The Laura Cardinal Novels (81 page)

Suddenly it hit her, smashing into her stomach, a double-cut to the throat.

She remembered Josh Wingate that first day, how she thought he was trying to be a good cop even though he had lost his best friend.

Tears spilled out of her eyes and down her cheeks and onto the coverlet. Her chest ragged, and suddenly she was sobbing, as if a dam had given out and all the hurt and pain of the world poured out of her soul.

That was the state she was in when Tom Lightfoot found her.

They lay tangled together on the bed, Tom stroking her wet face.

“It’s okay, Bird,” he said, holding her eyes with his. Stroking her as if she were a frightened animal.

She had let go, let the tears pour out. She realized at some point the tears weren’t for Barbara Wingate or Josh Wingate, but for herself. Something was gone, something she couldn’t quite recognize, but she knew it from the shape of its absence. Gone from her life.

Making love to Tom had been wonderful at the time, comforting beyond belief, but now she felt stale. Stale and incredibly weary and sad.

Tom looked in her eyes, said the right things, but she could almost feel the division between them, as if it were physical. Making love had been an illusion. Something was going on. It was in the way he looked at her, his eyes not quite focusing on her. Focusing
around
her.

What was it—pity?

She felt her heart close up. Had to get out of the bed. She got up and trailed the sheet to the bathroom, suddenly not wanting to be naked in front of him.

Weird.

She looked at her face in the mirror, the puffiness under her red-rimmed eyes. The ophthalmologist saying,
We can fix that.

She closed the door to the bathroom and put the lid down on the toilet and just sat there, wondering what was going on. Tom had made love to her. It was like any and every other time, more or less. And yet she knew it was over.

After a while she got up and took a shower. Washing him away. She wrapped herself in a towel and walked back out into the bedroom.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his jeans, no shirt. Staring at the floor.

Looking like a man who dreaded what he was about to do.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

He looked up, his face immobile. Eyes sad, but she could see the resolve there.

“It just isn’t working out, is it?” she said. Trying to sound flippant, like it didn’t hurt her.

He didn’t say anything.

“It was a mistake. This whole living-together thing. You’re a free spirit, I knew that. You need your
space
. You like your lifestyle just the way it is, thank you very much, you don’t need anybody and neither do I.”

She sounded bitter to her own ears.

He stood up. “Bird—”

“Don’t say it. Just get the fuck out.”

She walked past him, ripped a shirt off a hanger in the closet, pulled on the slacks she’d just gotten out of from work. Forgetting her underwear. Screw it.

She took her shoes and her car keys with her, put the shoes on out on the porch. Yelled back into the house. “When I get back, you’d better be gone.”

Then she drove off the Bosque Escondido.

On the road through Vail, she wondered where she should go. Back to work? No. No way.

She got to the freeway exit, found herself on I-10 going east. Back toward Lordsburg. After Lordsburg there was Deming, then Las Cruces. From there she had a choice: continue east to Alamogordo, or south to El Paso.

She didn’t stop until she reached El Paso.

There was a place in El Paso Laura had hoped to find—a little park with a water tower, where she and her parents had stopped for lunch on one of their road trips, when she was eleven. There’d been a boy in the park, and it was clear he was attracted to her. They spent maybe a half hour together, and never saw each other again—the first time in her memory she’d felt that rush through her system, that attraction to the opposite sex. Better than any drug. But what good had that attraction ever done her?

She found two water towers, but no park. Wondered why the hell she’d driven all this way, what had gotten into her head.

After a night at the Motel 6 reading supermarket tabloids, watching reality shows, and eating bad Chinese takeout, she drove back home, no clearer in her mind about Tom, except that she wanted him back. The house was empty, though: every trace of him gone. She walked to the corrals. His pickup gone, his trailer gone, the old bronc Ali—all gone.

Following the horse trail back to her empty house, she reached a patch of mesquite. And there was Frank Entwistle, sitting on a tree stump.

“How you doing, kiddo?”

“How do you think?”

He had his crimson blazer folded over his knee. The one he wore to court almost every day of that terrible summer when Ricky Lee Worrell went on trial in the death of her parents.

“What are you going to do now?”

