Burn for Me Read online

  “Yes, you will. Write an addendum to the contract that in the event of my death, my family can buy out the agency’s name for a dollar, and I will go after Pierce.”

  “A dollar?”

  “If I die, my family gets the firm back. Take it or leave it.”

  “Very well.” Montgomery’s fingers flew over the keyboard. A piece of paper slid out of the printer. I read it, signed on the line, and watched him write his name in an elegant cursive.

  Montgomery tapped his tablet. “I’ve emailed Pierce’s background file to you. Once again: you must apprehend Adam Pierce before the police take him into custody or your loan is forfeit.”

  I got up and walked, leaving the picture of the family on his desk. He should have to look at it. My hands shook. I wanted to turn around, march back, and punch him.

  I kept walking until I was out of the building. Outside the wind fanned me, pulling at my clothes. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Bern.

  “Drop whatever you’re doing. I need everything on Adam Pierce.”

  “We’re going after Pierce? Are you serious?”

  “Look in our inbox.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I need his lineage, his full background, his criminal record, who he went to school with—everything. Every scrap of information you can find. The more we know the better.”

  “Do you want me to tell Aunt Pen?”

  Oh, Mom would just love this development. “No. I’ll do it. Call Mateus for me.”

  When I said that all of our part-time employees were children, I didn’t lie. But occasionally, when we needed muscle, we hired free agents on a one-job basis. I had a feeling none of them would touch any job involving Pierce with a ten-foot pole, but it was worth a try.

  “How much should I offer?” Bern said into my ear.

  “Ten grand.” It was about three times what we normally offered. It was also the entirety of our rainy day fund. We could take a loan if we had to.

  “We can’t pay that much.”

  “We can if we apprehend Pierce. Tell him payment on delivery.”

  The phone clicked as Bern put me on hold. I walked to my car.

  Where the hell would I even start?

  Another click. “He laughed.”

  In his place I’d laugh too. “Try the Cowboy.”

  Click. Click. “No. And that’s a quote.”

  “Asli? Bump it up to fifteen.” Asli was expensive as hell, but she was worth every penny, and I haven’t known her to back down.

  I reached my Mazda and leaned against the grill.

  “She says she’s busy with something else.”

  Argh. These were my top three. Why did I have this vision of all of our freelancers running away from us like a pack of scared rabbits? “Okay. Start running the background on Pierce, please.”

  I hung up. The panic that first welled inside me in Augustine’s office crested and drowned me. I let it pull me under.

  If we failed, MII would call in the loan and take everything. We would literally walk out of our home with nothing but a black plastic bag filled with clothes and whatever toiletries each of us could carry. Grandma would have no place to run her business. I would have no business at all. I could start over, but it would take time and money. I built on the name and foundation that my parents had created. Personal referrals accounted for 90 percent of our jobs. We would be on the street, all seven of us. We would lose our health insurance. We would still have our other debts. Our savings might put a roof over our heads and food in our mouths for a month or two, but then what?

  Bern would drop out. There was no way he wouldn’t. He would drop out and take any job he could get, whatever would buy us another week in a cheap motel or another meal. I saw his future, and it was going up in flames.

  And my sisters . . . We’d just gotten back to normal after the chaos of dad’s illness. We’d just stabilized. The therapy worked, everyone was back on track, and the kids finally had some routine. If this happened . . . It felt like someone had taken an ice-cold knife and stabbed it into my stomach to gut me.

  No. This wouldn’t be happening. They would not do this to my family. They would not take everything I’d worked so hard to build. No. Just no.

  I breathed in and out, exhaling anger.

  Think. It’s a skiptrace. I had done skiptraces. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

  Private investigators tended to specialize. Some developed financial profiles and dealt with asset searches. Some took surveillance cases. Others performed background checks. We did a little bit of everything, and I had done my fair share of skiptracing. This was just another skiptrace. Except if I found him, he would sear the flesh off my bones. And the family might still end up on the street, when MII took our house. At least they would get the business name back.

