Clean Burn (29 page)

“I waited for her, but when she didn’t show up by eight, I walked to a neighbor’s place a few miles away. He drove me into town.”

“I’ll need the make, model and year on your truck.”

Rich gave him the info, and Ken radioed a BOLO to dispatch, then he returned his focus to Rich. “Let’s talk about the fires.”

Rich squirmed in his chair. “The cuffs hurt.”

“I’ll take them off if you promise to stay put,” Ken said.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “And tell us what you know.”

Rich bobbed his head in agreement. Ken unlocked the cuffs nodding at me to continue.

“How many fires has she set?” I asked.

“I don’t know how many here.”

How many
here
. “So she’s set fires elsewhere,” I prompted.

Rich wouldn’t look at me. “She can’t help it. After what happened with her daddy, then when the–” He bit the words off. “Burning things makes her feel better.”

That sent a shiver down my back. I’d convinced myself of the same thing, although I limited the destruction to my own hide.

“What happened to her daddy?” I asked.

“When she was seven... she was with her daddy while he was burning leaves. Kerosene splashed on him somehow and he caught fire. Burned him bad.”

“These files,” Ken said, gesturing toward the desk. “Did you tell her where to burn?”

Rich seemed to collapse in on himself. Tears spilled down his cheeks. “She wanted to know who I talked to during the day. She’d ask me about them.”

“To learn about their sins?” I asked.

He slumped further in the chair. “She idolized her daddy. When he preached, she sat in the front row, and her eyes never left him. Even with the scars the fire left.”

“So he taught her about sin,” I said.

“He was a good man,” Rich said. “She just got it a little mixed up.”

So mixed up, she felt a compulsion to burn, again and again.

Rich lifted his wrist, checking the time. “I have to make sure she got back okay.”

“We’ll be heading out there, soon,” Ken said. “Where’s the cabin?”

“South county,” Rich said. “I can show you on a map, on the computer.”

Rich moved his chair aside, making room for me to use the keyboard. I brought up a map of Greenville County. With Rich looking on, I zoomed in until he said stop, then he pointed to the screen. “Here. It’s built up against a huge boulder, maybe twenty feet tall.”

“I’ll need directions,” Ken said.

Rich gave Ken a sidelong look. “It’d be easier to show you.”

“You can show us,” Ken said, “but you’ll stay in the car.”

It crossed my mind that I could finish the Google search I’d started earlier, read the complete article from the
Daily Press
. Something kept nudging me to lay my hands back on that keyboard. Wisps of dreams, filled with fire and sin, momentarily fogged my mind.

“How about you talk to Ken now, Rich,” I said. “I need to look for something on the internet.”

“Sure. Okay.” McPherson wiped away tears with the heel of his hand.

Ken continued my line of inquiry. “Tell us about the other fires. The ones that weren’t set here.”

“There were trash fires in the dumpster out behind our apartment. I tried to tell myself it was just kids.” Rich glanced over at the screen as I set up an account at the
Daily Press
. I positioned myself to block his view.

“Where was this apartment?” Ken asked.

He looked at me, then away. “San Francisco.”

A prickling danced up my spine, pulled me from the opening paragraphs of the article. “Where in San Francisco?”

He whispered, so softly I had to strain to hear. “Jones, near Golden Gate.”

I locked gazes with Ken. He gave me a nod of encouragement. “What else did she burn there?” I asked. “Besides dumpsters?”

“A dry cleaner,” Rich said, still trying to see the computer screen. I planted myself firmly in his way. “A church.”

A roaring started up in my ears. “Was there a baby at the church?”

I might as well have struck McPherson with a sledgehammer. His mouth dropped open and he swayed in his chair. The waterworks turned on again, tears gushing down his cheeks.

My own knees trembled. Turning like an automaton, I scrolled down the page displaying the article and read about Glenn and Michelle Cresswell and the family they lost.

“Ken. Listen to this.”

My stomach churned as I traced a finger down the third paragraph. “Killed in the fire were Lydia Cresswell, ten months old. Sean, Thomas and Glenn Jr, ages four, eight and ten.”

Still caught up in Rich’s admissions about the fires, Ken didn’t get it at first. “I don’t follow you.”

I turned the screen toward him. “They’re the same genders, nearly the same ages as James, Enrique, Brandon and the baby.”

