Page 41 of Into the Fire

He photographed everything.

“We’re not taking any of it?” I asked.

“No.” He framed the last shot and took it. “Right now it’s a dead man’s things in a dead man’s cabin, sitting where he left them. If any of this goes to somebody official, having it undisturbed means something. They find it here, not in a box in my truck.”

We put everything back the way Dutch had it. Boone rested a hand on the closed drawer.

“We’re not stopping until we know,” he said.

We closed the windows. Boone rinsed the two glasses at the wellhead and set them upside down on the sideboard. The bottle went back behind the chimney bolts.

At the door, I took one look back. Everything was where we’d found it.

Then I went back and picked the headlamp up off its shelf. Boone watched me do it.

“He stole it,” I said.

Boone thought about it for several seconds. “Log it,” he said, and held the door.

Boone drove back. For the first ten miles, we were silent.

“He sees it in June,” I finally said. “Writes it down. Goes back with a camera. Starts asking whose it is.” I counted the days on my fingers, tapping them against my knee. “And in July the mountain burns, and he dies in the same fork where the ribbon’s placed.”

“We don’t know the ribbon has anything to do with the fire.”

“I know we don’t.”

“I mean it,” Boone said. “What we know is he found flagging with no job number, and he was trying to run it down.”

“Do you believe it’s nothing?”

He was quiet as he steered the truck through a curve. “No, but I’m not letting what I believe steer. We’ll do this in order. Find out if any work was ever authorized in that fork. Survey, timber, trail contract, utility, anything from any agency. If a record exists, the line’s boring and Dutch was chasing paperwork. If nothing exists—”

We both let that go.

“Tell me about New Order,” Boone said.

We were still talking about music when Boone drove his truck through the gate.

Operations had its lights on. Marty worked late. He was at the copier with his glasses up, feeding it a stack that kept jamming. He was still working at it when we opened the door and stepped inside.

“Marty. If there’d been authorized work in a drainage,” Boone began, “survey, timber, anything—summer of twenty-one—where’s that paper now?”

“Depends whose work.” Marty hit the copier once, flat-handed, and it finally surrendered and worked. “If it’s ours, it’s in the project files, and anything that old got re-boxed in the same audit that ate two of your weekends last March. If it’s district work, you have to call the district.”

“What about contractors?” Boone asked.

“There’s a permit or an agreement somewhere with a number on it.” He squared the pages the copier spat out. “There’s always a number. That’s the one thing this outfit is good at.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “We’ve got flagging in the North Fork with no number on it.”

“North fork of what?”

“Carson.”

Marty’s glasses dropped down onto his nose. “Huh. Before the fire?”

“Before the fire. Dutch found it. It’s in his notebooks.”