Clean Burn (25 page)

“I was too far away to make out the face, but it was definitely female.” He slurped up some more coffee.

When I took a breath, Ken put up a warning finger. “Was she white?” he asked. “Black? Hispanic?”

“White for sure,” Dave said. “Dark hair. She was wearing jeans and a big, baggy jacket.”

“When did you see the boy?” Ken asked.

“When she got down to the river. I saw her bend over to look at something. I didn’t know what it was at the time.”

Again, my inner five year-old got the upper hand. “How could you not recognize a body?”

Ken grabbed my wrist, digging in his fingers. “What did you think it was?”

Dave shrugged. “I was so far away, it just looked like a bundle of something. Old clothes maybe.”

Lips pressed together, I cast a pleading look at Ken. He scowled, but nodded my way. “As fast as the river was running,” I asked, “how do you suppose the body ended up there?”

“I know that spot,” Dave said. “I’ve stopped there quite a bit to... stretch my legs. There’s a sheltered cove on the other side. I’ve seen dead raccoons, possums wash up. They get snagged in the deadfall.”

“What happened next?” Ken asked.

“She stepped into the water and picked up the kid. Wrapped him in that jacket of hers, then started back up the hill. She might have seen me... She stopped at the top and looked back across the river.”

I squeezed in another contribution to the interview. “Did you see anything else up the hill where she took the kid?” I left the query open-ended.

Sanders’s brow furrowed as he considered. “Yeah, actually. As I pulled away. I thought I saw smoke through the trees.”

Ken and I exchanged a look then he asked the next obvious question. “Why did you take two days to report this?”

“I had a job to get to. It wasn’t until I saw it in the Sacramento Bee that I put it all together.”

“You have time now to take us out there?” Ken asked.

Dave checked his watch. “I’ve already missed the morning Bible reading at Holy Rock. My wife will give me hell.”

“It would be a big help, Mr Sanders,” Ken said.

“Can I take my own car? Then I can still make the tail end of services and lunch at Emil’s after.”

Ken pulled in behind Dave’s red Honda and we headed toward the highway. I prodded my leg with my thumbs, trying to dig out a knot. “Why would this woman take a body from the river, then not report it?”

“Folks living on that side of the river don’t come to town very often. They keep to themselves.” Ken followed Sanders onto Highway 50. “She might not be in a big hurry to bring in a body.”

“Still, it’s been two days.”

Silence ticked away as Ken whipped around the highway curves. “Why’d you leave?”

“Did you want to try for round two?” I asked, to annoy him, to deflect the need for a real answer.

He flexed his hands on the steering wheel, all male ego and wounded pride. “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it. Without any damn matches.”

That he understood the significance of what we’d done just made things worse. I told him softly, “It didn’t change anything, Ken.”

“I thought I might have mattered to you, just a little bit. My mistake.”

He mattered too damn much. But if I let him in, let him tear down carefully constructed walls, all the ugliness would gush out, destroy us both.

I couldn’t let that happen. “I’ve always disappointed you, Ken. I don’t know why you thought this would be any different.”

I saw him shutting down, as if a mask obscured his face. Then silence settled between us, heavy and suffocating.

The turnout Dave led us to was four and a half miles east of Strawberry Canyon, according to Ken’s odometer. “A mile and a half from where Brandon went in,” I noted. “The dogs searched here?”

“They did.” Ken’s tone was neutral and distant. “Lost the scent past the creek on the granite and shale.”

“Where that fire was set.”

“Yeah.”

As we followed Sanders through the willows shielding the river from the highway, moisture from the night’s drizzle soaked through the sleeve of my T-shirt. “This wet won’t make tracking easy if you send the dogs out again.”

We caught up with Dave where he had stopped at the top of the bank. “I was in there.” He pointed to his private outhouse within a thick screen of willows. “She was over there.” He gestured across the river.

Boulders had tumbled down into the river sometime in the past, creating a sheltered cove. A downed tree added another protective arm. Bank, rocks and tree surrounded the quietly swirling stretch of water on three sides.

“She slung him over her shoulder and zigzagged up the hillside,” Sanders told us, tracing out a path with his finger. “Kind of took the easiest path up, then hit the trees about at that big pine.”

