The Laura Cardinal Novels (95 page)

A mockingbird sang from the immense wall of oleanders lining the front yard.

Laura wondered if Mrs. Carmichael had accepted the probability that Jenny was dead. Probably not completely—there was always that slim hope that somehow her child would come back to her. Especially in light of the Brashear family's miracle.

But Laura knew that Mary Carmichael would take one look at her on her doorstep and she would know. She would then be forced to carry the weight of two deaths instead of one. But at least Laura would be bringing Jenny home. She'd be bringing Jenny Carmichael home, and finding Jenny led her that much closer to her killer.

Laura vowed that she would find him.

As the day lightened, Laura looked at the house. There was no gold star, but an American flag hung like a curtain in the center of the picture window. It gave Laura an empty feeling.

A light snapped on in the house just after six thirty. Laura left the Yukon and started up the walk. The door opened before she got there. Mary Carmichael standing in the doorway, the place dark behind her. She was dry-eyed, but Laura had been right. Mary Carmichael knew why she was there.

“I just saw it on the news. It's Jenny, isn't it?”

“Yes, ma'am. We have a positive ID.”

“You used the dental records.” It was not a question. “Why don't you come in? I have coffee.”

Mary Carmichael's voice was matter-of-fact. Laura knew she had been living with the idea of Jenny's death for eleven years, but she'd expected more emotion than this. Especially this week—with her only other child dead in Afghanistan. Maybe she was so put-together to keep from falling apart.

Mary Carmichael led her into a dark kitchen, the sun casting stripes through the venetian blinds.

“Sit down. Do you take cream? Sugar?” Her matronly figure negotiating the cramped kitchen adroitly.

“Cream's good, thanks.”Laura then introduced herself.

“We've met before at some function or another.”

Laura nodded, accepting a mug that had the initials of Carmichael's organization on it: Survivors of Homicide. “I wanted to say how sorry I am about your loss.”

“I can't even . . .” She sat down opposite Laura. “I want to concentrate on Jenny. They're sure it's her?”

Laura nodded.

“They said on the news that she was buried not far from the camp. Is that true?”

Laura estimated in her head from her own memory of the camp. “About a mile or so.”

“So she wasn't at the lake. It sounds like she never left the camp.”

“That could be. Or someone offered to drive her back there . . .” Laura paused. It was the only way the man and the car figured in. If he had driven her back to the camp. But after that, it fell apart. Why was Jenny found over a mile from Camp Aratauk? Did they walk there? It was certainly possible, but it felt wrong.

“Does the ME have a cause of death?” Mary Carmichael asked. “I suppose they can't tell much. She'd just be bones by now. It amazes me that both those girls have been found within a week . . . why do you think that is?”

Laura cleared her throat. “I don't know.”

Mary Carmichael gripped her coffee mug tightly and looked across the table at Laura. “What do you know? You can tell me. I've waited eleven years.”

Laura decided to go with the facts. Mary Carmichael could read what she wanted to into it. “When I left, it didn't appear that there was any obvious cause of death—“

“No blow to the skull. Or gunshot wound. Nothing like that?”

“No.” Laura paused. She wanted to tell Mary Carmichael that it was possible that Jenny had been buried fully clothed, but that determination could only be made by the forensic anthropologist after the autopsy. Instead she said, “There was a book buried with her.”

“A book?”

“
The Man in the Moon
.”

“She loved that book—all of them. The first one was her favorite, but she had all the books in the series. She must have been reading it. What do you think?”

Once again, Laura had to say she didn't know. It was frustrating. The idea of a man meeting Jenny and offering to drive her back to camp—that could have happened. The idea of them walking over a mile away together, less likely, but still plausible. It was also possible he had killed her near the camp and took her far enough away to bury her where no one would find her.

But why take the book?

“I want to help you as much as I can,” Mary Carmichael said. “I wrote everything down—everything that happened. What the detectives told me. I have photos, too. Pictures from the camp, and my niece took photos on the grid search. You're free to look at everything. I gave copies of all this information to Detective Schiller, but I don't think he used it. I've got two boxes. Would you like to see them?”

