Ladies Man (Laura Cardinal Series Book 6)

by J. Carson Black

A sign of the times.

  Seemed like everybody was pissed off and easily riled these days.

  Laura had learned early on to walk the tightrope. She wanted to at least start out non-threatening, yet she could leave no doubt that she was in charge and controlled the scene. She said, “Detective Walker, do you know this area well?”

  “Not this part. It’s private property."

  “Those the people who found her?” She nodded in the direction of the two middle-aged men talking to one of the sheriff’s deputies at the rear of a newer-model SUV.

  “Uh-huh. They’re historians, something about a guy who died around here."

  “We’ll start with them, then."

  The two men who had discovered the body were standing by their truck, studying an old blueprint spread out on the hood—the most indifferent spectators to a homicide scene Laura had ever encountered. One of them said in an excited voice, “It’s the CAP canal, don’t you get it? That must be the second curve in the road where the car tipped over."

  Laura said, “Where Button Salmon’s car crashed?”

  “Yeah. See?” He showed her the old blueprint-slash-map. “They drove through two washes, both of them on tight turns—on the old road. But look here. Look how it matches up." He pointed to the blueprint. “It makes sense that when they put in the new road, it would be easiest just to lay it over the old one, because the work was already done for them, see? Except they’d straightened out the kinks. So where the bridge is now, that’s probably where they hit the second curve, the deeper arroyo, and the car tipped over. Of course, now it’s all straightened out and buried under CAP water."

  Laura knew the story. John “Button” Salmon, a University of Arizona quarterback, had been traveling back to Tucson from Phoenix—this was back in the 1920s—and the young woman who was driving hit a curve and overturned the car. In those days, the center of gravity in vehicles was much higher—most of the cars on the road were Model T’s or something like it. Salmon was rushed to a hospital, where he lingered for more than a week, but ultimately succumbed. His last words inspired the U of A football team. “Tell them…tell the team to bear down." His words became a legend, and when the new gym was built shortly thereafter, it was named Bear Down Gym in his memory and the motto, Bear Down painted on the roof.

  “Although there’s no way to prove this,” the other man, Greg, was saying. “It’s likely that’s where it happened, even though that second wash is now a canal. But it makes sense. Especially when you look at this map."

  Historians.

  She asked Marks, who seemed to be the dominant one, “Did you go down into the arroyo?”

  “We both know better than to do that. Besides, that’s one helluva tricky descent. You could break a leg if you took one misstep. Or land on a cactus."

  Laura nodded. “Can you stay here for a while? I’d like to talk to you again."

  “No problema,” Marks said.Laura said to Detective Walker, “We’ll start outside and work our way in. You know the drill. We’re looking for anything that doesn’t fit in with the terrain. Bottles, new. Cans, new. Gum wrappers. Anything recent. Broken mesquite branches, too."

  “Just so you know, this ain’t my first rodeo."

  She gave him her best smile. “Well then, let’s make it to the horn.”

  The dirt was hardpan and there were areas of red gravel, packed so tightly it yielded no footprints. Mounds of desert were broken up by steep gullies large and small.

  They started in a wide circle and worked their way in concentrically. Because the desert was riddled with deep gullies—some of them very hard to get in and out of—they had to skirt them. All the time, looking for any evidence that might belong to the victim.

  But there was nothing. This saguaro forest was pristine, except for the body, curled up inside a tight curve in the arroyo, jammed up under the bank’s overhang and caught in a nest of mesquite branches and junk. Laura wondered when it had last rained. It was fall, now, with clear, picture-perfect days, and in Tucson, there had been no rain in weeks. They’d have to go by the decomposition rate.

  She wondered. Could the body have been shoved up in there by her killer? Or was this merely an accident? She could easily have slipped and fallen into the water to be carried downstream.

  Laura stood at the edge of the arroyo, looking at the terrain, thinking that it would be easy for a person to lose her balance and end up skating down the gravel to land in the riverbed. In fact it would be hard to get down there any other way, but not impossible.

