For a minute he wondered if The Mean Green was the right car to be seen in. The lime green paint and chrome wheels weren’t exactly camouflage. But everyone was so busy looking at cases full of minerals or watching their own feet, they probably wouldn’t notice a circus driving through.
Besides, he liked how ballsy it was—hiding in plain sight.
The Bambi Ranch was out of town; he knew that was a requirement of all legal brothels in Nevada. He was surprised at the size of the layout—there were five narrow buildings, like temporary offices they had at schools, only this was no school. All of them were painted lavender. As he drove over the cattle guard into the parking area, he noticed an airstrip to his right, the windsock sticking straight out like a condom. There was also a satellite dish on a balding Bermuda lawn surrounded by a white picket fence.
The place was lit up like a Christmas tree. Tiny white bulbs strung up in the Aleppo pines, colored lights all over the front office, and not the kind you got at Kmart either—these were professional quality, the kind you’d find on the front of the casinos in Vegas. All that light power on these little sorry buildings. Like the crown jewels on a ten-dollar hooker.
He’d wanted to savor the event, but it didn’t turn out that way. The women outnumbered the men, and they sure didn’t line up like he’d expected. More like they converged on him like sharks on chum.
“You want me, don’t ya sweetness?” a handsome woman in her thirties said, practically getting him in a half nelson. She smelled of heavy perfume, breath mints and gin, but her skin was smooth and her boobs were huge.
Another one said, “With me, you buy one, you get one free. Redeemable any time.” This chick was younger, with black hair and purple lips. Pale as a fish’s belly.
Then there was the brooding Russian woman who tried to smile. At least he thought she was Russian. Pale, washed out, sad. Most of them, though, they flounced and strutted and ran their fingers through his hair. When the door opened and another man came in, three of them made a beeline for him. They reminded him of the catfish he used to feed as a kid at Lake Mead: boiling up the water, their mouths avid.
The one who remained was the young chick. She had a stud in her eyebrow and looked kind of skeletal, but her skin was like cream. And she didn’t reek of booze like the older ones. She caught his look and nodded to the menu on an easel near the counter—a list of services and their prices, all nicely written up in fancy calligraphy on white poster board. He opted for basic cable, so to speak, and paid the bored little man behind the counter in cash.
The Goth girl motioned him to follow her. She led him outside into the warm night, across the cracked walkway to the first trailer, down a hallway to a small dark room, paneled with walnut veneer.
The minute they got through the door, she removed her clothes. If you blinked, you missed it. She had on boots that zipped up the insides and a flimsy skirt with an elastic waist band. Zip, zip, and the boots were off, and then she shimmied out of the skirt and her bottom half was naked as a jaybird. She clasped her arms around his neck and pulled him down on the bed without a word.
It wasn’t as fun as he thought it would be. In fact, he found his mind drifting, thinking about tomorrow and all the days after that. Playing it out in his head. He seemed to hear her from a distance, moaning and groaning, doing her level best to get him to finish up.
But he wasn’t into it. It wasn’t anywhere near as exciting—as dirty—as he had expected it to be. The whole idea had been huge in his mind, but this—this was paltry. And so his mind wandered to something he saw on the road on the way up here today: an abandoned airplane hangar baking in the desert sun. The Goth woman whimpered about how good he was—he noticed she worked herself into more of a lather the longer it took, like jockeys waling on their horses as they neared the wire—but his mind was on the checkpoint trailer at the California border, the two Homeland Security agents in their protective vests and their dark clothing, the sun bouncing off their sunglasses, the big German shepherd between them.
He liked their look. Easy enough to approximate. All he needed was a haircut and the right kind of sunglasses.
“Oh—my—God!”
Bobby wondered if he should fake it like his girlfriend did, or just quit. But he was stubborn; he wanted his money’s worth. So he decided to put his mind to it, and with intense concentration, managed to put it over the top, just as the egg timer by the side of the bed rang.
It was the hardest work he’d done all day.
Feeling good about getting it done, he said, “How was that, sweetness?”
“Oh, it was great.”
The way she said it made him want to slap her. That tone in her voice. He’d heard that tone all his life, and every time, it said he wasn’t worth talking to or listening to or even lying to. The way women could put you down just by the inflection.
Just once, he’d like to see something on a woman’s face besides contempt, disappointment, greed, or want.
“The tip jar’s over there,” Goth said.
For a moment he saw himself picking up the jar and tossing it into the mirrored closet doors, but then he remembered that he shouldn’t do anything memorable. He had to think about the big picture. He wanted to be like those two agents—anonymous in their dark glasses and their clipped haircuts.
He put a dollar in her jar and said, “Sorry to overtip you, but I don’t have any loose change.”
She slammed the door after him with her foot.
The Mean Green sat patiently outside, his only friend.
Well, his girlfriend thought she was his friend. She thought she was more than that. But the more she loved him, the less he felt like loving her. Human nature was funny that way. It had always been like that with him. He knew it, but still he kept digging himself into these holes. Now he was going to meet her in Vegas, and he knew what was coming. All these wedding chapels going to waste.
He had other plans for his life.