Laura realized that Mary Carmichael had been building up to this.

She thought of the cut-and-dried case file. Detective Schiller had made no mention of the material Mary Carmichael had given him. Not in the original book, not in the half-dozen supplementary reports.

“I absolutely want to see them,” Laura said.

Back at DPS, Laura looked through Mary Carmichael's material. There were a few photos of Jenny at camp. She was such a pretty little girl, her gaze forthright and serious. But there were times when she smiled and laughed: a water fight, at a picnic, the day she won first prize in the archery competition.

Someone—Mary Carmichael?—had written the names of the girls under their pictures. Most of the photos, though, showed Jenny with another girl, a sad-faced child battling baby fat, dark-haired and wan. This girl had to be Jenny's “best friend,” Dawn Sayles.

Detective Artie Schiller had interviewed Dawn Sayles. Laura located the report.

The day they'd gone to the lake, Dawn and Jenny had explored along the water. By lunch time, they’d split up; Dawn had gone back for the picnic and Jenny had continued to explore the area.

After lunch, the thunderstorm had hit, and all the girls had been shepherded into the van.

Laura remembered several interviews from the case file narrative that corroborated Dawn's story. It appeared Jenny had been a true explorer, as Laura herself had been as a child. Always going off by herself, always lured on by whatever lay beyond the bend in the road. Just the kind of girl who would be vulnerable to a predator.

Laura went through the case file, looking for the camp counselor's statement: Sherri D'Agnostino was sure that Jenny had been on the van when they’d driven back to the camp.

Which meant that Jenny could have gone off by herself later in the day. Laura would have to reinterview both Jenny's friend Dawn and Sherri D'Agnostino.

She was leafing through photographs of the Mt. Lemmon grid search when her phone rang. It was Dave Toch. “I wanted to catch you up on the Grady investigation. We picked him up a block away from his house.”

When a TPD patrol officer drove to the house, Grady's Hummer was out front. Sean Grady had gone straight home.

The officer knocked, but got no answer. Toch ordered a surveillance unit to sit off the house. About five minutes after the patrol officer left, Grady came out and drove off. He was stopped and arrested before he got out of the neighborhood. “We searched Grady's vehicle for a knife, but didn't find it.”

Laura had described the hunting knife in great detail yesterday. A
big
knife. Police were allowed to search any place that could conceal the knife, so when she described it for Toch yesterday, its dimensions might have increased a little. Okay, a lot.

With probable cause to search Grady’s house, they’d found the knife stashed in a bedroom closet “along with some coke,” Toch said.

Laura knew what this meant. They could get a new warrant to search any area large enough to conceal coke—which meant they would be allowed to search every corner of the house.

“Turns out he had a nice little cottage industry going—dealing coke. The prosecutor likes that part of the case.”

“Who's the prosecutor?”

“Jimmy Rutan.”

“What about the assault?”

“He's more interested in working out a plea on the coke possession, see who else he can get.”

“Shit.”

“That's not gospel. I'm just warning you. Besides, it's not looking all that cut-and-dried.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just interrogated this guy, and he's good. He almost convinced
me
.”

Laura's pulse sped up. “What'd he say?”

“All sorts of bullshit. He was just messing around, trying to get a rise out of you. Thought he'd show you the knife and see if he could freak you out. That kind of thing. Said you cut your finger yourself.”

“How'd I do that?”

“He said, and I quote, 'she fucking wigged out.’ All he did was take the knife out to show it to you like he'd show it to anybody, and you panicked. He said you tried to grab the knife and that was how you hurt yourself. He really freaked out when you went for your gun for no reason.”

“You believe any of that?”

“Of course not—“

“Who hacked that door to bits?”

“It's not what I think. It's what Jimmy Rutan thinks. Jimmy loves drug busts, the flashier the better. I think he's going to bag the ag assault and go for the drugs.”

Jaime called from Mt. Lemmon and suggested they meet at the Cowboy Corral for breakfast. Sounded good to her; she was in the mood for Eggs Benedict. Bad news made her hungry.

On the way over, she told herself she'd have to come to grips with the fact that Sean Grady's assault on her would probably go away. She could forget about her fraud case, too.

