The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  But in this girl’s eyes Laura saw no emotion, just broken blood vessels in the whites—petechiae—which hinted at death by strangulation. Brown and brittle as acorn hulls, the girl’s eyes showed nothing at all.

  Laura hoped it meant she hadn’t suffered, but the petechiae told her otherwise. Either way, she would never know the truth for sure.

  She stood up and walked around to the other side, looking at the girl from that angle.

  Laura always felt the victim could tell her something. There was usually some evidence that the dead kept to themselves, a secret they had taken with them, a secret the killer forgot. In every homicide case she’d investigated, there had been something that the dead had held back. She just had to find it. To recognize it when it looked her in the face.

  “I figure the lividity points to the fact that she was moved,” Officer Billings said behind her. “Down by her ears, the bottom of her neck, see?”

  She tried to block him out, concentrate on the girl.

  “Looks to me like she was prostate when she was killed.”

  “Prostrate,” Laura said.

  “Prostrate, sorry.” He laughed nervously. “That’s funny, prostate. Anyway, I knew it the minute I saw her.”

  “Would you shut the fuck up?” Buddy Holland snapped.

  Hurt, Billings said, “Hey, I was just—“

  “I don’t fucking want to hear it.”

  Laura was aware of Buddy’s legs, spread in a fighter’s stance. She thought he was very close to the edge. When the chief introduced them, he’d mentioned that Buddy Holland had been with the Tucson PD a long time before coming to Bisbee. Why did this death affect him so much? He must have seen his share of corpses—even young girls.

  He squatted down beside her. She could feel his breath as she studied the girl’s hair near her ear.

  That was when she saw it.

  You slick son of a bitch, she thought.

  You missed something.

  5

  After Musicman logged on at the Earthling Café, the first thing he did was check his mail.

  There were two messages from CRZYGRL12@ synerG.net.

  Fingers tapping rapidly on the table, he tried to think it through. Hard, because his mind was rushing a mile a minute. Although his rage had not abated one bit, he felt the overwhelming need to know what happened.

  Out front, another police car went by, this one from the sheriff’s department.

  He tapped his fingers some more and then brought her picture up on the screen. Maybe he could find a clue in her eyes.

  The waitress, a scarf-haired girl wearing heavy white linen tied around her waist, set his iced tea down. She glanced at the picture. “That your daughter?”

  He lowered the laptop lid so she couldn’t see. “Uh-huh.”

  “Pretty girl.”

  He nodded, acknowledging but not friendly. She took the hint and threaded her way back through the cramped cafe to the stand-up counter. Only then did he push the laptop’s lid back up.

  She smiled out at him—his girl.

  Like a tidal wave, the desire—the need—came rumbling up from deep inside him. He could feel it in the trembling of his hands, the prickling saliva in the corners of his mouth. The adrenaline rush, the beating of his heart, the answering chime in his groin.

  If she was his girl.

  He had to know. No way could he leave it like this—not when he was this close.

  He opened the first message.

  Where wer u? I waited 1 hr. I thought for sure this was the day and I walked 3 Miles. Did I get the wrong day? Let me know. Luv, Your Muse. PS I looked it up, it’s really cool to be your muse.

  He closed the first email without replying and opened the second one.

  Y haven’t I heard from u? Write me!

  The same. She was the same. Or at least she seemed the same.

  Another cop car went by, lights on but silent. That was seven, total, since he’d been here. He poured two packets of sugar into his glass and stirred, having to use a regular teaspoon because they didn’t have the long ones.

  Suddenly, he wanted to throw the goddamn spoon across the room.

  His girl. Who was he fooling?

  He wasn’t stupid—far from it. He knew he couldn’t dismiss what he’d seen. There came a time when you had to trust your instincts. He had always been fully aware of the dangers, and that was why he was so careful. He’d always had a sixth sense for trouble.

  Until now.

  6

  Dusk had fallen by the time one of the lab techs, Danny Urquides, motioned to Laura from the band shell stage. “The ME’s gonna take her now.”

