Darkness on the Edge of Town (26 page)

She opened it up, careful not to smudge anything. The first thing she realized: it was less than a quarter full.

The first few pages were some of the best photos of Marisa de Seroux.  Pale skin, blonde, with serious eyes and a heart-shaped face.  An angel.

Then she came to a yellowed newspaper clipping. Laura recognized it: The
New Times
article about the de Seroux murder-suicide.  She turned the page and saw the photo from Page 2, a white coffin under a mass of lillies being hefted up the steps into a church.

In the margin someone—Lundy, she assumed—had written in faded ink, “Liars!”

She made a note to save it for handwriting analysis.

Chief Redbone bent to see over her shoulder. “What does he mean by that?”

Laura knew.  She felt it, that tangible truth that occasionally revealed itself at a certain point in a case.  “He didn’t believe she was dead.”

“What?  Why would he think that?”

“It was a closed-casket funeral, right?  He could have gotten the idea  she somehow escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“Uh-huh.”  Laura remembered the news reports on TV after the Judd murder case in Safford. The hope everyone had that one of the children had escaped when all that time she lay underneath the house, dying.

“He must have been delusional,” Redbone said.

“They say love is blind.”

“What?  Are you saying he was in love with a twelve-year-old girl?”

“Is it really that much of a stretch?  How old do you think
he
was?”

Redbone frowned. “I don’t know.  A teenager, I guess.”

“Probably not that much older than Marisa—Misty.”

“She didn’t escape, though.  Everbody knew that.  No way anyone could escape something like that—Henry shot up the house.”

“The paper didn’t publish any crime scene photos.”

“No, of course not.”

“There was no trial?”

“Nobody to prosecute. Everybody was dead.”

“I’m guessing Lundy didn’t want to believe it, so he didn’t.  What do they say?  Perception is reality.  Misty escaping—that was his reality.”

“We can’t know that for sure.”

“No.” Laura turned the page.  It felt fragile in her hand, crackly.  Another, shorter article describing the murders-suicide. Laura read through it quickly; nothing new.

But on the opposite page was something that made no sense at all.

It was a small news item in a Vancouver newspaper. 

WOMAN IN ALERT BAY SUCCUMBS TO INJURIES

Live-in Boyfriend Charged with Capital Murder

“Misty Patin of Alert Bay, British Columbia, who has been in a coma for half a year, died today, paving the way for Robert Lewis to be charged with murder…”

Laura read quickly.  Misty Patin, age twenty-eight, had been beaten so badly she had been on life support for six months before succumbing to her injuries.  She left behind a girl, thirteen, and a boy, five.  This had been one of two traumatic events in Misty Patin’s young life.  Her daughter, Kim, had been kidnapped from a Wal-Mart in Vancouver during a family shopping trip two years before.  Tragedy was averted, though, when she was found shortly afterwards in the custody of a cabbie several miles away. According to the cabbie, he had picked up a nervous man and young girl in the Gas Town district.  The girl started crying and told the cabbie that the man was not her daddy.  The man then jumped out of the cab and disappeared into the crowd. 

The Pakistani cabbie described the man as “not a tough guy, you know?  He was more like a gay.”

Gay, Laura thought. Or just effeminate?  The kind of guy who grew up sewing alongside his mother.  She said aloud, “How would he get the idea this woman was his Misty?”

“Lundy?”  The chief stared at her.  “What, you think he followed her there?  Because of her name?”

Laura was thinking on her feet now.  “My guess it was Lundy who kidnapped the girl.”

“I thought he was in love with Misty.”

“I know.”  It didn’t make sense.  Something was missing.  Maybe it wasn’t him.  Maybe he didn’t follow her there.  But she wondered how a man in Apalachicola, Florida would get his hands on a newspaper from Alert Bay, Canada.  She wondered how many people in Apalachicola, Florida, knew of the
existence
of Alert Bay, Canada—or vice versa.  She herself had never heard of Alert Bay until now.

Laura said, “There must be some link.”

“You think he tracked down every Misty he could find?”

“Somehow he got on to this one.”

“That’s crazy.  How would he get the idea that was Misty de Seroux?”

“I don’t know.”  She was stuck on the kidnapping.  If it was him—and she felt sure it was—why did he kidnap the girl when it was Misty he was after?

