Crimson Lake Road (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  “Illegal scripts?”

  He shook his head. “All doctor prescribed. And nothing recent. Other than that he’s clean. But you’re gonna wanna see what I got on Lucas Garrett.”

  “What?”

  “First, I got reports on about twenty cases in there where he didn’t do shit. Lazy as hell. But his disciplinary record is clean, so I had to dig a little harder.” He smiled.

  “What are we, on a game show? Just tell me.”

  “See, now that little comment just added a hundred bucks to your bill.”

  “Sorry, oh wise Brody. Please tell me what you found, pretty please. With sugar on top.”

  “Tell me I’m the best first.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “That wasn’t very sincere.”

  “Brody, for shit’s sake—”

  He laughed. “All right, man, don’t piss yourself. So get this: Garrett used to be married, right. Few years ago they had all sortsa problems, mostly I’m guessing because of his drinking. Talked to an old neighbor of his who said the wife told him Garrett was a high-functioning alcoholic. Anyway, the missus, she goes out and finds another man, right. A bodybuilder. So Garrett is going insane ’cause he doesn’t want a divorce. I included some transcripts of the divorce hearings, and you gotta hear the shit he says. He lost his damn mind. And then one day, outta the blue, the police show up at the wife’s new condo. This is before the divorce went through. They went there on a call of a stabbing. Some gangbanger up the road was stabbed the previous night, and they received a tip that the bodybuilder was the one who did it. So they asked to search the house.”

  “And I’m guessing they found something.”

  He nodded. “The knife. They arrest the dude, only he’s got a solid alibi; he was in Canada at the time.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. So they think maybe it’s the wife, which would be weird as shit for a soccer mom to go out and stab a gangbanger fresh outta the can, but all right, whatever. But she’s got a good alibi, too. The condo only has one entrance, and she’s got a doorbell camera. The camera recorded her and her kid going into the condo at around nine and not coming out again until seven the next morning to take the kid to school. The stabbing was around midnight.”

  “They find anything else in the condo?”

  He nodded. “A shirt with some blood on it. No signs of a break-in.”

  Ricci said, “What about the door cam? Was Garrett on it?”

  “Wasn’t in the reports, but I’ll bet my ass he is.”

  Aster shook his head. “He planted it. He planted the knife and the shirt. How’d you even find this out?”

  “Hey, man, you want dirt on cops, you hire an ex-cop. We got the connections.”

  “They ever bring charges against him?”

  “No. And all this was buried. Buried deep. I’m talkin’ the reports were purged from the system.”

  “Someone wanted it gone that bad, huh?”

  “I’ve seen it buried like this a few times, but it’s always for higher ranks when they don’t want to embarrass the department with a drug or prostitution charge. Never seen it for just a low-level detective. He’s got connections somewhere.”

  Aster looked at Ricci. “Thoughts?”

  She glanced between the two men. “Get his ex on the stand and tear Detective Garrett a new one.”

  48

  Yardley was loading the dishwasher when Tara told her she was going out. Yardley checked the clock on the oven: it was past eight.

  “Where to?” she said casually, not looking up from the dishes.

  “Just some stuff I gotta finish up at the lab before tomorrow. Be back soon.”

  Yardley waited until Tara was out of the house before she threw on her shoes and left. She hated having to do it, but she opened an app that she had gotten installed by the US Attorney’s Office IT division when she bought her and Tara’s phones. It allowed her to track Tara’s phone from anywhere in the world, even if it was off and its location services disabled.

  She got into her car and gave Tara a few minutes’ head start, then pulled out into the street and followed the map. Tara got onto the freeway, and Yardley followed. Anxiety gnawed at her. What if Tara really was going to the labs? It was entirely possible she was corresponding with her father because she felt she had never had one, and maybe she wanted to get to know him before she didn’t have the chance anymore. Though his appeals were stalled, they wouldn’t be forever, and eventually the State of Nevada was going to kill Eddie Cal. Maybe Tara just wanted some conversations with him first? The problem was that Tara didn’t know Cal like she did.

  Cal would never do anything out of some sentimentality, even for his own daughter. If he was taking the time to correspond and meet with her, he was using her for something. And he had an ability to put people under a spell. A combination of superficial charm, intellect, and stunning good looks. It disarmed people in the way the beauty of a spider’s web might disarm a fly.

  Tara got off the freeway and drove to an industrial section of Vegas consisting of cheap office space and warehouses. Several storage unit businesses were in the area, and the train tracks cut right through here.

  The road wasn’t busy, and Yardley was worried Tara would spot her, so she stayed far enough back that her headlights wouldn’t be visible. The map showed Tara’s phone as a blue dot on the surface streets, and Yardley would glance at it every half a minute or so.

  The area became even more industrial the farther she drove, with factories overtaking most of the office buildings. The factories were all pushed up against the red rock mountains, giving the place an otherworldly feel. Like a colony on some distant planet.

  Tara pulled in front of a small office building.

  Yardley turned her lights off and parked on the street. She watched Tara hurry up a set of stairs to the second floor, and the blue dot stopped on the map. No one was around, and the area had an abandoned feel to it.

