Two times in the past week hikers had reported strange behavior to the ranger. Evidently, the hotshot had been seen fiddling with a campfire during no-burn days. She'd interviewed both sets of hikers over the telephone and they'd told her Logan had acted strangely when they came upon him. As soon as the wildfire had been noted, the ranger had contacted the Forest Service with this damning information.
And then, just yesterday, Logan's name had been called in to an anonymous “Smoky the Bear” forest-fire tip line. Combined with his very public objections in recent weeks to reductions in pension and health care payments for veteran hotshots, her boss had assigned her to the case immediately.
With no natural lightning strikes to blame—and given that ninety percent of all forest fires were due to arson—every finger pointed straight to Logan Cain, the leader of the local hotshot crew.
She laid his file on the passenger seat, then turned her eyes back to the thick column of black smoke that rose up from the valley floor. Shifting into four-wheel drive up a narrow dirt road off Highway 50, certain that the crew would be out on the mountain fighting the fire, she bypassed the Tahoe Pines Hotshot Station and headed straight for the ridgetop.
Current Forest Service reports indicated that the fire was steadily growing, but still under control. She turned on the wipers, dousing the windshield with fluid to clean the thin layer of soot. She leaned forward, squinting up at the sky. Smoke had turned it to a gray haze. Why on earth were they under the impression that this was a controlled fire?
From her vantage point, it looked to be just the opposite. And an underestimated fire was a deadly one. Once a fire exploded it would consume everything in its path—including any firefighters currently on the mountain.
Maya was suddenly struck with a dark premonition. Burns. Fatalities. Oh God, she should never have come back here. The worst hours of her life had been spent in Lake Tahoe after Tony's death. Unlike the throngs of tourists who came to gamble and ski and backpack, when she looked around she didn't see beautiful lakes and soaring pine trees.
She saw death.
Depression.
And an unpardonable afternoon in a stranger's arms.
Slipping on her shades, she grabbed her binoculars and exited her car, hiking briskly to the anchor point at the top of the mountain. A couple of buckets of unloaded medical supplies had been dumped beneath a thick dry sagebrush.
Alarm settled in beneath her breastbone. This fire had clearly exploded, and yet there were no water trucks, no helicopters doing water drops, no additional wildland firefighting teams pitching in.
Her heart was in her throat as she moved toward a group of hotshots who were standing on the ridgetop. She scanned the hotshots' faces, counted seventeen men. Which meant there were still three hotshots in the blowup.
Was one of these men her suspect? And had he yet realized that if one of his fellow firefighters died in this blaze, the penalties would be so much worse than just millions in restitution for loss of property? He'd be charged with murder … and would spend a lifetime living with crushing guilt.
An older man she assumed was the squad boss spoke steadily into his radio. “Logan. Sam. Connor. Respond if you can hear me.”
She squinted down the hill into the fire until she could see three figures moving slowly toward them, their white hard hats a blessed sign of life.
The squad boss had called out her suspect's name and she briefly wondered which one of the three he was, but she couldn't hold on to the thought. Not when the only thing she wanted was for all three hotshots to make it out alive.
She couldn't bear to think of the suffering these men's families would face—of the moment when they got “the call,” when their biggest fears about having a son or brother or husband who was a firefighter came true.
She'd lived it. It was horrible.
Fire was rolling over the mountain like a wave. Maya had never seen anything like this, had never wanted to. Even though her brother had dreamed of being a firefighter since he was a toddler, she'd never wanted to physically fight fire. Her father had been the one to suggest she move from criminal justice into arson investigation, and he'd been right. It was her way of quenching the fire in her blood.
Even so, ever since Tony's death, she'd avoided actual fires at all costs. Now she felt utterly unprepared to witness this one's destruction—and sure death knell—firsthand. She fought back a vision of what it must have been like for Tony before he died, of black smoke swamping his vision, the crack of a burned-out beam beneath his boots, the sure knowledge that he was going to die.
But she couldn't think of him now, couldn't keep her lunch down if she allowed herself to go to that dark place.
A dead silence hung over the men as they watched the flames leap into the air. Once a fire exploded like this, no sane firefighter would go back in. Not without risking even more lives. Seventeen men had no choice but to watch three of their own die.
Maya watched helplessly, an unthinkable question burning into her brain: If these three men died today, how would the other hotshots erase the picture from their minds? How would she?
Because even from this distance, Maya could see that the men were about to be consumed by flames. All it would take was one hard wind and they'd be sucked into the firestorm, their skin and bones melting while they still lived. Bile rose in her throat and she swallowed it down, knowing she couldn't sidetrack any of the fire-fighters' attention by throwing up or fainting.
The gray-bearded man yelled into his radio, “Hit the wall. Hit the wall. Hit the goddamned wall.”
Maya had been so blinded by the red-orange flames that she hadn't noticed the rock face that extended out into the canyon. If the men could make it past the rock, it might force the blowup into a different path, one that would spare their lives.
But she knew they couldn't hear the squad boss's directions. Even if they hadn't already thrown down their radios to save weight, they wouldn't be able to hear anything over the roar of the smoke and flames and the blood pounding in their ears.
Go, go, go, she silently screamed, barely keeping the words in her throat.
The fire lashed out at the small figures and Maya caught her gasp a moment too late as a wave of gas knocked over one of the men, throwing him facedown into the dirt. Putting her hand over her mouth, she inhaled her scream, the smoke searing her lungs even from this distance. She watched in horror as the two men in the lead backtracked to help the third.