Burn Season

Chapter 1: The Cold Case

The last arsonist Vera Gallo caught had left a note wedged under a rock at the trailhead, written in ballpoint on the back of a gas station receipt: I did it because the trees were wrong. She'd found him three days later at his sister's house in Bend, a man named Derek Paulson, forty-two, who'd set seven fires across Oregon and Washington over the course of a month. He'd been methodical in his chaos—each fire placed to destroy, to consume, to clear ground in ways that made no sense to anyone but him. In the interview room, he'd cried while explaining his theory about the forest's spiritual misalignment. She'd listened, documented everything, and watched him get sentenced to eight years in federal prison.

The note was in a file somewhere. So was Derek Paulson's psychiatric evaluation. So was the evidence log and the witness statements and the photographs of char and ash. Everything in its place, everything documented, everything resolved.

This case was different. This case wouldn't close.

Vera sat in her government-issue sedan on a ridge road above the town of Merton, Oregon, looking down at the Cascade Range through the afternoon haze. Smoke hung in the air—not from the fires she was investigating, but from a controlled burn two valleys over, part of the region's ongoing prescribed fire program. The irony wasn't lost on her. Neither was the fact that she could smell the difference in smoke the way other people smelled weather