The Laura Cardinal Novels (9 page)

Buddy nodded toward Noone. “You about done up there?”

“Might be another half hour. How’s Mr. Parris?”

“Wouldn’t talk to me. We put up three sections of rain gutter, though.”

“Wouldn’t talk at all?”

“The only thing he said was, if Cary Statler ever showed his face around here again, he’d kill him.”

As Laura reached the turnout, Noone said, “They’re almost dry.”

Beside the metal-framed cast lay a couple of sticks, all that was left of a sampling of twigs, grass, and debris Laura had instructed Noone to collect from around the site. These Laura had used to reinforce the plaster. Not only would it make the cast stronger, but it would also supply a soil and debris sample for the crime lab. Laura picked up a stout twig and wrote her initials onto the cast, along with the case number.

“I never saw anyone take a tire cast before. It’s pretty interesting,” Noone offered. “Too bad there weren’t any footprints.”

It was clear Officer Noone had made the leap from the motor home sighting on Brewery Gulch to the abduction of Jessica Parris on West Boulevard, concluding that the killer had used a motor home.

“These tracks could belong to anyone. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

“But it could be his.”

“Could be.” Emphasis on the
could
.

To business.

Musicman wrote: “D—Your shipment has come in.”

Immediately, a reply popped up.

DARK MOONDANCER: Hello, friend.

Musicman’s fingers flew over the keys.

MUSICMAN: I have that special order you requested.

DARK MOONDANCER: Same price?

MUSICMAN: Two thousand more.

DARK MOONDANCER: Verification?

MUSICMAN: Turn on the local news.

DARK MOONDANCER: That one? You’re in my jurisdiction! Let’s meet.

MUSICMAN: I never meet my clientele. It’s not good to mix business with pleasure.

DARK MOONDANCER: You do it all the time, mix business with pleasure. LOL. But seriously, we are an exclusive club, you and I. Please come visit. Bring a friend.

MUSICMAN: My plans are fluid at the moment.

DARK MOONDANCER: Fluid? There’s a pun. So you are still here. I would have thought you’d be a thousand miles away by now.

MUSICMAN: Parting is such sweet sorrow.

DARK MOONDANCER: Don’t be cryptic. I’d love to know what’s going on in your mind.

MUSICMAN: Shall I make the shipment or not?

DARK MOONDANCER: By all means. As before, payment is forthcoming. But if you’re planning an extended stay, do give serious thought to my invitation. You might not come this way again.

Musicman thought:
We have less in common than you think
.

Dark Moondancer’s desires were base, his enthusiasm clumsy. He didn’t get the subtle distinctions; he was just another cretin saturated with blood lust, looking for a vicarious thrill. The guy reminded him of a comic book character—way over the top.

Still, he paid the bills.

Musicman pulled up the photograph he intended to use: baby ducks following their mother across a lawn. Beautiful, the play of sunlight and shadow on their soft yellow down. So innocent. And yet beneath the surface resided a dark secret.

A secret that, truth to tell, shamed him.

He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t need the money. So far he’d ignored Dark Moondancer’s hints about escalating the violence—it just wasn’t his way. Even with this one—who’d made him so fucking angry!—he’d stopped short of fulfilling Dark Moondancer’s requests. Partly because he didn’t like the sight of blood (although he’d proven that he
could
deal with it if he had to), and partly because he didn’t like Dark Moondancer or anybody else calling the shots.

This was
his
show.

Musicman knew, though, that Dark Moondancer was getting impatient. The gravy train wouldn’t last forever.

Utilizing a user-friendly software program he had downloaded from the Internet, Musicman embedded the first photo into the picture of the baby ducks. He pulled up another scenic from his photo library—boats in a marina.

He would send four pics in all. Each pic would be encrypted and require a password to open. Dark Moondancer would have the baby ducks, but he would not have the real picture underneath until Musicman got his payment. Only then would he send back the encrypted password.

He pictured Dark Moondancer looking at the little duckies, wishing he could see what was underneath.

“Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” Musicman intoned. He hit the SEND button, consigning the ducklings and their invisible cargo into the ether.

