A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

She kept calm and tried to remain motionless, but her stomach was twisting into knots, and she had begun sweating. Law enforcement was a machismo patriarchy; she had fought her entire career as a federal prosecutor to make sure none of them ever saw a hint of weakness. One of her supervisors, a woman who had retired at fifty and owned a restaurant now, had advised her: “Show your feelings, and you’re just an emotional woman that can’t be trusted. Don’t show them, and you’re an icy bitch that can’t be trusted. Take your pick.”

  “There’s something else, Jess,” Baldwin said. “I’ve never even read about a scene so completely clean. I had the evidence response team go through that place for twelve hours. Nothing. We can’t even tell what kind of blade he used because he ripped the wounds open wider to hide it.”

  Ortiz added, “They’re three weeks apart. So we got about two and a half weeks until the next one, if he’s not speeding it up or anything. I mean, he could just stop, I guess, but we don’t think so. Right? I mean, you know this type of thing.”

  “I know it?”

  Baldwin glanced between them. “He didn’t mean it like that. He just meant with your education and experience, you have some insights that could be helpful.”

  She chuckled mirthlessly now. “You have crowds of PhDs and psychiatrists to help you. You don’t need me.”

  “Yeah, they wanna help. They wanna help so they can get their faces in the news. Not to catch him.”

  Yardley picked up her satchel and stood. “Sorry. I’m not an investigator. I’m a prosecutor. Find a person of interest, and let me know when you need warrants. Other than that, I can’t help.”

  She left the room and waited until she heard the click of the door closing before she pressed her hand to the wall and leaned against it, sucking in air as though she were breathing through sand.

  Eddie Cal.

  He had been a painter and sculptor by trade. The type of man that always wore jeans and T-shirts spattered with different-colored paints. She had loved that about him—his indifference to what other people thought of him. She’d found it alluring.

  Only later, after his murders had come to light, did she realize it wasn’t something he did consciously. He was, in a very real sense, unable to believe that other human beings existed separate from his experience of them. That they had their own opinions and emotions separate from his. They’re just longer pigs, Eddie had once joked about art critics. Now she knew he’d meant it to apply to the whole human race. Had she, too, just appeared like a longer pig to the man she’d allowed into her heart?

  She closed her eyes and took two large breaths, and when she opened her eyes, the calm veneer had returned. On her way out of the courthouse, one of the marshals wished her a good night, and she kept her gaze straight ahead, pretending not to hear him.

  4

  White Sands High School was a newer building made of glass and steel. The county wanted to appear modern and had taken out a bond to build a school with all the amenities, including several computer labs with the latest Apple computers as well as a library that put the public library to shame. In the hall that led to the front office, posters hung on the walls. Announcements for musicals and plays, artwork by the graphic design students, a notice about an upcoming dance.

  Yardley remembered her high school years vividly. Her father had abandoned her and her mother when she was thirteen, and her mother had gotten drunk most days to cope. Her income went from full time to part time and eventually to unemployment and welfare disbursements. Yardley began working at fourteen, bagging groceries and selling fruit on the side of the road. High school was her only reprieve from real life, and the chance to read Chaucer or study anatomy excited her. She had few friends and even fewer boys interested in her, but she was content where she was: studying nights after a shift at the grocery store and taking care of her mother when she came home from the bars after blowing her unemployment check.

  Her mother had drunk herself to death when Yardley was eighteen. She remembered the cold rain at the funeral, that it had cost Yardley her entire savings to even have one, and that no one had shown up but her. She had an aunt somewhere that had sent a card, and one of the neighbors had asked Yardley if she needed anything, but other than that, it was as if her mother had never existed. The thought that you could live a long life and have no one remember you had terrified Yardley to her core.

  At the front office, she asked for the vice-principal, and a receptionist led her back to where Tara sat in the hall, her eyes calmly taking everything in. Nothing slipping past their notice. Every once in a while, those deep sapphire eyes sent a small shock through Yardley. She had only seen eyes that blue in one other person: Tara’s father.

  Cody Jackson, a slim man with wire-frame glasses and a bow tie, rose from his desk and shook her hand. He asked them both to step inside his office. Yardley noticed the sway when Tara stood, a slow drifting in circles of the body caused by the unbalancing effects of alcohol, indicating her daughter would fail the Romberg test, a test commonly employed by police to determine if someone had been drinking.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Yardley said when they were seated.

  Jackson nodded and kept his eyes on Tara. “Her chemistry teacher noticed the odor of alcohol. When she was confronted, she grew quite agitated. At one point we thought she might turn violent, but instead she vomited in the hallway. I’ve had her at the nurse’s office since. The nurse determined an ambulance wasn’t necessary, though I was close to calling one.”

  Yardley stared at her daughter, who wouldn’t look at her. “It’s the middle of the afternoon, Tara.”

  She shrugged.

  “Where did you get the alcohol?”

  “A friend.”

  “What friend?”

  She shrugged again.

  Yardley lifted Tara’s chin and made her daughter look at her. “What. Friend.”

  She pulled her face away.

