THE DAY GREW warmer as Sara and Nick trekked through the woods. Still, it wasn’t nearly as hot as it no doubt was down in the city, where the sheer accumulation of concrete and pavement added to whatever heat the sun provided. Though the birds and mammals had fled the forest, the insects were already coming back, and as the CSIs worked, they found themselves slapping at flies and clouds of gnats.
They had decided not to start a close examination of the fire’s origin point until they had scoured the area around it for signs of human activity. Sara was ducking under a charred live oak branch when she caught a glimpse of something through the burned trunks that looked wrong. She shoved the branch away, sending a cascade of crisp, brown leaves to the ground. They landed with a dry clicking sound.
“Nick,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Something . . .” She pointed. “Up there?”
Nick crouched, got at her eye level. “Yeah, I see.”
“Let’s check it out.”
“Yeah, okay.” They angled their course and headed up the slope, feet crunching in ash that was as thick on the ground as a fresh snowfall. Sara’s shoulders were feeling the weight of her field kit, and her clothes were almost black.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to get this stink out of my nose,” Nick said. “I’ll be dreaming about it.”
“I know what you mean,” Sara said. She had been thinking the same thing. “Where we’re staying, there’s a shower, right?”
Castillo had offered them a cabin, ordinarily used by rangers but temporarily vacant. They hadn’t had a chance to get inside yet. “I hope so. If there isn’t, I’m gonna be pissed.”
“Worse comes to worst, we can always have a fire truck hose us off.”
They passed through a thick stand of trees and found what had looked so strange from below. In a clearing was a campsite, and though the tent and some tarps had burned, other things were smoke blackened but otherwise intact—cooking pots, metal grommets, utensils. Detritus on the ground could have been the remains of clothing, boots, and cleaning equipment. A stone circle in the middle of the clearing was obviously a campfire ring.
“Someone’s been camping here,” Sara said.
“And not just for a little while,” Nick added. He pointed out multiple rubbed marks on the trees. The campers had tied and re-tied ropes to them, possibly moving their tent or tarps, even hanging a hammock. “They’ve been adjusting to different weather conditions, maybe.”
“Or different seasons.”
“Could be.”
“How many of them, do you think?”
“Hard to tell.”
“It looks like there’s just one tent,” Sara observed. She indicated a smoothed area on the ground, covered with a fine layer of ash not as thick as in most spots. She’d had fairly recent experience with camping, in Costa Rica. Gil Grissom had found her there, before they had married and he’d gone to France. “It stood here. Not a big one, either. Two people, three at the most, and that would be crowded.”
“Probably chased out by the fire,” Nick said. “It’s too pristine to have been empty for long. Not to mention it’s unlikely people would have left so much stuff behind if they hadn’t had to get out in a hurry.”
Sara went down on one knee beside what seemed to be the remains of a crate. An assortment of knives, forks, and spoons had fallen from it, along with a couple of metal mugs. “It’ll be hard to find useful prints on most of what’s here,” she said. “It’s all so coated in ash.” She picked up a mug by the rim, and blew ash from around the sides, where fingers would be likely to grip it. “Not going to find any by dusting, that’s for sure.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Still, we could send some of it back to the lab, maybe get something through fuming or other techniques.”
“ID whoever was camping here? You think they started the fire?”
“They might not have, but they might know who did.”
“True.”
“Let’s bag the likeliest items, send them down the hill with a courier, see what we get. Can’t hurt, right?”
Nick agreed. They selected items that would have been touched frequently, metal because those surfaces had survived the fire. In a couple of cases, Sara could make out friction ridge impressions on some things that had a surface in contact with the ground, protecting it from the ash fall. They bagged a handful of good possibilities, and Nick slung the bag over a shoulder. It clanked when he moved. “At least it’ll scare away the bears,” he said.
“Pretty sure the fire took care of that already, Nick.” While Nick had been bagging the last of them, Sara had searched the surrounding area for signs of trail. “Hey, it looks like they went this way,” she said. She twitched a branch that had snagged a bit of fabric on a broken end. “There’s a sort of path here, maybe an old animal trail or something.” She removed the scrap with tweezers, dropped it into a plastic bag, and labeled it.
“Makes sense, someone living in these woods for any length of time, it’d be easiest to get around on existing trails.”
They followed the path. There were faint impressions of boots in the dirt, filmed with ash, as everything was. “A lot of tracks,” Sara said. “Coming and going. They’ve used this for a while.”
“But that fabric scrap you found, that was new.”
“That hadn’t even burned.”
“So they were here after the fire started.”
“It sounds crazy, but I think so. Probably getting out in a hurry, not watching where they were going.”
“This trail keeps leading up, it’s going to lead right to that neighborhood,” Nick said. “Where the firefighters died.”
Sara looked at the hillside, checked the position of the sun through the brittle trees. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Although they thought they knew where the trail led, they followed it. Sara felt like a tracker of old, studying the landscape for faint signs, cracked twigs, and indentations in the earth. At one point she found a granola bar wrapper that the earlier inhabitants of this mountain region wouldn’t have come across. They had been at it for almost forty minutes when they heard scrambling from up the slope.