  Yardley got out and made her way over to the stairs and went up. There were two offices on each floor, and the light was on in the second office. The blinds were drawn, and she couldn’t see inside, but she put her ear to the door and could hear movement inside. She went back down the stairs and around the corner and waited.

  A few minutes later, Tara came down the stairs carrying something. They were large boxes but must’ve been filled with something light enough for a lithe seventeen-year-old girl to carry. She put them in the trunk of her car and then got in and pulled away. Yardley lifted her phone and sent out a text.

  It was a good forty minutes before the sedan pulled up to the office building. Yardley had been sitting in her car, trying to distract herself by listening to music. Her stomach was in knots, and horrific scenario after horrific scenario kept running through her mind of what Eddie Cal had gotten her little girl to do for him.

  An Asian woman in sweats hopped out of the sedan and came over as Yardley got out of her SUV.

  “So do I even want to know?” the woman said.

  “I would really appreciate if we just kept it between us, Ella.”

  “Hey, snitches get stitches, right?”

  Yardley led her to the office. Ella was an in-house investigator at the US Attorney’s Office who had worked closely with Yardley over the years. They were both in male-dominated professions ruled by a machismo culture. It had created a bond between them, a sense that they had to look out for each other. So when Ella said she wouldn’t tell anyone what she saw, Yardley knew she meant it.

  Ella pulled out the universal lock pick, and within seconds the lock was opened. Yardley was about to open the door when Ella said, “Stop!”

  She pointed to the top of the door and the sensor that was attached. Ella had brought a small leather case with her. She took out what looked like a tuning fork and held it up to the sensor. It made a soft humming noise, and after a few seconds Ella put it away.

  “All yours,” Ella said. “Better I don’t see w
hat’s in there.”

  “I really appreciate this.”

  “Good, because you’re taking me out to an expensive dinner for it. And if you do something that ends up on the news, I’m denying I was ever here.” She grinned and hesitated a moment. “Good luck, Jess. I’m going to miss you at the office.”

  They hugged, and Yardley waited until she left before opening the door.

  49

  Baldwin couldn’t sleep. He lay on his silk sheets staring up at the ceiling, thinking about meeting Scarlett at her house for dinner earlier, her words running around his head, haunting him.

  “I’m keeping it. I’d like you to be a part of the life of your child, but if you don’t want anything to do with us, then fine, we’ll do it without you.”

  “You have no idea what’s out there in the world, Scarlett. No idea what people are capable of.”

  “It’s not your choice, Cason.”

  She went to get up, and he held her wrist.

  “Having a child would be like being held over a cliff every second of every day, wondering what was happening to him. If he was alive or dead or tied up in some freak’s basement.”

  “Let go of me,” she said, pulling away.

  He’d always thought he’d feel some elation at becoming a father, some sense of immortality that a part of him would live on after he was gone, but he felt neither of those things. The only thing he felt was a sickening dread.

  He rose and went to the bathroom to splash some water on his face and take some CBD oil, something he’d been using to help him sleep, when he noticed the picture of Harmony he had taped up. He stared at it a long time. The thought of what she might be seeing right now, of what she might be going through, wouldn’t leave him. Like some poison that was seeping into his skin and going deeper and deeper into him. He looked at himself in the mirror a moment and then got dressed.

  Detective Reece had been right about one thing: Child crimes investigators were not like other investigators. The child crimes detectives and federal agents he had known, the great ones, had a stomach for it. They could place their feelings aside and work the case. He wasn’t sure he could do that.

  The apartment complex he drove to looked like a place that was near being condemned by the health department for unsanitary living conditions. The dumpster overflowed with trash, garbage was scattered on the sidewalk, and the parking lot was full of broken-down cars that probably hadn’t moved in weeks or months. The complex itself was outside of the city, a place that wasn’t near any schools, churches, shopping malls, or anywhere else children might gather. The majority of residents here weren’t allowed anywhere kids might congregate.

  There were different tracks for sex offenders depending on what they’d been convicted for and how severe a threat their parole officers deemed them to be to the public. Track C allowed them to live at home and be around children, a track reserved for people who’d committed crimes against adults and had no proclivities toward children. Track B was for those with proclivities toward children but who were deemed not to be a severe threat, like those who had undergone chemical castration. Track A was little used and reserved only for those who had served their prison time but were still deemed a severe threat to the public. They couldn’t live anywhere near children, but they had to live somewhere. So places like Green Leaves Apartments were funded by the Bureau of Prisons to house them until they could prove themselves capable of moving to track B.

  Baldwin had been here a couple of times years ago, and the place hadn’t changed at all. Music blared from somewhere, loud metal, and empty beer cans littered the halls. A garbage can against the wall flowed over like the dumpster, mostly with bottles of booze, packages of cigarettes, and the cream-colored boxes with no outer markings the marijuana companies used when they delivered the drug.

  Baldwin knocked on the door of the apartment. A thin man with glasses and a short mohawk answered. He had large brown eyes and was missing one hand. He swallowed when he saw Baldwin and said, in his soft voice, “What do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you, Orson.”

