Ladies Man (Laura Cardinal Series Book 6)

by J. Carson Black

  Dennis shrugged.

  The Wicked Witch. Laura wondered how and why anyone would commandeer her phone for this. She’d recently finished up on a case of a woman who ran her husband down in his garage. The woman was no looker—she had long black hair and a nose like a Lemur. “Remember the Gloria Dally case?”

  “She’s still in jail, last I heard. You think she or someone she knows sent this to you?”

  “Her husband was pretty damn mad."

  “Funny how couples will try to kill each other right before they gang up on the cops."

  Laura nodded. Domestic arguments were unpredictable. A husband and wife trying to kill one another would gang up together on the cops trying to break them up. In a situation where a cop faced an armed perpetrator, there had to be a decision between overwhelming force and trying to talk someone down. You can go A to Z in the force continuum in a matter of seconds. A cop’s life depended on that split-second decision, and once the decision to shoot was made, it was shoot to kill. Too many cops had died due to one second’s worth of hesitation, or an attempt to wound the perpetrator. Always shoot a subject “center mass,” so there would be no doubt as to the outcome. The tactic might seem unnecessary overkill, but it was amazing how quickly a man with a knife could get to someone within twenty-one feet.

  Or a woman—like Gloria Dally.

  And now they would talk to her again.

  But Laura didn’t think this had anything to do with Gloria Dally.

  As they drove back, Laura, who was driving, said, “Facebook."

  Dennis clicked through to Facebook and found her. “What d’ya know. There she is. Carla Borel." He turned the phone toward Laura. “Another great photo of her. What a shame—she was a real looker!”

  Laura pulled over to the side of the road. “We’ll have to contact Facebook—see if Forensics can analyze this, but first…” She worked her phone, scrolling down Borel’s Facebook page. Mostly, it was politics. Borel had been on the liberal side. She also loved to pose for the camera. Laura had seen pictures of Borel in her home; she already knew what a beautiful woman she was.

  Laura said, “I’m putting in a friend request."

  “She’s not gonna answer. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Maybe a relative will. Her page is still up.

  “So whoever killed her could have been somebody who bought her work?”

  “Maybe,” Laura said. “Or a rival?”

  “Professional jealousy?”

  “Could be. She was also single. Maybe she got to know some guy on Facebook. A local connection—or even someone from out of town."

  “LinkedIn!” Dennis said. He started working his phone. “Nope, she’s not on LinkedIn."

  “What about a professional page on FB."

  He typed in her name and up she came. “Hey, these are good! I’d love to buy that one for Marie." He showed Laura a photo of an oil painting of the desert. Clearly, the woman had been a talented artist.

  “So all those paintings were her work. She painted them." She felt embarrassed that neither of them had made the connection.

  “If I could paint like that, I would put my name in ten-foot-high lights."

  “But it wasn’t her job, was it? I’m getting the impression she was retired. Let’s go check out the art studios in town—someone might know her."

  There were three commercial art studios in Tucson, all clustered around Fourth Avenue and Sixth. Nobody knew her, or at least nobody admitted to knowing her—or her art.

  “What next?” Dennis said as they walked back to their car.

  “Western art galleries? We could call them."

  They divided up the number of galleries, split up, and contacted the galleries. Laura sent at least a dozen of them photos from her phone. No one knew her name, no one recognized the artist. Laura was good at listening—and over the years she had developed a canny sense when someone was lying. She could be wrong, but everyone she talked to was accommodating and respectful. Not one gallery owner had given her any reason to doubt his or her word.

  Could it be that Carla Borel was just a weekend painter? A tremendously talented artist who kept her own paintings and didn’t want to sell them commercially?

  One of the things she’d photographed in the house was a studio portrait of Borel. The woman was beautiful, especially in that one photo—and she had an unusual trait. One of her eyes was green, and the other, brown. Laura had looked it up. There was a word for it: heterochromia. She’d encountered this only one time before, in the eyes of a psychopath who had nearly killed her.

