Darkness on the Edge of Town

by Black, J. Carson

  “It says in the article her boyfriend killed her. I think that’s probably true. Lundy wouldn’t hang around. He wouldn’t kill her two years later. He would have moved on by then.”

  To pre-teen girls.

  “Found something here!” yelled Officer Oliver from somewhere else in the house. He sounded excited.

  Laura didn’t like being dragged away from her thoughts. Hard enough to keep track of them—they kept doubling back on themselves, trying to make sense of Dale Lundy’s actions.

  “In here!” Oliver called again.

  She left the scrapbook and made her way to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was utilitarian, with a round-shouldered refrigerator and sunny yellow chintz drapes and matching covers for the kitchen chairs. The large hooked rug in the center had been pushed aside to reveal a trapdoor in the old floorboards.

  “Want me to open it?”

  “No,” Laura said.

  He gave her a hostile look. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing for now. We’ll get to it later.”

  He scratched his head. “I don’t see why…”

  “Because she told you, is why,” Redbone said behind her. “Leave it be.”

  Oliver shot him a look of undisguised contempt. He was the son of a city council member, probably felt he was entitled.

  “What do you want to do?” Redbone asked Laura quietly.

  “I want to make sure we don’t have any surprises.” So far, Lundy had been full of surprises. “I want us to make sure we have cover and do this right. We might need assistance from Hazardous Devices.”

  “Good enough for me.” Redbone looked at Oliver and nodded to the door. “You mark the evidence I pointed out in the living room yet?”

  Oliver stared at him, fuming, before brushing past them without a word. Redbone followed him out, ostensibly to make sure he did what he was told.

  Laura looked at Descartes, who had witnessed the exchange from the hallway. “Andrew, wait a minute.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Keep an eye on Oliver for me, would you? Under no circumstances is he to open that trapdoor. It’s a safety issue.”

  “I’ll make sure, you better believe it, ma’am.”

  * * *

  Laura got Victor on the phone and gave him a rundown of what they had found. She read off Lundy’s credit card numbers and gave him a detailed description of the motorhome he was driving, the 1987 Fleetwood Pace Arrow.

  Victor broke in. “Chuck Lehman confessed—“

  “What?”

  “But not to killing Parris. He was sleeping with her.”

  The moment Victor said it, all Lehman’s actions, his evasions, made sense. Hanging out with Cary and Cary’s girlfriend, the falling-out between them.

  “It would explain a lot. The lipstick, for one. He’s gonna plead to contributing to the probation violation and to delinquency of a minor. That’ll put him away for a while.”

  “So you believe him?” Laura asked.

  Victor sighed. “I believe it. Especially after I looked at the time line and it didn’t fit with the Burns killing. Do me a favor and don’t say you told me so.”

  They talked about Lehman, but Laura’s mind was still on Dale Lundy and his cross-country adventure. The idea that he was looking for someone like Misty de Seroux was, in a way, a hopeful sign. He was looking for an emotional connection. That might mean the difference between life and death for the next girl he took.

  He’d kept Alison Burns for five days. Most sexual predators who murdered their victims killed them within the first few hours.

  “…With this?” Victor was asking.

  “What?”

  “You want us to go to the media?”

  “No. I think we should keep it within law enforcement agencies for now. Put out an Attempt to Locate, make sure everybody gets pictures of him, the motorhome, the credit card numbers. We don’t want to scare him out of the area. This weekend he’s supposed to play at the Copper Queen Hotel.”

  “We might get lucky if he used his credit cards, too. Find a paper trail.”

  “I’m hoping.”

  After he hung up she said into the phone: “I told you so.”

  She started photographing the bedroom, paying particular attention to the evidence she had marked: the scrapbook, the wall of photos, the contents of the closet. Chief Redbone had gone back to the evidence room at the PD to pick up more evidence bags—they’d need them.

  She had just walked into the master bathroom when the roar of a shotgun blast reverberated through the cheap wallboard, stunning the air into silence.

