“I heard that.” He followed her, ponderous. “You want to go get 'em?”
“Might as well go see what kind of damage they've done.”
Laura and Jaime caught up with them at the railroad tracks as they waited for a long freight train to pass by. Jaime recognized the older Jeep Cherokee—it belonged to Rory Flynn. In the horizontal light of the lowering sun, Laura could see four shapes: two people up front and two in the back. When the gate went up, the Cherokee crossed over and took off down the road.
No way to tell that this was a drunk driver. Taking the curve past the tracks like a pro, straightening out, not a hair over the speed limit.
Taillight-chaser that Laura was, she thought about stopping him. But they weren't that far from the crime scene, and she wanted to see what he would do when he got there. Still hoping to get him on her side. “He seemed drunk back at the party,” she said.
“Doesn't matter how drunk Rory is, when it comes to driving or shooting, the guy is perfect. He's got the reflexes of a NASCAR driver. I heard he'd do biathlons dead drunk when he was young.”
Kristy's body was found in a desert area on the west side of town. Superimposed over what was actually out here, Laura saw the area the way it used to be: a sprinkling of ranch-style houses in a rural setting, dirt roads between fallow fields, and big old tamarisk trees. Now, a massive auto mall sprawled across several acres to the south, looking more like the parking lot at LAX than a car dealership. Most of the land nearby had been scraped up. Some of the old houses were mere shells of themselves, waiting for the coup de grâce.
The patch of desert where Kristy had been found was still relatively untouched, but tractors and other heavy equipment were parked along the road, including a tree spade.
The tree spade had been removing a mesquite tree when a construction worker on the ground noticed something unusual hanging from one of the long blades—it had turned out to be Kristy's rib cage.
Laura watched as Rory Flynn parked behind the earthmovers. As if on cue, four doors opened and the men got out. She pulled in behind them. Not one of them looked back. They were men on a mission. They started up a dirt road bisecting the desert lot in the direction of the crime scene tape.
Their destination was a eucalyptus tree and a cement slab marking a house long gone, two rows of water-starved palms lining a dirt drive to nowhere. Nowhere except a mesquite tree torn out by its roots and tossed onto the slab, and the three-foot-deep rectangular hole where bits and pieces of Kristy Groves had been removed from the earth. First yanked out by the tree spade, then the rest of her painstakingly uncovered, bagged, and transported.
Flynn stood over the grave, his big shoulders tight, his face pale and slack in the late afternoon light, eyes only dark hollows under the heavy shelf of his brow. Beside him stood Knit Shirt and two younger men Laura thought might still be with the sheriff's office. It could have been a tableau from an old western, the four men standing over the upturned earth, heads down as if in prayer.
The mood was broken when Rory Flynn looked up and saw her coming.
“Did you look for other graves?” he demanded, kicking his foot at the yellow string that formed a grid around the excavation.
Putting himself in the role of the investigator.
Jaime said, “There weren't any.”
“Here, sure. But what about those mesquite trees back by the fence?”
Jaime's face turned red. “We're gonna get to it. We've been busy.” Which was true—they had been busy. Jean Cox, the forensic anthropologist, had made sure the crime scene technicians dug five feet in each direction from the original grave and went down as far as they could before hitting caliche, which was as hard as concrete and almost impossible to dig through. The FA had directed them to dig outward from Kristy's burial place for precisely the reason Rory Flynn was making such a stink—there might be other remains. When a killer found a good place to bury his victim, he often used it again. That had not been the case this time. They'd found nothing but Kristy Groves and the few articles of clothing that had survived the years under the earth.
Laura looked over at the mesquite trees by the fence. Rory Flynn was right: Kristy's killer might have buried other victims under those trees. They offered thick cover and would screen him from the road. After Micaela Brashear's description of the killing in the desert, Laura thought it could be more than possible.
Rory Flynn charged off in the direction of the mesquite trees, his unsteady entourage at his heels. He trudged around in the brush, shoving his way through the tree limbs, reminding Laura of an agitated bear. Stopped to look at her and Jaime.
