“Good Lord. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“The DHS didn’t tell me until about thirty minutes ago. They’ve sent an arson-terror specialist — Special Agent Max Knechtl. He told me that no one has claimed responsibility for this fire. But the good news is that NSA electronically monitors Inspire readers here in the U.S. And they report to the DHS. So, if there’s a connection...”
Evelyn wondered if NSA surveillence of e-magazine readers without a warrant was good news or not. But there were larger questions here, or at least more urgent ones.
“And the other good news,” said Bruck, “is that I’ve wrapped up the investigation and gotten everything into the lab.”
“Well, Bill — we’ve wrapped it up,” said Sheriff Stan Hazzard, who sat in back with Evelyn. The two men chuckled. The driver, a young fireman with a buzz cut, glanced back at Evelyn in the rearview.
“What did you find out?” asked Evelyn.
“Oh, that’s going to take some time,” said Bruck. “We may have evidence of arson. But we’ve also got San Diego Gas and Electric power lines, apparently downed by the wind.”
“How long until you know what caused the fire?” asked Evelyn.
“The lab is good,” said Sheriff Hazzard. “A week at the most.”
“But you can see right over there that the trees were higher than the lines,” said Evelyn. “And we know they were swaying like crazy in the winds that night. It’s the power company’s responsibility to keep the trees away from their lines, right?”
“Exactly right,” said Bruck. “Except Ashley found what may well be accelerant.”
“Ashley?” asked the mayor.
“Our arson dog,” said Bruck. “We really can’t discuss what she may or may not have found, Evelyn.”
“Then, without discussing it, can you at least tell your mayor what you found? We lost three lives here, Bill. And you’re talking about Al-Qaeda and homegrown terrorists.”
He turned and gave her a granitic look. “The evidence of arson appears faint at best.”
“Maybe that’s good,” she said. “A negligent accident is still better than a terrorist. It would be a silver lining for our little town to have the wind and San Diego Gas and Electric prove to be at fault. They’re insured for billions for this kind of thing.”
“I know that.”
She looked out at the broiled trees and earth and wondered who could start such a fire on purpose. The damage went on mile after mile. She knew that most wildfires were natural and they helped balance and restore the ecosystem over time — nature’s form of self-government. She winced at her own thought. Since becoming mayor she’d felt that she was a governmental wildfire: cutting, cutting; trimming, trimming, no, no; I’m sorry, we can’t afford that, no! We can’t even build a few lighted crosswalks to keep people from getting killed by cars, she thought. Mother Nature and government can be cruel things. Who’s to govern them?
Then the car came to a stop and she saw two uniformed deputies pulling away orange cones to let them pass onto a county fire road. They bumped along for maybe half a mile then parked. “We’re pretty sure this is where it started,” said Bruck. “You wanted to see it.”
Evelyn got out and followed the three men down into a shallow arroyo. The fireman-driver carried an extinguisher pack on his back and used a shovel as a walking stick. Evelyn’s jeans were soon lashed with soot and her athletic shoes were blackened with ash. Single file they climbed a hillock. The fireman stopped and blasted a hot spot and Evelyn saw the ash and chemical dust rise and disperse. They stood on top of the rise and looked east.
“Some of the line went down right over there,” said the fire chief. “You can see the branch that came off that big oak and took down the line with it. You can see that the wind pushed the fire west — Santa Ana winds, strong offshore. Everything east, behind us, was spared because of that. The rest burned and burned. Drifted north as the winds weakened. Skilled arsonists wait for those conditions. Unfortunately.”
Evelyn shot pictures. The digital SLX had been a Christmas gift from her husband, son, and daughter and she thought of them every time she used it.
“We’ve got plenty of documentation, Evelyn,” said Sheriff Hazzard. “Just let me know what you need.”
Evelyn shot more pictures of the power lines tangled within the fallen branches. When she lowered the camera she caught the looks of annoyance passed between the fire chief and the sheriff. Let them be annoyed, she thought, this is evidence of San Diego Gas and Electric negligence and it’s going to mean billions of dollars for Fallbrook and its citizens. Billions.
She skidded down the embankment to where a power pole stood. The downed line was nowhere in sight. She thought she saw a segment but it turned out to be a snake, caught above ground on the warm night and quick-roasted by the fire. “There’s nothing worth seeing down there,” the fire chief called out.
“Where’s the power line that came down?”
“At the crime lab, Evelyn, where it belongs!”
She looked up from the snake to the blackened ridgeline and the muted sky and the vultures circling above with machined precision. Suddenly she was sickened by it all — by the stench and the ash and the death. The idea of terrorists doing this. Or any other sorry bastard. She angrily broke through a stand of scorched manzanita to find a private place, went to her knees in the ashes, and threw up. Then again. She had to hold the camera to her chest so it wouldn’t swing out on its strap and get puked on. A moment later, slack-faced and panting softly, she stood and wiped her mouth with her hand then wiped that on her filthy jeans. She felt tears running down her face as she kicked some rubble over what she had ejected. She laughed at her simple human instinct — in spite of utter disaster — to not leave your messes for someone else to clean up. And when she looked down to check her work she saw the tangle of wires and fat D batteries and the old-fashioned wind-up travel alarm, all soot-blackened and weirdly fused to what looked like a small melted container. “Bill! Stan! I found something!”
After a quick shower and a change of clothes at home, Evelyn went back downtown to her office at City Hall. She could hardly focus on her duties after what she had found out in Rice Canyon. If that wretched ash-choked tangle of junk proved to be what Bruck and Stan said it almost certainly was, then three people had been murdered, Fallbrook was out billions of dollars, and a cold-blooded or even terrorist killer was lurking somewhere among them. Or, more than one? She googled Al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and found the most recent issue. Sure enough, the table of contents listed a piece calling for jihadi firebombing of forests in the United States. The article was dedicated to starting “huge forest fires in America with timed explosives and remote-controlled bombs.” The magazine called for “Lone wolf attacks on American soil.” Evelyn’s heart jumped and fluttered. Wasn’t Cade Magnus’s group called the Lone Wolves? Or was it Rogue Wolves? Hell, she thought, in a weird way, what’s the difference? Wasn’t everybody a something these days? What reasonable person could be heard, with so many nutcase extremists of every ilk screaming and setting fires? Everywhere in the world! Even right here in Fallbrook! She wondered if this simple computer search would land her on some NSA watch list. She shivered.
She looked up to make sure her office door was propped open, very important, then started in answering the scores of phone calls and the hundreds of e-mails that awaited her. Talk talk talk. Tap tap tap. There were dozens more media requests for quotes and interviews — with Evelyn herself, not staff — they needed to put a face on disaster. She tried to accommodate them. Talk talk. Most of what awaited her were citizen’s complaints — citizens bereft with loss, citizens furious with the fire department, citizens wondering if the air and water were safe, citizens suspicious of fellow citizens. Tap tap. She answered each one as best she could before hurrying to the next: it was like juggling knives and bowling pins while balancing on a medicine ball. In Fallbrook, the mayor was an elected part-time position that paid two hundred and eighty dollars per month. Some weeks she spent three hours at city work, and some weeks twenty. Or thirty. The next few would be a test of her ability to govern and perform her full-time work as a “wealth manager.”