  39

  In the first few moments after the blast, Laura heard nothing. She ran to the kitchen like she was running through a dream. Like those movies where the woman runs from her pursuer, the soundtrack screeching and thrumming along with her thoughts, tracking her with a shaking hand-held camera as she blunders through tilting corridors and jack-in-the-box shadows before stumbling onto a scene of unrelenting horror.

  She knew it would be bad.

  Two men down. One breathing, one not. Laura radioed Apalachicola PD, got no one. No one minding the store—the chief en route? Shit shit shit! She called 911. The phone still cradled between her shoulder and her ear as she dropped to her knees beside Andrew Descartes, compressing the carotid, her mind ticking between clinical observation and a panicked string of thoughts, just a kitchen towel and the gloves between her and his blood—unlikely he had AIDS but you never knew—his life leaking out, the phone slipping out from under her chin and dropping to the floor. The air was bright, every airborne fiber, every dust mote, every speck of blood delineated, every sound magnified. Knowing it was hopeless but unable to stop trying.

  Descartes Jesus.

  Oliver moaning, then screaming, like a stuck pig.

  Looking at Descartes, knowing he was finished. One shot to the carotid. Gone.

  Let him go.

  Move on to Oliver—more wounds. Find the worst one and compress that.

  * * *

  Later.

  More sounds: Radio static, a paramedic talking into his shoulder; ripping sensors and snatching bandages and sucking oxygen; the pneumatic wheeze of the gurney bearing Jerry Oliver down the steps to the waiting ambulance, a few blocks to Weems Memorial Hospital, and from there a Medevac to Tallahassee Memorial—if he didn’t die before he got to Weems.

  Jerry Oliver had been shot in the cheek, eye, left shoulder, and upper right chest. Oliver, whom Laura was sure had been the one to open the trapdoor, was going to Weems and, if he was lucky, on to Tallahassee. Andrew Descartes, who had tried to stop him, was going nowhere—not for another couple of hours at least. First he would lie in his own blood while he was photographed from every angle. Then he would be transported to the morgue, evidence tweezered from his wound, his statistics read into a recorder, his organs weighed and measured, his skull sawed in half.

  Andrew Descartes was now evidence in a crime.

  The responding officer—a sheriff’s deputy—looked sheepish after yorking his guts out on the linoleum floor. Uniforms coming, but where the hell were they?

  Where were the techs from the Hazardous Devices unit?

  They would be the ones to handle the 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun still resting in its brackets on the underside of the trapdoor, everything but the muzzle concealed by a homemade plywood box. This she saw with brilliant clarity; her clinical mind divided right down the middle from her more emotional side, the emotional side lagging behind, still in shock. A simple principle. When the trapdoor opens, the shotgun fires: Chief Redbone’s police force wiped out in an instant.

  Laura stood in the torn, blood-spattered kitchen, hands tucked up under her arms from long practice.

  She would not touch anything.

  A paramedic entered the room, pulling another gurney bearing a body bag.

  “You can’t do that,” Laura said.

  “Who are you?”

  I’
m the person who caused all this She held up her shield and gave him her name and rank. “He’s not going anywhere.”

  “The chief—“

  “This is a crime scene. He’s staying here.”

  The sheriff deputy stepped up. “She’s right, man, we have charge of this scene now.”

  Only then did the paramedic leave.

  The room narrowed down to just Laura and the body of Andrew Descartes. She made herself look at him. She was used to looking at the dead, but this was different. She knew him. She’d shared a joke with him not an hour ago. She saw his promise—a good cop who might have grown into an exceptional cop.

  I wonder who will tell his wife.

  She should be the one to do it because she felt responsible. If she hadn’t come here, none of this would have happened. He’d still be at home, getting over strep throat, his new wife babying him with chicken soup…

  The thought suddenly occurred to her: Where was Chief Redbone? She didn’t remember him being around here. Had he already gone to tell Descartes’s wife?

