The Bone Fire: A Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

get back here we’ll get more of a game plan going.”
    “Am I allowed to interview them?” Gil asked.
    “Not without their attorney present. We can only do the notification. Nothing else. Keep it very informal. Just tell them we found something that might pertain to Brianna.”
    Lucy stood by the ambulance as the guys finished up with the fire. Even though they were only twenty feet away, she couldn’t just walk over to them. She was in the safety zone, and they were in the incidentzone. She wasn’t in protective clothing, only her regular uniform, while the guys in the incident zone were in full gear—helmets, face masks, breathing equipment, protective gloves, boots, coats, and pants. Because a car fire, even though it might seem like no big deal, releases toxins as it burns through plastic, gasoline, and rubber. Enough carcinogens to make a grown man die, if he gets too close.
    So Lucy stayed where she was, daydreaming about sleep, until the radio on her hip squawked.
    “Piñon 373, this is Attack,” Gerald said. He was hard to hear through his face mask and over the rush of air from his breathing equipment.
    “This is Piñon 373. Go ahead,” she said.
    “Are you ready to take down the VIN?”
    “Copy that.” She grabbed a pen and a fresh incident report. “Go ahead.”
    He rattled off the number as she wrote it quickly in the space provided on the report and then repeated it back to him. He then gave her the make and model of the car and a guess on its age. “Also, could you put a note on the form that there is some red spray paint on the side of the car? It could be graffiti, like it’s been tagged. There might have been letters, but it was hard to tell. Maybe we should notify the gang task force.”
    He signed off, and she started filling in other blanks on the page. The date. The time. Personnel on scene. She then got into the passenger seat of the ambulance and pulled out a large, overflowing binder. Its cover was red and had the word backroads on it, handwritten on masking tape. This was a collection of all the streets, roads, highways, and interstates in their fire district. If a lost hiker called 911 from his cell phone and only knew his general location, this binder showed all the tiny side roads and untrampled trails that he might be near. Or when a person called to say there was a brush fire by Dead Dog Well, the pages could tell them the topography of the area and whether it was dominated by grasses or trees.
    Sure, the county provided them with newly printed map books, which they used daily, but for the problematic places—the locations that didn’t appear on official maps—they had the binder. Yes, it wasfalling apart, but no matter how worn the exterior might get, the binder would never be thrown out. Because it contained something precious—thirty years of the fire department’s history. Every chief in the past three decades had added his wealth of information to the pages. The history wasn’t written down like a fully formed story. Firefighters have no time for that. The maps and the notes on them were the history. On the corner of one page was written the gate code to the ranch on Highway 599. On another were black
X
’s that showed the locations of caves and climbing cliffs. Even the attack patterns that the wildland firefighting crews had used during the huge Cerro Grande fire of 2000 were drawn in red marker across a map of Los Alamos.
    Lucy opened the binder now to get a general description of their location. She actually had little idea of how they had gotten to the fire; there had just been one dirt road after another bringing them deeper into national forest land. She used her pinkie and some creative mapping to guesstimate the driving distance from town. She then filled that information in on its proper place on the form.
    When she was done, she went in search of the sheriff’s deputy who had been on scene with them. He was sitting in his cruiser, with the passenger door