Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
CHASE
“ Y ou’re a jackass.”
“I don’t want to hear it, Jules.”
She’d wasted no time saying her piece the second she got in the car. I regretted the agreement I’d made months ago to be her Thursday-night ride. Most of our time together was spent listening to a radio station neither of us actively hated. Other times, she liked to tell me her opinions .
“This is truly asinine, Chase. Even for you.”
Jules being Violet’s best friend meant I couldn’t afford to alienate her. I clenched my jaw against saying something I would regret. I was fired up enough that I just might.
“I mean it. Not tonight,” I warned.
“Why? You planning on growing some sense by tomorrow?”
Now, I was getting angry. “She dropped a bomb on me. I think I have a right to ask her why.”
“You even saying that proves what an idiot you are,” she spat.
“I consider ‘idiot’ to be an offensive term.”
“ Fine ,” she came back angrily. “You’re a goddamn fool.”
What did I have to say to prove to this woman that I was not in the mood? “Don’t make me leave you on the side of a dark country road and call you an Uber.”
“Someone’s got to tell you, even if Violet won’t.”
There it was. The gauntlet. Proof she was not going to let this go; proof that she knew my weakness; proof that she knew that I knew there was something more at play. What I needed was information. I’d gone to the source, but Violet wasn’t budging. I hated that I was going to take the bait.
“So quit insulting me and tell me,” I demanded, my hard glare that was meant for her trained on the road.
She leaned up in her seat, turning to me more fully. “You’re so focused on the bomb she dropped on you, you aren’t asking yourself how she’s doing. Or thinking about the bomb you dropped on her.”
“What bomb?” I was defensive—resentful of how she was picking at me.
“The one where you’re going back to the job that killed her husband. You. The most consistent father figure her kids have ever known. Trey wasn’t born when he died and Bri only remembers Todd from pictures. You told Violet you’d be there for her, no matter what.”
Fuck.
I let what Jules was telling me begin to sink in—let myself imagine what hearing that must have been like. It dawned on me that Violet quitting seconds after I’d told her hadn’t been a coincidence. Maybe Violet didn’t want to leave me. Maybe it was the ultimate act of self-protection—her leaving me before I could leave her.
“Now, she’s got to think about whether you’re gonna run into a burning forest and never come out again.” This time, I didn’t blame Jules for the contempt and sarcasm in her voice. “I wonder why something like that might have her rattled.”
“Fuck.” I banged the steering wheel as I yelled the word out loud. I’d given up on exercising a filter.
“Yeah. Fuck ,” Jules bit back.
I gritted my teeth against all I couldn’t say. Neither Violet nor Jules could know my real motivation for returning to the fire service. They couldn’t know that I was investigating Todd’s death, or that I was flirting with breaking the law. I would find a way to leak whatever information was needed for Violet to win her case, but there was no coming out and saying that. So I defaulted to what I could say, however vague.
“The job’s not what she thinks. I won’t be running into that many forests.”
“ Not that many ? ” Jules looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Well, I guess that changes everything. Let’s call Violet right now and tell her you won’t have that many chances to be killed.”
I shut my mouth again. I couldn’t guarantee anybody I wouldn’t be called to a scene as part of the investigation. And reaching my goal meant maintaining my cover, and playing my part.
“Look,” I said finally. “I don’t want to run into a burning forest, either. Violet knows how much it fucked me up when Forrest asked. She also knows how many other people have asked and how many times I’ve turned it down. Do you honestly think the idea of being on the ground during a fire doesn’t scare the shit out of me? I spent two years in therapy for PTSD. I’m an investigator now and I’m going to do my damndest to stay out of the fire.”
Jules sighed and shifted her body somewhat, looking out the window again. Maybe our conversation was over and maybe it needed to be. But Jules was right. I should have seen the obvious. I should have gotten past my own insecurities long enough to realize how all of this might scare Violet, and the kids.
Soon enough, I pulled onto Jules’s street, up to her house, and into her driveway. I was on the brink of humbling myself—to thank her—when she spoke.
“What’s done is done.” She looked at me pointedly. “Now you have one job only. Don’t make her any promises you can’t keep. Don’t write her a single check she or those kids might not be able to cash. And, for the love of the Lord, do not try to get her to stay with you on that farm.”
That last one walloped me. It felt like a punch in my gut. But there was nothing I could say on my own behalf. I couldn’t explain to Jules how not making Violet any promises was exactly what I was trying to do. I couldn’t say how I was protecting her by not giving her hope that I could help her case. I couldn’t confess that all would be explained, but not until I had something substantive. I couldn’t prove that I only had Violet’s best interests at heart.
