Clean Burn Read online

  CLEAN BURN

  Karen Sandler

  Copyright © 2015 Karen Sandler. All rights reserved. With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the author.

  Originally published by Angry Robot/Exhibit A

  Smashwords Edition

  Karen Sandler’s CLEAN BURN is a taut, timely thriller ripped from today’s headlines. Blisteringly paced, authentically told, here is a novel that demands to be read in a single sitting. I can’t wait to strap on a side arm and join Watkins for her next case. —James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Eye of God

  Chilling, engrossing and addicting from page one! Karen Sandler weaves a tight, tense mystery, and with Janelle Watkins gives us an honest, tough, and flawed heroine—I can’t wait to read what comes next for this exciting character. —Brenda Novak, author of When Snow Falls

  CLEAN BURN is a guilty pleasure. Curl up for a snappy pace, and an ex cop P.I. heroine with attitude and a haunted past. —Lynn Hightower, author of The Piper and The Debt Collector

  PROLOGUE

  Mama was busy in the alley when the car pulled up to the church next door.

  It wasn’t a proper church, not a real place of worship. No towering steeple, no stained glass, nothing but an electronic keyboard for music. The stucco one-story had been a dry cleaners until some prideful mail-order minister came in with a few folding chairs and a podium and declared it a place of God.

  Mama knew better. God’s glory didn’t reside in so humble a place as that ramshackle storefront on Sanchez. As His instrument, Mama took it upon herself to purify and clarify God’s message in this place. To make clear the folly of sin.

  Which was why she was busy in the alley when the car pulled over to the curb.

  Mama shrank back behind the dumpster, squeezing between it and the church wall. She’d worn sturdy shoes and blue jeans to protect her feet and legs. If she was quick with a kick, the rats wouldn’t bother her much.

  It was a fancy car, a Mercedes or maybe a Lexus. Shiny silver gray. The passenger side door opened and a girl put her feet out onto the pavement, something cradled in her arms. The girl had skin the color of milk chocolate, and her pretty face was tired and drawn. She looked barely older than Angela, Mama’s thirteen-year-old.

  The girl rose carefully and walked toward the front step of the church, holding what looked like a mass of blankets held close to her chest. She looked up and down the street. At one point, Mama thought the girl saw her and she retreated into the shadows and held her breath.

  By the time Mama dared look again, the girl had set the bundle down on the steps and was pressing a button beside the door. The girl probably thought that would call the minister, but Mama knew he didn’t stay overnight on Thursdays, which was why Mama was here. He wouldn’t be back until the morning when it would be too late.

  After a moment’s hesitation, the girl dashed back to the car. She slipped inside and the car roared off down the street.

  Mama counted out ten breaths before she crept out of the alley to the front step of the church. She peeled back the pale pink blankets the girl had left, her hand trembling when she saw the brown stain of blood. Then she saw the milky brown eyes gazing up at her and she couldn’t breathe at all.

  It was Lydia.

  Tears filled Mama’s eyes as she picked up her infant daughter. Lydia had been gone so long. Mama held the sweet weight close to her breast, praising God, reveling in His magnificence. Confirming the righteousness of Mama’s mission with this gift.

  Cradling Lydia against her hip made it harder to finish the work she’d come out to do. But she’d performed the task so often now, she managed it one handed. Then she dashed up Sanchez the two blocks to her apartment.

  The next morning, the minister found his church engulfed in flames. By the time the fire department extinguished it, there was nothing left inside but sodden ashes.

  CHAPTER 1

  9am on a Wednesday morning. While I slurped up a triple-shot latte in my San Francisco Excelsior district office, the past tapped me on the shoulder with a sledgehammer.

  Not to say the past ever left me completely alone. Tommy Phillips made sure of that. Even now, he lurked in the back of my mind, sad-faced and accusatory, the twelve stab wounds in his small body red and lurid in my imagination.

  Sometimes, I ignored him, blanking away the image. Sometimes, like now, I let him stay, due penance for my sins.

