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Chapter 16

 

Forest fires are common in the Trinities in June. They are more common in August and still more in September. Moisture comes in off the Pacific Ocean as the occasional summer storm. Most of the storms dump their load anywhere from the Lost Coast to Crescent City, the clouds too laden to climb the mountains. Some storm energy makes it over the low coast range and twists and turns through the valleys to soak parts of the Trinities and Salmons. The forest dries out. Lightening from a thunderstorm picks a tall tree or rock outcropping or a hiker to short out on, and it is fire time. Funny thing. They watched the system moving in on radar during the flight in to Redding. All the lightning strikes from the sparse thunder-bumpers were at least twenty miles north of Mike’s house.

Heather stepped in front of him and looked up, eyes huge in her face. She looked thinner than when he had fallen asleep. He wanted her to stay at the hotel rather than go to her house. She said, “It’s my home. If your home was burning wouldn’t you have to go?”

The fire fighters had already put out the smoldering shrubs around the house. They had to fell two burning spruce. The great oak that adopted Jack wasn’t touched. The firefighters labeled it arson within seconds of their arrival. It was now a crime scene. They were more effectively sealed from the property than if someone posted armed guards. Was the attempted arson a way to keep them away from Mike’s house until the enemy could get reinforcements?

 

HEATHER walked up to the fire chief. It was hard to think of him as Chief because he had always called her dad pops. Her dad dated his mom long ago before she married someone else. That was the little joke. If only things had been a little different he would have been Mike’s son. He was one of the few people in town who stayed on her dad’s side. Her dad always said firemen were caring people. He would follow that with a laugh, saying firemen’s relationships were mostly train wrecks. Larry Morton looked huge in the heavy fire suit. He wore the big, funny hat that meant someone nice was coming to help.

“Hello, Mr. Morton.”

The soot around his mouth and eyes creased into a comforting smile. The area around his eyes was whiter from where he had taken off goggles. “Heather, I am so, so sorry to hear about your dad. He was a fine man. You know my momma was always wistful about him. I hate the way the town treated him. And, now somebody tried to burn your home. It’s terrible the way folks in this town are acting. I am ashamed for my neighbors. You make sure you come see me if you need anything.”

“Thank you. Could you please let me go in and get my guitar and practice amp?”

Mr. Morton shrugged his big shoulders, made bigger by the fire gear. He looked at the ground and said, “I’m so sorry, Heather. I can’t let anybody in until after the arson investigators get over here from Redding and clear the place.”

“Is there any reason you can’t go in and get my guitar and practice amp for me? The guitar is the last birthday present I will ever get from my dad. It’s a Paul Reed Smith, Orianthi SE. My dad got Orianthi to autograph it ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. And the Gibson practice amp, please?”

He looked like he was going to say no, then he squared his shoulders and said, “I am the chief here. I will get them for you, list them as from the crime scene, take pictures and have an adult sign for them. Is that okay Heather?”

“Yes, please?”

Jack, Lee and Brigit gave her space while she talked to Mr. Morton. How could someone be mean enough to try to burn her house down right after her father died? She decided she wasn’t going to think about it. She watched Jack and Lee stand and wait. It was strange the way people reacted to Jack. Men either acted like roosters or seemed like they were a little afraid. Some men, like Mr. Morton, big, powerful men, seemed fine around him. The way Jack looked at Lee was a fine thing. Maybe someone would look at her like that someday.

The inside of the house hadn’t been touched. Dad said that their rustic looking cabin had a fire suppression system worthy of a combat ship. When he decided to keep the trees in close he installed a 1000 Gallon cistern in the reinforced attic with two high-speed pumps. They were near the end of a long power supply from the local power company. There were only two ways to break free from the power company. One was to install a generator. The other was to install a dynamo on the little creek that ran year round through their section.

Her dad had loved the wild little creek. It would have been impossible for him to dam except for one thing. There was a part of the creek that roared down over a pile of twisted, broken concrete. Years ago someone broke up a slab and, rather than taking it to the dump, dropped it off the cliff into the creek. He’d had the slabs moved up stream and buried them under the rocks of his little dam. He had electricity and a prettier creek.

