Clean Burn (23 page)

I peered up at him. “Stay with you?”

“At the hotel, in your car… I don’t give a damn.” He looked away, maybe to search for some patience. “There’s a benefit dance tonight at the community center for the Thompsons. To raise funeral expenses.”

“Have they found a body?” I would have thought he’d tell me if they had.

“Not yet. But he’s dead. Drowned. That’s a near certainty.”

If I stayed, I could evaluate the data I’d gathered so far, see what ProSpy could tell me. Investigate the fire connection further. “You know I can’t dance.”

“Then come and watch me make a fool of myself.”

That notion held some appeal. Also, with everyone in town likely attending, maybe the owner of the Volvo would show up. “I could stay another night. Today’s shot anyway.”

“I’ll pick you up at eight.” He let go of the door and walked to his Explorer.

I felt a little suckered, not so much by Ken as by my own demons. Bad enough that guilt at the lousy results in the search for James and Enrique goaded me into staying. The irresistible compulsion to follow the trail of arson had its hooks in me as well.

The impulse to save the boys was a human enough inclination – I’d let their identities bore into me too deep to easily let go of them. But I trod on thin ice by giving in to my fascination with fire.

At least Tommy, lurking as usual in the back of my mind, wasn’t snickering at me. That would have been enough to shatter the camel’s back.

CHAPTER 18

Before I returned to the Gold Rush Inn, I detoured back to the SaveMart and spent an excruciating twenty minutes wandering its women’s clothing section. I could have freshened up the previous day’s T-shirt in the bathroom sink, but I wasn’t sure it would dry in the five or so hours before Ken picked me up. So I opted to buy something new instead, a near life-altering decision since I loathed shopping for clothes.

I found a long-sleeved polo shirt in a color that didn’t completely suck, then splurged on a new bra and underwear. Fantasies of Ken stripping them off me drifted into my mind like a scene from a damn romance novel. I almost put the clothes back, dithering over whether my scummy current shirt would do. I decided even my personal hygiene hadn’t sunk that low.

At the checkout, I dropped my pile on the conveyer behind a box of tampons and tin of chew. I was digging in my wallet for plastic when a familiar voice snagged my attention. Marty Denning glowered down at a bone-thin bag of nerves with long, scraggly black hair, midriff-baring tank top and size zero jeans.

“I gave you the cash yesterday,” Marty hissed. “Have you spent it all already?”

So the girlfriend wasn’t a lie. Under Marty’s dark glare, she plowed into her cavernous purse. Pawing with both hands, she muttered to herself as if to summon the missing money. Her brown eyes, wide with fear, seemed to fill her face. Considering the exemplary character Denning had displayed at Arnie’s, a bruise or two on Sharon’s cheek wouldn’t have surprised me. But other than a healed sore, her too-pale skin was unmarked.

She pulled her hands free of her purse, holding them out in an awkward shrug. Exasperated, Marty looked past her, scowling as he recognized me. But I only spared him a glance. What I saw on Sharon’s hands was far more interesting – burn marks on her knuckles, on her wrists, on her fingertips.

Denning figured out where I was looking. He snatched Sharon’s hands down, pulling her behind him. Then he dug in his back pocket for his wallet.

They zipped out of the store in record time, leaving me with a host of tantalizing questions. Was Denning’s girlfriend playing with matches, too? Had their mutual attraction to fire drawn them together? It certainly wasn’t Marty’s charm. On my way back to the Gold Rush Inn, I made a mental note to mention the condition of Sharon’s hands to Ken.

I’d planned to utilize my time until eight by running my ProSpy data against other child abduction cases online, try to find any others with links to fire. But thanks to construction up the road, the motel’s internet connection was down. So I spent an antsy two hours updating the database I’d set up for James and Enrique, checking on my connection status about every two seconds. My addiction to flame and self-abuse had some strong competition in my compulsion to check email.

When I finally had internet, I came up empty on cases similar to Enrique’s and James’s. There wasn’t much involving an age spread as wide as a four year-old and an eleven year-old, certainly not with different ethnicities. There were no cases with bearded suspects accompanied by a woman. And although there were cases where the victims themselves were burned, none where fires were set nearby.

