One Through the Heart (20 page)

‘What’s the size of one of these incendiary devices?’

‘Roughly the size of a football, and they had them ready.’ Staten paused. He cleared his throat before continuing. ‘We get these winds every year in the spring and fall. In the spring nothing will burn, but it’s all different by now, huh. Where are you? You’re in the news. You’ve been right in the middle of all of this. What can you tell me?’

‘Not much. We’re talking with someone who is affiliated with the three you’re seeing on TV and there’s every reason to think those are the perpetrators. I’m up on the roof of the Hall of Justice looking across the bay at fires in Oakland and the Berkeley Hills. I can see smoke to the south down the peninsula and Marin is dark with smoke. I can see Diablo burning. It looks like a volcano from here. And there’s something burning farther back in the East Bay, and also farther. They’ve slowed the inbound/outbound at SFO and in Oakland.’

‘There are fires all the way down to where I am. Three new ones in the last hour.’

Raveneau couldn’t remember where Staten had moved to when his hourly billing rate crossed over three hundred dollars an hour, but it was somewhere south and near the coast.

‘Ben, you can’t talk to me?’

‘Not yet, not really, other than it’s almost certainly the three the fugitive warrants went out on.’

‘Well, that was pretty obvious already.’

Staten was disappointed and Raveneau remembered how moody he could be. Good chance he only picked up the phone because he thought he was going to get something in return that he could pass on to his clients. Raveneau asked Staten now what he was working on.

‘A fire with three fatalities, all of them kids. Their mother was badly burned. The fire started at five this morning when they were asleep and they got trapped in a canyon. The insurer I’m working for excludes terrorism coverage, so they’re hoping that’s what it is. Call me when you can talk.’

Late in the afternoon Raveneau rode with Coe who was driving and not saying an awful lot about where they were going yet, except that they were headed to Mt. Tam. The SFPD website was still down, the victim of a denial of service attack it was supposed to be invulnerable to, but the department computers were working. Someone got a hold of a local legend, a guy named Tim Chee. Chee got the SFPD system up and going again. At the mayor’s office there were problems with the landline phones and there were other quirky failures in the city computer systems.

They crossed the Golden Gate with Coe talking about another person of interest, a medical technologies engineer let go four months ago for failing to properly track a waste disposal though his guess was that was negligence and not nefarious. Two agents interviewed the man and he was still unemployed and very regretful.

Coe took a call and Raveneau heard enough to not need an explanation. Lindsley had turned up. He was in a Marin high school gym designated as an evacuation center, arrived there fifteen minutes ago and said the FBI needed to be notified.

‘He’s only ten minutes from where we are right now,’ Raveneau said. ‘Let’s go there.’

‘We’re picking him up and bringing him in and you and I are going somewhere else. We’re going to see a body.’

‘Whose?’

‘We’re hoping you can help with the ID.’

‘What’s the matter with the rest of you?’

‘It’s a male and his face isn’t what it used to be. We’re hoping that seeing the rest of him you’ll have an easier time IDing him.’

‘You’re telling me you know already who it is?’

‘We think we do, but I want you to take a look.’

A four-wheel-drive fire vehicle escorted them through the worst smoke as they wound their way along the coast, and they reached Stinson Beach and continued on down past the lagoon. Off to his right and looking up Raveneau saw much of this face of the mountain had burned off. In the ravines he saw stands of charred trees and white ashes. They crossed through another roadblock just past the end of the lagoon and another as they turned up the mountain. Raveneau saw only one fire crew on watch for any restarts. The fire was over here. There were pockets of green, and in the winter there would be mudslides because there wasn’t anything left to hold the soil. But above Mt. Tam columns of black-gray smoke still boiled up.

‘It’s burning down the other side,’ Coe said. ‘It may reach the town.’

The road up was narrow and windy and the pale gold rye grass and the trees still green underscored just how much was chance. On their right, everything was burned. As they neared the top of the winding two-mile road he saw the redwoods along the spine were fine and for some reason that made him feel better.

