Page 33 of Into the Fire

The preliminary origin-and-cause was short. Officially, it was lightning. Sunday’s strike map showed a cluster in the draw, and one strike hit within a quarter mile of the origin. The origin area itself had burned hard, hot enough that there wouldn’t be anything left to contradict the story. No physical evidence inconsistent with the report.

I read it twice, the second time slowly, looking for anything that didn’t fit.

There was nothing unusual. The strike was real. The fire started where a fire would start. Everything about Whitmore Creek was ordinary except the one hour we’d stood inside it, and that wasn’t in the report. No instruments recorded it.

“So the official position is that lightning behaved like it always does,” I said.

“So far.”

“You still think what we saw was wrong?”

Boone looked at me. “I know what I saw.”

That shut me up for a second.

“Okay,” I said.

“The report gives us lightning. It doesn’t give us an explanation for the fire moving against the wind.”

“No.”

“And it doesn’t give us anything to take to anybody.”

“No.”

Boone closed the folder and set it aside.

“Carson Ridge,” he said.

The old incident files were in the records room behind Operations. Marty was at his desk with the phone against his shoulder when we entered. He pointed us toward the back, hung up, and followed.

The records room was narrow and windowless, with steel shelving to the ceiling, flat LED panels overhead, and air that tasted like toner and old cardboard. Marty hit a second bank of lights. It didn’t improve anything.

“What year?”

“Twenty-one,” Boone said.

“Left side, second section.” Marty traced a finger down the shelf, reading the box ends under his breath. “Anything older than three years got re-boxed after the retention audit. Whoever Regional sent labeled everything by fiscal year instead of calendar year.” He pulled a gray archive box off the shelf and read the end of it. “Carson Ridge?”

“Yeah,” Boone said.

“This is the incident file. Medical and personnel are separate. If you need either of those, that’s a request form.” He set the box on the table. “Coffee’s fresh if you need a jolt.”

The phone rang out front. Marty disappeared to answer it.

Boone lifted the box’s lid.

I don’t know what I’d expected. Something heavier, maybe. It was a standard records box, half full, with a folded map on top that somebody had refolded wrong.

We carried it to the side table and started laying the contents out. It included incident action plans, weather reports, and the fatality investigation binder. Further down were crew manifests and a packet of photographs.

The names on the first manifest caught my eye—Kroeger, J., crew boss; Hatcher, B.; Coyle, N.; Mendoza, R.; Fellhauer, D.; Vega, D.

Dutch Kroeger had a line the same size as everyone else’s. The official Carson Ridge report had a start time, legal description, acreage, weather observations, and a table of contents.

“Hey.” Boone was watching me across the spread of paper.

“It’s small,” I said. “I thought it’d be bigger.”