“This guy could've buried a whole bunch of kids in here.” His voice accusatory.
Laura said, “I'll get the FA out here tomorrow.”
“A little late now, isn't it?”
No, it wasn't. Now he was just being an asshole about it.
At least there was nothing wrong with his thought processes. Laura knew what he was looking for: loose stumps or other debris that could have been used by the killer to mask a grave, anything that seemed to have been added to the natural landscape.
Jaime's phone chimed. He stepped away from her, phone pressed to his ear, listening and nodding.
A dry wind rattled the palm fronds, the lowering sun glinting off them in the yellow-pink light. The sun a baleful red eye now, about to wink out in the heat haze of the Diamondback fire.
Jaime ended the call and looked at Laura. “Patsy Groves's flight was canceled due to severe thunderstorms,” he said. “She's staying in a hotel in Atlanta for the night.”
Laura glanced at Flynn, still banging around the mesquites like a dog trying to flush birds. Looked at Jaime.
Jaime grinned. “Hey, Rory, what do you say we take you out for a drink?”
Flynn's head popped out from behind a mesquite trunk.
They'd finally found his price.
Chapter 6
Laura, Jaime, and Rory Flynn ended up at a new Chuy's with a view of the auto mall, found a place in the corner under a plaster shark wearing a hula skirt. Rory's three buddies had decided to go back to the party, which suited Laura. It meant she didn't have to get into a fight with them. This meeting was between her, her partner, and Rory Flynn.
Now Flynn's hands were clasped around his beer chaser, the shot of tequila already knocked back and down. He'd gone from belligerent to sincere, which Laura thought was a good sign.
“All I want is to be consulted,” he said. “You understand that, right? I might know some things you don't.”
“I bet you do,” Laura said, trying to mirror his earnestness. Jaime had turned back into a statue, letting her take the lead. She wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he just wanted to see her in action.
Once Rory Flynn decided to talk, he was loquacious.
“I spent a lot of time running down leads that went nowhere. Plus, this kid Kristy didn't live in a good neighborhood, you get my drift. Talked to her schoolmates.” He scratched his head, and a few flakes drifted down onto the table. “What I got, she wasn't exactly a good girl. She was already sleeping around, was into drugs, all sorts of shit. I felt real sorry for her parents. They were just starting out, had a little restaurant on the west side, bought a deli. Probably they were spending too much time trying to make that work and weren't paying enough attention to the kid, but these days, that's pretty much par for the course. Good, honest people though. I looked real hard at the father. A lot of time, it comes down to the parent, but I never got that vibe.”
Laura said, “She disappeared in April eleven years ago. Was there anything going on at that time? With her parents, the restaurant, anything?”
“I covered that. Don't think I didn't. Day before, she went to the Pima County Fair with her parents and her older sister from out of state. Patsy Groves swore a guy was giving her daughter the eye. I checked it out, but it didn't pan out. Thing is, that's a long way from where she was found, and it was the day before. The guy would
have to be pretty ambitious to drive all the way out there and look for her, you know what I mean? I had to discount it.”
Laura understood that. The fairgrounds were east of town on I-10 out in the desert. “The Groves family lived only a few blocks from I-10, though,” she said.
“I thought of that. I also figured out a way whoever it was could have gotten her address. Family entered a sweepstakes put on by the carnival to win a Ford Explorer. Name, address, everything. I questioned the folks who ran the sweepstakes, came up with snake eyes.”
“But it could have happened,” Jaime said. “Some of these guys, they'll do anything if they find a girl they like. Go all the way to Timbuktu.”
Rory glared at him. “This was almost as far. I said I interviewed all of them, and it was to my satisfaction, believe me. You're poking it in a dry hole.”
Charming.
Laura suddenly remembered something else she'd seen. Not in Kristy Groves's file, but in Micaela's. She could swear that Micaela had gone to a carnival with a friend.
