Clean Burn (27 page)

I could have whined, pleaded with him, batted my eyes. Even if I’d had it in me, I doubted it would be effective.

“Then let’s go back to your arson victims,” I suggested. “Maybe if we think about something else, we’ll get some new inspiration on the kidnappings.”

“Go through the report folders again? I took them back to the office yesterday.”

I shook my head. “Tell me what you know about these people. About their lives.”

We returned to the table. I booted my laptop and brought up my notes file. I’d created a table listing dates in the first column, structure burned in the second, victims names in the third. I glanced down the list in time order – BLM, Sadie Parker, unnamed contractor, Westfields, McKays, caretaker Elvin Hughes, Markowitz, Abe and Mary Jacoby.

“So, what do you want?”

“Anything. Small town stuff. Secrets. Scandals.”

His expression dubious, he sat back, staring out into space. “There was a scandal last year involving Mrs McKay. Something about her and the UPS man. Mr McKay was living at the Gold Rush Inn a few months until they worked it out.”

I typed a note on a fresh page. “What else?”

He considered. “When the Westfields first arrived, people sniped about how they threw their money around, buying sixty-plus acres, building a gargantuan mansion, shelling out for a big flat screen from the electronics store.”

“Good. What else?”

He rocked his head side to side as if to shake loose a mental tidbit. “Elvin Hughes is the biggest pisser and moaner about the Westfields. Complains about Abe and Mary too. Doesn’t matter that the Westfields and Jacobys worked hard for what they own. Elvin can’t stand the fact that they have so much and he has nothing.”

“Didn’t occur to you that he might be a suspect?”

“Elvin’s in a wheelchair. His granddaughter shops for him and brings him supplies, takes him into town as needed.”

I typed, glancing up to prod Ken further. He threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Markowitz was a greedy bastard. The contractor has a temper. Punched his hand through a wall in the post office.”

An envious man. A greedy one. A cheating wife. An angry contractor.

A deeply buried bit of trivia was tapping me on the shoulder. I shut my eyes, willing it to unearth itself.

I sat bolt upright. “The seven deadly sins.”

“Say what?”

I ticked them off. “Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride.”

Ken looked at me blankly a moment, then realization struck. “Mrs McKay committed the sin of lust.”

“Markowitz filled the bill for greed. The contractor was wrathful. Elvin envious.”

“You still have gluttony, sloth and pride,” Ken pointed out.

“Both the Westfields and the Jacobys could be considered gluttonous, because between them, they own half the county.” I noodled over the other two, remembered Sadie’s great-grandson. “You told me Sadie was always bragging on Ben. That could pass as pride.”

“There have been plenty of folks unhappy with the rundown state of that BLM land where the chicken coop burned. There are still a few other structures standing, just about ready to fall down.”

The government too lazy to take care of its property. “Sloth.”

He nodded agreement. “Which gives me a way to link the arsons. Except...”

“Except...?”

“Seven fires, seven sins,” Ken said thoughtfully. “But then an eighth. And that shed makes nine. Which could mean...”

“He’s started over again.”

Ken grimaced. “So we could be looking at five more fires.”

Not a pleasant prospect. “But maybe knowing how they’re linked will help you catch him before that happens.”

I wished I could say the same about my missing kids. I couldn’t see a damn thing that pinned all four together. “Let me enter what we’ve learned, run it through ProSpy. Who knows what we might come up with?”

“I thought you were going home.”

My one day of snooping around Greenville had morphed into a long weekend of examining the nasty underside of rocks. “I’ll go back tomorrow. If I play around with the data, maybe I can substantiate my theory about the kids. At least enough to give you something more definitive for a search.”

“Did you check out of your room already?”

“I’ll check in again. It’s not as if the Gold Rush Inn is swarming with tourists.”

“Spend the night here.” He shut the dishwasher door and swiped a rag across the tile counter. “You can work in the dining room. I’ve got some weeding to do in the yard and Cassie won’t be home until five.”

Working at Ken’s versus spending the next several hours hunched over my laptop on a motel bed wasn’t a difficult choice. “Where would I sleep?” With Cassie home, I assumed we’d be refraining from mattress Olympics.

“You can have my room. I’ll take the sofa.”