Laura shrugged. “I’m going to counseling.” Counseling, as far as she was concerned, was just a word right now. Something she’d have to go through and hopefully come out better on the other side. She had no idea what it entailed and had no desire to know. Just Do It. Starting on Monday.

She hoped the counselor could do something about this stone in her gut, but she wasn’t optimistic.

Frank crossed one knee over the other. He wore white loafers—old man’s shoes.

“He didn’t dump you. You know that, don’t you?”

Laura crossed her arms to keep the tears down in her chest where they belonged. “It sure feels that way to me.”

“You want to know what I think?”

“Sure, why not? I’m sure everybody’ll have an opinion.”

He looked unusually serene today, the way he had appeared in his coffin. Like an old warrior who had finally earned his rest. “He wanted you to be the one to feel it, not him.”

“Hey, I was the one who wanted a relationship.”

Entwistle gave her a look. “You really think that?”

“Look, I gave myself freely. I wanted to make it work—”

She stopped. That wasn’t exactly true.

Frank stood up, folding the ugly blazer over his arm. “You liked the idea and then tried to make him fit. He could have been anybody. Don’t you think he knew it?”

Laura didn’t have an answer for that.

“Tell you what, you weren’t all wrong—wanting someone to love.” He made a fake gun with his finger and pointed it at her.

“Don’t give up on it.”

And then she was alone again.

Richie called her a week later. All the pieces were falling into place; she could hear it in his voice.

He told her about the blog on Josh Wingate’s computer, left up for them to read. “Kind of like a suicide note.”

A suicide note from the age of social media.

He gave her the details: Josh had used the same 12-gauge shotgun he’d used on Dan and Kellee to kill his mother and then himself. “She was making him lunch,” Richie added. “Shot her point-blank in the face—a real mess. Kind of a shame, she was such a looker.”

There he went again. Laura inwardly groaned.

“Then he put the gun in his mouth and used his big toe to blow himself to kingdom come.” He paused. “Something interesting came up on another front. Jamie Cottle was in a Catholic youth group run by Barbara Wingate.”

“You mean the catechism class?”

“Nah, more like a youth group after school. According to one of the kids I interviewed, those two were thick as peas in a pod. Wonder what they talked about.”

“I’ll bet she wanted him to keep trying for Kellee.”

“Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Big-time. Stoke up his fantasy, get him fired up. Couldn’t hurt, I guess. Maybe Kellee would have tumbled to him. Persistence can wear a person down. That’s how I got my wife.”

Laura didn’t want to go there, so she said, “Barbara Wingate could be manipulative.”

“Uh-huh. She manipulated herself right into an early grave.”

“So. How are things going?”

“Believe it or not, we all kind of miss you. You are coming back, aren’t you?”

Laura held on to the phone. She looked out the window at a roadrunner crossing the back patio, a lizard dangling from its beak. Beautiful around here, but enough was enough.

Already wishing she was back in the squad bay, bantering with the guys, feeling the electricity as she zeroed in on an answer to a particularly tough case.

Missing it like it was a ghost limb.

“Laura? You there?”

“Oh, yeah,” she told Richie. “I’m here. And you don’t have to worry—I’m coming back.”

Big-time.

Thanks to Leslie Boyer, M.D.; Tracy Bernstein; John and Doreen Bransky; Karen Brichoux: Sinclair Browning; Tony Copeland; Pat D’Antonio, MD; Mike and Ani DeHart; Leonard Fieber, MD; J.A. Jance and Bill Schilb; Kallie Johnson; Judy Layton; the incomparable band Little Feat—Paul Barrere, Sam Clayton, Craig Fuller, Kenny Gradney, Richie Hayward, Shaun Murphy, Bill Payne, and Fred Tackett—and Andy Martin at Deep South Entertainment; Janet Loeb; Jennifer and Billy Lopez; Judy Layton; Carol Davis Luce; Jane Bunker Overy; Cliff McCreedy; Jean McCreedy; Elizabeth Owen; Ziggy Pawlowski; Michael Prescott; Sharon Putnam; Scott Shackleford; Barbara Schiller and Darrell Harvey; TPD sergeant Jim Schneden; Jen Stead and Orville Wiseman of Wiseman Aviation; and Alice Volpe.

