Mortal Crimes 1

by Various Authors

  “You’re being downright obsequious.”

  “Now that’s a big word.”

  “It means—”

  “I know what it means. You think I’m an egg-sucking dog.” He cocked his head. “You think I’m trying to flatter you out of suspecting me of murder?”

  It surprised her, his coming out with it like that. “You think that? That I see you as a suspect?”

  “I’d think you weren’t doing your job if you didn’t.”

  “You’re right about that.” She paused, kept her voice neutral. “Everybody’s a suspect.”

  “If I was a guilty man, I’d be shaking in my boots.”

  Laura glanced pointedly at his legs. “No shaking there.”

  “Nope.”

  “So according to your theory, you must be innocent.”

  “Diogenes can give it up, retire, live off his stocks. Take that trip to New Zealand he’s always been harping about.”

  “Diogenes?”

  “The guy with the lamp.”

  “You’re the last honest man?”

  “If the shoe fits.”

  “Does it?”

  They stood there, the silence stretching, having gone from easy banter to awkwardness. Laura liked him—okay, be honest, she liked him a lot—but there was still the feeling he wasn’t telling her everything he knew. She doubted it had anything to do with Jenny Carmichael’s death. Unlike Jaime, she didn’t believe Steve Lawson killed Jenny.

  She could be wrong, though.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to go over your statement again.”

  “Fine with me. Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee? I think I have tea.”

  “Water’s fine.” Laura pulled the tape recorder out of her purse and set it down on the coffee table. She sat down on one of the Early American chairs.

  Steve excused himself, went down the hallway, ostensibly to the bathroom.

  While he was gone, Laura got up and walked across the room so her back was to the window. This was another precaution she had schooled herself in, something that had become a habit. Any time someone left the room, she went to a different spot. She’d learned this from her old mentor, Frank Entwistle. If someone—someone like Sean Grady, for instance—planned an attack on her, he’d find her in a different place. He wouldn’t have the upper hand.

  She heard a medicine cabinet open and close. She heard the rattle of pills in a plastic bottle, heard the faucet turn on, fill up a glass, and then turn off again. Heard him set the glass down with a crack.

  He’d massaged the place above his eye a couple of times; she wondered if he had a headache.

  He came back into the room. If he noticed that she’d moved, he didn’t mention it. He walked over to the sink and poured water into two glasses. She saw that his sleeves were now rolled down and buttoned.

  “Do you live up here full-time?” Laura asked him.

  “I’ve got a place in Tucson. Haven’t been back there in a few days.”

  “In this weather, I don’t blame you.”

  “It is nice up here.” He brought her the water, handed it to her. A plastic Casper the Friendly Ghost cup.

  Laura said, “I had these when I was a kid. The movie tie-in.”

  “I don’t know how they got here. Grandpa must have picked them up somewhere.” He sat down opposite her. “You grow up around here?”

  “I’m a native. How about you?”

  “California. LA, Laguna.”

  “Lucky you.”

  His eyes seemed to flicker at that. Something not so good. Something he wanted to keep to himself. “I also spent a lot of time up here and down in Tucson. At certain points in my life, my grandfather practically brought my sisters and me up.”

  “Your grandfather sounds like a good man.”

  “He was.” He bore down on the words in emphasis. Clearly, he didn’t want her to probe about his grandfather. Which meant that was where she would go. But they were relaxing at the moment, and she let that happen. Jake sat at her feet. She rubbed his head and asked Steve about his sisters.

  They stayed on relatively safe topics, Laura trying to divine what was going on with him. And finding herself responding to the kind of person he seemed to be.

  At last they came to a silence. Not an awkward silence this time, just a resting spot. Laura was amazed at how comfortable she felt around him. She needed to keep from falling into that trap. Heywood was her prime suspect, but Steve Lawson was another, just by dint of his proximity to Jenny’s grave. She nodded to the tape recorder. “I’m going to record this.”

  “Fine with me. Just don’t quote me on The Three Stooges. I have my image to think of.”

  Laura asked the same questions she’d asked before in a slightly different way, and Steve Lawson gave her the same answers. Then she went farther afield. She stuck to the topic of his grandfather for a long time. She learned a lot about him, but nothing that contributed to her knowledge about the case.

  She turned off the tape recorder and said, “That does it.”

  Whatever had been bothering him when she’d first seen him seemed to have gone away. Laura wondered if it had anything to do with his ex-wife. So she said, “I’m amazed that you have such a good relationship with your ex. How do you do that?”

  He shrugged.

  “I couldn’t do it.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  She nodded. Stayed quiet, hoping he’d fill the vacuum. He did.

  “Julie is a good friend. We still have things to work out.”

  “With a Ouija board?”

  Again, she saw a flicker in his eyes. “I’m not a big believer in that.”

  Laura nodded. “Compromise. I get that.”

  He stood up. “It’s been a long night.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “You can say that again.”

  He and Jake walked her out onto the porch. Laura looked up at the stars. “Unbelievable.”

  “What is?”

  “How close those stars are.”

  He nodded. “Better watch your step. These stairs are old and falling apart.”

