Fatal Burn

  The lieutenant didn’t answer. He slid a look at Travis, then glanced away, then glowered into his cup. Sparks was another man who wasn’t going to lie.

  His gut churning, Travis walked barefoot to the window where he’d stood so many mornings, drinking coffee, half-listening to the morning news from the television in the living room while Dani, upstairs in her room under the eaves, roused. He would wait here, gazing outside, occasionally spying a black-tailed deer wander across the yard or a raccoon peering through the branches of the trees as dawn streaked over the hills. All the while Dani, never particularly happy to wake up, reluctantly got ready for school. It didn’t take long. At thirteen, unlike a lot of girls her age, she wasn’t into boys yet. She still eschewed makeup and hair coloring and those idiot teen magazines, which, he understood, would all come crashing into his life before he was ready…or at least he’d always expected they would.

  If he thought hard right now, he could almost hear the distinctive thump of her feet hitting the floorboards as she hopped out of bed, the sound of water running through the old pipes as she brushed her teeth and then groggily stepped into the shower, the trip of her sneakers as she hurried down the wooden stairs. Invariably her backpack would be slung over one shoulder, her hair still damp, eyes bright and eager for whatever the new day would bring. She’d be wearing worn-out jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, an outfit her mother would have forbidden, had she still been alive. Then Dani would grab a granola bar and a box of juice on the run—another practice Ella would have railed against.

  Pausing only to pet the dog, Dani would pile into the pickup behind the steering wheel and he’d let her drive the length of the lane before they’d exchange places and he’d haul her into town and deposit her beneath the wide awning of Harrington Junior High.

  Jesus, would he ever hear those sounds again? Those simple, mundane, everyday noises that announced his daughter was alive and well and happy…even carefree.

  He glanced toward the bottom of the stairs as if expecting her to appear, to end this nightmare he was living. Then he gave himself a swift mental kick. Stop it! She’s not here! Someone nabbed her and it’s your fault for not being vigilant enough!

  “Quit blaming yourself,” Shane advised as if he’d read Travis’s mind.

  Travis cut the sheriff an icy glare.

  Carter had the luxury of handing out advice. He didn’t have a kid, couldn’t understand. No matter how close Carter had gotten to Jenna Hughes’s daughters, it wasn’t the same as actually being a father.

  “It won’t help,” Carter said.

  “Nothing much has,” Travis muttered, glowering at the phone, silently daring it to ring.

  “He’s right,” Sparks said. “Won’t do a lick of good.”

  “What will? Waiting around here like dime-store dummies?”

  “No…just letting us do our job.” Sparks’s cell phone rang and he snapped it to his ear.

  Travis couldn’t help the bit of hope that leapt into his chest. He stared at the state trooper as he answered, “Sparks.”

  Please let it be Dani…Please let it be that they found her, that she’s safe, that, just as the police suspected, she was a runaway and hasn’t been hurt and…

  Sparks caught his gaze and probably noticed the glimmer of hope in Travis’s eyes. The lieutenant gave a quick shake of his head and set his mug on the windowsill as the person on the other end rattled on. All Travis’s hopes withered. Sparks nodded and checked his watch as he spoke into the cell. “Got it.” He clicked off the phone, shoved it into the case clipped to his belt. “Gotta run. Accident up on 84. I’ll be in contact.” Squaring his hat onto his head, he paused as he reached for the door handle. His gaze found Travis’s. “Hang in there.”

  “All I can do.”

  With a nod to Carter, Sparks took off, the screen door slapping shut behind him.

  Through the window Travis watched the lieutenant leave. Sparks’s state-issued Jeep rolled down the driveway, leaving a wake of dust to settle onto the sparse gravel.

  Fear, black as midnight, stole through Travis’s blood as he glared through the glass to a scene he’d once found tranquil: a view of stands of old-growth timber, thick ferns and remnants of a split rail fence some long-ago owner of this property had built. The posts were rotting, the few remaining rails gray and sagging, yet Travis hadn’t had the heart to tear it down. The old fence spoke of another time and space, less complicated, overly romanticized, but still steadfast and true, now long gone.

