Clean Burn (3 page)

As expected, I didn’t learn much at the Arco. Rodney, the greasy-haired attendant, vaguely remembered James coming in for a candy bar around noon on December 29th. Rodney saw him eating the candy bar over by the pumps one minute; the next, James had vanished. I left my card with a request that he call if he thought of anything else.

Back on the road with a coffee refill and a fat-laden cinnamon roll, I hit the Yolo Causeway east of Sacramento around 11.30, then stopped in Rancho Cordova for lunch. After the cinnamon roll, I didn’t have much of an appetite for the coffee shop burger and fries I ordered, although the three glasses of Coke I downed polished my caffeine edge nicely.

The Micky D’s where Emma worked was another half hour up Highway 50, ten miles southwest of Greenville. I’d called her last night to arrange our little gab fest, the crack of her chewing gum pinging in my ear with every other word. Since it was her spring vacation, she was working the day shift and would take her break around one.

My mental picture of sixteen year-old Emma proved accurate – spiky black hair, seven earrings lined up along the outer edge of her left ear, only two in her right. I saw the faint mark of a brow and lip piercing, but apparently Emma had made some effort to uphold the McDonald’s image by leaving those adornments at home. She’d covered most of the tattoo on her neck with a T-shirt under her uniform shirt.

A light drizzle had started up as we stepped outside the restaurant, the parking lot misted with moisture. I would have suggested we sit in my car, but I saw that pack of cigs in her hand. No way was I sullying my upholstery with tar and nicotine. Not to mention that temptation to brush against that searing heat in the close quarters of my Escort.

Instead we sat on the edge of a planter spilling over with impatiens and pansies. The building’s overhang did a half-assed job of keeping us dry.

Her cigarette lit and dangling from her right hand, Emma took a look at James’s photo. “Yeah, that’s him. They were calling him Junior though, not James.”

“Then how do you know for sure it was him?”

Emma studied the photo again. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure. Thing is, it was weird seeing a black kid with a white family. He stood out. Kinda stuck in my mind.”

“So what did you see?” I took a notepad from my pocket.

“I was taking a smoke break, you know? We get ten whole minutes. Big deal.” She took a long drag, then blew smoke from the side of her mouth, away from me. “I saw the whole thing.”

“Saw what?”

“There was like, a fight or something.”

“James was fighting?”

She flicked an ash. “Well, he like, got out of the car, started to walk away.”

“What kind of car?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe a Honda. Dark. It had four doors, cuz the kid got out of the back seat. Anyway a lady in the car yelled, told him to come back.”

“What did she look like?”

“Couldn’t see her. Just heard her hollering. Mostly I saw the guy. He was older, like your age.”

I wrote, white male, late-thirties. “Describe him.”

“Kind of like... I don’t know.” She stared at the burning tip of her cigarette for inspiration. “George Clooney in that brother movie. The one he sang in.”

I had to scratch my head over that one. “
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
”

“Right. The guy had long raggedy hair and beard. I didn’t like that movie. Too weird.” She rubbed the empty hole of her lip piercing.

“About how tall, do you think? Dark or light hair?”

“Kind of average.” She shrugged and the two-inch long pendant hanging from her right ear swayed. “Brown hair, brown eyes.”

“But you didn’t see the woman.”

Down to the filter, she lit another cigarette with the butt of the first. “She never got out of the car.”

“What did the bearded guy do when James took off?”

“He goes and talks to the kid.” She ground the spent cig into the dirt of the planter.

“Did James get back in the car?”

“Didn’t look too happy, but he did.”

I fished Enrique’s photo out of my pocket, shielded it from the drizzle as I showed it to her. “I don’t suppose he was with them.” It wasn’t even a long shot. It was mere whimsy. But as long as I was here...

Emma took a look. “Nah. Just the baby the guy had.”

“He had a baby?”

“Yeah. Like, I don’t know, eight, nine months old. The baby was black, too.”

I didn’t know what to make of that little oddity. Was the baby adopted and they snatched James to give her an older brother? That was just plain goofy. “You’re sure they were headed to Greenville?”

“Heard the lady ask the scruffy guy how much farther it was.” She pinched the end of her half-smoked cigarette. “Oh, yeah. One more thing. It was beyond strange.”

“What’s that?”

“As they pulled out, I saw fire in the back seat.”

