The SFPD website went down first. Raveneau figured that would worry some fraction of the public and make an equal group happy. But not long after that they lost the ability to access any police databases on their computers. When that happened Raveneau and la Rosa left the office and rode up to the top floor and then climbed the stairs to the roof.
They weren’t alone. Others had made their way up and there was a post-earthquake feel as strong gusts swept the roof. The burn smell was sharp and pungent and across the bay the fires looked, if anything, stronger and larger, dark smoke billowing then flattening, tongues of flame visible as a house caught or a stand of trees. Overhead the sun was a bloodshot eye.
By early afternoon more was understood about the incendiary devices. The first remnants were recovered from the Tam fire not far from the junction of the Fairfax-Bolinas Road and Highway 1. Raveneau leaned on another old friend, Bill Staten, an arson investigator who had left SFPD four or five years ago and now consulted for insurance companies.
Staten picked up in the first ring. ‘Knew I’d hear from you.’
‘What are these devices?’
‘Think of high quality accelerant in a plastic drinking bottle like you might carry on your bike, if you ever exercised which you probably still don’t.’
‘I walk.’
‘Extending out of it is a high quality underwater fuse. Taped to the bottle is a cheap electronic timer and a reliable igniter to light the fuse. With this wind and the dry conditions that’s enough, because when the accelerant ignites it’ll give you six to eight feet in height and four in width. Not for long, but it’ll burn very hot, real hot, and I was surprised they found anything worthwhile. I think what probably happened was the wind was so strong that it moved the fireball with it right away. Dry as things are right now, eight to ten seconds is enough to start tinder burning. Five minutes in the brush well-started, but the real engine is the wind. Whoever started these was thinking wind and counting on what we usually get in the fall. They just happened to catch a very strong cycle.’
‘What have you seen?’
‘I saw the remains of one the incendiary devices this morning and the thinking is they’re all the same at all of these fires. They’re cheap and easy to make. They’re portable. It could be one person but with this many locations distributing them works better with a pair, one getting out of the car and one driving. They probably scouted locations and were ready when the time came. One guy gets out with the device and goes up the slope. Five minutes later he’s back in the car, or maybe he uses his cellphone and another driver picks him up.’
‘You’re assuming it’s the threesome we’re looking for?’
‘Me? No, not me, I’m not making any assumptions. This accelerant evaporates very easily and at low temp so you don’t distribute these until you’re ready, and in this case that seems to be as they knew the wind was rising. You go out with a map and make the rounds as the wind is coming up. They’ve got preset timers. That’s why Mount Tamalpais went up all at once and maybe they’ve done their homework. Could be they know what departments will respond and where and the timing with the next ignitions was built around that. You know they’re not even trying to fight the Diablo fire right now other than to keep it out of the populated areas. It’s burning its way up the mountain. There are no crews available to stop it.’
‘What’s the size of one of these incendiary devices?’
‘Roughly the size of a football, and they had them ready.’ Staten paused. He cleared his throat before continuing. ‘We get these winds every year in the spring and fall. In the spring nothing will burn, but it’s all different by now, huh. Where are you? You’re in the news. You’ve been right in the middle of all of this. What can you tell me?’
‘Not much. We’re talking with someone who is affiliated with the three you’re seeing on TV and there’s every reason to think those are the perpetrators. I’m up on the roof of the Hall of Justice looking across the bay at fires in Oakland and the Berkeley Hills. I can see smoke to the south down the peninsula and Marin is dark with smoke. I can see Diablo burning. It looks like a volcano from here. And there’s something burning farther back in the East Bay, and also farther. They’ve slowed the inbound/outbound at SFO and in Oakland.’
‘There are fires all the way down to where I am. Three new ones in the last hour.’
Raveneau couldn’t remember where Staten had moved to when his hourly billing rate crossed over three hundred dollars an hour, but it was somewhere south and near the coast.
‘Ben, you can’t talk to me?’
‘Not yet, not really, other than it’s almost certainly the three the fugitive warrants went out on.’
‘Well, that was pretty obvious already.’
Staten was disappointed and Raveneau remembered how moody he could be. Good chance he only picked up the phone because he thought he was going to get something in return that he could pass on to his clients. Raveneau asked Staten now what he was working on.
‘A fire with three fatalities, all of them kids. Their mother was badly burned. The fire started at five this morning when they were asleep and they got trapped in a canyon. The insurer I’m working for excludes terrorism coverage, so they’re hoping that’s what it is. Call me when you can talk.’
Late in the afternoon Raveneau rode with Coe who was driving and not saying an awful lot about where they were going yet, except that they were headed to Mt. Tam. The SFPD website was still down, the victim of a denial of service attack it was supposed to be invulnerable to, but the department computers were working. Someone got a hold of a local legend, a guy named Tim Chee. Chee got the SFPD system up and going again. At the mayor’s office there were problems with the landline phones and there were other quirky failures in the city computer systems.