  She wondered how it felt to have your whole police force devastated in the course of a split second. She thought of how his life had been laid out just the way he liked it, his teenage daughters, his sleepy town, dispensing his good ol’ boy wisdom.

  In twenty-three years, I never had to draw my gun in anger.

  That record was shot to shit.

  Laura kept her eye on Andrew Descartes, feeling dizzy. Look at him until you detach. Step back, detach, do your job.

  Never before had her job felt moot. Never until now did she realize what a small dent seeking justice made into grief. Yes, she helped pick up the pieces, but they were still pieces. The aftermath of a tornado. In the face of that destruction, you were helpless. Now it had struck home, and she wondered if her job was worth anything at all.

  She continued to stare at him, like serving some godawful penance. Filling her eye, her soul with him. Her mind straying away, and she, patiently bringing it back, around and around again to the fact: You did this. You’re responsible.

  But now she had to do the right thing. Look around, figure it out. Do your job.

  Buckshot. .00 buckshot, she guessed from the look of the wound. A single pellet, slicing through his carotid like a tiny razor.

  Tears formed at the edge of her eyes, threatening to brim over, a still pool. That, she could not allow to happen. So she blinked. She blinked so hard and so fast she could feel it in the back of her skull, a corresponding ache to the one inside her gut.

  Where was Chief Redbone? The deputy was the only other member of law enforcement here, but when she looked for him he was gone.

  Out to meet the reinforcements, she hoped.

  She heard the toilet flush somewhere in the house. The kid had used the bathroom at a crime scene.

  She’d ream him out when he came back.

  And then she realized it: You have no standing here. She would not be the investigator of this crime. That would fall to the state police, her counterpart in Florida.

  But Laura couldn’t leave. She couldn’t leave Andy Descartes here alone.

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon, Laura and Chief Redbone drove up to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement regional office in Tallahassee to give their statements after handing the crime scene over to two FDLE agents. Both of them were preoccupied with their own thoughts and did not speak. Laura found refuge in the scenery as they drove in and out of the lengthening shadows. The grass along the roadside was a dazzling kelly green from the rain earlier today. The sun’s horizontal rays ignited the trees and shimmered on the blacktop like gold. Laura found herself looking back at the sunset behind them, the left-over clouds turning from tangerine to cherry-red to dark plum.

  Andy Descartes would never see another sunset.

  At FDLE, Laura gave her statement, as clear and detailed as she could remember. When she was through, Special Agent Jack McClellan shut off the tape recorder and smiled. Laura noticed he smiled a lot, but she wasn’t sure why.

  “That should do it. You’re free to go.”

  Free to go where? Laura thought. She pictured herself getting a ride to the Tallahassee airport, changing her ticket, boarding the plane. Maybe sip a cocktail as they passed over the Mississippi and she put the south behind her. Just a quick trip in and out of Florida, leaving an obliterated Apalachicola PD and broken lives in her wake.

  But that wasn’t who she was. “There’s the disposition of the evidence. We need to work that out.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” said Jeremy Poitras, McCellan’s co-agent. He was a massive black man with an exquisitely-shaped shaved head. He wore an expensive suit. “I’m sure we can come to some accommodation.”

  A fancy-ass word for a fancy-ass man. Laura said, “We’ll need to do forensics on the computer, if you find one.”

  “We can work that out,” Poitras said.“ We have very good people here—we can do the specific computer forensics.”

  “I want the computer to go to the DPS lab in Phoenix.”

  McClellan broke in smoothly, “First of all, we don’t know he even has a computer. But if your agency can make their case to us, there’s a good chance we’ll release to you all the evidence that doesn’t pertain to our investigation.”

  “I want to go into the de Seroux house. You understand I have a vested interest in this. Your guys are going to be looking for other things.”