Those abductions that came close, where one boy disappeared, not two disparate boys like James and Enrique, did not end well. In all cases, the child was found dead, sexually assaulted either pre- or post-mortem. Not a scenario I wanted to ponder for James or Enrique.

I snapped the heads off two boxes of matches as I worked, then set the heads on fire in the bathroom sink. As I breathed in the beguiling scent of sulfur, racking my brains for another approach that might bear fruit, my mind circled back to Ken’s arsons. Not that they related to James and Enrique, but I was tired of the futility of finding the boys. Ken’s mystery might only be a distraction, but maybe pondering it would loosen up a few brain cells. Or feed my fire fix.

Rather than do any hard thinking, I let my thoughts flow freeform as I showered. A series of fires with similar MO threading their way up Highway 99. Three, possibly four kids missing, fires set at various locations where they’d been spotted. An irrational, motiveless fire-setter.

Drying myself off, I changed into my new duds, pulling on the least disreputable of the two pair of jeans I’d brought with me and headed out for a bite to eat. Emil’s Café was jumping, no doubt catering to the pre-dance crowd. I got a chicken fried steak and Coke to go, then slunk out with my white plastic bag.

Another check of email as I wolfed down my food, then a whimsical Google of “bearded man.” Some goofy stuff came up – political blogs, a webpage on Mayan culture, another on Hungarian fairy tales. When I added “abduction,” I got more crazy stuff – a story of a purported UFO abduction – but a few child abduction cases involving a bearded man. None of them recent, most far from California.

I channel-flipped a while, checking my watch every few minutes. When Ken finally knocked, I’d become absorbed in a Discovery channel show on Mesopotamian agriculture.

He gave me a quick once-over. “You bought a new shirt.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“It is when you leave part of the tag on.” He reached behind me and gave a tug, then showed me the plastic tether I’d neglected to remove.

I could still feel where his thumb had brushed against the back of my neck. “I can’t even dress myself properly.”

The two of us alone in that room together brought to mind too many potential activities, so I scooted past him and waited for him to exit before locking up. He had the good sense not to open the car door for me, letting me climb into the Explorer on my own. I wasn’t about to think of our getting together as a date.

“What did you find out from Lucy?” I asked, hoping to defuse the tension.

“A crazy story. She heard the kid crying, went out to find him on her porch. Couldn’t stop him from crying, so took him down to SaveMart to buy him a doll.”

“Except it was her supposed daughter she thought she was buying the doll for.”

“Yeah,” Ken said. “Lucy swears she never went to the Vallejo’s house. Her pickup truck is similar to the one the witnesses saw, but the mileage to and from doesn’t match the odometer.”

“It’s a pretty generic truck,” I pointed out. “You really think she took that boy from his house?”

“How’d she get hold of him if she didn’t?”

I had no answer to that. I told him about Sharon Peele’s burns, and he agreed it was worth a conversation with her. He still hadn’t tracked down Marty’s actual address – Arnie only had a PO Box and Denning didn’t exactly have a host of friends in town who might know the location.

The parking lot of the community center off Main Street was packed with cars. I could hear the music blasting from inside the moment I opened my door. Teens and tweens swarmed the wide lawn in the front of the building, boys and girls eyeing each other, considering the possibilities. Cassie sat with a cluster of her friends on a tree swing that had been set up under a massive blue oak.

Just inside, a shrine of sorts to Brandon Thompson had been set up. His mother and father hovered nearby, mom’s eyes red but dry, dad looking lost. Photographs and memorabilia of Brandon’s short life, from baby photos and a soft, knit blanket, to soccer pictures and well-worn shin guards surrounded a basket filled with checks and cash. I dropped a ten into the basket.

The band was live and raucous, bluegrass with a sprinkle of rock. The musicians ranged from early thirties down to one young man who looked barely out of his teens. An enthusiastic crowd gyrated on the dance floor, couples whirling past me at light speed.

Ken leaned close to shout in my ear. “That’s Brandon’s oldest brother on fiddle. The one on the left.”

That explained how they’d been able to muster such an accomplished band on such short notice. Watching the dancers, Ken’s foot tapping in time with the music, I had an uneasy suspicion he was about to ask me out on the floor. He’d turned to me, put out his hand when rescue arrived in the form of Miss Sweet-as-pie.