  Yardley turned to Jackson and said, “This will never, ever happen again, I can assure you. She won’t have the means for it to happen again because she is grounded the rest of the semester, and her phone is going to be shut off.”

  Tara shouted, “What! You can’t do that.”

  “Watch me,” Yardley said calmly.

  Tara folded her arms and shook her head. “You’re such a bitch.”

  Yardley felt the anger flare in her stomach. It rose hot into her face, but if not for the clench of her jaw muscles, no one would have been able to tell she had any reaction.

  “What’s her punishment, Cody?”

  “She nearly struck a teacher in anger. I think a three-week suspension is appropriate. As well as cleaning the halls one day with the staff after school to make up for the time it took for them to clean up her mess. I’ll have to put a letter in her file as well, and she’ll be on probation when she returns to school. By rights, I could expel her, but because of her excellent academics, I’m willing to cut her a break.”

  Yardley knew Tara didn’t study; she could listen to a few lectures and ace her exams. Her intelligence was both astonishing and unsettling. At the age of five, she’d explained Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to Yardley at the dinner table. At seven, Yardley had caught her reading Nietzsche on the balcony of their home.

  Several teachers had urged Yardley to let her skip a few grades or put her in a gifted school, but she had refused.

  Occasionally, thinking about Tara’s intelligence sent a chill down Yardley’s back. School for Yardley, though enjoyable, had been a colossal amount of work. Tara had inherited her father’s intelligence: Eddie Cal had an IQ of 175.

  “Tara,” Jackson said, “will you please wait outside?” When she’d left, he said, “She doesn’t belong here, Jessica. Ms. McCombs caught her doodling in her class the other day. She thought it was drawings, but Tara was working out mathematics problems in vector spaces and scalars. I had to google what those were, and I still don’t understand them. And she’s already gone through all the AP cla
sses we offer and taken all the college credit we can give. We simply cannot challenge someone like her here. She’s bored and acting out. She needs to be in a gifted school or test directly into a university. Probably a graduate program at a university.”

  Yardley shook her head. “You know our background. It took me so long, Cody, so long, just to give her a semblance of a normal life. I don’t want her feeling like an outcast in any way; that’s why I’ve never pursued that for her. Besides, for the first time in her life, she has friends. She doesn’t want to go anywhere else.”

  Jackson sighed and folded his hands on the desk. “There’s two paths someone with her caliber of intellect can go. If they receive love and support and the correct amount of intellectual challenge, they can become an Albert Einstein or a Steve Jobs. If they’re bored and their mind is left to find its own amusement, they will become a—”

  “If you say Eddie Cal—”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I was going to say Billy Mackerus. He’s a gentleman I sometimes see begging for change outside a restaurant near my home. He was a professor of philosophy, working on theories I can’t even pronounce, and now he’s in and out of drug rehabilitation centers and jail. His mind went toward the second path. Tara needs to be challenged, and I can’t give her that challenge with the resources I have.”

  Yardley nodded. “Thank you for calling me, Cody. I’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.” She rose, and once outside the office, she said to Tara, “Let’s go.”

  When they were in the car, Yardley held out her hand. “Phone.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry I said that. It was just—”

  “Phone.”

  Tara hesitated and then took the phone out of her pocket and handed it to Yardley, who put it into her purse. She drove them home in complete silence. Tara kept her arms folded across her chest the entire time.

  When they parked in the driveway, Yardley finally asked, “Was it Kevin?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me. Who was it?”

  “I told him to get it. It wasn’t his idea.”

  “How did he get it?”

  Tara didn’t say anything.

  “I swear to you, Tara, I will call one of my friends at the FBI and have Kevin investigated today. They can have a talk with him about supplying alcohol to minors.”

  Tara stared at her in silence.

  Yardley pulled out her phone and began dialing.

  “Wait, Mom. Don’t. I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “He’s already in trouble. Who?”

  “His . . . his dad.”

  “His dad?”

  She nodded. “His dad is laid back like that.”

  Yardley shook her head. She exhaled and said, “I have to go back to work. I want you in the house. No friends over and no going out without my permission. If you go out without asking me first, I’m increasing your grounding to two semesters, and I’ll just throw your phone in the garbage. Are we clear?”

  Tara nodded and went to open her door.

  “And Tara? If you ever call me a bitch again, I will pull you out of school and homeschool you myself. You won’t see your friends again until you turn eighteen and move out. Do you understand me?” Tara nodded. “I need to hear it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand.” She got out and slammed the door. Yardley rubbed her temples for a minute, a headache pushing its way forward from behind her eyes.

  She had to remind herself sometimes that Tara might share traits with Eddie Cal, but she was nothing like him. Not in any of the important ways, not in the ways that made her Yardley’s daughter.

  Once Tara was inside, Yardley took a deep breath and pulled out of the driveway.

  5

  Yardley attempted to focus on her existing cases, but her mind kept drifting to a couple lying in a bed, blood-soaked clothing sticking to pale flesh. Yardley wondered if the Olsens had watched each other die or if one of them had passed too quickly for that.

  The sun was going down by the time she headed home.

