Slow Burn (Smoke Jumpers) (9 page)

“Not lightning,” he agreed.

Rio was already nodding. “Boys yesterday put in a call to NOAA, and that’s the message they got, too. The feds confirm there wasn’t anything happening here, weather-wise, to set off a fire.”

NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, monitored the country’s weather. If lightning had hit here, those boys would have been the first to know.

“Other than that act of God.” Rio’s look said he didn’t like Evan’s suggestion. Evan wouldn’t have, either, if he’d been in Rio’s place. Acts of God weren’t predictable. In their business, predictable was good.

This far up the road from where Faye had pulled off, there was nothing but char. The fire had found plenty of fuel here and had hit the road fast. The bushes hanging over the guardrail and a helping hand from the wind probably explained the flames Faye had driven through.

Behind him, Faye’s camera clicked softly, recording their search for posterity. He wondered what she saw, what she thought about the small, tight group of guys leisurely strolling up the side of the highway. Walking the scene was never a quick job, and they’d take it one foot at a time.

“Here.” Ben stopped, pointing down. “Here’s our origin.” The burn pattern had been wide and broad when they’d started the walk a hundred yards down the highway. Now it narrowed. They’d found the point of their V, all right. That didn’t surprise Evan any. Ben Cortez was one of the best in the business.

“It didn’t get far.” The fire should have, though, given the amount of fuel it’d had. The highway had been a natural firebreak, but there had been plenty of room for the fire to go uphill. That had him questioning the presence of the unknown firefighter again. If that man hadn’t been on the scene, the fire would have been far worse.

A couple of smaller trees poked up from the edge of the burn zone, their bases scorched and blackened but their tops untouched. A handful of unburned, fallen branches on the ground confirmed the fire hadn’t gotten that far. This was the start point, all right.

Evan crouched down, looking at the grasses. Most were gone, just a small sea of black char and ash. Dry grasses always burned fast, and there was nothing to learn. Instead, he focused on those places where the grasses were only half-burned. That grass had a story to tell, all right.

“You’ve got it,” he agreed.

Behind him, Faye made a small noise of disbelief. “I see half-burned grass,” she said. “What do you see?”

“Same thing. This grass didn’t burn all the way. Fire’s going to start at the bottom and work its way up, right? Here, the fire didn’t get the whole thing. When the base of these stalks burned, the rest of the stuff fell over, but it fell over out of the way. Fire was moving in the other direction, so this part didn’t burn.”

He stirred a finger gently through the ash and found himself a match head. He looked over at Ben. “Yesterday’s boys may have missed one. You got the tweezers and a baggie?”

Ben and the Donovan Brothers were second string here. They all knew that. The primary on the case would do the coordinating with the state arson unit and the Forestry Commission, sharing information and cooperating in joint investigations. That was a hell of a lot of red tape for a what-if, so everyone would make sure they had their proof—he eyed the match head—before they let a private contractor like Donovan Brothers lend a hand in figuring this shit out.

It would have to
be
Donovan Brothers’ shit. Which, unfortunately, was looking more and more likely.

“It really wasn’t a big fire,” Faye said behind him, sending a jolt of something right through him. He’d forgotten she was there.

“No. This kind of fire starts small. She can burn fast, though.” Especially when some asshole was working the matches and the grass was this dry.

“We have the report from yesterday yet?” he called to Rio. He was betting the investigators had the match head’s companions safely stowed in a state lab by now. Sometimes, though, they missed. So he’d make sure.

Rio sprawled in the pickup’s cab, working his laptop. “Should be ready. Depends on how backed up our boys were.”

“You got a good zoom on that?” He motioned Faye over, stopping her when she got too close. She’d have a more powerful lens than theirs. “Watch your feet now—keep them over here. We need a picture of this.”

“Match head,” he said when she looked at him. She lowered her face to the lens, and the soft click of the camera doing its thing filled up the space between them.

“That doesn’t belong here.” Her face came away from the lens.

“No. This whole exercise is what-doesn’t-belong.”

Ben handed over the baggies and a pair of tweezers, and Evan carefully picked up his find. One unburned head, all nice and shiny red. Sealing the bag, he held it up to the light, turning it around. Just your standard match from the kind of box you used to get the barbecue going. Every home in the area had a blue-and-red box of these matches.

“Label it and send it in,” he said to Ben. “Let’s see if they’ve got the mates.”

He pushed to his feet and headed back to his truck. He didn’t want to be sitting here, staring an ugly truth in its face. He needed to
move
.