  For the last half hour, Laura had been waiting for the crime scene techs to finish their work. Now she realized how dry her lips were—a chronic problem. She fumbled in the pocket of her slacks, momentarily afraid she’d left her lip balm in the car, relieved and grateful when her hand closed around the small tin. When she worked a crime scene her field of vision narrowed so much she forgot about things like thirst, hunger, and dry lips.

  It had been a very long day. There had been so much to do, and she trusted no one else to do it—even the stuff some might label scutwork—because this was her case and she had to build it painstakingly. In her mind she thought of it as a Popsicle-stick house, placing one piece of evidence atop another until she had a case so tight no defense attorney could knock it down.

  One thing Frank Entwistle had drummed into her: Think about the end game. In police work, the end game was a conviction. Whatever she uncovered would have to stand up in court.

  Since this morning, she had walked the crime scene twice. She had marked and collected evidence, measured and drawn the crime scene to scale, and shot seventeen rolls of film from the ground and an additional two from the DPS helicopter. Laura hated flying in general, and flying in helicopters—where the world tilted crazily—in particular. But it was part of her job and she white-knuckled it.

  Laura dropped the lip balm into her slacks pocket and went up to supervise the removal of the body.

  A tech from the medical examiner’s office was in the process of gently moving the girl away from the wall. Laura photographed the part of her that had been concealed until now, from head to heels. Other than residue from the dirty wall, there was nothing new. The one thing the killer had missed—a mesquite leaf Laura had found on the girl’s neck—had already been photographed, bagged, and removed.

  By this time, they had made a positive identification: The girl was indeed Jessica Parris. Victor Celaya had made the notification earlier in the afternoon.

  A familiar twinge started in the small of her back. At five feet nine, she was on the tall side and had a long waist. A car accident during her time at the Highway Patrol had weakened her back despite the doctors’ assurances to the contrary, and she felt it every time the job required long hours and standing around. She couldn’t even lean against a wall until they were done with the crime scene.

  It had rained scantily off and on for about an hour—not much of a storm. The air smelled of wet earth and wet cement, nothing like the seductive perfume of the creosote desert where she lived. But it had cooled her down, blown some fresh air into her.

  As they lifted the girl, Laura looked at her face. Despite the deterioration already beginning to erode the hopeful image of youth, the face that once belonged to Jessica Parris seemed unconcerned with the indignities of death—as if she were already an angel.

  Laura thought of the parents, glad they could not see her now. How did you deal with the death of your own child?

  Anguish stormed up into her chest, the wanton destruction getting to her. Why? Why take this girl’s life? She knew the conventional wisdom, the explanations given by psychologists and FBI profilers, the charts and statistics and probabilities, but at this moment they rang hollow.

  The firestorm of emotion took her unawares, blowing up through her soul like a crown fire. Just as quickly, it burned out, leaving only cold, bit
ter anger.

  You think you can get away with it, she said to him. But you won’t.

  I will find you. I swear to God I will.

  I will make you pay.

  Going back down Brewery Gulch, she passed the bar she’d gone by this morning, what seemed like a hundred years ago. Heavy metal music spilled out along with the beer smell. Several Harleys were parked out in front of the bar. Bikers, tourists, and stray dogs populated the shadowy street, flickering in and out of lights from open doorways. They were joined by hippie types who seemed at the same time flamboyant and insubstantial, slipping through the night like ghosts of a long-gone era.

  Laura was tired, dirty, drained, and hungry. Earlier today she’d seen the sign in the Copper Queen Hotel lobby for prime rib. She hoped the restaurant would still be open after the briefing at the Bisbee Police Department. Maybe grab a bite with Victor. She hadn’t seen him since this morning. He’d spent most of his time canvassing the streets around the park or up at the Copper Queen Hotel conference room, doing what he did best: talk. Interviewing witnesses, being interviewed himself by the news crews from the Tucson and Phoenix network affiliates. He could have them.

  Laura was almost past a red brick building when she saw something in the store window, partly shielded by an old-fashioned canvas awning, its candy-stripes faded to pink. A doll, propped up against a metal trunk, legs splayed, hands together on her lap. She wore a Victorian-style little girl’s dress. The dress looked like it had once been white, but had been faded by the sun.