  She kept Borel’s portrait on her phone. She would look at it often in the months to come, as leads petered out and other cases took over.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 4

  Doris Acosta met Jeffrey Thomas at a swap meet in Flagstaff, her hometown. She was not in the market for a boyfriend at the time. At sixty-five-years-old, she knew her own mind. She’d had a wonderful husband for forty-one years, and now he was gone. As far as a love of her life was concerned, Frank was it. She saw Jeffrey as a friend—with benefits. The kind of friend she could go places with, a friend she could confide in. They were so much alike. They had exactly the same passions—flea markets and swap meets and used bookstores where they could roam the shelves for hours, and then go someplace nice for lunch or just ice cream. Doris’s daughter Lilac was in the Army—a sergeant, posted overseas. She was enough family for Doris.

  But Doris did like his company—he was a semi-retired professor who could match his wit with hers, somebody who might just give her a little tingle now and then to remind her that she was still a woman—and a good-looking woman at that.

  He was gracious, and just a wee bit old-fashioned. He always walked around to open the car door for her, always stood back for her to go through doorways before him. (At first, it was a little awkward, because he was shorter than she was—kind of embarrassing, and she’d tell him she did not like to be treated like a new-laid egg—but he’d persisted, and after a while she came to expect it). He would surprise her with gifts. Little things, mostly. Sometimes they were off the mark, like a china shepherdess, which she kept in a cupboard but would put on display when he came over to the house. And honestly, he was just being thoughtful. He knew she loved flea markets and swap meets, and never complained, no matter how hard the sun beat down or how many hours they spent there.

  He hailed from Wisconsin. Small world: she was from Wisconsin, too. So many Wisconsinites in Arizona!

  And, it was an adventure. He was always surprising her. Roses for no reason. Picking her up and telling her he had a treat for her—he would take her to a play or a new bar. Once, he even blindfolded her. When they got to their destination, he whipped off the blindfold and voila! They were at an ice-skating rink, which brought back memories of Wisconsin’s frozen-over ponds.

  So, on the day he called her over to his house, she was surprised—and thrilled—with his newest find. Backed into the driveway was a beautiful camper. A motorhome.

  Okay, it was an older one—used—but she could live with that.

  Just the week before, they’d been wandering around a travel trailer and motorhome show. They’d sat on the cushions at the dinette table and fantasized about just taking off and exploring the West. Both of them footloose and fancy-free.

  That was the amazing thing about “Boo” (Her pet name for him). He made you feel like you could do anything. And frankly, she found that liberating. Doris had lived a relatively comfortable life—she was on Social Security and Medicare, and Greg had left her with a pretty nice nest egg, which she’d handled wisely.

  Jeffrey was a little bit younger than she was, in his fifties.

  They married in a garden ceremony at Jeffrey’s friend’s house. Jeffrey’s friend was a man of the cloth, something ecumenical—she wasn’t a religious person, so it didn’t really matter—and it was a beautiful day in the garden, just a small group, her best friend Myrna from work standing up for her a
s bridesmaid. The nice thing about Jeffrey, he’d done all the paperwork (he thought of everything), so all she had to do was sign the marriage certificate. He had a friend who was a notary—one of his students at the university. No muss, no fuss. Jeffrey understood her—that she was the kind who liked things to go simply and smoothly.

  After the ceremony they would head off on their honeymoon. The motorhome was second-hand, but good as new. And so she would lock up her house (she and Jeffrey would live there—he said he’d already put his house on the market and sold it pretty quickly) and they would hit the road for the summer.

