Hotshots (11 page)

“Where did you think I had gone?”

“We heard the helicopter; we thought you must have left on it. We're very glad you survived, Neil.” She looked up from her sewing. The red light was gone. Her eyes were a warm, concerned brown.

“Thanks,” I said. “Did you see Ramona anywhere?”

“I never saw Ramona that day.”

“Eric told me you waited alone in the parking lot for an hour while he took a walk in the woods.”

She put down her sewing. “Eric told you he took a walk?”

“Didn't he?”

“Well, yeah, he did, but so did I. Didn't he tell you that?” The red light in her eyes was coming back.

“No.”

“He must have forgotten.”

“How long were you gone?”

“Forty-five minutes.” She was very precise, but she wore no watch on her sewing wrist, I noticed, or on her other wrist.

“Who had the pack?”

“He left it with me.”

“He told me he took it.”

“
He's wrong. I had it.”

When Eric said he'd taken a walk, he'd given himself the window of opportunity to have started the fire. Now Nancy had done the same for herself. He might have been giving her an alibi when he'd told me he took the pack and she waited under the tree. She couldn't very well provide him with one; he'd already said he'd taken the walk. But when it comes to married couples the effect of both giving the other opportunity was the equivalent of both providing the other with alibis—a smoke screen. While a prosecutor and jury would expect a married couple to alibi each other, they wouldn't necessarily believe them. To give themselves and the other opportunity was more unexpected and, in a way, more believable. The federal government doesn't have spousal privilege. A spouse can be forced to testify against a spouse in a federal case, but when a husband and wife are your only witnesses and they have provided each other with the opportunity to commit the crime, it makes it very hard to convict either one of them. Who are you going to believe? When both people are respectable citizens, a conviction could be damn near impossible. From a defense lawyer's point of view divide and confuse can be good strategy, but it could make it impossible to represent both parties.

“Did you see or hear anything unusual while you walked?” I asked Nancy.

“Only the birds and the squirrels. What did Eric say about talking to the investigators?”

“He said he would discuss it with you.”

“We'll want to cooperate. Could you set up the interview?”

“If that's what you want me to do. Would you prefer to be interviewed separately or together?”

She tied a knot, broke off a thread, stuck the needle in its cushion. “Together,” she said.

I stood up to leave. “I'll be in touch.”

She rose and shook the quilt loose to study her work. The red fabric on the white background had the zigzag pattern of snakes and lightning.

I retraced my route slowly down the gravel/dirt road, turned right on 14, got on I-40 West, and drove through Tijeras Canyon, where the road can be icy in winter and the wind treacherous at any time. It's another well-known
camino de la muerte.
My thoughts turned to life, death, murder, arson. With murder there's a definite object whether the killer knows the victim or not, but who knows where arson will lead? The motives have to be more complex.

I moved into the slow lane; a rig that hadn't seen traffic since Amarillo was hauling ass and breathing down my neck. The driver could have been popping ephedrine until he or she was bouncing off the walls. The driver wasn't trying to kill me per se, just anyone who got in the way.

12

I
GOT OFF
I-40 at Carlisle and drove to Mike Marshall's house. His red Subaru was parked in the driveway. The TV flickered through the blinds. I rang the bell, watched the TV go off, and waited for Mike to come to the door. Maybe he'd been reliving afternoons skiing with Joni, maybe he'd been watching baseball, maybe he'd been watching Oprah. It was late afternoon, Oprah hour in the Land of Enchantment. In my experience grief doesn't have a steady flow, it comes in waves. There are times of day when the waves wash in and others when they wash back out. Some people react to the inflow by hiding under their pillow, some get angry, some get drunk, some get angry and drunk—the most dangerous combination and one I hadn't come across on this case, not yet anyway. I prefer the total immersion route myself—on the principle that the fastest way out of pain is through it—but to follow that path you need experience or faith, something to make you believe you'll find light on the other side. Mike, I figured, didn't have the experience or the faith. The best path for him would be action, and that seemed to be the one he was taking. He opened the door wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He was drenched in sweat, his curls plastered to his forehead.

“Whew,” he said, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes. “I've been working out.”

“That's good, isn't it?”

“It helps. Come on in.”

I followed him into the living room, where an exercise machine sprawled across the carpet like a giant bug. There wasn't much light, but enough to see the weights on the floor, a pile of laundry on the futon, dirty dishes on the dining room table. This was what the house looked like when he didn't know someone was coming.

He pulled a sweat suit off the pile on the sofa and yanked it over his T-shirt and shorts. He was bending over to tie his running shoes and I couldn't see his expression when he said, “I'm sorry. I've been meaning to call you. There are times when I just can't talk about it and this week has been one of them.” He finished tying his shoes and looked up. “I need to get out of here. You want to get something to drink?”

It was all right with me, there was no place to sit in here. “Okay.”

“How 'bout a lemonade or a soda?”

“Why not?”

“Let's go to the Juice Bar. It's right around the corner; we can walk. It'll give me a chance to cool
off.”

To me the walk felt more like a speed-up than a cooldown. Mike's pace was too fast for conversation; I had to struggle just to keep up. It gave me a chance to start coughing and him a chance to collect his thoughts. The Juice Bar had round tables and the metal chairs you find in an ice-cream parlor. I sat down in the first one available. Mike went to get me a glass of water.

“You sound like a firefighter,” he said, giving that word all due respect.

I swallowed my water and asked for a lemonade. Mike ordered a Coke. “I feel like a firefighter,” I said. “I feel like I'll be coughing up smoke until January.”

“It'll go away eventually. I would have come back for you, you know, if I'd known you were still up there. Why did you hike out?”

“Because Hogue didn't think I was capable of it.”

“That's the kind of guy he was.”

