Fatal Burn

  So far, the Beast—that’s what Dani had decided to call him—hadn’t discovered her project. She lay on her cot, staring up through the skylight wishing she had another way, an easier way, to make good her escape.

  For the past three nights she had worked with the stubborn nail for as long as she could stand, trying to ease the rusted spike out of its hole, forcing it upward.

  She knew she was making progress, the nail head was now about a quarter of an inch above the board and easier to move, but it was still stubborn and she couldn’t risk making her fingers bleed.

  He would notice.

  And be suspicious.

  If this was going to work she had to be really, really careful.

  But she had the feeling that she was running out of time. The guy was getting antsy. She sensed a change in him, saw the restlessness and anticipation in his eyes.

  God, he was creepy and that weird rite of getting naked in front of the fire, slathering himself in oil, then pissing into the flames was just plain whacked! So far the routine hadn’t changed aside from the fact that he seemed pleased with himself a few nights ago and she noticed some blood on his shirt.

  Again she was reminded of the bloodied bag he’d left in that garage in Idaho. Who was inside? What kid had he killed and left to rot and stink in that garage at the abandoned farm?

  Don’t think like that! Forcing herself off the cot, she crawled into the small, airless closet and tried not to listen to the rats chewing and clawing beneath the floorboards. She took off her socks again and ignoring the fact that they reeked, used them as gloves, doubling the toes over, giving herself extra padding as she started to work removing the nail.

  Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.

  Sweat slid down her face, along her nose.

  Her fingers hurt immediately, but she kept working.

  Working the spike to and fro, pulling it upward, her muscles straining as she tried to keep hold of the small head. So intent was she in her work that she almost didn’t hear the engine.

  She froze.

  He was back?

  So soon?

  The engine died.

  Maybe it was someone else.

  Help?

  Quickly she eased out of the closet, fumbling as she pulled her socks over her feet, sweating like a pig.

  Footsteps crunched on the sparse gravel outside.

  Crap!

  She turned, banged her head. Nearly yelped. Sucked her breath in through her teeth.

  The outside door banged open.

  Quickly she crawled back toward the cot.

  She heard the latch to her door creak.

  She flew onto the makeshift bed and closed her eyes.

  The door swung open and a flashlight’s beam made a quick, cutting swath across the room.

  Dani’s heart was thudding, her nerves tight as the piano wires of Mrs. Johnson’s old upright.

  “What’re ya doin’?” he growled and she froze, feigning sleep.

  “I said what’re ya doin’?” He crossed the room and kicked at the cot’s frame.

  She jumped, no longer trying to fake him out with the sleeping ruse. He wasn’t buying it anyway. “I had to go to the bathroom.”

  He swung his light over to the empty Porta-Potty sitting near the bed. “Don’t think so.”

  “Cuz I didn’t get the chance. I heard you coming in and I knew you’d open the door. I didn’t want to be…well, you know, squatting…when you came in.”

  He snorted.

  Disbelieving.

  She couldn’t see him. It was too dark. Then he trained the flashlight in her direction and she couldn’t make out anything with the harsh, bright beam piercing her eyes.

  He swung it from the cot to the Porta-Potty to the boarded window, then up to the skylight. Satisfied they were as he expected, he trained the beam on the closet.

  Dani wanted to disappear. What if she’d left something inside? Her socks? What if he noticed the nail head rising above the board?

  Her heart was knocking so loudly she was sure he could hear it. She had to do something to distract him. She said the first thing she thought of. “I’m thirsty.”

  “What?” He swung the beam back at her and she held one hand up to shade her eyes.

  “I said, I’m thirsty.”

  “Tough. You’ll have to wait. Until morning.”

  “But—”

  “I said forget it. Christ, you can be a pain in the ass.” He stepped out of the room then, and for a second Dani saw his silhouette against the still-glowing embers of the fire. He had something more than the flashlight in his hand, something small and square and…she recognized it as a cell phone that he slipped into his pocket.

  Oh, God, if she could just get it away from him!

  Was there any reception up here in these hills?

  Why did he, all of a sudden, start carrying a phone?

  Where did he get it?

  From his house, stupid. He lives around here somewhere. Remember, he’s got some other life. If you can get hold of the phone, you might find out who the bastard is. Be able to turn him in!

  Hope flared bright for an instant but quickly died.

  He shut the door and latched the hook, then tested the door to her cage before leaving. It didn’t budge.

  Dani’s heart sank.

  Once again she was trapped.

  Chapter 14

  Come by my place tomorrow and we’ll figure out a plan. Shannon’s offer trailed after Travis as he set about his task. Could he trust her?

  He didn’t know.

  Did he have any other options?

  Not a whole lot.

  He checked his watch and decided it wasn’t too late to call Carter. Though he hadn’t expected much, he needed to hear that someone was doing something to help find his kid.

  The sheriff picked up before the phone rang twice. “Carter.”

  “It’s Travis. Wondering if there was any news?”

  “Not much. You keepin’ yourself out of trouble?”

  “Tryin’.”

  “Yeah, right.” Carter didn’t bother hiding his sarcasm.

  “Well, we might have a little more to go on, but it’s not much. Remember Madge Rickert?”

