Wild Inferno (13 page)

Thursday, 1300 Hours

When I got back to the ICP, Roy was sitting at a desk doing some paperwork. He showed me a faxed list of the names of the Three-Pueblos Hot Shots and their medical conditions. I scanned down the list. One firefighter, Delgado Gonzales, age twenty-three, was in good condition and was expected to be released within the next day or two. Most of the hotshots were in fair condition. Two were in serious condition due to smoke and heat damage to their respiratory systems, and some burns. At the bottom of the list was the name of one man in critical condition: Louie Gonzales. He was unconscious, unstable, and had burns over 80 percent of his body. A note beneath his name said
Indicators are unfavorable.
His age was listed as twenty-one years. I ran my finger back and forth over the print on the page, as if I could feel his body, his temperature, his pulse through the paper. I dropped my head.

“We got one firefighter about to get out,” Roy said. “And most of 'em are doing pretty good, all things considered. But we got a few boys that are touch-and-go.”

“Louie Gonzales,” I said.

“What's that?”

“Louie Gonzales. That's his name. The burning man.”

Roy stopped what he was doing and raised his head up. He looked over the tops of his little cheater glasses at me.

“Twenty-one years old,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. He's the brother of Delgado, the one about to get out.”

“Twenty-one years old.”

“All this is getting to you,” he said. He pulled off his glasses and set them on the desk, leaned back in his chair.

I bit my lip. “It doesn't get to you, Roy?”

He rubbed his forehead. “You know it does. I owe you an apology for the way I tore you up earlier. That was me being in a pressure cooker and not knowing what to do about it. I guess I just feel better somehow now that I have a list of names, knowing most of 'em are going to make it. It was not knowing anything that was driving me nuts.”

“Well, I'm going nuts anyway. I'm supposed to be in three places in the next half hour. I need to meet the BIA rep in Pagosa…”

“I'll get Information to take care of that,” Roy said. “They got about five trainees that just arrived. They won't like it, but I'll snag one and put them on that.”

“And the governor's office…”

“You need to field that one, but if we have to babysit someone till you get back, let me know. The FBI wants you on scene because you're the one who found the body. I can't send anyone else for that.”

My sat phone rang. “Fire Liaison, Wild speaking,” I said.

There was no answer.

“Hello?”

The line was dead.

“Might be the FBI agent,” Roy said. “He told me he'd call you when he was getting close and you could meet him down at the trailhead. Maybe he was getting out of range and got cut off.”

“I'll head over there.”

As I was walking through the door, Roy called after me, “Jamaica?”

I turned and looked at him.

“You'll be all right. You been through worse. You're tough.”

Ron Crane and I were quiet as we hiked up to the crime scene—mostly because it was such an arduous climb and we were working hard just trying to get enough air into our lungs. For me, the time spent simply moving my legs and working my body gave my mind freedom to ruminate. I thought about Louie Gonzales, twenty-one years old and running for his life through a blazing inferno. But Louie Gonzales wasn't running when I found him. He was merely standing in the road, possibly too overcome with his injuries to move any farther. And what about his cryptic message:
Save the grandmother
? He could have told me to call his wife or sweetheart, to tell his brother he was sorry he didn't stay and deploy his fire shelter, to tell the hotshot crew they were his brothers, to pray for his soul, anything. Why
Save the grandmother
?

When we arrived at the top of the drainage where I'd found the body, Agent Crane bent over and placed a hand on each knee, puffing and panting. Around us, what was formerly forested slope now looked like a moonscape. A wide brown plume boiled to the north and west of us, and small pillars of smoke rose from stump holes and still-smoldering pockets of ground around us.

“It was starting to get dark when we were up here yesterday,” Crane said. “I don't think there will be much of a crime scene since the fire burned pretty hot through here, but I thought we ought to take a look in the daylight anyway.”

“Okay to walk around, then?” I asked.

“Let's try to be careful, but—yes, we've got to move around.”