  The sign above the door said: COOGER & DARK’S PANDEMONIUM SHADOW SHOW AND EMPORIUM. The antique shop sold twentieth-century kitsch. Melmac, Buck Rogers space ships. A dim light came from the back of the store.

  Taped to the door’s window was a faded poster depicting whirling leaves on a dark sidewalk. Laura remembered it from her childhood, the cover of Ray Bradbury’s book, Something Wicked this Way Comes.

  Evil had visited Bisbee in the middle of the night, like the locomotive in Bradbury’s book, bringing the dark carnival to the edge of town.

  She knocked on the door and it rattled in the frame. No one answered.

  The shop next door was open, though—a tattoo parlor. Laura asked the proprietor about Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and Emporium.

  The heavyset woman looked up from tattooing the Virgin of Guadalupe on her customer’s forearm. “Oh, that place. Guy doesn’t show up much, kind of like a lot of shop owners around here. No set hours, just every once in a while the door’s open. Name’s Ted." She shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

  Laura could find out who owned the shop tomorrow. All it would take was a look at the city records. She was about to walk out when another thought occurred to her. “Did you do the tattoo for Jessica Parris?”

  “Hold her steady, Ramon." The woman put down a tool that looked like a dentist’s drill and bustled over to a filing cabinet behind the counter, handed Laura the file. “She wanted the butterfly—very popular with young girls. Turned out real nice.”

  “Don’t you have to get parental permission to tattoo a minor?”

  She gave Laura a look. “In this case, her mama brought her in. Her mama and her boyfriend.”

  Jessica had a boyfriend? “You know his name?”

  “Cary Statler. He lives with them. They took him in when his own mom left town.”

  “So what do we know about this guy?” Chief Ducotte said.

  Laura, Victor Celaya, and the eight members of the Bisbee PD were crammed around a table in the Bisbee Police Department conference room, an airless cubicle smelling of microwaved pizza.

  “The creep likes to play dress-up,” muttered Sergeant Nesmith.

  Nervous laughter.

  “I bet he’s done it before,” said someone behind Laura. Sandwiched as she was between a young police officer named Noone and Detective Holland, she’d have to turn herself inside out to see who had spoken. Holland had thrown his weight around, literally, making the most of his space and practically pushing Laura into Noone’s lap. The molded plastic chair didn’t help her back much either.

  She didn’t mind the chair so much as the feeling that this briefing was an exercise in futility. Chief Ducotte had asked that the briefing include all of the Bisbee Police Department. Laura remembered his exact words: He wanted “to foster an inclusive atmosphere” and make sure that everybody “was on the same page.”

  Bottom line: He didn’t want his people to feel left out. Even though they would be.

  Laura was well aware of the pressures the chief faced. The safety of a city dependent on tourism had suddenly been breached, and logical or not, the chief would be blamed. His job was to keep the town running smoothly, bring in revenue in the form of traffic tickets and fines, and maintain a comforting presence in the community. These were his priorities, and he needed to get the town back up on the rails as quickly as possible. That meant he had to get his cops back out on the street.

  But he also had to think about morale.

  In Laura’s opinion, this briefing was unwise; it would raise expectations in the rank-and-file that they would be integral to the case, and other than helping in minor ways, that just wasn’t true.

  Officer Billings, one of the few here who had seen Jessica Parris’s body, was enjoying his three minutes of fame. “You know what she looked like?" He paused dramatically. “Judy Garland in the The Wizard of Oz. The girl was too old for a baby-doll dress like that … damn, it was spooky.”

  Sergeant Nesmith leaned back and folded his arms over his considerable bulk. “Haven’t heard of nobody dressing ‘em up like that. Sounds like something you’d see on Most Wanted.”

  What no one said but everyone thought: This guy might be a serial killer. Either there had been other murders before this, or Jessica Parris was the first. Everyone here had some knowledge of FBI profile techniques. They knew as well as she did that when a person employed ritual in his killing, he would do it again.

