‘Well—’
‘How we’ve sent inquiries to all surrounding states—’
‘Have we?’
‘Must have. I’ll check to make sure.’ She called the sheriff’s office manager, got confirmation and told Mort, ‘Hannah says it usually takes a couple of days for those inquiries to get answered – we can use that. And in the meantime, I think the fact that nobody’s come looking for this person is a story in itself.’
It took some persuading, but they were running out of time, so in the end Mort let her write it up that way, featuring the unknowns. Everybody belongs somewhere, she wrote – why is no one looking for this man? How did he get so high on a burning mountain by himself? Or if he had help, are his helpers still nearby? She added contact numbers and email addresses for people to call if they had questions or information.
Mort read it over, shook his head and said, ‘Jesus, I don’t know.’ The big wall clock clicked ahead a minute and he said, ‘Oh, well.’ He put his byline on the story, looked up and found her regarding him with the level gaze she had always turned on eighth-graders handing in plagiarized book reports. Looking demure as a guilty prepubescent, he added her name as co-author and slid it into the spot they’d saved on page one.
Then he strained his brain to remember a few details to add to his sparse notes from the town council meeting.
‘Let’s see now,’ he said, ‘where’s that slip of paper where I wrote down what they voted on?’ As soon as he stopped patting his pockets, she wrote up as much as he could remember, and filed it as town news without attribution. Pretty shabby journalism, she told herself, but nobody gave much of a damn about the town council this week anyway.
They were actually only a few minutes late going to press, and Alice surprised herself by exchanging a high five with her boss.
She spent all day Thursday billing new customers for the five-thousand-plus extra copies of the Guardian they’d sold during the fire. As Mort insisted, she put an order form in with each bill, hoping to pick up a few new subscribers. By mid-afternoon she had composed the resignation letter she intended to write to Mort if he insisted she continue as billing clerk.
But she never got a chance to discuss it, because he came in from a long, beery lunch grinning and happy, and clapped her on the shoulder so hard he almost displaced her rotator cuff.
‘Wow, Alice, people are really gobbling up that mystery story,’ he said. ‘We gotta keep that baby going, kiddo. I think it’s gonna sell better than fire.’
‘Imagine the story we could write,’ Alice said, ‘if we ever got an autopsy report.’
The body was ‘in transit’ to Missoula as she spoke, its actual position in real time and space a carefully guarded secret. Mort wasn’t the only one to notice that an unidentified corpse could generate as much interest as a rock star. Sheriff Tasker, by now so beleaguered with questions that he would not come out of his office in daylight, made a quick list of all the places between Helena and Missoula where a body in transit might be vulnerable to the selfie-loving public and decided, ‘Not on my watch.’
He deputized two teams of ambulance drivers, who took turns negotiating an elaborate shell-game route along back roads in the dead of night. Trailed by several astute reporters, they all arrived at the crime lab in Missoula at nine o’clock, just as the doors were being unlocked. An unmarked sheriff’s van had delivered the body there a couple of hours earlier, having offloaded it in a parking lot at dawn from a refrigerated truck marked with the advertising of a local produce company, which the sheriff had borrowed for a day.
Another wait began then, while the team of specialists who investigated difficult cases at the crime lab wrangled over a date and an hour when they could wind up cases already started and begin to explore the burned remains of a man whose identity had been reduced to a case number on a toe tag. Even that much information was at risk, had to be handled gently and protected from drafts, since it dangled from the fragile stub of what had once been a foot.
SIX
The medical investigators at the state lab said they wanted to clear their calendars for one whole day, not an easy thing to do but necessary, they felt, for a case this difficult.
‘One whole quiet day with our phones off,’ the internist said, ‘should give us time to find … what little there is to find.’
‘I’ll get yelled at for what I’m putting aside but I’ll do it if you will,’ the dentist said. ‘He’s still got most of his teeth, they say. I could search his dental records if you could come up with his name.’
