Hotshots Page 8

  “Are we talking negligence suit?” Eric asked. There was still hope in the gray eyes, but that was a fire I was about to put out.

  “I think there’s cause for action.” And I wasn’t seeing dollar signs when I said it either. “I don’t have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. We only need a preponderance of evidence in a civil suit.”

  “Damn,” Eric said softly. He stared out the window. “You know what I’d like to do right now?”

  “Talk it over with Nancy?”

  “No. I’d like to go down to Baja, get in a boat, and drift out to sea.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  “I might never come back.”

  “You’ll come back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you didn’t raise your daughter to run away from trouble,” I said.

  11

  IT WAS A quarter to two by Anna’s clock when Eric left. If I got in my car and drove over the mountain I could be at Nancy’s house in Cedar Crest in an hour. I was having trouble getting back in the office groove anyway. I could have called Nancy and told her I was coming, but I didn’t. Eric had already said she’d be home.

  “I’m kind of tired. I think I’ll take the rest of the afternoon off,” I told Anna.

  “You’ll be in tomorrow?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I went the back way to Cedar Crest, through the village of Placitas, up the winding dirt road, past the cave where Placitas Man was found and later discovered to be a hoax. I continued through the woods and over the mountain. “Closed for the Winter” the sign said where the pavement ended; it always said that—even now in August. There were quaking aspens at the higher elevations and they were already turning yellow. About halfway up I stopped at Las Huertas picnic area, parked the Nissan, and walked to the stream that flows through the canyon. I sat on a rock wall and listened to the water rush under a downed log and over a rock. There’s enough Easterner left in me that every now and then I get a craving for water. It has a way of smoothing rough edges, but after a few minutes of soothing I began to hear crying in the gurgling. New Mexico’s streams, rivers, and ditches are haunted by the spirit of La Llorona, the woman who drowned her children and wanders our waterways weeping. The wide-open spaces were looking good again. I got in the Nissan and drove to the ridge top where the view stretches nearly to Texas.

  The road on the east side of the Sandias is paved; it’s the road the skiers, tourists, and hikers use. The weather is cooler and wetter over here, and the forest is lush. If this side of the mountain had ever been timbered, it was a long time ago. Second-growth forests tend to be monochromatic and boring. This forest had shades and levels of green from deep ponderosa to silvery blue spruce interspersed with crooked white aspen.

  The Barkers lived at the base of the mountain on Aspencade Drive in Cedar Crest. My map showed Aspencade to be parallel straight lines ending in parallel dotted lines, a gravel road turning to dirt. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where the gravel leaves off and the dirt begins. The bumps on Aspencade were spaced at intervals that made the Nissan rattle like a bucket of bolts whenever I exceeded fifteen miles an hour. In Santa Fe there’s a cachet to living on dirt roads, but they drive Mercedes-Benz jeeps up there and don’t have to get up every morning and go to work. That’s one reason I don’t live in the East Mountains; it’s too big a mind change to drive from rural to urban and back every day. It’s simpler to live and work in the same zone.

  The Barkers’ house was at the edge of the forest, where sunbeams were slipping through the branches of the pines and landing on the pine-needle floor. It was easy to see how a kid growing up here would want to protect trees. The house was wood frame with lots of east-facing windows, a pitched roof, and a large deck. A Saturn was parked at one end of the driveway. At the other was a vegetable garden with corn, tomatoes, and squash. As I got out of my car I was greeted by a squirrel screeching and dropping a pinecone to the deck. Nancy came to the door. “Neil,” she called, “what are you doing here? Come on up.”

  Climbing the stairs to the deck brought on another coughing fit. “You all right?” Nancy asked with a motherly concern in her voice.

  “Yeah.”

  “What brings you over here?” She was very surprised to see me, and as insistent on making that point as the squirrel was on making his. Her mouth was a slash of red lipstick. Her hair was a blond helmet. She wore khaki hiking shorts, sandals that gripped her big toe, and a T-shirt. The green ribbon was pinned across her heart. It takes discipline for a grieving woman to put on lipstick and get dressed every morning. Another mother I’d known who’d lost her daughter had never gotten out of her bathrobe again.

