Clean Burn (9 page)

“Do you like my hair?” Cassie asked.

It looked as if a reverse skunk had plopped on her head, but I didn’t tell her that. “What does your uncle think?”

She nudged me into the kitchen where Ken bent over the open oven door. “He hates it, which is the whole point.” She whispered in my ear, “It washes out, but I haven’t told him that.”

The kitchen was a little worn around the edges, the butcher block island in the middle scarred by years of the attentions of chef’s knives, the rustic wood cabinets with dark metal handles stuck in the seventies. Past the breakfast bar, the big trestle table in the dining room with its mismatched chairs had the hallmarks of a yard sale purchase. I guessed that after buying the property, there wasn’t much spare change for kitchen remo.

Ken pulled out a broiler pan filled with fat burger patties and set it on the stove. While Ken served up the burgers on buns, Cassie dumped a couple cans of cling peaches in a bowl. A basket of French fries already steamed on the kitchen table.

Aside from blackened edges, the burgers weren’t bad. Stuffed with green chilies and jack cheese and paired with a mondo bun, they made for a jaw-stretching mouthful. I slathered mine with salsa and shut my eyes in carnivorous bliss with every bite.

Cassie wolfed hers down in record time, shoving in one last French fry before pushing back from the table. She didn’t quite make it to her feet before Ken glared at her. “Cassie–”

The phone rang, freeze-framing the looming showdown between Ken and his niece. When Cassie looked ready to bolt, Ken aimed his index finger at her, cocked like a gun. “Sit. Don’t move.” Her expression mutinous, Cassie flopped back down.

Just as the answering machine clicked on, Ken grabbed the portable from the breakfast bar. He barked a greeting into the phone, then with an apologetic glance my way, walked off toward the living room, leaving me with a half-eaten burger and a seething teenager.

“Am I supposed to sit here all night?” she huffed.

I took another bite, mumbling out an answer around a mouthful of beef and bun. “Sure he’ll be back soon.”

She fixed her blue gaze on me, her amped-up righteous indignation fading a bit. “So, did you know my mom?” Her voice broke on the last syllable.

I didn’t see how I could avoid that minefield. “She came down to the station once or twice.”

Cassie picked at her paper napkin. “She’s way prettier than you.”

“I think we’ve established that.”

Her hand closed over the napkin, squeezing it into a tight ball. “She’s coming back.”

Beneath her declaration, I could hear her plea for confirmation. I gave her a non-committal shrug as I munched my way through my burger.

She rolled the napkin between her hands, compressing it even smaller. “Mom’s just been waiting for the diabetes to settle down. As soon as I let her know I have my insulin under control, she’ll come get me.”

The look on Cassie’s face told me that even she didn’t believe her fairytale. She knew that a mom who never called her daughter, who didn’t “stay in touch,” wasn’t likely to ever want her back. No doubt she’d mentioned her mother to me – a near stranger – in hopes I’d buy into her fantasy so she could convince herself she believed.

That would have been even crueler than leaving Cassie high and dry the way Melinda had. I wouldn’t tell Ken’s niece what I really thought, that her mother was a worthless excuse for humanity. But I wouldn’t join her in her land of denial.

The moment Ken returned, Cassie fell back on her scowling teenager persona again. “How long are you going to keep me chained to this table?”

Ken dropped the phone back on the counter with a clatter. “Did you adjust your insulin?”

Cassie fussed with the box at her waist. “There, it’s perfect.”

She was up and pushing her chair in when Ken caught her again. “Your homework?”

“If you’ll release me from custody, I’ll go do it.”

He waved her off and she flounced out of the room without clearing her place. “Cassie, your dishes,” Ken called after her, but her footsteps already pounded up the stairs.

Ken rubbed a hand across his face. “Are all thirteen year-old girls as mouthy as her?”

“Could be worse,” I told him.

“How?” he asked around a mouthful of fries.

“You know how,” I said. “You saw enough of it in the City. Sex, drugs, and alcohol. Speaking of which, that McPherson stinks like a distillery.”

“Yeah.” Ken swirled a cold French fry in ketchup. “He has a cot in his office, sleeps it off there if he’s had too much.”

“The kids must smell it on his breath,” I said. “I certainly did.”

