[Dnsmasq-discuss] Lease comes back after removing

[A C]

I'm having trouble removing leases from my system.  I have a client that
accepted a lease in my DHCP range before I remembered to put it in
/etc/ethers and /etc/hosts to give it a static lease.

I turned off the client, stopped dnsmasq, removed the lease file entry
in /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases and then restarted dnsmasq.  Then I
restarted the client.  It again found the original lease in my DHCP
range instead of picking one from /etc/ethers (in fact it reports "not
giving name ap.lan to the DHCP lease of 10.0.200.102 because the name
exists in /etc/hosts with address 10.0.0.252").

How can I fully purge the lease and get it to start over?  The client is
an embedded device and has no memory of the lease once I power cycle it
so somehow dnsmasq is remembering even though the lease file was purged.