  The body was mummified. She could see the longish hair. The corpse’s top half appeared to be partially encased in a bra.

  “When was the last time it rained here?” she asked Walker.

  He kept his focus on the corpse. “I dunno,” he said. “A couple of weeks ago? Aren’t we going to go down there?”

  “Yeah, we are." But how to get down was going to be a problem. She looked around. They were at the top of a hill.

  She walked a little farther along the brow of the hill, and saw a way down. A narrow path, likely pounded out by peccaries.

  She led the way, Nikon dangling from the strap around her neck, bumping against her chest as she ended up skating down a loose mosaic of rocks before grabbing a mesquite and puncturing her palm on a mesquite thorn.

  Hurt like a sonofabitch.

  Walker came down behind her—much more sure-footed—and jumped past her into the riverbed—made it look easy. She tried not to resent him.

  Once down, they walked the streambed in both directions, looking for anything that might have belonged to the woman, and photographing whatever they deemed might be important. Laura looked for a purse, or an article of clothing, or a cigarette pack. But the arroyo was clean of debris, except for broken branches and limbs here and there.

  At last they reached the victim. The Vicks VapoRub in her nostrils did little to cut the stench.

  Laura photographed her from every angle possible. Only then did she start to put the jigsaw pieces together.

  First: the woman had been out here for a while. She’d been mummified to some degree.

  Second, Laura now saw that the woman’s hair had been dyed dark brown. Around the ears and at the middle part, a thin strip of her hair was white and wispy, where it wasn’t stained by dried mud. But what Laura hadn’t registered before was that the woman was fully-clothed. She had been in the shadow of the overhang, and so the only thing Laura had really seen clearly was the white bra, which was not just looped around her—part of it was wrapped around her neck.

  If she’d tumbled down the arroyo during a rainstorm, it was possible that her clothing would have been pulled off, or skewed around her in unusual ways.

  Her clothing was pretty much intact—which made Laura think she might have been stashed in that small space, rather than thrown into the wash during a flood. The smell of rotting meat enveloped them. Her Vicks Vaporub fought valiantly, but lost. The clothing had been stained purplish-black to moldy greenish-black, the consistency of leather. Hard to see the color of the long-sleeved blouse, but she thought it was deep purple. She took a stick and scraped away the muck and sand. Yes, purple. It had been wrenched around sideways and lay underneath, revealing the bra. A leather vest hung off one shoulder, snagged by a mesquite branch and hauled around behind her. Her jeans, still tucked into suede knee-high boots now stiff with dirt and stained with fluids—some dry, some wet—had been pulled down over the hips but only by a couple of inches. Laura had seen a lot of women, many of them biker chicks, wearing boots like these. Rust-red cowhide suede, badly stained by body fluids. Decorated with fringe.

  No outward sign of sexual assault.

  Stage Three decomposition. The face, battered and bruised. Strands of waist-length hair caught in the branches of the mesquite.

  Laura donned gloves. “You okay shooting this?” she asked, handing him the camcorder from her pack.

  “Sure."

  They slogged through the deep sand, Walker
recording video while she described the scene and the corpse.

  No purse. No I. D. No jewelry. That was too much to hope for. Either those had been taken from her, or they had been lost in the flood.

  The woman could have fallen in and been shuttled downstream. She could have been drowned. But if the flash flood had been that violent, why didn’t it tear her clothes from her body?

  Her feeling was that the woman had been shoved up into the tiny hollowed-out impression in the arroyo wall—possibly to hide her. Maybe as a cache, for the killer to come back to?

  It was one way to go. But only one.

  “Record it from every angle you can."

  “I am."

  “Then let’s move her out of there. Maybe she had a purse."

  “Probably got carried away by the flood."

  “Yes, that’s one possibility. Do me a favor and film her mouth."

  “What about her mouth?” Camera still rolling.