  Her other best friend Louise flew in from California for the wedding. Unfortunately, they’d had a spat the day before, and this wore on her even as she started her new adventure. Louise, who always spoke her mind (even if nobody wanted to hear it), cast a real pall on Doris’s wedding day, telling her that Jeffrey “turned her off." When Doris asked why, Louise said that he was too young—at least ten years her junior—and “unctuous”—which was insulting. He wasn’t unctuous at all, merely kind and thoughtful. Louise had just come out of a bad marriage. It was obvious she distrusted men—and who could blame her? Yes, she was right that Jeffrey was eight years younger than Doris, but she knew her own mind and Jeff wasn’t unctuous at all. Not really.

  But a while later, Doris did bring this up with Jeffrey, remembering how quickly the wedding had happened and wondering if his friend was a reverend at all. He was evasive, and it wasn’t the first time. He gave her the impression he was hiding something. This time, she decided to tell him that—and very quickly after, it devolved into their first and last argument. She demanded that he turn the motorhome around and they go back home.

  He argued with her, pleaded with her, but she insisted.

  She grabbed her stuff—it took seven trips into the motorhome—and she put her clothes and dishes and camping chairs and everything else back into the house. She told him to never darken her doorway again, and he drove away in the motorhome.

  She cried.

  The next few days she did some thinking, and realized that maybe her friend had a point. In fact, there was something not quite right about the whole thing—how a usually level-headed woman like herself could fall for a man in the course of two and a half months. How did that happen? Her friends had warned her to take more time. Most of them, she now realized, didn’t like him, but she’d ignored everything and just went full-speed-ahead, as she always did.

  If Doris couldn’t get an annulment, she’d have to get a divorce lawyer. She’d also made a will with Jeffrey, as he did with her, and she was worried that he might have found a way to get hold of her house.

  He was on the road and she had no idea where he was. She lived on a fixed income and her little adventure had cost her.

  BUT—he didn’t get her house. With the help of her friends, she was able to get legal and financial help, and on that score, after many sleepless nights, after jumping through several legal hoops, she was all right. Fortunately for her, he failed to appear—which turned the trick.

  She thought she’d never see him again. He’d managed to get quite a bit of money out of her—she’d never get her share of the used motorhome back—but at heart Doris was a pragmatist and considered herself lucky. Very lucky.

  And two years later, when she picked up the newspaper one morning and saw the police sketch—

  She knew just how lucky she’d been.

  Laura’s parents, both of them schoolteachers, had subscribed to The Arizona Daily Star.

  Laura kept it up, since reading, or at least flipping through the paper while she had her morning coffee had been a lifelong habit.

  She turned over the front page and saw the headline: Women Missing After Meeting Suspect. The story reported on three older women who had gone missing—two from Colorado and one from Arizona.

  Laura didn’t see any obvious connection between Carla Borel and these “lost women,” but she did wonder if there might be more than one predator working the area. The common thread here was “women." Had the same predator in New Mexico come to Arizona and somehow enticed Borel out into the desert to be killed?

  That seemed implausible on its face. The women who disappeared in New Mexico were poor immigrants who worked the fields. They could have been rounded up by the police or fled to avoid them, or gone back to Mexico after the crops were picked. Carla Borel was nothing like them. She was older, fairly well-off, and held B. A. and M. A. degrees in art and design. All this Laura had learned from Carla’s friends—three of whom had been in a book club with Carla. Laura interviewed each of them separately, and all three said the same thing: that Carla Borel “had a good head on her shoulders,” was practical as hell, and suffered no fools.

  And all three of Carla’s friends said in interviews that they’d planned on meeting Carla at an eatery a week or two ago, but she never showed up and didn’t answer her phone. Her Facebook page had nothing new on it—which was also unusual for her.

  The last woman Laura interviewed, Jenny Ossoff, said she’d called a couple of times but only got voicemail. She’d added, when Carla was interested in a guy, everything else went out the window. They figured she was just spending time with her new boyfriend.

  And it was Jenny who put it all together and asked the obvious question. Was she the woman they found out in the desert?”

  Laura had to tell her it was. “We want to catch whoever did this, and you can help. I’d like you to write down when you last saw her, what she said, if she was seeing anyone—everything you can think of. Can you do that?”