‘If we had his ID we’d have a whole different ball game,’ the diagnostician said. ‘So let’s start. Is there a day next week, or does it have to be the week after?’ He hated this assignment. His soon-to-be ex-wife was going for full custody and maximum child support and his girlfriend was having second thoughts about long-term relationships. Why did he have to waste time talking about a burned corpse that nobody cared enough to come looking for?
They told Sheriff Tasker they’d let him know. He passed the news to the paper when he actually answered Mort’s third Monday phone call.
‘Probably some day this week but they haven’t got it all put together yet, they said. So now quit pestering me, Mort, because I can’t tell you what I don’t know,’ Tasker said.
‘And we’ve got nothing to tell our readers till then? Shit! Is this going to be one of those science bottlenecks where it sits in some frozen test tube while hell freezes over?’
‘Well, let’s hope not. Doc Burton said they might ID the guy off his DNA. And cause of death will be pretty straightforward, I guess. I mean, he’s burned to a crisp.’ They could hardly chuckle over a statement so gruesome, but they shared a matter-of-fact sigh.
The doctors finally agreed on Thursday. They used the whole eight hours they’d scheduled and then some, and emerged from the cold lab in the late afternoon complaining of lower back pain, sore feet and anomalies on the corpse too complex, they told Tasker, to go into right now. Wait for the report, they advised him.
Friday passed with no more word of an autopsy report. When the sheriff pleaded that he couldn’t get off his phone long enough to manage his regular job if they didn’t give him the means to answer a few questions, the coroner sent a single page stamped ‘preliminary’ in red ink.
Tasker made a copy of it and had his deputy deliver it to the newsroom. It read, Autopsy results on an unidentified body found in Grizzly Gulch on October 5 are inconclusive at present. Cause of death cannot be determined until we have the results of toxicity screens. DNA tests may yet identify the victim.
‘This is it?’ Mort said.
‘There’s a second sheet.’
‘Oh.’ It was stapled and he had overlooked it. ‘The coroner cannot sign off on the cause of death until all results are certified,’ the lab’s note read. ‘So we can’t deliver the autopsy report or release the body yet. This is not a problem so far, since no one has attempted to claim the remains. Be advised: these are very preliminary results, still subject to revision.’
‘What’s to revise, damn it?’ Mort said. ‘They haven’t said anything.’ He glared at the sheriff’s deputy who’d brought the report. ‘You’re sure this is all you have to give me?’
‘Till we get more,’ the deputy said. ‘Yes.’ She left him there with his cheeks getting redder.
Mort had a major snit. The Guardian had captured its biggest readership ever, he told his staff, as if they had not been listening to him crow for two weeks about sales. The Denver Post, he reminded them, had run an elegant review praising ‘the remarkable journalism a tiny staff in a remote mountain town had produced in the face of a sudden calamity.’
‘How’s that for praise? They called the Guardian “the little weekly that could,”’ Mort said. ‘And recommended us for a Pulitzer. So now that we’ve got the attention of readers all over the west, is this bunch of picky scientists going to split hairs for a month while our momentum dribbles away?’
&
nbsp; ‘Mort, I don’t think these doctors are much interested in your circulation figures,’ Stuart said. ‘They’ve got their own job to do.’
‘Then they should hurry up and do it!’ He had been on a crazy roll, during which all disasters worked to his benefit. It made him frantic, now, to watch his lucky streak evaporating. He slammed a drawer shut on his fingers, and his roar of pain rattled the windows. Maizie, the new high school reporter, hunched behind a stack of computer paper and rolled her eyes.
So Stuart, ever the pacifier, said, ‘Listen, Mort, there’s a lot of follow-up story on the fire that you’ve never seen because I’ve been working on it at home. Good stuff. You want to take a look? It would fill this dead spot till we get the autopsy report.’
‘What, you mean use up our reject pictures? Thrill everybody with an anticlimax?’ Mort was high on his own anger – he wasn’t slowing down to talk about leftovers.