He turned. ‘How do you know it wasn’t a homeless person living in the watershed who got caught by the fire?’

‘I don’t want to say too much yet, but you’ll see why. I’d rather you look at him first but I can tell you he appears to have been on a mountain bike on a single track trail. They found him as they followed the line of where the fire started. Not much question about what he was doing. Wind is supposed to die tonight or at least let up.’

Raveneau nodded. Everyone he had talked to today gave him a weather report. Winds were expected to abate, but the heat would continue. There wouldn’t be any marine air, just less wind.

‘Dogs scented to the incendiary materials found eight locations and we’ve gathered what was left. On the ocean side they had the paved road. They may have used a car to carry the incendiary bombs. On the other side they were all near a single-track mountain biking trail – and not much of a trail. The park people tell us it was an illegal track mountain bikers scratched together. The victim we’re going to see was on a bike and wearing a backpack. He’s on the watershed side up above the lake. We’re not far away now. You know your way around here anyway, don’t you?’

‘I do.’

They started down the road to the reservoir, drove eight or nine steep falling turns and pulled over where another vehicle was partially blocking the road, then climbed the embankment into the trees with a firefighter who led them in, talking as he did.

‘We climb up and across, and then we’ll pick up a trail.’

As they got closer they saw lights and heard voices, and as the track looped and headed toward the lights Raveneau tried to picture it. What he saw was the rider getting out of another vehicle after spreading five of these incendiary devices off the right side of the Bolinas-Fairfax Road as it climbed up the ocean side, maybe placing these devices at dusk when it wasn’t too dark to drive without lights. Or maybe the mountain biker placed them all. If so, he went up the steep road in a howling wind and then down the single track on the other side. That or he was dropped at the ridge and the vehicle turned around and went back down the way it came up. The vehicle would be something ordinary, a Toyota pickup, something that blended in, maybe salt-worn from the ocean and with a rack.

Up on the ridge the rider starts down, starts placing the devices. Behind him the timers are ticking and maybe he spends a little too long trying to make certain he’s got them placed correctly so they’ll ignite what’s around them. Maybe he falls a little behind and lets the bike roll a little faster, but it’s also darker on this side and he hits a root or a rock. He goes down.

He asked the firefighter now. ‘What happened to him?’

‘He went over the bars and landed badly. We’re guessing he was unconscious when the fire started.’

‘You’re thinking he rode this trail in the dark with a light?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he place these in daylight?’

Raveneau didn’t get an answer that satisfied him. It only told him they were guessing, but he didn’t ask any more questions either because as they came around the turn there was the FBI Evidence Recovery Team, a couple of park rangers, more firefighters, and the body.

T
he mountain bike was a Specialized, carbon fiber, and expensive. The front wheel was twisted, the tire flat and half stripped, seat torn and turned sideways. From blood on a rock and a gash the bike’s gear ring left in a scorched bay tree they determined where he was ejected. He struck the rock hard bursting off the incendiary devices in the backpack. The backpack was pulled tight, the waist band cinched. One shoulder strap tore loose on impact but the backpack stayed on as he tried to drag himself.

The head of the FBI Evidence Recovery Team turned to Raveneau. ‘He broke his right arm and collarbone when he hit the bay tree and it looks like he had trouble with his legs after he hit the rock. Gritty guy though, look how he dragged himself trying to get back to the trail. He thought he would get back on his bike.’

‘How do you know he rode down here at night versus earlier in the day?’

‘His helmet had three lights screwed on to the front of it. That’s the only part that didn’t melt.’

Raveneau studied the scuff marks and gouges in the dirt and came up with a different idea. ‘I think he was just trying to get the backpack off. He wasn’t trying to go anywhere. How many of those devices were in it?’

‘Two, and one ruptured when he hit the rock.’ The head of the ERT, Cabrera, stared at Raveneau.‘You just got here, but you’ve got it all figured out? Do you want to hear our version or do you just want to look at him?’

‘No offense.’

‘No problem. I deal every day with people who’ve been doing the same thing for so long they think they’re experts.’

