*
One more thing he had to do: mail the letters. Unlike his mother, he faced his responsibilities.
The pile of letters were on the seat next to him: one for the chief, one for Dan’s parents, one for Kellee’s parents. One for Erin.
He didn’t know where to send Erin’s letter in Germany. Jeff, Michael Ramey‘s brother, had given him the address, but he’d been a little distracted lately and had lost it. He could look through his mother’s address book; she’d have his address.
He pictured that, looking through her address book while she made him lunch.
Chapter Fifty-One
Since she couldn’t do anything, Laura went home to officially start her vacation. For the first time in years, she felt disconnected from her work. It had consumed too much of her time and energy. Nice to think about puttering around in the garden, going for long hikes, spending time with Tom—if that was still a viable option. She turned on the TV while divesting herself of her work clothes. That was how she heard about it—on the news. The phone started ringing at the same time, but she turned the ringer down and sat on the edge of the bed, mesmerized by the scene, watching as the tech with the Coconino County medical examiner’s office wheeled a gurney out of the blue house where Barbara Wingate lived.
Surprised that she wasn’t surprised.
The reporter, a brunette with a wide mouth, talked over the buzzing in Laura’s ears. Laura caught the words “murder-suicide.”
Suddenly it hit her, smashing into her stomach, a double-cut to the throat.
She remembered Josh Wingate that first day, how she thought he was trying to be a good cop even though he had lost his best friend.
Tears spilled out of her eyes and down her cheeks and onto the coverlet. Her chest ragged, and suddenly she was sobbing, as if a dam had given out and all the hurt and pain of the world poured out of her soul.
That was the state she was in when Tom Lightfoot found her.
*
They lay tangled together on the bed, Tom stroking her wet face.
“It’s okay, Bird,” he said, holding her eyes with his. Stroking her as if she were a frightened animal.
She had let go, let the tears pour out. She realized at some point the tears weren’t for Barbara Wingate or Josh Wingate, but for herself. Something was gone, something she couldn’t quite recognize, but she knew it from the shape of its absence. Gone from her life.
Making love to Tom had been wonderful at the time, comforting beyond belief, but now she felt stale. Stale and incredibly weary and sad.
Tom looked in her eyes, said the right things, but she could almost feel the division between them, as if it were physical. Making love had been an illusion. Something was going on. It was in the way he looked at her, his eyes not quite focusing on her. Focusing around her.
What was it—pity?
She felt her heart close up. Had to get out of the bed. She got up and trailed the sheet to the bathroom, suddenly not wanting to be naked in front of him.
Weird.
She looked at her face in the mirror, the puffiness under her red-rimmed eyes. The ophthalmologist saying, We can fix that.
She closed the door to the bathroom and put the lid down on the toilet and just sat there, wondering what was going on. Tom had made love to her. It was like any and every other time, more or less. And yet she knew it was over.
After a while she got up and took a shower. Washing him away. She wrapped herself in a towel and walked back out into the bedroom.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his jeans, no shirt. Staring at the floor.
Looking like a man who dreaded what he was about to do.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
He looked up, his face immobile. Eyes sad, but she could see the resolve there.
“It just isn’t working out, is it?” she said. Trying to sound flippant, like it didn’t hurt her.
He didn’t say anything.
“It was a mistake. This whole living-together thing. You’re a free spirit, I knew that. You need your space. You like your lifestyle just the way it is, thank you very much, you don’t need anybody and neither do I.”
She sounded bitter to her own ears.
He stood up. “Bird—”
“Don’t say it. Just get the fuck out.”
She walked past him, ripped a shirt off a hanger in the closet, pulled on the slacks she’d just gotten out of from work. Forgetting her underwear. Screw it.
She took her shoes and her car keys with her, put the shoes on out on the porch. Yelled back into the house. “When I get back, you’d better be gone.”
Then she drove off the Bosque Escondido.
On the road through Vail, she wondered where she should go. Back to work? No. No way.
She got to the freeway exit, found herself on I-10 going east. Back toward Lordsburg. After Lordsburg there was Deming, then Las Cruces. From there she had a choice: continue east to Alamogordo, or south to El Paso.
She didn’t stop until she reached El Paso.
Chapter Fifty-Two
There was a place in El Paso Laura had hoped to find—a little park with a water tower, where she and her parents had stopped for lunch on one of their road trips, when she was eleven. There’d been a boy in the park, and it was clear he was attracted to her. They spent maybe a half hour together, and never saw each other again—the first time in her memory she’d felt that rush through her system, that attraction to the opposite sex. Better than any drug. But what good had that attraction ever done her?
