She opened her mouth, almost said something. Then she started to cry. Just leaned her head on Laura’s shoulder and sobbed.
The little boy was standing on the couch now, leaning against the back. He knew something was wrong. He slipped, fell to his knees, and clamped on to Shana’s thigh, his faced screwed up, ready to cry. Which he did with a burst—long, braying sobs.
Richie said, “It’s not fair to let your parents—”
“Richie, could you go get Shana some water?” She said it politely, as Shana’s warm tears seeped into her jacket.
“Sure.” He disappeared into the kitchen, and Laura heard him slamming around the cupboards, pouring water.
Just then a truck pulled into the driveway. Laura saw it through the window, out of the corner of her eye as she continued to hold Shana.
Laura heard truck doors slam, voices, a little boy’s shout. “Is that your parents’ truck?” she asked Shana.
Shana looked at her numbly, nodded.
Richie appeared in the doorway with the water, looking toward the door.
A key turned in the lock and the door opened.
*
They sat around the kitchen table: Chuck Yates, his wife Louise, Laura, and Richie. Shana leaned in the doorway of the kitchen, arms folded, watching and listening. Looking as if someone had slapped her face raw. Occasionally shouting at the little boy, Justin, to “quit running around and for God’s sake stop screaming!” The baby, Adam, had been put down to sleep.
The notification had not gone easier with her parents. Mrs. Yates stubbornly refused to believe that her son Dan was dead. She resisted quietly, with dignity. She didn’t argue, just refused to believe it—would not even let the possibility in. The police had made a mistake.
That meant that, after a while, Laura had to address all her questions to Chuck Yates.
If Louise Yates refused to hear, Chuck Yates saw it coming and met it head on. She saw him as an aging knight, tall as a redwood, facing the enemy and taking the blows—the killing blows.
“I guess I have to go identify him.”
“We don’t require that anymore,” Richie said. “We have more than enough for identification.”
“What are you saying?” Rubbed his grizzled forehead with one ham hand.
“You don’t want to see him,” Richie said.
His words took the air out of the room.
Laura glanced at Louise Yates. Her mouth was grim, her chin stubbornly set. Holding the line.
Laura said to Mr. Yates, “Do you know anybody who would want to do this to your son?”
He stared down at the yellow cheesecloth covering the round oak table, shook his head.
Shana said from the doorway, “What about Ray Simms?”
“Ray Simms?”
Shana shoved her fist under one red eye to catch more tears. “He used to be on the football team with Danny. He had it in for him because Danny was starting quarterback. He hated him.”
“How long ago was that?”
She took a deep ragged breath. “Five years ago.”
Laura dutifully wrote down Simms’s name. “He still lives in Williams?”
“I think so.” She tightened her arms around her chest, not letting anything in or out. Defiant.
“Did you see them yesterday?”
“I didn’t even know they were in town,” Chuck Yates said.
“That’s not like Dan,” Louise said. “If he was in town, he would have called.”
Richie said, “Did you know about the wedding?”
He might as well have lobbed a bomb. Stunned silence radiated throughout the room.
At last Louise said, “Wedding? Whose wedding?”
Laura said, “Dan and Kellee got married yesterday. In Las Vegas.”
Louise’s face clamped down. “That can’t be.”
“It’s true,” Richie said. He handed her the photographs.
She glanced at the top photo, Kellee and Dan in front of the chapel, then put the stack face down on the table. “I don’t believe it.”
Richie said, “Why’s she in a dress like that? Why’s she holding that rose?”
Laura looked at Richie and cleared her throat.
Richie saw her expression and hiked his shoulders: What are you going to do?
“I’ll bet it was a play,” Louise Yates said. “Kellee has a drama class.”
Richie opened his mouth to say something, but Laura gave him another look.
Chuck Yates reached over and touched his wife’s hand. She jerked back as if he had dashed boiling water on her instead. The look in her eyes as she regarded her husband—Laura could swear there was loathing there.