Being a finicky man of infinite patience and someone who liked to tinker, he did even more. He set solar panels on his roof and a bank of batteries in his cellar. Somehow his power supply from the creek had been interrupted. The batteries in the basement did the job and four hundred gallons of water cascaded down on his roof, dousing the fire before it had a chance to get started. She already missed her finicky, funny father.

Heather thought about that guitar. She’d asked for it and explained it to her dad, why it had to be that guitar. She asked three months ahead of time. He was preoccupied with a deal, but she thought she’d gotten through to him. Then, about a month before her birthday he got all excited about something. He couldn’t keep a secret from her. She figured he’d bought the guitar. So, she looked in all his hiding places. She couldn’t find it.

Then, on her birthday, Heather opened her other presents and no guitar. Her dad made an excuse that he had to run into town quick before he took her to her birthday party. She figured he was going to give the guitar to her at the party. Bobbie, the dorky Fed Ex guy, showed up with a big box addressed to her. She looked at the address and saw that it was from LA, not from a music store and not from the factory in Stevensville, Maryland.

Heather carried the box inside and happened to glance at the sender. It was from Orianthi Panagaris. She opened the box carefully, hoping. There was her guitar. On it was written:

 

Happy Birthday Heather!

Let’s jam

Orianthi

 

Finally Mr. Morton came out with the practice amp and the guitar. She let him carry her light practice amp out to the Suburban, but asked if she could carry the guitar.

“Mr. Morton, could I please carry the guitar?”

“Okay, Heather. And, I’m serious about helping out if I can. Your dad was a fine man and he always helped people out when he could.”

She waited while Jack signed for the guitar and amp.

 

JACK had seen too much death. Heather hadn’t seen any that he knew of. Her world had just been snuffed out. Little girls get their self-esteem from their fathers. Mike had loved her well and now he was gone. He had done a good job helping her set foundations for the rest of her life. How the rest of it turned out would be up to her and maybe him and Lee. The thought that he might be responsible for how another human being turned out terrified him. When their parents died and he had to take care of Meghan, he hadn’t had the liberty of time to think about it.

“God damn it, Mike,” he thought. “Why in the hell did you leave me in charge? I don’t know anything about raising kids.”

But, he did know something about raising kids, from trying to raise Meghan. He had always figured if he did the opposite of what his parents did, he wouldn’t do too badly. There was one thing he knew for certain. Lee had enough nurturing love for a whole room full of kids, big ones like him, and middle sized ones like Heather. The trip back to the hotel was quiet. The ex-cop stayed, so they didn’t need to check the rooms. Lee led Heather back into her room. How in the hell do you take care of an almost twelve year-old girl whose father had just been killed?

Heather needed to be around friends. How many friends did she have left after her father killed off the prison? Was she better off away from stuff that reminded her of Mike or nurtured by things familiar? Like most rich kids Heather had a shrink. This one was actually a psychologist. Mike insisted, saying if he had to rely on luck he wouldn’t have been sane enough to take care of his only daughter.

“Brigit, you said the shrink contacted Heather as soon as she found out, right?”

“Yes, she did. Nice woman, a friend of their family, from what I hear, came and talked to her for a half hour. Right after she left, the aunt scooped her up.”

“I need some help on what to do, whether we should try to keep Heather here or take her back to the City. Could you call her and pass her off to me?” Brigit nodded and headed into the room they had quickly turned into an office.

IT wasn’t long before Lee softly slid out of the room they assigned to Heather and gently closed the door. She leaned her forehead against the doorframe for a while before she slid onto her man’s lap. He rocked her, bouncing her on his knee as if she were the child who needed cheering up, tucking her head under his, as she drank in his smell. She didn’t realize how hard it would be trying to help Heather feel and at the same time shield her from it. She hadn’t thought she would relive her own loss.