  Laura used a rubber-gloved finger to again part the woman’s lips. “No teeth. Her nails are gone, too."

  He looked mystified. “Maybe she had dentures? Could have been lost during the flood—maybe we could find them."

  “Could be."

  But she doubted it.

  They took still photos and Laura sketched the scene—“X” marking the spot of the small alcove in the bank, and the width of the arroyo in comparison. Finally, Walker helped her gently pry the woman out of the hollow.

  The stench billowed up, enveloping them—ten times worse than it had been.

  “Gloves."

  Laura and Walker donned gloves.

  The body remained in a squashed position, but they managed to turn her on her side in the white sand of the arroyo (good for contrast) and took photos of that.

  “What’s that?” Walker said.

  He pointed at a dark stain between the shoulder blades. “There’s a hole here."

  Laura described it for the video.

  “Could be a stab wound. Could be post-mortem, if she was caught on a branch. Hard to tell with the skin the way it is."

  Gently, Laura lifted the woman’s head.

  “Shit,” Walker said. “Lookie here. She was shot in the back of the skull. Small bore! You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Yes, Laura knew.

  Whoever this woman would turn out to be, they now knew the manner of her death.

  Execution.

  Chapter 2

  After the victim was removed and sent to the Pinal County Medical Examiner, Laura and Det. Brent Walker spent the rest of the day photographing the small cave in the arroyo, looking for shell casings, bullets that missed their mark (unlikely), bits of clothing that might have been torn from her body in the swollen creek (even less likely), discarded gum wrappers or cigarettes or anything else they could find, in preparation for the forensics team, which would be coming from Tucson.

  But they found nothing. The place was pristine.

  If what she believed to be the case—that the woman had died from one shot from a .22 at the base of the skull—it would have been more than sufficient. A bullet from a .22 would ricochet and break up, bouncing around the brainpan in such a way that it would rend it to rags. That was why the .22 was known as the assassin’s weapon.

  What did that say about him? (Or her. Statistically, she’d go by the numbers and think of the killer as a male. ) It might be that he had planned to kill her, had studied up on it, or knew that a .22 could do that much damage at pointblank range.

  Perhaps he had done it before.

  They’d found nothing else that could point to the killer. The ground did not yield footprints. And even if the bad guy hadn’t thrown the woman into the wash, even if he’d made it down into the wash and trudged to the cave, river sand was deep and would not show footprints.

  Walker said, “No purse, no I. D. Looks like this is gonna come down to ‘missing persons’ and forensics."

  Laura looked at the sky, now a lighter shade of blue. The temperature had dropped precipitously. Sunlight and shadows stretched out in a hotly contested race. A breeze picked up and shuffled everything toward night. It wouldn’t be long before the sun set. “We should wrap this up,” she said.

  Walker kicked at the dirt with his boot. “Yeah, there’s nothing out here. Fucker was either very smart . . . or very lucky."

  They waited for transport, which didn’t take long, and strung up crime scene tape at the entrance to the dirt track leading in to the area: CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS.

  On the way back out to the highway, she saw a 9 On Your Side TV satellite truck from the Tucson network affiliate slowing down on State Route 79 to turn onto the dirt road. She hoped they’d respect the yellow tape, even though she was doubtful that they could do anything to mess up the crime scene. For one thing, they wouldn’t know where to look, and she wasn’t about to tell them. The area was pristine and there were only a few old cans out there, probably from the middle of the previous century, and a few shotgun shells.

  The autopsy would not be scheduled yet, but it should be within the week.

  After stopping to fill up on a sandwich from a Circle K, Laura drove home. Matt had already fed the livestock (horses, dogs, and cat) and was watching Bosch on Netflix.

  She sat down next to him, grabbed some popcorn out of the bowl in his lap and ate some, then leaned over to kiss him. He stopped Harry Bosch mid-investigation.

  The kiss became a butter-flavored make-out session, which led them to the bedroom.