“I mean it, Chase,” Jules dug in. I’d never seen her more determined. “Don’t make this about you for once. Quit interfering and just follow her lead. Let her prove to herself for the first time in her life that she can be on her own.”
“Well, that was intense.”
I squinted into the sunlight as Forrest and I exited the distinguished building and found ourselves on a busy Washington street. I’d been inside the headquarters of the Department of the Interior for hours. Forrest and I had flown in that morning to meet with the Secretary herself. We’d gone there straight from the airport. I’d also needed to get my security clearance and learn the protocols.
“Monica doesn’t play around.” Forrest was on a first-name basis with the Secretary, the head of the agency who was two years into her role. Secretary of the Interior wasn’t an elected position—Monica was an appointee, selected personally by the President of the United States.
“So let me get this straight…” I cast Forrest a sidelong glance. “You’re a special attaché to the Secretary, which makes her your direct boss. But her direct boss is the President. That makes the President your grand-boss.”
“That’s right.”
“And since you’re the head of the Council on Wildfire Prevention, and I’m a council member, that makes me your employee.”
Forrest chuckled. “Technically, yes.”
“That means the President of the United States of America is technically my great-grand-boss,” I concluded.
Forrest nodded. “It surely does.”
“Hot damn,” I muttered, still disbelieving as I followed Forrest to wherever he was leading us down the street.
He lived in Tennessee, but DC was one of his stomping grounds. Once upon a time, he’d been the federal fire marshal assigned to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It had been a prestigious job to begin with given the park’s status within the system. But Forrest hadn’t stopped there. He’d climbed his way up the ranks. Every firefighter who worked for a federal agency had heard the name Forrest Winters.
After he left Great Smoky Mountains, he’d managed to get himself assigned as the head of a special commission based on a big grant he’d won. Its charge was to investigate wildfires nationwide, and develop an early detection system using drones. Now, he’d been tapped to lead the council. I’d known before that he was a mover and a shaker, but after all this, I knew . I was just beginning to truly grasp the council’s visibility, and was blown away by being here now.
Forrest had tried to tell me this “wasn’t some rinky-dink council” and he was right. They hadn’t just checked my ID and handed me my badge. They’d asked for my birth certificate and my passport. They’d taken my fingerprint and scanned my retinas. They’d asked me intrusive questions. They’d proven to me how seriously they were taking all of this.
“So now you know our charter.” Forrest stepped off of a curb to cross the street. “You heard what Monica said. The three wildfires we’re investigating aren’t the three deadliest from the past ten years—they’re the three most suspicious. We’re looking at the ones where there shouldn’t have been loss of life. Given Violet’s situation , we’re starting with the one that killed Todd.”
“I’ve read the case file,” I told Forrest then. “End to end. Top to bottom. I’ve read it over three times.”
“That’s just the assembled case file—the conclusions drawn by the State of California. The goal of that investigation was to determine the cause of the fire and to establish whether the agencies involved followed procedure. Our job now is to treat this as a new investigation. To figure out why—if everything was on the up-and-up—three men had to die.”
I frowned. “You think maybe I shouldn’t have read the case file? That I biased myself?”
“Maybe,” Forrest hedged. “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now, we need to look at the feeder reports—official findings from the smaller agencies; we’ll review documentation from dispatch and incident command; documentation from the captains on the ground, including our own; and exit interviews from the men who fought the fire.”
The question I might have asked next flew from my mind no thanks to a distraction.
“Is that the White House?”
Forrest didn’t need to answer. It was across the street on the next block, behind tall wrought-iron fences and set way back from the photo takers and onlookers who lined the street. My first instinct was to whip out my phone and take a selfie with Forrest. Easier said than done to frame it up. Then, I remembered. Violet and I weren’t right. The only reason to have taken a selfie would have been to send it to her and the kids. I needed to smooth things over when I got back to Tennessee. I needed to sort myself out and figure out how.
There was nothing in the world I hated more than fighting with Violet. It was unusual for us to be at odds, which made the times we were that much more painful. We had mostly locked horns over me offering her help. I would never forget what happened after the guys took up a collection when we found out the insurance company wouldn’t pay. When I handed her the check, she’d yelled at me through her tears for ten solid minutes. At least then, I’d understood why we were fighting.
