Ladies Man (Laura Cardinal Series Book 6)

by J. Carson Black

  “Yes."

  “And one of those houses, that’s where you were? Can you pick out which house?”

  “There was a big tree in the yard next door."

  Laura zoomed in. “A pine? An Aleppo pine?”

  “Yes."

  Laura found the address: 4029 Terrace Drive. “Which house? The one on the right or the one on the left?”

  “The one on the left. I think . . ."

  “Four-oh-thirty-one?”

  “The one with the paved walkway and gravel, right?”

  “Yes. It was night, but I parked by the curb and walked up the walk. It was supposed to be a party, but there was only the one car in the carport. I thought I was early."

  “Then what happened?”

  “He opened the door and said something to the effect that I was the first one there."

  “And?”

  “I sat down. I had a glass of wine. There were bowls of chips and dip on the coffee table."

  Jan was recalling more details now. She described sitting there—it was just the three of them. She said it was awkward. The younger guy—the student—was staring at her, scrutinizing her. He called her “Stacy." She reminded him that her name was Jan. “He kept calling me Stacy, even after I corrected him."

  “Do you know why he called you that? ‘Stacy’?”

  “No. I’m trying to remember, he said I was ‘like all of them, just another “Stacy."

  Laura wondered if “Stacy” was his ex-girlfriend. Jan said she felt insulted, but it also made her a little nervous. She ignored the feeling. No one else knocked on the door. There was no music. Just the chips and the dip and the beer. She tried to make small talk, but that fizzled out. The young guy’s disdain seemed to turn to dislike. She got the feeling he resented her presence.

  She drank some of the beer, and that was when she became sleepy. “A little bit sleepy. Maybe it was the beer, but I didn’t think so. But I felt pretty drunk. Kind of . . . out of it. And then . . . I think . . . the young guy stood up and said something like, she’s out of it."

  “And then what?”

  “I woke up hurting—down there…and Jacky was on top of me raping me. I was too out of it to struggle, it felt like a dream, but I remember him putting his hands around my neck and trying to choke me, and that was when I asked him not to grab my neck that way, that it was freaking me out."

  “Did he stop?”

  “Yes."

  “And then what?”

  “He punched me in the face. And that’s the last I remember until we got to the desert."

  “What happened when you came to?”

  I don’t recall them dumping me out. I was in the desert, and it hurt. I threw up a few times. I thought I should call the police, but I didn’t have my phone and that was when I realized I needed to get to some shade."

  “What happened to your car?”

  “It was in Tempe. Someone with the police called and told me the car had been impounded—it was parked in front of someone’s house."

  Laura took Jan’s hands in her own and leveled her gaze on her. “You did good. You showed great personal strength. You did everything you needed to do to survive. You are a strong person, and I’m so glad you kept your head and registered what you saw. I’d like you to sit down with a sketch artist."

  Laura had taken notes, but she wanted to go some place quiet to think about it. She drove around the block, parked in the small parking lot of the park, and walked over to a bench. There, she wrote her summary. She now had an important brick in the wall, thanks to an Internet search. The term “Stacy."

  Not the name, the term.

  The young guy—Jan’s rapist—called her “Stacy” for a reason. It wasn’t a woman’s name. It was something else entirely, and it gave Laura a sinking feeling in her gut. She remembered a recent incident where a man drove his truck onto a running path in New York, mowing down joggers, runners and hikers, killing a number of people. The man who committed the crime was an “Incel."

  Which led her to a theory.

  This man—“the ladies man”—had a sidekick, and now she guessed that the sidekick might possibly be an Incel. She thought that he might be the guy who killed the women, after the Ladies Man tired of them. That was her theory for now.

  Laura had run into a few out-and-proud Incels in her time, and they were toxic. Her partner called them snowflakes dipped in battery acid.

  This was what she knew about Incels: they desired, resented, and despised women. Incels blamed women for not being attracted to them. They resented women who would not sleep with them. Their toxic behavior often spilled over into hatred and bile. They held the self-righteous and juvenile belief that women should love them, sleep with them, and adore them—even though there was very little to adore, since they resented the very women they were hoping to attract. When their perceived “rights” were denied to them, this led them to feel that they were being duped and ignored.

  It was a fraternity of grievance.

  The Incels had their own language—a language of simmering anger. People in heterosexual relationships were called “Chads” and “Stacies." Chads and Stacies were ordinary men and women who had lovers or spouses or even friends of the opposite sex. The Incels were angry that they had been denied all the joys of a sexual relationship. They believed that they were denied the right to have sex with a woman, they were denied romantic relationships. This, despite the fact that they despised those very women they were enamored with. Laura’s term for them was “sour grapes."

  Some acted out, accordingly.

  Laura had worked on a homicide with an Incel police officer. He was generally discourteous to everyone, but he resented her in particular. In fact, his resentment was off the charts. At first she thought he just didn’t like to be working under a female, but it was more than that. She overheard him on a call with someone describing her, and it was ugly. She remembered one remark: “a split-tailed pussy who thinks her shit doesn’t stink—she thinks she’s too good for me."