  “That’s okay—“

  He steadied her with his arm.

  Shit.

  She felt it, a shock up her elbow. It was her left elbow, and it was nothing like the shock she would have felt if he touched her bad arm. Not the same sensation at all.

  Laura wanted to pull her arm back, but she didn’t. She hoped he didn’t notice her reaction. Hoped he didn’t notice that for just an instant, she had responded to him the way a detective working a case shouldn’t.

  ________

  Driving down from Mt. Lemmon, Laura tried to get a handle on her feelings. She liked the guy. That was plain. She more than liked the guy.

  And she couldn’t do that. He was still a suspect. As fine and upstanding a citizen as he appeared to be, as much as she would like to go with her feelings—that this guy was solid—she had to keep a lid on it until she cleared him. Which might never happen.

  But another voice in her head wore a completely different groove. The other voice was asking, Is it mutual? Was he attracted to her, too?

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said aloud as she passed the ranger’s station and took another curve. “It’s just not going to happen.”

  ________

  Laura opened the door to her house on the Bosque Escondido and saw the answering machine blinking across the room. The digital display showed fourteen messages.

  Laura stopped just inside the door. The most phone calls she’d ever received in one day were six, and that was when she’d been home with the flu, helping to set up a task force.

  She withdrew her SIG and moved away from the door, deeper into blackness. Heart slamming in her chest, mouth dry. Gun ready, she snapped on the lamp by the TV.

  Nobody here.

  Of course not.

  But there was a rabbit warren of rooms; this was an old ranch house. She didn’t dare let her guard down
yet.

  She went through the house and cleared every room. Positive—well, almost positive—that no one would be able to break in here. Still, she went by Ronald Reagan’s mantra: trust but verify.

  Satisfied that she was locked in and alone, she played the first message.

  “This is Candy from Lolita Escorts. We do have an opening, so if you want to schedule an interview—“

  Laura deleted the message.

  The next message was from Fetishes Escort Service, also returning her call.

  She listened to and deleted all the calls: X Girls Cinema, Oracle Adult Movies, Sensual+ Massage, Nightshade Motel and Video, Sensations Adult Novelties, and a host of others.

  Laura was learning: Tucson had a robust sex trade.

  She sat down, aware that she was shaking from adrenaline.

  Someone had her home number. It could be Grady, or it could be someone else. She was betting on Grady.

  This was the kind of sophomoric thing he would do—a childish prank. Like ordering twenty pizzas for somebody you didn’t like.

  The question was: Did this prank stem from impotence and pettiness or was it a sign of worse things to come?

  She remembered the knife flashing past her vision, the knife he had meant to kill her with, and suddenly in her mind’s eye, she saw the black mamba mural on Jaime’s wall. The snake rearing back like a cobra, the black depth between its unhinged jaws. Its shiny dead eyes.

  The thought occurred to her that there was a mamba.

  And it was coming for her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Laura awoke fifteen minutes before her alarm went off, thinking about the banality of evil.

  She had dealt with plenty of sociopaths, and all of them were the same. No matter what their crimes—and contrary to popular belief, most sociopaths weren’t slavering killers—they all shared the same trait:

  They lacked.

  They lacked compassion, they lacked the capacity for love, they lacked the ability for self-examination, they lacked guilt, they lacked fear. Sociopaths were defined by what they didn’t have.

  Laura thought that the internal landscape of a sociopath must be a dreary, barren place, devoid of the joys and sorrows characterizing the lives of average people. There was only want, impulse, and immaturity. Sean Grady could have been the poster boy for sociopathy; he was the essence of banality. Laura thought his kind of evil was all the more chilling because it was rooted in shallow ground: It didn’t mean anything.

  Laura knew that if she confronted Grady about the phone calls, he’d lie. She knew that she would get no satisfaction by talking about this with Dave Toch. She’d only appear weak. So she would watch her back as she always did, only a little more carefully.

  She was getting ready for work when her cell rang. It was Peter Waddell.

  “You have a fax machine at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve got six pages to send you—Heywood’s trophies.”

  “Sandy came through? How’d you get her to do that?”

  “Wasn’t me. She found out Robert cleaned out their bank account.”

  “That would do it for me, too,” Laura said. You did not want to mess with her on money issues. “Did you get my message last night?”

  “Hey, I just got my first cup of coffee. And I’ve been spending some quality time with Heywood’s trophies. What’s up?”

  “He showed up at Clinton Purvis’s place.”

  She could almost hear him sit forward. “When was this?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “So he’s not staying there?”

  “I don’t think so, unless he’s camping on the property somewhere. There’s a guy looking after Purvis’s dogs. I think he’d keep him off.”

  “I need to fly out there. Let me check flights, and I’ll call you back.”

  Laura set the phone down and walked outside into the hot, still morning. Even the birds’ voices were lackluster. She looked at the list of items found in the suitcase and the accompanying photographs.

  She looked at the list first.

