by Nora Roberts
the crackle and snap. Then the whoosh of air and flame as that fire began to breathe.
A thing of beauty. Dazzling, dangerous, destructive.
So beautiful and fierce, and personal, when started with your own hands. Never realized, never knew.
It would purge. Erase her. Send her to hell. She belonged there. The animals wouldn’t get her, tear at her as the dogs had torn at Jezebel. But she’d earned hell.
No more harm, no more threat. No more. In the fire, she would cease to be.
Watching it take her brought a horrible thrill, a bright tingle of unexpected excitement. Power tasted. No tears, no regrets—not anymore.
That thrill, and the rising voice of the fire, followed down the trail while smoke began to climb toward the shimmering moon.
14
For the second time Rowan woke curled up to Gull with her head on his shoulder. This time she wondered how the hell he could sleep with her weight pressing on him.
Then she wondered, since she was shoehorned into the narrow bed with him, why the hell she wasn’t taking advantage of it. She bit his earlobe as her hand trailed down his chest. As she’d expected, she found him already primed.
“I’d’ve put money on it,” she murmured.
“I like your hand on it better.”
“Now this . . .” She swung a leg over him, taking him in slowly. Slowly until she sheathed him in the warm and the wet. “This is what I call efficient.”
Thinking there was no finer way to greet the morning, he got a firm grip on her hips. “A plus.”
When she bowed back, the sun slanting light and shadow over her body, casting diamonds through her crown of hair, a snippet of Tennyson flitted through his mind.
A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair.
She was that, in that moment, and in that moment took command of his romantic heart.
His grip gentled to a caress. And she began to move, undulating over him in a slow, fluid rhythm. Sensation spooled through him, unwinding a lovely, lazy delight.
Her eyes closed, her hands stroked up her own body, inciting them both.
Through the bars of light, the building beauty, he reached for her. He thought they could drift like this, leisurely awakening body, blood, heart, forever.
The siren screamed.
“Shit!” Her eyes popped open.
“Give me a fucking break.” He held on to her for one frustrating moment, then they broke apart to scramble for clothes.
“You did this,” she accused him. “You called it last night with that damn efficiency crack.”
“Ten minutes more, it would’ve been worth it.”
Instead, in ten minutes they suited up in the ready room.
“Spotted smoke at first light.” L.B. gave the outline. “Lolo National Forest, between Grave Creek and Lolo Pass. It’s fully active on the south slope above Lolo Creek. Conditions dry. Rowan, I want you in as fire boss; Gibbons, you’re on the line.”
The ground thundered as the tanker began to roll with the first load of mud.
The minute she boarded the jump ship, Rowan pulled out the egg sandwich and Coke she’d stuck in pockets. She ate and drank while she coordinated with the pilot, the spotter.
“There she is.” She pressed her face to the window. “And, damn, she’s frisky this morning.”
A hundred acres, maybe a hundred and twenty, she estimated, already fully active in some of the most primitive and pristine areas of Lolo. Lewis and Clark had traveled there, and now the fire wanted it for breakfast.
Here we come, she thought, and guarded her reserves as wind rushed in through the open door.
She felt fresh and fueled and ready—and couldn’t deny the ride down was beautiful. She checked on Gull, shot him a huge grin. “It’s not sex, but it doesn’t suck,” she shouted.
She heard his laugh, understood exactly what ran through him. It ran through her, free and strong into the sky, the smoke, and down to the soft landing on a sweet little meadow.
Once the unit and the paracargo hit the ground, she strategized with Gibbons. She decided to do a recon up the right flank while the crew headed in to start the line.
She traveled at a trot, gauging the area, the wind, and keeping twenty yards off the flank as the fire burned hot. She heard the head calling in that grumbling, greedy roar as it tossed spot fires into the unburned majesty of forest.
Not going to have it, she thought, using her Pulaski and her bladder pump to smother the spots as she went. It wants to run, wants to feed. She smelled the sharp resin as trees burned, heard their crackling cries, felt the air tremble with the power already unleashed. Smoke spiraled up where spitting embers met dry ground.
She yanked out her radio. “She wants to run, and she’s fast, L.B. She’s fast. We need another load of mud on the head, and another down the right flank. She’s throwing a lot of spots along that line.”
“Copy that. Are you clear?”