“Cassie’s mentioned it. She thinks it’s pretty gross. Enough that she doesn’t seem to have any inclination to drink herself.”

Hip-hop music started up, vibrating through the walls, the lyrics a harsh mix of misogyny and homophobia. Ken winced at the volume. “Why is she so pissed at me all the time?”

“You know it isn’t about you.”

“Her mother. Yeah. Therapist told me that much.”

“She still seeing a shrink?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Cassie stopped talking to the woman. Waste of money having her sit there, stone silent.”

Stone silent and hemorrhaging inside from the pain. I fidgeted with the fries left on my plate and tried not to think about it. “Who was on the phone?”

Good God, the man was blushing. “Julie Switzer.” His gaze riveted on his plate. “She had some paperwork to discuss.”

What kind of paperwork would Miss Sweet-as-pie need to mull over with Ken at 7.45 in the evening? I suspected it had nothing to do with police work.

I was dying to know if this was a two-way romance, or unrequited love on Miss Sweet-as-pie’s part, but Ken had filled his mouth with a chunk of burger big enough to choke a horse. He didn’t look eager to share the details of his conversation with Julie.

I picked up my plate and reached for Cassie’s. Ken grabbed for it at the same moment. “I’ll get that.”

I didn’t back away and his hand brushed against mine. As if we were hero and heroine in some sappy romance novel, we locked gazes and leaned in closer. I actually looked down at his mouth and fantasized about kissing him.

Then I came to my senses and backed away, rubbing my wrist against the side of my jeans. I thought about making a joke about wiping away boy cooties, but I was a little afraid my voice would shake if I spoke.

I filled my empty hand with the bowl of peaches, nearly jettisoning the last two lonely slices onto the linoleum. As I followed Ken into the kitchen, I was determined to pretend I hadn’t just had a Harlequin moment.

I set the plate and bowl beside the sink. “So,” I said, pouncing on a conversational gambit, “no one new after Tara?”

He upended the contents of the fruit bowl into the garbage disposal. “No time. What about you?”

Figuring he wasn’t asking about the parade of one-night stands, I racked my brain for a G-rated answer. “Believe it or not, there was one guy, about a year ago.”

He slotted plates and bowl into the dishwasher. I had one of those in my tiny kitchen, but it didn’t do a very good job with take-out boxes. “What happened?” The silverware clattered as he dropped them in from a height.

“He wanted a family, can you believe it? That wasn’t going to happen.” He hadn’t exactly been someone whose gene pool should have been extended anyway.

Shutting the dishwasher, Ken straightened, leaned his hip against the counter. His blue eyes fixed on me, and I experienced a sudden flashback of the way he’d looked at the moment of climax.

Caught up in sexual fantasy, Ken’s question flew at me from left field. “Do you still have the nightmares?”

I let out a half-assed laugh. “Which one? There have been so many.”

“Tommy.”

I turned away, my skin prickling. “I never even think about Tommy.” I stared at the floor, not wanting Ken to see the lie in my face.

“Do you still visit Maynard?”

He meant Maynard Frye, aka, the sickest bastard on the planet. Just because I liked to drop in at San Quentin, satisfy myself that Tommy Phillips’s murderer was still under lock and key, didn’t mean I had some kind of hang-up about him.

Even still, I didn’t want to admit it to Ken. “What business is it of yours?”

Before I figured out what he was doing, he grabbed my hand, pushed up my sleeve. I tried to twist my arm so he wouldn’t see the freshest marks, but he held me fast.

“You’re still burning yourself.”

I tugged my arm free. “A girl’s got to have a hobby.”

His gaze narrowed on me. “I’ve never understood. Your father did this to you. Why would you do it to yourself?”

The department shrink had told me that deep down inside, I thought I deserved the punishment. Because of Tommy and all my other failures as a cop. Because I thought my mother wouldn’t have died if she’d loved me enough. I never believed his bullshit.

“Have you considered maybe I just like the pain?” I said it lightly, trying to make a joke out of the bald-ass truth. “If you don’t care about me, why the hell are you even asking?”

Color rose in his cheeks again and he looked away. “Maybe because I did care once.”