I scrolled down further, to the photograph of the family that accompanied the article. I clicked on it to enlarge it.

There were the five children with Mom and Dad, all of the young ones lost in the fire. The woman I didn’t recognize, but the man’s shaggy head of hair and full, bushy beard set off a rocket in my brain.

“It’s Glenn,” I blurted out.

“Who’s Glenn?” Ken rose to better see the screen.

I stepped back to give him room. “The man Sadie Parker said traded his Volvo for her truck. The same man Andros over at Emil’s Café and the girl at the McDonald’s saw. Glenn who had James and the baby.”

As Ken stared intently at the photograph, Rich covered his face with his hands. Ken knocked them away, compared the face on the screen with the man sitting in the chair.

“Oh my God,” Ken said. “Rich is Glenn.”

Now I could see it. The eyes were the same, never mind that the beard and hair obscured everything else.

I looked up at Ken, ramifications thundering down on me. “He has the kids. All of them.”

Rich – Glenn – shook his head so hard, I half expected it to unscrew from his neck. Ken dragged his chair around and sat knee to knee with Glenn again. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He wouldn’t look at us, tears reddening his eyes, snot seeping from his nose.

“Those missing kids,” Ken said. “We’ve got witnesses who saw them with you.”

He shook his head some more, snot flying. “They’re mistaken.”

I dropped my hands on his shoulders, bending close to his ear. “Come on, Glenn. We know it all. About Michelle finding the baby at the church. Taking James from the Arco. And Enrique...”

Glenn slumped, elbows on knees, head bowed. I could almost feel his emotional meltdown through my hands; knew the moment his barriers shattered.

“At the cabin,” he whispered hoarsely. “She keeps them at the cabin.”

“Where?” Ken asked. “Are they safe?”

“They’re in the basement.” Cresswell sniffed, a wet, pitiful sound. “But they’re all okay, I swear to you.”

“She hasn’t hurt them?” Ken asked, his fingers tightening.

Glenn swiped snot onto his arm. “I wouldn’t let her hurt them.”

I grabbed a handful of tissues from the desk and stuffed them in his hand. “But you left the kids alone this morning.”

“Because I knew she’d be back,” Glenn said. “I had to come in to work.”

“But you’re sure those kids are okay,” I said. “You checked on them before you left?”

Glenn snorted into a tissue. “Junior would’ve yelled if there was a problem.”

That was no damn answer. Ken pulled Glenn to his feet. “We’d better get out there, now. Hopefully before Michelle returns.”

Ken stowed Glenn in the Explorer’s cage. As he pulled out onto Main Street, he called Sadie at the
Gazette
to ask her to lock up the store. Then he radioed for backup to meet us at mile marker thirty-five where we’d be turning off the highway.

In my mind’s eye, I saw Tommy Phillips in the back seat beside Glenn, directing his accusing stare at someone other than me for once.

“Tell us how it happened, Glenn,” I said.

Now that the walls had broken down, Glenn seemed eager to talk. “When she found Lydia in San Francisco, I thought it would help.”

Ken gunned up the entrance to Highway 50. “Why not take the baby to the authorities?”

“That girl didn’t want her. What was the harm in Michelle keeping her?” Glenn asked. “I thought then maybe she’d stop...”

“Setting fires?” I asked. “But it didn’t work out that way, did it? And now all those kids are at risk.”

Cresswell swiped his snotty nose. “Michelle wouldn’t hurt any of those kids. Not after what happened to her own.”

What happened to her own
. Had seeing her father badly burned when she was a child set a time bomb ticking inside Michelle? An emotional nuke that exploded when she lost all five of her children in a fire?

Either one might have been enough of a trigger to create Michelle Cresswell’s fascination with burning. Combined, they would have been more than sufficient to pull the pin. Just as Lucy had become unhinged by the death of her baby.

Insight suddenly burst into my brain. “You took Norberto. Dropped him off at Lucy’s.”

He muttered his affirmative response so softly, I barely heard him.

“But why?” Ken asked.

I answered for Glenn. “To distract us. He’d heard the story about Lucy’s baby, knew from his own wife how far into the deep end a woman could plunge after losing her kids.”

“What about Enrique?” Ken asked.

For a moment, Glenn looked at me blankly. Then he said, “I never knew his real name. Michelle always called him Sean.”