That meant that two of the three girls had gone to a carnival some time in the week before they were kidnapped. That was too much of a coincidence for her. She mentioned this to Rory.
“You're kidding, right? The opera singer's kid? Nobody ever told me that. Of course, that was TPD. They wouldn't share anything with me. Guess that one's closed, though. Nice, it turned out like that.”
Laura thought of the tension in the Brashear household.
Jaime said, “There might be a connection.”
“Really? Heard it was some old fart, wanted himself a fresh young thing for his wife, kept her all this time. That doesn't square with what happened to Kristy Groves.”
Jaime told him about the other girl, the one Micaela had told them about.
Rory whistled long and low. “That puts a whole different slant on things, you know? Did this guy work for a carnival?”
Laura said, “Not that I know of. The girl—Micaela—doesn't remember a lot. She says she was drugged a lot of the time. But it's something we need to ask her about.” She added, “But Micaela did work for Sea World. That's an attraction.”
“Yeah,” Jaime said. “But that's different.”
“Maybe not. Somebody, say, who ran a concession with the carnival might have gotten a job at Sea World.”
“Micaela was the one who worked at Sea World, not Bill Smith.”
Rory grunted. “Bill Smith. Now there's an original name. These guys aren't very original in anything they do, you ask me. Didn't he use the old puppy ploy with the Brashear kid? Now there's a golden oldie.” He scratched his nose. “These days, kids are more sophisticated than that; he wouldn't get away with that now.”
That was true. A nine-year-old girl wasn't likely to fall for the lost puppy story. A five-year-old, maybe. One good thing about cable TV news, they covered abduction stories so often that almost every kid in America knew to be leery of someone looking for a lost puppy.
Laura said, “I know he worked as a short-order cook. Was anyone associated with Kristy a cook?”
“Neighbor. That was a sad story. He once pitched for the Mets, ended up slinging hash at a local diner.”
They all fell silent. The Bill Smith theory didn't make a lot of sense, especially with Smith taking Micaela all the way to Oregon and back. “Did he move at all?”
“Far as I know, he's still there. I kept track of him for a while, but it didn't pan out, and the guy was all right.”
“We need to know if he moved.”
“I can get that info for you,” Rory volunteered.
Laura said, “That's okay. We can do that.”
His joviality turned to sullenness in an instant. “That figures.”
Laura was getting tired of babying him. “What kind of restaurant did the Groves family have?”
“Deli. They didn't actually cook anything on the premises, unless you count using a microwave.”
“Did you talk to their workers?”
“What do you think? One was a young kid, the other was a middle-aged woman. Neither one of them struck me as the type who'd kill a little girl.”
“How old was the kid?”
“Twenty or so. But you got it wrong. He was gay as a three-dollar bill. Made me want to wash my hands afterward, just talkin' to him, he was such a fairy. Just made me a sandwich, too; when I found out he was the one who made it, I threw it in the trash.”
The more she saw of this man, the more she disliked him. She made sure to keep her expression and her voice neutral. “Just remind me. What were Kristy's actions the day she disappeared?”
“She helped prepare stuff at the deli in the morning, then she went over to her friend's house, must have been early afternoon. They hung out for a while, and she walked home. She only lived a couple of blocks away. Disappeared on the way back.”
Laura knew all this from the notes she'd been copied on. She had been over it several times since she got the cold case last year, but it was better to hear it from the investigator. She listened carefully to his inflection, so she could get a feeling for his prejudices and what interested him most. He seemed to have a low opinion of the girl, but not the parents. In his mind, the parents were hard-working and decent, and the child had let them down. Did that affect the way he saw Kristy? Did it affect how hard he had worked to find her killer? Did he think Kristy had come to a bad end due to her own actions?
Jaime shifted on his stool. Uncomfortable, Laura thought. Such a big man, he probably didn't find many chairs to accommodate him. “Nobody saw her,” he said.
“Nope. Nobody. Like she disappeared into thin air.”
