The Burning Season

by Jeff Mariotte

  “If you’re convinced, by all means, arrest me,” Carrizoza said. “Of course, I’ll be out an hour after I’m booked. As you said, I have powerful friends, and plenty of resources at my disposal. But if you want to waste everybody’s time, then be my guest.”

  “We’re not here to waste time,” Ray said. “We thought we’d give you a warning. We’re on to you. If you lay a hand on one more person—” He had chosen the word hand intentionally, hoping to elicit some sort of reaction, but none came. Carrizoza stood with his arms crossed over his chest, the look on his face as calm as if he were watching a not particularly exciting chess game.

  “Frankly,” Carrizoza said, “I’m surprised that you would even bother yourselves over some illegals. Wouldn’t you rather be rid of them?”

  “Immigration status has nothing to do with it. Assault, kidnapping, and murder are crimes, whoever the victims are, and we don’t allow them in this city,” Vega said. “Am I clear on that?”

  “Crystal clear,” Carrizoza replied. “If we’re done, Erwin will show you the way out.”

  “We can find our own way.”

  “Nonsense, I insist.”

  Ray hadn’t expected the man to confess. He had wanted a look at him, though, and he had wanted to issue his warning, to at least try to make Carrizoza put his activities on hold while Ray continued gathering evidence. “Fine,” he said. He extended a hand, offering the bruiser named Erwin the opportunity to lead.

  Erwin was the taller of the pair by a couple of inches, and Ray estimated his weight at somewhere more than 270 pounds. He was one of those guys who looked like he could barely clap his hands, because the muscles of his arms and chest would get in his way. He had a zigzag pattern shaved into his scalp, and what looked like a fairly fresh scrape under his left eye. “Paper cut?” Ray asked.

  Erwin grunted something unintelligible and opened the door. Ray figured Carrizoza didn’t keep him around for his scintillating conversation. When Erwin released the door, Ray noted a damp film where the man had clutched it. Apparently the thug suffered from palmar hyperhidrosis, more commonly known as sweaty palms. The affliction was not uncommon, and it was worse when the subject was under some sort of severe stress. Probably not a good sign for hired muscle—overbearing stress might cause him to pull a gun too readily, and assuming he could hang onto it, he could do some damage. Ray greatly preferred thugs to be relaxed and easygoing, if he had to deal with them at all.

  Passing through the club, they were blocked by a dancer draped over a customer’s chair, back arched, her exposed rear and legs extending into the pathway between tables. Erwin laid a meaty paw on the curve of her back, and she straightened with a giggle. “Oh, it’s you, Erwin,” she said, moving aside to let the big man pass.

  She was starting to turn her attention back to the seated customer when Ray reached her. “Excuse me, miss,” he said.

  As if she smelled money, she swiveled toward him, giving him a slyly seductive smile and a sensual shimmy. “Something I can do for you? You want a private dance? I’m very good in private.”

  “I’ll just bet you are,” Ray said. “But actually, I was wondering if I could scrape off a little of your body glitter. It’s got nothing to do with you, I’m just trying to have a basis for comparison back at the crime lab.”

  “Crime lab? Sounds sexy.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving.”

  “Still, it’s like, I’ll be evidence or something. Scrape away. But when you come back and you’re off duty, you have to let me dance for you.”

  “It’s a deal,” Ray said, knowing that when he was off duty, no force on Earth could drag him back through that front door.

  The dancer squeezed her arms together to pop substantial breasts out even more. “Where do you want to scrape from?”

  “Your back, if that’s all right.”

  She let out a sigh. “You are just no fun.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “So show me.”

  “Not just now.” Since she wasn’t turning, he moved around her, tore two clean sheets of paper from his notepad, and used one to scrape glitter from the center of her back onto the other. That one he sealed with a druggist fold.

  “Thank you,” he said. “What’s your name? Your real one, not your stage name. For evidentiary purposes.”

  She whispered it to him, and he jotted it down in the book. “Now that you know that, are you going to stalk me?” She sounded hopeful.

  “You never know, do you?”

  Vega was waiting with Erwin, a dozen paces ahead. They had made it that far before realizing that Ray had stopped. Most of the patrons sitting nearby were watching Ray instead of the stage, and Vega and Erwin’s gazes were locked on him. “What was that about?” Vega asked when Ray caught up.

  “I needed a glitter sample, to match with what we already have,” Ray said. He didn’t finish his thought until they were out in the parking lot, and Erwin had closed the door. “And I wanted it from her, from the spot on her back that Erwin touched, in case I could get some touch DNA off it. His hands are sweating rivers. The sample’s minuscule, but it’s still possible.”

  “You are an evil genius,” Vega said. “I saw you writing in your notebook, thought maybe you were getting her number.”

  “She thought the same thing,” Ray admitted. “I guess I’ll have to disappoint the both of you.”

  Out in the city, Brass assured Catherine, every cop on duty was looking for the Kirklands. There were helicopters in the air, cruisers at major intersections and freeway on-ramps. Las Vegas-McCarran International Airport swarmed with uniforms, as did bus and train stations. The father and son scam artists—and possibly murderers—would not, Brass swore, make it out of Las Vegas.

