Fatal Burn

by Lisa Jackson

  It seemed improbable, or even damned impossible, that he should be attracted to her, given the situation. So she was beautiful. Hadn’t he learned his lesson about gorgeous women? Hadn’t Jenna Hughes slam-dunked him? And this…The mother of his kid, this was out of the question.

  Just use her.

  He shook his head. It seemed not only unfair but unwise. She was still recovering from a beating, the bruises on her face not yet disappeared. She’d been through so much in her life and she was trying desperately to help him find his child. Wasn’t she? Certainly it wasn’t an act. But he couldn’t be certain. Though he no longer believed she was a part of Dani’s abduction, she was still certainly a player, albeit unwilling.

  Shannon Flannery was the link.

  So use her…You know she’s attracted to you. You felt it today, didn’t you? Don’t wimp out.

  “Son of a bitch,” he growled, feeling a bit of sweat along his forehead. He kicked at a pebble, sent it careening into the hubcap of a dented minivan.

  Angry with the world and himself, Travis climbed into his truck, fired up the engine and pointed the nose of the pickup toward the street where traffic, thinning with the night, rushed by.

  He crammed the Ford into drive and hit the gas.

  Chapter 23

  Paterno switched off the ignition. Armed with as much information as he could plumb about the Carlyle and Flannery families, he, along with Rossi from the arson division, had driven to Shannon Flannery’s little ranch. He’d already interviewed all of her siblings and Mary Beth’s family and friends before calling on the infamous widow of Ryan Carlyle.

  In his mind all the crimes were linked. The old Stealth Torcher business, Ryan Carlyle’s murder, Dani Settler’s abduction, the new fires and the murder of Mary Beth Flannery. As he’d looked into old information, he’d found out a few other skeletons hanging out in the Flannery and Carlyle closets, strange things that had remained unexplained for decades.

  Just like the number six in the weird symbol left at the crimes, Shannon, whether she liked it or not, was at the center of what was happening.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Rossi and they climbed out of his car. The grounds around the place were well-enough tended. There were lights blazing in the house, but the apartment over the garage was dark and the only vehicle he spotted was the truck registered to Shannon Flannery. He made a mental note that the guy who lived on the property, Nate Santana, wasn’t around tonight. The little ranch, though not far from town, had a serene, rural feeling. One security lamp illuminated the gravel lot where her truck was parked and several buildings rimmed the lot. One had been burned to nearly nothing, yellow crime scene tape still surrounding its perimeter. A tall barn nearby had been scorched, its paint blistering on the side nearest the charred debris, some of the windows boarded up.

  Paterno walked across the lot. A dog barked from inside the house and before he reached the stoop a porch light blazed on. The door opened and a small-boned, athletic-looking woman stood in the frame. A mottled-colored, shaggy dog, every muscle tense, hackles raised, stood beside her and glared up at Paterno with mismatched eyes.

  “Shannon Flannery?” he asked, flipping open his badge, keenly aware of the dog. She nodded. “Detective Paterno, Santa Lucia Police Department. This is—”

  “Detective Rossi,” she said icily. “We’ve met.”

  Paterno ignored the frosty glare she sent to the younger detective. “We’re investigating the death of Mary Beth Flannery. If you don’t mind, we’d like to come inside and ask you a few questions.”

  He expected her to try to stall, or to hesitate, even balk, given her history with the police department. Instead, she opened the door wide. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said. “I heard you visited my mother and brothers. Come on in.” To the dog she said, “Get on your blanket. Now.” With one last furtive glance at Paterno and Rossi, the mutt did as it was bid, claws clicking on the floor as it headed toward the kitchen where a puppy whined and the spicy smell of onions and green peppers erupted. As they passed by the archway he noticed a microwave meal, still steaming in its cardboard box, on a counter.

