Having weighted the shelter with rocks once again, she followed the path of the grave robber back to where the others waited by the boulder.
The shelter LeFleur had rigged was surprisingly cozy and Anna had a strange sense of hearth and home when she saw the familiar faces.
Paula had been dressed in a spare fire shirt and wool trousers someone had had the foresight to stuff into their yellow pack— Black Elk, by the size of the clothes. And Anna recognized a pair of her own blue wool rag socks on the girl's feet. Lindstrom was sitting close, jollying her, and she was laughing. Better medicine still. Howard Black Elk leaned against the boulder, eyes closed. He'd gone a bit gray around the mouth. Though he was a strong man, his injuries were taking a severe toll.
The fire pit was well stocked with embers and Joseph Hayhurst had converted helmets into vessels to hold snowmelt. While Anna approved the Apache's enterprise it depressed her slightly. It was an admission they might be there awhile.
Pepperdine was haranguing John LeFleur about posting twenty-four-hour watches. The crew boss's mouth was clamped shut and his eyes fixed beyond the younger man's shoulder.
Back to the others, Jennifer sat staring out at the nothing peeling away above the creek bank. Her eyes were hooded, unseeing, and Anna knew she was at as much or more risk than the two burn victims. Most people at some time in their lives lose the will to live for a minute, n day, a week. It was possible Short's survival instinct had chosen the wrong place and time to abandon her.
Pepperdine saw her approach and turned from LeFleur to what he clearly hoped would be a more sympathetic ear. "Gonzales is gone." His tone made it clear he considered Anna to be at fault. "I told you we should've radioed John."
He hadn't but she let that pass. "Hey, John, what's Hugh been telling you?"
"Gonzales went to take a dump," LeFleur said bluntly. "Barney's got a problem with that, I guess."
"He's gone," Pepperdine insisted.
"Looks like Neil's gone too," Anna said mildly.
"Nature calls," Hayhurst put in, "and man answers. I kind of envy their regularity."
Hugh looked from Anna to John and back again. "I think somebody ought to go bring him in," he insisted. Color had come up in his fat cheeks and he was balling his fists.
"Suit yourself," Anna said and, sitting down, pulled her wet gloves off to warm her fingers over the embers.
A high ululating wail, like a child in terrible pain or a man in an extremity of fear, cut through the bickering. Little hairs on Anna's neck began to prickle and she could feel adrenaline pumping into her overtaxed system.
No one spoke. Paula clutched the sleeve of Stephen's jacket and Jennifer pushed a palm to her lips as though to stifle a scream rising in her own throat.
Again the cry came, high and clear and cutting to the bone. Paula began to whimper.
"Gonzales—" Pepperdine began.
"Shut the fuck up." Lindstrom. Silence, deep and awful, followed.
"Want to go see what it is?" LeFleur asked, and for the first time Anna heard a quaver in the man's voice.
"Not particularly," she returned.
Again the cry.
This time something cut it short.
Chapter Thirteen
DAWN NEVER BROKE. With fog and drizzling snow the quality of the light never changed. Impatience gnawed at Frederick's innards like the Spartan boy's stolen fox, but he bore it less heroically. Gene Burwell, a well-groomed man of Santalike girth and facial hair, was patient and understanding. Stanton realized it took a true gentleman to ignore his fidgeting.
Incident Base was still surrounded by statuesque ponderosa and fir, the manzanita still green. Snow gave the scene a holiday feel; white drifts on evergreen needles. But for two crews with six sawyers, the camp was devoid of the one thousand souls who had called it home for the last couple of weeks.
A low-boy with a D-8 Cat had been dispatched from the Forest Service office out of Chester, a logging town twenty miles to the south. Seven miles down highway from Base a helicopter sat at ready, fueled and loaded, with two EMTs standing by.
Burwell, Stantori and Lester Treadwell, a lean, wiry man in his fifties who was in charge of clearing the deadfall, had taken a four-wheel drive truck up the logging road toward spike camp as soon as it had gotten light.
The first few miles were clear, then the road turned along the side of a mountain and wound up through the black—part of the burn left by the Jackknife. There they'd had to stop. Charred snags from a foot in diameter to some grand old trees that must have measured eight or ten feet across and a hundred feet long had blown down in countless numbers. The road and the land surrounding were crosshatched with black. Logs tumbled like windblown straw lay in a tangled mat. Even a man on horseback couldn't pick a path through the devastation.
Cigarette dangling from his lips, Lester Treadwell stomped around muttering, his grizzled hair sticking out from beneath his hard hat where he'd pushed it back on his bony skull in a frenzy of thinking. "These're big boys," he said. "There'll be fire in 'em for a couple days. Hell on saw blades. Keeps things interesting though. Six sawyers. I'll send them up to cut anything looks like it'll bind." For Stanton's benefit he explained that downed trees, piled like these were, created strange tensions. When cut there was always a danger of one of those tensions being released too suddenly and part of a tree snapping loose and killing or injuring the sawyer.
"That'll get us started but we need heavy metal. With that D-8 Cat we'll push this mess aside," Treadwell said.
"How long?" Frederick asked.
"A D-8'll push a lot of weight," Lester said, flicking a spent cigarette and pausing to light another. "It's a hell of a machine. We can clear a mile a day easy."
Burwell had estimated four to six miles of the road fell within the black. Frederick rubbed his forehead, knocking the borrowed hard hat askew. He hadn't asked Anna if she was hurt. She hadn't reported any injuries to herself but then she might not. He found himself thinking how small she was. Though she carried herself like John Wayne, she was only five-four. No fat to keep her warm.