‘No, no – I’m talking about the helicopter team that was working on the fire when the storm hit. It’s kind of a best-kept secret. They were gaining fast on that fire – they would have had it contained in another day or two. But the storm swept in and surprised everybody, and the story turned into one about the deluge that saved the town.’
‘I never heard any of this,’ Alice said. ‘You mean we printed the wrong story?’
‘Well, not exactly. Everything we said was true – the rain put the fire out. But those pilots deserve a lot more credit than they got. They would have rescued Clark’s Fort, even if the rain had never come this far south.’
Mort got interested in spite of himself. He squinted at Stuart and asked, ‘You sure about this?’
‘Absolutely. I’ve got the pictures to prove it – notes, too. I could show you by tomorrow. What do you say? We could make up another free extra for our subscribers, announce it in this week’s paper and put it out next Monday. It’s an alternate ending to the fire story, it’ll give everybody something new to talk about, keep the fire story hot – pardon the pun – till we get the autopsy report.’
‘But where’s the profit? It’s just another print run.’
‘Make up a little quarter-page teaser with two of the best pictures and a few lines of text,’ Stuart said. ‘Email it to all the new customers who bought the fire stories before. Tell them we just got this surprise ending to the fire story and we expect to have an ID and autopsy results on the victim a little later. Then use some more of that deal-making moxie you showed us before. Put the two stories in a package and make another sale. You might even get some more subscribers.’
‘Oh. Well … hmm.’ Mort punched up a screen on his computer. ‘Let me think about that. Where’d we file that mailing list, Alice?’
He rose to the bait like trout after a fly, Alice thought, watching him put on his salesman cap and go to work. ‘Wasn’t it fun watching that mood swing?’ Alice said on the walk home that night.
‘Like sunshine after a storm, huh?’ Stuart’s grin was brief. He knew he had claimed the story was a lot closer to finished than it was. What he really had, he confessed to Alice now, was a lot of confusing notes that had seemed potentially thrilling when he wrote them. ‘And about a hundred pictures, none of them trimmed or straightened up. On some of them the smoke’s so thick I don’t really know if I can make them work. And my notes are so jumbled – could you possibly come home with me tonight and work on the text?’
‘Uh … I’ll go change into my sweats and come back.’ Betsy had fed her enough emergency dinners for a while, she thought. She’d grab a sandwich and drive back on her own wheels. Then she could go home with no discussion when her brain quit work. Exhaustion had been nipping at her heels for a couple of weeks; all these late hours were no joke anymore. It probably meant she had left early middle age and entered the middle part. Rats. She didn’t want to face that idea till this fire story was finished. After Christmas, I’ll figure out how to fight fatigue.
When she saw exactly how raw the notes were, she was tempted to suggest they leave this whole job to the weekend – it seemed too hard to tackle at the end of a day’s work.
But then Stuart showed her some of the pictures he wanted to use, and her doubts flew out the window. He had captured the breathtaking spectacle of nature on a rampage on Meredith Mountain, devouring trees, fences, buildings like a ravenous beast. He’d scrunched himself into the crowded rear space behind the pilot to show readers how terrifying it felt to be in one of those little Hueys, flying straight into walls of flame.
To get herself started, Alice pulled up some jottings about how the Huey’s motor had to strain to lift that tankful of water out of the lake and carry it (carefully!) to the mountain. She actually felt how his heart banged on his ribs when the pilot pulled the release valve that opened the alligator jaws on the tank. Thermals were already bouncing us around like a toy, and then we dropped a ton of water onto the fire – a fifth of our weight gone in a blink. In that superheated air, we leaped like a gazelle.
Sometime during the first struggling hour, Alice found a phone number buried in the notes. There was a word next to it, half covered in dirt. ‘Does this say Jones?’ she asked Stuart. ‘Is that the name of the helicopter pilot you rode with?’
Stuart lifted his eyes from a stack of pictures, blinked at the name for a few seconds and said, ‘Uh … not the pilot. The traffic controller. I think they all called him Jonesy. Damn, I never confirmed … there was so much going on. I’ll ask Judy, she’ll know.’