The boulders almost stair-stepped up the rocky bank. I could imagine the woman climbing with the boy’s body in a fireman carry. He was slight for his age, only about fifty pounds according to the SAR briefing. Even with Brandon over her shoulder, it would have been hard work getting him to the top.

Sanders fidgeted, checking his watch. “Okay if I go now? As it is, I’ll barely make the fellowship.”

“Sure,” Ken told him. “We’ll call you if we need you again.”

After Sanders left, I contemplated the steep rocky hill. “That’s a hell of a schlep to the top carrying dead weight. Why would she have bothered taking the boy’s body all that way? Why not just call the sheriff and let you take care of it?”

“Don’t know. Unless...” He hesitated. “No.”

But I picked up on his audacious train of thought. “Unless Brandon wasn’t dead.”

Ken shook his head. “If he was alive, don’t you think the woman would call 911? Because the boy’s sure as hell going to be in sad shape after that ride down the river.”

“But why take him at all if he’s dead?” I pressed, unwilling to give up the possibility that Brandon wasn’t.

“Maybe she just didn’t want a coyote or mountain lion to make a meal out of his body.”

My stomach clenched at the ugly picture. “You won’t wait for her to call, will you? You’ll bring out search and rescue again?”

“Yeah. One of the CSIs as well, see if we can find any footprints or trace.”

“After last night’s drizzle, not much hope of that.”

Back at the Explorer, Ken called Sergeant Russell and requested one of the dog teams. The CSI on duty was thirty minutes away at the high school. Ken read him the GPS coordinates from the unit on his Explorer.

“Still planning to go back today?” Ken asked as we pulled onto Highway 50.

“I should. Less traffic getting into the Bay Area on a Sunday.”

“Don’t want to wait and see what the dogs find?”

“If it’s going to be a dead body, then no, I don’t.” I stared at the trees across the river, listened to the thrum of the tires on the pavement, watched a squirrel skirting the highway via a power line.

I did a double-take when I saw the smoke. “Turn around,” I told Ken. “There’s something burning back there.”

Ken veered into a turnout, then waited with ill-concealed impatience for a minivan towing a fifth wheel to get out of his way. “Where?” he asked, gaze on the thick cover of pines and cedars.

At first I thought I’d been mistaken, then I spotted the puff of gray. “There.”

Ken gunned the Explorer past the spot. “There’s a bridge another half mile ahead.” He got on the radio, called central dispatch for fire and backup.

We roared over the bridge and up a pitted dirt road. “It could just be someone burning brush.”

“You said there weren’t many houses over here. Who would be burning brush?”

“There are a few old BLM cabins.” At a blind curve, he yanked the wheel left to avoid a boulder. “Homeless folks hole up in there sometimes.”

Ken tried to accelerate, but the terrain we covered could only charitably be described as navigable. The Explorer jounced and groaned into potholes and over rocks littering the road. The trail of smoke, now visible, now concealed by the trees, beckoned us on.

One more teeth-jarring concussion over the rise and we reached a clearing with a rundown shack of a cabin. My heart sank when I first spotted the fire – it looked exactly like a pile of brush being disposed of by a thrifty homeowner. Except the homeowner in question was ex-con arsonist Marty Denning, and the moment he spotted us, he took off on his signature run.

Ken wrenched the Explorer around into Marty’s path. When the ex-con bolted around the Ford, Ken jumped from the vehicle, shouting the de rigueur, “Police! Stop!” and took off after him. As luck would have it, Marty caught his foot on a tree branch and did a face plant in the pine needles. Ken caught up and cuffed him, then all but dragged him back toward the cabin.

Meanwhile, I slid from the Explorer and registered for the first time the musky sweet stench that mingled with the smell of burning gasoline. Good thing I’d had nothing but coffee that morning, because it wasn’t just brush Marty was burning. At least the ex-con’s unconventional fuel was too large to be James or Enrique. The waifish Sharon, I guessed.

Ken and the squirming Marty joined me beside the roaring blaze. Ken’s jaw worked as he perused what was left of the charred corpse amongst the brush.

“Who is it?” he asked Marty.

Marty wouldn’t look at Ken. “Girlfriend,” he confirmed.

I stepped into his line of sight. “Was she dead before you set her on fire?”

Improbably, my question had offended Marty. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Then you killed her first?” Ken asked.

