Clean Burn

by Karen Sandler

  We set a time, then I disconnected. I hustled out of the sheriff’s station to my car, then let the ugly sobs rip from my throat. When I was done, I swabbed the wet from my eyes with the hem of my grody T-shirt, then drove to the Gold Rush Inn.

  After a few restless hours sleep, I got to Emil’s ten minutes late to find waiting for me in a booth. There were two cups of coffee on the table, mine properly dosed with sugar and creamer. It was lukewarm, but I gulped it down to forestall the conversation I knew was coming.

  If I’d hoped to slurp up one cup of java then get on the road, I was disappointed when Diana made her way over with two plates piled high with breakfast. A stack of pancakes and scrambled eggs for Ken and a greasy Hangtown Fry for me, an omelet packed with oysters and bacon. A guilty pleasure of mine, and of course he knew it.

  Ken drowned his flapjacks in syrup, then set the pitcher aside. He speared me with his irresistible blue gaze. “You could stay, you know.”

  I ducked my head to address my Fry, but damn, a part of me wanted to. To risk the crap I would make both our lives. “That’s not a good idea.”

  He carefully cut a bite of pancakes. “Why not?”

  I tried to craft a lie that would make him mad, that would forever cut him off from me. Nothing but the bare-knuckle truth came to mind.

  “Because I’m sick, Ken. Sick in the mind, sick in the heart, sick in the soul.” My throat tightened. “Putrid sick.”

  “No. You’re not.”

  “You don’t know a tenth of what goes on inside me. What I keep on a leash. I take up with you, let the prison walls soften up, and all that sickness escapes. All over you and me both.” I felt the hard knot of it burn inside me. “It’s better to keep it inside.”

  His mouth tightened in a hard line. He didn’t believe that I was so irretrievable, but he at least understood the magnitude of the barriers between us. “You think you might go back to it? Finding lost kids?”

  I’d considered it. Except for Brandon, the kids were safe, back where they belonged. Happy ending all around. Nearly.

  “I don’t think so,” I said finally. “It’s better if I don’t care too much.”

  “Better for who?” he asked, then he waved away the question, and changed the subject. “Are you sure you don’t want me there when you do it?”

  “I’m sure. The fire marshal’s got it all set up. We won’t need you.” That was part of the ugliness I didn’t want to risk him seeing. I wasn’t entirely sure how it would be for me.

  I forced myself to finish the breakfast he’d bought me. When he walked me to my car, I let him hug me, kiss my cheek. I promised I’d keep in touch, although it was a foolhardy commitment.

  I drove off, avoiding a glance in the rear view mirror. I didn’t want that last look at him.

  I traced the familiar path over to Lime Kiln, turned at the weathered sign lettered with the name “Watkins.” Parked my Escort out of the way of the two fire engines, the fire truck, and battalion chief’s Expedition. Someone had brush-hogged blackberry brambles and manzanita for thirty feet on all four sides.

  Peterson approached as I eased myself from my car. “It’s all ready,” he said.

  Someone had already been inside pouring a trail of gasoline throughout the interior. It had taken some arm- twisting, but the fire marshal agreed to let me toss the Molotov cocktail. After all, it was my property I was letting them burn for their training exercise.

  With firefighters at the ready to constrain the fire to the old cabin, Peterson lit the wick of the gas-filled beer bottle. I allowed myself only an instant to admire the flame before I flung it through the cabin’s open door. The fire took hold with startling rapidity, greedily licking at the floor and spreading toward the door and windows. My heart lifted at the sight of the brilliant sherbet orange flames, the deep black smoke. I imagined my father inside, burning to death. Other than Michelle, he was the only human being on the planet I would have wished that torture.

  But it wasn’t my father I saw inside in the last moments of the holocaust, just before the company started their planned suppression. It was Tommy, looking like he was standing in a protective halo of white light. His sad eyes softened as they stared at me and for the first time in eight years, that vision smiled at me.

  I staggered back, terrified and jubilant all at once. Stared, thunderstruck, as Tommy vanished in a cloud of steam. As the smoke thrust its tail into the sky, I imagined that towhead boy following it up to heaven.

