Flight 12: A Novella

by J. Carson Black

“What the hell?” Anthony asked.

  Laura shrugged. “I guess we pissed him off.”

  The drive back was quiet, both of them alone with their own thoughts. Laura wondered if there were undocumented workers at Lawson’s place. She also wondered if he was telling the truth about Desert Geological Institute, and if that mattered at all.

  Finally, Anthony said, “So what do you think? Did you believe him?”

  “About his relationship with Payton?”

  Anthony wiped a hand across his mouth. “Something’s not adding up here. What do you think?”

  Laura admitted she’d been thinking the same thing.

  “So who was lying?” he said.

  Laura said, “He has more to lose.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah . . . but?”

  Anthony shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Someone shot her.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  They resumed their silence, each with their own thoughts as the Crown Vic shuddered down the bumpy road, a long trip ahead of them.

  9

  The next day a shooting in a midtown office—a prominent weight loss doctor shot in his sleep by his trophy wife—kept Laura and Anthony busy.

  The relationship was a tangled mess. The good doctor had not one, but two mistresses—and a boy on the side. There were two sets of angry adult children from previous marriages involved. And a crazy amount of money. The financial machinations alone were so daunting that Laura found herself snapping at Anthony and trying to reconcile the tangled finances in her sleep.

  There just didn’t seem to be any place to go with the Payton Hatcher case. Laura suspected Steve Lawson of harboring undocumented workers, but could do little about it. Frankly, she didn’t know if she wanted to do anything about it. It was not her business. She did contact a friend of hers, a Border Patrol agent in that sector, and told him of her suspicions, but doubted anything would come of it.

  They were only suspicions. Lawson had not let her look inside his house, garage or barn, and without probable cause, there was nothing anyone could do.

  Forensics were finally done on Payton Hatcher’s computer. Laura had learned little from the files there, except that Payton had no immediate family left. Her parents and her older brother were deceased.

  The Hatcher case remained open, but the weight loss doctor and his demanding family kept Laura and Anthony busy. Anthony was already considering ideas for a screenplay based on the high-profile shooting. “Glitz sells.”

  There was nothing to tie Steve Lawson to the victim—except for her diary, which fell under the sub-section “hearsay.” If that was all the evidence Laura and Anthony had, they’d be laughed out of court.

  But of course it would never even get that far.

  So they worked the diet doctor’s case, dodging news cameras, bloggers, and a TV producer working on an episode for his show Celebrity Murders. Hatcher’s case remained on Laura’s desktop. She looked at it often, but couldn’t seem to come up with anything remotely worth investigating.

  Until the night in March when the Border Patrol raided Steve Lawson’s place and found eleven UDAs hiding in his barn.

  According to Steve Lawson’s neighbors, he was out of town at a conference. Whether or not Lawson had been harboring undocumented workers was open to conjecture. There was no way to prove he’d done any such thing. It was possible a group of border crossers had just broken in, looking for shelter. But in light of Lawson’s demeanor the day Laura and Anthony had questioned him—especially his reaction to the Chevy Suburban that nearly turned onto his property—it seemed more than a coincidence.

  Laura was in the process of following weight guru Dr. Stephen Marcus’ financial bolt down the rabbit hole when the light on her phone blinked. It was her friend at the Border Patrol, Dan Boren.

  “Thought you might be interested in this,” Dan said. They’d discussed her case that wasn’t really a case, and Dan understood Laura’s frustration. “We found a weapon at Steve Lawson’s place.”

  So what? Lawson wasn’t a convicted felon. He could own a firearm. In Arizona, he could own an arsenal if he wanted. But Laura was aware that her jaw was clenched, and she held the phone in a death grip.

  “It’s a Colt .45.”

  The same caliber weapon as the one used to shoot Payton Hatcher.

  Laura’s fingers tightened on the phone so hard her knuckles turned white. “Where’d you find it?”

