Clean Burn

by Karen Sandler

  Thomas in her arms again, ready to make her way back up the bare granite, she considered the possibility that the man might have seen her after all. She had to be sure no one could track her home. She had to keep her children safe.

  Slipping off her shoes again, she tucked them into the jacket pockets and stepped back into the creek. Luckily, its course was gentle upstream of the waterfall. She could walk through the shallow water for quite some distance before the going would be impossible to navigate.

  Once she left the creek and returned to the safety of the trees, Mama contemplated the way the man on the other side of the river had fouled the earth. The careless sins of man always astonished her. The surrogate fire she’d set on this side wasn’t sufficient. Someday she would have to make her way across the river and burn away the man’s stain.

  If only she could burn the man himself.

  CHAPTER 13

  Voicemail picked up when I called the office from the motel. Sheri didn’t answer her cell, either, although at this time of day, she was probably riding BART. The subway shielded cell phone signals, making it one of the few places in San Francisco where every other person wasn’t jabbering away on their Nokia.

  While I waited for her to return my call, I got a head start on the night’s work by setting up a database in ProSpy for Ken’s arsons. I’d made a concerted effort to steer clear of arson investigation, worried I might end up like John Orr, the fire investigator serial arsonist that Wambaugh wrote about.

  I created data fields for everything I thought might be of interest in arson fires: date of the fire, likely time the fire was set, time of ignition, type of structure, the ignition source, accelerant. Ken could clue me in later on anything I might have missed.

  With the database constructed, I entered what I knew about the most recent fire, then considered propagating that data for the other six. But as Ken had reminded me, I shouldn’t make assumptions about anything. The theory should suit the facts, rather than vice versa. I’d wait until Ken and I looked over the incident reports.

  With only seven fires to process, ProSpy wouldn’t be able to tell us anything more about the data than what we already knew. I’d need to link the ProSpy engine to a backend database. Thanks to a fire investigator I knew in the Bay Area, I had access to CAIRS, a statewide data program that mandates reporting by all fire departments in the state. ProSpy would provide a search engine capability for CAIRS.

  I switched to the boys’ database and entered the pittance I’d learned for the day. The fact that Mrs. Lopez kept a recent picture of her grandson, that she’d expected him to come live with her soon, at least partially balanced the other side of the equation that Mrs. Martinez had supplied. I just couldn’t yet provide confirmation that Enrique was safe.

  My telephone chimed out the melody to “Light My Fire,” a ring tone I’d downloaded last night after I’d finished playing with matches. “Private Number,” on the display told me it was probably Sheri. She kept Caller ID blocked on her cell, the by-product of being the daughter of a judge.

  “Get any work done today?” I asked her in lieu of a hello.

  “Finished my Contracts paper. Thanks for asking.”

  I told her the slim pickings I’d harvested on Enrique. “Made progress on your Lopez calls?”

  “I’ve made my way through the first hundred or so.”

  “Go ahead and do an internet search on Mrs. Lopez,” I told her. “I already checked the freebie search sites. So you can skip Yahoo, Google and BRB and go straight to Argali and Intelius.”

  “You have a phone number?” Sheri asked.

  “Just the last-known address I gave you before. No forwarding. We’re guessing she used a PO Box for her mail, maybe in Sac.”

  “A driver’s license?” Sheri prodded.

  “No record of one. No California ID card either. The woman lived off the grid.”

  “An illegal?” Sheri asked.

  “Maybe. I’ll ask Ken. Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Sheri said. “Some guy named Rodney called. From the Arco in Emeryville.”

  An image of pimples and greasy hair sprang to mind. “Where James was last seen. What’d he have to say?”

  “After he finished hitting on me, he told me the owner of the Arco finally got a copy of the police report from that day.”

  Sheri liked to take her own sweet time to get to the point. She seemed to think confusion was good for the soul. “And they filed a police report because...?”

  “Someone set a fire in the women’s restroom the night James disappeared. Police told the owner it was vandals, probably kids, low priority crime. Owner was having insurance problems, finally requested a copy of the report.”

  Chill fingers danced up my spine. A fire. Set at the same location James disappeared. If it had been in the men’s room, I might have conjectured that James had done it himself, acting out. But I couldn’t see a twelve-year-old boy going into the women’s room, no matter how angry he was.

  A dim memory bubbled through my brain cells, but wouldn’t surface. Something about fire. I set the notion aside for the moment.

  “Email me a copy of that police report,” I told Sheri. “Any other calls?”

  “Benjamin. Called around three.”

  Guilt tugged at me. The nine-year-old lived across the street from me. With his mother working graveyard, he slept at my place sometimes.

  Damn. I should have let him know I’d be gone a couple days. “I’ll call him back.”

  A brief silence ensued. I waited Sheri out.

  “So,” she said finally. “How does he look?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Janelle.”

  I considered fabricating a pot belly and bald spot, but tamped down the urge. “He looks okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “More gray.”

  “Distinguished,” she said.

  And yet, on a woman, a few silver hairs turned her into a hag. “You want to hook up with him? I’ll give him your number.”

  “Just sleep with him, Janelle. It’ll do you some good.” She disconnected before I could muster a response.