No damn way I was following up on that one. I shifted gears to something with a little less emotional baggage. “What do you know about Paul Beck?”

Ten full seconds of silence ticked away before he answered. “He’s been here six months. Previously registered in San Diego County.”

“What was the charge?”

“Lewd and lascivious with a child under twelve. But as far as I know, he’s never been near San Francisco.”

“He could have had someone bring him one of the boys. You can arrange just about anything over the internet.”

A light bulb went on in Ken’s eyes. “The librarian told me Beck surfs the web once or twice a week. Uses the library’s internet.”

“How close a watch does Big Brother keep on computer users?” I asked.

“They have filtering software so he couldn’t access kiddy porn websites.”

“Do they censor email?”

“No.”

“What about chatrooms?” I asked. “Facebook? MySpace? Lots of ways to contact an underage target.”

Wincing, Ken pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll call the librarian in the morning. See if I can get a record of which sites Beck has been visiting.”

The stomp of footsteps on the stairs had me yanking my sleeve down to cover my multitude of sins. Not that I was ashamed, mind you; I just didn’t want to give Cassie any ideas.

Ken’s niece launched into an elaborate story about a get-together at the electronics store. She insisted she had to go, that every other kid in the universe would be there. Ken played the, “It’s a school night” card, Cassie’s pleas segued into a high-volume whine and Ken yelled louder. His voice carried to the front door as I slithered through it.

Too much of a coward to stay and listen to their wrangling, I nevertheless marveled over one aspect of Ken’s interaction with his niece. He cared about where she went and who she would be with. He’d raised nothing but his voice. A damned novelty in my experience.

The Gold Rush Inn was about a twenty minute drive from Ken’s house. There had been a second motel in Greenville once, but it had apparently been converted into a continuation school since I’d left. Exactly the sort of place the Greenville Unified School District would have sent me if they’d had the option back in the day.

If the Gold Rush Inn had been updated in the intervening decades, the changes escaped my notice. There was still the massive statuary of a gold panner holding up a neon sign, half the lettering in “Gold Rush” flickering intermittently. The anonymous 49er had been gilded as if poked by an ersatz Midas. I say ersatz because the gilding had worn through on Mr Gold Rush’s knees, elbows, and the creases of his jacket, revealing the black metal beneath.

There was one surprising upgrade to the property, high speed internet in all the rooms. It cost me ten bucks extra per day, but that was a small price to pay for contact with the outside world.

Room 106, described by the owner as a deluxe accommodation, sat at the far end of the complex, a stone’s throw from Highway 50. No worries that my sleep would be disturbed by the country quiet; I’d have the rumble of passing semis rattling the walls of my room all night long. More used to the rowdy screams of partying neighbors than traffic sounds, I wasn’t counting on much slumber.

The deluxe bed that I settled on with my laptop was a lumpy queen-size rather than the double in most of the rooms. The television had a working remote – permanently affixed to the nightstand – and the carpet had only unraveled in one or two spots. Clearly, I was living in the lap of luxury.

Once I’d logged into the wireless network, quaintly named The Gold Rush Innternet, I checked email, then brought up my instant message window. A quick scan of which of my “special friends” were online didn’t turn up the one I was looking for.

So I fired off an email and waited. A few minutes later, after several games of Spider, my computer mooed and “luvzboyz” came online. An undercover Fresno cop who hung out in chatrooms frequented by slimeballs, he’d made a name for himself nailing child molesters.

A request to go private flashed on my screen. I clicked the link and waited.

What’s up, gimpgirl?
popped up in my IM box.
Long time no chat
.

Need some info
, I typed back.
A Northern California request for one or two boys. Three months ago
.

There was one in Santa Rosa
, luvzboyz entered.
One boy, under four. Popped up a month ago. Don’t know if the order was filled. Still tracking that one
.

I’m looking for two
. I typed in what I knew so far about Enrique and James, then uploaded their pictures.
Might be a Greenville connection
.

After a long pause during which I wondered if he’d logged off, luvzboyz typed,
Nothing about kids in Greenville. Heard about that string of arsons, though. Might have a lead on a firestarter
.

Information like that could be a real gift. Wouldn’t help my cause with Enrique and James, but might give me some leverage with Ken.
Be glad for the information
.