  “It was wrapped in cheesecloth in a feed bin—hidden at the bottom of a full sack of grain.”

  “Do you have Lawson in custody?”

  “No. He’s gone, baby, gone. We think he knew what was coming and cleared out.”

  It wasn’t until the weekend that Anthony had time to drive over to Border Patrol and pick up the gun.

  Laura was knee-deep in paperwork on the diet doctor’s homicide, which, fortunately, was pretty clear-cut. She did make it over to ballistics and watched as the crime lab tech, Michele Borton, discharged the Colt. Laura didn’t want to get her hopes up—

  But it was a match. The striations were identical to the bullet retrieved from Payton Hatcher’s frontal lobe.

  They had their killer.

  Except, of course, they didn’t.

  Steve Lawson was in the wind.

  10

  March warmed into April. Laura and Anthony worked other cases, but Laura couldn’t get Lawson out of her mind. Where had he gone? He’d left no trace. She’d talked to his neighbors and friends in Cascabel and none of them offered anything in the way of information—they’d formed a united front of gentle cluelessness. Clearly, Lawson was not just a neighbor, but a friend, a part of the community. In rural areas people tended to form strong alliances—they relied on one another. Now Lawson was gone—after a raid by the Border Patrol—and folks weren’t liable to forget that raid, either.

  Meanwhile, there were other cases, plenty of homicides to troubleshoot—some in other parts of Arizona. DPS was a statewide agency, and Laura and Anthony could help out anywhere in the state. They were particularly helpful in rural areas or small towns that lacked resources. Often, these localities would call for assistance from the Department of Public Safety on homicide cases.

  Laura always knew that law enforcement was a small world, but was reminded again when she was asked to assist on a double homicide in Pinetop.

  One of the cops, Bill Hart, had been a TPD officer in 1997 when nine-year-old Jenny Carmichael had disappeared. In fact, Bill had been the responding officer on what had seemed at the time to be a related case. Three girls had gone missing in the summer of 1997. One victim, Kristy Ann Groves, age fourteen, was found in a desert grave, but the other two girls seemed to have vanished completely.

  Years later, when Laura was reassigned to Cold Cases, she’d looked for a link among the three girls—two of whom were still missing—but found none. Everyone thought the missing person cases were related, but it turned out they weren’t.

  Over dinner, Laura and Hart discussed the old cases.

  “Too bad Lawson got off,” Bill Hart said. “Damn, that was a weird time. I interviewed your girl’s step-brother—that was when we thought Jenny Carmichael’s death was linked to ours.”

  “Jenny’s brother?”

  “Yeah. Big kid.”

  Laura remembered interviewing him. He had not only been a big kid, but an angry one. He lived with his father’s family way out in the boondocks, somewhere west of Tucson, but all Laura remembered was the boy’s sullen behavior. She didn’t know if it was teenaged angst or just plain anger at the loss of his half-sister.

  Bill shook his head. “Felt like I was handling a pipe bomb. Kid was all rage.”

  “I remember that,” Laura said.

  “I always wondered where that kid ended up,” Hart said. “If he was smart, he’d channel all that anger and join the military. Or sports, at least.”

  Driving back to her room at the Pinecone Inn, Laura wondered how the stepbrot
her felt now.

  It was a moot point.

  Steve Lawson was gone. He had been acquitted of second degree murder in the Jenny Carmichael case and could not be tried again. That was the irony. Still, he could be tried for Payton Hatcher’s death.

  Laura wondered where he had gone, and if he would ever be found. Maybe he’d slipped into Mexico with his girlfriend. But he could be anywhere. And still there was no justice for Jenny Carmichael, and no justice for Payton Hatcher, either.

  Steve Lawson, she had to admit, had plenty of good luck on his side.

  Laura couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking back to Steve Lawson and his beautiful girlfriend.

  She could see why Payton Hatcher would have been so upset. Upset and jealous. Laura had been attracted to Lawson herself once. Because he was interesting, accomplished, and smart. And there had been that spark between them. She had thought maybe they would end up together, was sure they’d at least end up in bed.

