Clean Burn

by Karen Sandler

On the other hand, the amount of water dumped on the structure during suppression could wash away signs of ignition source or whatever accelerant might have been used. On top of that, a dozen firefighters likely had been tromping all through the garage. Their job was to knock down the fire, not preserve evidence for investigation. And after suppression came overhaul, where the firefighters moved or removed the contents of a structure to eliminate any hidden flames, glowing embers, or sparks to prevent the fire from rekindling.

  All that aside, Ed would wash his boots before entering. Dawn dishwashing liquid was the only thing approved to clean equipment in California. He’d use a separate pair of latex gloves for each sample he took. He’d also sometimes sample where he entered and exited.

  Ed had finished his photo circuit and started back toward his Expedition with the camera. I swept a hand toward the garage and asked Ken, “So what do you think happened?”

  “What do you see?” Ken asked.

  Everything I knew about incendiary fires, I’d learned in a book, so I had none of the practical knowledge that Ken had. I scanned the mess, tried to compare what I was seeing to the pictures from the books. “Everything inside’s pretty evenly burned,” I ventured.

  “What about the interior walls, particularly down close to the floor?”

  I scanned the sheetrock, soot-covered from the ragged upper edge to its junction with the concrete foundation.

  Rifling through my memory of the pages of Kirk’s Fire Investigation, a light bulb went on. “If it’s an accidental fire, you won’t see fire damage clear down to the bottom of the interior wall. There’ll be an unburned swath along the floor.”

  He nodded. “You see anything else?”

  I compared the destruction on the nearest side to the less- scathed opposite wall. “I’d guess the fire started over here.”

  “Possible. But you don’t want to start with assumptions.”

  Which I knew well enough from my work as a detective with SFPD. You start assuming things and you run the risk of trying to fit the facts to your theories instead of the other way around.

  “It also may not be an incendiary fire at all,” I said.

  “Maybe not. Before you think seriously in that direction-”

  “-you want to find at least three signs of arson,” I finished.

  Ed had entered the scene wearing latex gloves. With a trowel in one hand and a quart-sized paint can in the other, he moved through the debris, away from the location I’d guessed as the point of origin.

  The point of origin might seem like the obvious place to start sampling, but I knew you generally started at the area of least fire damage. Then you work your way backwards from there.

  Ed scooped up ash into the can and shut the lid, then scribbled on a tag he adhered to the can. He set the can down where he’d taken the sample, then stripped off his gloves and dropped them beside the can. He would set an identifying number beside each of his samples, then take a photo of the can, gloves and number.

  “Could it have been an electrical fire?” I asked as Ed moved off to his next sampling spot.

  “You heard Markowitz,” Ken said. “He wouldn’t trust his baby to anything but the best. It was a brand new garage. All the electrical was pristine and to code.”

  “Could the bastard have torched it himself for insurance?”

  “Possible. But as pissed as he is, I doubt it. Although...” Ken rubbed his chin, a gesture I remembered from our time together. I always teased him that that was the way he activated his brain. “Markowitz is a recent divorcee. Nasty custody dispute.”

  “So this could be the ex-wife’s revenge.”

  Ken’s gaze slid over towards me. “She’d know where to stick the knife.”

  Like I did. The message seemed to dangle in the air between us. He turned away, retracing our path around the front of the garage. “If you have a reason for being here, get to it.”

  I hurried after him the best I could, limping along on the uneven ground. “I just had a couple of questions.”

  As I caught up with him at the Explorer, I reached in my back pocket for the photographs. He put out a hand to stop me. “This better not be about some damned wayward husband.”

  “It’s not a divorce case.”

  “Cheating spouses hit a little too close to home.”

  “It’s kids. Missing kids. Two boys.”

  There was a time, before we lost our grip on the grenade that destroyed our partnership, I would have had him hooked, just like that. He’d been even more of a sucker for the lost kids than I’d been. He’d actually had a heart, as opposed to the chip of ice lodged in my chest.

