Burning Man

By Jeff Widmer

Can You Ever Go Home Again?
Did CW McCoy’s father kill her mother and brother and nearly take her life? The question has haunted the former detective for nearly thirty years. When friend and mentor Walter Bishop discovers that police have arrested a suspect, CW reluctantly revisits her roots to uncover the hard truth about her family—no matter the cost.

Confronted by hostile sources and a city ravaged by a string of arsons, CW questions everything she’s come to believe about that night. Did her father commit the crime, or was he framed? Did he disappear, or was he murdered? And what about her own history with conflict? Does the family’s violent streak run in her veins, too?

In her fifth outing (after Permanent Vacation), CW rushes headlong into her most troubling case, one that will change her life forever. With Burning Man, she faces the greatest challenge of all—coming to terms with a past that continues to blaze.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Widmer
• Release date: May 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463909652

Jeff Widmer

Jeff Widmer is the author of the CW McCoy and the Brinker series of crime novels and well as numerous standalone novels and non-fiction books. A former journalist, advertising executive and nationally syndicated reviewer, his work has appeared in publications ranging from Advertising Age to US Airways magazine to National Geographic World.

Book preview

CW is a great character. Widmer easily brings the town of Spanish Point and its colorful cast of characters to life. An entertaining mystery romp.

— Kirkus Reviews

A writer who knows how to put the reader in the action is a rare thing. Jeff Widmer does it with every character and every scene.

— Anna Schmidt, The Peacemakers

Jeff Widmer takes you on a wild ride in the murderous tour bus in a uniquely dark and twisted story that touches on euthanasia, addiction, sex and more. And then there's Brinker. . . .

— Louise Machinist, My House Our House

Contents

Burning Man

Praise for Jeff Widmer

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgements

Books by Jeff Widmer

About the Author

Connect

1.

I WOKE TO the smell of danger. It seeped through the floorboards and pushed under the door and crawled into my bed. It stung my eyes and clogged my nose and tasted sour as an old penny. There was another smell, too, like the time Mommy turned on the stove and forgot to light it and my brother made a joke about the house blowing up.

It was four days before Christmas, a Saturday and the start of our holiday vacation, mine from kindergarten, Colton’s from second grade, although it didn’t feel like Christmas, because there was no snow. Daddy had just put up the lights, too many, Mommy said. He’d stood on a ladder and hung them over the windows while Mommy stood on the sidewalk below, her arms crossed, telling him not to burn down the house.

This smell felt wrong. Like the time Daddy lit a fire and forgot to open the flap in the chimney, and the smoke tumbled out in swirling stripes, as if it were trying to escape. The smell was dry as the newspapers he pushed beneath the twigs, the logs making a high, hissing sound as if they were hurt by the flames.

My parents had gone to a party. They should have been back. They should have come in to check.

The light that came through the curtains made a square on the wooden floor. Beneath the door, the smoke went in and out as if something in the hall was alive and breathing and coming after me. A lizard with a flame for a tongue or the lady with her hair full of snakes. Or burglars. Daddy was always talking about burglars. Colt would say it was a dragon, breathing fire and smoke as it hunted for little children to cook and eat, but he liked to scare me.

The smoke hurt my head. I couldn’t swallow. But I had to warn everyone. And I had to see what was in the hall.

Sliding from bed, knocking over the lamp and a gold cup with curly handles that said I could count to twenty, I crept toward the door. The floor felt warm. I reached for the knob. It turned, but the door wouldn’t open. I rattled and pulled and yanked as hard as I could, but the door wouldn’t budge. I banged on it and yelled for Colt, whose bedroom was across from mine, but no one answered. I put my ear to the keyhole, but I couldn’t hear the voices I’d heard earlier, just before I’d fallen asleep. Angry voices.

Smoke curled over my feet and crept up my pajamas. Like a dusty hand, it pushed me toward the bed. Tripping over the lamp, I crawled under the quilt Nana had made for me, the one with a picture of Snoopy on his doghouse, and stared at the door, daring the monster in the hall to break it down. Its gray breath grew dark, rolling up the wall and across the ceiling. It warmed the air and stuffed my nose and made my tongue stick to the top of my mouth.