  Bracelet - silver

  Bracelet - charm bracelet

  Earring - hoop

  Earring - gold stud

  Earrings - heart-shaped, silver

  Earrings - turtles

  Earrings - butterfly

  Key fob - red leather

  Tongue stud - silver

  Underpants - paisley

  Underpants - plain, pink nylon

  Underpants - teal lace

  Watch - plastic, Minnie Mouse

  Watch - Timex

  The banality of evil.

  Laura looked at the items, three or four to a page.

  The quality of the fax wasn’t good, and some of the items looked smudged and dark. Waddell would be bringing the actual photographs with him later today.

  But Laura wanted to get going with this. She was more and more certain that Heywood was the killer of at least two of the girls kidnapped in the mid-nineties: Kristy Groves and Jenny Carmichael.

  Micaela Brashear was the anomaly. Micaela, and the girl she called Lily.

  A horse neighed for its breakfast in the direction of the corrals.

  Laura couldn’t help feeling that Micaela wasn’t being completely forthright. It was possible the girl had sublimated significant portions of her ordeal. That there were experiences she couldn’t bring herself to face. Laura got the feeling that Micaela had met Robert Heywood, even if the girl herself wasn’t able to acknowledge it on a conscious level. It was just a feeling she had. Maybe it had been a flicker in the girl’s eyes when she saw Heywood’s photograph.

  She wanted to talk to Clinton Purvis. She wanted to know if he knew a Bill Smith. But there were more important things to do at the moment. She checked her watch—almost eight a.m. Patsy Groves was leaving for home today.

  ________

  Laura and Jaime arrived just as Patsy Groves finished packing. When she opened the door to her room and saw them, she looked annoyed: Now what?

  Jaime handed her the trophy list.

  “Could any of these items belong to Kristy?”

  Mrs. Groves stared at the list. “A few of them. The pink underpants, the earrings, the charm bracelet.”

  He handed her the other sheets of paper. “Mrs. Groves, please look at each of them carefully. I know it’s been a long time—”

  Patsy Groves sat down heavily on the unmade bed. Her face had turned a pale color, like putty.

  “That was hers.” She clenched the paper between two fingers, causing it to bend, then wilt.

  Jaime standing over her, leaning at the waist. Again, reminding Laura of a giant draft horse who didn’t know where to put his feet. “Which one, ma’am?” he asked gently.

  Mrs. Groves touched the sheet with the index finger of her other hand, and the sheet of paper rattled. “That one.”

  Laura and Jaime looked.

  “The charm bracelet?” Jaime asked.

  Patsy Groves nodded. She was already crying.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded again. Her face suffused with redness, already congested with tears.

  Laura stared at the fax. It was hard to tell, but she guessed the bracelet was silver. There were six charms on it. All of them were shoes. Intricately-made, perfect little shoes. High heels, pumps, shoes from the turn of the century.

  “See those little baby shoes? I gave her those. I looked all over for them. They were real silver.”

  Laura looked at Jaime and he looked at her.

  Both of them feeling the same thing. Sadness for Patsy Groves—and exhilaration.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Feeling restless, Steve had to do something, so he took a hike up to Camp Aratauk. The air was fresh, the sky an incredible, pulsing blue above the pine tops, which at eight in the morning were green-gold, individual pine needles catching the light like tinsel. Their scent overpowering.

  He’d relented and let Jake come along. Packe
d two bottles of water in his day-pack and a nylon bag which magically turned into a dog’s water dish when he opened it up.

  A rushed feeling—that was the best way he could describe it—seemed to propel him through the forest. Every sense alive. He felt impatient, anxious, as if everything else was unimportant. It felt as if he were just marking time, that what he did up here on the mountain was just something to be gotten through so he could start his real life.

  He recognized the symptoms.

  “What do you think, buddy?” he asked Jake. “You think it’s mutual?”

  Jake was digging under a grapevine, so he didn’t answer. But Steve thought Detective Cardinal was as attracted to him as he was to her. He doubted she would act on it, though. She’d have to get the case behind her. She’d have to find out who killed Jenny Carmichael before he could so much as ask her to dinner.

  Right now it was only attraction, but he couldn’t help but jump ahead.

  Steve had been in love—truly in love—twice before. Julie—that was bad for a while, but he had gotten over it. They were friends now. But Linda … that still ate at him. Linda and Bill Gardner.

  Bill Gardner, the dog trainer. You couldn’t really call him a dog trainer, though. He used to hold Doberman pups up by their choke collars to punish them. Hang them until they became docile. Until they feared him.

  In the time that Steve had known Bill Gardner, two of his dogs had died in “accidents.”

  But Linda had liked him. She’d liked him so much she had taken him to bed—their bed, the one they’d bought at Bed World. He remembered bouncing up and down on the mattress in the show room, then lying flat, and when they’d thought no one was looking, they’d even made out on it, the bed with the super-ultra-spring-air-astro-sponge mattress. They’d also bought the bedding there—one-stop shopping. A black and purple and gray comforter and matching sheet set, a jumble of rectangles and circles, which had looked pretty sharp against the window behind it, the window looking out at the ocean, if you squinted past the two blocks of houses that ran down each side of the street.