Clean Burn (18 page)

“And the program does the rest.” His knee pressed against my leg.

I pressed back. “The program organizes the elements optimally. I still have to rank the results to eliminate superfluencies. Pieces that come from a different puzzle, parts that don’t fit.”

Damn him, he got closer, his mouth brushing against my hair. Breathing became a real issue. “I tweak the data... put the brown pieces in one corner, the reds in another... The program makes correlations a manual search might not...”

He kissed my cheek, then the corner of my mouth. My libido was reporting for duty, every nerve in my body standing at attention. I didn’t want to think about that little girl inside me, always aching for affection.

I turned toward him, my hands curling around his shoulders, my mouth ready for tongue-wrestling. I summoned up a modicum of self-control.

“Back off, Ken,” I said with little conviction.

“I lied to you, Janelle.” His voice rumbled in my ear. “I do care. Never stopped.”

“I’m not good for you.”

“You think I don’t know that? I wish to hell you’d never come here.”

The honest truth of his declaration hurt more than I wanted to admit. “My bed’s already too crowded with monsters, Ken. There’s no room for you in there.”

He stroked my hair. “But there’s no one to stop us, Janelle. Tara’s gone. You have no one in your life.”

I was ready to melt against him. Instead, I grabbed his wrist to pull it away. We stared at each other, gazes locked, temptation digging in its claws. “Don’t.”

One more tantalizing moment sizzled between us, then he shoved back his chair and grabbed his empty beer can. Slapped it into a can crusher in the kitchen. The sound of him pulverizing the defenseless aluminum jolted me. I could relate, though, since I wanted to pitch my laptop across the room.

When he returned to the trestle table with another Bud, he positioned his chair a good foot away from mine. So he wouldn’t go blind trying to read the screen, I angled the laptop toward him and shifted my own chair out of his way.

I could tell myself it was all for the best. Entangling myself in Ken’s life again would be like jumping in front of an armed perp and daring him to take his best shot.

Even still, deep inside I knew that was one bullet I would have been glad to take.

CHAPTER 14

The computer beeped as ProSpy completed its processing, and a message flashed telling me the results were ready. Now it was time for the real number crunching part. Using the criteria ProSpy had spit out, I had to search against the California Fire Incident Reporting System database.

“You use CFIRS?” Ken asked as I double-clicked the appropriate icon.

“I have access to the arson module through a friend.” The less said about that the better since my use of CFIRS wasn’t entirely kosher. I’d called in a favor when the cheating husband of one of my clients had tried to destroy marital assets by burning them.

A dialogue box popped up on the screen, whining about the lack of a connection. “What do you use for internet out here?”

“Satellite and wireless network. I’ll set it up for you.” He scooted closer to the table, reaching for the keyboard.

I imagined an invisible keep away barrier around Ken pushing me back in my chair. While he tapped away at the computer, I took my half-empty beer into the kitchen and emptied it into the sink. I wondered if he had any hard liquor in the house, considered searching through the cupboards. Instead I took a glass from the dish drainer and filled it with water.

The glass lifted to hide my face, I surreptitiously spied on Ken. Physically, he was everything a woman could have wanted in one boffo package. But it wasn’t raging hormones that had me feeling restless and agitated. It was the connection that still threaded itself between us, first woven when our professional partnership began, strengthened each day the trust between us grew. Seemingly shattered the day Tara discovered us.

“We have internet,” Ken said.

I set aside the empty glass, then returned to the computer and started up ProSpy’s search and match function. Too edgy to sit while waiting for the results, I wandered around the dining room, nosing through a bookshelf full of well-thumbed paperbacks. The mysteries and thrillers didn’t surprise me; the classics did.
Grapes of Wrath
.
Huckleberry Finn
.
Heart of Darkness
.

I turned to find him staring at me. He didn’t drop his gaze when I caught him. I had some trouble breathing.

Would you have left her for me?
For a moment, I was terrified that I might have spoken it out loud. I don’t know where it came from, knew damn well I didn’t want to hear the answer.

Saved by the computer. With a beep, it displayed the first 20 of 586 matches to the data we’d entered.

Ken broke his eye-lock on me and adjusted the screen for a better look. “Those can’t all be my arsonist.”