  Stewing over Sheri’s relationship advice, I dialed Benjamin. He answered in the middle of the first ring. Likely his mom was still asleep.

  “Hey, Benjamin.”

  “Janelle,” he said softly. “I wanted to let you know I’m keeping an eye on your place.”

  “You’re not going over there by yourself, are you?”

  “I have to make sure no one’s messing with your stuff while you’re gone.”

  “You can watch out from home.” Last thing I wanted was Benjamin getting hurt trying to thwart a break-in at my apartment. “You see anything, you call 911, okay? No playing cop.”

  He agreed reluctantly, then spent the next quarter hour regaling me with the minutia of his life, the B on his math test, the mystery meat the cafeteria had served that day, how he’d accidentally smacked his best friend in the face with a soccer ball and gave him a bloody nose.

  He might lead a less than ideal life with his father dead and his mother working all night and asleep all day. But his childhood was a paradise compared to what mine had been. His boyish chatter never failed to put a smile on my face.

  Once I hung up with Benjamin, I still had another twenty minutes before I had to leave for Ken’s. I stretched out on the bed and shut my eyes. As exhausted as I was with the previous restless night, I knew I wouldn’t sleep, but if I let my thoughts percolate, I might be able to put a few pieces of the puzzle together. Maybe that fragment of memory would coalesce.

  Regarding Enrique, there were a couple of possibilities: he’d either arrived safely at his grandmother’s or he hadn’t. If he had, all was well. If he hadn’t, he could be anywhere on God’s green earth. Either way, Greenville was a dead end as far as Enrique was concerned.

  James, on the other hand, might still be here somewhere, with the mysterious scruffy guy and a woman with a baby. Bu
t in nearly lily-white Greenville, a black eleven-year-old boy should have been such an oddity that someone would have noted his presence. That Ken, who despite his insular tendencies seemed to keep a close eye on his adopted hometown, had never seen James didn’t seem likely. If he was here, he’d stayed below the radar. Or been kept there by scruffy guy.

  I’d have to just start asking around, flash James’s picture and see what I came up with. Ken wouldn’t like me tromping all over his turf, but he had his own hands full with the arsons. He couldn’t follow me around everywhere.

  I’d give it one more day. I’d check out of the motel in the morning, take a look at Beck’s place, then do some interviews around town. If I came up empty, I’d at least be able to tell Mrs. Madison I’d made the effort. She’d have to be satisfied with that.

  I did doze off, drifting just into the leading edge of sleep, vague dream images tangling with my thoughts of James and Enrique. Flame and water swirled and mixed, twisting together like an elemental braid. Smoke and steam clouded my mind, drowned consciousness. I saw Brandon Thompson’s face, his mouth moving as if he were trying to impart an urgent secret. Then the image vanished into darker dreams.

  * * * *

  When my eyes snapped open, a sense of doom sent me groping under the pillow for a gun I no longer owned. My heart hammering a million beats a minute, I nearly fell off the bed when the motel phone ran. I fumbled with the receiver, mumbled a greeting.

  “Did you change your mind?” Ken asked.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to reorder my sleep- muddied thoughts into something resembling sense. A glance at the clock told me it was nearly eight, long after I’d intended to be at Ken’s. “Overslept. Why didn’t you call my cell?”

  “You slept right through it. I was about to send Marylou in there to see if you were still alive.”

  “Be there in twenty minutes,” I told Ken, then rolled out of bed.

  I made it in seventeen, gunning the Escort down the gravel road leading to his house, fishtailing and kicking up dust. He was waiting for me on the front porch, arms crossed, expression somber as I climbed from the car. He was wearing well-worn jeans and a T-shirt advertising a local bluegrass festival. He’d showered, his still damp hair slicked back.

  “How’s Abe?” I asked as I hitched up the stairs.

  “Doesn’t look good.” He opened the screen door for me, then followed me inside.

  He’d tidied the living room. No more soda cans, the books were neatly piled, and the afghan was folded over the back of the recliner. He might have even knocked some dust off the knickknacks. A spooky thought, that he’d cleaned up for me.

  I entered the kitchen, spotted the towering stack of incident report folders on the trestle table. Ken spared me a glance over his shoulder, then pulled a casserole out of the microwave and set it on the counter. “I had to reheat it. It’ll probably taste like hell.”

  He plopped a generous spoonful of a cheesy chicken and rice concoction on each of two plates, then served up some broccoli that was sadly past its prime. We sat on opposite sides of the trestle table, Ken’s attention focused on his plate as he inhaled dried-up casserole and soggy broccoli.

  He watched me as I finished my own plate, his gaze intense and troubled. I avoided direct eye contact, the electricity zinging between us palpable and perilous. In that moment, he looked so damn vulnerable, I had to squelch the idiot impulse to step around the table and put my arms around him.

  Last bite finished, I pushed my plate away, then leaned well back as he cleared the table. As he washed dishes, I booted up my laptop and double-clicked on ProSpy.

  “Any word on the Thompson kid?” I asked as the ProSpy welcome screen displayed.