She found two water towers, but no park. Wondered why the hell she’d driven all this way, what had gotten into her head.
After a night at the Motel 6 reading supermarket tabloids, watching reality shows, and eating bad Chinese takeout, she drove back home, no clearer in her mind about Tom, except that she wanted him back. The house was empty, though: every trace of him gone. She walked to the corrals. His pickup gone, his trailer gone, the old bronc Ali—all gone.
Following the horse trail back to her empty house, she reached a patch of mesquite. And there was Frank Entwistle, sitting on a tree stump.
“How you doing, kiddo?”
“How do you think?”
He had his crimson blazer folded over his knee. The one he wore to court almost every day of that terrible summer when Ricky Lee Worrell went on trial in the death of her parents.
“What are you going to do now?”
Laura shrugged. “I’m going to counseling.” Counseling, as far as she was concerned, was just a word right now. Something she’d have to go through and hopefully come out better on the other side. She had no idea what it entailed and had no desire to know. Just Do It. Starting on Monday.
She hoped the counselor could do something about this stone in her gut, but she wasn’t optimistic.
Frank crossed one knee over the other. He wore white loafers—old man’s shoes.
“He didn’t dump you. You know that, don’t you?”
Laura crossed her arms to keep the tears down in her chest where they belonged. “It sure feels that way to me.”
“You want to know what I think?”
“Sure, why not? I’m sure everybody’ll have an opinion.”
He looked unusually serene today, the way he had appeared in his coffin. Like an old warrior who had finally earned his rest. “He wanted you to be the one to feel it, not him.”
“Hey, I was the one who wanted a relationship.”
Entwistle gave her a look. “You really think that?”
“Look, I gave myself freely. I wanted to make it work—”
She stopped. That wasn’t exactly true.
Frank stood up, folding the ugly blazer over his arm. “You liked the idea and then tried to make him fit. He could have been anybody. Don’t you think he knew it?”
Laura didn’t have an answer for that.
“Tell you what, you weren’t all wrong—wanting someone to love.” He made a fake gun with
his finger and pointed it at her.
“Don’t give up on it.”
And then she was alone again.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Richie called her a week later. All the pieces were falling into place; she could hear it in his voice.
He told her about the blog on Josh Wingate’s computer, left up for them to read. “Kind of like a suicide note.”
A suicide note from the age of social media.
He gave her the details: Josh had used the same 12-gauge shotgun he’d used on Dan and Kellee to kill his mother and then himself. “She was making him lunch,” Richie added. “Shot her point-blank in the face—a real mess. Kind of a shame, she was such a looker.”
There he went again. Laura inwardly groaned.
“Then he put the gun in his mouth and used his big toe to blow himself to kingdom come.” He paused. “Something interesting came up on another front. Jamie Cottle was in a Catholic youth group run by Barbara Wingate.”
“You mean the catechism class?”
“Nah, more like a youth group after school. According to one of the kids I interviewed, those two were thick as peas in a pod. Wonder what they talked about.”
“I’ll bet she wanted him to keep trying for Kellee.”
“Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Big-time. Stoke up his fantasy, get him fired up. Couldn’t hurt, I guess. Maybe Kellee would have tumbled to him. Persistence can wear a person down. That’s how I got my wife.”
Laura didn’t want to go there, so she said, “Barbara Wingate could be manipulative.”
“Uh-huh. She manipulated herself right into an early grave.”
“So. How are things going?”
“Believe it or not, we all kind of miss you. You are coming back, aren’t you?”
Laura held on to the phone. She looked out the window at a roadrunner crossing the back patio, a lizard dangling from its beak. Beautiful around here, but enough was enough.
Already wishing she was back in the squad bay, bantering with the guys, feeling the electricity as she zeroed in on an answer to a particularly tough case.
Missing it like it was a ghost limb.
“Laura? You there?”
“Oh, yeah,” she told Richie. “I’m here. And you don’t have to worry—I’m coming back.”
Big-time.
__________
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Leslie Boyer, M.D.; Tracy Bernstein; John and Doreen Bransky; Karen Brichoux: Sinclair Browning; Tony Copeland; Pat D’Antonio, MD; Mike and Ani DeHart; Leonard Fieber, MD; J.A. Jance and Bill Schilb; Kallie Johnson; Judy Layton; the incomparable band Little Feat—Paul Barrere, Sam Clayton, Craig Fuller, Kenny Gradney, Richie Hayward, Shaun Murphy, Bill Payne, and Fred Tackett—and Andy Martin at Deep South Entertainment; Janet Loeb; Jennifer and Billy Lopez; Judy Layton; Carol Davis Luce; Jane Bunker Overy; Cliff McCreedy; Jean McCreedy; Elizabeth Owen; Ziggy Pawlowski; Michael Prescott; Sharon Putnam; Scott Shackleford; Barbara Schiller and Darrell Harvey; TPD sergeant Jim Schneden; Jen Stead and Orville Wiseman of Wiseman Aviation; and Alice Volpe.