  Travis knew instantly. “The woman walking her dog who spotted a white van near the school?”

  “Yep. Seems as if she got all hot and bothered about what she’d seen and visited a hypnotist in an attempt to remember the license plate.”

  “Does that work?”

  “Sometimes, I guess, though it’s not too scientific. Anyway, she had this guy hypnotize her and lo and behold she comes up with a series of numbers and letters for an Arizona plate.”

  Travis’s heart stopped. His fingers tightened over his cell phone. “And?”

  “And that plate belongs to a black Chevrolet TrailBlazer, but, get this, the back plate was reported missing about six weeks ago. We called the guy and it turns out he thought he lost it in the car wash. Now, of course, we think it might have been stolen.”

  Travis leaned a shoulder against the motel room wall.

  “It gets better. The owner of the Blazer isn’t sure how long the plate had been missing when he discovered that it was gone. As it turns out he’d been on a two-week camping trip—started out in Medford, Oregon, traveled south over the Siskiyou Mountains and camped a few nights around Lake Tahoe.”

  Travis squeezed his eyes shut. “Pretty much a straight line between Falls Crossing and here in Santa Lucia.”

  “You got it. The Feds are checking into registrations and recent transactions for white Ford Econoline vans for the years that the description fits, but it’s pretty much like finding a needle in a haystack. Sometimes people don’t get around to doing the actual paperwork when they buy vehicles. It could go through several hands before someone actually takes the time to register the thing. A lot of vehicles are on the road with no insurance, no proper title or registration.”

  Travis’s hopes sank. “But you’re lo
oking for the van.”

  “Yeah.” Carter hesitated. “I don’t need to tell you that chances are he’s ditched the van already. We figure his MO is to change plates on his vehicles regularly to keep everyone off guard. He probably steals the vehicles, changes the plates and no one’s the wiser unless he’s stupid enough to get himself pulled over.”

  “He’s not stupid,” Travis said and felt a new dread thud in his soul.

  “So what have you found out? You talk to Dani’s biological mother?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Travis said, thinking of Shannon and how she’d offered to help him locate Dani. He gave Carter a brief sketch of what had transpired including the burned birth certificate left at Shannon’s house.

  Carter agreed to pass the information along to the FBI and warned Travis to let the police handle the case. His advice was little more than lip service. They both knew Travis wasn’t about to give up. “Just don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Carter said.

  “Too late.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  They talked a few more minutes before Travis hung up. Now that he’d met Shannon Flannery and learned of the burned birth certificate, he had a new perspective on what was happening and a more pointed fear. His hunch that Dani’s disappearance was linked to her birth mother wasn’t as far off the mark as he’d begun to think.

  Ordering himself to emotionally step out of the situation, to think rationally and logically, as if what was happening with his daughter was a case he was working on for someone else, he spent the next four hours sipping beer and organizing everything he knew about Shannon Flannery so that tomorrow, when he went to her ranch, he’d be prepared for anything.

  Though the police had confiscated his computer and notes, he had taken backup copies of all the old newspaper articles and his notes, and had kept his computer data on a jump drive the police hadn’t found. Earlier in the day, he’d purchased a new laptop and before Shannon Flannery had come knocking on his door, he’d loaded new programs onto the machine and had transferred information from the jump drive onto the hard drive of the laptop.

  Working on the premise that Dani’s abduction was somehow linked to her birth mother, Travis reviewed what he’d learned. The burned birth certificate proved that Shannon was involved in the kidnapping, even if on the periphery. But how? And why? And was the fire significant? The document had been charred and left for her to find, the shed burned down, her husband killed in a forest fire that had been intentionally set. No one had ever bought the careless smoker or camper theory brought up by the defense. No, someone had wanted Ryan Carlyle dead and burned. Maybe to hide the evidence of murder, or maybe to make a point. Maybe for revenge.

  Travis scowled at his notes and clicked his pen a few times as he reviewed the articles about Ryan Carlyle’s death, Shannon’s arraignment and eventual trial.

  So why had Shannon’s shed been torched?

  He stopped clicking his pen.

  Torched.

  As in the…What had the arsonist been called? The Stealth Torcher? The firebug whom everyone had assumed had been Shannon Flannery’s husband, Ryan Carlyle.

  Seven buildings had gone up in flames in a two-year span and miraculously there had been only one fatality: a woman by the name of Dolores Galvez, who had been inside an abandoned restaurant, though no one knew why.

  No firefighters had been injured or lost their lives fighting the blazes, no surrounding buildings had been destroyed, and though the investigations had indicated that the buildings, all abandoned, might have been set on fire for the insurance proceeds, that was all speculation. The warehouse, restaurant, two old apartment buildings, two residences and an empty private school hadn’t been connected, so unless the Torcher had been a freelancer, someone who was paid to burn buildings, the insurance theory didn’t hold water. All of the fires had been started with the same kind of remote-ignition device.

  With Ryan Carlyle’s death, the series of fires had stopped, though it had never been proven that Ryan was the arsonist.

  Coincidence?

  Travis didn’t think so.

  What did Shannon know about the blazes?