  Dear Reader,

  The story for CLEAN BURN started as a romance novel. At the time, I was trying to break in at Harlequin, the megolithic publisher of “category” romances. Unfortunately, my characters and plot line were a little too edgy for Harlequin, so that romantic suspense never went anywhere.

  Some years later when I’d burned out on writing romances (at that point I’d published 17 books, ten of those for Harlequin), I decided to revisit my romantic suspense story. I ripped out all but a shred of the romance. I created an even edgier story line, getting inspiration for my heroine, Janelle, from a real life L.A. County homicide detective named Bill Gleason.

  Former Detective Gleason, who was on the scene when Charles Manson was arrested, moved to Northern California’s Gold Country after retiring from L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. During his retirement in the late 1990s/early 2000s, he donated time to the National Center for Missing or Exploited Children.

  Another thread of the story sprang from an incident in the late 1980s in which a family lived in an RV on an isolated parcel owned by the Bureau of Land Management. The father was a monster who both physically and sexually abused his wife and children. There was a fire in the RV which led to the discovery of the family and their horrid situation.

  I love how real life details can get woven into fiction, and I make a point of tucking away interesting tidbits I pick up in newspapers or on the Web. I also love how CLEAN BURN and Janelle are an amalgam of fact and my own imagination.

  I hope you’ve enjoyed Janelle’s story. If you have, I would greatly appreciate it if you could post a review on the site where you bought the book or on Goodreads. It helps other readers discover my work.

  Karen Sandler

  About the Author

  Karen Sandler published numerous romances for adults in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, then shifted to crime fiction with the Janelle Watkins mystery series that includes CLEAN BURN and HANGTOWN. She’s also the author of the Tankborn Trilogy (TANKBORN, AWAKENING, REBELLION), young adult science fiction from Lee and Low Books. In addition to writing novels, Karen loves horseback riding and is an avid folk dancer. She lives in Northern California with her husband and dance partner, Gary, and two cats—pleasingly plump Tenka and formerly feral Zak.

  Excerpt from Book Two in the Janelle Watkins Investigations series:

  HANGTOWN

  Chapter 1

  Still spitting nails over my latest confrontation with the Greenville County building department, I came home to a five-foot-two, fourteen-year-old, pony-tailed problem on my front doorstep.

  Cassie Heinz sat hugging her backpack on the trio of cinderblocks I used to step into my wreck of a home—an unrestored 1974 Vogue Motor Home. With my ruined left leg, I needed some help to heave myself up those 18 inches into the door, hence my makeshift front porch.

  A string of bad luck and circumstances had rousted me from my happy home in the Excelsior district of San Francisco three months ago. Having been dumped back in the personal cesspool that is Northern California’s Greenville, I needed a place to live that wouldn’t eat too voraciously into my savings.

  The acre of land outside Greenville city limits that Clement Watkins, my late, unlamented monster of a father, had bequeathed to me was dirt cheap, i.e., free. And when I went through the tax records, I discovered a bonus—an adjacent five acres of Watkins land that ran clear down to Pleasant Creek.

  Unfortunately, I’d burned down the only structure on those rocky manzanita and blackberry-choked pa
rcels. Destroying the old cabin had been my way of cleansing the past from my present. I would never have slept in that derelict pile of dry-rotted timbers anyway, it having been the setting for my many nightmares, both sleeping and waking. But had I known I’d end up back in Greenville, I might have preserved the front porch and bunked there.

  I’m not the type to camp under a manzanita shrub and my shot-up leg would never have survived that kind of treatment anyway. So I had to dole out a few precious shekels on the motor home and the fee to deliver it. A water tank and the monthly water deliveries, plus the occasional visit from a septic pumper put a further dent in my finances. However, I had a fine view out my front door of the rubble of the cabin I had let the Greenville Fire Department burn down as an exercise for the rookies.

