Mortal Crimes 2

by Various Authors

  His tears falling on the counter.

  Laura waited, feeling that familiar sinking in her heart as she absorbed the pain of others. I’m like a shock absorber, she thought. One that doesn’t work so well.

  Richie had stopped browsing and stood quietly. Listening to the pain in Jack Taylor’s voice.

  Laura asked them if they knew Kellee was planning on getting married.

  “I knew she wanted to,” Taylor said. “She loved Dan. He was a nice kid. You could do a lot worse. Responsible, serious. Although I worried about the religious aspect.”

  “Religious aspect?” Richie asked.

  “The Yateses. Chuck is very active in the Southern Baptist church. Nothing wrong with that, but…” Jack Taylor took Megumi’s hand in his. “We’re not big on religion. We both think…” He looked at her. “There’s been so much misery in the world because of religion. Although you could say what happened to Kellee was a miracle.”

  Laura thought, but didn’t say, that it was strange that God had spared Kellee from death three years ago, only to allow her life to be taken now. Laura understood their ambivalence. Although she believed in God—she just did—she had a hard time understanding where He stood on things.

  She’d seen the unspeakable. Hard to fathom, a loving God.

  Jack Taylor did not look up, but stroked Megumi’s tiny hand with a giant, callused thumb. “Now I’m glad they did get married. Maybe that was what Kellee was waiting for.”

  *

  They stopped off at a freeway exit for some fast food and sat in the car under the sodium arc lights of the Burger King. Laura tried to eat healthily at home, but whenever she went on one of these trips, all bets were off. On the road, a McDonalds Big Mac or a Jack in the Box Supreme Crescent offered unique comfort. Even the smell of fried food acted on her like a soporific drug.

  Laura was glad Richie was driving. On the way back to Williams, she closed her eyes and listened to the deep, throaty engine, to the hum of the tires on the freeway as they left Flagstaff and drove out onto the high northern Arizona plateau, feeling the accumulated psychic weight of this day.

  When they drove into Williams, it was going on eleven. Too late to call home. Tom got up early—a habit for both of them. What Laura really wanted to do was ask him about this morning. She wouldn’t do that, though. How could she frame it without sounding whiny and insecure?

  Laura was convinced that if she just heard his voice, she’d know immediately if he just hadn’t been in the mood—which was fine—or if it went deeper than that.

  It was too late to call, so it was a moot point. She was relieved, but also just a little bit more anxious, because not calling put off the moment of truth a little longer.

  On the way into town, they detoured by the Williams PD. The yellow-brick building on the main drag was quiet, the lighted alcove open to the street, one lonely guy behind the window inside. He recognized them, though, celebrities that they were.

  “The chief called in awhile ago,” Officer Donnelly said. He had thick glasses that magnified his pale eyes and a comb-over of dyed brown hair. He handed Laura a “While You Were Out” slip with Loffgren’s home number on it. “He said to go ahead and call as late as you want.”

  She called from the station, Loffgren picking up on the second ring.

  “Thought you should know about this. There have been three reports of road-rage incidents between here and Las Vegas in the last couple of months. One on 93 just north of Kingman, two on I-40. The Mojave County Sheriff’s Department investigated all three. The investigator’s name is David Fellows. He’s on duty tonight. I’ll give you the number.”

  “Two of the incidents were pretty typical,” David Fellows told her when she reached him. “Someone gets cut off, the other guy flips the bird, it escalates. Fortunately, nothing came of either one of them.”

  “The third one, though—that’s another story. A woman was turning onto 93 toward Vegas, just outside of Kingman. Guy came right up on her tail, almost clipped her. Both the driver and passenger yelling obscenities. The victim says the passenger waved a gun at her.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “She said it was ‘big’. A rifle of some sort. She didn’t get his license, it happened so fast. I can fax you the report.”

  Laura got a description of the vehicle—a black truck, newer model. The woman couldn’t describe it any better than that.

