Clean Burn

by Karen Sandler

  “I’m sure your parole doesn’t allow you to surf the internet,” I reminded him, “but we know you’ve been down to the library. I’m betting you know about the request for a boy in Santa Rosa.” I could see from his reaction he knew exactly what I was talking about. “Has that request been fulfilled?”

  “N-n-no.” His Adam’s apple bounced.

  Ken approached Beck, closing the distance between them to inches. “Stay off the computer, Mr. Beck. Next time the librarian sees you on it, she’ll call me.”

  Having scared the crap out of Beck, Ken walked with me to my Escort. “Sister said he was there the last three days.”

  “How do you know she’s not lying for him?”

  “She referred to him several times as ‘my creepy pervert brother.’“ He opened the car door for me.

  “He confirmed he saw the shaggy-haired guy at the tavern. He also gave me a story about seeing a kid out in the woods,” I told Ken. “Close to where Brandon went in, but on the other side of the river.”

  “There’s maybe a half-dozen houses out there on a couple thousand acres of BLM land. What the hell would James be doing in such a remote location?”

  “Someone took him there.” Likely to kill him. I couldn’t think of any other reason.

  I swung into the Escort, my leg twinging. “You can’t drive out there, take a look? It sounds like it’s the same place where the fire was set, the one that threw the dogs off.”

  He looked at me as if I was a loon. “I could if there were roads to drive on and the manpower to search. Or I could ask Sergeant Russell to deploy a mounted SAR team. But you want to be the one to articulate to him what your basis is for that wild-ass goose chase?”

  He was right, but it didn’t make me any happier about it. I had one iffy witness of questionable character telling me that maybe he saw someone and maybe it was the kid I was looking for.

  “Besides,” Ken said, “I thought you were leaving.”

  Truly, I had all the data I needed. Any further investigation I could do from home in my spare time. If I came up with any solid leads, I could let Ken know.

  I shoved my key in the ignition. “I will, as soon as I talk to Pickford again. Turns out he installed Mrs. Lopez’s television.”

  “I’ll follow you,” Ken said, swinging the door shut so I couldn’t argue.

  I pulled out of the mobile home park, Ken on my tail, Tommy occupying my imagination. His sorrowful mug kept me company all the way to Pickford’s place.

  * * * *

  Knowing I had to face the stairs again leading up to Grandpa Chuck’s, I made Ken wait for me while I did some calf stretches, my hands against the hood of the Explorer like a perp about to be searched. Ken took in every unsightly grimace and whimper of pain, never once offering up his services as a masseur. Obviously there was a cruel streak buried somewhere deep inside him.

  My exertions put me in a nasty mood by the time I dragged myself up to the third floor. Pickford’s grandpa smile when he answered the door polished up my crappy disposition. His opening remark, “Good to see you again, Sheriff. Miss,” added the finishing touch.

  I stiff-armed him backward into his living room, taking great satisfaction in the way he stumbled over an ottoman and fell on his butt. The son of a bitch just gave me a mournful smile, as if he didn’t understand why anyone would be pissed at him. Coming up beside me, Ken didn’t say a word about my rough handling.

  I wrenched Pickford to his feet and shoved him down onto the ottoman. “Let’s talk about Mrs. Lopez.”

  He gave me a soulful look. “There’s no need to be rough. I’m glad to tell you what I know.”

  “You installed her television and Blu-Ray. Did you see the boy there?”

  He shook his head, brow furrowed. “What boy?”

  Ken stepped in, a friendly hand on Pickford’s shoulder. “The Hispanic boy in the photo she showed you the other day.”

  As if he’d only just remembered, Pickford’s face lit with recognition. “I do remember now. The little boy that’s missing.”

  I leaned over, level with his face. “Where is he? Have you got him somewhere?”

  “No!” His eyes widened, just a trace of fear flickering through them. “I never actually saw the boy. I only saw his picture.”

  Disappointment nibbled at me. “At Mrs. Lopez’s?”

  He nodded. “She had it up on the wall. Alongside a few baby pictures.”

  “Any sign that the boy was there?” Ken asked. “Toys strewn around? Kids’ books on the table, anything like that?”

  “Not that I saw.” He locked his fingers together and rocked forward and back. “I was just there to do a job. I only noticed the pictures because they were on the wall above where I put the TV.”

  Yeah, right. His wandering gaze likely zeroed right in on Enrique’s picture. “I bet you asked about him.”

  “I was just trying to be friendly.” Chuck smiled, blue eyes all but twinkling. I wanted to rip away his kind facade, expose the evil behind it. “She was glad for the opportunity to talk about her grandson. She said he was three years old and he’d be coming to live with her soon so her daughter could get back on her feet.”

  “Did she say when he’d be coming?” I asked.

  Rubbing his chin, he made a show of trying to remember. “I don’t recall her mentioning when. Soon was all she said. She showed me the room she had set aside for him.”

  Ken dug his fingers in a little deeper. “You had no business going into his bedroom.”