  I pulled up as close to the Vogue as I could, then I levered myself out of my dirty beige Ford Escort. “I’m calling your uncle!” I shouted by way of greeting to the ponytailed blonde. Her uncle, Ken Heinz, was Greenville County’s sheriff, my former partner at SFPD and my occasional lover.

  “I don’t care!” Cassie snarled back. “I won’t go home with him!”

  In the last month, two or three times a week, Cassie had taken the school bus to the end of my road instead of to her Uncle Ken’s house. Sometimes I didn’t discover her squatting on my cinderblock porch until dinner time, and I had to feed her Pop Tarts and soda while we waited for Ken to arrive. At least today it was only 3:30, so I could skip the part about playing hostess.

  “You can’t stay with me,” I told her as I limped toward the Vogue. “Hardly room enough for me.”

  “Give me a blanket, I’ll just sleep outside,” she said with a stubborn thrust of her chin.

  I eyed the stomach-baring red crop top Cassie wore, paired with a barely legal denim skirt. “You’ll freeze your ass off. And I’m guessing you don’t have a spare insulin cartridge in your backpack.”

  Her gaze dropped for an instant, so I knew my guess had hit the mark. But then she stood up, blocking me from my own door.

  A formidable barrier even though the top of Cassie’s black-streaked blond head came barely to my chin. Diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes three years ago then abandoned by her mother soon after, she had some sharp edges that rivaled the razor wire I had wrapped around myself.

  Mixed up as Cassie was, she hated the uncle who took her in when her mother gave up on her. Her life only got more complicated a little over a year ago when a mass murderer had kidnapped her, and her uncle had helped to rescue her. I had been there too, and since she hated Ken, I was the one she focused on as her hero.

  I wanted to whip out my cell and call Ken just like I had two days ago and four days before that. Minimize the time spent with a needy teenager who’d picked me, the most non-maternal woman ever born, to glom onto for support. Just because I wasn’t her uncle and I wasn’t her mother, and I never made fragile promises to her.

  But I left my phone in my pocket. “Get out of my way and we’ll go inside.”

  She smiled, her blue eyes lighting up for an instant. Then she remembered her surly teenager persona, and she gave me a half-hearted sneer.

  But she moved aside, pulling her backpack out of my way. I stepped up onto the first cinderblock with my right foot, but lost my balance a little as I brought my left leg up beside it. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Cassie’s hands twitching as if she was about to reach out to steady me. She didn’t, not out of meanness, but because she had a certain amount of respect for people who do for themselves.

  I hobbled into my euphemistically named kitchen and grabbed two bottles of water from the bar-sized fridge. I handed Cassie one and she slumped on the thinly padded bench behind my dinette table.

  The most charitable thing you could say about the Vogue was that it was compact. There was seating with a view in the front end—the driver and passenger seats facing the broad windshield. Combo kitchen and eating area took up the middle—the propane fridge, one burner stove, tiny sink, bench with dinette table, a thin slice of counter opposite.

  I’d replaced a lower cupboard with a filing cabinet, and that plus the printer-scanner on top of it constituted my office. The no-elbow-room toilet/shower was crammed next to the dinette.

  My bedroom took up the back end. Enough elbow room surrounding the double bed for a little end table on one side and a laundry pile at its foot. Despite the cramped quarters, I toyed with the idea of locking myself in that bedroom to escape this raging hormonal teen.

  My cell vibrated in the back pocket of my jeans. Cassie’s head swung up. “Is that Uncle Ken?”

  “You’ve been here three seconds,” I said, slipping out the phone. “How could I have texted him already?”

  She had those magic thumbs that all teens seemed to have, so she could probably have texted out the Constitution in less than three seconds. I tapped the cell’s screen to read the message. The unfamiliar phone number had a San Francisco area code.

  Cnt gt u outa my mind. Msg me.

  A teardrop-shaped emoji followed the text of the message. What the hell? A prank text? Some drunk guy who’d dialed me by mistake? And what was that emoji supposed to mean?

  It wasn’t as if my cell was unlisted. It was on my pitiful excuse for a website—nothing but a home page listing my services—skip-trace, infidelity investigation, insurance fraud. A former miscreant named Darren, now an IT director at some hotshot startup, had set it up for me as a favor.

