Fatal Burn (West Coast 2)

“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.