He was attracted to young girls.  That had to be the reason. Maybe he went looking for Misty.  And then he saw her daughter.

He’d gone looking for Misty.  It was the only thing that made any sense.  “If you thought you’d been lied to, that the girl you were in love with got away, how would you track her down?” Laura asked the chief.

“It’s too unbelievable.”

“I know. But remember that story about Anastasia, one of the Czar’s daughters?  A lot of people believed she escaped.  They made a movie about it.  If you thought Misty had somehow gotten away, what would you do?”

“I guess I’d get in touch with her people—if she had any left.”

“Do you know where her family were from?”

“I have no idea.  I know they moved here from somewhere else. But they weren’t from too far away. Their accents.”

“Why’d it take him so long?” Laura said.

“What?”

“Why did he go after her in 1998?”

She looked down at the scrapbook. That was the last page.  It was as if he’d abandoned it.  Or started a new one.

She stared at the sunflower.  It sat in a turquoise water can.  Behind it, through a window, a man stooped behind a plough.  She thought that Jay Ramsey could have used his image recognition software to pinpoint the water can, the man, the mule, the plough. 

“The Internet,” she said.

“What?”

“He found Misty on the Internet.”

“How would he do that?”

“He did a search on Google or another search engine.  Probably found himself a bunch of Mistys, then whittled them down.”

“How would he do that?”

She shrugged.  “Age. Coloring, height—maybe he knew how to get information from driver’s licenses.  Maybe he hired a private investigator.  For whatever reason, he zeroed in on this Misty.  Maybe because of the name. Patin.”

“Makes sense.  Patin’s French.  De Seroux’s French.”

“Maybe he found a Misty Patin, found out she once lived here in this part of the country.”

“That’s crazy.”

“He was there, in 1998. He took her daughter.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“No, I don’t.”

Redbone scratched his head. “You think he was the one who killed her?”

“It says in the article her boyfriend killed her.  I think that’s probably true.  Lundy wouldn’t hang around. He wouldn’t kill her two years later. He would have moved on by then.”

To pre-teen girls. 

“Found something here!” yelled Officer Oliver from somewhere else in the house.  He sounded excited.

Laura didn’t like being dragged away from her thoughts. Hard enough to keep track of them—they kept doubling back on themselves, trying to make sense of Dale Lundy’s actions.

“In here!” Oliver called again.

She left the scrapbook and made her way to the kitchen.

The kitchen was utilitarian, with a round-shouldered refrigerator and sunny yellow chintz drapes and matching covers for the kitchen chairs.  The large hooked rug in the center had been pushed aside to reveal a trapdoor in the old floorboards.

“Want me to open it?”

“No,” Laura said. 

He gave her a hostile look.  “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing for now.  We’ll get to it later.”

He scratched his head. “I don’t see why…”

“Because she told you, is why,” Redbone said behind her.  “Leave it be.”

Oliver shot him a look of undisguised contempt.  He was the son of a city council member, probably felt he was entitled. 

“What do you want to do?” Redbone asked Laura quietly.

“I want to make sure we don’t have any surprises.”  So far, Lundy had been full of surprises.  “I want us to make sure we have cover and do this right.  We might need assistance from Hazardous Devices.”

“Good enough for me.”  Redbone looked at Oliver and nodded to the door. “You mark the evidence I pointed out in the living room yet?”

Oliver stared at him, fuming, before brushing past them without a word.  Redbone followed him out, ostensibly to make sure he did what he was told.

Laura looked at Descartes, who had witnessed the exchange from the hallway.  “Andrew, wait a minute.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Keep an eye on Oliver for me, would you?  Under no circumstances is he to open that trapdoor.  It’s a safety issue.”

“I’ll make sure, you better believe it, ma’am.”

Laura got Victor on the phone and gave him a rundown of what they had found.  She read off Lundy’s credit card numbers and gave him a detailed description of the motorhome he was driving, the 1987 Fleetwood Pace Arrow. 

Victor broke in. “Chuck Lehman confessed—“

“What?”

“But not to killing Parris.  He was sleeping with her.”

The moment Victor said it, all Lehman’s actions, his evasions, made sense.  Hanging out with Cary and Cary’s girlfriend, the falling-out between them. 