  “Road rage could fit,” Richie said when Laura hung up. “Dan pisses somebody off on the way back from Vegas, guy gets mad, follows them all the way to Williams. Bang.”

  “But why wait?”

  “Yeah, you’ve got a point there. They got here, what? Four thirty? What was the guy doing between then and ten o’clock that night?”

  “I’ll check it out tomorrow anyway.” Laura was starting to drag. Now that she had made her decision not to call Tom, all she wanted to do was get her stuff into a motel room and go to sleep.

  Most of the motels on the main drag were built in the forties and fifties, many of them renovated but still looking the way they had in their heyday.

  They settled on the Pioneer, an L-shaped motel on a newly resurfaced parking lot, a covered wagon sign out front, and a line of pink neon running along the eaves just under the roofline. HBO and a coffeemaker in every room.

  Chapter Eight

  What a relief.

  All day she had been building it up in her mind, what in retrospect was an incident of no importance at all—the way Tom had warded her off this morning. Her fears had proved baseless. Tom showed up at the motel shortly after she did. He had everything packed in his truck—tent, wine, bread and cheese for a midnight snack. Now here they were at Cataract Lake. After some torrid lovemaking, they lay entwined, drowsing in each other’s arms.

  The whole incident forgotten.

  As Laura lay in the shelter of Tom’s body, she understood that everything had changed. She, who prided herself on her independence, realized that she had committed herself to him. The commitment was clean and hard and pure, and she didn’t want to go back to the way it was before. You couldn’t unring a bell, and Laura found that she didn’t want to.

  Luxuriating in his closeness, she felt his breath on her shoulder, his sides rising and falling in sleep. And she smiled. Drowsed.

  The crunch of a twig startled her into full wakefulness. In an instant, every muscle, every nerve, every synapse was on alert.

  A laugh. Or was it the wind rustling through the trees way up?

  No, a laugh. Barely there, crude and insinuating.

  She huddled in the tent, stone-scared, Tom beside her still deep in sleep. Her heart pounding.

  A shoe scraped on dirt. Laura braced herself, knew what was coming next, but for some reason, couldn’t move. But Tom did. He erupted from the sleeping bag and took hold of her, dragging her across the tent with incredible force, covering her with his body just as the first volley blasted through the tent like a rocket booster.

  Shot peppering the inside of the tent, exploding in the ground beside her. Three loud blasts. She must be hit, but was still in shock, the organs of her body no doubt already breaking down—

  Tom’s grip loosening suddenly, Laura squirming in his arms, trying to see him, his blood raining down on her face. The realization that he was dead barreling through her, dousing her in sweat.

  An excruciating cramp in her calf.

  Automatically, she shortened the muscle in her leg. The pain vanished in an instant. The harmonica chord of a passing train sounded close by. She realized she was in a motel room in Williams, on old Route 66, alone. No Tom. No one shooting at them. The sheets plastered to her with sweat.

  The train horn again. The desert where she lived outside Tucson was two miles as the crow flew from the railroad tracks. The train tracks here were only a block away.

  She sat up in bed and got her bearings. A generic motel room, the yellow porch light from the walk outside creeping in around the curtains and staining the roun
d table by the window. As the train horn receded, Laura noticed a ping-ping-ping sound coming from down the street. The pain in her calf gone completely, she got out of bed and looked out, isolating the sound: the chain on the flagpole outside Williams PD, pinging every time the flag unfurled in the wind.

  It was windy. She could hear it, scrabbling in the corners of the motel, gusting through the trees, the scraping branch on the bathroom window. A restless night.

  Flicking on the light, she went into the bathroom and stared at her face. She looked the same. Just another bad dream in a string of bad dreams.

  “Seems to me you’ve been having a lot those lately.”

  Laura stared past her own reflection through the bathroom doorway at Frank Entwistle, sitting in the chair by the door.

  She said, “It goes with the job.”