I moved as carefully as I could in my heavy wildland boots. I checked the ground before each step, walked in fairly straight lines from the trailhead around the perimeter, and approached the mound of dirt and loose stones piled up beside a depression. I reached into the cargo pocket of my fire pants and pulled out a map and studied it. “It looks like this is either right on or next to Site 8AA.104. Do you still have the lat and long that we radioed in?”

Crane leafed through a small notebook that he'd pulled from his shirt pocket and read me the coordinates. I checked them against the map. “I think this spot where Grampa Ned was digging is actually a few yards west of that site. That is, if he was the one digging.”

“Oh, he was digging, all right, and not just with the shovel,” Crane said. “We found lots of dirt packed under his fingernails, or what was left of them. One hand had been tucked under his body, and it was in better shape than most of the rest of him.”

“But why? Everyone keeps telling me what a rich tribe the Southern Utes are, and I've heard that Grampa Ned owned property as well. I wouldn't think he'd be digging for artifacts. He certainly didn't need the money. Besides, the Forest Service archaeologist told me that most Utes won't go in the ruins around here.”

Crane squatted down and started looking across the soil. “Well, if he was digging for artifacts, too bad for him.”

“And who would come up here and hit him with a shovel? I can't believe it's the hotshot. I found out today he's only twenty-one. He probably didn't even know Ned. He's from one of the Rio Grande pueblos.”

Crane got down on hands and knees and lowered his head almost to the level of the ground. He scanned across the place where someone had removed the earth. “I'll be honest with you,” he said as he studied the area. “Usually within a couple hours of something like this, I know who did it. I've been here long enough, I know these guys, and I have excellent cooperation from the Southern Ute Tribal Police. I usually talk to the family, find out what the victim had been doing, and come up with a short list of possible bad guys. Murder is all I do, and this is where I've been doing it for sixteen years. But this one is different.”

I used his technique, squatting and scanning the ground. “You can't think of anyone who might have done it?”

Agent Crane stood up and brushed off his hands. “I can't think of anyone who wouldn't have wanted to. From what I can tell, Ned Spotted Cloud did not have a friend in this world, other than his daughter Nuni, who just recently found out she had a father and didn't really know him. But there's a list of folks as long as my leg with motives. Some of them better than others, but not enough to narrow the field much.”

A tiny glimmer of reflected light caught my eye. I turned my head to the side and tried to lower myself even farther. “I think there might be something here,” I said, “under the soil.”

Ron Crane stepped carefully to the side of me and gingerly got to his hands and knees. He turned his head parallel to the ground as I pointed to the sparkle amid the ashes and charred soil. He knelt and took a pocketknife and carefully scraped the soil back. A minuscule bit of micaceous pottery emerged from the blackened earth, no larger than the tip of my pinky. “Well, what do we have here?” Crane said, as he used the point of his knife to gently pry up the tiny carbonized lump.

I recognized the figure immediately, having watched Momma Anna make countless numbers of them. “It's a bear!” I said. “A little pottery bear! A few of the women at Tanoah Pueblo still make them—they're like fetishes—medicine objects, power animals.”

Crane managed to turn the diminutive bear over with the blade of his knife. He moved to one side to allow more light on the object. “There's a hole on either side of his neck,” he said.

“It's for stringing it onto something—like a leather thong or yucca fiber—and wearing it around your neck. I know these bears. I know someone who makes them.”

Crane took a small digital camera out of his pocket, squatted down again, and snapped a few shots. “This one looks pretty old. We're going to have to have one of your resource advisors come up and take a look at this before I remove it. Can you call on your satellite phone?”

Steve Morella was astonished at our find. “What do you know?” he kept saying as he looked at the fetish, smiling. He took photos as well and made some notes. “There was a bear effigy like that, only larger, up at the Guard House site. They found it when they first excavated up there. That bear was almost four inches in length, though, not miniature like this one. Looks like the same kind of fine blackened pottery—though the other one was not as sparkly as this guy is. We'll have to document the find.”