From the street below, I heard a siren and the honk honk of horns.

The smoke changed from gray to yellow-brown. It rose through the cracks in the floor and reached over the bed. My chest felt as if someone had me in a bear hug, but I would not go with the smoke. I would climb out the window and come back through the front door and run up the stairs to wake Colton. And together we would save our parents.

Pulling the quilt over my shoulders, I stumbled to the window and tried to lift it, but the window was stuck. I pounded the latch with my hands, but the latch wouldn’t budge.

The sirens got louder, and then they stopped. Red lights flashed across the window. From the street, I heard honking and shouting and the rattle of something as it scraped against the house. Then a dark shape holding a long stick appeared in the window and ducked out of sight, so I wouldn’t know what it was doing. It raised the stick and used it to smash the window and ran it around the edge, the glass flying into the curtains and bouncing across the floor. The shape had a big head that stuck out in the back and a mask like divers wore in the ocean. That’s where its breath came from, the smoke, how it blew it under the door into my room. And because the door was locked, it had climbed up the side of the house. It put a foot on the window and another on the floor and, setting the stick against the wall, stuck out its big black hands and moved toward me.

My ears burned. My heart hurt. My mouth felt as dry as paper. Falling back into the quilt, I cried for help, but nothing came out.

The dark shape wore a raincoat and gloves and had a hump on its back. As it got closer, I saw that it wasn’t a monster but a man, a fireman. He was saying something from inside his mask, but I couldn’t hear. He stomped across the floor and, like the smoke, reached for me. I got scared. I couldn’t leave before I found Colton and Mom and Dad. As I backed against the bed, my hand landed on the cup. I couldn’t stop whatever was still in the hall, Colt would have to do that, but I could stop the man. Raising the cup over my head, I rose to my knees and swung as hard as I could.

But the man was too fast. Wrapping me in the quilt, he threw me over his shoulder and lifted me through the window. I couldn’t breathe and began pounding on his hump. Opening my eyes, I looked down a ladder at firetrucks and flashing lights and people dragging big fans through our front door. The ladder bounced. I felt dizzy. The lights hurt my eyes. The man’s foot slipped. I thought he’d drop me.

That’s when my cellphone rang.

2.

I WAS BORN in 1986, the same year as Lady Gaga, Shia LaBeouf and Usain Bolt. I don’t sing, act or run as fast, but I know that Randy Travis, Hank Williams Jr. and Ronnie Milsap rode the country charts. It was the debut year for Designing Women, The Oprah Winfrey Show and something called Kissyfur. Top Gun topped the box office, along with Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The year started with the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, lurched into the first Gulf War and ended with a fire at the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico that killed ninety-seven people. The fire was ruled arson.

On December 21, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. Jane Fonda wed CNN founder Ted Turner. And my father set fire to our house, wiping out my family, save for my grandparents and me. Twenty-eight years ago this week.

It all came crashing back yesterday when Walter Bishop made a surprise appearance at my desk at Laine & Company, the real estate factory where I work. He stood in the sprawling glass-and-steel heart of Southwest Florida’s housing industry, a handsome man capturing the attention of anyone with a pulse, dressed not in his usual boat-bum outfit but in long pants and loafers, his lips as pressed as his khakis, and delivered the news that would change my life.

Riverton police have arrested someone for your family’s murder. He said it as calmly as diners would tell the maître d’ party of two.

The news blew through me like a gale-force wind. I’d grown up in Riverton, a small city in the heart of Pennsylvania’s anthracite belt. Hard coal and hard people. Raised by my grandparents after my father set fire to our house. Twelve-hundred miles and a lifetime from my adopted home of Spanish Point.

Parading your emotions in public is like showing your lady parts in church. You just don’t. Force of habit, I told him I didn’t care.

Discovering what happened to your father might bring closure.

My father killed my mother and brother and tried to murder me. That’s all the closure I need.

What if he didn’t?

