The Laura Cardinal Novels (54 page)

His voice alien, too.

Then he fell to his knees, his hands clutched to his face, and broke into hoarse sobs that came from his depth.

She ran to him, embarrassed and scared at the same time. His wife, the one he turned to, always. She held his hot wet face against her breasts, saying soothing things, some of them in her almost-forgotten language.

He clutched at her and poured out his soul.

Laura thought: This is stupid.

But she was here now, slowing down for the turn into the Cataract Lake campground. She’d learned long ago to go with her instincts, even if they seemed unreasonable.

To the right she saw headlights on the lane leading out of the campground, bouncing off the trees—a car coming out. The gate to the lake was still closed, but the lane ran a couple hundred feet to that point.

She pulled onto the verge just before the campground entrance to let the car come out. A small car, white. Young man at the wheel, a flash of concern in his wide eyes as the car jounced past her and turned left on Country Club Drive. Laura glanced in her side mirror, trying to see the license plate, but it was too dark.

Her heart rate already going double-time.

She made a U-turn and followed the car, which turned on Cataract Road going east. Followed him along the railroad tracks, under the freeway overpass, recording her impressions. The white car was the kind kids who didn’t have a lot of money drove. It had a Chevrolet decal on the back window and no hubcaps. Cheap but made to look kid-cool. Possibly souped-up. She radioed in the license plate and got her answer: The car belonged to Jamie Cottle.

Small world.

She followed him toward town. A car pulled off a farm road in front of her, slowing her down, but on this flat terrain, she could track the white car’s taillights as it turned onto Seventh Street and headed toward the main part of town.

As she turned on Seventh, the taillights seemed to blink out. She sped up, almost drove right past him. The car was parked under the elm at Shade Tree Mechanics, the kid sitting on the hood.

Laura pulled in so that the car and the kid were in her headlights. She remained inside, assessing the situation. Kid leaning back, cross-legged on the car hood, hands behind him and palms flat on the car. Looking at her.

She stepped out of the car, her right hand close to the Sig Sauer in the paddle holster on her hip. “Police,” she said. “Let me see your hands.”

He shifted forward, raised his hands up high.

Using her left hand, Laura played her flashlight over him. Kid was tall and sinewy, a thin face bisected by the dark bang of hair falling down over thick brows, the hair parted at the side. He wore a jacket over jeans. Diamond stud in one ear. She couldn’t see his expression, but he had cooperated with her immediately.

“Are you Jamie Cottle?”

He cleared his throat. “Yes, ma’am.”

Laura identified herself as a DPS officer. “Get down off the car, turn your back to me, and put your hands behind your head. Clasp your fingers together.”

He didn’t argue. He slid to his feet, turned so his crotch was up against the side of the little car, hands behind his head. Back stretched, an attitude of patient waiting.

“Do you mind if I search you?”

“I guess not.”

She patted him down, asked him if he had anything in his pockets that might hurt her. “No, ma’am.”

Nothing except a wallet and a couple of sticks of gum. When she was done she asked him to face her.

“Are you aware that Cataract Lake is a crime scene?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“What were you doing there?”

A fraction of a pause before he said, “Mourning.”

“Mourning.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at his face. Pale, stoic. His eyes holding hers. “Can I move now?”

“Yes.”

Before she could react, he had the car door open, and was sitting in the bucket seat, one long, jeaned leg stretched out as he reached for something.

Laura withdrew her weapon and assumed a shooter’s stance, her gun locked in both hands and aimed into the car’s interior. Every sense was heightened; the scrape of his sneaker on the asphalt, the light falling on his neck as he leaned for the floorboard of the passenger side.

“Let me see your hands.”

He didn’t react as quickly as he should have. Laura tensed, ready. He could have a knife or gun under the seat.

Jamie Cottle straightened in the seat, his hand coming up. “I have to show you this,” he was saying.

Holding a sheaf of paper.

He saw the gun leveled at him, and his eyes widened. “Shit.”

Laura returned the Sig Sauer to her holster.

“Oh, man.” He swallowed. “I just wanted to show you this.”

“Go ahead and step out of the car.”