“I'm taking it for evidence,” Agent Crane said. “It could have fingerprints on it. After we check it out, we can arrange to return it to your possession.”

“This is quite amazing!” Morella said. “Quite amazing! The site near here was a small family pueblo—Elaine would know all about it. She worked on the excavation of this very dig in the eighties. I believe it was a five-room block pueblo with only a few items found intact, nothing major.”

“Well, this could be major,” Crane said, “if it has fingerprints on it.”

“There's just one thing that's kind of strange,” Morella said.

“What's that?”

“The site was excavated twenty-some years ago. It was sorted, sifted, things were collected, labeled, and then covered over again. This bear effigy is lying nearly on top of the ground. Even where it looks like someone has been digging, they didn't get down very deep. I'm not saying it never happens that something washes up when we have heavy rains or something, but…” He stood and looked around him. “I just don't see signs of that kind of erosion here. It seems odd that whoever was digging here would find something so near the surface, an isolated find, not a group of pot shards or something like that. And that bear doesn't even seem to be clotted with soil, as it would be if it had been buried here for a century or more.”

Agent Crane removed a small plastic pouch, then managed to scoop the tiny figure up onto the blade of his knife. He gestured for me to hold the evidence pouch open, then carefully inserted the knife and lowered the fetish into the sack. It fell in with a small
plumpf
sound and then appeared to look up at me from the bottom of the bag. Crane stood and held the container up to the light, admiring its contents. “Well, we'll just send this little guy down to the lab and see what he has to tell us.”

After Morella left, Crane walked around and took more photos and some measurements. The blackened ground still radiated heat, and the sun baked down on us from above. I took a long look back up the slopes to the place where they had found the hotshots who'd been burned over. I remembered that I had seen a glimmer of silver from above, that there was almost a direct line of sight between the two spots. Ron Crane saw me looking up the slope and followed my gaze. He said, “Your burned guy, he was a Pueblo man, right?”

I nodded. “Three-Pueblos Hot Shots.”

“And this is a Puebloan ruin, right?”

I looked at him, but didn't speak.

“Maybe he spied old Ned digging here and came down and stopped him.”

I remained quiet.

“A Pueblo guy would probably take great offense if he saw some old man digging in one of their sacred sites.”

I shook my head. “I think the sacred sites are all up on top by Chimney Rock. Morella said this was just a simple little family pueblo. Besides, how would a hotshot from New Mexico know there was even a site here?”

He wiped his forehead and blew air through his lips, making a sputtering sound as if he were blasting a few notes out of a trumpet. He looked up the slope again to where the hotshots had been found. Then he looked back down at the place where Grampa Ned spent his last moments. Suddenly, Crane started walking back downhill. “I'm going to tell you what I think. I think he either saw Ned here and risked his life to save him, or he saw Ned here and risked his life to kill him. It's one or the other, because nothing else makes any sense.”

Thursday, 1800 Hours

Kerry's Division Bravo had set up a self-contained camp near the front—known as a spike camp—to the east side of the heel of the fire, near the area where I'd found the burning man. Since I got down off the slope from the crime scene at a few minutes before six p.m., I headed to the spike camp for evening briefing. Agent Crane decided to tag along and listen. A crew of Hopi hotshots was about to airlift in to start the night shift, while the Blackfeet #3 Hotshot crew remained near the fire line, but stood down after a long day.

Smoke rolled off the slopes behind us as we gathered in a circle. The heat of the day was still so severe that I noticed the firefighters were reluctant to stand too close to one another.