“I will be.” She kept moving, away from a spot that ate ground the size of a tennis court. “We need to contain these spots now, L.B. We’re at critical. Gibbons is on the line, southwest, and I’m doubling back.”
“Stay clear. We’ve got another load of jumpers on alert. Say the word and we’ll send them in.”
“Copy that. Let me finish this recon, check in with Gibbons.”
“Tankers on the way. Don’t get slimed, Swede.”
“I’m clear,” she repeated. “And I’m out.”
She ran, charging her way down as she checked in with Gibbons, making for the trail where Lewis and Clark had once traveled. At the roar behind her, she cursed, ran through the falling embers, the missiles of burning pinecones hurled by the blasting wind of a blowup. When the ground shook under her feet, she charged through the heart of the fire.
Safer inside it, she thought while smoke gushed through the lick of orange flames.
In the black she took a moment to pull out her compass and get her bearings, to plot the next moves. Gibbons would have sent the crew up the ridge on attack, she thought, and then—
She nearly ran over it. Instinct and atavistic horror stumbled her back three paces from the charred and blackened remains of what had been human. It lay, the crisp bones of its arms and legs curled in. Contracted by the heat, she knew that, but in that terrible moment it seemed as if the dead or dying had tried to tuck into a ball the fire might overlook.
Her fingers felt numb when she pulled out her radio. “Base.”
“Base here, come back, Swede.”
“I’ve got a body.”
“Say again?”
“I’m maybe ten yards from the Lobo Trail, near the southeast switchback, in the black. There’s a body, L.B.” She blew out a breath. “It’s crisp.”
“Ah, Christ. Copy that. Are you safe there?”
“Yeah. I’m in the black. I’m clear.”
“Hold there. I’ll contact the Forest Service, then get back to you.”
“L.B.” She rubbed her fingers between her eyebrows. “I can’t tell for sure, but the ground under and around the remains, the pattern of the burn . . . Hell, I think maybe somebody lit him—her—up. And there’s . . . I don’t know, but the angle of the head. It looks like the neck’s broken.”
“Sweet Jesus. Don’t touch anything. Do you copy, Rowan? Don’t touch anything.”
“Believe me, I won’t. I’ll radio Gibbons, give him a SITREP. Jesus, L.B., I think it’s a woman or a kid. The size . . .”
“Hang in, Rowan. I’ll come back.”
“Copy that. Out.”
She steeled herself. She’d seen burned bodies before. She’d seen Jim, she thought, when they’d finally recovered his remains. But she’d never stumbled over one, alone, in the middle of an operation.
So she took a breath, then radioed Gibbons.
It took her more than an hour and a half to get back to her crew, after holding her position, and guiding two rangers in. She welcomed the heat, the smoke,
the battle after her vigil with the dead.
As she’d expected, Gibbons had the crew up the ridge, and the line held.
“Holy shit, Ro.” Gibbons swiped a forearm over his blackened face. “You okay?”
The time, the vigil, the hard reality of giving a statement hadn’t completely settled the raw sickness in her belly. “I’m a lot better than whoever’s back there. The rangers are down there now, and a Special Agent Somebody’s coming in. And an arson guy.”
“Arson.”
“It might be this fire was deliberately set, to cover up murder.” Because it felt as if it squeezed her skull, she shifted her helmet—but it did nothing to relieve the steady throbbing.
“They don’t know yet,” she told him as he cursed. “Maybe it was some dumb kid messing around, but it looked to me like that could’ve been the point of origin. Putting the fire down’s first priority. The feds’ll handle the other. Where do you want me?”
“You know you can pack out, Ro. Nobody’ll blame you.”
“Let’s finish this.”
She worked the saw line, while another part of the crew reinforced the scratch lines riding up toward the head. A fresher crew of jumpers attacked the other flank, down toward the tail.
Countless times during the hours on the line, she pulled off to radio the other crew for progress, updated base, consulted with Gibbons.
A few more hours to finish her off and mop up, she thought, and the crew would sleep in beds tonight.
“What’s up?” Gull stopped by her side. “There are rumors up and down the line something is, and you’re the source.”
She started to brush him off, but he looked her dead in the eye.
“You can tell me now or tell me later. You might as well get it done.”
She’d shared her body with him, she reminded herself, and her bed. “We’ve got her caged. If Gibbons can spare you, you can come with me to scout out smokes.”