He did as he was told. Watching her, his expression unreadable. She held out her hand and he gave her several sheets of paper, stapled. Apricot-yellow in the sodium arc streetlight above. Printouts from internet sites—news pieces.

She’d not seen these particular articles, but she knew what they were about.

One of the headlines:
Arizona DPS Detective Nabs Serial Killer
.

Kid looking at her. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“What you did—that took a lot of guts. I admire you.”

What game was he playing? “Why do you have these?”

He brushed at the bang on his forehead. “When I heard there was DPS here, I recognized your name. I looked it up. I knew what you did in Tucson, how you caught that guy.” He flicked his eyes from the printouts to her face. “How are you doing? Do you have any suspects?”

She ignored that. “What were you doing at Cataract Lake?”

“I told you, I was mourning. I went to be at the place where Kellee’s soul last left this earth.” He brushed at his hair again, which had flopped back in place over one eye. “Isn’t that what you would do? If it was you?”

This kid knew how to frame the debate. Laura admired his quickness, but it only added to her distrust. “Could you tell me what your were doing Friday night?”

He touched his chest. “Me? You think I would hurt Kellee?” He walked around in a circle, slapped his thigh, looked at the sky. “I can’t
believe
that.” He came toward her, his shoulders hunched, and Laura’s hand tensed again as she stepped back to give herself room to draw the gun if she had to. This was what police work did to you. It made you think about killing or being killed several times a day.

“I would never hurt her!” Cottle was saying. “How can you think that? I would never, ever, harm a hair on her head!”

Turning away from her, walking some more, hands in his pockets. “No way would I do that to Kellee. How could you think that? I love her!”

She consciously softened her tone. “Granted, you love her. But she’s dead and I need to know what you were doing on the night she was killed. To eliminate you as a suspect, if nothing else. You understand that, don’t you? I bet you know the statistics. How women are most often killed by their lovers.”

“I was
not
her lover. Get that straight. We never, ever were lovers.” His eyes holding hers again. Dark pinpoints in his head, but she could see something wild and untethered behind them. The tip of her thumb hooked over the belt holding her holster, just in case.

“What are you going to do,
shoot
me?”

“Just tell me where you were. How hard is that?”

“I was doing my laundry, okay? While somebody was out there shooting the woman I love—” He stopped. Shook his head.

It looked like real grief to her.

The only problem was, in domestic situations where loved ones were killed, the killers often expressed remorse.

Jamie Cottle was sucking it up. His face impassive now. His voice neutral. “My friends and I were hanging out on Friday. I had laundry to do so we did it at Sandoval’s 76. I bought a candy bar. Maybe the lady there saw me. In between, we cruised, hung out. Darrell got some guy to buy us beer at the Circle K. Now I wish it was me who talked to him.”

Laura asked him a few more questions, which he answered satisfactorily. She let him go. His last words to her as he climbed into his little car were, “Let me know when you catch the motherfucker. I’ll be there!”

He laid scratch out of the parking lot.

Back at the lake, her headlights picking out the pines on either side, the moonlight turning the cinder lane the color of putty. Laura flicked off her lights at the entrance to the campground and cruised in, coasting stealthily down the slight decline, gravel popping off the tires.

Adrenaline just now kicking in. The kid slipping into the car so fast, Laura a hair’s breadth away from shooting him. Shooting or being shot.

You never knew when death would come up and hit you in the face. Most people didn’t understand that simple truth, but cops did.

She put it out of her mind and thought about Jamie Cottle in a more clinical way. She believed he loved Kellee. But she had no idea how that love might manifest itself. There was something wild about him. It could be that two traumatic blows, so close together, had unhinged him a little bit.

But there was a calculating side to him, too. The way he had gotten her to play on his terms, even if it was only momentarily.

Whichever way you looked at him, Jamie Cottle was a strong kid. Laura was sure there was something he wasn’t telling her. She doubted she’d ever get it out of him if he didn’t want to tell.

Outside, the night creaked with crickets. She stared up at the indigo sky above the black cutouts of the pines: incredible. The stars spread out above her like an Appaloosa blanket, so close it was dizzying.