  “I haven’t done anything. I’ve been straight and narrow.”

  “I’m sure you have. I’m not here about you.”

  “Who then?”

  “Can we talk inside?”

  Orson hesitated, then opened the door for him to come in. Baldwin entered the apartment. It was clean to the point of obsession; the carpet even had the freshly vacuumed wave patterns, and the air had the scent of bleach.

  Baldwin had used Orson in the past for information on cases unrelated to child crimes, and he had proved reliable.

  He pulled out the photo of Harmony Pharr. “I’m looking for this girl. She was taken from behind her home on—”

  “The Executioner, right? Yeah, I’ve been reading about it.”

  He took the photo in his good hand and looked at it for a few moments. His other hand had been taken in a car accident and replaced with a thick plastic replica that looked like a mannequin hand. Baldwin didn’t like him holding the photo and felt itchy till he’d handed it back.

  “Sorry, can’t help you. I’m not connected to that world at all anymore.”

  “I’m not your parole officer. I just want to find her. And I know you’re connected to all the right forums on the dark net. I was hoping you could see if anyone has posted anything about her.”

  “Of course they have. She’s beautiful.”

  A stab of anger coursed through him, and he had to swallow it down. “I mean maybe if someone posted something about taking her, or someone who maybe knows something about it that isn’t in the news.”

  “You work child crimes now?”

  Baldwin put the photo away. “Can you help or not?”

  “I can look around. What’s in it for me?”

  “Hey, I saved your ass when—”

  “And I paid that back. That info I gave you on the guy who was stabbing cab drivers led right to him, and I sure as shit didn’t see my name in the news. Didn’t get any credit, and my parole officer didn’t believe me when I told him.”

  Baldwin took a deep breath. “Fine. Find me something, and we’ll say that I owe you a favor. And as long as the favor is within reason, I’ll do everything I can to make it happen.”

  Orson nodded. “I’ve got a job now and a steady girlfriend. I’m on good meds. I gotta move out of this shithole, Cason. I want a house and a dog and all that normal shit. So you come testify at my hearing that you think I’m ready for track B, and I’ll see what I can find out.”

  Baldwin watched him a moment. He bit his lower lip and then released it. Taking out a card from his wallet, he said, “This better not come back to bite me in the ass, Orson.” He laid the card on the coffee table. “Find me anything you can. I don’t know how much time she’s got left.”

  50

  Yardley flipped on the light. The office Tara had entered was large, with two additional rooms and a long hallway that led down to a bathroom. But it was completely bare. Nothing on the walls, the carpets clean—when she glanced into the first office, she didn’t even see the pressed-down markings on the carpet indicating a desk had been there. She continued down the hall to the second office, next to the bathroom. She opened the door and quietly gasped.

  Paintings were lined up against the wall. At least six of them. She would recognize the style anywhere. Sharp slashes of paint, human figures so accurate they could pass for a photograph, the sky always in the middle of a chaotic storm of black or gray. Never blue and sunny.

  The angled signatures in the lower right corner just confirmed what she’d known the second she saw them: they were Eddie Cal’s paintings. Ones she’d never seen before. Ones he’d hidden from her.

  Yardley slid down against the wall and sat there, staring at them. To an objective observer, the paintings would appear expert and beautiful. The beauty would be almost stunning—until one stared at them long enough. After a certain time, a quiet unease would grow. At gal
lery showings, Yardley had watched people stare at Cal’s paintings with wonder but then quickly move on and not look at the rest. Some couldn’t help but stare for a long time, and those were the ones who purchased them. The ones who Cal’s work spoke to on a spiritual level.

  Was her daughter one of those people?

  The box she’d carried out of there must have contained some of his paintings, but why? What possible use—

  It struck Yardley just then in a flash. In one powerful moment she saw the entire relationship between Tara and her father and why she was leaving with his paintings.

  Yardley inhaled deeply and then exhaled slowly, trying to release her growing panic with the breath. Then she rose and left the office, locking the front door behind her.

  51

  The trial seemed to come much too quickly. The days had gone by in a flash, with Yardley working from sunup to sundown at the DA’s Office, only taking breaks to go on walks and eat lunch at her desk.

  She found herself so exhausted in the mornings she’d taken to drinking three cups of coffee right on waking up and another three at lunch and dinner. To sleep at night, she had to take pills, which would make her even groggier the next day.

  She had won on all five of Aster’s arguments in his motion. Weston and Aster kept getting into it again in court, but each time Ricci took over and calmed down the tension. Yardley offered life with the possibility of parole again, which Aster turned down.

  She and River met for lunch frequently, with a trip to a wine bar late one Saturday thrown in at the last minute. River insisted they go, arguing that Yardley needed to take a break from work, and they only went because River came to the house and dragged her out.

  Yardley told her about what she had found Tara doing.

  “So she’s selling them?” River said.

  Yardley nodded, staring down at her wineglass. “He needs money for his appeals, and he’s using her. I don’t know what her motivation is, but he’s got something planned for her.”