“Her hyoid was broken,” Cochise County ME Carmen Sotomayor said as she snapped off her gloves and dropped them into a BIOHAZARD container.

The smell of sawed bone clung to Laura’s nostrils, almost as bad as the odor of death. The last thing Carmen Sotomayor had done before sewing Jessica Parris back up was to use an electric saw to open up her cranium to examine her brain.

Laura thought the killer had been crafty, but now she knew to what extremes he had gone to avoid detection. He’d bathed the girl’s body and washed her hair, clipped her fingernails, even given her a douche.

The douche was necessary. He had sexually assaulted his victim after death, not before. Postmortem sex was another indication that the killer didn’t want to risk abrasions to Jessica and to himself. Whoever he was, he knew something about the collection of evidence.

She looked at Jessica Parris, small and forlorn on the stainless steel autopsy table. Gutters running around the edge of the table gleamed in the light, still holding the residue of blood from the autopsy. The girl who had reminded her yesterday of a Victorian doll now looked more like Raggedy Ann, big ugly stitches forming a Y down the length of her body.

“When you measured her—you said she was small for her age?” Laura asked.

“And underdeveloped.”

“You mean more like a little girl than a teenager, anatomically?”

“There’s a phenomenon we’re just beginning to see in the physical development in girls. They’re maturing at a faster rate than, say, when you and I were their age. But this girl is on the immature side, although it appears she had enough pubic hair for him to shave.”

“He shaved her so he could think of her as younger,” Laura said.

“And to destroy evidence—her pubic hair and his.” Carmen Sotomayor stared at the girl, her eyes sad. Laura noticed she had bitten her lip, a little gash, dark lipstick edging her teeth.

Carmen added, “If he did it to make her seem younger, it wasn’t too much of a leap—she’s pretty flat up top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. You’d think a fourteen-year-old girl would wear a bra, whether she needed to or not.”

Laura thought of the bras in the top drawer of Jessica’s dresser. “He took it.”

“But he left the bikini underwear.”

Laura said, “I wonder if he had a replacement pair and they didn’t fit.”

“What would he replace them with?”

“Maybe something more modest.”

Two vertical lines appeared between Carmen’s dark brows. “You think so?”

“Who knows? It was just something that occurred to me." Laura divested herself of the paper booties, gown, the gloves.

She knew not to jump to any conclusions. Her method had always been to disprove a theory, rather than prove it. That way, she avoided making leaps in logic just to bolster a theory that might not pan out. She liked to look at evidence as if it were a disassembled car spread out on a tarp, making damn sure that whatever parts connected weren’t forced into place.

Something didn’t fit here. Maybe it was the girl herself. She seemed out of place, although Laura couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was her age; maybe it was more than that.

“That dress is homemade,” Carmen Sotomayor said. “No tag anywhere, and those darts looked like they were from a pretty simple pattern. So that ought to narrow it down.”

By the time Laura left the ME’s office in the Sierra Vista Community Hospital, it was going on six o’clock and looked like it would storm. She rolled down the window, inhaling the scent of the impending rain on the dense air. The area had greened up a lot since she’d been down here a couple of weeks ago—johnsongrass lined both sides of the road, lush and green, soaking up the runoff. Ocotillo on the hills looked like dark green pipe cleaners.

The evidence for the DPS Crime Lab resided in the back of the 4runner, each piece packaged separately and bearing her initials: head and pubic hair samples from Jessica, fingernail clippings, scrapings from under her fingernails, swabs from her body, and her clothing. And of course the tire tread moulage and the matchbook in its paper evidence envelope.

He had been pretty sure of himself to go back and leave the matchbook—another taunt. He was playing with them. In a way, that was good. Laura knew that when you got cocky you made mistakes, and she intended to be there when he did.

The dress intrigued her, the idea of it having been run up on a sewing machine from a pattern. Did that mean he could sew, like Ted Olsen? Did he have someone in his life who sewed for him—a girlfriend, wife or mother? He’d tried to buy a dress that would fit a fourteen-year-old girl because his own dress didn’t fit.

