The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  His mother going into the hole. Forever.

  He looks at the hole again and realizes it is not as deep as he originally thought. He thinks he's been at it for eons, but by his watch, he's only been out here for a little over an hour.

  Actually, the hole he has dug is relatively shallow. For a while there, it felt as if he were digging down to China. It had to be an illusion, didn't it?

  His palms start to itch. He feels an almost insurmountable craving to dig some more.

  One more bucketful, he tells himself, although the bucket is lying on its side just down the hill.

  Just one more. Then, put a fork in me, I'm done.

  He puts the blade against the earth and shoves down with his right foot.

  And the shovel strikes something hard.

  Chapter 13

  Twenty-one feet. Let anyone with a knife within twenty-one feet, he can kill you before you have a chance to shoot him. Every cop knew that.

  You always maintained a distance of twenty-one feet between you and a subject with a knife. That was gospel.

  Sean Grady had not been twenty-one feet away from her when he’d attacked her. He had been right next to her. By rights, she should be dead. She knew that it had only been luck—and Grady's poor aim—that had saved her.

  Laura thought she must be in shock. She felt fine, except for the bang on her elbow and the disturbing lack of sensation down to her fingers. Except for the sticky, bloody cut of her pinkie finger. Except for the knowledge that she could have very well ended up in the morgue at the same ME's office she'd been to today.

  It was still hard to believe Grady had come at her like that.

  He had tried to kill her. For what? His daddy had money; he would have gotten a good lawyer. To kill her for a simple fraud case?

  Laura knew she hadn't taken Sean Grady seriously because he had committed a white-collar crime. Even though she knew he was a sociopath. That lack of care had nearly cost her life.

  The ambulance in the strip mall parking lot rumbled so loudly she could barely hear the paramedic, who had her sitting on the back bumper, manipulating the area above her elbow.

  “We can patch you up,” he was saying, “But you'll need to see a doctor and get an x-ray. You've damaged your radial nerve.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “From your symptoms, it's probably a soft contusion and pretty small, but you need to put ice on it and keep it that way for seventy-two hours.”

  She opened her mouth to say she was too busy to fool around with icepacks—that while they were using up precious time here, she needed to get with the TPD detective in charge of the case and run it down for him—but decided to keep her thoughts to herself. She had to go through this anyway; there was no reason to alienate a man who was just doing his job.

  “You keep this sling on,” the paramedic said. “I've got some written instructions for you to follow, but I strongly recommend you see your doctor.”

  She nodded, knowing she wouldn't.

  As soon as the paramedic was done with her, Laura snagged the First Officer at the Scene, a TPD cop. “The subject—Sean Grady—has tickets to Canada in his possession. Be sure to tell whoever's handling this case that he's a flight risk.”

  The cop’s reaction time was slow; he just stared at her sling as if he'd never seen one before.

  “Aren't you going to call it in?” she asked.

  She made sure he did, then waited in her car for the DPS investigator and the TPD ag assault detective assigned to her case. Her mind buzzed with everything that had happened and would happen. Internal Affairs at DPS would have to convene a Shooting Board, since she had fired her weapon. Even though the shooting was justified, the internal review would go forward. That would take up the rest of the day and then some.

  The TPD detective was Dave Toch. Dave Toch had been a friend of Laura's mentor, Frank Entwistle. Frank Entwistle was the TPD detective who’d investigated the deaths of her parents when she was twenty. Frank had found her parents' killer, a loner named Ricky Lee Worrell, who’d broken into the wrong house looking for drug money.

  It was Frank who’d made Laura decide to go into police work.

  Frank Entwistle had died of a heart attack last year, but Laura always felt he was with her. She talked to him all the time.

  Dave was polite, even deferential, but Laura knew her special status with him had slipped. She knew he was thinking: What do you expect from a taillight-chaser? That was what most TPD cops would think. She herself, like pretty much everybody else at DPS, thought of TPD as “the local cops,” and sometimes even “the Keystone Kops,” so she understood the prejudice. She felt his disappointment in her.