Kerry's lower lip bulged with a wad of tobacco. “Listen up, people. This is a very hot division. The slopes and fuels are maintaining a lot of heat. We have the potential to maintain high to extreme fire activity tonight. Our spot weather forecast says there may be some dry thunderstorms overnight, and the wind effect from these could really kick this up. The terrain here is very difficult, and we're trying to burn out ahead of the fire. You all know how risky that is. Strike team leaders, make sure every person on your crew is thoroughly briefed, that you've got good communications, and that those communications are maintained during the firing operations. There's some radio dead spots up there; we're right in the shadow of the repeater. You'll have to make sure you use whatever means you can to keep comms—use human repeaters if you need to. Even though this is a night operational period, temperatures will stay hot, and humidity is low. They've had a couple of heat stress–related incidents on Division Alpha along the western flank, so maintain your fluids, watch one another, pace your workload, take breaks. We've got two coyote crews already in there, so tie in with them once you drop into your zone, make sure you get a briefing from them.” Kerry looked at me. “Do we have any news on the Three-Pueblos Hot Shots?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes.” I addressed the group. “We heard today. They're all alive…”

A clamor of whooping and cheering went up from the camp.

“We have one member of the crew who is expected to be released tomorrow…”

Another round of cheering. There was a perceptible lift in the mood of everyone gathered there.

“And…I'll make sure you get any further updates as they come through.” I chose not to say any more, knowing the good news would sustain the firefighters. That was enough.

Ron Crane walked with me as I headed toward my Jeep. “I heard what was said about firing operations. I guess that old adage about fighting fire with fire is true.”

“Yes, it is. Setting a backburn can often rob the fire of fuel and oxygen. And burning out ahead of it deprives it of fuel as well. Hotshots, in particular, do a lot of stringing fire. They're the best-trained firefighters we have, and they know how to manage it.”

“It looks like a lot of work—those heavy packs, the long hours, the terrain.”

“It's hard work all right. But there's nothing like it.”

“Why do you do it?” he asked.

“I don't know. Partly it's that I love the West. But mostly it's the chance to work with all these brave people. And maybe also to sit at the end of the day on top of a mountain somewhere and see a beautiful view that maybe no white girl has seen before, and may not again soon.”

“No
white
girl?”

I smiled. “I hang out with a bunch of Indians. Most of the women just call me White Girl. They never even use my name.”

He laughed. “I'd call you Red Girl today.”

“Yeah, I got a little burn. But almost everyone in camp is sunburned, so I fit in here.”

“So, have you got someplace you have to go right now?” He stopped walking.

I stopped, too, wrinkled my brow, thinking. “I have to get some chow, then head to a storytelling this evening. Oh, God, I almost forgot. I have to meet with the governor's representative for Native Cultural Affairs.”

“Well, I can take care of your chow if you'll let me buy you a sandwich or something.”

The knot of firefighters was breaking up, the hotshots headed for the helispot to catch a ride to their new assignment. From across the road, I saw Kerry looking at me, his head tipped to one side in curiosity. He looked at Ron Crane, then spit tobacco juice on the ground and turned away.

“I can't,” I told Crane, and started walking again. I looked at my watch. “I've got to meet with the governor's rep. I got all excited when we found that little bear effigy and I forgot all about that. I'm already really late. She's going to be pissed.”

“I might need your help with the investigation.” He hurried to keep up.

“Me?”

“Yes. You just said you hang out with a bunch of Indians. And I need to know what was going on with the hotshot that you found. He's Indian, right?”

“Yes, Puebloan.”

“Okay, there's that. And you're on the inside as a member of the fire team. You'll hear things, maybe see things I won't be able to hear and see.”

I furrowed my brow, trying to think of a polite way to refuse.

Crane continued, “And Clara White Deer evidently agreed to talk with you, right?”

“Only a little bit. We had a glass of lemonade.”

“Well, she will hardly say a word to me, and the tribal police said the same thing. Said she doesn't like men. I was wondering if you could find out a couple things from her for me.”

I made a grimace. “Listen, I'd like to help but I have stuff to do. I work long days on a fire. I don't have a deputy and I don't have a crew. If the IC thinks it has something to do with my job description, then I have to do it myself. And on this fire, that's been a lot.”

Crane smiled. “Well, then, I guess I better talk to your IC.”