A tremor shivered down my spine. “The car was on fire?”

She shook her head. “Just a flame. Like a lighter or candle or something.”

“Could the lady have been lighting a cigarette?”

“If she was, it took her an effing long time. I could see the flame burning all through the parking lot. And they drove slow.” She got to her feet. “I gotta go.”

I dug a twenty from my pocket, handed it over. “Thanks.”

“Hey, anytime.” Emma grinned as she stuffed the money down her bra. There wasn’t a whole lot there to hold it in place.

I climbed back into the Escort, relieved to be out of the wet, and grabbed my cell. As I punched in my office number, I tried to ignore the sense of impending doom. “Sheri? I need you to check on any missing six- to ten-month olds in the Bay Area and greater Sacramento area. African-American.”

“Is this where I talk you down from the ledge?”

“Just do it.” I chewed on the inside of my mouth, too damn intrigued by the puzzle Emma had laid out for me. I pressed a thumb to the bridge of my nose. “Don’t give me any crap,” I said preemptively.

“What?”

“Get me a room in Greenville. The Gold Rush Inn isn’t a complete dump.”

“What happened to just one day?” She was laughing at me. Silently. I could sense it.

“The day’s half over. I need a little more time.”

I hung up before she started snickering, then switched off the phone and tossed it back on the seat. Besides the emergency mini-toiletries bag I kept in the trunk, there was a plastic Safeway bag stuffed with old T-shirts I’d planned to take to the thrift store. They were stained and full of holes, but there might be one decent enough to wear tomorrow. I could rinse my unmentionables in the bathroom sink.

Done ruminating on my wardrobe, I twisted the key in the ignition and backed away from the Golden Arches. As I drove back onto eastbound Highway 50, I could feel Greenville sucking at me like some evil Klingon tractor beam. With any luck I’d still be in one piece when the old hometown spit me out again.

I’d expected the Sacramento Valley suburban sprawl would have spread to Greenville in the twenty years since I’d escaped. It had nibbled at the edges a bit, creeping up the foothills starting at the western edge of the county, filling the empty rolling hills between oak trees. But the cookie-cutter housing developments with inspiring names like Valle Verde Vista and Sunset Equestrian Ranch petered out at about the 2000-foot elevation mark. Nothing competed for the space between oaks except a few scrub pines, some redbud and manzanita and the occasional rustic log home.

Oddly, Tommy receded in my mind not long after I’d crossed the Sac County line into Greenville County. Maybe he’d been elbowed out by the innumerable other ghosts that haunted my psyche now that I was on home turf. Knowing what kind of dark memories lurked deep in my brain cells, I wasn’t sure Tommy’s absence was a good thing.

I avoided Main Street once I’d passed into Greenville city limits, unwilling for the moment to confront that blast from the past. Instead I took the back road to the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office, a familiar track from days of old when Sheriff Kelsey caught me breaking windows or committing other minor acts of chicanery.

As I pulled into the parking lot, my ruined calf muscles sent a warning shot across the bow. Long car trips wreaked havoc with my leg, set off breath-stealing spasms. The dull ache I felt when I swung my foot to the pavement was only a precursor to the agony I’d feel when I tried to straighten and stand.

Hooking my fingers over the car door, I pushed myself up with my good leg and gritted my teeth as I unbent my left knee. I stood there, eyes shut as my knee throbbed, praying no one was watching. When the pain receded from excruciating to bearable, I shut the car door and made my way across the parking lot, pretending I wasn’t sweating from every pore.

Although the low-slung brick building housing the county sheriff’s office hadn’t changed a whit on the outside, it looked like the interior had been spruced up with another coat of beige paint. The chipped Formica reception desk in the lobby looked like the same one Miss Gladys Woodward had hunched over in my wild adolescence. Since Miss Woodward had been requisitioned from the same era as the desk, I half-expected she’d still be there, her pruney face even more convoluted than it had been two decades ago.

But instead, a young woman with a bad-hair-day coif smiled as I approached. “Can I help you?”

“Where’s Miss Woodward?” I looked around. Maybe they had her preserved in alcohol somewhere.

“I’m afraid she’s passed on.” Her smile faded for an appropriate moment, then she turned up the wattage again. “How can I help you?”

Julie Sweetzer, her name tag read, her badly fitting red and white striped shirt telling me she was a civilian. An evil impulse in my brain immediately labeled her Miss Sweet-as-pie.