“Louise—”
“Don’t you say a word. Dan would tell us. He wouldn’t go behind our backs like that. It’s just not true.”
“Why would they tell us this if it wasn’t true?” Chuck asked.
“They made a mistake, is all.”
Richie mouthed to Laura: Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
She ignored him. Her gaze strayed to Shana. The girl had straightened up against the doorjamb, and Laura could swear she saw alarm in her eyes.
“Shana?” Laura asked her. “Did you know Dan and Kellee were getting married?”
The shutters came down. “Huh-uh.”
“Dan didn’t say anything? A hint, maybe, something you might have misinterpreted?”
She shook her head and recrossed her arms. “Nope.”
Louise stood up. “Would you like coffee?”
Laura smiled at her. “That would be nice.”
She smiled back. “Dan got me a coffee grinder for Christmas. I have a macadamia nut—”
“That would be fine.”
Richie turned to Chuck. “Anyone else you’d consider an enemy?”
“Dan mentioned some kid had a crush on Kellee.”
“Oh?”
“He didn’t think much about it, but the kid was pretty obvious.” She thought he was going to say something else, but he only stared at the refrigerator.
“You know his name?”
“Jamie Cottle. His dad owns Shade Tree Mechanics here in town.”
The coffee grinder roared to life, drowning out all other sounds.
“Honey,” Chuck said, “could you stop that? We’re talking.”
The sound rose to a grating shriek, then stopped suddenly, like the abbreviated cry of an animal taken in the night.
Louse’s eyes darted from one to another—everyone in the room. Her eyes small.
“I won’t believe it. Not unless I see for myself.”
Chapter Seven
At the briefing, Laura met the Williams police chief, Peter Loffgren, who had arrived late in the day. It was Loffgren who had called DPS early this morning to ask for assistance. The Phoenix DPS, much closer to Williams, had been unable to send anyone, and so the directive had gone down to Tucson.
The shape of the chief’s head—his receding hairline, lack of chin, and thin neck—made Laura think of a lightbulb. He must have stopped off on his trip back to don his uniform. She liked the fact that his eyes, which at first glance seemed lazy, missed nothing.
Six of them took up the small conference room—Chief Loffgren, Warren Janes, Ben Tagg, Josh Wingate, Laura, and Richie.
Laura had already looked through Dan Yates’s wallet, which had been brought back this afternoon from the ME’s office. In it were several receipts and one credit card. Something else had gone with Dan to the medical examiner’s office— the marriage license, still in its stiff envelope. It had been tucked into the inside pocket of Dan’s jacket. Laura wondered if he had kept it there, on his person, so the two of them could look at it whenever they wanted.
The discussion centered on the canvass of the houses near Cataract Lake by officers Tagg and Wingate .
According to Tagg, a few people had heard three or four (there were conflicting stories) shotgun blasts around ten o’clock at night. The time was generally agreed upon
because two families in houses just north of the campground had been watching the local news at ten.
Tagg said, “The people I talked to heard it, but they didn’t do anything.”
“Why not?” Laura asked.
Tagg shrugged. “A lot of hunters around here. The locals hear plenty of gunshots in rural areas.”
“At ten o’clock at night?”
“There’s folks that’ve been known to jacklight deer.”
What Josh Wingate had said.
“Plus a lot of people hear gunshots, they try to talk themselves out of it,” the chief said. “They’re not sure they’re gunshots, tell themselves it’s a backfire.”
Laura knew that was true. She also knew most people hearing gunshots would stay inside for safety reasons. Because they didn’t go out to see if it really was gunfire, they were often too embarrassed to call it in. No one liked to be thought of as a busybody.
After the police officers left for their shift, Laura, Richie, and the chief sat down and talked it through. She gave the chief what she knew—the rough timeline of the events, that Dan and Kellee had gotten married, and that they had not told Dan Yates’s family.
