Donning latex, Laura opened the box. Three files, two of them labeled in Shana’s bubble-like script. Laura opened the one marked Clippings. On top was a cut-out from The Williams News on a fire at a Williams car dealership. Three SUVs had been burned to the ground. A black and white photo accompanied the article showing an SUV engulfed in flames against the night sky, firefighters launching a thick stream of spray from their fire hoses. The article was dated June 13.
Laura scanned the article. An accelerant had been used—gasoline—and an environmental group, the Earth Warriors, had sent an e-mail to the paper claiming responsibility.
The Earth Warriors. She’d never heard of them. She glanced around the room, at the nature calendar, the posters, The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Was Shana a member of the Earth Warriors?
Laura went back over her conversations with Shana, and couldn’t remember one reference to the environment. If you went by stereotypes, Shana would have more in common with the ranching families than environmentalists. She grew up here in Williams, not a bastion of liberal thought, and her off time had been spent at horse shows and rodeos.
Which reminded her: Something was missing.
There were no photos of Mighty Mouse. No ribbons, no silver bowls, no belt buckles.
Had Shana taken them with her? Or had she decided to put that part of herself away? Sometimes it was less painful to close a door, so you didn’t have to think about the life you once led. Laura was no stranger to that. In the eleven years since her parents’ death—after she had sold the place and stored her parents’ possessions—she had gone by the house exactly once, on an impulse.
Shana had sold the horse, the trailer, all her tack to Mrs. Wingate.
If she had closed that chapter in her life, was she about to close another? Could she have left for good?
Laura had searched the room, the closet, and had found no luggage, matching or otherwise. Shana had definitely planned to stay more than one night, and her closet was only a third full, her dresser drawers close to empty. Planning for an extended stay?
She had taken off without telling anyone.
Laura looked at the file box again. There were no other clippings other than a follow-up article on the SUV burning.
She looked at the two other files. One was marked, Someday. Inside there were more clippings, but these were more in keeping with a twenty-one-year-old woman-child prone to dreaming big about the future. There was a photo of a Porsche Boxter, bright yellow, and one of a grandly rustic cabin—more like a lodge—overlooking a pristine blue lake, cutout from a glossy magazine, The place was called Big Bear Creek Lodge, situated on the Big Bear Lake in Montana. There were also sumptuous pictures of the interior—cowboy chic—and other photos of rooms taken of homes in Los Angeles, the Caribbean, and Aspen. There was a Hinckley picnic boat yacht, a swimming pool where you almost couldn’t tell where the water left off and the bay began. Expensive clothing, the kind of stuff you’d get on Rodeo Drive. Beautiful women walking down a red carpet, giving off the aura of untouchability. Laura recognized them: movie stars.
Shana thought big.
The last folder was unmarked, but contained magazine articles about recent environmental setbacks throughout the country. A depressing litany of dying rivers, toxic beaches, lost species.
Laura looked back at the Someday file. There was a schism between some of the things Shana wanted for herself (the rustic lodge, a moose head staring glassily from the wall coming to mind) and the atrocities to the environment.
Shana knew how to compartmentalize.
“She’d tell me if she was going to leave,” Louise Yates said.
“Her suitcases are gone.”
Louise touched her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I didn’t know.” She sat down on the brown tweed couch facing the fireplace, her face ash gray.
“I found her address book,” Laura said. “Can you go through it with me and tell me who she might have gone to stay with?”
Armed with Shana’s mobile number and the numbers of a half dozen of Shana’s friends, Laura drove to the Williams PD to compare notes with the officer who took Chuck Yates’s statement.
Officer Wingate, who had taken down the information, had just gone out on patrol. Laura arranged to meet him outside the Dairy Queen.
He was sitting in his car when she approached. He got out, and they sat down on a low wall that divided the parking lot.
“How are you doing?” he asked her.
“I should ask you that.”
“Okay, I guess.” He shrugged, looked at his feet.
Laura noticed he was freshly-scrubbed, but the flesh beneath his eyes were bruised-looking and his eyes were red.
He added, “It would’ve been worse a couple of years ago. Because he lived in Flag. Him going to NAU and me to the academy and becoming a cop. We didn’t see each other much, except in the summers.”
Trying to put space between himself and Dan. Laura understood why he had to do it. “I read your missing persons report on Shana. That’s what I wanted to ask you about.”
“Not much to tell. She probably just took off to clear her head.”
“Did you know her well?”
“Nah.” He ran his hand over his short-cropped hair. “When we were kids she used to tag along sometimes. Kind of funny, because they were born a couple of minutes apart. If you didn’t know them, you’d always think of her as Dan’s little sister.”
“Dan looked out for her?”
“Yeah. Of course there were times he saw her as a monumental pain in the ass.”
“They were still close?”
“Probably. He was always the one she turned to if she needed anything. I wouldn’t say she was a clinging vine exactly, but she usually got him to do what she wanted.”
“How so?”
“She was kind of a drama queen, you know? Used emotional blackmail to get her way. More than once Dan had to go rescue her. Get her out of some scrape or another.” He scratched his neck. “One time she got stranded at a bar when the guy she was with drove off and left her. Neither one of them were of legal age yet, but Dan had to go into the Buckhorn Bar to get her.”
