Darkness on the Edge of Town (Laura Cardinal Series)

by J. Carson Black

  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 ‘Wizard of Oz’. The girl was too old for a babydoll 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.

  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 bandshell. 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 bluejean-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.”

  “How many people from out of town know where West End Boulevard is?” demanded Heather Duffy. “Nobody.”

  “He could’ve grown up here and come back,” said Danehill.

  “It’s one theory,” the chief said. “But I’ve been thinking there might be an Internet connection. It could be what drew the guy here, like maybe he met her on the Internet. Buddy’s been raising concerns about this—his daughter--” He looked at Holland. “You’re the logical choice, why don’t you look into it?”

  “Okay,” Holland said. “We have to cover all the angles.”

  Laura knew she should say something before the chief took the briefing over and started making assignments. “Looks like we’ve got a plan.” She looked at the chief. “I know you’re short-handed, but if you could spare an officer to help canvass the houses facing the park once I get the photos from the scene, that would be helpful.”

  Chief Ducotte stood up. “No problem. My people are your people. You want Detective Holland to coordinate that?”

  Code for: He wanted Detective Holland to work closely with her.

  “No,” she said. “He’ll have more important things to do.”

  If she’d expected Holland to be grateful, she would have been disappointed.

  * * *

  As the briefing broke up, all of them crowding around to squeeze through the door of the conference room, Heather handed Laura a tampon still in its package. “You drop this?” she asked.

  Her voice had the exaggerated sweetness of a bully.

  Laura became aware of men shuffling, coughing, some of them amused, no one looking at her. Mention a tampon and you’re back in second grade, never mind most of these guys were married and had umpty-ump kids.

  Laura took the tampon, thought briefly about stabbing Duffy in the eye with it. “Thanks, Duffy. I never turn down anything that’s free.”

  It took the drive back to the Copper Queen Hotel to get her heart rate back down. Hard to not show how humiliated she was. It took her right back to grade school.

  It had been her experience that there were certain women who knew just where the soft underbelly was—an instinct they were born with. A toxic form of cunning. She supposed there were men like that, too, but she hadn’t met any.

  Victor didn’t help—reliving the scene more than a few times. “Jesus, I bet you haven’t been razzed like that since you were a rock at the Academy.”

  “Fuck you, Victor.”

  They ate in the dining room at the Copper Queen just before the kitchen closed, then headed for the bar. She wanted to talk about this guy, bounce some things off Victor. This was a bad bad guy. He was on a roll, and she knew he wouldn’t stop with Jessica Parris.

  A man was playing the upright piano in the bar, “Rhapsody in Blue”. On the table next to him was a jar for tips. Laura loved Rhapsody in Blue, so she put some cash in the jar. He nodded to her as she and Victor went out onto the terrace.

  The moment they sat down, Victor produced the photographs. Laura had been expecting them. Victor’s daughter Angela had been born a week ago, his fifth child.

  Laura oohed and ahhed over the baby, who looked like a red thumb wrapped in a bandage. The baby did look cute in her little green blanket with the yellow ducks.

  The rest of the roll was from the “get-acquainted barbecue” at Lieutenant Galaz’s a couple of months ago. There was Let’s Go People! himself, holding a meat fork and wearing an apron emblazoned with the words GOT CARCINOGENS?. Detectives and their wives playing volleyball, chowing down on burgers and dogs, holding plastic cups of beer and smiling hazily at the camera. A couple of group photos, Laura conspicuous by her absence, Richie Lockhart’s fingers forming bunny ears behind Let’s Go People!’s head.

  “A great time had by all,” Laura commented.

  “You should have been there,” Victor said. “It was fun.”

  “I was busy, remember?”

  She had been working the most disturbing case of her career. A Safford man had shot his wife, his mother, and four children. At first they thought he had taken the youngest--a little girl--with him. But it turned out she had crawled under the house and died of her wounds. The little girl had been alive for at least a day.

  “How did the notification go?” she asked Victor, not wanting to think about that case.