She talked so quietly her man had to move his ear near her mouth. She could feel her own breath, warm and a little wet. “She hid a lot of it from me before, when we had our talks on the phone. I knew it was tough, but not how tough. She lost most of her friends, even closest friends from school, soccer, and clubs because of what her father did. Her friends’ parents counted on the prison. They needed the prison to sell houses to the guards, hardware to the builders, dinners to the construction crews, and plumbing supplies for the new houses. Because it was private, the addition to the local tax base could have been 40%.”

She looked at the framed photograph of the Joss House above the mantle. “Her teachers, other than the hardcore greens, made her life hell. She was suspended from school for having a fistfight with her former best friend. Her father’s allies in this were men and women he normally despised. And now…”

He held her, stroking the back of her neck where skin disappeared into hair, rubbing her back, giving strength, as she thought that she had to be the luckiest woman in the world. She jumped up and gave a little shake.

“What have you been doing?” she asked, turning his head away with her hands so he couldn’t see the circles under her eyes and her face puffy from tears.

They moved to the table and he showed her the local news articles he pulled up on the net. Mike had taken Jack’s idea and run with it, taking the seed of a strategic outline and turned it into a specific tactical battle plan. He’d formed a new non-profit corporation, Friends of the Trinity Vole. The group succeeded in having a temporary restraining order issued to stop further ground improvement and construction preparation.

If you live in the Western US and thought you had seen a tiny gerbil in your house, chances are it was a vole. It has a round face, not sharp like a mouse or rat, but more like a tiny guinea pig. It is longhaired with its hair brown above and gray below. This species of voles is the smallest of the western voles, around six inches long, fully grown, with nearly two inches of that being furry tail. Its ears are tiny and nearly hidden. Unlike many mice, this vole excavates its burrow.

He moved the Air so that they could both read the screen. The Trinity Vole’s habitat was the problem for the prison builders. Most Voles lived in forests on the floor under rotting logs. This species thrived in grassy meadows and farms that were just the kind of nice, flat area the prison would have been built on. Their range was extremely limited according to the Friends of the Trinity Vole. An artificially introduced predator, the red fox, had reduced the vole’s breeding area to less than four percent of its former range. Now over half of its breeding area was on acreage the prison was to have been built on. The local paper didn’t think a whole lot of the vole.

Each editorial walked a fine line of being a liberal paper supporting all things green and outrage that something so important to the local economy was being stopped. If it were a state or federal prison project, there wouldn’t have been a problem. The state could and did ignore the environmental impact laws because they didn’t apply to them. Since it was to be a privately built and run prison, the rules had to be followed.

The president of the local chamber of commerce was a good quote.

“Letting a pest, especially one that has not even been declared a separate species, much less an endangered one, stop the building of a prison that is necessary for the safety of all of Californians and vital to the economy of this area, is a travesty of environmental law.”

A rally celebrating the prison construction stoppage, just two weeks ago, was interrupted by a brief, but violent, confrontation. The factions were the Friends of the Trinity Vole, or FOTV, and picketers who supposedly represented the local unemployed. Rumor had it that the men who attacked the FOTV had been assured they would be first on the list for jobs at the prison or on the construction site.

JACK found the work that Mike had done fascinating. Even if it hadn’t been, he would have found it so. He grabbed any distraction to avoid feeling the death of his friend. He looked up to see Brigit stomp into the room and stop in front of him.

“What?”

She opened her mouth and a croak came out. He handed her a glass of water. She tilted her head back and drank until she drained the glass. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“That fucking bitch!” she said. She paced back and forth. “It took me six tries to get through to Heather’s shrink. I could tell the damn receptionist was lying about her being in session. I had to call from my cell phone and disguise my voice, saying I was feeling suicidal, before she would talk to me. Then I had to fucking threaten her with a subpoena to keep her from hanging up.”

She tap-tapped back across the room to stand in front of him. Even standing she was only an inch or two taller than he was sitting.