Every bone she’d ever had to pick with me had been about something like that—me giving too much; her wanting to do things on her own. But Jules was right about this one. For once, this wasn’t about me and my stubbornness or Violet and her pride. Her being scared for me? I didn’t know what to do with that.
“How much will I have to travel?” It was time for me to plan. The clock was ticking. Violet’s retrial was in seven weeks. That gave me fifty days to crack her case, all while simultaneously letting her go and reinforcing a sense of presence and security for her and her kids—all while running a working farm.
“We’ll start with the reports from the smaller agencies. After that, we’ll knock on some doors. A lot of those doors will be in California.”
I didn’t like the idea of more days away from home, or being a plane ride’s distance away from her.
“You gotta try the restaurant here,” Forrest said as we entered the lobby of the Hay-Adams. Of course I’d heard of The Lafayette. Any other day, my mouth would have been watering for long meal. But I just wanted to get to my room, and to my desk.
He must have sensed my disquiet. “I know you’re wanting to get started. Trust me—I am, too. But nothing good ever came from an empty stomach.”
If you had told me a month ago I’d be sitting in my living room reading classified incident reports, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you’d told me it energized me, I wouldn’t have believed you twice. Nowadays, I fell asleep with my laptop on my chest. And something about being around this again—I liked it.
Thinking about safety protocols and incident leadership would bore most people to tears. I’d been telling myself I was only staying up so late out of a sense of dedication. But there was more to it than that. This didn’t feel like work. Time flew and I was in my flow.
Cooking was like that for me. It hadn’t escaped my notice that running a kitchen was a proxy for the excitement I had missed. Some part of me thrived in fast-paced environments, and being around highly trained people doing what they did best. In just two days of being an official investigator, the process had proven something I’d been denying: there were parts of the fire service I missed.
During an actual incident, information dashboards were digital and changed second by second—they showed the most pressing needs within the system at a given time. Reviewing reports after the fact was a lot different. At the moment, I was looking through incident severity data that had been pulled out at one- hour intervals. It contained far more information than would have been feasible to review on the day of.
Wildfires were rarely single, contiguous blazes. Multiple blazes could be active within a single fire. But it could also be the case that multiple fires in proximity to each other were named separately. Separate fires were what we’d been dealing with on the day that Todd was killed.
Cranston Fire. Population Threat Level 6. Status: 34% contained.
Rutland Fire. Population Threat Level 9. Status: 18% contained.
Pomona Fire. Population Threat Level 2. Status: 58% contained.
Artville Fire. Population Threat Level 4. Status: 76% contained.
The basic logic of fighting wildfires was to keep them away from populated areas—to let a fire burn a forest sooner than we would let it burn a town. The environmental trade-offs could be argued, but the economic and human stakes were clear. It was also a priority to fight fires that could be contained, rather than ones that would be resistant to our efforts. The information was all here, but in tabular form. I would do better graphing it all out.
This doesn’t look right.
No sooner had I set parameters for my chart than I found three lines that trended the wrong way. If procedure had been followed, the chart ought to look like a waterfall cascade. The fires with the highest population threat levels should have appeared highest on the y-axis, with the x-axis indicating time. Each line curtailed itself once a crew had been sent. But two lines close to the bottom were misplaced, an indicator that crews had been sent in earlier than they should have been. One of those crews had been ours.
Something doesn’t feel right.
I looked at the data again. Then I went back to the source data and reran it. Frantically, I went back and triple-checked the source. From there, I went into two different databases and looked at the sources that fed the sources. When I knew for sure there was no mistake, the rage came fast.
I didn’t realize I’d thrown my full coffee cup against the wall until I heard the smash. Now it was shattered, just like me.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing it all away—trying to shut down the part of my brain that wanted to take me back there . My eyes burned, maybe with tears, maybe from the sweat I had broken into seeping beneath my eyelids, maybe because I was back in that forest and it was the smoke. For minutes, I held on to my breath like a lifeline, some corner of my mind trying to measure it out.
I had the presence of mind to reach into my memory for tools I’d learned in therapy. I remembered something about my five senses—rooting myself in each one in order to ground me. I remembered to make my exhales longer than my inhales. It took everything I had in me to pry my eyes open and speak aloud five things I could see. By the time I finished four things I could feel, I was outside. By the time I’d listed the three things I could hear and two things I could smell, I was feeling more in control. As a final measure, I tasted a blade of grass.
The dark sky told me how late it was, probably the middle of the night. My hands trembled enough that I didn’t want to look at my watch. I shivered from the coolness of my sweat as it changed in the night air. When I regained my faculties, I texted Forrest.