  “That’s fine by me,” Poitras said. “You can certainly tag along, but…” He consulted his watch. “You’d better get down there soon. I have a feeling they’ve already gone in.”

  Laura felt her hostility rise to the surface. “I hope nobody opened any trapdoors,” she said.

  * * *

  The de Seroux house itself seemed normal compared to Lundy’s secret place. Cheap generic furniture. Plenty of fingerprints but little else. There was a desk for a computer, a cheap printer, split phone lines, a surge protector and APS, but the computer (or computers) were gone.

  Again, Laura had the feeling that Lundy wasn’t coming back. He had left the furniture but taken all his paper trail with him; checkbooks, statements, records. There was a square of less-worn linoleum in the room where the computer had been—she guessed it was where he kept his file cabinet.

  The place felt like an abandoned ship.

  The first to enter the de Seroux house was the FDLE Hazardous Devices Unit, entering through the tunnel from Lundy’s side, past the deployed weapon, looking for traps along the way. They found nothing on the other end except a corresponding trapdoor in the floor of de Seroux’s tool shed.

  Laura wondered if Lundy expected his house to be searched and planned for that eventuality.

  She had never been so tired. Perhaps it was because she felt like a guest at her own scene. She was allowed to gather evidence, but always under the watchful eyes of the FDLE special agents. She chafed; she never did well where she didn’t have some control.

  * * *

  They finished processing the house early in the evening of the next day. Laura realized she was starving. She went by the deli on Market and got herself a submarine sandwich and a bottle of water, took them down to Battery Park. It was the first food she’d had all day.

  After finishing her sandwich, she walked out onto the long dock. There was a slight squall out in the bay tonight, the scent of rain hanging in the air, and the sky alternated between bruised blue and copper when the sun came through. Fishing boats—she guessed a lot of them were charters—were coming in at sunset.

  Why did he booby trap the tunnel? That bothered her. If he was protecting the de Seroux house, did he really think the booby trap would stop the police? Or maybe was it just to kill whoever got that far—because he could.

  Maybe he did it because he was embarrassed by the house itself, what it said about him—his obsession with Misty, his shrine to his mother’s memory, the Victorian parlor. Mother and son sewing together. Maybe he wanted to hurt whoever
became privy to his secret life.

  Impossible to know what was in his mind.

  Tomorrow morning they would search the tunnel again. Maybe she’d find her answer then. But she was beginning to believe it was just what her mother used to call pure bloody-mindedness.

  She’d have to ask him when she met him face to face.

  A pristine white sportsfisher was coming in, dropping down into idle just inside the no-wake zone. Freedom’s Daughter was written in blue cursive on the bow. Laura felt her spirit lift just looking at it.

  “I’ve always wanted a boat like that,” Chief Redbone said behind her.

  For a big man, he was light on his feet.

  “Lot of work though,” he added, leaning on the dock railing. “Time and money both.”

  The light had turned red now.

  “That’s a beautiful name for a boat,” Laura said.

  “I sure do second that.”

  Laura felt uncomfortable around him. The only time they had spent together since the tragedy was on the drive to FDLE in Tallahassee. She had not seen him since.

  “How’s it going over there?” he asked now.

  She shrugged. “We haven’t found much.”

  He sighed. “Glad I’m out of it.”

  He didn’t sound devastated. He sounded like his old self. Laura wondered if that was a front.

  “How’s Mrs. Descartes doing?”

  He leaned his back against the railing. His eyes looked like dark pebbles in his face, which seemed unusually slack. “About as well as you’d expect, which is not good at all.”

  “I should have gone with you. I feel responsible.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.” He said it, but she could tell he didn’t believe it.

  “Will she be all right? Financially?”

  “She and Andy belong to the Church of Christ. Don’t have to worry about making ends meet, not in this town. We take care of our own.”

  Laura opened her mouth to tell him she wished she could help, but said nothing. She could tell from the tone of his voice that she in fact wouldn’t be asked to help. She was the stranger here.