  “You know it.” The retired TPD homicide cop, recently dead, crossed one leg over his knee at the ankle. She could see a spot where his wife Pat had darned his socks. Who darned socks anymore?

  It occurred to her that she hadn’t visited Pat since Frank’s burial. This made her feel guilty.

  Entwistle lit a cigarette. Laura could swear she smelled it, dry and slightly cloying, like the wind chuckling at the doorjamb outside.

  “What do you think about this guy, Dan? Quite the hero, huh? First instinct was to save his wife. Kid had guts, shielding her like that.”

  “I know.”

  “I bet you’d do anything to get the guy who did this.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  “You’d do anything to get him, and that’s good. But the way you’re going about it…” He shook his head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lorie, you think you can fool me? This isn’t about Dan Yates and Kellee Taylor. It’s about you.”

  She felt as if he’d pried up something, a piece of wood over a window, just the edge. Just warping it a little, enough to let in a pinhole of light. “How’s it about me?” she asked, aware that her voice sounded weak and high.

  Entwistle rubbed the bridge of his nose, the cigarette dangerously close to his eyebrows. He did not look good. His face was that unhealthy pink of a glistening ham, and his white hair was almost translucent. Appropriate for a ghost.

  “You’re not helping anybody, the way you’re going.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “What’s that Bible quote? Take the log out of your own eye before trying to take the mote out of someone else’s?”

  “What does that mean?” She grabbed a washcloth, saturated it with water, started going over her arms and legs to rid herself of the dried sweat. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Just a piece of advice, kiddo. Work the case because it’s your job.”

  “I’m planning on it.”

  He stood up. “This place is starting to fence me in. I’m gonna take a walk.” He opened the door and looked back at her, his eyes sad. “You know what they say, though. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

  Another damn cliché. If she had to be haunted by a ghost, why couldn’t she have one with a fresh thought in his head?

  Entwistle pointed his finger at her. “And you’re the one in the glass house.”

  He walked out into the restless dark, the wind tugging on the top-piece of the hair that looked like a toupee but wasn’t, and shut the door behind him.

  Laura went to the door and opened it.

  As she’d expected, the parking lot was empty.

  Chapter Nine

  The air had a chill to it when Laura turned out of the Pioneer Motel parking lot a little after five the next morning. The place was dead quiet on a Sunday morning, the street empty except for a crumpled-up fast-food wrapping scudding along the curb.

  She stopped at Circle K on the main drag for coffee, parking beside an old International Scout with the engine running and a hunting dog in the back. Two guys in camos holding a six-pack of beer and snacks nodded to her as they got in.

  Feeling out of balance and mildly depressed, she dog-legged over to First Street to avoid the one-way street, and took the road out of town.

  She and Richie had decided to split up for the day. He would drive to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and talk to Dan’s and Kellee’s friends and roommates. Laura would retrace the young couple’s movements to and from Las Vegas.

  On the seat beside her was a photocopy of a gas receipt from a Circle K in Kingman, photos of Dan and Kellee from the trip, and their marriage license.

  She doubted the answer would be found in Vegas, but she couldn’t ignore the one detail in the Route 93 road-rage incident—the passenger waving a rifle. Laura didn’t like the lag time between Dan and Kellee’s drive back and the time they were killed, but there could be an explanation. She’d seen stranger things in her career as a detective.

  On the way, Laura found herself thinking not about the case but about what Frank Entwistle had said about glass houses.

  She knew she was brittle, that in some ways she was barely hanging on. She acknowledged that this was why Tom’s lack of interest yesterday morning had wounded her so deeply. In a world where every little thing seemed to get to her, she’d counted on Tom as the only person in her life she could depend on. Maybe she depended on him too much.

  Laura knew about needy people. She didn’t like them herself, so why would she expect Tom to? Tom had spent a large part of his life alone, living his life his way. That was part of what attracted her to him—a man in his mid-thirties who wrangled horses and tourists on a guest ranch. She didn’t want someone who would make too many demands on her. At least she’d thought she didn’t.