“Do you have any idea where she would go?”
“To tell you the truth, I didn’t know her all that well. She had a friend named Heather she used to hang around with.”
Laura looked at her list. Heather was on it.
A small car went by, stereo thumping so loudly it resonated in Laura’s gut. The back windshield emblazoned with the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Josh Wingate said, “I heard you found a shell casing. That ought to help a lot.”
“Only if we have a suspect.”
“That’s what I figured.” His eyes continually scanned the street; a cop’s eyes. Always on alert. “You have anything else? I’m really hoping you can catch this guy.”
“Not much. You heard about Luke Jessup. I’m still trying to find him.”
“You know I was the one who took the report on that one, too?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t put too much stock in what he says. Sounded to me like he didn’t see much, if he saw anything at all.”
“You don’t think he’d make a good witness?”
He shrugged. “Just the feeling I got. I’ve seen him around town. He’s always buttonholing people about something. Usually it’s about being ‘saved.’ ”
Laura said, “Why did Dan major in Forestry?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it was a natural.”
“Because he cared about the environment?”
“He wasn’t a tree-hugger, that’s for sure. But he loved to hunt and fish, be outdoors. But I wouldn’t call him an environmentalist.”
“What about Shana?”
“What?”
“Was Shana an environmentalist?”
“Shana?” He looked at her, snorted. “I never heard her talk about it, if she was.” He wiped his sleeve across his face. “Of course,
I haven’t seen her lately. Any wind could blow her—she was always getting excited about some damn thing or other, like, this was it, you know? This was what she was going to do. When she married that guy, the one she had those kids with? He belonged to est or eck or something like that—she was convinced that was the be-all and end-all. Threw herself into it, headfirst.”
“She still into it?”
“I doubt it. That was just one in a whole string of fads. She was gonna join AmeriCorps, but nothing ever came of that. Usually it was because there was some guy involved.”
“You mean in the group?”
“Yeah. Dan was always worried about that. How she didn’t seem to have any core. He said the only thing she ever stuck to was barrel racing. But that’s not totally true. No matter what was going on in her life, she always stuck to Dan.”
Back at Williams PD, Laura asked to see the report for the arson at Jimmy Davis Ford. While she waited, she made some phone calls with limited results. Heather Olson, the friend Josh Wingate told her about, apparently didn’t own an answering machine. After eight rings, Laura hung up.
Heather lived in Flagstaff and attended NAU. Maybe Shana was staying with her. A nice thought, but things rarely worked out that way.
She tried two other of Shana’s friends and got voice mail messages for both. When she called Bobby Burdette, she got a message saying the number was unlisted. She hung up. Next, she ran him on NCIC. Two convictions: one for domestic violence—he had pleaded out and spent three months on probation— and one for a series of small-time burglaries. He’d graduated from Florence three and a half years ago, presumably walking the straight and narrow since then.
Domestic violence. According to the records, he had grabbed his girlfriend and shoved her head in a toilet.
Why a girl from a nice, religious family would take that, Laura didn’t know. From what Laura had heard, Shana was needy, but she also called the shots when she wanted to. Using her vulnerability to get what she wanted. She certainly controlled her brother that way.
Go figure. Love—or what passed for love—manifested itself in strange ways.
Officer Tagg appeared with the report on Jimmy Davis Ford. “Not much to it,” he said apologetically and left.
The report was pretty much straightforward. Although the Earth Warriors had contacted the Williams paper to take credit for the fire, there had been no arrests.
Laura looked at the lab report. The accelerant used was gasoline, but the special kind of gasoline used for boat engines. The three torched SUVs were all Ford Excursions, brand new, each one estimated at $36,000 to $50,000.
The name Earth Warriors had been run on NCIC and VICAP, but there were no matches. Was it a new group? Or a made-up name to throw the investigation off?
Back at the motel, Laura fired up the laptop and looked for the Earth Warriors on three different search engines. She came up with only one reference, and that was a blog by a guy named Peter Sage, who apparently had a limitless appetite for writing about everything and anything, none of it the least bit interesting. Laura was almost cross-eyed by the time she found the words “Earth Warriors” buried in a two-page paragraph.
“… a guy named John something-or-other. I heard he was in an eco-terrorist group called the Earth Warriors or some such thing, in the sixties, if you believe that. Janet said he loved avant garde art, her stuff in particular, and bought several pieces …”
She backed up and read the beginning of the sentence. Janet, apparently, had sold a house in Ojai for the man named John. From the context of the blog, she got the impression that this had happened some time in the early nineties.
She scanned the blog for further references, but after learning more than she ever wanted to know about water lily cultivation, gave up. She did send Peter Sage an e-mail asking her to contact her.
So, going by what she had just read, there had been an Earth Warriors ecoterrorist group in the sixties in California. Laura wondered if the new group had stumbled on the name somewhere or if they came up with it on their own. Either way, she doubted the 1960s Earth Warriors were still going, especially since she hadn’t found any references in legitimate media.