Dave said Grady had almost convinced him his side of the story was true. Interviewing a sociopath could be an out-of-body experience. People like Sean Grady were believable, no matter what line of bullshit they were peddling. Laura had found herself being pulled in by Grady herself even though she knew better.

It felt different when the sociopath was coming after you. And that was what this felt like—Grady coming after her. Trying to make her look bad to the people she worked with and probably succeeding.

Trivializing his attack on her.

And Jimmy Rutan would help him do it.

Laura didn't know what she could do, so she did what she always did when she didn't want to think about something: stuffed it down the basement and slammed the trapdoor shut.

Jaime pulled into the parking lot of the Cowboy Corral just as Laura locked her car. Someone with him, a young Hispanic woman in a brown tunic and slacks—a Cowboy Corral waitress uniform. The girl's brown hair was caught up in a ponytail. Her arm was in a cast and sling.

Jaime said, “This is my niece Christine. She's taking the Academy exam next month.” He looked from Christine to Laura, her own brown hair in a ponytail and her arm in a sling, and added, “Hey, you two could be twins. The Broken Wing Sisters.”

“If I was still in my twenties,” Laura said.

Christine smiled shyly.

Jaime said, “Christine broke her arm playing soccer. You should see her—she's the reigning queen of Las Estrellas.”

Christine asked Laura, “What happened to you?”

“My chair fell over. I hit my elbow—it's nothing serious.”

“That's the short version,” Jaime said. He looked like a draft horse next to a Thoroughbred. “Cause for a celebration, here. This is Chris's last week as a Cowboy Corral employee.”

Christine glanced at her watch. “I've got to go,
Tio.
” She flashed Laura a shy grin. “Nice to meet you.” She went inside.

“Good kid,” Jaime said. “She wanted to meet a real live female detective in the flesh—I'm glad you obliged. Wanted to be a sheriff's detective ever since she was this high. Esther—my wife's sister—tried to steer her away from it, but she's determined.” He held the door for her as they walked inside. “Esther's old-fashioned. Doesn't think that's the right thing for a young lady to do. But times, they are a'changing. Kid's been at me to go on a ride along forever. Told her she didn't want to go with me—all she'd see was paper-shuffling—so last month I set her up with one of the deputies. It was all she ever talked about. She decided then and there to go to the Academy.” They picked a booth by the window. “What happened with Mrs. Carmichael?”

Laura ran it down for him and supplied him with her notes. For a while, they tried to puzzle out the idea that Jenny might have been driven back to camp and been killed there. Jaime didn't see the transporting of the book as an issue. “My guess is he lured her down there. If she wanted to bring along her book, I don't think he'd make a big deal of it.

“Tell you what, I'll see if I can hunt down the Camp Aratauk staff—what's left of them.” Jaime took a bite of his omelette, talking with his mouth full. “What do you think of Steve Lawson?”

“It's possible he could have picked her up by the lake and driven her up there.”

Jaime nodded. “It would explain how she ended up so close to the cabin.”

Laura knew they had to look at it. Steve Lawson's story barely hung together. Laura had to separate her first impressions of the man from the facts. He didn't act like a man with a guilty conscience, but that meant less than nothing. Neither had Sean Grady.

“More I think of it, the more I'm sure he's the one,” Jaime said. LA's only twelve hours away. He could've driven out here, stayed at his grandfather's cabin. He goes for a drive in his grandfather's car, spots her by the road, offers to take her back to the camp, but he takes her to the cabin instead.”

“And digs her up for us to find eleven years later?”

Jaime leaned back, pushed his plate away. “People have done a lot weirder things.”

There was a While You Were Out note stuck on the spindle on her desk. It was from Helen Desormeaux, the HR person at Behr Family Amusements, calling to tell her she had gone through their files and had no record of Bill Smith ever working for them.

Feeling awkward in her sling, Laura crooked the phone under her left ear to call her back. She didn't hear as well from that side. She knew it was only because she was used to hearing with her right ear.

When Laura reached Helen Desormeaux, she asked her if BFA had ever employed a man named Robert Heywood.