At six-foot-plus, he’d be gimpier than me in the morning. “Thanks for the noble gesture, but the sofa’s fine with me.”

He went upstairs to change into appropriate garb for weed pulling while I retrieved my computer from the car. Ken brought me another Sprite before he headed outside, looking buff and manly in T-shirt and jeans.

Using Ken’s satellite network, I connected to the internet. Once ProSpy was ready, I entered the additional information I’d discovered about the kids, what we’d surmised about the fires. One of ProSpy’s features allowed me to create a grid of what I knew about each of the four children versus the circumstances of their disappearance. I could then work through the grid as I would one of those logic puzzles with clues like the red-headed girl was three years older than the boy with the blue suspenders. Usually, if I stared at the grid long enough, something useful would pop out at me.

But I was still having trouble wrapping my mind around a woman being the perpetrator. Typically, women didn’t abduct children except when it involved a custody dispute. And then it would be her own child she took, not a stranger’s. And why would the guy set fires at the scene? To provide a distraction from the abduction?

So what would compel a woman to take four unrelated children? If it was Pickford or Beck, the answer would be easy. But although a female molester wasn’t an impossible scenario, it also wasn’t likely. And the wide range of ages, as well as the different genders, made an already unlikely scenario even more of a rarity.

Searches of the internet turned up nothing similar to what I was trying to tie together. I couldn’t see anything linking these children except opportunity. The baby was easy – she’d been abandoned and this woman had found her. Even James made sense. Somehow my mystery woman came across him after he’d run away. Maybe she’d lured him into her car with a promise to take him home.

But what about Enrique? He wasn’t abandoned on the street or a runaway. How had she come across him?

The brain cell that had stirred when Sheri had told me about New Holy Light Church suddenly woke up and stood at attention. Pulling the computer closer, I minimized ProSpy and brought up my notes. The church where the baby had been taken from was in the Tenderloin, between Eddy and Turk on Jones Street. The apartment where Enrique lived with his mother was down near Golden Gate, maybe a block and a half away.

If the mystery woman lived near enough to the church to have found the baby, maybe she lived close enough to Enrique’s mother to have known her. Maybe she went over to Felicia’s to borrow a cup of sugar or to shoot the breeze and discovered her dead and Enrique sobbing. Or another possibility – Enrique left the apartment after his mother died and mystery woman found him roaming the streets.

Ken wandered into the kitchen, face smeared with dirt, the back of his T-shirt sketched with a sweat map. He had grass stains on his knees and something green clinging to his backside, but damn, I wanted to roll him into bed.

He headed for the sink to wash up. “Making any progress?”

“More guesses and suppositions.” Leaning back in my chair, I plopped my left leg on the table. Maybe he’d take the hint and give me another massage. “Turns out the church where Naomi left the baby was spitting distance from where Enrique lived.”

He scrubbed his hands dry on a paper towel. “So your kidnapper had opportunity.”

“It seems so,” I said. “So let’s say she scored a baby and a three year-old boy in the city. She and her husband leave town. James runs away that day and ends up at the Arco. Maybe mystery woman sees James there and nabs him.”

Ken joined me at the table and, bless him, took my leg in his lap. “I can understand why she took them,” he said as he dug in his thumbs. “But why keep them? Why not turn them over to the authorities?”

I tried not to melt into my chair. “Maybe she thinks she’s rescuing them. If the mystery woman knew Felicia, maybe she knew about the grandmother. Maybe her intent was to take Enrique to Mrs Lopez.”

“If they were good-hearted enough to do that, why take James to Greenville? At the least, I’d think they’d give him a ride home.”

I tried to formulate an answer with Ken’s magic fingers on my calf turning my brain to mush. “Maybe she thought he’d be better off with her.”

“Maybe.” He sounded almost convinced. “Then Brandon comes along.”

Air gusted from my lungs as he ran the heel of his palm along my knotted muscle. “A real gift, washing up right in her two-thousand acre backyard. Although I don’t understand why she’d want a dead boy.”

Ken kneaded in silence. I could see some kind of calculation working in his brain.

“Is it enough?” I asked him.

He still didn’t look completely convinced, but he nodded. “I’ll have Sergeant Russell deploy foot and mounted teams. Not a whole lot of daylight left today by the time the teams get out there.”