  She led them into a small living room with a worn carpet. Pictures of her family and several dogs covered the tops of small tables scattered around the room. She curled up in a striped side chair with a matching ottoman, and tucked her bare feet beneath her. He sat on the edge of a beat-up old couch and Rossi took a seat in a rocker that creaked beneath his weight.

  Shannon eyed the two men warily. “What do you want to know?” She’d known she wouldn’t be excluded from their interrogation, but as Rossi began taking notes and Paterno, with her permission, set a small recorder on the coffee table, she clenched inside. She was assaulted by a horrible sense of déjà vu, remembering the last time the police had interrogated her here, in this very room.

  But this time she had nothing to hide, had done nothing suspicious.

  Paterno started by asking her about her relationship with Mary Beth, and what Shannon had been doing on the night her sister-in-law had been killed. She explained everything including driving to the scene, seeing her sister-in-law’s body being removed from the house and her truck being blocked in so that she had to leave it parked on the street.

  Yes, she had witnessed the fight between Robert and Mary Beth and seen them get in his car. No, she hadn’t called her sister-in-law, though Mary Beth had insisted she had and even Shea thought Shannon had called her.

  “But you didn’t call her,” Paterno reiterated, watching her with hawklike eyes.

  It hit Shannon like a ton of bricks. “Oh, Jesus,” she whispered, straightening in her chair. “No, I didn’t call her, but I lost my cell phone on the night of the fire in my shed. I called 9-1-1, but then dropped the cell when I was attacked. It had been missing for days, since that night. I just found it yesterday and, of course, the battery had run down to nothing. I haven’t used it since. Wait just a sec.” She unfolded herself from the chair, hurried into the kitchen and knew without a doubt what she would find. Heart pounding, she pulled the cell phone from its charger. Ignoring the puppy who whimpered for her, Khan who lay on his rug, waiting for the word to be released, and the microwave Chicken Oriental dinner she’d just heated, she switched on the phone. Walking slowly into the living room again, she stared at the small screen as it came to life. With a touch of a button she found the list of recently dialed calls.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. Hand at her throat she witnessed the familiar number on the display. Robert and Mary Beth’s number listed three times in succession. She handed the damning evidence to Paterno. “I found this in my truck, wedged under the seat, but I didn’t have it on the days those calls were made.” On a note of barely suppressed hysteria, she wondered aloud, “Who would do this? Who would take the phone, make the calls and then hide it in my truck?”

  “You have no idea?” Paterno carefully placed her phone in a plastic evidence bag.

  Shannon lowered herself onto the ottoman. “No.”

  “No one you know who would want to set you up?”

  “Oh, my God, you don’t think I…I…That I killed Mary Beth?” she asked, stunned.

  “We don’t know what to think,” Paterno said with maddening patience. “But you asked ‘Who would do this?’…I think you’re the best one to answer.”

  “I already gave Detective Rossi and his partner a list of people I thought might attack me and set my shed on fire. It hasn’t changed.”

  “Could you elaborate on your relationship with your sister-in-law?”

  Shannon gazed at him blankly. She had no idea what he was really thinking. “We were friends once, best friends, in grade school and high school. She met Robert through me. We all went to St. Theresa’s together. My brothers, me, Mary Beth, Liam, Kevin, and Margaret.”

  “And your husband?”

  Shannon clenched her hands. “Yes.”

  “Ryan Carlyle was Mary Beth Carlyle Flannery’s first cousin.”
/>   “That’s right.”

  “Her adopted cousin.”

  “Yes,” she said, “Ryan was adopted. It wasn’t something that he broadcast, but nothing he or his family had tried to hide.”

  “He had a brother, too, didn’t he?”

  Where was this going? “Yes. Teddy.”

  “You knew him.”

  “In grade school. He was a year older than me.”

  Paterno checked his notes. “In the same class as your brothers Neville and Oliver.”

  “Yes,” she said automatically and remembered Teddy Carlyle, a spoiled, loud-mouthed, athletic kid with freckles and slightly crooked teeth.