  He frowned.

  Now the landscape was dominated by two Federal agents who had nodded to Sparks as he’d driven off.

  One of the Feds was leaning a hip against a dusty, unmarked car that glinted under the sun’s harsh rays. José Juarez was a short, wiry man whose emotions were under such tight rein he seemed almost detached. Cold as hell, but, Travis suspected, deadly as a coiled snake. The other one, Isabella Monroe from the local field office, was forever restless, her eyes darting from one person to the next, suspicion in their slate-gray depths. Tall and a little too slim, with angular features and impossibly high cheekbones, her hair pulled back in a knot at the back of her neck, Monroe was pacing beneath the sagging bows of an ancient cedar tree, all the while concentrating on the cell phone jammed to her ear.

  Useless.

  What had they done to find Dani? Nothing. Not one damned thing. “Even they know there won’t be any ransom,” Travis said, staring at the agents who had already told him that they would be pulling up stakes soon, probably today, not that they still wouldn’t check in, and that someone, probably Monroe, would stop by daily, but they wouldn’t be here around the clock.

  Even the press, so hungry at the outset of the story, had backed off, the calls and visits to his house having petered off as the reporters caught onto the scent of other, more interesting stories. A blessing.

  “Everyone’s doing what they can,” Carter offered.

  “Well, it’s not enough, is it?” Travis failed to keep the rage out of his voice. Why Dani? Why had she been abducted sometime before her last class of the day? He’d spent the past sleepless nights asking himself that same question and still didn’t have an answer.

  The police were continuing to work on the theory that she was a runaway. They’d brought it up several times. But she’d never left before.

  There’s always a first time. They hadn’t said it, but he’d seen the suspicion in their eyes and knew that he, too, was a suspect, the single father, no, the adoptive single father. Travis didn’t kid himself; he knew his entire life was being studied under a microscope, every little misstep he’d made—from crashing his fist into Tommy Spangler’s face at sixteen and being suspended from high school, to the dismissed insubordination charge in the army—was being scrutinized, picked apart and put back together again, only to be reexamined.

  Fine.

  He had nothing to hide.

  He just wanted his daughter back.

  Rubbing a hand over his beard stubble, he thought back to the afternoon she’d come up missing.

  Dani called in the morning, told him she’d forgotten her overnight backpack and asked him to bring it to her at the home of the piano teacher, where she was taking the dreaded lessons that she despised, lessons her mother had started when Dani was five and lessons Travis, as a form of penance to his wife, had insisted Dani continue.

  So he’d driven to Blanche Johnson’s house, a tall Victorian with gingerbread trim and flower beds teeming with petunias and geraniums in splashes of bright pink and red. He’d expected to hear piano music drifting from the open windows.

  Instead he’d found Shane Carter and Jenna Hughes, Allie Kramer’s mother, already parked and waiting outside. Travis’s pride had still been wounded, because he’d been interested in Jenna for quite a while. But she’d chosen Carter and so he’d walked up to Jenna’s Jeep carrying Dani’s overnight bag, a smile frozen on his face.

  “Emergency call from Dani,” he’d said in explanation, and
then whatever other conversation they’d shared had been lost as he’d smelled it: that first whiff of smoke hovering in the late summer air.

  His memory came back to him in bits and pieces after that. He recalled sprinting up the steps of the wide porch, finding the front door ajar and racing inside. His heart had been knocking wildly as he’d faced more smoke, all if it roiling from the back of the house. Fortunately the blaze had been little more than a grease fire in the kitchen, one he’d quickly killed with the fire extinguisher he’d found hanging on a hook near the back door.

  But the gruesome discovery, the one that still sent splinters of fear shooting through his body, had been finding Blanche Johnson’s mutilated and very dead body. She lay in a pool of her own blood behind the couch in the parlor, the room where she gave her lessons. Sheet music was scattered over the floor, the piano stool was empty.

  Blanche’s face was a pasty shade of white, her glassy eyes open, the carpet beneath her stained a dark, spreading red. Scratched deep into the wall, in what looked like blood, were the words that had haunted him from the moment he’d seen them: Payback Time.