  Pickford tried to wriggle out of Ken’s grip. “I told you. I was only being friendly. She offered to show me.”

  No doubt after he dropped a few hints. I bet you have a nice room all ready for him, Mrs. Lopez. The thought of him sniffing around the little boy’s room made me want to lop his head right off his shoulders.

  Swallowing back my disgust, I got nose to nose with him. “I’m thinking Enrique was there. Maybe you were so friendly that day, Mrs. Lopez invited you to come back. Maybe you even got to babysit the little tyke.”

  “No. I’m telling you I never saw him.”

  “And while you were alone with Enrique, you did what you do best. You showed him how much you really liked him. Didn’t you, Grandpa?”

  “Damn it, I never saw the boy. He wasn’t living there yet.”

  I wasn’t even sure what I was driving at, what I was hoping to get from Pickford. But I kept at him. “I bet you were disappointed, seeing all those pictures, hearing Mrs. Lopez talk about her sweet little grandson. You were just aching to get your hands on him, weren’t you?” Remembering Beck’s stash, inspiration struck. “You took a souvenir instead, didn’t you? What did you take home that day, Grandpa?”

  Now his blue eyes nearly goggled right out of his head. “What do you mean?” He choked out the words.

  I angled a glance up at Ken. “Where is it, Pickford? Where’d you hide it so the sheriff couldn’t find it?”

  He squirmed against Ken’s tight hold as if the miniscule fragment of guilt that he still harbored inside had broken loose and was worming its way through his body. His gaze shifted away from mine. “I wasn’t hiding it. I was just keeping it safe.”

  Ken moved his face into Pickford’s line of sight. “Where is it?”

  His mouth got a mean set to it. “I’ll have to show you.”

  Ken released Chuck and backed away. Pickford led us into the bathroom. A claw foot tub had been crammed into the tiny room, its enamel surface chipped and pitted with rust. The toilet lid was up, its yellow contents stinking. The slimeball couldn’t even flush his own toilet.

  Some baby blue fabric had been glued in a ruffle to the rim of the sink, concealing the plumbing beneath it. Pickford went to his knees and pulled back the drape where it split in front.

  “I looked in there,” Ken said.

  His head half under the sink, Pickford reached around behind it, into the space between the back of the sink and the wall. When he emerged, he held a plastic zipper b
ag with a photo folded inside.

  Ken took the zipper bag by a corner and led the way out. “Flush the damn toilet, Pickford.”

  In the living room, Ken held up the bag. The photo had been folded so that only the boy in the picture was visible. Pulling out Enrique’s photo, I compared it to the one-year-old in the bag. Same eyes and carefree grin. When Ken turned over the bag, I could see what Pickford had folded out of sight. Mrs. Lopez and her daughter. I recognized Felicia’s photo from the folder Mrs. Martinez had given me.

  Proof that Enrique’s grandmother had indeed lived here in Greenville. If Pickford could be believed, and I couldn’t see any reason for him to lie about it, the boy had been on his way to Greenville.

  Ken planted a hand on Pickford’s shoulder again. “I’m taking you in.”

  Pickford turned those grandpa eyes on Ken. “It was just a photo. I still have the frame. I’ll give it back to you.”

  “What do the terms of your probation say about pictures of unrelated children in your possession?” Ken asked, giving Pickford’s shoulder a shake.

  Pickford flapped his mouth a couple times in indignant silence, then clamped it shut. Ken marched him from the apartment.

  We tramped back down the stairs, Pickford whining and moaning and groaning as we went. While Ken packed Chuck away in the Explorer, I returned to my Escort. Bending over the hood, I stretched again in a vain attempt to remove the twelve-inch hunting knife someone had shoved up into my leg.

  As Ken approached, I gave up on the effort. “Enrique’s probably safe and sound with his grandmother.”

  “Maybe.”

  I jammed my fingers into my hair, trying to remember if I’d brushed it that morning. “And James is just a runaway. If he’s not dead already, he’ll make his way home someday.”

  “Could be.”

  I tried to cling to the fairy tale. “There’s no crime in me choosing to believe that.”

  “Right,” Ken agreed.

  I took a stab in the dark. “You wouldn’t happen to know if anyone in town owns an early 80s Volvo sedan?”

  Ken’s gaze narrowed at the off the wall question. “Have a hankering to own a Volvo?”

  “That’s the kind of car Andros at the cafe thinks he saw James in.”

  Ken gave it some thought. “I see Volvos around here all the time, but mostly late model. I can’t say I’ve noticed one that old.”

  “Damn.” I rubbed my temples where a throbbing beat in time to the ache in my leg. “I’m going to lose three new clients if I don’t get back. They’ll get tired of waiting and find another private investigator.”

  “Then go home,” Ken said.

  He wasn’t even going to try to talk me out of it? I opened my car door. “See you around.” I sat abruptly, my left leg too wracked with pain for a graceful descent.

  Ken blocked me from shutting the door. “Stay one more night. You can get an early start in the morning.”

  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 Cafe 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, like a story of a purported UFO abduction. But there were 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.