Chasing Fire

Maybe he thinks about burying her, and went back to get tools. Fire’s quicker and takes less effort. Dry conditions, some brush.”
    “If you started it around two, three in the morning,” Gull calculated, “it would get a pretty good blaze up by dawn, and buy you a few hours.”
    Yes, she thought. Sure. Survival had to be the first priority.
    “Pack it up, and you’re way gone by dawn.” She nodded, steadied by working it as a problem to be solved. “It’ll take time to identify her, so that buys you more yet. And the fact is, if I hadn’t taken that route back to the line, maybe it’s hours more, even days, before she’s found. I wasn’t going that route, but the blowup sent me in and over.”
    They continued to find and kill spots as they talked. Then she stopped. “I didn’t think I wanted to think about it. I found her, I called it in, now it’s for the USFS to deal with. But it’s been gnawing at me ever since. It . . . it shook me,” she confessed.
    “It would shake anybody, Rowan.”
    “Have you ever seen somebody after they’ve been—”
    “Yeah. It sticks with you.” And he knew talking about it, thinking about the hows and whys, helped.
    “Summers are usually about this.” She drowned a bucket-sized spot before it had a chance to grow. “Putting out fires, mopping them up, training and prepping to jump the next. But this summer? We’ve got crazy Dolly, my father going on a date, dead people.”
    “Your father dating ranks with vandalism and possible homicide and arson?”
    “It’s just different. Unusual. Like me sleeping with a rookie—which I haven’t done, by the way, since I was one.”
    “Points for me.”
    She shifted direction, angled south. Points for him, maybe, but to her mind change, exceptions, the different screwed up the order of things.
    After nearly two hours on spots, they rejoined the crew and shifted to mop-up mode.
    She pulled out her radio to take a call from the operations desk.
    “We want the first load to demob,” L.B. told her. “Second load and ground crew will complete the mop-up.”
    “I hear that.”
    “The fed wants to talk to you when you get back.”
    “Can’t it wait until tomorrow? I talked to the rangers, gave them all the details.”
    “Doesn’t look like it. You can pack out. There’ll be ground transportation for you at the trailhead.”
    “Copy that.” What the hell, she thought, at least this way she’d get it all over with in one day.
     
     
    SHE’D PLANNED on getting a shower first, but she’d no more than dumped her gear when the fed came looking for her.
    “Rowan Tripp?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Special Agent Kimberly DiCicco. I have some questions.”
    “The rangers already have my answers, but since we both work for a bureaucracy, I know how it goes.”
    “Mr. Little Bear offered his office so we can speak in private.”
    “I’m not stinking up L.B.’s office. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty ripe with smoke and sweat.”
    She had to notice, Rowan thought. The agent’s compact body was tucked into a black suit of classic lines with a pristine white shirt. Without a hair out of place, her sleek nape-of-the-neck bun left her refinedboned, coffee-with-a-splash-of-cream face unframed.
    DiCicco’s eyebrows arched over tawny eyes as she angled her head. “You’ve put in a long day. I’m aware. I’ll make it as brief as possible.”
    “Then let’s walk and talk.” Rowan stripped down to her tank and trousers. “Maybe I’ll air out a little.”
    “Heads up.”
    She turned, caught the cold bottle of Coke Gull sent her in a smooth underhand pass. “Thanks. Save me some lasagna.”
    “I’ll do what I can.”
    “Okay, Agent DiCicco.” At Rowan’s gesture, they walked outside. “You ask, I’ll answer.”
    “You could start by telling me how you came upon the body.”
    Already covered, Rowan thought, but went through it again. “With the way the fire was running,” she continued, “I had to cut off the recon and make for a safe zone. I headed in, then hiked across the old burnout section and into the black. The area adjacent to where the fire had passed through. I was heading for Lolo Trail. I could take that most of the way back to my crew. And I found her.”
    “Her?”
    “I don’t know. The remains were on the small side for a grown man.”
    “You’d be correct. The victim was female.”
    “Oh. Well.” Rowan stopped, blew out a breath. “That’s better than the