Fatal Burn (West Coast 2)

“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?