley Givens,” she said. “You and Marc, you were always at odds. He tried and he tried to get you to cut back the brush, the trees, to build in defensible space around your homes.” She swept her arms in a circle, encompassing the whole gathering. “All of you. Some were worse than others.” She poked a finger toward Givens. “But Harley was worst of all. Telling Ty that his advice was unwelcome and unneeded. Calling him a worrywart. A little girl, isn’t that what you said last time? That he sounded just like a little girl worried about the boogeyman in the closet. You didn’t like it because he reported you a time or two, and you had to pay some fines. If you had worried a little more and argued a little less, he might still be here.”

  “Now, look, Marla,” Givens began. “I’m sorry as hell for your loss. We all are.”

  “That’s right!” someone else added.

  “But you got no call to be throwing blame around,” Givens continued. “Hell, a lot of wildfires are started by contract firefighters, just to make sure they got work coming in. I’m not saying that’s the case here, but for all I know . . . anyhow, I’m just saying that until you know all the facts you shouldn’t be throwing around accusations.”

  Marla’s face went a shade of crimson, and she slapped Givens across the face, her hand moving faster than he could react to. The slap was as loud as a rifle shot in the sudden silence. “You know full well Ty never did such a thing,” she snapped.

  “Everybody take a step back,” Sara said. She waded into the crowd, shouldering her way between Marla Fontaine and Harley Givens. “Tensions are high right now, and there’s a lot of work to be done rebuilding, so let’s not make things any harder than they have to be. Mrs. Fontaine, I am so sorry for your loss, believe me. If I were you, I would go home and rem
ember the good things about your husband, and not let anyone around here aggravate you for a while.”

  “That,” Marla said, “sounds like excellent advice. Thank you.”

  “We’re with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. Do you mind if we talk to you for a minute?”

  “No, that would be fine.”

  She let Sara steer her away from the crowd. Nick held his ground a moment, letting his presence serve as a reminder that Marla Fontaine was not to be messed with, then stepped to the side to join the huddle.

  “Some of those people are perfectly nice,” Marla was saying. “But that Givens man just peeves me so. He’s lived up here for a long time, decades, so the others look to him, as if he were the ultimate fount of knowledge. There’s a way that mountain people are—I suppose country people, pioneers of any sort, really. They like to do things their own way, and they don’t like anyone coming along and telling them differently.”

  “I’m familiar with the syndrome,” Sara said.

  “I’m sure. Anyway, that’s Harley in a nutshell. When he moved up here, the concern about wild-land-urban interface fires didn’t really exist. Hardly anybody lived in the danger area, and it was a different time, with different standards. In those days, if a forest fire burned your house, you were just out of luck. Now those transition zones are so crowded, developments pushing right up to the edge of the wilderness, and everybody expects that their homes will be just as safe as if they were in a suburban neighborhood somewhere near the city, with underground pipelines and functional hydrants. People like Harley encourage the others to ignore the warnings that Marc made, that everyone familiar with the danger makes. He tells them that there’s never been a bad fire on this part of the mountain. Does that mean there never will be? Of course not. It just means when it does come, it’s going to be a doozy. And as you’ve seen, when it does come, they aren’t prepared for it.” She waved a hand at the house she had parked in front of. It looked like a textbook example of the principles she had described, and the fire hadn’t so much as skinned it. “We were, thank goodness, and that saved our home. But it didn’t save my husband.”

  Her eyes were tearing up as she spoke. “We’re very sorry,” Nick said, although he knew Sara had just said it a few minutes ago. Sometimes it couldn’t be repeated enough.

  “Thank you. Anyway, I haven’t any proof or anything like that, but that man has been such a thorn in our sides, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he started the fire to get back at Marc.”

  “Get back at him for what?”

  “There are laws about maintaining one’s property, so that it doesn’t become a danger to others. Ty turned Harley in recently—again. Harley will be stuck with a hefty fine. His neighbors could sue him, if they can prove that his willful neglect harmed their homes. But he knew about the report and the fine, and I think he was so angry with Ty that he could have started the fire, just out of pure meanness. Or spite. Or maybe he thought he could frame Marc for it.”

  “That’s a very serious accusation, ma’am,” Nick said.

  “I’m well aware. It’s what I believe. It may or may not be true, but I feel in my heart that it is.”

  “We’ll certainly take it into consideration,” Sara promised.

  “That’s all I can ask for. Thank you for your time.”

  She turned on her heel and walked past her Suburban. At her front door, she fumbled momentarily with the keys, then managed to open it. Once inside, she tossed a final, bitter look at the gathering, then slammed the door. Nick hoped she didn’t have a shotgun handy.

  “That could have been quite a scene,” Nick said later, as he and Sara were starting back down the hill. “You handled it well.”

  “I just didn’t want to see it escalate,” Sara said. “Sometimes a slap can turn into a brawl.”

  “I hear you. What do you think about her theory?”

  “I think,” Sara said, “that we’ll have to check it out. It’s just a gut suspicion—but so far, my gut thinks there might be something to it.”