Laura had a pre-lunch meeting with Bobby Burdette’s parole officer—pre-lunch because he kept looking at the clock of his tiny gray cubicle and mentioning how hungry he was. He had little to offer except an unflattering mugshot of Bobby, his current address, reports he photocopied for her with considerable reluctance, and a piece of advice. Clasping his hands over his prodigious paunch, he swiveled back and forth in his chair and regarded her sadly. “Whatever you do, don’t get him riled. He doesn’t like women, and you seriously don’t want to cross this guy.”
Laura went by Bobby Burdette’s house, a cheap but neat, gray clapboard house on Edison near Seventh Street. Two big box elders dominating the dirt yard surrounded by the ubiquitous chain-link. An aluminum johnboat sat beside the short cinder driveway under a portable carport—white cloth stretched into a pitched metal frame. Laura didn’t see an outboard motor, but from the marks on the boat, assumed there was one somewhere, maybe in the metal shed nearby. Boat fuel, too. Hopefully, she could come back and take a good look later, if things went well and she got a warrant.
She debated leaving her card in his screen door, but decided she would rather make it a surprise.
A call to the Goodness Bread bakery depot headquartered in Flagstaff yielded the information that Bobby Burdette was a relief driver for a route franchise that covered Kingman, Williams, and the outskirts of western Flagstaff—that whole stretch of I-40. In a stroke of good luck, he was currently just up the street unloading baked goods at the Williams Safeway. Laura found him in the bread section, unloading hot dog buns from plastic bakery baskets stacked up on a fifteen-foot-high rack. As she approached, he paused to add up something on a machine that looked like a cross between a clipboard and a calculator.
Laura lingered at the other end of the aisle in the greeting card section, getting a good look at him.
He looked like his mugshot. Thin and seedy-looking, the same dead look in his eyes. His hair was solid black and clipped military-short. His naturally dark skin had been damaged by the sun. He was shorter than she imagined. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and dark purple tie, putty-colored slacks over work boots. The short-sleeved shirt barely cut off the tattoo of an eagle, poorly rendered. It looked like a jail tat.
She watched him work. His movements were smooth and precise; no action wasted. A good worker.
Laura tried to picture him with Shana, though—hard to do. Hard, too, to see him through Shana’s eyes, what he might represent to her. He was older, so maybe it was a father thing. But this guy didn’t seem anything like Chuck Yates, at least not in looks.
She hung back, thinking about how she wanted to play it.
Straight. She cleared her throat. “Are you Robert Burdette?”
He stopped mid-rustle, cocked his head at her. She saw that his eyes were dark brown and the irises seemed to jiggle. “Who wants to know?”
“Laura Cardinal, Department of Public Safety.” She pushed back her light jacket so he could see the shield hooked to her belt.
“Let me see that.”
Laura handed it to him and he studied it, eyes darting back and forth—little tiny shudders. Some kind of physical problem? Or drugs. Taking his time. She wondered if he had problems reading. Finally he handed it back to her. “This about Dan Yates?”
“I understand you came back from Las Vegas with Shana.”
He moved a step closer to her, his shoe squeaking on linoleum, and Laura took a step back, freeing up her body in case she needed her weapon.
He saw that and smiled, knowing why she did it. In no way intimidated. “I did come back with Shana, then I turned right around and went back to Kingman. Had to be in bed early because I had to get to the bakery outlet by four a.m.”
“Long drive, isn’t it?”
He kicked his toe lightly into the side
of the cart. “I’m used to long drives.”
“Why did you come back with her?”
“I wanted to give the lovebirds some time alone.” The way he said “lovebirds,” it could have been something nasty. Still standing close, his chin tipped up so he could look her in the eye. “Plus, Shana and Kellee didn’t get along that well, had a little tiff about something. You know how that can be. So I volunteered to take her back and drop her off.”
“Have you seen her lately?”
“No. Should I?”
Trying to intimidate her, put her on the defensive. Clear to her that Bobby Burdette had done time.
“No reason,” Laura said, purposely lowering his voice so he had to listen to her. “Except that her brother’s dead and you have a relationship with her.”
“Is that what she said? We have a relationship?”
“Am I wrong, sir?”
He shook his head as if he didn’t believe what he was hearing. Those jumping-bean eyes fixed on her; hard to look at. “In her head, we do.”
“What are you saying? You and she—”
“Shana thinks it’s more than it is. I’m not saying we haven’t had our fun—but even that wears thin after a while. There’s nothing there, you know?”
Laura asked,“How’d you two meet?”
“I don’t see that’s any business of yours.”
“In the Earth Warriors?”
For just an instant his hard-shell eyes flickered. “What’s that?”
“An ecoterrorist group. You heard about those SUVs burned at a car dealership here in town a couple of months ago?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Did you know Dan well?”
“Not really.”
“How about Kellee?”
“Nope.”
“But you were a witness at their wedding.”
“Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
Laura tried another tack. “Is Shana into the environment?”
He shrugged, his eyes shutting down.
He was not going to tell her anything. She debated asking him where Shana was now, but her instinct told her not to. She didn’t trust anything he said, and if he didn’t know Shana had taken off, Laura didn’t want to be the one to tell him.
The Laura Cardinal Novels Page 45