  “They hang around with him?”

  “Some,” she said. “Though he was more of a friend to Neville. Oliver and Teddy didn’t really get along.”

  “Why not?”

  “I guess because he got between Oliver and Neville. Teddy was a troublemaker and he teased Oliver about being shy and bookish. Whenever Teddy was over, there was always a problem.”

  “So you didn’t like him.”

  “You’re twisting my words. I didn’t like what he did to the family dynamics, how he came between the twins, but that was their business, not mine. Teddy didn’t have much use for me.”

  “But Ryan did.”

  “Not then.”

  “Teddy wasn’t adopted.” The remark came out of left field.

  She felt a shift in the atmosphere, sensed his eyes focus a little sharper. “He wasn’t? I guess not, I don’t really know. It wasn’t something I ever talked about with Ryan.” She frowned. “What’s Teddy got to do with anything?”

  “He died in a car wreck when he’d just turned thirteen. Ryan was at the wheel.”

  She nodded, feeling the need to tread carefully. “A horrible accident.”

  “I know. I read the report. Ryan was an inexperienced driver, barely sixteen, coming back from a football game, about this time of year.”

  “I guess…” Shannon said, trying not to nervously pluck at the arm of the chair. Where the hell was Paterno going with this line of questioning?

  “According to all the eyewitnesses, and the skid evidence taken at the scene, Ryan swerved to miss a deer, hit gravel, lost control and the car smashed into a tree on the side of the road. Witnesses at the scene testified that Ryan tried to pull the kid out, but the car exploded into a ball of fire. Autopsy reports show that it was too late anyway, Teddy wasn’t wearing a shoulder restraint. He died instantly from a broken neck.”

  Shannon shivered. Teddy had been a trial, always causing trouble between the twins, but it was a shame he’d died so young.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird that Teddy was thirteen when this happened? He’d just turned a week or so earlier, and now your daughter, Travis Settler’s kid, she turns thirteen and she’s abducted, presumably brought down here, though we can’t be sure of that, and now these recent fires…similar to the ones that were set by the Stealth Torcher. Doesn’t it all seem tied together?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s all connected somehow, you know what I mean? Like knitting, you pull one thread and everything starts to unravel.”

  “Then pull a thread,” she said, tired of the unspoken accusations, the innuendos that she’d recognized during the interview.

  “Your brothers, they were tight?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The twins. You know how that is. They were close.”

  “Very.” She nodded but didn’t relax. Just because the questions had gotten easier, she didn’t want to be lulled into a sense of security; not with Paterno.

  “Didn’t the twins hang out with other kids?”

  “Some. Especially Neville. Of the two, he is…was…the most outgoing.”

  “Was?” Paterno asked. The rocker squeaked as Rossi changed positions. “You think he’s dead?”

  Shannon shook her head in lieu of an answer.

  “He just up and disappeared. Right after the fire that took your husband’s life.”

  “Well…about three weeks later, I think.”

  “You saw him in those three weeks?”

  “Of course.”

  “Talked to him?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “I can’t remember! It’s all kind of a blur,” she admitted, turning up her palms as she remembered the horror of learning of her husband’s death. No, she didn’t love him any longer, no she didn’t trust him, but no, she didn’t really wish him dead. She’d just wanted him to leave her alone, to give her some peace, to quit hurting her in every way possible. But his death, the fire. The suspicion that she’d somehow either killed him herself or set him up had nearly pushed her over the edge emotionally. Yes, she’d seen Neville in that time, but had she really talked to him? She didn’t know. Her brothers had, she thought. The last one to see him was Oliver, and that was just before Oliver’s breakdown and stay in the psychiatric ward where he’d found Jesus, where through prayer, God had spoken with him, called him into the priesthood.

  Obviously Paterno had heard all about it. Just as obviously he wasn’t buying a word of it.