  “One of the foot team dug one of his sneakers out of the mud. No sign of his body, though.” Ken set a rinsed water glass in the drainer. “Divers couldn’t locate him under that snag where you found the glasses.”

  I clicked on Ken’s arson database. “What about the dogs?”

  “They went haring off up the bank and we thought by some miracle the boy had dragged himself out of the river.” He shut off the water. “Then they hit a creek and lost whatever scent they were tracking.”

  “Couldn’t pick it up on the other side?”

  “They crossed and took off up the creek for quite a ways, then gave up.” He dried his hands on a kitchen towel. “It’s shale and granite beyond the creek. Tough for a dog to track. In any case, it didn’t seem to be the boy’s scent they were going after. Letting them sniff Brandon’s jacket just confused them.”

  “Could it have been one of the other searchers they were picking up on? Someone out there before the dogs showed up?”

  “Entirely possible. Someone had set a fire on the far side of the creek. Maybe that messed them up.”

  A fire. The memory twinged inside me again. A fire at the Arco station the day James disappeared. A fire near where the Thompson boy fell in the river.

  Ken must have noticed my glassy-eyed stare. “What?”

  I told him what I’d learned from Sheri. “My brain is trying to tell me something.”

  “Two fires don’t make much of a pattern.” He dried his hands on a kitchen towel, the motions of tendon and muscle riveting.

  A tendril of heat burst into flame inside me. My heart hammered in my ears as I imagined what those hands might feel like on my skin. Skimming along my hips, my belly, between my legs.

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I dug my thumb into my brow to the point of pain. I needed a distraction damn quick. “Maybe if we work on your problem.”

  “Want a beer?”

  I wanted him to stop radiating testosterone. The way it was rolling off him, he was either going to wrap that kitchen towel around my throat or spread- eagle me on the table and rip off my clothes a la Body Heat.

  I ignored the shiver spiking along my spine, the catch in my breathing, and focused on the beer. “What have you got?”

  “Bud,” he answered succinctly.

  As my grandmother would say, I could piss stronger than that. “Anything else?”

  A ghost of a smile curved his mouth. “Bud Light.”

  Crazed laughter wasn’t really called for in that moment. “A Bud’s fine.”

  He brought the beers, setting a can beside my laptop before downing half of his. “So how do we do this?”

  On the table works, I mused. Move the napkin holder and the salt and pepper shakers, lose the bottle of barbecue sauce. I shook off the image of Ken clearing the table with a sweep of his arm.

  He leaned over to check the screen. “This is what you used to use for your profiling.”

  “Similar. It’s got a few more bells and whistles, but it’s basically the same software.”

  He dropped into a chair next to me. “What do you want to know?”

  “You tell me everything about the arson fires. I enter the data and the program puts it together.”

  “And out pops a suspect.”

  “Not quite so easy.” I edged my chair away from his a scosh. “First tell me about possible motives.”

  “For arson? You’ve got six basically.” He held up one finger. “Profit.”

  “That was a high-ticket car that burned at the Markowitz’s.”

  “The rest of the structures have been like Abe’s shed. No insurance value.” He unfolded another finger. “Then there’s vandalism.”

  “Still possible.”

  “Except the targets don’t make sense. Vandals are usually kids. They’ll set fire to a trash can at school, maybe an abandoned building or car.”

  “Profit, vandalism,” I prompted.

  A third finger went up. “Crime concealment.”

  “Doesn’t fit. What are the odds so many different people have something illegal to hide?”

  “Right. Same problem with revenge. Unlikely someone had an axe to grind with all these different folks.” He held up four fingers. “Then there’s extremism. Using fire as a form of social protest or
terrorism.”

  “If that was the case with your fires, some wacko group would be taking responsibility.”

  “No one has. Excitement is number six. Thrill seeking. Need for attention. Sometimes there’s a sexual component.”

  That froze my brain in its tracks. Hearing the word “sexual” from Ken’s mouth brought me back around to the naughty thoughts I’d been entertaining. A tangible energy lingered in the air between us.

  I remembered it all, the way his legs felt sliding between mine, his tongue in my mouth. His groan as he climaxed.

  Those memories were a damn slippery slope. I shook them off. “You think it’s number six, then? Excitement?”

  His gaze fixed on me, he swirled the can of Bud. “Doesn’t make sense they wouldn’t stay to watch the fire.”

  “What if they are coming back? Hiding somewhere we can’t see them?”

  “Maybe at Markowitz’s place where the tree cover is dense. But where would someone hide at the Double J?

  It’s all open country. And why not just watch it burn when it’s set? Why use a delay at all?”

  “Then we’re out of options.”

  He took a sip of beer. “There is irrational fire setting.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s motiveless. Or at least it seems that way to you or me. To a perpetrator with a mental disorder, his reasons for setting a fire are completely rational.”

  “Then by process of elimination...”

  He nodded. “We’ve ruled out everything it couldn’t be. We can start with the theory of an irrational fire-setter. See where the facts take us.”

  “You’ve already given this some thought, though.”

  “Yeah. I already got to this point.”

  He didn’t seem very happy with it. I couldn’t blame him. Even I, who could easily fall into the excitement category if I let my obsessions take complete control, felt uneasy at the irrationality of these fires.