“Is Deputy Ken Heinz in?”

“It’s
Sheriff
Heinz.” She looked offended in Ken’s stead. “I’m afraid he’s out. Can I take a message?”

“Where is he?” I looked past Miss Sweet-as-pie to where a female deputy sat behind a desk, a metal detector wand at the ready. Homeland security had even reached its tentacles here to Greenville.

She kept that smile fixed on her face. “I’m not at liberty to divulge Sheriff Heinz’s current location. But I’d be glad to take a message,” she told me cheerily.

I rarely let myself be thwarted by cheer. I leaned close to the reception desk and kept my voice low. “I’m sure you know Sheriff Heinz was with the San Francisco Police Department.” She nodded. “He’s my former partner. I drove over from San Francisco to discuss a case with him.”

“You’re a police officer?”

I always try to avoid the direct lie. “I really could use Ken’s input on this case.”

She stared at me, washed out blue eyes looking deep into my soul. She’d have a hard time finding one.

“He’s at the Jansen place.” She pulled a sticky pad over and scribbled an address. “You take Rock Creek Road out past County Line–”

I snatched the slip of paper from her. “I know where the Jansen place is.” Although since Bart Jansen had been older than dirt when I left Greenville, I doubted he was still in residence.

By continuing on the access road out of the sheriff’s headquarters, I sidestepped Main Street again as I cut over to Rock Creek. I caught a glimpse of Holy Rock Baptist church, its steeple still the highest structure in downtown Greenville. I had only the dimmest memories of walking into that church with my mother, sitting in a well worn Gold Rush era pew and admiring the particularly gory stained glass rendition of the crucifixion over the altar.

The Jansen place was three or four miles out of town, back in off Rock Creek a good mile or so. The fact that I could picture nearly every winding turn along the way before I hit it wasn’t comforting. Two decades should have obliterated the familiarity.

Anticipation of my upcoming reunion with Ken added to the anxiety stewing inside me. He’d been the perfect partner, damn near reading my mind when we were investigating a scene or interrogating a suspect. We could still be mowing down evil-doers in San Francisco if I hadn’t stepped over the line with him.

I nearly missed the turn into the Jansen’s driveway, despite the massive stone and concrete mailbox that had been installed there. Old Mr Jansen’s mailbox had been standard gray metal on a four-by-four; this new one was five feet tall and topped with the name
Markowitz
in six-inch-tall letters. Old Mr Jansen was used to finding his mailbox broken off at the base Sunday mornings after young Greenville miscreants such as myself cavorted through the countryside on Saturday nights with baseball bats in search of mailboxes to flatten. He had a stock of four-by-fours in his shed, ready to repair the damage.

Local juvenile delinquents wouldn’t put a dent in the Markowitz mailbox with anything short of dynamite. I guess big city transplants have no sense of humor.

The Markowitzes had also paved old Mr Jansen’s pothole pitted gravel drive, smoothed it out with a sheet of high-dollar asphalt. It would make the trek up the driveway less messy when the winter rains hit, but considering the lack of a culvert at the halfway point where heavy storms always laid a ribbon of rushing water, the drive would be impassable with the first winter deluge.

I pulled around the last turn into a clearing and my heart went pit-a-pat at my first view of two pretty red fire engines. Parked alongside were a fire truck, fire department SUV and an EMT rig. They’d apparently already quenched the blaze, leaving in black sodden ruin an out structure too big to be a shed, too small to be a barn. A detached garage maybe, a guess that was confirmed by a glimpse of what appeared to be the skeleton of a car under the collapsed roof.

The two-story behemoth that had replaced Jansen’s tidy frame house seemed untouched by flame. Lucky Mr Markowitz. As I did a U-turn in the driveway, parking my car off to the side to give clearance for the fire rigs, the EMT pulled out, no sirens, no lights. Apparently no injuries for the Markowitzes either, another stroke of good fortune.

I drew my creaky body from the Escort, a matchstick in my mouth to work off some of my nervous energy. As I tried to work some flexibility into my calf, I spotted a Crown Vic and Ford Explorer, both emblazoned with the Greenville County Sheriff emblem, parked over by the house. The fire companies were stowing their hose back in their engines, the captain chatting with a kid way too young to be wearing a deputy’s uniform. If Ken was here, I didn’t see him.