‘Show me what you see.’

‘Then let’s start a little higher up.’ Raveneau followed him up the narrow bike trail and after they hiked around the first turn Raveneau saw the long run down the rider had before he hit the next turn. He came into that turn with a lot of speed but made it through.

‘He was flying,’ Cabrera said. ‘Why do you think that was?’

‘The incendiary devices were timed to go off at the same time and he was running late.’

‘Exactly, and he was probably a good rider but it was night and this is an illegal single-track trail and poorly marked. He made it through the turn down there before losing control. He couldn’t see his bike after he crashed and was trying to get back to it. He only had two more of the devices to drop and the bike was his way out of here. He needed to get back on it and he must have thought he had enough time. Otherwise, he would have shed the backpack.’

‘Unless he couldn’t get it off.’

‘Come on, one strap was already gone, and it’s a backpack, they’re made to come on and off easily.’

They walked back down and Raveneau saw the shoe still clipped on to the bike pedal. He looked at the marks in the dirt again and the blanket over the body.

‘The shoulder strap broke and one of the incendiary devices burst when he hit the tree. It was the right shoulder strap, same as his broken arm. He flew backwards through the air and struck in the mid lumbar and with the backpack turned he didn’t have any cushion.’

Raveneau wasn’t seeing it quite the same way and normally an autopsy would largely resolve it, but that might not be the case here due to the severity of his burns. There was something that didn’t quite mesh in the way they were putting it together. He walked up to the tree, looked at the gash, the grease stain, and the tire mark, and saw where the ground was gouged. He agreed the bike struck the tree and the rider shattered his arm and was ejected and had the bad luck to hit the rock. Maybe he was unconscious after that. When he came to what would he do?

He would be disoriented and in pain and probably the thing that made him ride too fast would come back to him. He might go for his bike like Cabrera claimed or he was too badly hurt for that and there wasn’t enough time. Raveneau stood at the rock where the blood was and looked up the steep slope at the bay tree and the bike down below it. The bike had a light and he walked up and looked at it, felt for the switch. It was on and the plastic lens glass was broken but the pieces were all still there, so the light might still be on as the bike came to rest.

If so, he saw it, and let’s say he felt his injuries and checked the time and smelled the leaked accelerant. That would have scared him, that and the time going by.

Raveneau turned back to Cabrera. ‘I think he was trying to do both things, trying to get rid of the pack and get to the trail to walk or ride out. He may have knocked himself out when he hit the rock.’

‘You ready to take a look?’

Cabrera pulled the blanket off. When the incendiary devices in the backpack ignited the rider was near a dry pine tree. The pine probably turned into a fireball. The backpack and helmet melted but for the front section that was intact because his head shielded it from the incendiary’s intense heat. The backpack became white ash. His shirt burned away and the skin cooked. Vertebrae in his upper spine and a blackened section of skull were visible.

Raveneau stepped back. He asked, ‘Did a branch of the tree fall on him?’

‘Yes. We moved it off.’

It was grisly, and where his head was turned the right side of his face was still covered. Raveneau wasn’t in any hurry to see that. They were letting him talk and come to it his way, but were already past that themselves and only being patient with him.

‘OK, show me his face.’

Cabrera pulled the rest of the blanket and two of the ERT rolled the body. Half of the face was gone. Raveneau got closer. He used one of their flashlights to look at the other nostril. It was still intact and that made sense to him since Staten had said these type of incendiary devices generated a fireball that lit the surrounding tinder but also burned itself out quickly. He reached and moved the head just a little and saw he’d breathed smoke and soot, his nostril dark. He must have hid his face as they went off and when the pain became too intense his head twisted toward the fire.

The dead man’s mouth was locked open, a rock between his back left molars, and he had shattered his teeth biting down on the rock. It was as Coe predicted and Raveneau studied what remained of his face and then looked at his hands. He pulled the cycling glove on the man’s left hand and turned his wrist and saw the scar he wondered about at Grate’s Place.