Clean Burn by Karen Sandler Read Free Book Online Page A

card,” he said. “Never sent it.”
    “I was pretty inundated with that crap.” Not entirely a lie. The department sent me flowers and a single card signed by most of the detectives. At that point in my career, I’d alienated pretty much everyone in the squad.
    He motioned me to a chair. “I was surprised to hear you quit.”
    I sank down on the molded plastic chair, barely holding back a moan of relief. “Being chained to a desk and shuffling paperwork was a real dream job, but it was time for the party to end.”
    I looked around at the cluttered space that passed for his office. The dimensions were barely bigger than the shoebox I worked in, and he’d managed to crowd in even more furniture. Besides the desk, piled high with reports and miscellaneous paperwork, he had a computer desk with a desktop model tucked beneath it, a printer/fax/scanner combo beside the monitor, twice as many file cabinets as I had, and a waist-high refrigerator with a microwave on top of it. The coffee maker sat on the microwave.
    “All the luxuries,” I noted.
    “Some perks in being top dog.”
    An array of photos on the wall above the computer caught my eye. I recognized the smiling woman in the leftmost picture as his sister, her long blonde hair brushing the cheeks of the towhead baby girl on her lap. Next to that one, Ken’s niece looked to be about six years old and his sister’s smile wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. The remaining three in the gallery featured the niece by herself, progressively older in soccer and baseball uniforms. The last photo was a school shot of a defiant adolescent.
    As Ken moved toward his desk, I blocked him. “Something I need to say.” I’d rehearsed on my way over here and had to get the words out before I wimped.
    He eyed me suspiciously. “What?”
    “I’m sorry.”
    He looked confused for a moment, then pushed past me to his chair. “I called on the way here. There was no forwarding address for Mrs Lopez at the post office.”
    “Let me finish. I screwed up your life. Your marriage. Was an asshole afterward.”
    “Have you been watching Oprah ?” He pushed back in his chair as if he didn’t like being so close to me. “Is this some kind of 12 Steps crap?”
    “Can’t a person just be sorry? If I hurt you–”
    “I’d have to care about you to be hurt, Janelle.”
    That knocked the wind out of me, left me struggling to get my bearings again. Ken avoided my gaze, cutting me even more adrift.
    “Anyway...” Damn it all, my voice was quivering. “Sorry.”
    Silence stretched until I thought its weight would crush me. I focused back on the lifeline of Mrs Lopez. “Was there any mail left in her box?”
    Ken still wouldn’t look at me. Anger warred with a nagging ache.
    “You want me to take back the damn apology?” I asked him.
    Finally he turned toward me. “I want you to drop it. I’d like it better if we’d never...” He shook his head. “Mrs Lopez didn’t get her mail here in Greenville at all.”
    “Not even general delivery?”
    “They had no record of it.”
    Was the woman hiding? With a daughter involved with drug dealers, maybe that was how she kept herself safe. “Would the Stuarts know where she went?”
    “Maybe. They’re in South America for most of April. Their son’s on a mission in Peru.”
    I dug my fingers into the clot of pain in my calf. Better that than what I was feeling inside. “The neighbors?”
    “The Stuart place is on ten acres at the end of a dirt road,” he said. “The nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. The only reason I remember Mrs Lopez at all is that she called about an intruder. Turned out a raccoon was digging through her trash.”
    A paranoid woman might interpret marauding forest creatures as a threat. “Could she have moved down into Sacramento?”
    “She could have moved anywhere.” He turned toward his computer and typed. I got to my feet stiffly to check out the display over his shoulder. “Over six hundred