Cleared, they moved away from the line. Rowan beat out a spot the size of a basketball, moved on.
And told him.
“You think the person was murdered, and whoever did it started the fire to try to cover it up?”
“I can’t know.” But her gut, roiling still, told her differently.
“Smarter to bury it.” His matter-of-fact tone slowed the churning. “A fire like this brings attention. Obviously.”
“I’ve never done it, but it seems to me killing somebody might impair logic. Or maybe the fire added to it. Plenty of people get off starting fires.”
“They spotted this one at first light. From the progress it made by the time we jumped, it must’ve started late last night, early this morning. It was burning damn hot, had at least a hundred acres involved when we jumped at, what, about eight?”
Odd, she realized, that talking it through, picking out the practical, calmed the jitters. “Yeah.”
“The campground’s not that far west, but with that burned-out area between where you found the body and the campground, the fire sniffed east. Lucky for the campers.”
The drumming inside her skull backed off, a little. Thinking was doing, she decided. Up until now she’d done too much reacting, not enough doing.
“Maybe they were from the camp,” she speculated. “And came out on the trail, got into a fight. By accident or design, he kills her.”
“Her?”
“The size of the body. I think it was a woman or a kid, and since I don’t want to think it was a kid, I’m going with woman. He’d drag or carry her off the trail. Maybe he thinks about burying her, and went back to get tools. Fire’s quicker and takes less effort. Dry conditions, some brush.”
“If you started it around two, three in the morning,” Gull calculated, “it would get a pretty good blaze up by dawn, and buy you a few hours.”
Yes, she thought. Sure. Survival had to be the first priority.
“Pack it up, and you’re way gone by dawn.” She nodded, steadied by working it as a problem to be solved. “It’ll take time to identify her, so that buys you more yet. And the fact is, if I hadn’t taken that route back to the line, maybe it’s hours more, even days, before she’s found. I wasn’t going that route, but the blowup sent me in and over.”
They continued to find and kill spots as they talked. Then she stopped. “I didn’t think I wanted to think about it. I found her, I called it in, now it’s for the USFS to deal with. But it’s been gnawing at me ever since. It . . . it shook me,” she confessed.
“It would shake anybody, Rowan.”
“Have you ever seen somebody after they’ve been—”
“Yeah. It sticks with you.” And he knew talking about it, thinking about the hows and whys, helped.
“Summers are usually about this.” She drowned a bucket-sized spot before it had a chance to grow. “Putting out fires, mopping them up, training and prepping to jump the next. But this summer? We’ve got crazy Dolly, my father going on a date, dead people.”
“Your father dating ranks with vandalism and possible homicide and arson?”
“It’s just different. Unusual. Like me sleeping with a rookie—which I haven’t done, by the way, since I was one.”
“Points for me.”
She shifted direction, angled south. Points for him, maybe, but to her mind change, exceptions, the different screwed up the order of things.
After nearly two hours on spots, they rejoined the crew and shifted to mop-up mode.
She pulled out her radio to take a call from the operations desk.
“We want the first load to demob,” L.B. told her. “Second load and ground crew will complete the mop-up.”
“I hear that.”
“The fed wants to talk to you when you get back.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow? I talked to the rangers, gave them all the details.”
“Doesn’t look like it. You can pack out. There’ll be ground transportation for you at the trailhead.”
“Copy that.” What the hell, she thought, at least this way she’d get it all over with in one day.
SHE’D PLANNED on getting a shower first, but she’d no more than dumped her gear when the fed came looking for her.
“Rowan Tripp?”
“That’s right.”
“Special Agent Kimberly DiCicco. I have some questions.”
“The rangers already have my answers, but since we both work for a bureaucracy, I know how it goes.”
“Mr. Little Bear offered his office so we can speak in private.”
“I’m not stinking up L.B.’s office. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty ripe with smoke and sweat.”
She had to notice, Rowan thought. The agent’s compact body was tucked into a black suit of classic lines with a pristine white shirt. Without a hair out of place, her sleek nape-of-the-neck bun left her refinedboned, coffee-with-a-splash-of-cream face unframed.
DiCicco’s eyebrows arched over tawny eyes as she angled her head. “You’ve put in a long day. I’m aware. I’ll make it as brief as possible.”
“Then let’s walk and talk.” Rowan stripped down to her tank and trousers. “Maybe I’ll air out a little.”