undue stress and ordered the officers to cut back on their intrusions. The case had already cost the department hundreds of thousands of dollars, and without any new leads, the police agreed.
All but Fisher, who continued to visit the family’s home about half a dozen times, despite the warning, to check out new evidence, use the latest tracking gear, or just clarify a point in his mind. He was eventually suspended with pay for a week, which was the department’s way of saying loudly, “This is a reprimand,” then adding in a whisper, “But not really.” Fisher could have just considered it a vacation due to attitude. Instead he shot himself.
Fisher’s suicide gave the department yet another reason—like the lawsuit and the lack of evidence—to put the investigation on a shelf until they got a new lead. Gil only wished that lead had been finding a new suspect instead of a body.
Kline clicked his phone shut and said, “Okay, so Robert says I can’t talk to the family because I’m individually named in the lawsuit, but you two can go as long as we can justify it as necessary contact. Gil, why don’t you go over there and just let them know the circumstances. Joe, I need you there for continuity, plus it’ll give you a little on-the-job training. When you get back here we’ll get more of a game plan going.”
“Am I allowed to interview them?” Gil asked.
“Not without their attorney present. We can only do the notification. Nothing else. Keep it very informal. Just tell them we found something that might pertain to Brianna.”
Lucy stood by the ambulance as the guys finished up with the fire. Even though they were only twenty feet away, she couldn’t just walk over to them. She was in the safety zone, and they were in the incident zone. She wasn’t in protective clothing, only her regular uniform, while the guys in the incident zone were in full gear—helmets, face masks, breathing equipment, protective gloves, boots, coats, and pants. Because a car fire, even though it might seem like no big deal, releases toxins as it burns through plastic, gasoline, and rubber. Enough carcinogens to make a grown man die, if he gets too close.
So Lucy stayed where she was, daydreaming about sleep, until the radio on her hip squawked.
“Piñon 373, this is Attack,” Gerald said. He was hard to hear through his face mask and over the rush of air from his breathing equipment.
“This is Piñon 373. Go ahead,” she said.
“Are you ready to take down the VIN?”
“Copy that.” She grabbed a pen and a fresh incident report. “Go ahead.”
He rattled off the number as she wrote it quickly in the space provided on the report and then repeated it back to him. He then gave her the make and model of the car and a guess on its age. “Also, could you put a note on the form that there is some red spray paint on the side of the car? It could be graffiti, like it’s been tagged. There might have been letters, but it was hard to tell. Maybe we should notify the gang task force.”
He signed off, and she started filling in other blanks on the page. The date. The time. Personnel on scene. She then got into the passenger seat of the ambulance and pulled out a large, overflowing binder. Its cover was red and had the word backroads on it, handwritten on masking tape. This was a collection of all the streets, roads, highways, and interstates in their fire district. If a lost hiker called 911 from his cell phone and only knew his general location, this binder showed all the tiny side roads and untrampled trails that he might be near. Or when a person called to say there was a brush fire by Dead Dog Well, the pages could tell them the topography of the area and whether it was dominated by grasses or trees.
Sure, the county provided them with newly printed map books, which they used daily, but for the problematic places—the locations that didn’t appear on official maps—they had the binder. Yes, it was falling apart, but no matter how worn the exterior might get, the binder would never be thrown out. Because it contained something precious—thirty years of the fire department’s history. Every chief in the past three decades had added his wealth of information to the pages. The history wasn’t written down like a fully formed story. Firefighters have no