Laura thought he might have said this a few times; it had the sound of a well-grooved path in his tongue.
Laura and Jaime went over the other information: Kristy's schoolmates, her boyfriends—plural, Flynn had added darkly—and the people in the neighborhood, including a registered sex offender. The registered sex offender had been in jail at the time on another charge.
Laura said, “Did you make the link to Micaela Brashear's disappearance right away?”
“Pretty much. I contacted the TPD detective, can't remember his name now—it's in the report—and it happened pretty much the way I wrote it. He wasn't very forthcoming.”
Laura had read the report several times, but wanted his answer anyway. “Why was that?”
“I think it was because Kristy was so much older. Fourteen, that's a teenager. He really got hung up on that. You know, how a lot of these creeps like kids a certain age? He had a point.”
Laura knew how particular child molesters and child killers could be. “So it went nowhere?”
“Like talking to a stone wall.”
“What about Jenny Carmichael?”
“That was much easier. The Brashear kid and the Carmichael kid were almost the same age. Plus Mt. Lemmon's our jurisdiction, and I worked pretty closely with Artie Schiller.”
Laura remembered how thorough Schiller's report was. He had assembled it as a case file, even though technically the child was considered missing, not dead.
“You know Artie's dead, don't you?” Rory said. “Heart attack. Guy ran in marathons and everything. Guess when it's your time, it's your time, doesn't matter how much frigging granola you eat.” He leaned back, beaming with self-satisfaction. “So what are you going to do now?” he added.
As a courtesy, Laura told him; he'd find out sooner or later anyway. “Kristy's mother is flying in, so we'll talk to her.”
“What about the other kid? The one on Mt. Lemmon? You talk to her parents yet?”
Laura hesitated.
Jaime broke in smoothly, “We're working on it.”
Rory Flynn's eyes narrowed. He knew they weren't going to share anything else with him, and he was mad about it. He tossed off a last shot and bit into a lime, then said, “Why don't you take me back to the party?”
On the drive back home, to the Bosque Escondido, Laura saw fireworks over the mountai
ns. The official fireworks were over; these were the renegade ones—small and sporadic—but far more dangerous to the tinder-dry Tucson valley.
Fires everywhere, but people had to have their fun.
After Jaime dropped her off at the Department of Public Safety building, she'd tried to run down the missing girl. As she'd suspected, there were no missing children reported in Tucson during the years that concerned her, other than the three she knew about. There were sure to be runaways, but they would be older. She'd follow through on that tomorrow.
She and Jaime had learned little more than was in the report. They would follow up on the short order cook, but Laura doubted it would pan out. The guy who took Micaela had been driving all over hell and back.
Maybe they'd have better luck with the TPD detective who investigated Micaela Brashear's disappearance. Unfortunately, he now lived in Florida. She would have liked to talk to him face-to-face, but due to budget cuts, times were hard and money scarce.
Laura's house loomed up chalk-white in the starlight, situated on a dogleg in the ranch road. The dirt lane was lined by walnut trees, mesquite, and a stand of bamboo. The Bosque Escondido, a guest ranch sprawling across twenty acres of desert foothills, was owned by an old friend from high school. They'd worked out an agreement—she would maintain a law enforcement presence on the property, occasionally working traffic control for weddings and other events, and in return, she got to stay in the little house for minimal rent.
County land abutted the ranch on three sides. None of the ticky-tacky houses growing up over Kristy Groves's gravesite would ever set up shop in this pristine part of the world.
The house was closed up. She flipped on the pump switch for the swamp box cooler. She turned on every fan in the house and put her files on the desk in the alcove by the kitchen. Already this case was messy. Three jurisdictions, five detectives—one of them dead and another living in Florida. A tangled skein of egos, lapses in time, communication snafus, and turf battles. She needed to get control of the material, untangle all the threads. The thread she was most inclined to pull was the carnival connection. Both Micaela and Kristy Groves had been to a carnival within days of their abductions.
The Laura Cardinal Novels Page 69