“Hello!” Nick called. “LVPD Crime Lab! Who’s up there?”
A muffled response drifted down to them. “Probably can’t hear you over all the noise they’re making,” Sara suggested. “You think it’s our campers?”
“Only one way to find out,” Nick said. “Let’s meet ’em halfway.”
Sara groaned, but mostly in fun. She loved being outside, was glad Catherine had assigned her this duty. The only drawback was that the forest was so trashed from the fire, and she preferred them vibrant, greens so pure and rich they made your eyes ache, buzzing with the sounds and smells of fertile life. She and Nick kept climbing, the trail growing progressively steeper and rockier as it cut uphill.
A few minutes later, she got her first look at the man coming down. “Nick,” she said in a loud whisper. “It’s just one guy.”
“I thought it was a platoon.”
The man looked accustomed to forest hiking. He wore jeans with huge black streaks up the legs, from ash and char. His shirt was long sleeved, light cotton, and his boots were serious outdoor gear. A sheen of sweat coated his face, darkening his shirt at the sides. He cradled a shotgun in his arms.
“Sir?” Nick called. “We’re with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. I’m going to ask you to put that shotgun down.”
“Why?”
“Just put it down!” Sara said, her voice commanding.
Nick’s hand drifted toward the service weapon at his belt.
“This is still America, isn’t it?”
“We’re only going to say it one more time,” Nick said. “Put down that weapon.”
“Fine,” the man said. He bent over and gently rested his shotgun in a bed of ash. “It’s going to be filthy.”
“Yes, sir, I’m sorry about that,” Nick said. “But we’re more comfortable talking to people who aren’t carrying firearms.”
“Have you found them?” the man asked. He was on the burly side, but not fat.
“Found who?” Sara asked.
“Those hippies who were camping down here.”
“Hippies?” Sara echoed.
“Whatever you call ’em these days. They had dirty long hair. Man and a woman, I think, but it was hard to tell.”
“We haven’t found the people who were camping below, if that’s what you mean. Why do you ask?”
“Because they started this fire.”
“They did?”
“I’m sure of it.”
In Sara’s experience, the more certain people were of things they could have no way of knowing, the less likely they usually were to be right. “We’d like to talk to them,” she said. “Their trail seems to lead this way. You don’t know where they might have gone?”
“I got no clue.”
“We’ve just come from their camp,” Nick said. “They’re completely burned out.”
“Serves ’em right.”
“Can we get your name, sir?” Sara asked. “Givens. Harley Givens.”
“Do you live around here?”
He jerked his head back up the hill. “On the road up there.”
“The evacuation order hasn’t been lifted, as far as I know,” Nick said.
“Well, nobody stopped me when I drove back in.”
“That was probably an oversight. I believe the fire is contained, but it might not be safe yet to go home.”
“What’s left of my home, you mean?”
“Was there a lot of damage?” Sara asked.
“It’s only about half gone.”
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” she said, aware that she was using phraseology ordinarily reserved for survivors of the recently deceased. The grief had to be similar, though, if not exactly comparable. One of the stages of grief was anger, and that seemed to be where Harley Givens was stuck.
“I’ll tell you what, sir,” Nick said. “We’re going to figure out who started this fire, and that person or persons will be punished. But having people tromping around the woods with guns is only going to make our job harder, and may obscure important evidence.”
“Can you tell us what you know about these campers?” Sara asked.
“Not much,” Givens said. “They have long hair, they’re dirty, they’re living in the woods like animals.”
“How long have they been there?”
“It’s been months. Five, six, maybe. I don’t know what they live on. I guess they go to town for groceries once in a while. Mostly I think they hunt, or eat nuts and berries or whatever they can scrounge out here. Sometimes they steal, too. Most of us pay a pretty penny to live on this hill, and here they are, squatting in the woods for free, leaving their waste around, scaring off the animals.”
“What makes you think they started the fire?” she asked.
“It just stands to reason. They had a campfire going every night.”
“Mr. Givens, we were just at their camp. It looks like they had a pretty well constructed fire ring. They’re in a wide clearing, no branches directly overhead.”
“Doesn’t take much of a breeze to pick up embers from a fire up here, carry ’em to the trees,” Givens countered. “It’s been so dry.”
“I understand that, Mr. Givens. But the Forest Service investigators believe the fire was started intentionally, and they have a good idea of where. And it was not at that campsite.”
“Yeah, they believe. But they don’t know, right?”
“Not for an absolute certainty, yet,” Nick admitted. “That’s one of the things we’ll be looking into.”
“They gotta pay,” Givens said. “You gotta find them and make them pay.”
“We’ll find the perpetrators, sir,” Sara assured him. “Why don’t you go back down the mountain until the evacuation order is lifted?”
“Guess I don’t really have much choice, do I?”
“No, sir,” Nick replied. “You really don’t.”