  It just added to the rotten feeling.

  Laura tried to wall herself off from the depression that was slowly enveloping her. She needed to suck it up. The main thing was to get this guy, and she couldn't be much help if she was feeling sorry for herself. Like the commercial said: Never let 'em see you sweat.

  Just as they were finishing up, her phone rang. She got it with her left hand, trying to hear over the dieseling ambulance. It was Jaime, calling her from DPS where he had gone to meet her after the autopsy.

  “Are you okay?” His concern for her audible.

  At the sound of his voice, she wanted to cry.

  Heart hammering in his chest, Steve jogged back to the house to get his new paint brushes. Urgency ignited goosebumps like ant bites up and down his arms and across his back. Excitement and fear, both.

  Because he knew what he'd found.

  He knew the shape. Elliptical, definitely bone. He had found a skull. A small human skull.

  The minute the shovel blade had touched bone, he'd stopped what he was doing. Even though his shovel had only tapped the skull lightly, the feel of the blade had shuddered straight up his arm, as if he'd hit the hammer on the high striker at the county fair. It had runneled its way right into his soul. He'd immediately thrown the shovel aside, got down on his knees, and brushed away the dirt. He was afraid there would be a mark on the brown, convex bone, but there wasn't. Not so much as a scratch, thanks to the dirt compacted on top.

  Steve felt both anguish and an odd kind of triumph. He knew in his heart who the skull belonged to. He saw her in his mind's eye, her hair capturing the sun, a sheaf of wheat. The serious eyes watching him, watching Jake. The khaki uniform, the tanned arms and legs.

  He knew it was her.

  He was not crazy. He was not seeing things: it was her. He had met a ghost. He'd have to come to grips with that. He’d met her by the stream bed and she’d pushed him into uncovering her after all these years.

  As he reached the cabin, Steve realized that he would have, as Ricky Ricardo would say, “some 'splainin' to do.” The police would ask him questions. Why was he digging up the property? What was he looking for? Did he know what he would find before he found it?

  He knew how it would look. He'd seen it often enough on the nightly news: a man weighed down by the guilty secret in his backyard finally confesses. He says he's just digging for heck of it, but you could drive a Mack truck right through that explanation. He would be the prime suspect. He knew a few cops in LA and knew that was how they would see it.

  Right now, he didn't want to think about that.

  He went inside and grabbed the paintbrushes, which he'd left on the kitchen counter by the sink, price stickers still on them, still tucked into the flat brown paper bag. He chose the smaller one. He knew he should leave it alone, call the authorities now, but it was still light and he wanted to at least get the shape of it, see if he was seeing things or not.

  Could be he'd go back there and it would all be a dream. Something he'd made up in his head. He'd been awfully strange up there by the stream bed, working like a manic railroad laborer.

  The way time had seemed to stretch, then telescope. The way the hole had seemed wide and deep, then turned out to be only a couple of feet down—two-and-a-half feet at the most.

&n
bsp; His fingers caressed the paintbrush bristles, mind racing.

  Where had he been back in 1997 when Jenny Carmichael had gone missing? He’d been living in LA at the time, working for the U.S. Geological Survey. Had he come out here at all that summer? He was sure he hadn't, but that summer was a blur. He and Linda had broken it off, and their breakup had consumed him. It had been a long, hard summer, and he'd been obsessed with his work. Work had been good; it’d gotten his mind off their failed relationship. Long hours, late nights, extended trips. No time to come out here.

  There had been a time, back in the nineties, when he hadn't seen his grandfather for a few years.

  As he opened the door, Jake dashed out like a black streak. He took off up the hill toward the stream bed, toward the excavation, barking joyously as he ran.

  Looking like he had when he was two or three years old.