Marty shrugged. “She OD’ed last night.”

“And you didn’t bother to call 911?” Ken asked. “Notify the sheriff’s office?”

Marty’s shifty gaze strayed to the ramshackle cabin. Now I saw the telltale signs – industrial sized buckets piled alongside a mountain of discarded cans and bottles. I couldn’t read the labels from that distance, but I knew what they were. Acetone. Toluene. Lye. Drain cleaner.

I could see Ken having his own light bulb moment. He clamped an unfriendly hand on Marty’s shoulder. “You’re cooking meth in that cabin, aren’t you?”

Denning offered up a preposterous defense. “It was Sharon’s idea.”

Ken looked as if he’d like to shove Marty into the fire. As far as I, his only witness, was concerned, he could have done it with a clear conscience. We could have crafted a plausible story of Marty kicking over the can of gasoline, dousing himself and accidentally stumbling into the flames.

Alas, the scream of approaching sirens eliminated that appealing option. The fire was extinguished within twenty minutes. Ken turned Marty over to a deputy then had to wait for the arrival of Hazmat and drug enforcement before we could head back to town. The whole way, the stench of flambéed Sharon hovered in the Explorer, permeating our skin, our clothes.

As we passed down Main Street, the parking lot of Holy Rock was still full of cars and people. Ken stopped to let a parishioner exit the lot and I spied Dave’s red Honda next to an old clunker of a sedan. As I contemplated whether Sanders had arrived in time to preserve marital bliss, I focused on the ancient black sedan, its windshield bright with glare.

It was a Volvo. A CCSF decal gleamed in the noon sunshine.

Ken stepped on the gas. “Stop,” I said, putting a hand on his arm. He pulled into a parking space vacated by a churchgoer.

“Give me a minute,” I tossed off as I slid from the Explorer. I limped through the parking lot as fast as I could, hoping to catch the driver of the Volvo before they left.

Luck was on my side. An old lady had caught up with whoever sat behind the wheel to chat while the idling Volvo spewed gas fumes. The long-winded old biddy beside the car went on and on about how some in the congregation weren’t picking up the slack at church fundraisers as I tried not to inhale the exhaust that curled around the car.

She finally hobbled off with her walker just as Ken arrived. He hovered over my shoulder. “What are you up to?”

Before I could come up with a reasonable response, someone called out to him, drawing him away. Unencumbered, I stepped up to the driver’s window.

It took a moment to recognize the vaguely familiar face of the elderly woman behind the wheel. Sadie Parker. She had about a million more wrinkles creasing her weathered skin than the last time I’d seen her, but she hadn’t lost her crafty wariness.

She peered up at me suspiciously. My face hadn’t changed that much and Sadie was a sharp old lady. “Janelle Watkins,” she said finally.

I’d been too intimidated by Sadie twenty plus years ago to commit the kind of idiot petty crimes I’d pulled on many other Greenville notables, so I could smile at her with a clear conscience. “How are you, Mrs Parker?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I still haven’t forgotten that pumpkin.”

Good God, what a memory. That one little Halloween prank had slipped my mind. “Sorry about that, Mrs Parker. I had a question about your car.”

“You want to buy it? It’s a piece of crap.”

“Have you had the car a long time?”

“A few months,” she said. She patted her sparse white hair where a wisp had escaped her tight bun. “Traded my great-grandson’s truck for it.”

My heart went from pit-a-pat to light speed in an instant. “Who traded with you?”

“A bushy-bearded fellow. Glenn... can’t remember his last name. Started with a C.” She waved out the window at the pastor. “Truck was a worse piece of junk than this, but he didn’t care. He saw it parked one morning at the church, for sale or trade sign in the window. Called me up and we made the trade.”

“You still have the paperwork for the car?”

“Sent the pink slip in to DMV when I transferred ownership. Threw away the old registration slip when I got the one with my name on it.”

Trust Sadie to be efficient. “What kind of truck was it?”

“An old Chevrolet. Supposed to be white, but had so much Bondo on it, you’d think it was gray. Great-grandson thought he would fix it up. Then Ben went into the army and gave the truck to me.”

Every other pickup in the Greenville area was a Chevy, more than one patched together with Bondo. Had I seen a white one covered in Bondo? “You wouldn’t remember the year and model, would you?”