“They’re playing Levi Jackson Rag next, Sheriff,” she informed him. “I’m looking for a partner.”

She gazed up at him dreamily, then gave me a narrow-eyed glare behind his back. I gave her a friendly smile. “Have at it.”

Ken mouthed Save me! as she dragged him out on the dance floor. I ignored him, dodging the gyrating bodies searching for sanctuary. Flip-down chairs were installed along the walls that flanked the stage and a table with munchies and punch was set up beside Brandon’s shrine. The chairs were mostly occupied by the older, blue-haired set who probably wouldn’t appreciate a young, spry thing such as myself in their company. So I scooped up a handful of chips and found a corner beside the snacks table where I could hide.

I found McPherson there, swaying slightly, sipping punch from a red Solo cup. I guessed that the bulge in his jacket pocket was his friend, Mr Gin Bottle.

I raised my voice so he could hear. “Can you explain the small town appeal to me? Is it that everyone knows your business... but pretends they don’t when it’s convenient? That they love to sit in judgment and sniff out your dirtiest laundry? Or just that you can’t get a decent cup of coffee anywhere within fifty miles?”

Whatever high he’d experienced from saving Norberto had come crashing down. He looked at me blearily, as if I’d intended he take my questions seriously. “Can hide inna small town if you want to.” He slurred the words only slightly.

“You can hide in the city,” I pointed out.

He shook his head, then took a healthy swallow of the boozy punch. “People’re everywhere. Watching you. Here, you can fall inna river an’ no one will ever find you.”

He stared morosely down at his cup. Had the alcohol put him in such a damned gloomy mood, or was something else eating at him?

“We found the kid Lucy took,” I reminded him.

I thought he’d smile at that, him being the hero, but he only looked more morose. “What ’bout those two boys? Ones you been looking for?” he asked.

“Still missing.”

He took another sip. “Too bad.”

Ken and Miss Sweet-as-pie do-si-do’ed or sashayed or whatever dancers do past me, the admin glowing as she gazed adoringly up at him. When the dance ended and the band launched into a polka, he put out a hand toward me, begging again for rescue. Cold-hearted bitch that I am, I backed out of reach and left him to Miss Sweet-as-pie’s tender mercies.

Rich gripped his cup so hard, a little of it sloshed on his hand. “D’you got kids?”

I thought of Benjamin. “No, I don’t. How about you?”

He shook his head slowly, his gaze fixed on something across the dance floor. A woman was shaking an angry finger at her five year-old son. The boy said something to her and she gave him a swat on the butt.

Victim of abuse that I was, I generally had two responses to that sort of thing – instant knee-jerk fear, or blinding anger, depending on whether it was the child me or adult me that stood up inside. More adult than child tonight, I wanted to walk over and give that mother a shake.

McPherson looked mildly horrified at the woman’s treatment of the boy, and I wondered if he was a member of my club. “Your parents hit you like that?”

He shook his head. “Din’t believe in phys’cal pun-ish-ment.” The last word came out in three carefully enunciated syllables.

He tipped up the cup, gulping down the last of it, then made his unsteady way to the punch bowl. He served some more up, only half of it landing in the cup. He must have trusted me, or else he was too far gone to care because he turned back toward me, coming close enough so my body would shield him from view of the room. Then he reached inside his jacket for the bottle and topped off the punch cup.

Tucking the gin away again, he drank deep. The band’s fiddle player launched into a long riff and the dancers spun past us in a whirl of skirts and cowboy hats knocked askew.

McPherson stared at the little boy who was now screaming his head off. Rich’s eyes were red and he blinked slowly as he struggled to focus. “More’n seven,” he muttered.

“Seven what?” I asked.

“Jus’ the ones we count.”

What the hell? I peered at the swaying McPherson. “I’m not following you.”

He took another slug of his drink. “T’others’re way worse.”

While I wrestled with McPherson’s drunken non sequitur, Ken snaked his way toward me through the crowd. I could see Miss Sweet-as-pie on tiptoes trying to locate him through the press of bodies.

“Have a heart,” he said, grabbing my hand, “or she’ll have her hooks in me all night.”

I tried to break Ken’s hold and nearly jabbed an elbow into McPherson. Rich gave me one more bleary, alcohol-infused look, then wandered off toward the exit.