  As they lay together in the big bed, the cool air billowing the curtains and bringing in the sweet scent of alfalfa flakes, Laura found her mind returning to the woman stashed in the arroyo wall.

  Something . . .

  Matt rose up on one elbow and said, “I know that look. You’re in Harry Bosch mode."

  “I could have seen her before,” Laura said.

  “The woman in the wash."

  “Yes. Or at least I saw the outfit."

  “Outfit?”

  “The stuff she was wearing. Gypsy stuff." She described the jewel colors, the blouse, the long sleeves ending in cuffs, the fringed rust-red suede boots, the tight jeans on the remarkably skinny body. “I saw her, or someone like her, but I can’t remember where."

  “The same clothes?”

  “Not sure if the blouse was the same. But the boots. And the long hair, down to her waist."

  “Downtown?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know."

  “Who sells that stuff?”

  “A lot of boutiques on Fourth Avenue." She sat up. “I can have Terry sketch her."

  DPS Homicide Detective Terry Doss was called upon from time to time to sketch victims. Using his valuable talent, he could bring even a skeleton to life, approximating lips and eyes and nose, and cheek contours until they had a human face they could display on television or in newspapers and online. DO YOU KNOW THIS WOMAN?

  Chapter 3

  Laura awoke to an empty bed. For a moment she wondered if Matt was in the bathroom. Then the realization came.

  Matt was assisting firefighters in Colorado.

  He would be gone for at least a couple of days. Which meant she’d better get her ass out of bed and feed the horses. Not to mention the dogs and the cat.

  She threw on some clothes and headed out to the barn. It was going on six a. m. and the horses were nickering for their flake of hay. The dogs accompanied her, and their barn cat, Luke, came out to greet her.

  As Laura put a couple of flakes of hay in the feed bin and ran fresh water in the trough, her thoughts turned toward the woman. No purse, no I. D. All the woman had were the clothes she was wearing when she was—

  Executed.

  You had to be some kind of cold to shoot a person pointblank like that.

  Laura wondered if the woman’s killer lured her out there, if, maybe, her purse was still out there somewhere—if he didn’t keep it as a trophy or dispose of it at another location. She wondered if they had been in a relati
onship, or if this was a random act. She thought there would be others. Other women, or men, who had been dispatched in the same cold manner.

  More likely, it would be women.

  Dentures could have been ripped out by the flash flood. She wouldn’t know if that was really what happened until she had a timeline on the woman’s death. But she leaned toward the theory that whoever killed this woman pulled her teeth out. Or removed her dentures. It was possible Forensics would know if the teeth had been wrenched out, or if she’d had dentures pulled out of her mouth by the force of the flood.

  That would be something the pathologist could verify. The autopsy was scheduled for later today. Laura needed to know who this woman was. She was definitely a person who loved jewel colors—deep, rich colors. She wore her hair long, parted in the middle, which said something about her—how she identified. She wasn’t manic about her hairstyle. And yet she definitely wanted to make a statement with her clothes. The boots. Fringed suede boots, tall as English riding boots. She loved color, she loved gypsy stuff, she had a certain exotic gypsy flair—which might go with her age. If she came from the Flower Children era, she would feel right at home with long hair parted in the middle and colorful gypsy clothes. Laura guessed she was in her late fifties to late sixties, but that would be something Forensic Facial Reconstruction could decide.

  DO YOU KNOW THIS WOMAN?

  Laura considered having the sketch done, or possibly a clay outbuild from her skull to approximate the depths of the skin, muscle, and tendons of her face—a sculpture. She’d had less-than-stellar results from both options. It was about fifty-fifty, in her view.

  Back to the clothes. People generally fit into groups—identified with other people. They belonged to communities of people who were like them.

  She didn’t have the woman’s face, but she did have the outfit: a statement. An ensemble. The blouse, the two-and-a-half inch-long cuffs. The boots. The jeans.

  Laura knew where to start: boutiques. Especially boutiques on Fourth Avenue, adjacent to downtown in Tucson.