  Jenny said, “I’m a writer. That’s what I do." Her voice was like steel.

  Good. Jenny now had something to do.

  “And let me know the names of every man she was seeing—whatever you remember. Make a list of everything and everyone you can think of. What she said about the man she was seeing, anything and everything that comes to mind. What he looked like, what kind of car he drove—”

  Jenny shook her head. “She didn’t say much. She wanted to surprise us. She planned a party for when they got back from their trip to announce their engagement."

  “Did she give you his name?”

  “Jeffrey."

  “No last name?”

  “No. It was so sudden. One minute she was trying to get over her ex, and the next, it was all about this new guy. She said he was wonderful and a great lover, and so considerate. He’d open doors for her, and he’d pull out her chair when they went out to eat. She said they were going to travel the West together."

  “They were?”

  “That was what she said. It would be an adventure."

  “When were they going on this trip?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Did she mention where they were going?”

  She started crying. “I don’t know. Something about traveling the West in a motorhome. She might’ve said, but I don’t remember. God, I wish I could remember! She’s—I mean was—my best friend."

  “A motorhome. Did she say what kind?”

  “She sent me a picture on my phone, way back. Not sure if it’s still on here."

  She went to Gallery on her phone and scrolled through. “I’m pretty sure I kept it, but . . . Wait. Here it is." Jenny handed her phone to Laura.

  A man and a woman—Carla Borel—posed in front of a motorhome. It was a sunny day. The man wore sunglasses, and stood in the shade of the motorhome’s awning, his arm around Borel’s shoulders. You could barely see him. Borel, though, was in full sunlight. She wore a long knit sweater, the kind that molded to her figure and fell down to the knees, the kind that looked great with high boots and leggings. Stylish and beautiful.

  It was almost impossible to make out the man’s features, but he did have a big grin on his face. He had a dark handlebar mustache to go with the dark hair. The mustache and the hair peeking out under the cap might have been dyed, although she wasn’t sure about that. His ball cap had an initial on it, possibly a foot
ball or baseball team. “Could you send this to my phone?” She gave Jenny her number.

  Jenny complied.

  Laura looked hard at the photo. The initial on the cap was the letter B, in scrolled cursive. She’d have to figure out what that meant. The motorhome—if it was a motorhome—seemed to be half-motorhome and half-camper. A brown stripe ran along the left-hand side, just past the open door. A smallish gold-colored chevron-shaped sticker was on the opposite side of the open door. She might be able to find out what make the motorhome was, just by blowing up the photo—that would be helpful. The interior was dark-paneled, except for a narrow oblong of sunlight on oak veneer, and a small sink. Pale yellow curtains framed the window, and she could just see the edge of a cupboard. The man was skinny and wore baggy blue jeans. So thin. A beanpole. Illness, maybe? Or he was just naturally skinny? He looked to be in his mid-fifties. He had one arm around Carla, and the other hand held a cigarette down and away from his body. The way he stood, the way he held the cigarette, the clothes he wore, suggested he was working class. He wore a long-sleeved snap-buttoned cowboy shirt with brown and yellow stripes.

  She wondered if someone took the picture of them, or if they’d done it themselves. If there was another person, it would likely be someone in a campground where they had been staying. There was no background, since the motorhome covered the whole space. It could have been here in town, or it could have been taken on the road somewhere. “Did she say where they were?”

  “I think it was in California somewhere, a national park?”

  It took her some time—looking at various makes of models of campers and motorhomes and trailers on the Internet, but eventually, she believed she had found it: a 1998 Shasta Cheyenne. One of the salient features on the Shasta Cheyenne was a swoop of a bird, in a V shape, toward the back of the vehicle. She wasn’t sure, but she thought that a brown stripe coming from the left-hand side of the picture aligned with the bird motif on the photo she had of the Cheyenne. She would be able to blow both pictures up for comparison, but she was fairly sure she’d found the make and model.