Rio called over from his truck. “They’ve got match heads.”

He knew that.
Fuck.
He knew that.

 

“God
damn
it.” Evan’s fist slammed down on the truck’s hood.

“Bad news?”
Stupid, stupid, stupid
. That was obvious, wasn’t it? Faye tried and failed to think of something else to say. Evan was pacing up and down beside the truck. She didn’t think he lost control often, but right now he was walking the edge. And he was a big man.

She watched and he pulled it together, the anger and upset vanishing, as he forced his hands to relax by his sides. He paused by the driver-side door and looked at her, shaking his head. As if he didn’t have all those emotions churning away inside him somewhere. “You could say that, darlin’.”

His size and obvious strength made other people nervous. She’d seen the instinctive wariness others displayed around him, even at Ma’s bar, the night he’d first walked into her life. People saw him and couldn’t help realizing how much physical power he was packing. She couldn’t help thinking, though, that he wouldn’t use that power destructively. Not unless he was out of options.

Evan thought with his head, not with his hands or even his heart.

So, instead of running away from his bad mood, she asked, “You want to tell me about it?”

“Not particularly.” He walked around the truck as if he hadn’t just put a dent in the hood, and she followed him. She didn’t like following, but she wanted more from him than a two-word answer.

“But you’re going to.”

“Yeah.” Again with the too-brief succinctness. He opened the passenger-side door for her and waited until she got in before carefully shutting the door and heading around to his side. That old-fashioned courtesy was sweet. She wanted to think it meant something, but she didn’t know. Instead, she kept her thoughts to herself, waiting while he drove out, lifting his hand to Rio as they passed his brother.

“I’m waiting,” she said, when the truck picked up speed and they’d put some distance between themselves and the burn site.

Evan’s voice was calm and smooth as he laid it out for her. If she hadn’t seen him do a number on the hood of his truck, she’d have wondered if the afternoon’s discovery meant much at all to him.

“Match head on the side of the road? It doesn’t have to mean anything, but you find a match head where you had a fire? You’ve got yourself probable cause. You pair that with an eyewitness who just happened to spot a fireman before anyone called in that fire? That means I’ve got a big fucking problem.”

That last observation wasn’t so calm. “Arson,” she agreed.

“Looks like it,” he said grimly. “I got the smoke, I got the fire.”

“What happens now?”

“Now I try to find out the
who
before this happens again.”

“You think this was more than a one-off?” She wondered if he would say it or if he’d try to convince her that everything was fine. That it was all under control here in Strong.

“Almost certainly. This kind of arsonist specializes in serials, and this isn’t our first brush fire,” he admitted. “We’ve been keeping our eye on the situation. What I didn’t know before was that there was a fire-department presence at these fires. That’s the piece you brought to the table.”

She hadn’t expected Evan’s brutal brand of honesty, but it shouldn’t have surprised her.

“This shouldn’t be happening again,” he said, and her head snapped right around from her contemplation of Strong’s green-and-pretty.
Again?
“We already had one arsonist this summer. Lily Cortez, Jack’s fiancée, had a crazed nut-job stalker who thought setting her stuff on fire was a courtship ritual. His last ‘love note’ burned up three hundred acres in the mountains.”

She’d seen the arson mentioned in the handful of newspaper articles she’d read as background before coming out to Strong. She knew it had been bad. “You have no idea who this new arsonist is?”

“No.” He glared at the road, as if somehow he could undo what had happened. “Only who he
isn’t
.”

“Why is it your fault? I mean,” she added hastily, when he shot her an incredulous look, “why are you acting like this is so personal? It’s more work for you, and you have to clean up the mess. I get that. But isn’t this just another job, when you get right down to it?”

Evan cursed. “Firefighting doesn’t work like that, Faye. If these fires are an inside job, then it reflects badly on all of us. We’re a team. Whatever this guy does, it hits all of us professionally and personally. Because we
should
have known. We should have stopped it.”

“Right. Because you’re a team of superheroes.” Apparently, smoke jumping and urban firefighting had even more in common than she’d suspected. Those were the kinds of sentiments she’d come to expect from her ex-husband. It was all about the team. The boys. Hurt one, and you hurt them all.

“Jack has that new firehouse,” Evan said calmly, ignoring her outburst. “He’s looking into some grants and private sponsorships to really fix the place up. What do you think happens to the funding tap if it turns out one of our firefighters is running around starting fires?”

“That’s not fair,” she protested.