  “You know it’s never good. On a scale from one to ten, maybe a seven. No hysterics.” He took a drink of his Chivas Regal. “The mother was pretty weird. Too busy kowtowing to her husband, making sure his dinner was still hot—can you believe it? When I did get her attention she seemed embarrassed. Like the kid made her look bad. Could be just shock. She kept saying stuff like, ‘I told her something like this would happen’, and ‘that’s what happens when you don’t listen’, as if the kid skipped school or something. Almost like she expected her daughter to turn up dead.”

  “They’ve been living with it since yesterday afternoon,” Laura said. “If they’ve been watching cable at all they know the drill.” Hungry for filler, the cable news channels had blown stranger abductions up into epidemic proportions, the experts drilling it into the American psyche that children abducted by strangers were killed within three to five hours after being taken.

  One cable TV network had labeled this “The Summer of Fear”. The spotlight had moved on in recent months to three separate grizzly bear attacks, and a reasonable person might assume that the child abductions had ceased altogether.

  “Did you meet the boyfriend?” she asked.

  “Boyfriend?”

  “According to the tattoo artist next door to the doll place, Jessica’s boyfriend lived with her family. His name is Cary Statler.”

  “Nobody mentioned him, and I didn’t see anyone matching a boy her age.” He took out his notebook and wrote the name down. “He lives with them?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Cozy--just another modern American family.” Victor sipped his Chivas. “There’s someone else we should look at, just in case Sherlock Holmes in there is right and it was a local. A neighbor—a friend of the family. Chuck Lehman. Guy was over there in the role of concerned friend, but there was something…I dunno, avid, about the way he was tuning in. So I checked him out. Two DUIs in the past three and a half years; one in Colorado and one here. Also, he broke into his ex-wife’s house, tore up some of her dainties. Felony trespass and criminal damage, both DVs. They pled the felony down.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Early forties. I know, I know. He skews old for this.” He lit a cigarette, even though he knew Laura didn’t like it.

  Victor turned his head and blew out the smoke, and also held his hand away--his try at meeting her half way. “It’s a lead. Don’t worry, we’ll get a match on this creep somewhere, you’ll see. Jesus. Dressing her up like it’s her first fucking Communion.”

  The pianist had finished Rhapsody in Blue. Even though they were outside, Laura applauded with the rest of the bar patrons, Victor following suit. The door was open and it was possible the pianist might hear.

  “With Lehman, there are some serious stressors,” Victor said. “Guy’s divorce was finalized a month or so ago, just around the time he got laid off from work.” He saw the question in her eyes. “He worked at the mine—well
, what’s left of the mining operation out here.”

  “Where’d you hear this?”

  “I asked around. Danehill was the one popped him for the DUI and the DV. I’ve got the number for his probation officer if you want it.”

  “Sure. We have to look at everything.” The story depressed Laura. “How’s Elena doing?”

  “Fine now. At least she’s not cursing my name anymore. There was about eight hours there where she seemed a little pissed off at me.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Come on, it’s not all my fault.” Victor showed her his most irresistable grin, no doubt the one that had snagged Elena into motherhood five times. “She was the one who wanted another one.” He took a sip of Chivas. “Some women actually want kids. It’s the maternal instinct, something you’d appreciate if you ever grew up, found a nice man, got married--”

  “Hey, I put in my time.”

  He laughed. “Seven months? That’s a slap on the wrist.”

  “I got time off for good behavior.” Laura realized that she’d never told Victor the whole story about her marriage. Maybe because, logic to the contrary, she still felt embarrassed.

  “One of these days you’ll find the right guy and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I got the impression you didn’t agree with Buddy back there, about the guy being a local.”

  Laura sighed. It didn’t feel local to her, but her gut could be wrong. “Who knows? Maybe there’s an Internet connection, like the chief said. In that case, it could be someone from anywhere. Buddy Holland says the guy wouldn’t know Bisbee, but it’s not that big. It wouldn’t take much to figure this place out.”

  “But why here?”

  Laura shook her head.

  Why anywhere?

  * * *

  Victor left for Tucson soon afterwards, wanting to get home to his new baby. Laura would stay here and go directly to the autopsy in Sierra Vista tomorrow afternoon. The Copper Queen Hotel was full up, but after calling around, she found a place on the main drag through town.