“When the Judge talked to me about what he wanted me to do, I did some checking, not only with him, but other places. In custody battles it’s almost always about the money. With rich people it’s more about the money than with poor people. The Judge laughed when I brought it up. He said you were more about ‘fairness’ than anyone he’d ever met. So the last time I talked to the shrink I shared that with her, told her Mike had picked you for that very reason. When she found out it wasn’t about the money she opened up a little bit. I thought she was a hell of a nice woman. I thought she cared. That was nine hours ago. Now she’s recommended to child protective services that Heather should be a ward of the State of California until a custody hearing.”

He thought about the change in the shrink’s attitude. There were drawbacks to him being considered the world’s best potential father figure. He was unmarried and living with a woman who was a foreign national. On the other hand he was, according to some, wealthy, healthy, and successful. He contributed heavily in time and money to local charities. The list went from CASA to funding and coaching youth Judo in inner-city Oakland. And he actually had experience at raising children — well one gifted, wonderful, scary-smart, funny, younger sister anyway.

News stories flashed into his head. He stopped reading them long ago, hoping the memories would go away. He remembered one story in particular, despite having tried to forget it for years. A little girl is beaten to death by the new boyfriend of the mother. This is a week after Child Protective Services decided keeping the child with its drug addict mother was better than taking the child away. Could the shrink have changed her mind because the state had proven itself much better at raising kids than the environment he could provide? The odds against this being why she had a change of heart and him being struck by a meteorite while playing polo were about the same. He didn’t play polo. Brigit said what he was thinking.

“Somebody got to the bitch.”

 

TRINITY County did not have a medical examiner. There were only four counties in California with full time medical examiners. San Francisco, Marin, Los Angeles, and San Diego. In Trinity County, the coroner, who was an elected official and not an MD, decided whether the death warranted an autopsy, based on California law. If there was an autopsy, the body was transported to Redding. There an MD, who wasn’t a full time pathologist, usually performed the autopsy. They were more than happy to have one of the best pathologists in the world do their work for free.

Doctor Giddings started the autopsy at 7:00 that morning and finished at three. By four PM he sat across from Jack at the small meeting room in the hotel.

Dr. Giddings hands always held Jack’s attention. They were long-fingered and thin even for his slender frame, with tendons standing out with each movement as if all the flesh had been rendered away. Dr. Giddings hands normally shook. At first Jack thought a pathologist didn’t need to be as precise with the dead as a surgeon working on living flesh. But, steady was important. A thin slice of flesh that missed the air bubble or the minute piece of fat that caused the embolism was just a slice of flesh. If his work was done with care, it could lead to improved treatment or surgical practice. As evidence, his expertise could help convict or free.

Dr. Giddings pale skin accented the dark circles under his eyes. Rumor had it he had been a hell of a surgeon. Then he hit that string of luck that surgeons sometime hit and lost three people in three days he thought he should have saved. After that, he’d gone the other route with an obsession about the causes and effects of diseases. Dr. Giddings flipped through his autopsy notes.

“I was called upon by the family to do an autopsy. I was asked to perform a medical-legal autopsy by the coroner. The autopsy is used to determine a number of things. First, I was to determine the cause of death. Was it a fall or gunshot for example, then the mechanism of death, heart failure, drug overdose etc., and the manner of death, accident, murder etc.?”

Dr. Giddings gratefully accepted another cup of tea.

“I wanted to first establish if the death resulted from an uncontrolled fall. I know it sounds as if it is unimportant to differentiate between a controlled and uncontrolled fall at nearly 400 feet, but the logic has to be followed. Many uncontrolled falling deaths are from roofs and ladders less than a dozen feet off the ground. A significant percentage of people survive controlled falls of a hundred feet or more.

Cause of death was an uncontrolled fall. I determined that the victim had not been killed somewhere else and carried to where his body was found. The level of damage and contaminants from the local environment, combined with picture evidence, and description of other physical evidence from the scene, all led me to establish that the fall killed your friend Mike.”

“For mechanism of death you could flip a coin. You could say it was massive head trauma or spinal trauma significant enough to cause failure of Mike’s cardio pulmonary mechanisms or massive trauma to his heart caused by shattered ribs.” He looked up.