  14

  RAY FOUND HIMSELF back at Lucia Navarre’s house sooner than he had expected.

  The DNA lab had been able to get to the hairs he’d brought back almost immediately. They didn’t have time to run enough tests to narrow down the identity of the donors—if they were even in the system—but they did manage to discover one significant fact.

  Hair that had been yanked from a head was often missing the follicle, which was the best source of nuclear DNA. But the shaft itself contained mitochondrial DNA, passed down from the mother. And the mitochondrial DNA located in the two distinct hair samples Ray had found in Lucia’s brush showed that the people to whom those hairs had been attached had the same mother.

  She answered the door almost immediately. “You again?”

  “Me again,” Ray said. “Sorry to trouble you so soon, Ms. Navarre, but I’m afraid that you weren’t straight with me last time.”

  “What do you mean? I told you every—”

  Ray cut her off. “You didn’t tell me that your brother either lives here or stays here sometimes.”

  “What brother?”

  “The one whose hairs were in the hairbrush in your bathroom.”

  “You said you were taking my hairs.”

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t specific about which hairs I was taking. But I did ask your permission, and you granted it.”

  “Not for that.”

  “It’s done,” Ray said. “The point is, you weren’t honest with me. If Ruben Solis is your brother, then you’ve got to trust me, because he could be in a great deal of danger.”

  She eyed him for several long moments. “How do I know? That I can trust you, like you say?”

  “You don’t have much choice,” Ray said. “I could turn you over to the LVPD or Immigration.”

  She visibly flinched when he mentioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her reaction did not come as a surprise. “I haven’t . . . I’m not . . .”

  But Lucia couldn’t finish her sentence. She sucked in a couple of deep breaths and then backed away from the door a few steps, turned her back to Ray, and buried her face in her hands. Ray followed her inside and closed the door.

  “I’m really not here to make your life difficult,” he promised her. “I just want to find Ruben, before it’s too late. If you come clean with me, I’ll do everything I can to help you both. That’s all I can offer you.”

  Without looking back, she led Ray into her tiny living room. She collapsed onto a plaid fabric-covered chair with arms so worn Ray could see the wood beneath the cover. Ray stepped behind a sofa mostly occupied by two big bags of clothing that had probably recently come in from a Laundromat, and studied the bookcase full of odd little art pieces. Up close, he could see that the figures had distinctive personalities: one redheaded woman was playing an accordion made of folded paper, with a painted smile on her face. In another, a heavyset man made from a crushed soda can drooped in a chair while wire children scampered around him.

  There were grooves in the floor of each box, which he hadn’t noticed before. “Do these figures move?” he asked.

  “There’s a key in the back,” she said. “You wind it up.”

  “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  He took the one with the big, sad man off the shelf. The key in the back looked like something from a music box. When he wound it, he felt tension build. He released the key, and the wire children circled around the aluminum can man in a stuttering dance.

  “That’s impressive,” he said. He looked at the others, probably thirty in all, and they all had similar tracks for the figures to move on. “Did you make these?”

  “Ruben did.”

  “He’s very skilled.” He almost added “with his hands,” but he caught himself in time. He put the box back on the shelf. A stray thought flitted through his mind—that someone who could make these could also construct a bomb. But there was no earthly reason to link this case to the atta
ck on Dennis Daniels.

  Lucia breathed in and looked toward the ceiling. She was afraid of something, but was it him? Afraid for Ruben? Or just afraid in general, living with perpetual fear, like many undocumented people? “All right,” she said. “It’s true. I don’t have any papers. Only the thing is, I’ve lived here all my life, almost. Ruben, too. Our mother brought us here when I was, like, four and Ruben was just a baby. Then she got busted and deported. She left us here so we’d have a chance for a better life. She was going to come back again, but before she could, she got sick. She died down there, and my aunt Esmerelda raised us here. She couldn’t get us papers because she wasn’t a parent or a legal guardian, but she took care of us like she was.

  “I finished high school, and went to community college. I got an accounting degree, and I figured there would be a career for someone like me, who was smart and ambitious. A country as big and rich and wonderful as the U.S. should have room in it for me, shouldn’t it?”

  “It seems like it should,” he said.

  “Seems like. But I work as a maid for a few families that don’t have much more money than me. Enough to hire someone to clean their houses, but not, like, rich people. I have more education than most of my clients. But I can’t use my degree, because none of the big companies want to hire me.”

  “You are undocumented,” Ray reminded her. “That’s always going to be a problem for legitimate employers. I’d think there would always be a place for a skilled accountant, but that’s a significant strike against you.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She came across as angry but resigned. “Still, it’s better living here, even this way, than going to Mexico. My mother was the only family I had down there, and Esmerelda was her only sister. I would be lost there.”

  “What about Ruben?” Ray asked.

  “Same goes for him. He wasn’t even two yet when we came here. He doesn’t remember anything about Mexico. He just wanted to build his boxes, and now there’s an art gallery at the Marrakech that wants to sell them. They sent Ruben a contract. But it came this week, and he hasn’t been here to sign it.”