  White Sands, Nevada, was forty minutes from the downtown courthouse and federal building in Las Vegas where she worked. Yardley had wanted someplace far enough away that work and home couldn’t meld into each other.

  Her home sat on a hill overlooking the valley, with thick glass for walls to allow in the most sunlight possible. A vast expanse of empty desert surrounded the neighborhood, and farther out, on clear nights, she could see the iridescent glow of the Las Vegas Strip.

  When she walked into the one-story home, she heard music blaring from Tara’s room. Yardley tried her bedroom door, and it was locked.

  Yardley reached up to knock but then dropped her hand. What would be the point? Tara was both more intelligent and more stubborn than her. She could hold a grudge seemingly forever. Yardley wondered if sons were as difficult to raise as daughters.

  Wesley stood over two plates of crab with mashed potatoes and a bottle of wine in the kitchen. He wore a polo shirt, and his gold watch gleamed in the setting sun. In his unobtrusive Tennessee accent, he said, “Rough day?”

  She put her satchel down and sat on one of the barstools at the island in the kitchen. Since Wesley had moved in a few months ago, she’d been spoiled with homemade dinners every night. “Yes, and they seem to be getting more frequent.” She sighed. “I don’t like that boy she hangs out with. I don’t trust him.”

  He shrugged as he put some garnish on the mashed potatoes. “Did your mother ever trust your boyfriends at that age?”

  “My mother couldn’t be pulled away from the bars long enough to notice I had boyfriends.” She dipped a finger in the gravy and licked it off. “Tara has no idea what’s out there. What men see when they look at her. She doesn’t understand what people are really like.”

  He took her hand and kissed it. “You are a great mother. And she, despite the rough edges, is a great kid. Don’t sweat it. Plus we choose who to become, don’t we? She’ll choose right. Just give her time. Now let’s eat before this crab gets cold.”

  They sat at the table on the balcony, overlooking the desert. The sun had set, and the stars took its place, a sparkling blanket in the vast blackness above them.

  They drank good white wine and ate crab as Wesley told her about his day. A law professor at the University of Nevada, he spent the day teaching classes and a couple of hours afterward as a volunteer mentor, supervising interns and young attorneys at the Guardian ad Litem’s Office, an office set up to protect children in the court system.

  Most guardian ad litems dealt with divorce cases, representing the children during nasty custody disputes, but Wesley worked on only those cases where neither parent was fit to take the child. If both parents were deemed unfit for custody, he became the de facto guardian and helped the courts determine what would be best for the child: to live with a relative or to be placed into foster care. His passion for the helpless and underprivileged was one of the reasons Yardley had fallen in love with him.

  They’d met at the law school when Wesley had taught her second-year legal research class. She’d found him exciting. He was handsome—all the girls in class thought so—but his mind was what attracted her. He had an ability to break complex problems into simple components and explain them in ways anybody could understand. To Yardley, simplicity was the highest form of elegance. From then on, any course Professor Wesley Paul taught, she took. Whether she needed the credits or not.

  What followed was the typical cliché: she became his teaching assistant and slowly got to know him. After she graduated, they stayed close, having occasional lunches and dinners as well as drinks on stressful days. There was even one weekend together in Yellowstone when Yardley’s date—Cason Baldwin, ironically—fell through. Wesley insisted on sleeping on the couch.

  But after years of friendship, Wesley finally told her that despite her reverting to her maiden name, cutting her hair short, and never speaking about her past, he knew who
she was, knew her background with Eddie Cal, and had waited for her to reach a place where she could begin thinking about a relationship again. That patience spoke volumes to her.

  After Cal, she had resolved to never be in a relationship again. To never hand her heart over to someone that could laugh while crushing it. But Wesley had been kind to her from the moment they’d met. He was intellectual, but intellectual about practical matters like law and politics rather than art or architecture like Cal. Where Eddie Cal was tall and muscular, Wesley was shorter and more rotund. In many ways, he was Cal’s polar opposite. They’d begun dating a year ago, and he’d moved in with her and Tara nine months later.

  “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?” Wesley asked.

  She touched his hand in apology. “That obvious?”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  She sighed, then sipped her wine and watched the headlights of a car winding down the canyon road ahead. “Do you remember Cason Baldwin? That agent that worked the Boulevard Rapist case with me?”

  He nodded as he kicked his shoes off and leaned back in the seat. “The gentleman you dated before me?”

  She grinned. “That’s the one.”

  “Nice guy. Looks more like he should be smoking pot in a band than a federal agent, though. He should look the part if he wants to be taken seriously. What about him?”

  “He came and saw me today.” She hesitated. “He wants help with something.”

  “Yeah? Exciting case?”

  “He thinks there’s a copycat of Eddie Cal.”

  Wesley stayed silent a long time. So long that she looked at him to make sure he had actually heard her.

  “What does he want with you?” he finally said.

  “He wants my help. There’ve been two couples, one in North Vegas and one down in St. George. Three weeks apart. He thinks there’ll be more.”

  “You’re a prosecutor. What do you have to do with it?”

  “That’s what I told him. He says I have insight into it because of Eddie.”

  He snorted. “That’s ridiculous. You told him to shove it, right?”