It would be time-consuming to locate the company that produced the pattern and backtrack from there to the outlets. Laura was even less optimistic about tracing the material, the zipper, the thread, the lace, and the ribbon.

If he didn’t purchase those in the area, you could forget about that.

The storm hit just as she reached Tucson. She took the Valencia Road exit and drove west to the Department of Public Safety on Tucson Boulevard down the street from the Tucson International Airport.

Lightning sizzled across the sky as she turned into the parking lot. Built in the sixties, the DPS building reminded her of a grain elevator. In the blowing rain, the concrete building darkened to the same slate color as the sky. US and Arizona flags whipped in a wind-driven frenzy, their chains rattling. Laura waited for the automatic gate to roll back and drove in, taking note of the cars in the inside lot. Victor’s truck wasn’t there. She doubted she’d see anyone at this hour.

She booked the tire moulage, the matchbook, Jessica’s clothes, and other items from the autopsy into evidence, filled out the paperwork, and requested the types of tests she wanted from the crime lab. On her way to the squad bay, she passed Mike Galaz’s office and noticed something new—two rows of photos on the wall by his door. Mostly of the Tucson social scene, Let’s Go People! and his wife standing in groups of three or four at various fundraising events. Expensive coifs, more expensive smiles.

Laura had never been part of that social circle, and knew by now she never would be. Fortunately, she didn’t need an expensive evening gown to send her check to the Hermitage No-kill Cat Shelter.

Everybody had gone home except for Todd Rees, the youngest and newest member of the squad. His desk was catty-corner to hers, facing the other direction. She liked that, because it kept their interaction to a minimum. He looked up and then back at his computer.

Her plant was looking a little dry. She prodded it, filled a coffee cup with water from the bathroom sink, and gave it a drink before checking her messages and her voice mail.

One message had been placed on the center of her desk in Rich Lockhart’s handwriting: “Call Myra Maynes at the medical examiner’s office.”

“My remains. Very funny,” she muttered, tossing the note into the wastebasket.

A California detective named Barry Endicott of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department had left a message on her voicemail, “regarding your child homicide in Bisbee.”

She didn’t recognize the name. One of her contacts at another agency must have made some calls. As she picked up the phone, Todd Rees slipped on his suit jacket, picked up his briefcase, and ambled past her. He always dressed in a suit and tie.

Tall and thin, he reminded her of a praying mantis. Now he craned his neck over her shoulder, looking at her notes.

She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Watcha need?”

“Nothing.” He slouched past her, but she could feel him lurking in the doorway. Todd had a reputation for keeping his mind on other people’s business, always looking for a way to ingratiate himself with the brass. “You have a good time in Bisbee?”

The phone started ringing on the other end and she broke the connection. “’Good’ is not the way I’d describe it.”

“The lieut kind of wondered why you didn’t come back with the techs.”

So that was it. What, he thought she turned it into a vacation?

One of the new rules Galaz had instituted was financial: He wanted to see a justification of every expense over a hundred dollars. This affected overnight stays. If at all possible, he wanted his detectives to drive back rather than stay the night.

“I used my own money,” Laura said, mad at herself for letting Todd put her on the defensive.

“Did you use your own time?”

It was a parting shot; he was already out the door and halfway down the stairs. Todd had a habit of sniping at people and then running for cover. Still, she knew she’d have to smooth it over with Jerry Grimes, and he in turn would smooth it over with Galaz.

She wasn’t going to worry about it. Jerry knew she got results. Maybe her methods were a little unorthodox, but that had always been the way she worked.

Lieutenant Mike Galaz had been here for five months. Other than his watchful eye over the budget, he was an unknown factor, generally considered to be a good (if political) administrator who left the sergeants to run their own squads.

His first official act was to institute weekly briefings where everyone in the criminal investigation division got together and discussed their cases. Galaz himself didn’t take part, but stood at the front of the room listening intently. At the end of each meeting, he’d give a short speech about the importance of their mission, ending with a phrase he must have picked up from a TV show: “Let’s go, people!”