  That wasn’t good enough.

  They were obviously plenty dangerous in Las Vegas. They had killed Alec Watson, who hadn’t been Catherine’s favorite person in the world, but at least had hoped to ratchet down the rhetoric embraced by his fellow activists. Worse, they’d killed one cop and injured another—men whose only transgression had been enforcing society’s laws.

  Sitting at her desk, she felt powerless. She hated that. She wanted something she could examine, put under a microscope, test with chemicals. Some reagent that would turn red if the Kirklands were within a five-mile radius. This kind of police work was outside her area of expertise. This was grunt work, relying more on sheer numbers of officers in the street than a fancy education and costly instrumentation.

  She didn’t know enough about the suspects to even speculate on where they might go. They were from Georgia, originally. Nevada was a long way from the deep South. They did have local allies, though, and—

  “Archie!” she shouted before she had even left her desk. “Archie!”

  Archie Johnson wasn’t the only tech geek in the lab, but he was the best. Catherine stopped shouting and hurried to his lab, where she found him hunched over a monitor.

  “Whatever you’re doing, stop,” she said. “This is priority number one, as of right now.”

  “What is, Catherine?”

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard about these Free Citizen people putting a lien on my house—”

  “Just rumors, nothing concrete.”

  “—well, it’s bogus. The point is, apparently this is a regular stunt for them.”

  “Okay.”

  “And sometimes it works. They actually manage to seize property, because the real owners don’t have the knowledge or the wherewithal to fight back.”

  A trace of a smile played about his lips. “So you want me to find those properties.”

  “That’s right. Any property the Free Citizens or their members own here in town. The Kirklands are in the wind. I think they’ve gone to ground someplace, and I’m guessing it’s with supporters.”

  “Makes sense,” Archie said. “Safer than a hotel, when you’re on the lam.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It could take a while.” />
  “We don’t have a while, Archie. We need this now. Sooner.”

  “I’m on it,” he said. With the slightest wiggle of his shoulders, he indicated that he was not to be disturbed. Catherine left him with his computer. If anyone could pull the information together quickly, he was the one.

  With so much at stake, it was hard to put her trust in anyone. But she was part of a team, and trust, as much as anything else, was the key to teamwork. She glanced back once, then left Archie to do his job.

  28

  IN THE GENTLE night breeze, dry burned branches clattered together like the bones of skeletons on the march. The streets were dark; those families that had been able to return had done so, but others had gone back down the mountain for the night. Empty homes, and the shells of structures that had not survived, loomed against scorched hills, black on black. Here and there, a light burned in a window.

  Sara and Nick walked quietly, side by side, studying the houses and the windows. Sara wondered about the people inside. The fact that they lived on a mountain separated them from most. The nation had changed; over these past few years the population had shifted to one that predominantly lived in urban areas.

  That left people like these—people who chose to live away from cities, closer to the land—pioneers, of a sort. They clung to old ways, perhaps, not pre-industrial but not quite contemporary, either, in spite of their satellite dishes and cell phone towers. She thought that at their cores, they might have more in common with the mountain’s earliest inhabitants than with the people crowding Las Vegas.

  More in common with her, as well. Once she had escaped—and that’s how she thought of it, as a form of liberation from the cage she had grown up in—from her childhood home, she had lived in cities. San Francisco, Cambridge, Las Vegas. She thought it was her decision to do so, only later coming to realize that it was less conscious choice than reaction. She felt safest surrounded by faceless masses. But when it came to interacting with people one-on-one, she was out of her depths. It was easier to look at the lifeless face of a murder victim than to make small talk at the mailbox with an upstairs neighbor.

  When she had left Las Vegas, fleeing, once again, she accepted, she took to the jungles of Costa Rica. There she could be alone with the animals and plants. They asked little and gave much in return.

  It took Grissom to draw her out of that, to make her feel that she had the strength, once again, to face city life. Looking at these homes, though, surrounded by tall trees, cut off from the scars a city left on the land, an uncomfortable tightness filled her chest. She recognized it as envy, and more—as the urge to shake off the bonds of city life one more time. Even the campers down the hill, with their tents and tarps and fire ring, were living a life she would more willingly embrace than the miles and miles of concrete, the chuff and chatter of millions of souls, the fumes of their automobiles and the profligacy of their water use, the mess they made of their own lives and the devastation they visited upon others.

  If she did walk away from Las Vegas, she knew it would be the last time. She wouldn’t return again. She couldn’t. If she turned her back on what people liked to call “civilization,” she would do so for keeps. Grissom could join her in the woods or in the jungle, but except for his, she would be okay if she never saw another human face. She wouldn’t even take a mirror.

  “It’s peaceful up here,” Nick said, as if reading her mind. He was like that, extraordinarily perceptive, even when he didn’t recognize it in himself. He carried a field kit, she only a flashlight. “In the dark, if it wasn’t for the smell, you wouldn’t even know there had been a fire.”

  “The smell and the sound,” Sara countered. “A living forest makes a shushing noise in even the slightest breeze, like it’s reminding you to slow down, step lightly, to be one with the trees. This one, though . . . it sounds dead. Brittle and broken.”