  Victor said, “The dress was too small. He must have had the dress first. Why’d he have the dress first?”

  “Maybe that’s all he could find,” said a scrawny cop with a rust-colored, handlebar mustache like Wyatt Earp’s. His nameplate said Danehill.

  Laura said, “We need to check the resale and antique shops in the area.”

  “He could have gotten the dress anywhere,” said Victor. “Also, there was no tag on the collar.”

  “Maybe he tore it off.”

  “Or it could be homemade.”

  “What, you mean like sewed? From a pattern or something?”

  “My wife sews,” Sergeant Nesmith said. “If I could get a look at the dress, I could probably tell. I could get on the Internet, check out dresses like that, see if there are any patterns.”

  Laura shifted in her seat to relieve the pain in her back, caught Officer Heather Duffy’s eye. Duffy was glaring at her.

  Victor crossed his leg at the knee, played with the tassel on his Italian loafers. “We’ll get photos of the dress and pass them around to everyone. I wonder what he did with her clothes?”

  “Took ‘em for a souvenir?” suggested Officer Billings. “A trophy?”

  “Or threw them away.”

  Chief Ducotte said, “You have someone on that? Checking all the garbage cans around here?”

  “We’re on it,” said Nesmith.

  They discussed the mesquite leaf found on Jessica Parris’s neck, stuck like a piece of confetti behind her ear—something the killer had missed. This pointed to the possibility that the girl had been killed outside of Bisbee, since mesquite trees were rarely found above five-thousand feet. Unfortunately, the surrounding valleys—some of them only a mile or two away—were thick with them.

  Then they came to the doll at Cooger & Darks. “I’m going by there tomorrow and talk to the owner,” Laura told them. “Maybe he saw somebody, someone too interested in the display.”

  Chief Ducotte nodded, blinking his rabbity eyes.

&nb
sp; Victor said, “Another thing, we’re all agreed he took her up there after she was dead. That means we have three crime scenes. The one where she was abducted, the one where he killed her, and the band shell. Any ideas on that?”

  “His house?”

  “A motel, if he isn’t from around here.”

  Laura glanced in Duffy’s direction and noticed she was looking at Noone with an odd expression. She tried to pigeonhole it: Longing? Anger? Something in between? Duffy’s short, compact body looked like it was about to explode.

  Something between Duffy and Noone.

  Buddy Holland, who’d seemed preoccupied throughout the proceedings, followed Laura’s gaze. One corner of his mouth came up. Whatever was going on with Duffy and Noone, he knew about it.

  Victor was saying, “Motels, bed and breakfasts, apartments, what else?”

  “If it’s his crib it’d be pretty much impossible to find,” said Danehill.

  “I got some photographs of the crowd by the crime scene tape this morning,” Laura said. “Our guy might not have been able to stay away. As soon as we have them, I want to canvass the neighborhood again. Maybe somebody noticed something unusual, maybe someone they knew did something outside their routine. That is, if he’s local. But I have my doubts about that.”

  Detective Holland picked at some invisible lint on his sleeve, stretched his long blue jean-clad legs out and stared at his feet. “I think he is local.”

  “You do?” asked Noone. “From here in Bisbee?”

  Holland shrugged. His watchful eyes scanned the room, landed on Laura. “Why would he come here? We’re a little off the beaten path. It just doesn’t compute.”

  Officer Duffy spoke up. “I think Buddy’s right.”

  Chief Ducotte looked at Holland. “Go on,” he said.

  Buddy Holland paused, waiting until he had their undivided attention: When E.F. Holland talks, people listen.

  “This is a local guy, been working up to this a long time, peeping in windows, maybe caught masturbating outside some little girl’s house. I see it as opportunistic—nobody was around, he saw her, he grabbed her. Maybe it got out of hand. He’s fantasized about this for a long time." He pushed his chair back, almost pinning Laura’s arm between them. “I think what Ms. Cardinal here said was telling. The doll shop. He could have got the idea from the doll. A local would know the park really well, know how easy it’d be to get up and down with a DB without being seen.”