  My very soul screaming for caffeine, I’d gulped a mouthful of latte just as my assistant, Sheri Proud, buzzed me to announce an unexpected visitor. “Ruth Martinez is here.”

  The latte burned my tongue as my throat refused to swallow. I set the cup down and my hand crept of its own accord toward the box of matches tucked beside a stack of client files.

  I dropped my hand in my lap. “What does she want?”

  “To talk to you.” The couldn’t-care-less tone of voice was vintage Sheri, but I’d bet Watkins Investigations’s every last receivable she was itching to know Ruth’s business with me.

  I’d just as soon the diminutive Hispanic woman would drop off the face of the earth. Because she’d walk through the door of my office with enough emotional baggage to outfit an around-the-world tour, and a sizeable portion of the contents of those metaphorical suitcases would be given to me.

  Without conscious thought, I swept up the box of matches and closed my fingers around it. Okay, I’d hold them. I just wouldn’t open the box.

  In my mind’s eye, Tommy just stared at me. He never spoke, but I could imagine him saying, “Yeah, right.”

  I turned slightly to block him from my peripheral vision. “Send her in.”

  It was too damned early to face bogeymen. I’d run a surveillance the night before, snapping digitals of a sicko creep violating his marital vows with two blonde bimbos. When I crawled home at 2am, exhausted and disgusted, I spent five restless hours in bed entertaining dark dreams.

  Sheri opened the door to let Mrs. Martinez into the closet that passed for my office. I clutched the matches tighter, feeling the corners of the box bite into my skin.

  The manila folder under Mrs. Martinez’s arm didn’t bode well. I creaked to my feet, gulping back a yip of pain as my left calf cramped. As I shook her hand in greeting, Mrs. Martinez glanced down at my arm. Even though all my secrets were hidden by my long-sleeved T-shirt, I had to resist the impulse to tug the sleeve farther over my wrist.

  She’d scarcely aged over the last decade, a little more gray in that jet black hair, the lines in her face a shade deeper. Her waking nightmare fifteen years ago transformed her from a youthful forty-two-year-old to a middle-aged dowager overnight. Her face had marked time since then and only now matched her age.

  The gaze of her dark brown eyes strafed me from head to foot. “Janelle, you look like crap.”

  No use denying the honest truth. I gestured toward a visitor’s chair wedged in a corner. My desk was jammed into a third corner beside a tiny window with a view of the adjacent building. Still seated, I could turn from my desk to rifle through the filing cabinet that occupied the final corner. In desperation, I could brew my own java in the geriatric Mr. Coffee that sat on top of the filing cabinet.

  Mrs. Martinez ignored the chair, instead squeezing past me to examine the photo gallery I’d posted on the scrap of wall between desk and filing cabinet. A bittersweet reminder of my days with the San Francisco Police Department, the faces of my successes smiled at me from school photos framed in cheap plastic. Underneath the pictures of smiling boys and girls, their name and a date, when I’d found them and reunited them with their parents.

  Not always unscarred, physically or mentally. But alive at le
ast and back in loving arms.

  Mrs. Martinez zeroed in on the sweet young face of a dark-haired girl. Touched a finger to the tacky plastic frame.

  “How is Teresa?” I asked.

  “Married last year. Which you ought to know since I sent you an invitation.”

  Those canny eyes spotted the framed photo face down on my desk. Before I could scoop it into a drawer, she snatched it up, gazed down at the smiling towhead.

  “Tommy Phillips,” she said softly.

  I wanted to shut my eyes, to forever banish that face from my consciousness. Why did I keep the damn photo anyway?

  Mrs. Martinez set Tommy’s picture back on my desk and edged past me again. We seated ourselves and she set the folder in front of me.

  No way I was stepping into that briar patch. I slid the folder toward her. “I handle domestic cases now, cheating spouses, that sort of thing.”

  She slid it back, opened it. The sweet face that smiled up at me from the folder could have been one of those hanging on my wall. “His name is Enrique Lopez,” Mrs. Martinez said. “And he’s missing.”

