Full Measure: A Novel (6 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Evelyn Anders sat in the back of the Fallbrook Fire Department sedan and looked out at Rice Canyon, where the devastating fire had started. The early October morning was warm and dry and the scorched earth wheezed smoke and ash. Rice Canyon was steep and rugged and serviced by only one paved road, which intersected Highway 76 six miles from the Fallbrook city limit.

She hadn’t seen the canyon in two years, since she and her husband had gotten a sitter for the kids and come out here to hike and watch birds, then gamble and spend the night at the Pala Casino. Now she looked out at the utter destruction on display. She remembered Rice Canyon as a lovely, thickly wooded area, clotted with lemonadeberry and sage and ceonothus, which, she knew, would all burn like matches in any drought month. And October was the absolute worst month of all. It looked like a hydrogen bomb had gone off.

Fallbrook Fire Chief William Bruck swung around in the front passenger seat and looked at her. “Evelyn, we’ve just learned something interesting that I’d like to share with you. Last week, an online English-language Al-Qaeda magazine called for homegrown terrorists to start fires in the U.S. They published detailed directions on how to use simple timers and accelerants. The terrorist magazine is called
Inspire.
”

“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.”

She thought of her always open office door as her way of healing the break in her heart caused by 9/11, two bloody wars, the great recession, the mortgage meltdown, the real estate collapse, and the bailouts of the big boys. These things had broken the hearts of her fellow citizens, too. God knew, they weren’t shy about voicing it. But she was doing her part to fix what was broken:
she was leaving her door open.
The door to cooperation, the door to government
of, by, and for the people.
Then why did she feel so helpless?

She looked up from the screen and saw Iris Cash and the two girls who had held up the
WHO KILLED GEORGE?
sign at the meeting the night before standing in her doorway. Behind them, tall and inelegant, looking as if she would rather be any other place on earth than here, stood a young woman wearing only black, a thatch of copper hair jammed up into a black porkpie hat. “How can I help you?”

“I am McKenzie,” said one of the girls. “And this is Dulce. We were George’s friends. And this is Cruzela Storm. She has agreed to help us.”

*   *   *

“And their idea is to do a concert and raise the forty-four thousand dollars for the crosswalks,” Evelyn told her husband that evening as they checked the news on the kitchen TV and did the dinner prep.

“Cruzela Storm could sell out Warrior Stadium in a second flat,” he said. Brian was a rocker by heart but an accountant by trade, and Evelyn’s tireless partner in Anders Wealth Management. She knew that not every fifty-year-old accountant would know of Cruzela Storm, but Brian would, certainly. He had a collection of guitars, mostly electric and vintage and valuable. He played them with voluble abandon through a large Marshall in their music room–den. And of course he had thousands of recordings and high-end audio gear to play them on. “Let me get that new one of hers.”

Still an unrepentant CD listener, Brian came back a moment later with the jewel case and put the disc into the player. He turned off the TV and cranked the music to his usual level of too loud. Evelyn thought the opening guitar riff was dire and slightly head-banging, but when Cruzela Storm’s voice kicked in, it was low, pure, and somehow honeylike. Evelyn looked at the picture on the CD cover: Cruzela Storm looked like Daryl Hannah in
Blade Runner,
but with crazy copper hair instead of crazy white hair, all eyes and makeup. Nothing like she had looked in Evelyn’s office.

“I like this bass line,” said Brian.

“How much should tickets cost?” asked Evelyn. “If Cruzela Storm played at the stadium?”

“Her audience is older because she’s relatively sophisticated—twenties and thirties, I’d say.”

“Older? Twenties? God, what happened to us?”

“Hey, hot stuff, I got ten years on you and I’m not complaining.”

“That’s sickening,” said Ethan, heading for the fridge with half a smile. Ethan was thirteen, taller than his father and still growing, currently in size eleven shoes. He enjoyed castigating his parents but Evelyn rarely saw meanness in him.

“Get out of there,” said Evelyn. “Dinner’s in half an hour.”

“Cruzela Storm is cool,” said Ethan, tearing off a package of string cheese. “What does she look like in person?”

“She’s tall and shy,” said Evelyn. “She has beautiful pale skin. She’s not exactly pretty. But she’s … striking.”

“I’d pay twenty to see her, but only for good seats.” Ethan dropped the plastic sleeve into the wastebasket and walked out.

“Times two thousand at Warrior Stadium, if you put up chairs,” said Evelyn. “That’s forty grand right there. Then there’s concessions, donations, raffles. Forty-four thousand? Easy. Lighted crosswalks—presto.”

Evelyn drank some wine, thinking. She slid the sautéed pancetta, then the peas and olive oil, into the pan of bow tie noodles and started mixing. Cruzela Storm sang. “I think it’s really more than cool of Cruzela Storm to help us build two new crosswalks,” she said. “But why wasn’t that little boy’s life enough? Why did the people of his own town have to tell his family his life wasn’t enough?”

“Because Fallbrook is full of racist pigs,” said Gwen, following in her brother’s footsteps to the refrigerator. She had her mother’s thick dark hair, which she wore straight to her shoulders. “Cruzela Storm is half-Mexican, for your information. That’s why she’s going to sing. If George Hernandez had been white you wouldn’t need Cruzela Storm. We’d have crosswalks leading
to
the crosswalks.”