  While Laura had a feeling the younger man was an Incel, she couldn’t jump to conclusions without testing the theory. For all she knew, the bad guy could have a completely different motivation.

  Motivation rarely mattered to an investigation (the reason many investigators leaped to conclusions, sometimes wrongly), but sometimes, it did matter.

  She knew a guy on the force, Gerry Phillips, who worked in the Internet crime division. He knew all the tricks, how to draw out people like her guy. She would outsource this part of the investigation to him.

  Now that she had an address, Laura drove to Tempe to find the Terrace Drive house. She parked just up the street, got out and walked over to the small lake in the park. She followed the path around the edge of the water as dusk dropped down around her. There were a lot of kids and their parents in the park, and a few runners. She walked down to the other side of the lake and sat on a bench, watching the ducks trying to determine if she was going to feed them. It was almost full dark now. There were a few other people there, some jogging along the running path around the park. As dusk fell, she saw the lights come on in the house opposite.

  An hour and a half later, a young man left the house and got into his car. She’d already noted the license plate and a description of the car—a white 1996 Mazda RX7 parked behind the SUV in the carport. Laura would have the RX7’s owner’s address in minutes.

  Once his car turned the corner and was gone, she looked him up.

  Jack Edward Neave. Beyond that, his information was thin. No wants, no warrants. She made note of his address, which was also in Tempe. She checked for a Twitter account, then Instagram. Nothing there.

  She wondered if he had an alias. If so, he might use that name for a Facebook page. But how would she find him? She decided to do the easiest thing, go to the ASU online phonebook, and enter Jack Edward Neave in the search field. And there he was: a sophomore and English major. Confirmed. She searched for him on Facebook and found his page<
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  She scrolled down through his Facebook feed. At first glance, there wasn’t much there—a few juvenile poses—some indicating that he might be naked. Nothing, though, that would get him kicked off Facebook. She made a mental note of his desire to show his body. He also loved his car—there were a number of photos of the RX7. His Facebook page gave very little information on him, and listed just six friends.

  She went to his friends. Four of them seemed to be your average young men. One of them held up a lunker bass from a fishing trip. Another had his arm around his girlfriend.

  Six friends.

  She thought about “friending” one of them to get info on the guy, but decided against it.

  Scrolled down some more.

  And there he was with the professor, the professor’s arm laid across his back, smiling at the camera . . .

  In the desert.

  But it was what they were doing that got to her.

  “Great adventures in the wild. We even found and skinned a beaver,” the post said.

  Jack was holding up what looked to Laura like a scalp.

  It was full dark now. She was nowhere near the park overhead lights. Which was good, because she was afraid that her dinner might come up.

  Chapter 9

  It was now time to go wide with the story—an exclusive interview with The Arizona Republic: “Have you seen this man?” complete with a photo of the camper, and what little could be seen of the woman.

  Within the hour, a man named Jerry Naughton called in to the tip line. He told her that he believed the man they were looking for had been at the campsite next to theirs at the beginning of the summer. He described how the people in the campsite had taken off in the middle of the night, leaving their dog chained to a stake. Jerry and his wife were at the campsite for two more days, but the guy never came back, and by that time his wife said they were “damn well keeping him." Laura smiled at this—Jerry’s wife was a woman after her own heart.

  Laura asked him to describe the man. He’d only seen him once. He described him as was “short, skinny, and wiry." He wore large rectangular sunglasses way out of fashion—“old man’s sunglasses,” he said. “Maybe he had eye damage." Laura signaled to Dennis to pull up the photo she had of the man and his camper.

  She said, “I’m going to send you an image, and you tell me if you recognize it."

  It took Naughton no time at all. “That’s him. What really bothers us is how he and his wife took off in the middle of the night, and left their dog chained up—just left him. So we took him—he’s our dog now."

  Laura, an animal lover herself, smiled. “Finders Keepers, that’s what we in the police biz like to say. You said he was chained up, so he must have had a collar. Did he have tags?”

  “No, just the collar and the choke chain."

  She asked him if they knew where the man and woman were going, and he told her there was only one way out of the campground. She asked if there had been anything else unusual.

  “I just remembered this, but late in the afternoon before they left—going on evening, we ran into him and his wife, they were on the road. Said they were walking up to Eagle Rock to see the sunset. This was about, oh, a mile away to the trailhead, and farther than that to get to the rock."

  Laura made note of that. “And you left two days later? That’s when you took the dog, right?”

  “Right, we stayed for a couple of days. We were planning to stay, but we also waited to see if they would come back for the dog—you know, in case they forgot. By late afternoon, someone else pulled in, and by that time, my wife made it clear that we had a dog."

  Laura smiled. Yes, there were good people in the world. Sometimes, she had to remember that. “How’s that working out for you?”

  “Pretty good. In fact, if they came back looking for him, we’d tell them to go pound sand."

  He gave her a description of the man and the woman—his wife chimed in and corrected him on some of the little things she’d noticed—and by the time she ended the call, Laura knew a lot more.

