The Burning Season by Jeff Mariotte

Author:Jeff Mariotte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

17

NICK AND SARA went back down the hill, to where the Forest Service investigators believed the fire had been started. The CSIs had requested that the Forest Service hold off on their investigation so they could study the scene before it was compromised.

The fire had begun in a hollow, a small depression in the earth. The area below it was full of dry oak leaves and downed branches. If the same was true above, it wouldn’t have taken much to get a good blaze going. Sarah pointed this out to Nick.

“You’re right,” he said. “And check the trees right around here.”

Sara did. “They’re hardly burned at all.”

“So it began as a surface fire,” Nick said. “Burning loose debris as it gathered strength. The burn moved uphill—”

“As fire tends to do.”

“That’s right. And as it did, it found ladder fuels, shrubs and low branches, that helped it climb into the crown. Some crown fires burn almost independently of surface fires, but this one seems like it covered every elevation once it got going good.”

“And it gained strength as it went uphill,” Sara added. “Creating its own air flow. The heat must have been intense, up above.”

“Hot enough that those firefighters never had a chance.”

“Are we convinced that it was human-caused?”

“The Forest Service people were. No reported lightning strikes in the area. No other reason for a fire to start on its own. Either it was accident or arson.”

“Let’s find out which,” she said. “Because if it’s arson, then someone’s got a lot to answer for.”

They gloved up and went to hands and knees, inspecting the transition area between burned and not-burned. After about thirty minutes, during which Nick began to suspect he would never breathe freely again, so caked with soot were his nasal passages, he heard Sara’s voice.

“Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“Take a look at this.”

He rose, a little creaky from having been down for so long, and walked over to her. She had brushed a circle in the ash about fifteen feet in from the edge of the burned area, revealing a bundle of tiny, pale sticks in the center of the circle. “Matches?”

“Matches,” she said. “But they’re stuck together, and they didn’t burn all the way.”

“I guess that’s our good luck and the firebug’s bad luck. I wonder why, though.”

“From the size of these matchsticks,” Sara said, “I’m guessing they’re the strike-anywhere type. These days most matches have to be struck on a special surface.”

“That strip on the matchbook,” Nick said.

“Because the strip contains red phosphorous. The friction converts it to white phosphorous, for a fraction of a second.”

“White phosphorus, that’s bad stuff.” Because it generated a lot of smoke, it was commonly used in battle to make smokescreens. But it was also highly incendiary, and it had a tendency to cling to surfaces, resulting in a lasting, extremely destructive burn. Most civilized nations didn’t use it in that way anymore—at least, not officially. That didn’t stop others from claiming that they did. What the truth was, Nick couldn’t know.

“You’re not kidding.

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