  My fingers prickled with the urge to open the matches still cupped in my hand. “My office isn’t equipped to handle the missing kids cases.”

  Mrs. Martinez barreled on ahead. “Enrique’s three and a half. One of my Head Start clients. His mother was an addict, coke at first, then meth. Clean off and on, but she was on the drugs more than off. Felicia tried, but she was stuck in the Tenderloin with all the other addicts on Jones Street.”

  “I know a great PI who can help you, Sheri will get her number for you.” I said it loud enough for Sheri to hear me through the paper-thin dividing wall.

  “About four months ago Felicia told me she’d be sending Enrique to her mother, that she’d found a rehab facility that would take her. She had it all worked out.” Mrs. Martinez finally took a breath. “A month later, I go down to her apartment to check on her.”

  Damn, this woman had cojones. I tended to avoid that part of the Tenderloin. If I had to traverse Jones or Eddy Street, it was in my car with doors locked, praying for green lights.

  But Ruth Martinez had shown her mettle fifteen years ago when her seven-year-old daughter, Teresa, was kidnapped. Tempered in that forge, she wouldn’t back down from anything if it involved someone she cared about.

  “I find out from one of her sleazy buddies Felicia died of a drug overdose a few weeks before. No sign of Enrique.”

  I blanked out the image of that small boy abandoned in his apartment, sobbing over his dead mother’s body. “Social services got there before you. He’s probably in foster care.’’

  “Social services has no record of him. The landlord found everything still in the apartment—Enrique’s clothes, his toys, his blankie. Vandals had set fire to the sofa, but all the boy’s things were still there.”

  “Then he’s safe with his grandma,” I told her. “Give me her number. I’ll call her for you.”

  “Don’t you think I tried that?” Mrs. Martinez speared me with that knife-sharp glare. “It was a cell number. It belongs to someone else now.”

  I forced myself to maintain eye contact as I shut Enrique’s folder. “Sheri will give you Patti’s number. She’s a fantastic investigator. The best.” I held the folder out to her.

  She didn’t take it. “I’d go see the grandmother myself if I could, but my dad’s got the Alzheimer’s now. I take care of him. I don’t know when I’d be able to get to Greenville.”

  A chill burned down my spine, roiled my stomach. “Greenville.”

  “That’s where the grandmother lived. It’s up in the foothills,” she told me helpfully. “Off Highway 50.”

  “I know where it is.” Sixty miles west of South Lake Tahoe. A locale that featured prominently in my nightmares.

  “The grandmother’s last name is Lopez, same as her daughter. I don’t have a first name.” Mrs. Martinez rooted around in her purse. “I won’t be able to pay you until Friday, but I have an extra twenty I could...”

  As if I’d take money from her. “Let me call Patti. She owes me a few favors. I’m sure she’ll do some pro bono work for you.”

  “I don’t know this Patti. I know you. You found my Teresa. You found those others.” She gestured at my gallery.

  She’d propped Tommy’s photo up, angled toward me. He grinned, maybe one of the last happy moments of his short life.

  “I haven’t done that kind of work in years. Patti would be better at it.”

  “Please, Janelle.” Her face softened into a vulnerability that frightened me even more than her unshakeable self- assurance. “I know he’s not my responsibility anymore. But there was something about him—maybe because he reminds me of my Teresa, what happened to her. I just can’t let him go.”

  The impossibility of saying no left me breathless. Yet saying yes brought its own agony. There was no way I could jump into another investigation of a missing child without revisiting the emotional landmine of my failure with Tommy.

  “Let me make a few phone calls, poke around on the Web,” I said finally, hedging. “See what I can find out.” Who needed the legwork to Greenville with the internet close at hand?

