“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 since 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.”
Which had probably been the trigger for whatever psychotic nightmare she was living in now. Oddly, pondering Lucy’s tragedy sparked an idea, but I couldn’t bring the notion to full consciousness.
Either it was important enough to come to me later or it would sink back into the great unconscious. “Then we go back to the question, if Lucy didn’t take the kid, how’d she get her hands on him?”
Ken shrugged. “Maybe someone else took him, was feeling the heat and dumped Norberto at Lucy’s.”
“A cockeyed explanation.” I finished the last of my coffee. “You’ll keep me posted on what you find in the woods?”
“You don’t want to wait around, see what they come up with?”
“Just let me know if you find James and Enrique.” I set aside my coffee cup. “What’s the word on Pickford? Was the photo enough to send him back?”
“That and an outstanding warrant on a DUI traffic stop.” He stepped past me to the doorway. “Cassie! Let’s go! You’ll miss your bus.”
No answer from above. Ken moved closer to the stairs. “Cassie! I have to get to work.”
Her muffled voice drifted from upstairs. “Go ahead! You don’t need to stay and babysit me.”
It looked for a moment as if Ken intended to stomp up the stairs and drag Cassie down. He turned to me, the exasperation clear on his face. “What the hell takes her so long?”
“Girl stuff,” I said, although I had very little personal experience with such mysteries.
I grabbed my computer bag from the trestle table. An image flickered in my mind, a scene from the feature film of my dreams. I couldn’t capture it fully, but a shred of instinct lingered.
“Before I go, could I take another look at those arson reports, see if I spot any more details?” Maybe if I read the material again, something would spark that dim memory. Fires and missing kids, all tangled with sin.
“They’re sitting on my desk,” he said, still distracted by his niece.
“I’d just like a few minutes to look them over.”
“Sure.” Ken shouted up the stairs again. “Cassie! Lock up. And make sure you change your cartridge before you leave!”
“Okay, okay,” Cassie yelled down.
“She’ll miss the damn bus,” Ken said as he walked behind me through the living room. “Then she’ll be calling me asking for a ride.”
“Maybe she’ll surprise you.” Of course, in my experience, teenage surprises were never pleasant.
He hesitated, his hand on the front door, staring back inside. Then he followed me down the porch steps and into town.
CHAPTER 22
Mama never should have stayed out so late. Somehow, the first purification hadn’t been enough and she’d had to find the proper place to perform the ritual again. Still unsatisfied, the sense of sin still too powerful to ignore, she’d had to complete the ceremony a third time to quiet the feeling of wrongness.
After the third purification, she’d felt restless, unfinished. She knew she had to return to the children, that they needed her with time running so short. But she just drove, watching the stars vanish and the sky lighten. It was full daylight now, yet Mama couldn’t let go of the sense that she’d left something undone.
She turned aimlessly, drove slowly through a neighborhood crowded with houses, children’s toys strewn across lawns, flowerbeds full of so much color it made her heart ache. She knew the people in these houses were full of sin, that they passed their wickedness on to their children. But for a moment, she longed for the life they had.
A school bus was stopped up ahead, its red lights flashing. Mama pulled over, tried to see through the bus windows, to see the children inside. But the sun was so bright on the glass, she had to squeeze her eyes shut. She opened them again just as the bus was pulling away.
The paved road Mama had stopped on turned to gravel just beyond. A girl was running up the road toward Mama, waving her arms and yelling at the bus. When the bus kept going, the girl turned and saw Mama’s truck. She smiled and walked over and Mama’s heart stuttered in her chest. Blonde hair, blue eyes, perfect face.
Angela. Mama’s sweet daughter had returned.
Angela opened the door, started to climb into the truck. Then she saw Mama.
“Sorry,” Angela said, starting to back away. “I thought you were—”
Mama grabbed Angela’s arm and yanked her inside. Stomping the accelerator, Mama drove away fast, the door slamming shut. Angela screamed, tried to grab the door handle, but Mama hung on tight to Angela’s arm.
“Let me go,” Angela pleaded. “Please, let me go.”
She was crying and Mama couldn’t bear it. She slapped Angela hard, once, twice. The second time Mama’s daughter hit her head against the truck window. She was quiet after that. No more yelling, no more crying, leaving Mama to revel in her joy. Her oldest daughter had returned to her. Now her family was complete.
CHAPTER 23
An hour after Ken and I had arrived at the sheriff’s office, I was still flipping through reports, coming up empty but unwilling to give it up as a lost effort. He’d left me in his office while he attended the morning briefing, then came back with the remains of a box of donuts.
Grasping at straws, I’d entered as many of the small details I could think of. The exact time each fire was discovered, the weather, the damn phase of the moon. I had run it all through ProSpy, but I didn’t receive any more enlightenment than I had before.
The list of hits that ProSpy produced contained all the same
suspects, plus the house fire in Victorville from a year and a half ago. Ken, leaning over my shoulder to pick out a donut, spotted the anomaly on the screen. “I thought you’d filtered that one out.”
“Should have.” I picked the glaze off an old-fashioned buttermilk. “It was declared accidental.”
I studied the sparse details of the Victorville fire. It started in the early morning hours. Kerosene stored in the service porch beside the gas water heater was an accelerant.
Connect the dots. Dream shreds tried to coalesce in my mind. “I need to do a Google. Can I use the department network?”
“Use my computer.” He woke his monitor from sleep mode, entered a password and brought up his internet browser.
I went to Google and typed in the search terms “Victorville” and “fire”, then narrowed down the hits with the date listed on the hit ProSpy had given me. Google coughed up several citations, including one from the Victorville Daily Press.
I clicked on the listing and read it aloud. “‘Five children died today when an early morning house fire destroyed their two bedroom home near Victorville. Their mother, Michelle Cresswell, daughter of a local pastor, suffered severe burns...’ You have to register with the website to read the rest.”
I debated whether to waste a few minutes creating an account on the newspaper’s website, or just look for the article elsewhere.
Ken hovered over me. “I’ve got a meeting.”
I decided to check another of the Google hits. “I’m good. You don’t need to hang around.”
“Will you be here when I get back?” he asked.
That should have been my cue to say my goodbyes, but that little brain cell was still rattling, suggesting to me I stay around awhile longer. Not to mention, I didn’t want to leave without seeing him again. “I’ll wait for you.”
I went back to Google for more information on the Victorville fire. The other hits were even briefer accounts than the one from the Daily Press.
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