  Were those fires connected to Dani’s abduction and the recent fires at her house? He made a note: how was the fire in the shed started? He remembered hearing an explosion. Was it possible the shed fire was ignited in the same manner?

  Rubbing the crick in his neck, Travis reached into the minirefrigerator for another beer. Twisting off the cap, he frowned. It was a pretty big leap to think the Stealth Torcher had returned. It would mean that either Ryan Carlyle had not been the Stealth Torcher and so might be innocent of the crimes for which he’d been blamed, or that a copycat, someone with inside information about the original crimes, was now re-creating the Stealth Torcher’s crimes.

  Damn it all.

  He took a swallow from the bottle and sat at the desk again. He wondered if he was missing something, something vital, a connection between what had happened three years earlier and now. He reread the information, sifting through it, this time focusing on the personal side of Carlyle.

  Not only had Carlyle lost his life in a raging forest fire, but one of Shannon’s brothers, Neville, had disappeared a few weeks after the blaze, never to be heard from again, or so the Flannery family claimed. Soon thereafter, Neville’s twin, Oliver, had completely wigged out and been placed in a psychiatric ward for several weeks before finding Jesus and deciding to join the priesthood.

  Why would the church want someone so mentally unstable? Travis wondered. He took another swig from his bottle and made a note to check on that angle.

  What, if anything, did those two events—Neville’s disappearance and Oliver’s nervous breakdown—have to do with the fires and, more importantly, Dani’s disappearance?

  Who had taken his daughter?

  Some guy who stole cars, switched plates, probably butchered Blanche Johnson and was connected to Shannon?

  Travis’s guts twisted and he reminded himself to stay detached, to think like a private investigator, not a father.

  What did Shannon know that she wasn’t telling him, either intentionally or just because she didn’t think it significant?

  Was she as innocent as she insisted, as lily-white as she and her brothers claimed?

  Travis’s eyes narrowed as he thought of her battered yet determined face, the slope of her jaw, the curve of her neck, more visible with her hair scraped away from her face. It killed him, but he saw his daughter in Shannon’s features down to the small dusting of freckles across her nose.

  His back teeth gnashed and he finished his beer in one long pull.

  He started formulating a strategy.

  Maybe he shouldn’t act as if Shannon was the enemy. Maybe he should cool it a bit, temper his anger and try and get close to her, act as if he was interested in her, to find out how she, either by accident or design, was entangled in all this.

  He considered the men in Shannon’s life.

  Her first lover, Brendan Giles, the biological father of Dani, left the country and never returned.

  Ryan Carlyle, her husband, ended up murdered.

  One brother, Neville, disappeared.

  His twin spent time in the loony bin.

  Aaron, the hothead he’d met earlier, had gotten himself thrown out of the fire department…Why? Travis circled his name.

  Just last year her father died of a sudden heart attack, a man who, though admittedly in his seventies, had heretofore been robust and healthy.

  She’d had a couple of other very short relationships in the years since her husband’s death: Keith Lewellyn and Reggie Maxwell. Both losers.

  Lewellyn was a lawyer and went through women like water; his interest in Shannon might have come from her infamy. The other one, Maxwell, had dated Shannon for only a month and it turned out he was married. That relationship had died before it had started. Reportedly, and this was mainly gossip he’d picked up around town, Shannon had abruptly stopped seeing th
e guy after three dates, probably when she’d found out he had a wife. At least that’s what Travis had been led to believe.

  Then there was Nate Santana.

  The mystery man.

  The guy who had been so familiar with her on the night of the fire, touching her so naturally, taking command as if he alone should be in charge of her welfare. A jolt of jealousy again raced through Travis’s bloodstream and he told himself he was being the worst kind of idiot. There was no room for any emotional attachment to anyone right now, least of all Shannon Flannery.

  He focused again on the man who lived on Shannon’s property. Santana had a reputation for working with temperamental horses. He’d spent some time in prison, albeit wrongly accused of murder. Ostensibly he was her partner but probably also her lover.

  It all didn’t sit well with Travis.

  These days, nothing did.

  It was late. Her brothers had left a couple of hours earlier and she’d convinced Nate that she would be fine for the rest of the night. He must have believed her because as she placed a cup of water into the microwave she looked out the kitchen window and saw that the lights to his apartment were no longer burning.

  The phone rang. She set the timer on the microwave, then plucked the handset from the wall phone. “Hello?”

  “Is he there?” a woman demanded. “Shannon? Is Robert at your place?” Mary Beth Flannery’s voice was an octave higher than usual, her words slightly slurred, the rage within her nearly seething through the phone. Obviously Robert hadn’t been able to calm her down earlier.

  “Of course not, Mary Beth. The last time I saw him was with you.”

  “He left. With the kids.”

  “Then…Maybe he’s at his apartment,” Shannon suggested, silently damning her philandering brother. What was the problem with Robert that he couldn’t keep his pants zipped up around other women?

  “Already checked,” Mary Beth bit out. “Damn it. He’s with her and my kids! I just know it.”

  “You don’t know that,” Shannon said, cringing inwardly at the false ring in her words. Dear God, would he actually bring his kids into the middle of this mess?