  Steve should stop him, but he couldn't. He felt frozen, holding on to the paintbrush. Another thought occurring to him.

  His grandfather had been ninety-five when he died a few weeks ago. He would have been eighty-five when Jenny Carmichael went missing. Too old, he thought. Too old for what he was thinking.

  He felt like a bastard for even entertaining the notion. His grandfather had been a gentle, inquisitive man. He would no more molest a child than hack off his own hands.

  But it was his property, the nasty little voice in his head insinuated.

  Steve had an answer for that. Most of the year, his grandfather had lived down in Tucson.

  Not in the summer, though.

  No, not in the summer.

  Steve knew his grandfather’d had a lot of friends, friends from the old days. And as he’d gotten older, they’d dropped away, casualties of old age. It's like a steeplechase, his grandfather used to say. A few falls at every fence. But there had been a whole heck of a lot more falls in the later years, as his grandfather lost his friends one by one to death.

  His grandfather had known a lot of people on the mountain, though. Neighbors would check in on him from time to time. Steve remembered hearing about so-and-so and his wife inviting him over for dinner, about somebody else he had played chess with. Maybe his grandfather had been friendly with someone unsavory. Someone who had taken advantage of his hospitality to—

  You're jumping the gun, he told himself. The skull might not belong to Jenny Carmichael at all. People have inhabited the mountain for, well, centuries. First indigenous people, then settlers.

  But he didn't really believe that.

  He glanced in the direction of the incline, and saw Jake furiously digging.

  No need for a paintbrush now.

  He wondered if he’d let the dog out on purpose, to cover up his own excavation.

  As if it could.

  As she reached the house, Laura's pager went off. It was not a number she recognized. She shoved open the door and grabbed her phone, stabbed the number in with her left index finger.

  A man identifying himself as Rudy Valenzuela, a detective-sergeant with the Pima County Sheriff's office, answered. He told her that he had talked with Jaime Molina and learned that she was working the Kristy Groves homicide and related cases.

  Laura was aware she was squeezing the phone in a death grip—something important going on.

  “A cabin owner found some bones on Mt. Lemmon,” Valenzuela said. “They're small—we believe they belong to a child.”

  Laura's first thought: It might be Jenny Carmichael.

  Chapter 14

  Jenny Carmichael's mother was a fighter. At the time of her daughter's disappearance, she was a single mother with another child to raise, Jenny's older brother, Gage. Gage was older by two years, which would have made him twenty if he had lived.

  Two weeks ago, Marine Lance Corporal Gage Carmichael died in Afghanistan.

  As Laura drove up Mt. Lemmon, she thought about the dove-like woman who had become a soldier on the front line of victims' rights. The woman whose organization, Survivors of Homicide, grew out of a spare bedroom in her house. Mary Carmichael had changed at least one Arizona law restricting the movement of sexual predators and had testified before the US Congress.

  Now she would have a gold star in her window.

  Laura and Jaime had planned to interview Mary Carmichael, later rather than sooner, in light of the devastating loss she had suffered. But if the bones by the stream bed on Mt. Lemmon were Jenny's, Laura and Jaime would be the ones to tell her.

  Thinking about how she would face Mrs. Carmichael so soon after the death of her son might be premature. It was quite possible the bones near the cabin belonged to someone other than Jenny.

  As Laura reached Summerhaven, she spotted a sheriff's patrol car parked across from the Mt. Lemmon Café.

  She made a U-turn, pulled in behind him, and flashed her lights. He drove out and she followed. They went back down Mt. Lemmon Highway for a mile or so before turning off on a road near the Inspiration Rock area.

  Blacktop turned to dirt, the dust of the patrol car kicking up a white haze. The road turned rough, Laura's Yukon jouncing through ruts and over rocks, the beams from her headlights ricocheting off the pine trees. Ahead, parked down from a small cabin, Laura saw two sheriff's vehicles: Jaime's unmarked and the white van belonging to the forensic anthropologist.