  Considering I’d let my fixation with fire completely sidetrack my supposed goal here—discovering what had happened to James and Enrique -I had no right to judge

  Ken for his disinterest. Even still, seeing not even a flicker of reaction in his face surprised me.

  He wrenched open the door to the Explorer. “Take it up with one of my deputies.”

  I wedged myself in front of him before he could climb into the Ford. “This is James Madison. Eleven years old. That’s a pretty recent photo.” I pulled out the other picture. “And this is Enrique Lopez. Three and a half. He was two here.”

  Ken shouldered me aside and slipped past me into his truck. “I have a half-dozen runaways of my own on the department bulletin board.”

  Blocking him from shutting the door, I shoved James’s photo under Ken’s nose. “Have you seen him in Greenville?”

  He gave the picture a cursory glance before pushing it aside. “No.”

  I pushed it back in his face. “He’s been gone three months. He was last seen on his way to Greenville.”

  “I haven’t seen him, Janelle.” He started the engine.

  Still standing my ground beside the open door, I switched to the other photo. “How about him?”

  Ken barely looked at it. “Nope.”

  “His druggie mother supposedly sent him here to live with his grandmother. A Mrs. Lopez.”

  “Damned common name.” He tried to reach the door handle.

  I planted my butt in the way. “A town this small, you know everyone. Is there a Mrs. Lopez in Greenville who might be the boy’s grandmother?”

  “If I tell you, will you let me shut the damn door?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t bother to cross my fingers.

  He glanced down at the photo of Enrique. He was trying not to show it, but I could see that sweet baby face had tugged at him. “There was a Mrs. Lopez living in the Stuarts’s place. But she’s gone.”

  “How long ago?”

  “It’s been three or four months. The Stuarts said they went to check on her when she was late with the rent and she’d cleared out. Their daughter lives in the house now.” He reached for the handle again.

  I kept to my post by the door. “Where’d Mrs. Lopez go?”

  Ken gave me a not so gentle tap with his elbow. “Out of Greenville, that’s for sure.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  “I’m not the post office, Janelle.” That elbow dug in a little deeper.

  “Someone must know. A neighbor. Someone she went to church with.”

  “You know how it is around here. People pretty much keep to themselves.”

  I knew that all too well. “Did she have a child with her?”

  “As far as I know, she lived alone.”

  He was really starting to piss me off, and not because of that elbow drilling into my ribs. There are barriers you put up in the City, self-defense against the crap you see there. This wasn’t protective walls I was seeing in Ken, but the development of small-town mentality after only three years living in Greenville.

  If he didn’t actually see it happening he could ignore it. Sheriff Kelsey had been a master at closing his eyes to unpleasantness. I wouldn’t have thought Ken would have fallen in that trap.

  I leaned into the Explorer. “How would you know she lived alone? She could have kept a kid lo
cked in the basement, could have beat him every night and you wouldn’t know the difference.”

  Ken got the bulldog look I remembered from San Francisco. “If she’d had a boy living with her, I would have known.”

  I stuffed the photos back in my pocket. “Not much has changed here, has it?”

  Ken angled from the Explorer. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You and Sheriff Kelsey, I bet you’re good buddies. I bet the pair of you yuk it up about wife-beating husbands who keep the little woman in line. Who pound their kids into a bloody pulp in the name of discipline.”

  Color purpled Ken’s face. “Now wait just one damn minute-”

  I flung an arm in his general direction. Left leg begging for mercy, I ran toward my car.

  I don’t know what I thought I’d accomplish by cranking the Escort’s wimpy engine and tearing out of there. Just being in Greenville made me twitchy, and Ken’s transformation into a Sheriff Kelsey clone just about put me over the edge.

  I knew I wouldn’t get very far. Ken’s souped up Explorer could outrun my puny Escort without even trying. I’d just fishtailed onto the county road back toward town when he hit the siren. I kept going another half-mile, the wig-wags glaring red and blue in my rearview mirror. Not exactly a high-speed chase, since I barely broke fifty in the forty-five mph zone.