“Have you done the math, Jack? Do you know how long it took him to fall?”

Jack hadn’t wanted to do the math, but his brain loved math and did it without asking. Mike had fallen nearly 400 feet. “He fell for four and a half seconds.”

Dr. Giddings nodded and said, “A long time to think about the certainty of your death, but at least when he hit it was swift. I would think he lost consciousness upon impact in a very small part of a second. Next, I wanted to see if there were any obvious signs he had been restrained prior to the fall. Was he handcuffed or tied up and then thrown off the trail and the restraints removed at the bottom? This was disproved by a number of factors. No evidence of constriction at wrists, forearms, or ankles. No evidence of super glue, tape, or any of the other things people use to restrain other people.”

Dr. Giddings leaned back in his chair breathing deeply into his nose and out his mouth. He intertwined his hands as if he was going to make a steeple and then turned them inside out over his head. It was the least favorite stretch of anyone who made it through rotator cuff surgery. The doctor’s look was grim as he leveled his gaze at them across the mahogany table made too glossy with Old English Oil.

“The newest restraint method is shrink-wrap, which was hard to figure until we did analysis on the clothes of a number of victims and picked up the plastic. The lack of evidence of being restrained either physically or chemically, at least so far, is only part of it. He had torn the nails on his left hand on a rock twenty feet down from where he started his fall. Part of the left middle finger nail was still imbedded in a root sticking out. It is consistent with other live falls. He tried to catch himself on the way down. This would have been very hard for him to do because his left hand had been stomped on four times just before his fall.”

As the Doc told the story the fire in Jack’s belly grew. He dampened the fire. The burning embers roared back into flame, threatening to burn through.

“I looked at the injuries to the small bones of the left hand with x-rays. I have seen similar injuries before, some in gang beatings where a man is stomped to death. Unfortunately and, more usually, the same types of injuries are seen in children who die from abuse.”

Someone stomped on Mike’s hand. There was a tiny piece of a Vibram™ boot-sole in the skin of his left hand. The lug pattern on the back of his left hand was consistent with the pattern of a Vasque Three Seasons Hiker. The marks were sharp and clear as if made by new boots. It was a left boot. That meant the marks were probably made by someone who was left-handed. The boot struck down on the hand with great force. Somehow Dr. Giddings concluded with a high level of certainty that Mike was attempting to hold on to the edge of the trail while his hand was being stomped.

Some of the bones in the hand had been crushed nearly to powder. This is very difficult to do. Dr. Giddings was convinced that when they found the man who stomped him that he would be large and freaky strong. Not just weight-room strong, but NFL lineman, bus-pulling strong. Dr. Giddings was very sure the hand had been stomped on four times, because of the prints in the back of the hand.

The urge to live is the strongest urge there is. Even a tiny break in one of the little bones in the hand is horribly painful. In this case there were twenty-seven breaks. Did Mike feel as if he was weak letting go with a hand broken in twenty-seven places? Had he held on thinking, Stop! It hurts too badly. But wait. I can hold on. I know I can. I can deal with this pain as long as I know I will live. He was able to see the boot coming down again. Did the stomping men look away in guilt? Or, did they enjoy Mike’s pain and his knowledge of his own certain death? Had they taken their time? Did Mike think, No, No!! I can handle this, but not again, please don’t make this horrible pain worse.

Then the boot came down again. Did he want to let go and not let go, thinking that anything could be endured, but please someone, please come along the trail? Did he think, I know it hurts, hurts worse than anything, even the explosion that tore off my other arm, but I can hold on until the hand is mush, until it is flat and part of the earth? Or did he think, I have one missing hand now? Even if I survive there is no way this hand is ever going to work again. I will not suffer through life with two hooks.

Could he have clung to that rock ledge not thinking at all? How did he feel as he fell nearly 400 feet to the bottom in almost five seconds? How many lifetimes would that feel like, knowing he fell to a certain death? What kind of man could stomp on a one armed man’s good hand until it was so broken he couldn’t hold on any more? He knew there were men who could do things like this. He knew there were men, and women, who could do worse.

