Firestorm-pigeon 4 by Nevada Barr Page B

of unexpected luck. Stanton might even wangle official status with pay.
     
     
The thought of seeing Anna again gave him a thrill of adolescent proportions. The corpse was a fitting touch. He never saw Anna unless somebody died. If that wasn't the stuff True Love was made of he'd read all those Thomas B. Costain novels for nothing.
     
     
Setting his reading glasses down by the half-finished carving, he made squeaky sounds through pursed lips. Danny squeaked back and Stanton located him in the shadows on top of one of the bookcases. "Come, my little bird-brained friend. Time to return to solitary." As he put the budgie back into its cage it crossed his mind that he ought to buy Danny a companion. He could never tell if baby budgerigars were male or female but perhaps it wouldn't matter. Just somebody to pass the time with, twitter to in the dark.
     
     
"Maybe when I get back," Frederick promised.
     
     
TIMMY GOT HIM on a red-eye out of O'Hare, through Salt Lake City, arriving in Reno at three-forty-eight A.M. Seven hundred and twenty-three dollars. Frederick abandoned American Express at the airport counter and put it on an already overburdened MasterCard. This would have to be paid off one month at a time along with Candice's college tuition.
     
     
Long legs jacked up against the seat back in front of him, Stan-ton cinched his seat belt down, then opened the envelope of computer printouts Spinks had given him: data on the Jackknife, maps of the area and background checks on the survivors and the two deceased still up on Banyon Ridge just east of Lassen Volcanic National Park.
     
     
He started with the report of the fire. Not because it held the greatest interest, but because it was going to be a long flight and he was saving the best for last. Last was Anna's background check, on the bottom of the pile. She wasn't a suspect, he was just being nosy. Law enforcement computer networks weren't the all-knowing, all-seeing, long, strong, electronic arm of the law that the various agencies would have the public believe, but they housed more dirt than a Hoover. A professional gossip's dream come true. Frederick had the highest regard for gossip. It showed people still cared what their kind did or did not do. It shored up the illusion of self-importance and morality that separated man from the monkeys he carved.
     
     
With a pleasant sense of anticipation that claimed him at the outset of most investigations, he began to read.
     
     
The Jackknife had been spotted on the twenty-seventh of September by a fire lookout in the Lassen National Forest. The burn had originated near Pinson Lake, California. Lightning, the cause of a majority of wildland fires, was not in evidence. The first victims, Joshua Short and his dog, were suspected of starting the blaze.
     
     
Frederick noted the plural and wondered what role the dog was thought to have played in arson. Maybe in the vein of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
     
     
In eleven days the fire had grown to fourteen thousand acres of public land, thirteen thousand five hundred on National Forest land and five hundred acres in Lassen Volcanic National Park. An Incident Base camp of a thousand-plus firefighters had been established on the edge of the Caribou Wilderness east of the park and a spike camp within the wilderness area on Banyon Ridge. The fire had burned steadily but unremarkably until the cold front moved in over the Cascades. The blowup was a spectacular swan song, bringing the total acreage burned to over seventeen thousand.
     
     
Precipitation and cooler temperatures were thought to have stopped the fire. It was still being monitored and, though the crews were being demobilized, Gene Burwell, Incident Commander, would head the rescue effort to bring the stranded squad down off the mountain.
     
     
Chain of events, cause and effect, never ceased to fascinate Frederick. A cold front rolls over a mountain range; a brother is burned to death; a man named Nims is knifed in the