  “It’ll come back, though.”

  “Oh, sure. Fire’s a natural part of a forest’s life. Fire’s good for it, in the long run. If it weren’t for all these people and houses, a big fire would be winwin.”

  “It releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere, though. The trees store it, but fire lets it out.”

  Sara nodded. “That’s true. But again, if it weren’t for all the people—not just on the mountain, but everywhere—that much carbon wouldn’t be a problem. Face it, Nick, nature has its systems. We’re the ones who get in the way.”

  “If it wasn’t for people causing problems, we’d be unemployed.”

  “I don’t know about that. If people stopped hurting each other, stopped committing crimes tomorrow, Nicky, wouldn’t you be okay as . . . I don’t know, a cobbler? Maybe a baker? Nick’s Cupcakes, I can see it now.”

  “I could find something, I guess.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  “Not gonna happen, though.”

  “You’re right.” Sadness threatened to overwhelm her as she said it, to wrap over her face like a soaked blanket, smothering her. She saw it coming, though, and determined to fight it off. “You’re right, that’s not likely to happen.”

  “Hey, Sara.” Nick’s tone had changed, and he touched her left arm. “Take a look.”

  She followed his pointing hand, and saw a window with a three-pronged candelabrum in it, points of light flickering above. “Candles.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let’s pay a visit. You know whose place that is?” She couldn’t see much of it in the dark. A covered walkway angled toward the front door, and the place beyond looked like a glorified cabin, knotty pine walls with a base of river rocks, rounded and smooth. It was two stories tall. Whether it had survived the fire intact, she was unable to determine. “I have no idea.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Something seemed strange to Sara, and the closer they came to the house, the stranger it appeared. Instead of approaching the door, she stepped into the yard—a dirt patch covered in pine needles, still muddy from water sprayed to hold the fire back—and walked to the window. She returned to Nick’s side, shaking her head. “It’s electric,” she said. “The ‘candles’ are those flickering light bulbs.”

  “They might have real candles, too,” Nick suggested.

  “Any house might have some candles in it. Most probably have at least one or two. But anyone who would put an electric candle in a window is probably the least likely to be a big user of real candles—it’s a whole different mindset.”

  “You’re right, Sara. Guess I’m grasping at straws.”

  “When you’ve got so little to go on, straws start to look pretty good.”

  They continued down the street. “We need something more substantial,” Nick said as they approached the next property. “One partial footprint and a few half-burned matches aren’t much of a case.”

  “The fire didn’t help, and neither did the fire-fighting effort. But those things and the chemical composition of the wax will seal a case, once we’ve got a suspect,” Sara reminded him.

  She glanced at Nick’s profile as he nodded his agreement. From there, her gaze traveled past him, to a house set back in the trees, well off the road.

  From a downstairs window came a warm but unsteady golden glow.

  “Nick, that looks like candlelight.” She pointed out the house.

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “It’s too irregular to be another electric,” she said. They crossed the street and started up an unpaved driveway. The fire had not come near the house, and the pines were gathered thickly around it, shielding most of it from the road. The house was built against the hill, with stilts supporting a front porch. Firewood was stacked between the stilts. They were lucky that hadn’t ignited, Sara thought. Like the last house, it was a two-story, cabin-style job. Next to the house was an open carport, offering shelter to a Honda Insight hybrid.

  “Now this looks like a candle lover’s place,” Nick said, climbing the wooden steps to the porch and front door. “Bet they’
ve got granola in the pantry, too.”

  “They just might.”

  Sara looked at her watch as she knocked on the door. Almost ten. Late to go visiting, but she couldn’t worry about manners. If the arsonist lived here, he or she had certainly not taken etiquette into account.

  She and Nick waited almost a minute. She was about to knock again when a male voice called through the door. “Who’s there?”

  “Las Vegas Crime Lab,” she said. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Just a moment!”

  They heard rustling, rushing footsteps, the flush of a toilet. Nick and Sara locked gazes. Nick’s right eyebrow elevated, his expression bemused and quizzical at the same time. “Flushing a stash?” he asked.

  “Could be.”

  When the door opened, the lingering aroma of pot, sweet and woody, confirmed his suspicion. Another smell almost overpowered it—sandalwood, Sara thought. Incense, burned to disguise the marijuana smell. She was reminded of college days. “Definitely,” Nick said softly.

  A man stood in the doorway, effectively blocking it. He was in his fifties, Sara guessed, his hair gray and curly. He wore wire-rim glasses with thick lenses, making his eyes appear small and far away. A black long-sleeved T-shirt did little to hide a pronounced paunch.

  Behind him was a woman of about the same age, her hair long and straight, tucked behind her right ear but loose over the left. She had on a brown corduroy shirt with a denim collar, blue jeans, and sandals. The man’s expression was curious but without guile; hers was closed-off and suspicious.

  “Is there something we can do for you?” the man asked. “You’re with the sheriff’s department?”

  “We’re with the crime lab,” Sara said again.

  “You’re the ones who are here about the fire?” the woman asked.

  “That’s right, ma’am,” Nick said.

  “We know nothing about that except it was a tragedy. We’re thankful our home was spared.”