  But Darren had converted my email and cell number to a jpeg so it couldn’t be picked up by bots. People stumbling across the website could find it, but otherwise I tended to give my number out only to friends and clients.

  Whatever. I deleted the message and blocked the number.

  My left calf had started knotting up, so I leaned on the Formica counter opposite Cassie and switched my weight to my right foot. “What’s your uncle done this time?” I asked.

  She unscrewed the water bottle lid. “He says I have to go to summer school.”

  I took a swig of water. “Why not go to summer school? What else would you do? Sprain your thumbs texting all day?”

  Cassie got a crafty look on her face. “I could help you.”

  “Did you get a private investigator’s license while I wasn’t looking?”

  Another scowl. “I could do office stuff. The things you’re always complaining about.”

  She was right about me hating the paperwork. I’ve lost a few clients when I procrastinated about getting a contract emailed to them.

  Not that Cassie was the solution. I swept my arm around, encompassing the junky interior of the Vogue. “Where would you work? Not to mention I don’t have the income to hire even a part-timer.”

  I’d been in survival mode since I’d arrived in Greenville. I took the odd adultery surveillance gigs down in Sacramento, supplementing those cases doing skip traces for the county’s department of child support services. I had a nest egg, but it was spoken for. If I spent that, I’d never get out of Greenville.

  “I’d work for you for free,” Cassie said. “Just for the experience.” She let her teen scorn slip, ill-considered hope creeping into her eyes.

  I could see what was going on here, and I had to put a damn stop to it. It would be crueler to let her think she could depend on me.

  I set a hard edge to my voice. “I don’t want you here, Cassie. You’re not my problem.” I swiped my cell on again. “I’m calling your uncle.”

  She flung the open bottle against the opposite wall, and on its journey, water sprayed the legs of my jeans. As she stormed out the door with her backpack, the bottle rolled, spilling the rest of its contents into the stained carpet. I picked up the near-empty and tossed it in the sink.

  Meanwhile, Cassie slammed the door in my face. That and my gimp leg gave her a good-sized head start by the time I made it outside. I expected her to turn left and run back up my driveway to the road. But instead she’d turned right and was cutting a path through the boulders that filled the sp
aces between the thick manzanita shrubs and occasional pines.

  About a hundred feet through that rough going, you could turn right and plow through the stubborn red branches of the manzanita and prickly star thistle to reach Pleasant Creek Road. But from the crashing sound I was hearing, Cassie wasn’t going that way. Instead she was headed toward the freakishly steep hillside that led down to the creek itself.

  “Cassie!” I yelled, but she just kept on crashing in the wrong direction. I had no choice but to follow.

  As I stumbled along on the uneven ground, tracing Cassie’s path, I called Ken’s cell. The screen said dialing for a long time. Then with a boop, it hung up.

  I growled, slowing to try texting. Just as I got the text app open, my feet got tangled and I tripped. The phone went flying. I struggled to my feet, jeans torn at the knee.

  It took me precious seconds to find the phone, a new diagonal crack in the screen joining its brethren in an almost perfect X. I shoved the phone in my back pocket, deciding to focus on my footing. I could always call Ken after I’d caught up with Cassie and tied her to a tree.

  The girl’s blond head bobbed briefly into view as she started to descend. Then she disappeared down the hillside.

  “Cassie!” I shouted again.

  She ignored me. I heard tumbling rocks, her cry of Shit! then as I scrambled toward the edge of the cliff, I listened with my heart in my throat for the sound of her again. The crunch of brush assured me she was moving again.

  I started down the hillside, imagining twisted ankles and bashed heads, both mine and Cassie’s if we took a wrong step. I couldn’t see her, but could still hear her, her sneakers slapping on boulders and grinding through gravel. I thought she might be at the creek bed by now and relatively safe.

  And then she screamed.

  I put on some speed, all but falling down the hillside from boulder to tree to boulder. My left leg burned and my chest started to ache as I struggled for air.