  Now he closed his eyes, knew he was living every parent’s nightmare and he wanted to crack, to crumble into a million pieces, but more than that he wanted his kid back.

  And to kill the goddamned bastard who had taken her.

  All the talk of her being a runaway was just plain crap. Dani had her independent streak, sure, but she wasn’t into that kind of rebellion.

  Yeah, and what do you know? his conscience nagged.

  Deep inside he realized he wasn’t equipped to be a single parent and a part of him wondered if what was happening was the result of some flaw within himself, if the God he’d shunned completely since his wife’s death three years earlier was finally getting around to punishing him.

  Payback Time, he thought for the thousandth time. Who did this? What did it mean? For God’s sake, why was Dani the victim?

  Travis couldn’t shake the images of that day, the afternoon that he’d lost his daughter. A terror unlike any other had consumed him as he’d stared at the scarred wall with its dire warning. A deep, punishing fear for his daughter had gnawed at his guts as he’d driven to the junior high school where Jenna’s daughter Allie had been pissed as hell for Jenna being late. Her slim shoulders were propped against a post, her arms crossed over her chest indignantly. She’d been waiting under the canopy near the front doors of the school.

  The piano lessons had been cancelled, Allie had explained, and she was furious that her mother hadn’t gotten her call and had left her waiting.

  Travis hadn’t received any such call from his daughter.

  No communication whatsoever even though she had a cell phone.

  He’d barged into the school, demanding answers of a smug secretary who’d wanted to alert him to the fact that his daughter had missed one of her classes.

  Travis had come unglued. Things had only gotten worse as, upon questioning, it became evident that neither the smarmy secretary, the principal, nor anyone else at the friggin’ school had any idea what had happened to his daughter.

  What they’d discovered was that Dani had missed her last period of the day—PE, her favorite class, with Mr. Jamison, her favorite teacher—and not one of the students or staff at Harrington Junior High had remembered seeing her leave.

  There had been no clues and all attempts to reach her on her cell phone had failed. Police interviews with her friends and acquaintances had turned up nothing, no indication of what had been going through her head, nor had anyone known of anyone she had contacted.

  It was as if she’d been snatched out of thin air.

  Except for the bizarre death of Blanche Johnson, who died from a blow to the head and had left bacon on the stove…

  Payback Time.

  That message echoed through his brain over and over again. Had it been intended only for Blanche or did it include Dani as well?

  What did it mean?

  So far the police had no leads as to who had killed Blanche Johnson and, Travis knew, as each hour passed the chances of finding the murderer lessened, the clues, if there were any, got colder. The press had been hounding him; reporters from as far away as Denver and Seattle had called and he, through the local television station, had put out a plea to whoever had kidnapped his child. But there had been no response.

  Just dead air.

  Dead.

  Anguished, fists clenched impotently, he stared sightlessly out his window and realized that Carter was watching him, witnessing the agony ripping across his face, the fear gnawing at his soul. Thankfully Carter didn’t offer up any platitudes and didn’t so much as mouth the “I understand,” that Travis found so insipid. No one, except for a parent who had lost a child, could begin to fathom the extent of his fear, his desperation, his goddamned dread that he’d never see her again.

  He had to do something. Anything. To get his daughter back. And with each tick of the clock, he realized that it was up to him. He couldn’t rely on the Feds, or the state police, or the local sheriff.

  He would have to take matters into his own hands.

  Dani was his child, his responsibility, and when he thought of her—alone, hoping that he would rescue her—he felt weak and unworthy and knew he had to take action…any kind of action.

  “I can’t stay here another minute,” he admitted, turning to face Carter.

  “You have to. In case she calls.”

  “She’s not gonna call,” Travis said flatly. “We both know it.”

  “You—”

  “I’ve got to find her.” He jabbed a thumb at his chest. “Me.”

  “Leave it to the professionals.”

  “Who? Mutt and Jeff out there?” He hitched his chin toward the two FBI agents. “They’re convinced she’s a runaway and I know in my gut that she’s not.” He didn’t mention that he was a licensed PI, that he knew the ropes. Carter already knew that.