  Paterno shifted on the couch. “Isn’t that odd? Your brother just up and vanishing?”

  “Extremely odd.” She sighed, glanced out the window to the encroaching night. “I…I don’t get it. Never have, but during that time I was distracted.”

  “Because of the murder charges.”

  “Yes!” She glared at him and the rage she’d felt at the district attorney, at the police department, at the damned system, swept through her all over again. “My entire life was turned upside down. My husband was dead. Murdered. Accused of being a serial arsonist and I’m accused of killing him? On top of that my brother goes missing and no one can find him.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Look, Detective Paterno, this is all old news. I don’t know what happened to Neville. No one in our family does. Of course you know my brother Shea because you replaced him in this investigation, and my brother Aaron is a private investigator. They both, along with everyone in the family, have tried to locate Neville.”

  “And nothing?”

  “Nothing.” She looked up at him, felt her headache returning. “I thought you were going to ask me about Mary Beth’s murder.”

  The look he sent her was filled with the patience of a methodical but determined man, one who would never give up.

  “How did Mary Beth feel when her cousin died and you were on trial for his murder?”

  “She blamed me for his death,” Shannon admitted. “The whole Carlyle family did, especially Liam. He and Ryan were the same age, played on the same football team, were best friends.”

  “Along with your brother Robert.”

  “Robert was in their class, too.” She nodded, scooted back in the chair, resigned herself to putting up with a few more questions.

  “Tight little group?”

  “Most of the time.” High school seemed a lifetime ago.

  “Mary Beth testified at your trial.”

  Shannon closed her eyes. “Everyone did.” She remembered Mary Beth on the stand, her eyes wet with tears as she testified she’d heard Shannon say she wished her husband were dead. Then Liam had echoed the same words, more vehemently, while extolling Ryan’s virtues. Kevin had been quieter but had stared directly at Shannon with such hatred she’d shivered inside, and Margaret, ever the devout, had been visibly shaking, making the sign of the cross repeatedly as she told the court her only cousin’s marriage had been rocky.

  Of course they hadn’t known Ryan had abused her. Hadn’t believed him capable of such violence. But then few had.

  “Your husband”—Paterno’s voice brought her back to the present—“worked with your brothers in the Santa Lucia Fire Department.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Liam Carlyle, too?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And after the fire that took Robert Carlyle’s
life, not only did Liam quit, your brother Neville did, too. Then a few weeks later Neville disappeared. And you have no idea where he is?”

  “I’ve already told you: no. I wish I did, but I don’t. The truth is that I suspect something happened to him.”

  “Foul play?”

  “One day he’s with us and acting as if nothing’s wrong, the next he’s gone.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”

  “How does someone just disappear?”

  “Good question. Ask Jimmy Hoffa’s family,” she snapped, then pushed herself off the ottoman and into the chair. “I wish I knew what happened,” she admitted. Looking out the window to the dark landscape and the reflection of her own image showing in the glass, she said, “I wish he was here.”

  “There was a life insurance policy on him. You’re the primary beneficiary.”

  “The company never paid me.”

  “Yet…It’s still pending, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “And you got the lion’s share of his estate?”

  She nodded. “Neville wasn’t married, had no children.”

  “But he has a twin brother, an identical twin brother, and you said they were extremely close. They used to play tricks on everyone, trade identities.”

  “You think he should have left everything to Oliver.”

  “I’m pulling threads, Ms. Flannery.”

  Shannon ducked her head. “I don’t know why I’m the beneficiary, Detective. Maybe Neville knew Oliver was going to join the priesthood,” she said, having asked herself the same question over and over again. “Neville wasn’t particularly religious. I don’t know. All of my brothers are extremely protective of me, they always have been. I’m the only girl and the youngest.”

  “Number six.”

  “What?”

  “The sixth child.”

  “That’s true,” she said and felt a little change in the air, something shift. The hairs on the back of her arm lifted.