  I wrenched the wheel right into the next turnout and killed the engine. I felt prickly all over, about ready to run screaming from the car and into the surrounding oaks and pines. With my luck I’d hit a patch of poison oak and be itching for real before the day was out.

  Just to be perverse, I grabbed my registration from the glove box and tugged my license out as Ken came up alongside my car. I rolled down the window and held my documentation out to him as he leaned down.

  “Put it away,” he told me.

  “I was speeding.”

  “I don’t give a damn.” He held out his hand. “Show me the pictures again.”

  I retrieved them from my back pocket. He took one in each hand and gave them a good long look. In the end, he shook his head. “If they’ve been here, I haven’t seen them.”

  I took them back. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Follow me into town. Let me see what I can find on Mrs. Lopez.”

  I wanted to say no just for spite, but that would have been stupid. “Sure. Thanks.”

  I watched him in the side-view mirror as he ambled on back to the Explorer. Allowed myself the briefest flashback of the first time we met, shaking his hand, feeling the spark.

  Then I squelched the memory like I would a lit match, blowing it out, mentally grinding it into the dirt. I had to keep that flame dead cold, or it would burn me as surely as a glowing match tip.

  CHAPTER 4

  Rule number one of police work: never get naked with your partner. If that’s not the number one rule, it should be, especially if said partner is married.

  Ken Heinz and I ignored the physical signals zinging between us for the first four years of our partnership. At first we were too busy hating each other’s guts as new partners. I thought I knew everything, had no respect for the eight years Ken had on me with the department. To Ken, I was not only an idiot, I was a dangerous idiot, too stupid to know when I was putting myself in peril. I didn’t do much to change his mind about that during our time together, but I at least curbed the urge to display those self-destructive tendencies.

  Once detestation segued into grudging acceptance, hormones started their ugly dance. The attraction blindsided me. I usually hooked up with men from the bottom of the barrel with souls as sick as mine. Ken was actually a pretty nice guy. But a married nice guy, which was probably what got my twisted psyche worked up.

  I liked to tell myself it had just been physical between us. The sex had been phenomenal, even though it had only lasted a couple of months. But I would have laid down my life for that man, on and off the job. I couldn’t say that about any of the sleaze balls I’d played mattress tag with in the years since Ken left.

  For two months, the nightmares vanished. I put away the matches. The sounds and sights of fire engines barely raised an antenna. I let myself believe that Ken had healed me.

  Then his wife Tara arrived home early from a trip to her mother’s in Petaluma. And there we were, violating Ken’s marital vows on the living room sofa.

  After the disaster of that one desperate call to Ken, I shut him out. Barely spoke to him as we worked, avoided him completely during our off hours. The final blow, I requested a change of partner, taking on a rookie when I despised rookies. After three weeks of the cold shoulder from me, Ken had applied for a job with Greenville county sheriff’s department. A month after that, he was gone, Tara with him.

  I pulled into the sheriff’s office parking lot the second time that day, still marveling at the novelty of driving up to the low, brick building voluntarily and in my own set of wheels. A refreshing change from two-plus decades ago, when my usual mode of transport was the back seat of the sheriff’s car, with my wrists jammed behind me in cuffs.

  Ken waited for me by the entrance, got to enjoy the sight of me grimacing as I unfolded my leg from the car, then hobbling along those first ten, twenty feet until the worst of the knots released. Considering the animosity he still harbored toward me, I’m sure he was enjoying every excruciating step I took.

  He pulled the glass door open for me. “How’s the leg?”

  I sucked in a breath. “Functioning. Most days it doesn’t hurt like hell.” Except like now, when a white-hot knife blade was slashing its way through my calf as I followed him past the receptionist.

  “I thought about calling you when I heard.”