  Laura thinking: This cold case is exploding. If it was Jenny Carmichael, she had turned up far from where she had gone missing.

  Beyond the cabin, the place where the bones had been found was lit like Dodger Stadium. Powered by a noisy generator, bright 750-watt lights lit up the area, filtering down like moon rays through the trees.

  The sheriff's car parked just off the road, and Laura followed suit. He was out in a flash to greet her, a tall man with a broad, friendly face.

  “Detective Cardinal?” he asked. They shook hands, Laura feeling awkward using her left hand. Thinking she was getting a much better reception from Detective Sergeant Rudy Valenzuela than she had from the men at the party the other night. He glanced at her sling.

  “It's no big deal,” she said. “I'm only wearing it because I've been told to, as a precaution.”

  “Jaime's up at the site. I'll take you up there.”

  Valenzuela filled her in as they walked past the cabin and up the short incline. The cabin old and built of fieldstone and wood. The muffled sound of a dog barking came from inside. As they went up the hill, the noise receded until it sounded like somebody sawing wood.

  She followed Valenzuela along the stream bed, picking her way carefully over the uneven ground. Glad for the bright light, which threw every rock into relief.

  She saw a huddle of people in the bright glare. A large shape detached itself from the group and lumbered over. “Looks like a child's skull,” Jaime said. “Jean just got here, so you know she's not going to commit. But it looks like a child's skull to me.”

  “How was she found?”

  “Guy who owns the cabin said his dog dug her up.”

  Laura stopped, dismayed. “So it was recent?”

  “Doesn't look that way to me. Those are bones—it's not a body.”

  Laura wondered how a dog would find a skeleton that old. She supposed there could be some lingering putrefaction in skeletal remains, but from eleven years ago?

  Laura glanced at her notes. “The owner of the cabin is Steve Lawson, right?”

  “Yeah, that guy over there. The one with the glasses? He's a geologist or hydrologist, something like that. Works for USGS.”

  Laura looked at the group of people. Two uniforms—one sheriff's, the other with the Forest Service—Jean Cox, and a couple of other people.

  One of them looked like a geologist. From here she could see the gold glint of his wire-rimmed glasses, but even without them she'd know. Guy wore a dark green, long-sleeved shirt with button-flap, double chest-pockets, jeans, a thick leather belt, and desert boots. Clearly, he knew which pack he belonged to.

  She assessed the potential suspect. Nice enough looking i
n a scholarly way—he could have posed for the Cabela's catalog. She thought he was probably ten years older than she.

  “You want to take this one?” Jaime said.

  Laura nodded. She did want to take this one. It intrigued her, the guy letting his dog dig up these bones only days after Kristy Groves's skeletal remains were found down in the valley.

  Steve Lawson led Laura and Jaime to his cabin, where they could talk without distraction. Laura wanted to get Lawson's statement as soon as possible. She noticed a picnic bench shoved up against the screen door of the porch, spotted the picnic table and remaining bench under a ponderosa pine.

  “I blocked the door so the dog couldn't get out.”

  “What kind of dog?” Jaime asked, using a standard confidence-builder. People loved to talk about their animals, and Steve Lawson was no different.

  “He's a black lab.”

  The minute he opened the door, the dog stopped barking and started wriggling, dancing a jitterbug of extreme happiness. “Hey, buddy,” Steve said, holding both sides of the dog's head and rubbing his ears.

  “What's his name?” Laura asked, holding out her hand for the dog to sniff.

  “Jake.”

  Laura bent over the lab, running her hands over his gyrating body. He was one of those dogs who loved to have their hips rubbed. If anything could win the man's trust, making a fuss of his dog would. “Jake?”

  “At the time, TNT was running the mini-series Lonesome Dove. For some reason, the character in the movie reminded me of Jake, so that's the name I gave him.”

  Jaime said, “Wasn't that the guy they hung?”