“You didn't hear him talking on the radio?”

“No. I didn't use my radio that day. I had no reason to. That fire blew up really fast. Canyon fires do that. When we realized we couldn't do any good there, the Barkers and I drove out and notified the Forest Service.” His Coke had arrived. He started sipping on the straw, slurping his way through the drink.

“The Barkers were both there when you reached the campground?”

“That's right.”

“What kind of frame of mind were they in?”

He gave me a curious look. The Barkers were my clients; I was the one who was supposed to know their frame of mind if anyone did. But he answered the question. “Upset,” he said. “They'd smelled the smoke. They were relieved to see me.”

“Where was Ramona? Did you ever see her again that day?”

“I didn't see her after she left in the morning to leave her tribute,” he said. He made his way rapidly through the Coke and the ice until he was sucking on air. He flagged down the waitress and ordered another.

“Your paths never crossed on the mountain?”

“Never. I understand a couple of firefighters found Ramona in the South Canyon and brought her out after the fire.”

“That's what I heard. You haven't talked to her yourself?”

“No,” he said, and he looked me right in the eye when he said it. His eyes seemed duller than they had before, as if a thirst had been quenched, a passion burned out or a point proven. “I haven't talked to her since she left that morning. I can't find her. She must have gone back to the Rez. You're very lucky
she
was there. She saved your life. Ramona can hang. She knows what to do around fire.”

“Why did she save me? Why not Hogue?”

“That's something you'll have to ask Ramona.”

“I can't find her, either. I've been calling and calling but there's no answer. You don't have her address, do you?”

“She lives in the South Valley. Two hundred Sunset Court. Turn west off of Isleta. It's near the end of the block.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Have you talked to Sheila McGraw yet?”

“Oh, yeah, she called me. I'm a prime arson suspect, aren't I? I've been mouthing off about the Forest Service. I was on the mountain. I was carrying fusees on my pack. I know how to use them.”

“She does believe it was a professional job.”

“I made an appointment to see her.”

“Are you taking your lawyer?”

“What do I need a lawyer for? I'm telling the truth.”

“Sheila wants to talk to Ramona, too. From her point of view we're all suspects: you, me, the Barkers, Ramona. The means and opportunity were available to all of us, separately or together.” Although motive was a lot trickier.

“Hasn't the Forest Service caused the Barkers enough pain?”

“They've established that the fire was started by fusees. You carried them. Eric carried them. Since Ramona had a fire shelter, they're going to assume she was carrying a fully loaded pack and that she had them, too.”

Mike looked into his glass and rattled the ice with the straw. “So she was carrying a pack. What was the motive? Ramona has a strong attachment to trees. She sees her job as saving them, not killing them.”

“Revenge. The Forest Service was responsible for the death of someone you both loved. Hogue did threaten to fire you both.”

“You didn't tell McGraw that, did you?”

“No,” I admitted. “She didn't ask me what transpired on the mountain. I didn't see it as my role to volunteer.” It's seldom a lawyer's role to volunteer.

“Really?” Mike asked.

“Really.”

“Hogue couldn't fire me anyway; I'd already quit. If Ramona was worried about her job, the smart thing would have been to save Hogue's life, wouldn't it? Even the worst woman-hating racist wouldn't fire the Indian woman who'd saved his life.”

“
Maybe she couldn't find Hogue. The smoke was very thick.” Or maybe she did find him. No one knew if he died before or during the fire. “Did you see anybody else on the mountain or any other vehicles on the road that day?”

“No, but you know how thick the brush and trees were. There could have been people all over the mountain that I didn't see. There are plenty of people around with a gripe against the Forest Service.”

“Did you tell anybody else that you were meeting Hogue on Thunder Mountain?”

“No, but anybody could have seen and heard the helicopter flying in and known the Forest Service was around. A house went up in smoke, didn't it?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone looking for motive ought to be talking to the owner.” He put his glass down on the table. “I proved my point about Joni, didn't I?”

“You proved to me that she wouldn't have survived the fire even if she had dropped her pack, if that's what you mean.”

“Joni was a first-class firefighter. It pissed me off that she wasn't getting any recognition for that. So what if she didn't always go by the book? The best firefighters don't. How are you going to advise the Barkers about the suit?”

“I told them that I think there's cause for action. The government was negligent in a lot of areas. But whether the Barkers will choose to go ahead, I don't know. What do you think?”

“For myself I don't care anymore. I proved what I wanted to prove. But if it would make the Barkers feel better, I say go for it.” He stood up; in his mind the conversation was over. “I need to get back to my workout. You can believe it or not, Neil, but I'm glad you survived.”

“I believe it,” I said.

I called Ramona when I got home. Still no answer.

******

The Kid came for dinner with a bag of burritos from Casa de Benevides under his arm. We washed them down—Tecate for him, tequila for me—watched TV for a while, and went to bed early. When I woke up in the morning he'd already left for work. I was getting used to seeing his clothes draped over the bedposts at the foot of the bed, but a new pile had gathered on the chair. That's the way it is when you own a house, a man starts moving in. There was still plenty of mess in my house, but that was my mess. This wasn't. I gathered up all the clothes as if I was headed for the laundry, but they weren't all dirty and I didn't feel like washing them even if they were. I took the pile into the empty room and opened the closet, empty except for the fire shelter. That was empty enough for me. The garage was not a viable alternative. The hall closet was stuffed full. I went back to my bedroom, opened my closet, hung up
what
went on hangers, and found a bureau drawer for the rest.

13

I
N THE MORNING
I talked to Sheila McGraw and set up the appointment with the Barkers for four the following afternoon. I called Nancy and Eric separately and asked them to meet me in my office together at three. They sat down in the chairs across from my desk. I got Eric his coffee with sugar and Nancy her water.