  “Just as well you didn’t. I wasn’t in a frame of mind to talk to anyone.” Besides which, his wife Tara was probably checking their phone records.

  He waited while the deputy wanded me. The metal detector went wild when the young woman waved it over my left calf.

  I hiked up my jeans to show her the scars. “Bionic leg,” I explained. I had a card from my doctor I used when going through airport security, but with Ken’s blessing I didn’t need to produce it.

  We continued on through a door labeled “No Admittance” and down a long hallway carpeted with mushroom gray indoor-outdoor. Ken’s office was the last one on the left, his name on an engraved plastic placard by the door.

  “I bought a card,” he said. “Never sent it.”

  “I was pretty inundated with that crap.” Not entirely a lie. The department sent me flowers and a single card signed by most of the detectives. At that point in my career, I’d alienated pretty much everyone in the squad.

  He motioned me to a chair. “I was surprised to hear you quit.”

  I sank down on the molded plastic chair, barely holding back a moan of relief. “Being chained to a desk and shuffling paperwork was a real dream job, but it was time for the party to end.”

  I looked around at the cluttered space that passed for his office. The dimensions were barely bigger than the shoebox I worked in, and he’d managed to crowd in even more furniture. Besides the desk, piled high with reports and miscellaneous paperwork, he had a computer desk with a desktop model tucked beneath it, a printer/ fax/scanner combo beside the monitor, twice as many file cabinets as I had, and a waist-high refrigerator with a microwave on top of it. The coffee maker sat on the microwave.

  “All the luxuries,” I noted.

  “Some perks in being top dog.”

  An array of photos on the wall above the computer caught my eye. I recognized the smiling woman in the leftmost picture as his sister, her long blonde hair brushing the cheeks of the towhead baby girl on her lap. Next to that one, Ken’s niece looked to be about six years old and his sister’s smile wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. The remaining three in the gallery featured the niece by herself, progressively older in soccer and baseball uniforms. The last photo was a school shot of a defiant adolescent.

  As Ken moved toward his desk, I blo
cked him. “Something I need to say.” I’d rehearsed on my way over here and had to get the words out before I wimped.

  He eyed me suspiciously. “What?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looked confused for a moment, then pushed past me to his chair. “I called on the way here. There was no forwarding address for Mrs. Lopez at the post office.”

  “Let me finish. I screwed up your life. Your marriage. Was an asshole afterward.”

  “Have you been watching Oprah?” He pushed back in his chair as if he didn’t like being so close to me. “Is this some kind of 12 Steps crap?”

  “Can’t a person just be sorry? If I hurt you-”

  “I’d have to care about you to be hurt, Janelle.”

  That knocked the wind out of me, left me struggling to get my bearings again. Ken avoided my gaze, cutting me even more adrift.

  “Anyway...” Damn it all, my voice was quivering. “Sorry.”

  Silence stretched until I thought its weight would crush me. I focused back on the lifeline of Mrs. Lopez. “Was there any mail left in her box?”

  Ken still wouldn’t look at me. Anger warred with a nagging ache.

  “You want me to take back the damn apology?” I asked him.

  Finally he turned toward me. “I want you to drop it. I’d like it better if we’d never...” He shook his head. “Mrs. Lopez didn’t get her mail here in Greenville at all.”

  “Not even general delivery?”

  “They had no record of it.”

  Was the woman hiding? With a daughter involved with drug dealers, maybe that was how she kept herself safe. “Would the Stuarts know where she went?”

  “Maybe. They’re in South America for most of April. Their son’s on a mission in Peru.”

  I dug my fingers into the clot of pain in my calf. Better that than what I was feeling inside. “The neighbors?”

  “The Stuart place is on ten acres at the end of a dirt road,” he said. “The nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. The only reason I remember Mrs. Lopez at all is that she called about an intruder. Turned out a raccoon was digging through her trash.”

  A paranoid woman might interpret marauding forest creatures as a threat. “Could she have moved down into Sacramento?”