Unless the weather broke, it would be four to six days until help could be gotten to the stranded firefighters, to Anna. Cloud cover kept temperatures from dropping much below the mid-twenties, but without food and shelter it would be a rugged few days. Perhaps deadly. Especially for a crew harboring a scorpion in its bosom.
"Up higher the fuel load's not so thick," Burwell said kindly. "It'll go faster the higher we get."
Frederick noted the man's concern and knew he wore his heart on his sleeve. Stanton was being obvious and he didn't like being obvious.
"We'll get cracking," Treadwell said.
Frederick had never handled a chainsaw in his life and Tread-well wasn't going to let him start now. Stanton knew Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations as well as anyone; still he chafed at the enforced inaction till Treadwell took pity and signed him on as a swamper.
For two hours he dragged and rolled chunks of burned timber bucked up small enough it could be muscled clear of the road. Stanton's office-softened hands blistered. His back and shoulders ached. Time and again he had to leave a log for the other swamper because he hadn't the strength to shift it without help.
It had been years since he had felt like a ninety-eight-pound weakling. As he'd moved up in the organization, his mind and what amounted to a passion for detail had brought him honors. Brain over brawn, the pen over the sword. He couldn't even bench press his I.Q.
Shortly after nine a.m. Stanton's impatience, though still alive and well, had been tempered by hard physical labor. Nearly three hours of it had cleared less than fifty yards of road. Exhaustion brought with it some clarity of thought and he knew he would prove more useful in the less manly pursuits and wondered at himself for waxing so hormonal over a woman he'd known only a short while and kissed only twice.
Making his excuses, he borrowed an all-terrain vehicle from the incident commander and followed the logging road down to Base. The Command tent, Communications and Time Keeping kept the home fires burning. Portable space heaters powered by a generator in the back of a semi-truck trailer held winter at bay. Frederick was doubly glad of the warmth and fresh coffee. Glad for his chilled and tired body and glad, in a moment of pure unreflective selfishness, that it was not he who huddled hungry in a wash.
While he drank his coffee, thick with Cremora and three spoons of sugar, he allowed himself a small pleasant fantasy: warming Anna's square capable hands between his own, massaging feeling gently back into her little feet. Residual hormones kicked in, heating the dream too rapidly, and he shelved it. The time would come, he promised himself, when he could afford the luxury of distraction.
Four phones were hooked up in the Communications tent. Frederick took over one line to begin a series of calls. A spark of envy burned him as he thought of the wide-shouldered men with leathered faces running chainsaws and bulldozers and he quashed a sophomoric image of himself, newly Paul Bunyan—like, scooping a grateful Anna from the jaws of death.
Think, Frederick, he told himself. Think. It's what you're good at.
Nine-forty California time. Ten-forty in New Mexico; he would start with the Bureau of Land Management in Farming-ton.
One receptionist and one bum steer later he was talking with Henry Valdez, the head of the gas and oil leasing program for the three million acres of federal gas and oil reserves in New Mexico and southern Colorado.
Stanton was winging it. Without visiting the murder scene, viewing the corpse, interviewing the suspects or examining the physical evidence, he was at a distinct disadvantage. Anna would have to find out how it was done, who had means and opportunity. Motive was the only angle he could pursue. Until something that smelled like a lead turned up, he decided on the simple expedient of gathering information. As much as he could get.
Valdez sounded genuinely sorry to hear of Nims's death. Whether he personally liked the man or whether because the wheels of the Office of Personnel Management ground so painstakingly slow Nims's position would go unfilled for six months, Frederick couldn't tell.
Henry Valdez was disappointing, at least in terms of giving up personal information on his employees. Clearly the man disliked gossip and had little imagination where his fellow mortals were concerned. Nims was a good worker, well liked by most of the Bureau's oil and gas lessees. He was an avid hunter and fisherman and on good terms both professionally and personally with his clients.
Valdez was more forthcoming about the nuts-and-bolts aspects of Nims's job. Nims did the Environmental Impact Statements for proposed wells or the extension of leases on already existing wells. His background was in forestry but he'd acquired a solid understanding of geology.
Whether Nims was liked by his co-workers, Valdez didn't feel he was in a position to say. He was also not in a position to say why Nims had left the BLM in Susanville, California, to accept a position three years later at a lower pay grade. He did volunteer that, though it wasn't common practice, neither was it rare. Often government employees left to try their hand in the private sector or transferred because of personality conflicts.
What personality conflicts?
Valdez wasn't in a position to say.
Frederick scribbled down a few notes and moved on to John LeFleur.
Valdez seemed more than happy to gossip about the crew boss and Stanton guessed either his earlier reticence sprang from a sincere attachment to Nims or his sudden forthcoming attitude bespoke a pointed dislike of LeFleur.
According to Henry Valdez, John LeFleur was a dog in the manger. Always discontent with his lot and jealous of those around him. A dinosaur, Valdez called him, a man still crying because the college boys got promoted faster, because a man could no longer start in the mail room and become CEO. LeFleur had the firebug, he told Stanton. With some it's like an addiction. All John wanted to do was fight fire. He was getting too old to work the line but lacked the organizational and people skills to move up into overhead and hated anybody who did.
That smelled like the lead Stanton had been sniffing around for. "What about Nims?" he asked. "Did LeFleur hate him?"
"Hate might be laying it on a bit thick," Valdez said. "But they don't get along. John thinks Len gets all the breaks—that old song and dance. John just can't face up to the fact he's not manager material and never will be."
"Were he and Nims in competition for the same jobs, promotions, any of that kind of thing?"
"John may have thought they were for the fire management officer position we've got opening up, but John never had a snowball's chance in hell of getting it."
"Does he have a snowball's chance with Nims dead?" Frederick asked bluntly.