  The sheriff seemed about to argue. Instead he nodded curtly. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he advised, dark eyes focusing hard on Travis.

  “I won’t.”

  Carter’s cell phone trilled. He answered quickly and for a second Travis experienced that same incredible jolt of hope, his anxious mind grabbing on to the slim chance that it was news of Dani, that she was all right, that…

  Carter’s face told him all he needed to know. Listening intently, the sheriff gave a quick shake of his head. Travis’s hopes melted like ice in the desert. It was no use. They weren’t going to hear anything. And anyway, they were wrapped up in Blanche Johnson’s murder.

  Without another look at Carter, he started for the back bedroom, his room, the one he’d shared with Ella, and in his mind’s eye he was already packing. And he knew where he’d start looking for Dani, a lead he’d given the police that they were “looking into.”

  Well, he’d do more than take a peek; he’d scrutinize the hell out of the one person he’d feared all of Dani’s life: her birth mother, a woman he’d kept track of all these years, a woman he knew was far from being a saint. In fact, she’d literally gotten away with murder a while back. He’d read about it, and knowing her name, knowing who she was, he hadn’t been able to resist seeing her in person.

  He’d been in San Francisco on a job, tracking down a deadbeat dad for a client, so he’d decided to make a quick side trip to Santa Lucia. He, like the press, had camped out near the courthouse steps. Reporters wielding microphones and cameras like artillery had been situated strategically. Curious onlookers had huddled together under the trees. It had been early spring, light from a lazy sun sending rays through the leafy trees, guarding the plaza and dappling the ground.

  Travis had found a madrona tree and leaned against the peeling bark of the bole. Soon after five o’clock the crowd began to stir and he’d moved for a closer look. The courthouse doors opened and he saw her, the accused, looking much smaller than he’d expected. She’d been dressed in a conservative navy blue s
uit that Travis suspected the law firm had chosen, and she’d been flanked by several broad-shouldered men, her brothers, Travis had guessed, noting the family resemblance. Along with the brothers, an older man—with a shock of white hair, black-framed glasses and a pinched expression—had also been with her. Travis had guessed him to be Shannon’s attorney. His expensive-looking briefcase and impeccable gray suit, tightly knotted blue silk tie and starched white shirt had all screamed “legal eagle.”

  The men had shepherded her down the steps and toward a parking lot adjacent to the marble-faced building. Shannon Flannery had managed to hold her head high, her little chin thrust out, her eyes shielded behind dark glasses. With her entourage around her as if she was some kind of damned celebrity, she’d headed toward the cars and hadn’t paused for a comment to the throng of reporters.

  The cameras had rolled, microphones had been jabbed closer, questions hurled from the reporters.

  “Ms. Flannery, do you plan to take the stand in your defense?” one tall blond woman had shouted as she’d motioned to her cameraman to get a specific shot.

  Another voice, male this time, had yelled, “Ms. Flannery, you claim to be innocent and yet your attorney has brought up allegations of abuse, which sounds like a defense against the charges, as if you were involved in the death of your husband.”

  “What about the fact that you have no alibi?” a younger man, with a thick red moustache and a face flushed with excitement, had asked. He’d been standing near Travis and had acted as if he was about to get the story of his lifetime. An image of wolves circling a wounded deer had come to Travis’s mind. “People wonder what you were doing on the night your husband was killed,” the man said.

  Shannon had stiffened, then slowly turned, her gaze behind those shaded lenses zeroing in on the eager reporter. She shoved the glasses to the top of her head to hold her curling auburn hair away from her face. And it was a beautiful face with bold but even features. Her eyes, deep-set and a startling shade of green, had narrowed between a sweep of thick, dark lashes. Sharply arched brows had been nearly mocking and her lips, soft and pink, were a knife blade of quiet, suppressed fury. Despite the warning hand her lawyer placed over her arm, she responded. “No comment,” she said slowly and clearly, as if everyone around her were either deaf or stupid. Her eyes, sparking with intelligence, landed unerringly on the reporter standing near Travis.