And thanks to my compadres in crime: Sheila Cottrell, Liz Gunn, J.M. “Mike” Hayes, E.J. McGill; and Susan Cummins Miller.

Thanks especially to my husband and First Reader, Glenn McCreedy, and my mother, Mary Falk.

And to John Cheek of Cops ‘n Writers, DPS detective Terry Johnson, and TPD detective Phil Uhall—as usual, you guys went above and beyond.

THE DEVIL’S HOUR

For my mom, who taught me at an early age I could be anything I wanted to be, especially a writer.

From the
Arizona Daily Star
, July 4, 2007

GRISLY DISCOVERY AT CONSTRUCTION SITE

POSSIBLE LINK TO 1997 KIDNAPPING

The bones found in a shallow grave at a construction area on Tucson's west side yesterday may belong to a missing Tucson girl. Kristy Ann Groves, 14, disappeared from her neighborhood on April 21, 1997, three miles from where the remains were found. Laura Cardinal, the Arizona Department of Public Safety detective in charge of the investigation, declined to comment pending further investigation.

The Man in the Moon

Summerhaven, Arizona

July Fourth

Steve Lawson was on his way back to the cabin when he met the little girl.

It was a beautiful morning, the kind Steve loved. As he hiked, his eye automatically catalogued the glittery trail of schist mixed in with the dirt along the dry creek bed, the granitic boulders flecked with biotite flakes and garnet. But this morning, he wasn't thinking about the geological events that had shaped these mountains. He was preoccupied with the message someone had left on his cell phone. He wondered if the message had anything to do with the break-ins.

Two nights in a row, somebody had broken into the tool shed behind the cabin. Nothing was taken, but last night they'd slit open a bag of potting soil and dumped it all over the shed floor. And then there was the message he'd retrieved from his cell phone earlier today.

The message had gone on for nearly a minute. Heavy breathing and then crying. A man's voice mumbling something unintelligible. The only word he could pick out was “Why?” After that, there was silence stretching all the way to the beep. A long, menacing silence. It had left him feeling edgy and ill at ease.

So when Jake, his black labrador retriever, stopped abruptly on the trail, Steve felt a jolt to the heart.

Jake stood absolutely still, every muscle rigid. The soft flap of his ears pitched forward, and he growled low in his throat. The sound changed to a high-pitched mewl. Steve felt as if someone had pushed him in the back with a forceful finger. “Jake, what's the matter with you?”

Jake looked at him briefly, then back at the little girl by the creek bed. For a moment, Steve thought of the nearest neighbors over the hill—a family with several children and an angry pit bull chained to a stake out front. The children were unkempt and often stared at him with blank, sullen eyes as he drove by.

But this girl was nothing like those children. This girl looked well-cared for and happy.

She was anywhere from seven to nine years old. Her hair was the color of ripened wheat. She wore some kind of uniform—camp shirt, shorts, and hiking boots. At first he thought she was a Girl Scout, but the uniform was tan with green piping on the collar. Girl Scouts wore mint green. He knew that because he periodically encountered bands of Girl Scouts outside Safeway selling cookies with their mothers.

This girl was crouched down on her heels trying to dislodge a rock from the stream bed.

Steve was aware of all sorts of dynamics that would never have occurred to him even a few years ago. These days, a grown man's proximity to kids who were not his own, no matter how innocent, took on a cautionary aspect. Enough to make him self-conscious—the same kind of feeling he had when a credit card check by a cashier went on longer than it should have, the feeling that he was guilty, even though he wasn't.

He was thinking about what to say to her, all the time casting his gaze about for the girl's mother or camp counselor or classmate, when the girl saw him. She got to her feet. “Hi,” she said.

He hi'ed her back.

She brushed off the dirt from her hands on her shorts. “What a neat dog. Can I pet him?”

Steve glanced around for Jake, who was now ten yards down the trail behind him, sniffing at a fern.

Dogs.

“Jake,” Steve called out. The dog wagged his tail and manufactured a deep, loud whuffle, but kept his nose where it was. It was almost as if he didn't want to acknowledge either one of them.