The air chilly, the first harbinger of fall.

Laura let her eyes adjust to the darkness, then walked down the road to the campsite. She came to a stop at the fire ring, the small boulders coming up about shin-high. Ran her flashlight beam over the rocks, over the cracks
between
the rocks, looking for the perfect circle.

And there it was, just as she remember it.

As she played the beam over the crack between the rocks, Laura could make out a thin, round rim, a little smaller than the circumference of a quarter. Rubber? Plastic?

You wouldn’t see it in the shadow, but with the flashlight beam directly on it, the rim was red.

Laura squatted down, pulling the tweezers and evidence bag out of her jacket pocket. She grasped the rim with the tweezers and tugged gently. Lost her grip and had to do it again. Slowly drawing the red plastic tube upward, already knowing what it was:

A shotgun shell casing.

She put it in the envelope she’d brought with her. Felt herself grin with satisfaction. She glanced around, feeling the chill more than ever now. The level area where she and Richie had worked on the tent floor looked different. It lay in a pool of black shadow from a giant ponderosa pine, but there was something there that wasn’t there before, about shin-high.

She walked over.

A makeshift wooden cross, shored up by a pile of rocks, had been erected on the spot where the tent floor had been. Kellee’s name was cut into the crossbar.

Laura paged Richie in Tucson. He called back immediately.

“What are the odds?” he said, when she told him. “Talk about your million-to-one shot.”

“It must have fallen face up into that crack. If it was dark when he was cleaning up, there was no way he’d see it.”

“He must’ve been sweating it big-time. Interviewed any nervous nellies lately?”

A few of them
, she thought. Maybe Jamie Cottle had put up the cross and spent the rest of his time looking for the cartridge. “You know what I’m thinking? We should have had someone there night and day. I’ll bet whoever did this came back looking for it.”

“Well, if he did, we weren’t there. And he didn’t find it. So give yourself a gold star.”

Laura said, “I’m sure he knew them.”

“What makes you think that?” His voice skeptical.

“The thoroughness. The fact he covered up. Shooting into three sides of the tent, making sure they were dead.”

Another pause. Then, “It could just as easily be a random shooting. You said so yourself.”

“It could be, but I don’t think it is.”

“For all we know, that shell casing’s been there for years.”

“No, it was fired recently.”

“Okay, so we’ve got the evidence. Now all we have to do is find the guy who did it.”

In her dream she was back at Alamo Farm. A blood-orange sun sank low in the sky, melting into the big dark trees in their full summer green. Laura was on her way back to the barn, sitting easy in the English saddle, slightly weary from the work in the ring. A good weariness, though. Calliope, her mare, walking quietly “on the buckle.” There was a small buckle that connected the two separated reins, and when a horse was on the buckle it meant that the rider just let the reins lie flat on the animal’s neck, let the horse steer its own way home.

Her feet were out of the stirrups, a relief from the hot pins and needles in the balls of her feet. She leaned down to smooth Calliope’s dark, velvet neck. Looking between the divining rod ears, the soft fall of the mare’s short mane with each strike of a hoof on ground.

She rode past the tennis court. Jay Ramsey, whose mother owned Calliope and Alamo Farm, was busy hitting tennis balls. Tanned, white-shorted, his blond hair catching the light, he scrambled back and forth, whacking at the lime-green balls shooting out of a machine at one end. Faster and faster, the motorized wheelchair zooming and swooping. so many balls Jay had to catch them in his lap, many of them bouncing to the court floor. Suddenly, the machine stopped, and he turned his chair to watch her go by.

He looked lost.

Another goddamned nightmare. Laura awoke to the motel room in the dark, alone.

She didn’t want to be alone, but she was.

The image was strong, almost physical, the way she had reached her hand down and smoothed the mare’s rich, dark neck with one palm, the delicate tracery of veins underneath. She could smell the slightly wet coat, taste the bloom of dust in her mouth. And the image of Jay Ramsey, young and strong except for the wheelchair, had been vivid. Her mind had added the wheelchair in the disjointed way of dreams. When she first knew Jay, he could walk, run, and play tennis. This had been before he was paralyzed in a drug-related shooting.