“That’s how things work.” He shrugged. “Fair doesn’t come into it much. I think having a second arsonist in Strong won’t paint Jack’s project in the best possible light. Best case, the story about rehabbing a historic firehouse gets swallowed up by the more sensational story of a firefighter who is setting his own fires. It’s better reading. Bolder headlines.”

“So you don’t want that story out there.”

“I don’t,” he admitted, “but I’m not saying don’t file it. That’s not what I’m saying at all. If one of ours started these fires, I’ll do what has to be done. He goes down—he doesn’t get away with this. I just want to have the evidence first. I don’t want guessing.”

“Because you’d be flushing your brother’s dream away.”

“Exactly.” The intense look on Evan’s face made it plenty clear how he felt about keeping his brothers happy. She almost pitied the man who had started this fire and threatened Jack’s dream when Evan caught up with him.

“There’s not too much you brothers don’t share.” She eyed him speculatively. “You share women, too?”

“I wouldn’t share you,” he growled. He looked as if he didn’t know where the words had come from, but they were out there now. He wasn’t taking those words back, either. “You can count on that.”

“I can’t
not
tell this story, Evan. That’s the truth.”

“I know,” he said, and she watched his hands tighten and then relax on the wheel. “I know you have to, darlin’. I’m not asking anyone to hide anything. I’m just thinking it’s time to clean house—personally.”

T
he hangar had a full house. Evan eyeballed the men streaming in. Both the jump team and the ground crew were present. He should have been proud. Donovan Brothers had assembled one hell of a team. These were some of the finest firefighters the state of California had to offer, and, before yesterday, he’d have been proud to go out into the field with any one of them at his back. Today, however, he was full of doubts—and that was all due to walking the scene yesterday where Faye had encountered the brush fire.

One of these guys was playing with matches in his spare time.

There were things a man simply didn’t do. Lines that didn’t get crossed, no matter how bad the provocation. If he was being honest with himself—and there was no point in not being straight up, since he’d taken to having these little conversations with himself—the betrayal bothered him almost as much as the fires themselves did. The guy who’d done this hadn’t thought about his team. When the Donovan Brothers’ crew went out there to take on the fires this asshole set, there was always the possibility that someone could get hurt. Badly.

So
unhappy
didn’t begin to describe his conviction that the fires were an inside job.

The jumpers were a close-knit bunch, sprawled on their gear bags. The ground crew mingled some, but there were lines here, too, and those lines didn’t get crossed much. The ground crew was made up mostly of hotshots. They outnumbered the jumpers about three to one. They were damned good men, and they got the job done, but they didn’t jump, and like stuck to like.

Rio leaned in to Evan. “I’ll take the left side. You take right.” The two of them had agreed to hang back and let Jack handle the talking. Jack was the public face of Donovan Brothers, and if anyone could send a heads-up to their arsonist, it would be Jack. Rio and Evan’s preferred approach was a little more hands-on and physical.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said. When he looked down, his hands were balled into fists. Again. Forcing himself to relax, he sucked in a deep breath. Just because he wanted to beat the crap out of whoever it was didn’t mean he would follow through on the urge. He’d learned firsthand on the streets, before he’d gotten to Strong and discovered Nonna’s brand of salvation, that hitting didn’t fix things.

Hitting just broke things more.

After a few minutes, Jack got up and did his thing. He kept it short and sweet. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you all for coming in. I have a couple of things that need saying. You know Ben.” He gestured toward the other man, who nodded. “Ben’s with me on this one.”

Behind him, Ben got up, looking grim. He was taking the
got-your-back
thing literally.

“We’ve had a pretty active fire season so far.” That drew hoots and hollers from some of the assembled firefighters, the ones who hadn’t picked up on Jack’s tone yet. This wasn’t a celebratory meet-and-greet, and Jack was plenty pissed off.

“Yeah. Some of these fires were an act of God—”

“We’re the right hand of God,” Mack hollered.

Jack shook his head. “You’ve got to look before you leap, Mack.” More good-natured ribbing followed, and for a moment their meeting went right off the goddamn tracks. Before too long, however, Jack was steering them back to business.

“Last month, we had that big burn-up.” There was a moment of respectful silence for that one. Jack had come about as close to dying there as you could and still walk away. He’d gone after the arsonist who’d kidnapped Lily Cortez and taken her up into the mountains, where he’d upped the stakes by setting a forest fire of epic proportions. “That blaze took our entire crew two days to extinguish, and we lost three hundred acres.”

“But we got her out.” Those words came from one of the firefighters at the back of the room.