His mother would have socked him one for even thinking that. Her favorite expression was “Don’t blow your own horn.” But ever since he was a little kid, he was certain he’d make a name for himself. Sure, if you looked at it from the outside, if you were a stranger, you wouldn’t think much of that prediction. But he was just getting started.
He cruised back down the highway through the warm, velvet dark, The Mean Green’s windows open. Singing along with a Little Feat CD, shouting the lyrics into the desert air: “ ‘When the Feats are on the box, the speed just slips my mind, I start to sing along, tap my toe and slap the dash in time.’ ”
The Texas ranger in the song, who stopped the car, telling the guy: “Son those Feat done steered you wrong this time. Those Feat’ll steer you wrong sometimes.” Easy to get steered wrong; life surely was a slippery slope. He himself had spent most of the second half of his life trying to get out of the trouble he caused for himself in the first half.
But when God blew through your soul and told you it was your time, you heard it. And if you were any kind of man at all, you did something about it.
Back in Pahrump, he hit the slots at the casino. Thinking of all the people on the street and in this place. Wondering: Did they know how it could all change for them in an instant? Did they have any concept of God’s stern and unyielding judgment coming for them, rolling down the highway?
More than likely, they had their blinders on, like everybody else on the planet. Looking around at the people here filling their time, throwing their money away with both hands, he knew that was true. All most people did was try to get from one hour to the next.
Bobby quit while he was slightly ahead and went back to his room. Looked at his maps, thought about what he’d do the next day. Scouting mostly. And planning.
He thought about Death Valley just across the line—how appropriate was that? And the desolate stretch of road, the airplane hangar rotting in the sun, stark against the desert brush, noticeable and unnoticeable at the same time. And he, Bobby Burdette, loo
king cool and tough in his dark glasses.
Chapter Two
SATURDAY—WILLIAMS, ARIZONA
There were two cops at the campsite when Laura Cardinal arrived at the scene, one of them looking at the tent as if he were trying to figure out how to pack it up.
The opening to the red, two-man dome tent was unzipped, the nylon door piece lying on the forest floor like a tongue. From this angle, Laura could see at least half the interior. The backside of the tent glowed orange-red where it was lit from behind by the sun. Sunlight poured in through a fist-sized hole in the fabric. She could see little of the tent floor, but what she saw was empty and soaked with blood.
Warren Janes, the sergeant who had accompanied her to the scene, had to walk fast to keep up with her. “This is the second time something like this’s happened,” he said. “A kid drowned in the lake at the beginning of the summer.”
Laura was half listening. Her instincts had kicked up into high gear, and what they were telling her wasn’t good. Something wrong here. Not that there wasn’t plenty wrong to begin with—two college kids shot to death while sleeping in their tent.
“What happened?” she asked, her gaze still fixed on the campsite.
“Well, that’s the weird thing. Kid was with his teacher, Mr. Garatano, late at night. What Mr. Garatano said was the kid wanted to swim so he dove off of the boat. He never came up.”
“How old was the kid?”
“Fourteen.”
She stopped. “What were they doing out in a boat late at night?”
Janes shrugged. “He said they were fishing, but we all wondered about that. Mr. Garatano got fired not too long after that. We investigated, turned out the kid got tangled up in some weeds and drowned.”
Interesting, Laura thought, but she had other worries. Despite the perfect late-summer day and the reasonable assumption that the Williams PD cops had preserved the scene, Laura had the feeling there was something she didn’t know. And then it came to her.
She voiced her suspicions to Janes. “The bodies are still in the tent, aren’t they?”
He cleared his throat.
At that moment, she saw the younger cop reach down to pull one of the tent pegs out of the ground.
“Officer! Don’t do that!”
He straightened up, uncertain. Little more than a kid—maybe only a year or two out of high school. He stepped back from the tent as if it were a snake, his movement quick and athletic.
The older cop started in their direction, as if trying to ward them off. “The ME’s people were just here. I tried to stall them, but they couldn’t wait any longer.”
“They took the bodies,” Laura said. She wanted to a punch a wall—or something. Or someone.
The cop had stopped in front of them, hands on his hips, as if the altitude bothered him. “They were so busy in Flag this weekend—there was a pileup on the freeway—this was the only time they could cut someone loose to come get them.”
Laura resigned herself to the reality of the situation. This was bad, but she would have to work around it. She and Victor, her usual partner, had a saying when things went wrong at a crime scene: That’s showbiz.
Laura motioned to the younger cop to join them. She noticed he was careful to follow the prints the officers had made entering the scene, adhering to the “one way in, one way out” rule. This surprised her. After seeing him reach for the tent peg, she’d expected him to be impulsive.
Sergeant Janes made the introductions. “This is criminal investigator Laura Cardinal with the Department of Public Safety,” Janes said. He glanced at her. “Have I got that right?”
“Detective’s fine.” Thinking: Where the hell is Richie? If he’d been here earlier, he could have stopped them from taking the bodies.
The two officers were Tagg and Wingate. The older cop, Tagg, smelled of cigarette smoke. Wingate seemed on edge, adrenaline running through him like a muscular river. Laura guessed this was the first time he’d seen anything like this.