“The parents had no idea they were in town,” Richie said. “They cooked up this whole thing and their family didn’t even know.”
“I think Shana knew,” Laura said.
Loffgren said, “You do? I know they were close. Dan was always looking out for her. Little things you’d see. Dan was in and out of our house a lot when he was a kid, and a lot of times he brought her along.”
“I bet that went down well,” Richie said.
“She had one hell of a fastball, as I remember,” Loffgren said. “So what do you think this is? You have any ideas?”
“Could be a stranger,” Rich said. “Somebody just did it for kicks. It happens.”
“Kids?”
“Could be,” Laura said, “although whoever it was sanitized the scene. That doesn’t sound like kids.”
“Could it be a serial killer?” Loffgren asked. “Random shooting for whatever reason, but he covers his tracks? Maybe this is his ritual.”
They’d already run it on VICAP, but had found nothing similar. Random shootings, yes, plenty of them. But nothing like this. “If there were others, it could point to that,” Laura said. “We don’t have enough information at this point to know. You’re aware that agencies only report to VICAP if they’re in the network—and a lot of the smaller agencies aren’t.”
“We just got on ourselves last year.”
Laura said, “The kind of person who’d walk around a tent shooting inside without looking to see if his victims are dead doesn’t fit with the cunning it would take to cover up tracks, take his shell casings. Unless he knew them too well and didn’t want to see what he’d done.”
Richie rubbed the tip of his nose. “I notice you said, ‘guy,’ Laura. Why be exclusive? It could be a female.”
“It could.”
“But unlikely,” Loffgren said.
Richie leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “I don’t know. Women these days are as capable as men. That female serial killer in Florida, the one they made the movie about? And on our side, you know, what Laura herself did.”
“That was good work,” Loffgren said.
“You know it. She makes the rest of us look bad.”
Laura ignored that. “Chief, I don’t think it’s a woman running around with a shotgun. Sure, there are women out there who could do it, like from the military, maybe someone from one of the ranches around here, but it’s a less likely scenario than the other. While I wouldn’t rule anything out, going down that road too far would be counterproductive, in my opinion.”
Loffgren looked from one to the other and sighed. “We’ve got to put our backs into this. Dan was a good kid—the best kind of American—and from what I hear, so was Kellee. They didn’t deserve this.”
“I agree,” Richie said.
“It’s hit our family pretty hard—hell, everybody in town is upset about this. This is a small town and everybody knows each other. I want whoever did this.”
He didn’t say it, but Laura got his intention loud and clear.
Whatever’s going on between the two of you, don’t let it get in the way.
*
One thing you could say for Richie Lockhart’s car, it could corner. Laura found herself enjoying the curvaceous drive down off the rim, in and out of the moonlight shadows alongside Oak Creek.
At the northern end of the canyon where the trees were thickest, they bottomed out in a turn. Before them, on the left, a wooden sign grew out of an island of zinnias and petunias, lit from beneath: TAYLOR’S CREEKSIDE CABINS.
A rustic country store faced out to the road. Laura guessed that at one time there had been gas pumps out front.
The sign above the door said TAYLOR’S CREEKSIDE COUNTRY STORE: EST. 1924. Behind the store were several cabins reached by landscaped paths, the thick ground cover shining from recent watering. Fanning out, the farthest cabins stood among a smattering of ponderosa pines; she could see the cozy glow of lights here and there. Judging from the cars in the parking lot, the place was full up.
They stepped out into the crisp night air. Laura could smell earth and flowers and hear the sound of the crickets. The nicest thing, though—she looked up and could see the stars.
Looking around, Richie said, “Quaint, huh?”
Laura prepared herself as they walked up the steps to the store. Two notifications in one night—a great introduction to hell. The bell over the door tinkled as they walked in. A pretty, middle-aged Asian woman sat on a stool behind the high counter on the left of the tiny store, underneath a buzzing Marlboro sign.