  Laura got out of bed and walked to the window. The moon was full in the midnight sky. Outside the hotel was a small forest of ponderosa pines, much like the ones outside the window to Lawson’s cabin on Mt. Lemmon. She looked through the branches at the white moon. Felt the chill and rubbed her arms.

  Lawson was a smart man. An intelligent man.

  He must have known that the Border Patrol had their eye on him. He certainly was worried the day she and Anthony had driven out to see him—he’d been worried that they would think his girlfriend was there illegally.

  Why would he hide the Colt revolver—the murder weapon—in his barn, when he had all that property to bury it in? There were miles and miles of countryside out there. He could have driven up into the hills above Cascabel and hid it where it would never be found. He could have dropped it down a well. There were a million places he could have hidden it and no one would ever find it.

  Did he want to get caught? Maybe he wanted to taunt her. Maybe he had some mental defect that forced him to act against his own self-interest. In her career, she’d encountered many people like that, but most of them didn’t have the accomplishments Steve Lawson had.

  Laura stared at the moon, thinking: Where are you now?

  Back in Tucson, she requested the evidence they’d marked and collected, loaded it into a box, and took it to her office.

  More and more, this case seemed to be taking on a strange, almost dissonant tone. There was something off about it. Seriously off.

  The main thing was the weapon. She couldn’t get past that. Did he keep it as a trophy? To remember how good it felt to be rid of Payton Hatcher?

  Lawson had changed from the man she had first met. He was bitter and resentful. Angry. He felt sorry for himself.

  But after everything he’d been through, would he really chance another scrape with the law? He’d been in the county jail. She guessed he had not fared well. Would he risk imprisonment again?

  Another thing. Deep down, Laura realized she didn’t believe Steve Lawson had been harboring illegal border crossers.

  Why would he risk it?

  The border crossers could have found shelter in his barn. He might have never known they were there.

  Maybe the beautiful girl, Jazmin, was in the country illegally. But Laura couldn’t see him harboring undocumented workers otherwise. She could see him taking off, though. His Range Rover was gone, and so were his horses.

  Laura pictured Payton at the gym. How sure she was that someone was going to kill her. I want you to investigate my death.

  Then she’d mentioned Steve Lawson.

  And what had she said? Something completely innocuous.

  Payton had called Steve ‘a friend.’

  She’d brought him up out of the blue. Why would she do that? Because she knew Laura knew him?

  How did she know that? From the nightly news, from the newspaper? Trolling the Internet? How many people remembered stuff like that?

  Had Lawson mentioned Laura?

  Maybe.

  Laura pictured the gym. The one she went to four times a week. The one where she’d bumped into Payton several times.

  Something bothered her about it.

  What?

  Then it came to her.

  Payton was broke. Unemployed. She lived in a garage apartment in midtown, thanks to the largesse of a former schoolmate’s parents.

  And yet she could afford to go to Laura’s gym, Beyond the Pale Fitness/Tanning Center.

  The same gym Laura went to.

  She tapped the gym’s name into her phone. There were three Beyond the Pale Fitness/Tanning centers in Tucson. One was only three city blocks from Payton’s apartment in midtown.

  Why drive out to the gym in Laura’s part of town? Why go there as a regular, for months?

  Laura could only guess that Payton was studying her—figuring the best way to approach her.

  And why would that be?

  To that question, she had no answer.

  When Laura got back to town, it was still the weekend. She had talked to Payton’s landlord briefly over the phone: how long Payton had stayed (eight months, give or take), what she’d paid for rent (one hundred and seventy a month). She’d asked if Mr. Gates had noticed anything unusual or disturbing (raised voices a couple of times, going to and coming back from bars.) He was pretty sure they were bars, since he and his wife were awakened shortly after one in the morning when the bars let out. Now Laura had other questions. Maybe he knew a little more about Payton’s private life than he had let on, or had an opinion about how her life was going. She called ahead and he said to come on by—in fact, he and his wife were barbecuing ribs in the backyard.