  Initially, she’d resisted letting him move in with her. Now it turned out that the situation was reversed, and she was the demanding one.

  The realization struck her: When it came to sex, she was always the initiator. Always. What did that say about their relationship?

  If they were on a seesaw, she’d be the one up in the air.

  At Kingman she got off at the exit with the Circle K where Dan and Kellee had bought gas.

  The clerk at the Circle K didn’t recognize Dan or Kellee, even though she had worked Friday morning. Laura wasn’t surprised. There were probably fifteen people inside at the moment, and a line of six waiting to pay. The clerk’s eyes kept darting nervously to the people behind Laura.

  Laura turned around, looking for the surveillance camera, and found it situated in the corner of the store opposite the counter. “I’d like to talk to the manager.”

  The clerk picked up the pager and called for Reggie Fortin, clearly relieved that Laura was now someone else’s problem.

  Reggie Fortin led her into the small cubicle that served as the office. He was college age, probably ten years younger than the clerk, and had an everpresent smile that looked as if it were held up by invisible wires.

  “How long do your surveillance tapes go?”

  He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt frayed around the collar, and ghosted with yellow stains under the arms. “One VCR tape lasts twenty-four hours. We store the tapes for thirty-one days.”

  “You have, what, two cameras?”

  “We don’t have an outside camera at this store.”

  Laura asked to see yesterday’s. He asked if she had a warrant—something a lot of people did these days. What with all the cop shows on TV, a lot of people liked to prove they knew the drill.

  Laura said, “I don’t have a warrant.”

  That stopped him. He sat there, tapping his shoe, pretending to think it over. She let the silence stretch; she wasn’t about to help him.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt. This a murder investigation?”

  “It’s important, or I wouldn’t ask.”

  Thinking as she said it that this whole trip was probably pointless. What was she hoping the videotape would show? A black truck pulled up to the pumps, two guys with sho
tguns picking a fight with Dan?

  He put the tape in the VCR and cued it up to eight a.m. Laura figured that eight would be the earliest Dan and Kellee would get to Kingman; it was a 150-mile drive from Flagstaff. Judging from the shadows on the dam, Laura was pretty sure they didn’t get to Hoover Dam before nine o’clock.

  She watched a parade of people coming into the frame to pay the clerk. Had to stop a couple of times, but none of them looked like Dan or Kellee. No suspicious-looking black trucks either. She was up to ten o’clock now. That was cutting it close.

  “Let’s go back. Start it at seven this time.”

  Dutifully, Reggie Fortin ran it back. She watched again, trying to keep her mind from wandering.

  Then she saw the blond girl. She had passed over her before because she wore jeans, not shorts.

  “Stop.”

  He hit the remote and froze the girl in the frame, diagonal lines shimmering across the top.

  “You want me to go back?”

  “Just a minute.”

  The girl wore jeans and a camisole top, her hair pulled up loosely in a barrette.

  “Go back,” she said. He rewound the tape for a few seconds, then forwarded it again.

  “Stop.”

  The view of the counter came from the far corner of the room, so mostly Laura was seeing the customers’ backs. But the blonde turned back to look at someone behind her, said something to him.

  Laura knew her.

  The blonde was Shana Yates.

  *

  The Forget Me Not Wedding Chapel was a Tudor-style cottage set back from a side street just off the strip, aproned by a close-shaved lawn, the same glitter-green as indoor-outdoor carpeting in the harsh Vegas sun. At the right time of day, the chapel would be swallowed up by the shadow of one of the behemoth hotel-casinos on the strip.

  The sign out front, shocking pink, depicted the silhouette of a bride. She had her hand up to her mouth in a way that Laura thought was sly.

  The hostess who greeted her was fortyish with wild, hennaed gypsy hair. She wore a long-sleeved white lace dress that flounced down to the tops of white cowgirl boots. It was an outfit straight out of the 1980s, right down to the shoulder pads. Her name tag said AUDREY.