“You can’t power through there with your four-wheel drive vehicles?”

He shook his head. “No roads near where Brandon washed up. The terrain’s damn near impassable for even four-wheel drive. To our advantage, in a way. Wherever she’s holed up, it has to be walking distance.”

We heard Cassie’s footsteps stomping on the front porch and this time, Ken had a chance to extricate himself from his compromising position. By the time she came in, Ken was on the phone and I was back at the computer, idly searching the missing children pages of Court TV’s Crime Library. A few similar cases, but none that fit my specs in California.

Cassie’s gaze passed over me without interest, then fell on Ken. No doubt reading his mind, she pulled a palm-sized instrument from her pocket and pricked her finger with the lancet. Checking the blood sugar result, she pressed a button on her insulin kit. By the time Ken hung up, he had nothing to yell at her for.

“Did you eat at the party?” he asked.

“It wasn’t a party,” Cassie said. “It was a Warcraft competition.”

I could see him count to ten. “Don’t make everything an argument. Did you eat?”

She shrugged. “There were chips and stuff. No real food.”

“I want your help with dinner at five.”

Her chin thrust toward me. “She staying?”

They both stared at me. I weighed the relative merits of a solitary meal at Emil’s with a fun-packed emotion-fest here at Ken’s. “Sure. Why not?”

In the end, Cassie made herself scarce, given a reprieve from dinner prep by my offer to play kitchen helper. She mostly kept her mouth shut during the meal while Ken and I discussed the SAR teams’ game plan for a search pattern.

I bedded down on the sofa as promised, a long-sleeved Greenville Sheriff’s Department T-shirt as a nightie. I didn’t need it – I still had a few unpleasant options in the Safeway bag – but he offered and I couldn’t seem to say no.

Fortunately, we had a built-in chastity belt in the form of Cassie. Uncle Ken and his quasi-paramour, Janelle, weren’t getting any whoopee that night.

Just as well. He’d burrowed deep enough into the shell of my heart. Another night of intimacy, he might have taken up permanent residence.

My body curled on Ken’s cushy sofa, my nightmare theme de la noir was fire. It roared through my subconscious, horrifying and gratifying in turns. Fire of destruction, fire of passion, fire of expiation. I burned in a myriad of ways during the night, flesh melted from my bones, climax wrenched from my body, pain and exultation tangled like weeds in a forgotten wrecking yard.

Somewhere in the dark hours, I woke with a near epiphany, brilliant but dulled by drowsiness. Fires and missing children, seven deadly sins, a connect the dots picture I perched on the edge of recognizing. Sleep dragged me under before I could comprehend it fully, pushing me into conflagration again.

When morning light from the living room window poked at my eyelids, I squinted one eye open and tried to recapture the revelation my unconscious mind had offered up. Like dreams always do, the vague images scattered like smoke, too insubstantial to get a firm grip on. I had to hope something might trigger that same thought process in the waking hours. If it hadn’t been total crap in the first place.

I listened to the quiet house, wondering if Ken or Cassie were awake yet. All those dreams of fire still teased me, making me edgy and unfulfilled.

Ken’s footsteps on the stairs deep-sixed hopes for my version of a morning smoke. I shoved off the blanket and hot-footed it to the downstairs bathroom with my much-worn jeans and the last of the halfway decent T-shirts. Everything else in the plastic bag the thrift store would probably trash, or use to spiffy up the employee bathroom. Good thing I was going home today.

All changed and shiny clean, I joined Ken in the kitchen where he had a cup of coffee waiting for me. I gulped half of it down without speaking, letting caffeine course through my veins and jostle my brain cells.

I topped up my cup, added a scoop of creamer and a shovel full of sugar. “Did your deputies find anything interesting at Lucy’s place?”

“A 20-yard dumpster full of crap,” Ken said. “When they finally excavated enough to get to the basement, they just found more of the same.”

“No sign that she might have been preparing to kidnap that kid? Toys, kiddy furniture?”

“Where would she have put it? You saw her place.” Ken sipped his coffee. “Turns out Lucy was married once, had a baby girl forty years ago. The baby died of crib death as an infant. Husband left her soon after.”