  Laura turned down the ribs and coleslaw, but accepted an ice-cold Coke out of Ron Gates’s restored vintage Coca Cola machine. The back yard was all grass and old trees—an Aleppo pine and big spreading mesquites. The ribs smelled great. Ron and his wife Lou sat at a picnic table under one of the massive trees, the wood smoke wafting through the evening sun slanting through the trees.

  They talked about Payton. How she kept to herself mostly, was quiet except for some nights out on the town. Laura asked them to describe the vehicle of the man Ron called “her boyfriend.”

  “For all I know he wasn’t her boyfriend, but he visited often enough,” Ron said.

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No. I got the impression she wanted her own private life. It was just a feeling I got.” He glanced at Lou for her confirmation, and she nodded. “We keep our own business, and she was a good enough tenant.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Well, he was a big guy.”

  Lou Gates volunteered, “He just towered over—Ron called him ‘The Redwood.’ ”

  Laura said, “Did she ever see another man?”

  Ron looked at Lou and Lou looked back at Ron. They looked confused. “I don’t think so,” Lou said.

  “Maybe early on, a year or so ago?”

  Ron thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not that I can remember.”

  “What kind of car did he—the man she was seeing—drive?”

  “A GMC pickup truck. Late model.”

  “Any idea if they were romantic or not?”

  “Could have been.”

  “We try not to pry,” Lou added.

  “Anything else you can tell me about this man?”

  Lou dabbed at her lips, held up a finger, dabbed some more. “I kind of thought he was in the military. He had short hair—whitewalls, what my Daddy called them. Around the ears? And he dressed like he might have been military, or maybe wannabe military? Camouflage pants, t-shirts. He had tattoos, too.”

  “Your memory is very good,” Laura said.

  “I remember going out to bring in the garbage bins once and he drove up. He was in a hurry and gave me the dirtiest look. I could tell even though he was wearing those aviator glasses. Usually he didn’t look left or right. He drove fast, too, right into the driveway. But this time it seemed like he was, I do
n’t know, concentrating, and when he saw me he was angry because I was looking at him. Like he didn’t even want me to exist.” She turned to her husband. “That was when I saw the gun, remember?”

  “A gun. Was it in a holster?”

  She shook her head. “No, it was stuck in the back of his jeans, under his shirt. He saw me and said, ‘What are you looking at?’ Like that. Then he walked over to her apartment looking like he was mad at the world.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Ron said.

  “I didn’t want to worry you, Honey.”

  “Did he spend much time at the apartment?”

  “Not really. They left soon after that.”

  “This was when? Can you remember?”

  “The fall. Definitely before you came here in November. I want to say October.”

  October.

  Some time in late October or early November, Payton had died on the mountain. “Did you see her after that?”

  “No. But that wasn’t unusual. Unless she was going out, she stayed inside. Probably because she was so sick sometimes.”

  “Sick?”

  “I remember one occasion an ambulance came for her.”

  “Do you remember when?”

  “Oh, it was summer, two years ago.” She leaned forward confidentially. “At the time she was wearing scarfs on her head. I always wondered. She looked like she was going through chemo. I know, because I went through it myself. Wearing the scarfs. But her hair grew back, and we thought she’d beat it.”

  Laura could feel her stomach tightening. “Are you saying she had cancer?”

  “That was my guess.”

  Driving home, Laura’s mind raced. Everything she’d assumed—and face it, there had been a lot of assuming going on—had been wrong.

  It was hard to reconcile the picture she had of Payton’s life and the picture the Gates had painted for her. She’d expected Steve Lawson, but instead they had mostly seen a big guy. A guy in the military. The scarf on her head, the chemo. There was no mention of cancer, no mention of chemotherapy—nothing like that—in her diary. No medical records, either.