Jack had killed three men less than a year ago when they fought the Church of the Seven Sisters. He had killed many men years before. If it had been up to him, he would have killed a lot more men and most especially killed one woman a year ago. If their plan worked, these men and women would have done evil on a level much greater than an Amin, Taylor, or a Hussein. They might have achieved the status of a Hitler or maybe even a Stalin. Perhaps they would have reached the killing levels of a Mao.

Like most zealots, the members of the church didn’t have the impact they hoped. He didn’t believe in trying to get inside the heads of his enemy. Feel what they are feeling. Think like they think and you can defeat them. The inside of his head had enough cracks in it now. He didn’t need to understand. He just needed to get close enough to hurt them until their black hearts stopped beating.

“What about the cancer?”

The Doctor took another sip of the tea. “I have examined his colon completely. There is evidence of removal of polyps. You will have to subpoena the samples and his medical records. I am sure the samples will be lost. You should also subpoena the records from the lab. Not only paper records, but electronic records as well. But, I see absolutely no evidence of anything remotely resembling cancer of the colon. “

“Do I understand you right? You have found no evidence he had cancer of the colon or even evidence a competent pathologist would think he had cancer?”

“That is correct.”

Jack thought about the doctor’s answer. It was way too easy to believe in conspiracy, but it is so hard for anyone to keep secrets. He felt as if he was fighting an enemy he could only see pieces of. This enemy felt big and organized and smart.

“I think I know the answer, but I am going to ask anyway. Can we keep this quiet?”

“I have to report it. I can screw around with the results for a couple of hours before I send the report back to the coroner, but that’s as far as I can delay it. Do you want a copy?”

“Send a copy to the office.” He didn’t want to see the details of someone cutting into what was left of Mike’s body.

Dr. Giddings left to fly home.

“Jack, I think we should tell Heather now. I mean she already knows, but she really doesn’t know,” Lee said.

Lee did most of the telling. They didn’t tell her all of it. They didn’t tell her about the stomped hand or what it must have felt like to fall for nearly five seconds. When they were done Heather asked for time alone in her room.

A little while later Heather walked out of the room with her guitar slung over her left shoulder. She looked as if the skin on her face drew tighter with each hour. He had never met her mother, knew her only from pictures and Mike’s heart-breaking stories. When Mike lost his second true love to cancer he hadn’t climbed back into a bottle. He climbed into fatherhood. It looked like Heather had inherited the best of both sides of the gene pool. She had her father’s olive skin, lean bone structure, and laser-paper white teeth. From her mother’s side she inherited blue eyes Two radically different genetic structures in the jaw resulted in orthodontics. She still had a while to go on her braces.

Her normal style was brainy, funny and must have come from her mother. Her father was a man given to reflection and long silence. She was one of those very quick young women.

“Do you guys know why I took my guitar and amplifier?”

“The comfort of music?”

“Well, it does, give me comfort, I mean, but that’s not all of it. My father..,” she bit her lip and stopped. “My father said helicopter pilots had to be anal by nature. He is, was, and he worked at it too. Mike gave me copies of his research. He said if anything… if anything happened, I was to give a copy to you. I hid the CD’s in my practice amp.”

She handed over two CD’s. The labels on the cases were the kind of CDs any right thinking almost 12 year old would, he hoped, hide from her parents. Or better yet, not listen to at all. One of the bands, or do they call rap groups bands, was called the Pussy Fucking Gangsters? The other was the Bitch Slapping Home Boys. Even if someone searched and found the CDs they would assume she was just hiding music from her parents. If someone really thought it through , they would know twelve year olds don’t buy CD’s. They buy downloads, or vinyl to be retro-cool.

“There are other copies too. Mike mailed one to a friend every time he added a lot of stuff to his research. She lives in Maine. She copies them and then puts a copy in her safety deposit box.”