Janes said, “I want you to give her and her partner everything you’ve got.”
Tagg was looking at her as if trying to place her. “I’ve heard your name before. Aren’t you—?”
Laura didn’t reply directly to his question. Instead, she motioned toward a blue truck parked behind them on the forest road, just outside the campground gate. “Is that the victims’ vehicle?”
“That’s right,” said Janes. “Thought we’d leave it for you to process.”
“I’ll need a warrant.” Even though the truck belonged to the crime scene, Laura wanted to be on the safe side, go ahead and get the warrant. Depending on where they were, even crime scenes required warrants, which Laura thought was just plain nutty. “Is there a justice of the peace or judge you like to go to?”
Janes motioned to his patrol car. “I have his number on the computer. We can do it telephonically.”
“Do we have photographs?”
“The medical examiner’s office took some, but they’re in Flagstaff.”
“I took some Polaroids,” Wingate volunteered. He trotted up the red cinder road to one of two Williams PD police cars and returned a moment later.
Four Polaroids. “That’s all the film I had.”
Laura held each one of them in the shade of her body, squinting against the brightness.
Hard to tell what was what; the colors were faded and the shapes indistinct. Yellow hair in a tangle. Pale flesh clotted with blood. The boy behind the girl; half-in, half-out of the sleeping bag. Spoon fashion, his right arm over her body. The sleeping bag and walls of the tent soaked with blood.
The top of the boy’s head gone.
All four Polaroids had been taken through the holes in the tent, from different angles.
“Is that one sleeping bag, or two?” Laura asked
“Well, technically, there’re two,” Tagg said. “They zipped ‘em together. You can do that with Cabela’s.”
Tagg added, “Double-ought buckshot. Shot right through the tent flap and two other sides.”
“He didn’t see them then?”
“He could’ve seen them through the holes in the tent, but he didn’t bother to open up the door flap. We had to open it to get the bodies—” Tagg glanced at Wingate. “—the victims out.”
“Josh’s the one who found them,” Sergeant Janes explained. “He knew Dan.”
Josh Wingate was staring at the tent. The high-voltage energy field surrounding him had not abated; in fact, it seemed to be getting stronger. “We were best friends in high school,” he said.
Laura looked at him with new interest. No wonder he seemed so off balance. His eyes were like shards of cut green glass, pulverized with hurt, but she noticed his posture was straight and he held his chin high. Almost defiant.
She remembered a shabby kitchen in Florida, how it felt to see someone you knew die right in front of you. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s bad,” Josh Wingate replied, “but I’m okay.”
Laura had her doubts about that. “You found them?”
“My mom lives up that road.” He pointed to Country Club Road behind them. “I was on my way over when I saw his truck.”
“How’d you know it was his?”
“We used to camp out here a lot when we were kids. Plus, the bumper sticker.”
Laura glanced at the truck, a late-model GMC Sierra, the same medium-blue sheen as Cataract Lake. A common enough color in trucks. The bumper sticker said COWBOY UP. There was an NAU sticker on the windshield. Dan Yates and Kellee Taylor both had attended Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.
“They weren’t supposed to be here,” Sergeant Janes said. “The campground’s been closed since Labor Day for repairs.”
It was the third week of September now. Laura looked out at the quiet lake, the pines. The grass going tawny, the palette of wildflowers fading to tarnished glory. After Labor Day, the north country seemed to give up on tourists until ski season. “We’re kind of far from town,
aren’t we?” she said. “I would expect this to be the sheriff’s jurisdiction.”
“The city annexed this area last year. There’s plans to build at least one hotel and restaurant around here, what with the lake and all.”
Laura continued to stare at the lake. Wondering again, where was Richie Lockhart? Sergeant Janes hadn’t heard from him, and neither had she.
Well, she didn’t have the luxury to wait for him. Whatever she did now, she had to do right. Her crime scene—she always thought of a crime scene as hers—had been compromised by the removal of the bodies. She had to go with what she had.
Officer Wingate had been the first on the scene. He was friends with at least one of the victims, which might influence his memory in ways she couldn’t fathom, but he was still her best bet. He would have to be her eyes and ears.
Chapter Three
The first thing Laura did was clear out a space in the dirt. She said to Officer Wingate, “Why don’t you step right here?” He looked at her, uncertain, then planted his foot on the ground. Laura put a red and white ruler beside his footprint, then photographed the print and the ruler with her Canon digital SLR camera. Then she cleared another space in the ground, placed her own foot in the center, and photographed that.
“I see what you’re doing,” Wingate said. “Now we’ll know our own footprints.”
As they entered the area inside the crime scene tape, one thing was clear to Laura immediately. She said to Officer Wingate, “Look at the ground. Do you see anything unusual?”
“No, ma’am.” And then, “Wait.” Careful to stay on the path trampled by the Williams PD officers, he hunkered down and scanned the ground. “Looks like they covered their tracks.”
She nodded. A large area had been smoothed over, probably with a push broom. The random pattern of pine duff carpeting the ground had been replaced by a layer of ponderosa needles and dirt mixed together, the grama grass and purple asters and few green strands of meadow grass poking up dusty, dispirited heads. She took several photographs of the ground.
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