Moments like this reinforced how crucial their daily hard-core training routine was. Running a six-minute mile with a hundred-pound pack on your back was nothing compared to running from deadly smoke and embers through black clouds, but at least, Logan figured, they had a chance to get out alive. Just as long as no one stumbled and no one let fear get the best of them.
They took the first rise at a sprint, undeterred by the steep incline. A hundred yards ahead, the fire had overtaken the western slope. Chock-full of brush, it was the perfect midafternoon snack for the fire. Without breaking stride, Logan tossed his heavy pack several feet to the side. The wind whipped into them, driving sparks and smoke into their open mouths. It stung like a bitch and Connor coughed hard several times in a row, but barely slowed pace.
Logan had never respected his guys more. Here they were, completely screwed, moving through white ash while the fire lapped at their heels, and no one was crying like a baby, no one was pulling out a fire shelter and crawling inside.
Instead, they were running for their lives.
Sitting in her car at a stop light on Lake Tahoe Boulevard, Maya opened up her file on Logan Cain and stared at his photo. She couldn't make out many of his features beneath his helmet and sunglasses, but something about his cocky grin reached inside her and twisted her gut around.
She wanted to believe that a guy with a smile like that—and with a perfect, fifteen-year record—couldn't set a potentially deadly fire. But as an arson investigator she'd been trained to look for the worst, even when no one else could see it.
She'd worked for Cal Fire since graduating college five years earlier. When her brother had died, her boss, Albert, had told her to take off all the time she needed. But Tony's death had changed everything. Arson had become personal. Not just something horrible that happened to strangers she interviewed for her investigations. In the past six months, she'd put more arsonists in jail than any other investigator in Cal Fire history.
Nailing arsonists had become more than just a great way to utilize her Criminal Justice degree while being a part of the firefighting world she'd grown up in: It had become her mission, along with finding the person responsible for lighting the fire that had taken Tony's life.
She'd expected there to be a name and a face associated with that fire by now, someone she could pin down with her rage. But for six long months she'd followed one dead lead after another.
It wasn't technically her case—she'd been in daily contact with Cathy Hart, the state fire investigator assigned to the case—but she was just as frustrated and determined as if it were. And, if she was honest with herself, she knew Cathy wasn't thrilled with Maya dogging her every step, and likely wouldn't be overjoyed when she found out Maya had requested the Desolation Wilderness wildfire as the perfect excuse to stay in Lake Tahoe for a couple of weeks.
Maya wanted to do some digging into Tony's case in person, rather than over the phone or via e-mail. Especially since she knew Cathy was on the verge of filing the fire under “accident.” Maya wouldn't sleep through the night again until she knew for sure exactly what had started the fire that took Tony's life.
But for the next week or so, she needed to focus on the current wildfire. She looked back down at Logan Cain's file. It was a shoulder-high stack of heroics. The written records of his fifteen years as a hotshot painted a picture of a protector, a natural-born hero who saved expensive real estate, people's precious belongings, and human lives. He seemed to be a man who risked his own life on a daily basis because it was the right thing to do.
At the same time, she didn't doubt that Logan was also addicted to risk. Hooked on adrenaline. That was part of the job.
If hotshots didn't want—didn't need—to kick a fire's ass, it would kick theirs.
Arsonists, on the other hand, tended to be men and women whose fascination with fire brought them back to the forest summer after summer simply for the thrill of standing in the middle of an out-of-control blaze.
But this case was different. Because this was the first time she'd ever had to assess a hotshot's guilt. If Logan Cain were a volunteer firefighter, things would be a whole lot more cut and dried. Volunteer firefighters were often desperate for glory and action. Several years ago, she'd even contributed to an FBI report on identifying and preventing firefighter arson. It wasn't just boredom that drove volunteer firefighters to start forest fires. Money was frequently a factor as well. They made more money fighting fires, often raking in overtime pay if the fire was a bad one. But hotshots got plenty of action and very rarely needed to resort to lighting their own fires.
Still, even though putting a firefighter on suspension was one of the worst parts of Maya's job, right up there with questioning survivors who had lost everything, she'd do her job, no matter how ugly it got. And she'd make sure she put another arsonist behind bars.
She shook her head, trying to make sense of what she knew about the case, given that nothing in Logan Cain's file fit the profile of a firefighter-arsonist. Nonetheless, she couldn't ignore the facts.
Two times in the past week hikers had reported strange behavior to the ranger. Evidently, the hotshot had been seen fiddling with a campfire during no-burn days. She'd interviewed both sets of hikers over the telephone and they'd told her Logan had acted strangely when they came upon him. As soon as the wildfire had been noted, the ranger had contacted the Forest Service with this damning information.
And then, just yesterday, Logan's name had been called in to an anonymous “Smoky the Bear” forest-fire tip line. Combined with his very public objections in recent weeks to reductions in pension and health care payments for veteran hotshots, her boss had assigned her to the case immediately.
With no natural lightning strikes to blame—and given that ninety percent of all forest fires were due to arson—every finger pointed straight to Logan Cain, the leader of the local hotshot crew.
She laid his file on the passenger seat, then turned her eyes back to the thick column of black smoke that rose up from the valley floor. Shifting into four-wheel drive up a narrow dirt road off Highway 50, certain that the crew would be out on the mountain fighting the fire, she bypassed the Tahoe Pines Hotshot Station and headed straight for the ridgetop.
Current Forest Service reports indicated that the fire was steadily growing, but still under control. She turned on the wipers, dousing the windshield with fluid to clean the thin layer of soot. She leaned forward, squinting up at the sky. Smoke had turned it to a gray haze. Why on earth were they under the impression that this was a controlled fire?
From her vantage point, it looked to be just the opposite. And an underestimated fire was a deadly one. Once a fire exploded it would consume everything in its path—including any firefighters currently on the mountain.
Maya was suddenly struck with a dark premonition. Burns. Fatalities. Oh God, she should never have come back here. The worst hours of her life had been spent in Lake Tahoe after Tony's death. Unlike the throngs of tourists who came to gamble and ski and backpack, when she looked around she didn't see beautiful lakes and soaring pine trees.
She saw death.
Depression.
And an unpardonable afternoon in a stranger's arms.
Slipping on her shades, she grabbed her binoculars and exited her car, hiking briskly to the anchor point at the top of the mountain. A couple of buckets of unloaded medical supplies had been dumped beneath a thick dry sagebrush.
Alarm settled in beneath her breastbone. This fire had clearly exploded, and yet there were no water trucks, no helicopters doing water drops, no additional wildland firefighting teams pitching in.