That caught my attention, along with the rest of the staff. Everyone knew me as a former police detective from somewhere up north who’d moved to Florida to care for my grandparents. They also knew that I’d courted trouble with management for abandoning work to pursue investigations better left to the police. Our office manager, Melissa Cunningham, had been especially peeved. The situation got dicey when police charged her mother, the titular Casey Laine, with vehicular homicide, and Melissa assumed her post.

The incident in question occurred last fall during the tail end of a hurricane. I’d been investigating a murder connected to shoddy construction on the bayfront when I got a call to meet a source. Heading east into one of the few undeveloped area in Florida, I arrived minutes after a motor-vehicle collision to find the owner of our brokerage and her daughter leaning against the door of their SUV. Lying on the ground by the front bumper was a man who’d help me investigate construction defects in the condos Laine & Company was selling. The SUV’s right front tire hung over a drainage ditch. Laine told police that she’d been behind the wheel. The confession didn’t track. The driver would have stepped onto dry pavement. Whoever exited the vehicle on the passenger side would have wet pants.

Melissa’s capris had been dry.

I shared that observation with police. They politely listened. While my statement didn’t persuade them of Melissa’s guilt, it had convinced her that I was more defiant than loyal. As soon as she assumed command, she ordered an end to unexcused absences. If I left again for any reason, she said, I left for good.

I tried not to think about the course of justice as Walter Bishop and I sat shoulder-to-shoulder in coach and chewed gum to keep our ears from collapsing. The dawn flight from Florida to Pennsylvania would erase three decades in three hours but not the bitterness I felt about the murder of my family, something I’d kept to myself. Walter knew I wouldn’t talk about family until we reached Riverton, if then, and I wasn’t about to reveal my recurring nightmares about the fire, so we discussed the string of arsons that had plagued the city, more than a dozen this year. All of them unsolved, like the blaze that had killed my mother and brother. Walter had seen the damage firsthand in September, during his mysterious absence from Florida—the wreckage in Riverton, the damage to me.

Which is why I steered him away from the subject.

You were gone a while, I said. "We thought you and the Mary Beth were lost in the hurricane." The boat was Walter’s forty-one-foot Morgan. He’d named it after his wife, a nurse who’d spent her life healing others, only to die of cancer. It wasn’t fair. But then what was these days?

It was a reunion, he said. The men in my troop.

And you couldn’t tell your best friend and confidant.

I can’t tell you anything.

Any excuse to deny me a good time.

He chuckled. Half-a-dozen former state troopers telling war stories? You’d have been bored stiff.

And you just happened to hear that Riverton PD discovered new evidence.

"I’d heard they’d identified a person of interest.

Who is this guy? I asked.

Unknown. They haven’t released the arrest affidavit.

How’d you hear about it?

Heads up from a cop who just retired.

I stared through the porthole. Beneath the wings slid the hills of Pennsylvania, the trees like sticks dusted in white ash. Friends in low places.

Best place to have ’em.

I could hear the grin in his voice. I asked what other surprises he had in store.

Our retiree heard something from one of the corrections officers.

What’d he say?

The guy’s not wired right.

Sounds like my father. Truth was, I didn’t know my father. He’d vanished after the fire, along with any evidence that would have explained his actions. Not that I would have understood anything at the ripe old age of five.

Your father was an assistant DA. He tried drug dealers and murderers. Any one of them could have abducted him as payback.

What about the DA’s testimony that my mother and father argued at his Christmas party? What if the murder got him out of the marriage and the fire covered his tracks?

You base that on what?

On every police and news report I’ve ever read. You think that’s hearsay evidence?

Walter reclined his seat a fraction of an inch and lowered his eyelids in a classic sign of avoidance. Let’s not rush to judgement.

We swept over rows of houses stacked against each other like dominos. The landing gear rumbled. We hit the runway with a double bounce that went straight through my stomach. The budget airline hadn’t provided a Jetway so we zigzagged down a metal plank to another surprise—winter.

I’d worn a hoodie on the plane. Big mistake. The cold punched through the cotton like a fist. Snow salted the air. The cloud deck, which had long since darkened to ash, dropped another mile. I checked the weather app on my phone. When we’d left Spanish Point, the temperature had reached seventy. In Riverton, the air had warmed to a balmy seventeen degrees. At least the expected high was twenty-three.