“It would explain a lot. The lipstick, for one.  He’s gonna plead to contributing to the probation violation and to delinquency of a minor.  That’ll put him away for a while.”

“So you believe him?” Laura asked.

Victor sighed.  “I believe it.  Especially after I looked at the time line and it didn’t fit with the Burns killing.  Do me a favor and don’t say you told me so.”

They talked about Lehman, but Laura’s mind was still on Dale Lundy and his cross-country adventure.  The idea that he was looking for someone like Misty de Seroux was, in a way, a hopeful sign.  He was looking for an emotional connection.  That might mean the difference between life and death for the next girl he took. 

He’d kept Alison Burns for five days.  Most sexual predators who murdered their victims killed them within the first few hours.  

“…With this?” Victor was asking.

“What?”

“You want us to go to the media?”

“No.  I think we should keep it within law enforcement agencies for now.  Put out an Attempt to Locate, make sure everybody gets pictures of him, the motorhome, the credit card numbers.  We don’t want to scare him out of the area.  This weekend he’s supposed to play at the Copper Queen Hotel.”

“We might get lucky if he used his credit cards, too.  Find a paper trail.”

“I’m hoping.”

After he hung up she said into the phone: “I told you so.”

She started photographing the bedroom, paying particular attention to the evidence she had marked: the scrapbook, the wall of photos, the contents of the closet.  Chief Redbone had gone back to the evidence room at the PD to pick up more evidence bags—they’d need them.

She had just walked into the master bathroom when the roar of a shotgun blast reverberated through the cheap wallboard, stunning the air into silence.

In the first few moments after the blast, Laura heard nothing. She ran to the kitchen like she was running through a dream.  Like those movies where the woman runs from her pursuer, the soundtrack screeching and thrumming along with her thoughts, tracking her with a shaking hand-held camera as she blunders through tilting corridors and jack-in-the-box shadows before stumbling onto a scene of unrelenting horror.

She knew it would be bad. 

Two men down.  One breathing, one not.  Laura radioed Apalachicola PD, got no one.  No one minding the store—the chief en route?  Shit shit shit!  She called 911.  The phone still cradled between her shoulder and her ear as she dropped to her knees beside Andrew Descartes, compressing the carotid, her mind ticking between clinical observation and a panicked string of thoughts, just a kitchen towel and the gloves between her and his blood—unlikely he had AIDS but you never knew—his life leaking out, the phone slipping out from under her chin and dropping to the floor. The air was bright, every airborne fiber, every dust mote, every speck of blood delineated, every sound magnified.  Knowing it was hopeless but unable to stop trying.

Descartes
  Jesus.

Oliver moaning, then screaming, like a stuck pig.

Looking at Descartes, knowing he was finished.  One shot to the carotid. Gone.

Let him go.  

Move on to Oliver—more wounds. Find the worst one and compress that.

Later.

More sounds: Radio static, a paramedic talking into his shoulder; ripping sensors and snatching bandages and sucking oxygen; the pneumatic wheeze of the gurney bearing Jerry Oliver down the steps to the waiting ambulance, a few blocks to Weems Memorial Hospital, and from there a Medevac to Tallahassee Memorial—if he didn’t die before he got to Weems.

Jerry Oliver had been shot in the cheek, eye, left shoulder, and upper right chest. Oliver, whom Laura was sure had been the one to open the trapdoor, was going to Weems and, if he was lucky, on to Tallahassee.  Andrew Descartes, who had tried to stop him, was going nowhere—not for another couple of hours at least.  First he would lie in his own blood while he was photographed from every angle. Then he would be transported to the morgue, evidence tweezered from his wound, his statistics read into a recorder, his organs weighed and measured, his skull sawed in half. 

Andrew Descartes was now evidence in a crime.

The responding officer—a sheriff’s deputy—looked sheepish after yorking his guts out on the linoleum floor. Uniforms coming, but where the hell were they?

Where were the techs from the Hazardous Devices unit? 

They would be the ones to handle the 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun still resting in its brackets on the underside of the trapdoor, everything but the muzzle concealed by a homemade plywood box. This she saw with brilliant clarity; her clinical mind divided right down the middle from her more emotional side, the emotional side lagging behind, still in shock.  A simple principle. When the trapdoor opens, the shotgun fires: Chief Redbone’s police force wiped out in an instant.