  This probably wasn’t the most productive line of thinking.

  This mess, as my father used to say, was way above my pay grade. I wasn’t even sure where to start. I could go to First National and look at the burned-out wreck. I had handled exactly four arson cases before, all in connection with insurance, and I knew the scene really wouldn’t tell me anything. I didn’t need to determine if Pierce committed the arson. I just had to find him.

  Pierce had killed a cop and hurt his family. Right now every cop in the Houston metro area was champing at the bit, hoping to put a bullet in Pierce’s handsome head. I bet the cops had a file on Pierce that was a mile thick. That file would be an awesome place to start, except they wouldn’t let me look at it. First, I was a civilian, and second, I was in competition with the cops. In the crime novels, a PI is either an ex-cop or has some cop buddies who owed him a favor and who happily provided him with the department’s files, while carrying on about how it could cost them their job. I had no cop buddies. I tried to avoid them as much as possible. My dad had been friendly with a couple of people, but both of them worked in the Financial Crime Unit, not in Homicide. Besides, right now nobody except Montgomery, me, and Bern knew that I was looking for Pierce. If I put myself on the cop radar, they would start paying attention to what I was doing, which would make finding Pierce harder.

  Around me downtown Houston hummed with life. The skyscrapers, some glass and steel, some towering monoliths of stone, rose around me. The cobalt building of MII loomed to the left, looking even more like a shark fin. I could almost imagine the pavement cracking, breaking open in huge slabs, and a colossal shark head bristling with razor-sharp glass teeth emerging to swallow me whole. In front of me, traffic inched up the busy street. A red Maserati convertible pulled out of traffic and drove down the Metrorail tracks toward the hospital. The driver, a young guy in a black T-shirt, was putting on cologne. Dumbass.

  Above him a large flat-screen billboard mounted on the wall of a stone tower flashed with advertisements. A news segment came on, and an image of a woman in a business suit filled the screen. She was in her late thirties, athletic, attractive, with medium brown skin and a dark wealth of curly hair, currently pulled back from her face into a knot. Everyone in Houston knew her name. Lenora Jordan, Harris County District Attorney. When I was fourteen years old, she walked into the street to face George Kolter. She was fresh out of law school and he was a seasoned fulgurkinetic Prime. He could shoot lightning from fifty feet away, he stood accused of child molestation, and he had decided at the last moment that he wasn’t going to trial. Lenora Jordan walked down the courthouse steps, like a gunfighter from the Old West, summoned chains from thin air, and bound George Kolter to the pavement. The whole thing had been recorded and played by every news outlet. It was epic. Every girl in my grade wanted to be Lenora when she grew up. She was incorruptible, powerful, and smart, she had no fear, and she didn’t take shit from anyone. I had no doubt that if Pierce was apprehended and received his day in court, she would destroy him while making sure that his constitutional rights were perfectly preserved.

  I wasn’t Lenora Jordan, no matter how much I wanted to be. If I did run
into Pierce by some chance, I couldn’t dramatically bind him. I couldn’t make him do anything against his will either. I would have to somehow convince him that it was in his best interests to come with me.

  I pulled my phone out, downloaded the background file on Pierce, and opened it. Most people accumulated identifiers: DOB, SSN, last known address, driver’s license number, place of employment, all the things that tied them down and made them relatively easy to track. About 75 percent of the time, their idea of being off the grid meant hiding out at their cousin’s house. And 90 percent of the time, their mother, no matter what she claimed, could get hold of them within minutes.

  Pierce’s file provided me with a date of birth, place of birth, Social Security number, parents’ names and address, and his education. Elementary school, middle school, high school, Stanford University, bachelor of arcane science in materials science and engineering, minor in philosophy, 3.9 GPA. Applied and was accepted into a graduate program for a master’s of materials science and engineering, dropped out two months into it. Current residence: unknown. Current job: none. Awesome.