Welcome to paradise, I said as we shouldered our bags through the beige corridors of the terminal.

Walter walked at a good clip, swinging his head from side to side—an old habit designed to assess threat levels. Your enthusiasm is contagious.

At the car rental counter, we bickered over the ride. I argued for something sporty, like a Miata. He said he’d have to shake it off his foot every time he got out of the car and asked for a full-sized SUV. The clerk, an African-American woman with a blonde streak in her smooth hair, suggested a Chevy Tahoe. It could seat seven to nine.

What are we hauling? I asked. A football team?

We’d still need room for equipment.

The rental agent smiled. Like Walter, she had a gap between her front teeth. It looked sexy on her, too.

The only available SUV was white. Walter signed the paperwork. The clerk handed him the keys and said to look for the vehicle in Bay Four.

White? I asked as the automatic doors dumped us into an ocean of cold.

We’ll blend in with the snow.

He chirped the locks, and we climbed aboard. The seats crackled. He started the car. I cranked the heater. It blew gusts of frosted air.

The only thing I hate more than fire, I said, is cold.

Welcome home.

We pulled onto the interstate, a ribbon of concrete white with road salt. The wipers clacked, the tires hissed, and the landscape rolled by in an unbroken streak of grays and brown—hills thatched with dead grass, culm banks dusted with snow, the trees burned by ice, the clouds curling back on themselves like smoke. It looked as if fire had swept the valley and left it to smolder. Closer to the city, a junkyard stretched for a full mile, followed by gravel pits, pole barns and distribution centers. The only color appeared on a sign for a Mack Trucks dealership. I began to wonder how I’d survived here for twenty-eight years. Unlike Spanish Point, with its surge of tourists and development, nothing ever seemed to change.

I tapped the dash button and inhaled a blast of talk radio.

This is depressing, I said to the window. It didn’t talk back.

Here. He handed me a smartphone and pointed to the instrument panel. Plug this in. It’ll cheer you up.

An upgrade from your flip phone? I didn’t know you’d entered the twentieth century.

One of many things you don’t know.

Thanks to you.

Using its Bluetooth feature, I connected the phone to the Chevy’s sound system. I expected holiday music. Instead, Elton John’s Philadelphia Freedom worked its muscular way from the speakers.

I checked the playlist. It ran like a who’s who of golden oldies.

‘Get Down Tonight’? ‘When Will I be Loved’? Really?

You have to remember, he said, pausing no doubt to add dramatic weight to the coming revelation, I was a teenager once.

I find that thought highly disturbing. I checked the playlists. You don’t have any holiday music?

It’s on there. Somewhere.

Walter’s phone connected, the sound system virtually yodeling with Bing Crosby. Ten minutes later, he took the exit for the Crosstown Expressway. The view didn’t improve. As we entered Riverton city limits, businesses rose from weed-filled lots. Row houses presented their blank faces, plywood bandages patching their scorched frames. Blackened piles of debris lined the streets. They reminded me of photos of the city after Hurricane Agnes hit in 1972.

You were here for the fires, I said.

Fifteen reported cases of arson in three months. Three million in damage. Dozens homeless. No one hurt—so far.

I’d read about the fires. They’d flared all over the city, at all times of the night. The only pattern was the ignition source: the fires were set under porches or in outbuildings using materials at hand, mostly furniture and trash. Fires of opportunity, not the work of a pro. The city had ordered residents to keep their lights on and their porches and backyards clear of debris. It had imposed a curfew, distributed smoke detectors and offered a reward. The efforts had yielded hundreds of calls but no suspects.

And they’re all arson?

Arson, wiring, neglect, Walter said. Take your pick.

For profit?

No accelerant.

Do-it-yourself urban renewal?

He chuckled.

Someone with a personal beef?

Too widespread.

Copycat?

He nodded. Could be.

Why torch the city in the first place?

We won’t know until someone’s charged.

Has anything burned since our suspect was collared?

Nada.

Wheeling the SUV off the expressway, he turned onto River Street and drove past the hospital, its oxygen tanks milky with frost,