He didn’t need to look up the number, Alice noticed, and when a strong female voice answered, he said, ‘Hey, Jude.’ No need, evidently, to identify himself, and he fired his question without apologizing for the late hour. Judy consulted the apparently bottomless name file she kept on her phone, and after two or three uh-huhs and one indistinct murmur that got a giggled response, he clicked off and handed Alice a name and a number.
It wasn’t nine o’clock yet, so she took a chance and dialed the number. The man who answered sounded a little sleepy, but recovered energy fast when she told him what she was doing. In fifteen minutes, he was on the Campbells’ front step.
‘I’d’a been here sooner,’ he said, when Jamie Campbell led him down the hall to the kitchen, ‘but I couldn’t find my shoes. We got a new puppy and he loves to chew leather.’
Jonesy was Lee Jones, Air Force retired. He had logged thousands of hours in helicopters in Vietnam and Laos and several remnants of Yugoslavia – even, at the very end, Afghanistan. Too old to fly for the government anymore, now he volunteered to run traffic control for fire crews.
‘All that smoke,’ Lee Jones said, explaining his function. ‘Soon as you have more than one aircraft over a fire you gotta have traffic control up above.’
Alice’s job was immediately easier. For the next two hours, Jonesy explained load packages, visual flight rules, and told her about the section of highway they appropriated for an emergency landing strip.
‘We were lucky on this job – never had to use it for an emergency. But that’s where we made our pickups and deliveries.’
‘Including me, a couple of times,’ Stuart said, beaming. ‘These guys are wizards, Alice – you should see them doing short-field take-offs.’
Jonesy described the dicey problems of in-flight refueling from a SEAT – a single engine air tanker in turbulence, ‘Which is what we always had – what you’re always going to have over fire. Big fires make their own weather.’ He told her how careful they had to be, carrying empty tanks on windy days, ‘Because if they start swinging …’
‘I put stuff in this fire story,’ she told Stuart later, ‘that just about gave me cramps.’
‘It’s not easy, is it? Writing about events you’ve never seen or even thought about before.’
‘I felt like my brain was in a vice. Every noun, every verb, could be the one that blows the whole story sky high … there aren’t enough questions in the world to make you sure you’ve asked enough.’
‘And no matter how many d
etails we get right,’ Stuart said, ‘it’s the mistakes people will remember.’
‘But I couldn’t leave any of it out – it was so incredibly generous of him to come and talk to us on his last night home.’
‘You knew he was leaving for Idaho in the morning?’
‘Not till he told me,’ Alice said. ‘If I had known I might not have had the nerve to call him – but then, how could you resist going after a guy with such great stories?’
Jonesy had logged hundreds of hours as a traffic controller at Western forest fires, calling out entry and exit orders to dimly visible tail numbers. Stuart had a good shot of him in earphones in the co-pilot seat of a Chinook that had been circling at ten thousand feet above the Meredith Mountain fire.
The Chinooks had a much bigger tank than the Hueys, Jonesy pointed out, could carry twenty thousand pounds of water but usually had to go farther to reload. ‘At Meredith Mountain, we were lucky. Goose Lake’s only ten miles from the peak.’
The other advantage of the Chinook, he said, was that they were equipped with a device called a tarantula valve that allowed the pilot to release partial loads. Each time the pilot came back from the lake with his monster load he could squelch two or three of the hottest spots in the fire.
‘The downside of that is that Chinook pilots do a lot more talking with the controller. While that Chinook’s working the fire, it’s just gab, gab, gab up there, and the other pilots have a hard time getting a word in. So we have to have firm plans in place about holding patterns,’ Jonesy said, ‘because Hueys are going to spend some time in them, waiting for their turn to get back to fighting the fire.’
‘Hard on the pilot but a great chance for pictures,’ Stuart said, grinning over the memory.
When Jonesy looked at his watch at around eleven, Alice said quickly, ‘Did the Meredith Mountain fire grow unusually fast?’
Burning Meredith Page 6