  As I walked Mrs. Martinez out, her gratitude sent off knives of guilt into me—the freeform variety with no discernible source. I’d quit SFPD because a friendly-fire bullet in my left calf, and the surgeries that followed, had chained me permanently to a desk. But even before that rookie’s dropped gun sent a hollow .22 through muscles, nerves and bones, Tommy’s death had sent me on a downward spiral. I was spending far too much time contemplating the damage a Sig Sauer P229 could do to the back of my head.

  I was arranging the particularly juicy shots of last night’s freak show when Sheri came in without bothering to knock. I kept my eyes glued to my computer screen. “Pretty busy here.”

  Young, black and drop-dead gorgeous, Sheri didn’t suffer fools gladly. Scary smart and the daughter of a judge, she was only biding her time with me until she graduated law school at Hastings, when the world would kneel at her feet.

  Sheri loitering in my doorway like a supplicant didn’t auger well. I tried to keep my focus on my laptop display, but with a six-foot-one goddess looming over me, my attention finally strayed.

  “What?” I asked, one hand still on the keyboard.

  “You’re going to track down that kid for Mrs. Martinez?”

  “Just making a few phone calls.” Although I’d already compiled a mental list of databases I’d search and the connections at Social Services I’d tap.

  “What about Mrs. Madison?”

  My brain chugged along for several moments trying to recall which client she was. The wife of the guy who dated cheerleaders? Or the one whose husband had absconded with his secretary and all the marital assets?

  Sheri’s glower finally jiggled the right brain cells. “Your mother’s friend,” I said.

  “You passed her off to Patti two months ago. Didn’t want to be bothered investigating it yourself.” Sheri drew herself up, growing an inch in her Prada flats. “James is still missing.”

  I remembered Glenda Madison now—a petite black woman in her late thirties. A teacher at the middle school where Sheri’s mother was principal.

  “If Patti came up empty, there probably isn’t much I can do.”

  “Just talk to her again. Maybe there’s something Patti missed.”

  A burning erupted in my gut, crawled its way up my throat. “You know damn well why I can’t do that.”

  But Sheri had little patience for my ugly history and nasty scars, emotional or otherwise. “It’s been six years, Janelle. It’s time you stopped treating that dead little boy like a damn albatross around your neck.”

  That’s what a college education gets you, a snotty attitude and Samuel Taylor Coleridge references. Even though she was right about Tommy, that wasn’t why I considered giving in. Sheri, once she sank her teeth into something, had more perseverance than a pit bull. If I s
aid no now, it wouldn’t be the end of it.

  “Can she come by late this afternoon?” I asked. “I should get back from the Inman surveillance by four.”

  I’d like to say Sheri skipped off, happy as a clam that I’d seen the light. But she still eyed me with suspicion. “She’ll be here.”

  The surveillance went as well as could be expected. I wasn’t made by the target, I got plenty of photos and only had to limp along on my gimpy leg two blocks to and from the BART transit station. I was downloading photos of Mr. Inman feeling up the Other Woman when Sheri announced the arrival of Mrs. Madison.

  She was well dressed in a decent quality, but not expensive suit, her hair soft and feminine around her dark face. She toted a large, practical handbag with a manila envelope peeking out.

  She shook my hand. “I’m Glenda Madison. We spoke a while ago about my son, James.”

  I gestured her toward the guest chair. “How long has he been missing now?”

  She took the envelope from her purse, then seated herself. “Since December 29th.”

  Three months ago. A stone cold trail. “If Patti couldn’t help you, I’m not sure what I can do.”

  “The police won’t do anything. They say he’s a runaway.”

  And he probably was. “Tell me again what happened.”

  Mrs. Madison clutched the envelope to her middle. “He was having a hard patch with his stepfather and they weren’t getting along. They fought over a New Year’s Eve party James wanted to attend. My husband lost his temper and James ran out of the house.”

  Tears shone in her dark eyes, but she didn’t let them fall. “He was last seen at an Arco station in Emeryville.” She took in a shaky breath. “It was the middle of the day, so I thought he’d be okay. That he’d come back when he cooled off.”

  “You have to understand, as long as it’s been, there’s probably not much I can do.”