  She knew what the woman looked like. Early sixties, short, carrying a little extra weight, and “she’d dyed her hair—she had a brown-grey stripe in her part."

  Naughton asked why they were looking for the man.

  “He’s a person of interest,” Laura said.

  “In other words, he murdered someone. I thought as much,” said Jerry’s wife. “And frankly, I don’t want to know about it. But you can see the evil in the man, that’s for sure. Any person who would leave a dog tied up without water or food is a son-of-a-bitch in my book!”

  That was when it hit Laura. “Does the dog have a microchip?”

  “I don’t know."

  “Could you take him to a vet and see? Or an animal shelter? They check for microchips there." She knew it was a longshot, but perhaps the woman—likely the dog’s owner—might have microchipped him.

  “We can do that."

  Laura sensed the worry in the woman’s voice.

  “Look,” Laura said. “The dog is yours, now. He was abandoned by a man who doesn’t want him back. It could be useful if we knew the name of the woman who owned the dog."

  “But the woman might . . ." she trailed off. Laura knew that she had realized something, something she didn’t want to put into words. “All right. I think her name was Marsha. I heard him call her that."

  “Marsha. Can you describe her?”

  “I think she was in her late fifties? Early sixties? She was kind of on the skinny side. She had a blonde pageboy cut, with bangs."

  “Anything else?”

  “She wore some nice jewelry—turquoise and silver. I remember that."

  Laura said, “That will be helpful. And don’t worry. I’m very sure there’s no one who will want to claim your dog." She didn’t add that she thought the woman who owned the dog was now deceased. “He’s all yours now. But do me a favor and let me know if he has a microchip—it might be a great help to find the woman. You can call me any time."

  “You don’t think he hurt her, do you?”

  “I don’t know."

  Half-lie, half-truth.

  Three weeks later, hikers in the White Mountains found a motorhome at the bottom of a landslide area, not twenty miles from the campground. Someone had tried to burn the vehicle, but the front portion remained intact. Laura contacted the police there, and they sent her photos of the burned camper.

  It had been there for some time.

  Funny how things happened in close sequence—Laura had experienced this phenomenon several times. Often, out of the blue, she’d been dealt good hands—and these were some lucky cards.

  Laura already knew these two instances were related. The microchip in the dog came back to a woman named Cynthia Jeffrey. A simple scroll through her Facebook page revealed Cynthia with her dog.

  Laura hoped that Cynthia Jeffrey was still alive, but she didn’t think so. Why else would the dog remain behind? The man likely didn’t want the animal, so he just left him there to starve or die of thirst: typical psychopathic behavior.

  Psychopaths didn’t feel a connection to others. They had zero empathy. They cared only for themselves. Because of the way they were, they had no sense of shame, no love or concern for another human being. An abandoned dog was just that: an abandoned dog. To the psychopath the dog was no different from a plank of wood. If the dog served its purpose—if it was a good watchdog, if it could attract women—then it was worth something. This dog was just something the bad guy could use, no different from a person he could use. He very likely used the dog as a prop—a man with a dog was someone most people felt they could trust.

  Ladies Man couldn’t care less what happened to the dog when he was done with him, so he just left him. Dogs were objects to be used. People were objects to be used. It was as simple as that.

  The bigger question, though, was this: Why did he burn the camper?

  Laura thought she knew. Her target sensed that someone was coming
for him.

  He was right about that.

  It took Laura and Dennis forty minutes to get down to the site where the Shasta had come to rest. She scrambled down into the ravine, slipping and skating on the loose rocks, grabbing on to pine saplings. Dennis took another route, scooting down on his ass—he had bum knees. When they got down to the ledge where the camper had come to rest, Laura was happy to see that at least part of it was intact. The fire had been relatively ineffective.

  She thought it was a desperate move on the professor’s part. There was plenty of evidence left behind in the charred, twisted metal wreckage. Laura unscrolled the yellow crime scene tape, covering a larger area than the place where the trailer resided. She took photos of tire prints, which showed the trajectory of the fall.

  Although the wreckage was partially burned, most of the galley at the front was intact.

  “What a half-assed job,” Dennis observed as he pulled on his gloves.

  They spent an hour photographing the camper in situ and marking the trail the camper took as it slid down and off the precipice. It was precarious work. The camper was lodged against a big rock, the front end poking out over a ravine—it looked and felt unstable. Laura knew it would be difficult to bring the camper up, but it was late in afternoon and she wanted to see what was inside. Since she was lighter than Dennis, she hiked down and stepped inside. The camper rocked just a little bit, enough to give her pause. She would photograph the interior and dust the light above the stove for fingerprints—and then get out. It was hard to ignore her fear as the camper tipped slightly—she pictured the whole thing sliding down into the ravine with her in it. She reached into an open cupboard and dusted every surface she could reach, and bagged up cheap plastic cups and plates. As she started to strip a sheet off the bunk, she heard a grinding sound, and felt the camper floor sink downward. She stripped one sheet off the bunk, balled it up and threw it onto the rock, videotaped with her camera before she got the hell out. Laura’s heart took another hitch as the camper tottered just as she headed for the open door—