“Yeah. But here’s the thing. That fire shouldn’t have happened. It was set. We all know the dangers of setting fires. Even controlled burns can be dangerous. Sometimes there’s no predicting how fast the fuel will take or when the wind will shift.” He turned to look at Ben. “You’ve set a few training fires in your day. You ever had one cross the line?”

Hooking his thumbs in his belt loops, Ben took a long look around the room. “No. But it’s come close a time or two. And those were controlled burns with engines standing by. The minute things even looked like they might get out of hand, we had the hoses—and the fire—out. Thing is, there’s nothing like a real fire to get your hands-on learning, but it’s still a fire. It can surprise you—and then your shit’s hitting the fan.”

The room didn’t stay quiet, but you didn’t pack a room with firefighters and expect Carnegie Hall. The volume kicked up with a round of low curses followed by the buzz of men swapping their own war stories. Even if they hadn’t been out there on the mountain with Jack that day, they’d all had close calls of their own.

“Training fires,” Jack emphasized, “are run by the department only. You don’t take it on yourself to run a training op, because that’s a one-way ticket to trouble. That would be like taking on a house fire by yourself or doing a one-man jump from the plane. You can’t be both pilot and jumper. No one can.”

“Fucking true,” Rio muttered.

“Maybe,” Jack continued, his voice ruthlessly cutting through the buzz, “you get out of the plane and down to the ground, but now you’re out a plane, because that baby’s not flying by herself. Instead, she’s crash-landing, and you’ve likely got two fires. Twice the trouble, and you’re still just one guy.”

“Time to start running,” someone called out.

“All the way to the border,” Mack added.

“Same thing goes for setting a small practice fire. Don’t do it. Setting fires is not a fucking training exercise. Setting fires is not the way you deal with a case of the boreds.”

Evan let his brother’s words wash over him, while he scanned the faces of their team. It didn’t seem likely that their boy was going to flash a blinking neon sign on his forehead, but watching felt like the thing to do. While he watched, he formulated a plan, running through a mental checklist.

Jack looked over the assembled team. “What I’m trying to say here is, if I catch any member of my team setting fires, for any reason, I’ll have your ass. Then law enforcement gets what’s left. Are we perfectly clear?”

Mack stood up. There was no missing the hostility in that legs-apart stance or the curled-up fists on those denim-covered thighs. “Yeah. I think we got it. There a reason we’re having this little heart-to-heart?”

Jack wasn’t backing down, though, matching Mack stare for stare. “I hope not, but we’ve had ourselves a veritable shit-storm of nuisance fires. Maybe that’s an unhappy little coincidence. If it’s not, and anyone thinks he’s simply doing his part to make the summer fly by a little faster, I’m telling him right now that he’s not. This stops now.”

Mack jammed his hands into his pockets. “Got it. For the record, though, I don’t start fires. You’ve jumped with us for years. Now we’re potential screw-ups?”

Jack plowed ahead, because what did you tell a man you’d fought with in the desert and jumped from planes with? That all the times he’d pulled your ass from the fire didn’t count? Didn’t count enough? “You see something, you let me or Jack or Evan know. You’ve got concerns? Bring them to us. We clear enough?”

Mack flipped him a mock salute, and then a rumble of conversation broke out.

Jack approached his brothers as the guys streamed toward the exit, yakking it up. “You think that took?”

Rio’s short laugh said it all. “When you leave, watch out for Mack. You’ve pissed him off. You do two military tours with a guy and then jump with him regularly, he won’t appreciate an accusation of arson.”

“He doesn’t have to like it. I can’t stand up there, though, and exempt the jump team from any hassle I’m going to hand the ground crew. That’s going to go down even worse.”

Fair enough. If Jack’s motivational speech did the job, that was fine, but Evan wasn’t holding his breath. Their problem firefighter clearly didn’t listen to the do’s and don’ts, or he wouldn’t have been lighting up Strong. So, no, he didn’t expect a group heart-to-heart to fix things here.

And, fix it or not, the bottom line was, Donovan Brothers had a zero-tolerance policy on this kind of shit. You saw it, you called it out. Keeping your mouth shut was all kinds of wrong. Evan’s job was to keep his team safe. If the fire setter continued down this path, someone was going to get hurt. So he needed a name, and he needed enough evidence for prosecution. The fire setter would make a move eventually, and Evan would be waiting for him.

Jack dropped onto the seat beside him. “Faye Duncan is here as a photojournalist. No matter where she spends the night, she has a job to do. We need time to investigate, and yet here she is, ready and willing to tell the world anything and everything she knows right now.”