“How’d she find him?” I asked.

“His mother, Felicia, lived upstairs from us. Sometimes Michelle would take care of the boy when Felicia went out.”

To get high, no doubt.

“Michelle would pretend he was our four year-old. Sometimes she’d end up keeping him a week at a time.” Glenn wrapped his arms around himself. “Then she found Felicia dead. She ran and got me, all excited, saying we had Sean back.”

Ken threw on his wig-wags to nudge traffic out of the Explorer’s way. “So you just took him.”

“I knew Michelle would take good care of him. She always took good care of the kids.”

Except I still had an uneasy feeling about a woman who played with fire. My own dark urges toward self-abuse might have morphed into a compulsion to burn my own kids if I’d had young innocents under my control.

Ken slowed behind a slow moving truck, waiting with ill-concealed impatience for the driver to move aside. “How’d you get hold of James?”

“We stopped at a gas station to change the baby. I’d gone into the store for some juice for Sean. Somehow Michelle got James into the car, hid him under a blanket in the back seat. I didn’t know he was there until we were nearly to Fairfield.”

James had probably still been steamed at his stepdad, enough to get into the car, anyway. Later, when he’d changed his mind, it was too late. “He tried to bolt at the McDonalds?”

“I wanted to take him back home,” Glenn said. “But Michelle insisted he was Junior, come back to us.”

“What brought you to Greenville?” Ken asked.

“My family used to own the cabin, on leased BLM land. We broke in, cleaned the place up.”

Michelle had three of her children back, she must have been jonesing big time for the other two. She needed more fires to take the edge off her grief, used the excuse of sin to justify the destruction. “How’d she know where to find Brandon?”

“She knew that cove in the river,” Glenn said. “Would pull the dead things out and burn them.”

A sickening lump settled in my stomach. “Did she burn Brandon?”

“No!” Glenn insisted. “I told you, he’s safe. Just like the others.”

“Have you seen Brandon?” Ken asked.

“Saturday morning. When I brought them their breakfast.” Glenn turned away from me. “He was... sleeping.”

My mind kept circling back to the fire that killed the Cresswell kids. Instinct drove me to ask the question. “Were there other fires in Victorville?”

He shredded the tissue in his hands. “I told you, we moved away from there after the kids died.”

I turned in the seat to better see Glenn through the cage. “Were there fires
before
your house burned down?”

He looked at me, eyes wide, then dropped his gaze. His body had started to shake.

I leaned closer, right up against the wire mesh. “The fire that killed your kids wasn’t the first, was it?”

His body vibrated. Another minute and the guy would disintegrate.

I pressed my hand against the mesh. “What did she burn before your house? A woodpile? Maybe someone’s shed?”

“It wasn’t her. It couldn’t have been,” Glenn insisted. “She only did it after they died.”

“Come on, Glenn,” I said gently. “You know better. Seeing her daddy burned that way messed her up. So she went out at night. Leave you and the kids sleeping, go out looking for a way to soothe that inner pain.”

He flicked a sidelong glance at me, denial battling with stark reality in his face. “She was happy.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “All those children to take care of.”

“I helped her when the baby had colic,” Glenn said. “I’d walk Lydia at night when she cried. But Michelle loved our kids. She loved to show them off at church.”

I thought of Holy Rock Baptist Church, sitting beside my mother in the pew. To my mother, religion offered redemption and forgiveness. But to some, God only represented damnation and punishment.

I had a feeling I knew which side of the fence Michelle Cresswell had fallen on. “Did Michelle ever punish the kids, Glenn?”

He hunched in the seat. “Sometimes kids need to be punished.”

“Of course they do, Glenn.” As I pressed my hand against the cage, my arm flexed, burn scars catching on the knit sleeve of my T-shirt. “What did Michelle punish the kids for?”

He squirmed. “When they broke the rules. When they were bad.”

“The baby, too?” I nearly whispered the question. “Was the baby bad?”

The color left his face. “She said they sinned.” He spoke so softly I could barely hear him.

“They sinned,” I said aloud for Ken’s benefit. “And she punished them. With fire.”

His head bobbed, nose dripping. “She burned them.”

Out of the corner of my eye, Ken’s hands gripped so tight on the wheel, the tendons popped. His voice was hoarse when he asked, “How, Glenn?”