Maintaining a safety zone, I returned to the table and scrolled through the hits. “I still have to massage the data. Eliminate the most obvious mismatches. Overlapping dates too far separated by distance, solved cases where the perp is incarcerated and therefore couldn’t have set your fires.”

ProSpy included a feature that allowed me to list terms that would filter the results, both adding to and deleting items from the results. I entered the appropriate terms and ran the filter against the first set of data. “I threw in questionable cases, fires not definitively ruled intentional.”

ProSpy hummed along, the little hour-glass turning end over end. My better judgment seemed to have evaporated. Ken and I had drawn closer together, like flames reaching across a backfire. Maybe I should have followed Sheri’s advice, gotten Ken out of my system. Not that that was likely to happen.

Another beep from ProSpy and 21 matches displayed on the screen. I scrolled through and made a quick assessment. “Six of the eight Greenville fires. Seven in Mojave. The rest all over the state.”

“Not all over the state.” Ken drew a finger down the list. “Two in Bakersfield. Three in Visalia. Two in Fresno, one in Modesto.”

The light bulb clicked on. “They’re all along State Route 99.”

“Can you map them?” Ken asked.

“Alas, no map function in ProSpy. I’ll have to do it the hard way, with Google Maps.”

“I’ll get a printer. And a map of the state.”

I grabbed the addresses one by one and pasted them into Google Maps. Once we’d connected Ken’s color printer, we ran off hard copies of each location. Using Post-it flags, we marked the spots on the California map, including the incident date and sequence number.

“There’s a year’s gap between the first one here and the last one in Modesto.”

“Maybe the guy was incarcerated?” Ken suggested.

“Maybe.” I looked through the list of results again to confirm the dates and realized we’d missed one. I clicked to page two of the results. “Huh. An outlier. Something that fits... But doesn’t.”

Ken looked at where I pointed on the screen. “What is it?”

“We didn’t map this one. Near Victorville, in San Bernardino County. A year and a half ago. A month before the first Mojave fire.”

“But that’s a house fire.”

“Right. Every other arson on the list involved outbuildings, sheds, barns. No occupied structures.”

Ken clicked on the details link and read the report. “This was ruled accidental. Why did the program pull it up?”

“Same accelerant. They found traces of kerosene.” I scanned the report for other common elements. “There was flashover.”

“How did it start?”

“The investigators determined the kerosene had been stored too close to a gas water heater in the service porch.” I stared at the screen. “This seems familiar. I must have read about it at the time.”

“A house fire in Victorville? Maybe two column inches on page nineteen in the Chronicle.”

“Yeah. It reminds me of...” Thoughts bubbled up to the surface. “The Nguyen’s Laundromat,” I murmured.

“Sounds like the title of a Vietnamese art film.”

I laughed, too dead tired to resist the sick humor. “Place around the corner from me. Burned down a few months ago. The Nguyens stored kerosene in a storage room near a gas water heater. Fire investigators determined that someone – vandals, kids likely – had broken in overnight, made a mess with the kerosene. Some malfunction in the water heater started the fire.”

Another spark of inspiration struggled to ignite. I shut my eyes and willed it to consciousness. The fire at the Arco. The fire at the river. A fire in the dumpster at the Hangman’s Tavern. And...

Ruth Martinez’s words came back to me. When the landlord checked on Enrique’s apartment.
Vandals had set fire to the sofa
.

“Oh, my God,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Fires and missing kids.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Someone set a fire at Enrique’s place around the time he went missing. Someone set a fire at the service station where James disappeared. Brandon went into the water and vanished – and someone set a fire.”

Ken narrowed his gaze. “Except vandals set the fire at Enrique’s. Likely the same at the service station. The fire by the river is the only one that connects to the others in Greenville County.”

I scrubbed at my face, shoulders sagging in exhaustion. “You’re right. The fires in the Bay Area have nothing to do with yours.”

But if there were a connection, no matter how slim, between my missing boys and fire, wouldn’t it be a worthwhile avenue to follow? It was dangerous territory, and I’d damn well have to keep my mind on finding the boys rather than catering to my hell-born obsession. But it would be worth the struggle if fire was the key to break the logjam in discovering James’s and Enrique’s whereabouts.