They crossed the Golden Gate with Coe talking about another person of interest, a medical technologies engineer let go four months ago for failing to properly track a waste disposal though his guess was that was negligence and not nefarious. Two agents interviewed the man and he was still unemployed and very regretful.
Coe took a call and Raveneau heard enough to not need an explanation. Lindsley had turned up. He was in a Marin high school gym designated as an evacuation center, arrived there fifteen minutes ago and said the FBI needed to be notified.
‘He’s only ten minutes from where we are right now,’ Raveneau said. ‘Let’s go there.’
‘We’re picking him up and bringing him in and you and I are going somewhere else. We’re going to see a body.’
‘Whose?’
‘We’re hoping you can help with the ID.’
‘What’s the matter with the rest of you?’
‘It’s a male and his face isn’t what it used to be. We’re hoping that seeing the rest of him you’ll have an easier time IDing him.’
‘You’re telling me you know already who it is?’
‘We think we do, but I want you to take a look.’
A four-wheel-drive fire vehicle escorted them through the worst smoke as they wound their way along the coast, and they reached Stinson Beach and continued on down past the lagoon. Off to his right and looking up Raveneau saw much of this face of the mountain had burned off. In the ravines he saw stands of charred trees and white ashes. They crossed through another roadblock just past the end of the lagoon and another as they turned up the mountain. Raveneau saw only one fire crew on watch for any restarts. The fire was over here. There were pockets of green, and in the winter there would be mudslides because there wasn’t anything left to hold the soil. But above Mt. Tam columns of black-gray smoke still boiled up.
‘It’s burning down the other side,’ Coe said. ‘It may reach the town.’
The road up was narrow and windy and the pale gold rye grass and the trees still green underscored just how much was chance. On their right, everything was burned. As they neared the top of the winding two-mile road he saw the redwoods along the spine were fine and for some reason that made him feel better.
He turned. ‘How do you know it wasn’t a homeless person living in the watershed who got caught by the fire?’
‘I don’t want to say too much yet, but you’ll see why. I’d rather you look at him first but I can tell you he appears to have been on a mountain bike on a single track trail. They found him as they followed the line of where the fire started. Not much question about what he was doing. Wind is supposed to die tonight or at least let up.’
Raveneau nodded. Everyone he had talked to today gave him a weather report. Winds were expected to abate, but the heat would continue. There wouldn’t be any marine air, just less wind.
‘Dogs scented to the incendiary materials found eight locations and we’ve gathered what was left. On the ocean side they had the paved road. They may have used a car to carry the incendiary bombs. On the other side they were all near a single-track mountain biking trail – and not much of a trail. The park people tell us it was an illegal track mountain bikers scratched together. The victim we’re going to see was on a bike and wearing a backpack. He’s on the watershed side up above the lake. We’re not far away now. You know your way around here anyway, don’t you?’
‘I do.’
They started down the road to the reservoir, drove eight or nine steep falling turns and pulled over where another vehicle was partially blocking the road, then climbed the embankment into the trees with a firefighter who led them in, talking as he did.
‘We climb up and across, and then we’ll pick up a trail.’
As they got closer they saw lights and heard voices, and as the track looped and headed toward the lights Raveneau tried to picture it. What he saw was the rider getting out of another vehicle after spreading five of these incendiary devices off the right side of the Bolinas-Fairfax Road as it climbed up the ocean side, maybe placing these devices at dusk when it wasn’t too dark to drive without lights. Or maybe the mountain biker placed them all. If so, he went up the steep road in a howling wind and then down the single track on the other side. That or he was dropped at the ridge and the vehicle turned around and went back down the way it came up. The vehicle would be something ordinary, a Toyota pickup, something that blended in, maybe salt-worn from the ocean and with a rack.
Up on the ridge the rider starts down, starts placing the devices. Behind him the timers are ticking and maybe he spends a little too long trying to make certain he’s got them placed correctly so they’ll ignite what’s around them. Maybe he falls a little behind and lets the bike roll a little faster, but it’s also darker on this side and he hits a root or a rock. He goes down.
He asked the firefighter now. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He went over the bars and landed badly. We’re guessing he was unconscious when the fire started.’
‘You’re thinking he rode this trail in the dark with a light?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would he do that? Why wouldn’t he place these in daylight?’
Raveneau didn’t get an answer that satisfied him. It only told him they were guessing, but he didn’t ask any more questions either because as they came around the turn there was the FBI Evidence Recovery Team, a couple of park rangers, more firefighters, and the body.