  Arrest record. Aha. Adam Pierce had been arrested six times in the past sixteen months. Busy boy. Let’s see, public intoxication, vandalism, resisting arrest—surprise-surprise, loitering . . . loitering? That must’ve been one pissed-off cop.

  Let’s see, Facebook. I scrolled through half a dozen Adam Pierces. Nothing smelled genuine. That’s okay, he was probably a short burst social network kind of guy. I flicked to the Twitter app and searched for Adam Pierce. His Twitter account had been inactive for the last forty-eight hours. I followed him and clicked through his photos. Adam on a bike. Adam with his shirt off. Adam and a bunch of pretty-looking bikers in front of a bike shop. The photo showed a section of the sign: -aves Custom Cycles. I saved the photo on my phone.

  I opened a writing app and began typing what I knew about Pierce.

  Vain. Terminal fear of T-shirts or any other garment that would cover his pectorals.

  Deadly. Doesn’t hesitate to kill. Holding him at gunpoint would result in me being barbecued. Whee.

  Likes burning things. Now here’s an understatement. Good information to have, but not useful for finding him.

  Antigovernment. Neither here nor there.

  Hmm. So far my best plan would be to build a mountain of gasoline cans and explosives, stick a Property of US Government sign on it, and throw a T-shirt over Pierce’s head when he showed up to explode it. Yes, this would totally work. If only.

  Likes to be arrested. It probably made him feel tough. Adam Pierce, the rebel. He didn’t like jail though. His first arrest happened to be on Sunday, and he spent the night in jail. The five subsequent arrests showed bail posted within hours after booking.

  Famous. That was both in my favor and not. Being famous would make it harder to hide, but if he was recognized, the 911 boards would light up like fireworks and cops would be on him faster than I could blink. But being famous also would mean many false sightings. Especially if the cops offered a reward. People would see him here, there, and everywhere.

  Handsome. With devil eye bonus.

  Rich.

  Rich. Adam Pierce was rolling in money. This morning when I saw him on TV he was wearing a designer jacket and posing against a bike that looked like something out of a science fiction movie and probably cost a lot more than my car. He was a spoiled rich boy, and spoiled rich boys didn’t deal well with lack of money. They might slum for a little while, but they liked their toys and their creature comforts. The key concept of running any sort of enterprise, criminal or civil, was work. Given Adam Pierce’s track record, work was something he detested. Someone had posted those bails for him. Where was his money coming from?

  I scrolled through the file. Pierce had an incentive trust fund. He could draw money only while he was in college pursuing a master’s degree or after obtaining it. According to the file, the family had cut him off cold turkey. A note marked ASM—probably Augustine Something Montgomery—read, Confirmed with the family. Stressed importance of financial incentive as means of bringing him in.

  I called Bern. “Hey, have you pulled Pierce’s record?”

  “Does ice float?” Bern’s voice had a measured cadence to it, which usually meant he was doing about six other things on the computer screens while talking.

  “Who posted his bail?”

  “One of his college buddies. Cornelius Maddox Harrison.”

  Quite a name. Someone’s parents had ambitions.

  “I’m emailing his home address now,” Bern said. “You can catch him at the house. According to his tax return, he’s a stay-at-home dad.”

  “Thanks. I’ll swing by his house now.”

  “Wait,” Bern said, his voice suddenly flat.

  Uh-oh.

  “Can you come by the house instead? I need to show you something.”

  “This doesn’t sound good.”

  “It isn’t good,” Bern said.

  How could it possibly get any worse?

  I found Bern in the Hut of Evil, otherwise known as our computer room. Soundproof and equipped with its own air-conditioning unit, the room occupied the space at the north of the warehouse, directly behind the offices. It was raised five feet off the floor, like a house on stilts, because Bern found it convenient to mess with the wiring underneath it. We used to joke that if the warehouse got flooded, we’d all race to the Hut of Evil to stay dry. From the outside, it looked like a separate tiny house within the larger space of the warehouse, complete with a ten-step stairway leading to it. At first we called it the House of Evil, but over the years it somehow became the Hut of Evil.