  “I was taking the back road to Santa Fe; I get tired of I-25. I’d thought I’d stop by to see how you were doing.” I answered, proving, if only to myself, that I could lie as well as I could cough.

  “More important, how are you doing?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Come on in and have some tea with honey. That’ll help your cough.” I followed her into the house, which was done in a style I’d call Appalachian cabin. The furniture was made out of logs and there were quilted fabrics on the walls, the pillows, and the windows. An unfinished quilt with a red pattern on a white background lay on the sofa. Nancy must have been working on it when I showed up. The house was cozy and neat, no fuzzy film on the coffee table, no telltale dust balls under the sofa. No TV that I could see. Nancy put the water on and began banging mugs around the kitchen. “What would you like?” she called. “I have Constant Comment, Grandma’s Tummy Mint, Emperor’s Choice, Red Zinger.”

  “Red Zinger,” I said.

  She came back with a steaming ceramic mug and a jar of honey on a tray. I stirred in the honey with a plastic beehive on a stick and put the mug down on the end table. Nancy lifted the mug and placed a coaster underneath. She pushed the quilt aside and sat beside me on the sofa.

  “You’re making a quilt?” I asked.

  “It’ll give me something to do until school starts. I have to keep busy or I’ll go crazy.” It’s hard enough to stay occupied alone in a house in the woods without a death to deal with. With a tragedy it would have been all too easy to pull the curtains, turn on the TV, smoke Marlboros, drink tequila, and enter the dark place looking for light. Nancy picked up a needle and threaded it. Her relentless determination made me wonder if she wasn’t taking mother’s latest little helper—Prozac. It’s the perfect substance to keep a woman working and smiling from dawn to dusk.

  “You’ve been on the mountain now. What do you think? Do we have a case?” Nancy asked me.

  “Mike gave a convincing demonstration that dropping the packs wouldn’t have saved anyone’s life. It was a very steep and dangerous place to attempt to fight a fire. There should have been aerial surveillance. I can understand how hard it would have been for Ramona to see the fire. There should have been better training. There should have been better weather forecasting. The fact that that information wasn’t passed on to the firefighters is gross negligence in my mind.”

  Nancy’s eyes had the red fire of a deer trapped in the headlights or a woman caught off guard by the camera, a woman who was far too angry to be on Prozac. She appeared to be getting by substance-free. “They never should have sent the crew in there just to save somebody’s trophy home. Never!” she said jabbing the quilt with her needle.

  She lived so close to the woods herself I had to wonder what she’d have done if her house had been threatened.

  “It makes me so goddamn angry. Did you see how big that house was?”

  “It’s gone now,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “Do you blame Hogue for the South Canyon?”

  “I blame everybody in the Forest Service. I’m mad at them for sending Joni to Thunder Mountain. I’m mad at them for not giving the firefighters any support. I’m mad at Ramona for living. I’m mad at Joni for dying. Dumb, I know, but I can’t help it.”

&nb
sp; Emotions can be like fire. Sometimes they are easily ignited, sometimes not, but once they get burning it’s in their nature to get out of control. “Does the fact that Hogue died up there make any difference to you in terms of pursuing the lawsuit?”

  “No. He was just a symbol. I want to get the people who made the decisions that killed my daughter.”

  “I talked to Eric earlier,” I said.

  “Oh? He didn’t mention it.”

  “It was only about an hour ago. I tried to call you first but you weren’t home. The arson investigator has determined that the East Canyon fire was caused by arson.”

  “That figures. I mean, what else could it have been?”

  “They want to talk to you as part of the investigation.”

  “You’re our lawyer. Do you have any objection to that?”

  “It’s always better not to talk to investigators. Did you see or hear anything while you waited? Anybody driving or walking up the road?”

  “Not really,” Nancy replied. “I think some vehicles went by, but I couldn’t see them from where I sat.”

  “Under the cottonwood?”

  “Right.”

  “When did Mike get back?”

  “Around three.”

  “What kind of frame of mind was he in?”

  “He was very upset. He’d seen the fire. We’d smelled the smoke. As soon as Mike returned we got into his car, drove out, and called the Forest Service. That fire was terrifying to watch. It would have been even more terrifying if we’d known you were on the mountain.”

  “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.”