Jack didn’t have to say more in the awkward pause that followed. Journalists tended to lock on to whatever story seemed most newsworthy, and even just the possibility of a serial arsonist was Christmas come early. Jack knew—they all knew—she’d want to unwrap that present.

“I have a plan,” Evan offered. And he hoped that that plan sounded smarter than it felt right now.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Faye’s willing to hold off on submitting her photos. A temporary pause,” he added. “For two weeks.”

Jack whistled. “How’d you convince her to wait?”

Evan met his brother’s eyes and tried not to think about exactly how he’d bargained for time. He’d done what he needed to do. That was all. The firehouse meant the world to Jack. It was a dream and a challenge and maybe the first place, other than in Lily Cortez’s arms, that his brother had truly belonged. So Evan wasn’t letting any firefighter with the arson bug do his brother out of his dream. That simply wasn’t happening on Evan’s watch. Instead, he eyed the last few men trailing out of the hangar before he spoke. “She and I have an understanding.”

“Is that code for something?” Rio’s wicked grin said it all. “Because if it is, you let me know how I can help. Okay?”

Unfortunately, it was all too easy to imagine Rio with Faye. Hell, Rio would be a good match for her. He liked to laugh, and he lived for adventure. She could do far worse than his brother. Evan hated the idea.

“We’re going to show her a fun time,” he said. “Real fun. Tomorrow we have a training jump scheduled for the team—I’ll pick her up and take her with us. Keep her so busy, she won’t have time to be working.”

 

The plane shuddered around Faye, and the pilot banked hard, coming around for a closer look at the mountains east of Strong. Her ass was planted on the floor because the Donovans’ crew had ripped the seats out to make room for more gear, and she was currently 7,500 feet above ground.

She was crazy.

She curled her fingers into the webbing hanging from the side of the plane. The straps seemed secure enough, but who really knew? Maybe she needed to rethink her definition of adventure, because this felt dangerous as hell.

“We’re running some practice jumps today,” Evan had explained when she’d answered the knock on the firehouse door that morning. He’d braced one hand on the side of the door and looked down at her. “You want to come along and jump? Let me keep my end of our bargain?”

“Excuse me?”

“Jump,” he’d repeated patiently. “You said you wanted adventure. I’m asking if you want to jump today.”

“I don’t know how.” The thought of jumping, though, had that secret thrill snaking through her belly in an almost sensual jolt, part adrenaline and part anticipation. This was what she wanted, what she needed.

“No problem.” He shrugged. “You can jump with me. Tandem.”

She recognized opportunity when it came knocking—and right now opportunity was hammering on the door. So why not? “You promise this isn’t an excuse to throw me out of the plane?”

“Promise,” he drawled. “I’ll be with you all the way down.”

He’d offered, she’d accepted, and now, two hours later, here she was.

Having some serious second thoughts.

How could someone as large as Evan jump, anyhow, and not plummet like a rock? She’d asked him that very question as they’d walked out to the plane, and he’d told her he was right at the maximum weight for a jumper. He ran daily to stay lean and to keep his weight at the magic two hundred. The day his weight nudged over that number was the last day he jumped.

From her point of view, following his fine ass as he inched over to the doorway, Evan Donovan was six feet two inches of pure brawn. Watching those confident hands checking straps and buckles, she felt
safe,
and that was even crazier, because she was five minutes away from letting him throw her ass out of a plane. She barely knew him, and that was only partly because he didn’t make getting-to-know-you easy.

“We’re coming around,” the pilot hollered, and the spotter waved Evan over. Clipping his safety harness to the webbing by the door, Evan leaned out for a closer look. Whatever he saw worked for him, because he took a couple of steps backward and gestured for her to join him.

Oh, God
. This was crazy.

She cursed and went, sliding her feet over the vibrating floor of the plane.
Not my best idea
. It got worse, too, when she got her first look at the mountains underneath them and the small dot that was Strong. The wind roared like a freight train through the empty space where the door should have been, and that absence struck her as all wrong. The spotter was flat on his belly, inching forward for a closer look at that empty blue. Mack. She’d been introduced to him yesterday and the pilot, Spotted Dick, who was nothing more than a helmet and a pair of broad, uniformed shoulders right now. The other jumpers sitting on the floor waiting for their turn to go out the door probably should have been familiar faces, too, but right now her head couldn’t get past the freak-out factor here. She was
jumping
.