  I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” Bern called.

  I went inside and shut the door. The air here was at least five degrees cooler. Bern sat ensconced among four different monitors on swiveling mounts. Three computer towers blinked with red, white, and green lights. Across from him, Leon’s station, a smaller desk with a triple monitor, stood empty. He and the girls were in school.

  Bern turned to me, his handsome face tinted with blue by the glow of the largest monitor. There was always something a little comical about seeing his big frame next to the computer screens. The keyboards and monitors seemed too small for him.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  “While I was talking to you, I ran the background check on the kid implicated in the arson.”

  “Gavin Waller.”

  Bern nodded. “I pulled his lineage.”

  In our world, lineage was everything. The magical families owned corporations, and most major cities were divided into family territories. Some families influenced only a few city blocks, others controlled entire neighborhoods. Your last name and your family tree could open doors or get you killed. If the family became prominent enough, it was considered a house. House Montgomery. House Pierce.

  “Gavin’s father is Thomas Waller. His mother is Kelly Waller. Neither is magically significant.” Bern paused.

  I waited. Bern stored information in logical chains. When asked something, he would start at the beginning of the chain and pull it all out link by link until the relevant information finally emerged. If the house were on fire, Bern would begin by describing how he went to get the box of matches to light the candle that started it. Trying to hurry this process up wasn’t only futile, it was counterproductive. Interruptions derailed Bern. He would get back on track in his methodical way, and he couldn’t understand why you jumped up and down and foamed at the mouth in sheer frustration while he took his time doing it.

  “Kelly Waller’s maiden name was Lancey.”

  Mhm.

  “Her father was William Lancey.”

  Mhm.

  “Her mother was Carolina Rogan.”

  Mhm. Wait, what? “Rogan? As in House Rogan?”

  Bern nodded. “Mad Rogan is Kelly Waller’s cousin. That makes him Gavin’s first cousin once removed.”

  My
legs decided that this would be a fine time to go on strike. I landed in a chair.

  The United States hadn’t officially declared war in the last seventy years. Instead it got itself involved in armed conflicts, peacekeeping actions, and armed interventions, which, for all intents and purposes, were wars without having a scary label attached to them: Europe, the Middle East, and then the so-called South American Wars, which broke out when the discovery of magically potent mineral deposits in Belize destabilized the neighboring region. Mexico, already a magical powerhouse, invaded tiny Belize. Honduras, Nicaragua, and Brazil formed a coalition to oppose the invasion. Both the United States and the United Native Tribes joined the anti-Mexican coalition, even though the territories of the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana were nowhere near the border and even though UNT usually went against the USA in just about every policy decision. Everyone paid lip service to the brave soldiers of Belize, but the true reason was clear: nobody wanted Mexico, the magical juggernaut, to be more powerful than it already was.

  The war was terrible. In the end Mexico relinquished its hold on Belize, but the ripples of that invasion spread through South America. Armed conflicts flared and died down across half a dozen nations. Mad Rogan made his name in those conflicts. He was off the charts even for the Primes. Nobody knew exactly what he was capable of, but everyone knew the name. Mad Rogan. The Butcher of Merida. Huracan.

  The chances of us succeeding in apprehending Adam Pierce were already close to zero. If Mad Rogan decided to take an interest, it would knock us right into the negative.

  “What do we know about Mad Rogan?”

  Bern pushed a key on his keyboard. A grainy video filled the monitor. I remembered watching it once, a long time ago, while still in high school. I had gotten bored with it back then, because nothing really happened in the first two minutes, and hadn’t finished.

  A young man with longish dark hair and pale eyes, his face smudged by static, standing in the middle of an empty four-lane road, silhouetted against an overcast sky, padded with gray clouds.

  “. . . Carla will float you,” a measured female voice said. “No worries. We know you’re up to it.”