I groped for my phone, intending to call Sheri’s cell. Luckily, I squinted at the time on the display before I dialed. It was nearly midnight.

I called the office instead, leaving a message. “Sheri, do a search cross-correlating that missing eight month-old with fires. Dumpster, structure, whatever.” I disconnected, slumping in my chair. “Damn, I’m tired.”

I scrubbed at my face. My eyes closed, I tensed at the first feather light touch of Ken’s fingers in my hair. When he brushed along the curve of my ear, I ordered myself to move away, but just sat there, frozen, slave to emotions that should have been dead.

“Why don’t you stay the night?” he said softly.

I let myself enjoy the forbidden a moment more, then pushed back my chair. Since I was doing such a lousy job fending off Ken’s advances on my womanhood, I needed my own personal IED to keep him away.

I shoved up my T-shirt’s long sleeves and thrust my arms out to him, exposing the decorations dotting my skin. “You know I didn’t do all these myself.”

His gaze flicked down to the staccato pattern reaching from an inch above my wrist to the bunched up sleeve. “Your father–”

“Not just him, either.”

He might have seen where I was going, because he took my hand and tried to tug the sleeve back down. I pulled out of reach. “Listen to me, Ken.”

He looked away. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does.” I turned his face toward mine. “I’m a sick puppy, Ken. You knew that three years ago when we stomped on your marriage vows. Let’s just say I’ve gotten a little more twisted since you left.”

“I don’t want to hear this.” He started to rise.

I grabbed his arm and yanked him back into his chair. “Sometimes, I ask a guy to do it. A cigarette, a hot match head. Right before we do the deed. Sometimes that’s the only way I can get off.”

The horror in his face drove a spike into my stomach. As god-awful as what I’d told him was, it was the truth, although I hadn’t done it in a good long while.

“You do that now?” he asked, his voice so low I could barely hear him.

I could have told him the rest of the story, that I’d grown some self-respect and avoided intimacy altogether, but knowing how noble Ken was, that would take us back to square one. “Would you burn me?” I whispered, bile rising in my throat. “If I asked you, would you take a match–”

“You know damned well I wouldn’t.” He jumped to his feet and stalked off toward the kitchen.

I pulled my sleeves back down, my hands shaking. “You still want me to stay?”

He stopped, took a breath, then turned back toward me. “You can sleep in Cassie’s room.”

I ought to head back to the motel, take a cold shower, go for a run. Set my room on fire. Anything but stay in Ken Heinz’s house.

But I seemed to have lost all judgment between Ken’s first touch and my loathsome confession. “Sure,” I said calmly, as if I hadn’t just ripped open my soul. “Thanks.”

After I’d shut down and packed away my computer, I dutifully followed Ken upstairs to Cassie’s room. Her decorating scheme was pink and posters, completely at odds with the Cassie I’d met.

“Those boy bands are a little out of date.” I pointed to the largest poster that hung over the bed. “That kid’s been in and out of rehab the past two years. This one just announced he’s gay.”

“She’s been bugging me to repaint.”

“Let me guess, black? With a glow-in-the-dark pentagram on the ceiling?”

His mouth curved in a faint smile. “Something like that.”

Together we remade the narrow twin bed with fresh sheets. “I put clean towels in Cassie’s bathroom. Next door over. I’m at the end of the hall.”

“Hoping for a
tête à tête
during the night?”

He walked out without further comment. I waited until I heard his bedroom door shut, then found the bathroom. A T-shirt lay across the two haphazardly folded towels, a faded Greenville County Fair logo on it.

I stripped and showered, then threw on Ken’s castoff shirt. It hung to mid-thigh, but the short sleeves didn’t provide much coverage to my arms. No one to see the scars but me and God.

I gave my tighty-whities a quick wash in the sink, then hung them over the shower rod. I carried the rest of my clothes back to the bedroom and dumped them in a pile by the door.

I hadn’t spent the night in a chaste twin bed like Cassie’s since my first year in the dorm at SFSU. As I slipped under the covers and rested my wet head of hair against the pillow, I wondered if it had crossed Ken’s mind that maybe my sins would rub off on the flowered sheets. I wasn’t so sure myself that the darkness of my soul might not leak out during the night.