Laura glanced around. There were three aisles stocked with condiments and snacks—the condiments all in small jars and bottles. A cold drink case spanned the wall on the opposite end from the counter—beer, wine, soft drinks, bottled water. She noticed a revolving paperback rack and a tiny section for video rentals. The video tape boxes were faded from the sun. A white, four-door cold case took up half the wall to the right of the cash register. It could have been original with the building. One of the doors was cluttered with snapshots of fishermen displaying their catch, hunters holding up the heads of deer that could no longer hold them up for themselves, and a man posing with a red-white-and-blue plane: FLY THE GRAND CANYON—HIGH PINES CHARTER FLIGHTS—GLENN TRAYWICK, PROPRIETOR.
Richie asked the clerk if they could talk to Jack Taylor.
“What is this about?” the woman asked, eyes wary.
He showed her his wallet badge. “We need to talk to him about his daughter.”
“Kellee? What’s wrong?” The woman leaned against the counter, the whole of her small body taut. “Is she all right?”
“That’s really a matter for—”
Laura said, “You know Kellee well?”
“She’s my stepdaughter. Is she all right?”
Her face was pale, her black hair like silk, tiny blue threads catching the light.
“We’d like to talk to you both. Can you reach your husband?”
In the fish-belly white glare of the Marlboro sign, the woman’s’ face looked stark with fear. She picked up a walkie-talkie from under the desk. “Jack? Jack, come to the office. There’s … someone here you need to talk to.”
An older man’s voice, amiable and slightly hoarse, said, “Be right up.”
His voice comforting; the kind of voice that automatically allayed fears. The woman held the walkie-talkie to her ear long after he had signed off.
Her hand was shaking, her eyes dark. She watched as Richie wandered to the back of the store to look at video tapes, then turned to Laura. “I have to know. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
Laura had to answer her. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Taylor—”
A weak smile. “Megumi.” She held out a soft white hand—decorum in the middle of grief. “So she is dead.”
“Yes
, ma’am. She died last night.”
“I had this feeling.”
“Why? Why would you have that feeling?”
“I thought it might have come back.”
Laura was about to ask her to elaborate when the bell above the door rang. A tall, seventyish, gray-haired man entered, ducking his head to avoid the lintel. “Megumi? What’s going on?”
He had an open, tanned face, lined from sun. Blue eyes that held a degree of calculation in them. He wore a plaid flannel shirt tucked into gray trousers, a hand-tooled leather belt with a sandcast silver-and-turquoise buckle in a wheel shape—Navajo. Arms loose at his sides, he looked like someone who was used to hard physical work. He reminded Laura of her father, a schoolteacher who could fix anything and loved outdoor work.
Laura told the Taylors everything. When and where Dan and Kellee were found, the fact that they had eloped to Las Vegas.
Richie remained at the back of the store, engrossed in old video tapes. Letting her do the heavy lifting.
The man, Jack Taylor, didn’t react the way she expected. He accepted it immediately, seeming to have skipped part of the spectrum—shock, denial, anger—and landed on sad.
“It’s ironic,” he said.
“Ironic?”
“Kellee nearly died three years ago. She had a brain tumor. The diagnosis was … they said … it was inoperable.”
“What happened?”
He opened his hands. Calloused and rough; hands used to work. “It went away. Like that. Just … evaporated.”
“They did so many tests,” Megumi Taylor said. “MRI, CAT scan, blood tests. But it was gone.”
“The doctors couldn’t explain it,” said Taylor. He leaned against the counter, sagged. A big man bending under the weight of the unthinkable. Except he had thought about it, thought about it a lot. “It always felt like we were living on borrowed time. We even had a plot picked out in the cemetery in Sedona. She wanted us to celebrate her life, to have a life afterwards.”
Megumi said, “She’s … she was Jack’s only child.”
“My wife died when she was little. She grew up here, helping me around the place in the summers, and then she went to college…” He wiped at his nose. “She landscaped this place, you know that? Just a kid in high school.”
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