And thanks to my compadres in crime: Sheila Cottrell, Liz Gunn, J.M. “Mike” Hayes, E.J. McGill; and Susan Cummins Miller.
Thanks especially to my husband and First Reader, Glenn McCreedy, and my mother, Mary Falk.
And to John Cheek of Cops ‘n Writers, DPS detective Terry Johnson, and TPD detective Phil Uhall—as usual, you guys went above and beyond.
About the Author
Hailed by bestselling author T. Jefferson Parker as “a strong new voice in American crime fiction,” J. Carson Black has written fifteen novels. Her thriller, The Shop, reached #1 on the Kindle Bestseller list, and her crime thriller series featuring homicide detective Laura Cardinal became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Although Black earned a master’s degree in operatic voice, she was inspired to write a horror novel after reading The Shining. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Web:
http://www.jcarsonblack.com
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/JCarsonBlack.authorpage
Twitter:
@jcarsonblack
Newsletter (J. Carson Black News and Events): https://www.facebook.com/JCarsonBlack.authorpage/app_100265896690345
# # #
Also by J. Carson Black:
The Laura Cardinal Novels
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Dark Side of the Moon
Cry Wolf
The Laura Cardinal Novels (omnibus)
The Shop
Icon
The Survivors Club
The Maggie O’Neil Mysteries
Roadside Attraction
Writing as Margaret Falk
Darkscope
Dark Horse
The Desert Waits
Writing as Annie McKnight
The Tombstone Rose
Superstitions
Short Stories
The BlueLight Special
Pony Rides
NIGHT GAME
(A NIGHT SERIES NOVEL)
CAROL DAVIS LUCE
Copyright 1996 by Carol Davis Luce
Sudalu Media publication 2010
1st Printing: 1996
Kensington Publishing Corp.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author.
For my brothers Harry L Davis and Alan (Crazy) Christian, and for the newest additions to the Luce clan, sweet little Jacob and Jessica.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following people for their contribution to this novel:
These people gave me an inside glimpse into the hotel and casino business: Jim Crane, Jeri Coppa Knudson, Bill Knudson, and Ted Benture.
Thanks to supportive friends, family, and readers JoAnn Wendt, Kay Fahey, Patricia Wallace Estrada, Cathy Pierce, Patti and Michael Specchio, and Alonna Shaw.
Special thanks to Priscilla Walden.
Chapter One
The blue-white incandescence of the King’s Club marquee spilling through a narrow slit in the blackout drapes provided the man in the hotel room the additional light he needed to do what he had come to do. The air conditioner whirred softly. In the bed behind him, a lone occupant lay sleeping. The Monk listened to the old woman’s light snores as he stood at the dresser and rummaged through her fat handbag.
Usually he worked silently, coming and going without making a sound. But not tonight. The old woman was deaf. He had found her hearing aid, looking like a wad of pink bubble gum, on the nightstand. And if that weren’t enough, the sounds of her own snoring would mask any noise he might make.
The Monk opened another compartment in her purse. He pointed the beam of the penlight inside, illuminating vial upon vial of tablets and capsules, boxes of lozenges and suppositories, both prescription and over-the-counter—a regular pharmacy housed within cheap imitation alligator. He scanned the labels, found what he was looking for, popped the lid and poured the pink-and-blue capsules into the pocket of his windbreaker. He returned the empty vial to the purse and moved on. The next compartment was crammed with coupon books, casino circulars, and a dozen slot tokens—funny money embossed with the hotel name, KING’S CLUB, Sparks, Nevada.
He hefted the bag. A good ten pounds, maybe fifteen, even. It never ceased to amaze him how these old gals managed to tote so much weight around for hours on end. And that was just the half of it. To get to gaming paradise they rode all day on a crowded, noxious bus, then shuffled through one line after another with fistfuls of promotion packets to redeem casino freebies, stayed up around the clock pulling slot handles or staring at bingo or keno boards, and still they found time and energy to slip in a little sightseeing before boarding the same noxious bus again forty-eight hours later. The gambling junkie, no hardier creature existed.
Tucked away in a blue corduroy pouch he found cash, credit cards, traveler’s checks, and jewelry. He pocketed a few bil
ls, spilled the jewelry onto the dresser top, and sorted through it with a leather-gloved hand. Most of the pieces were bulky and old-fashioned—brooches, clip earrings, and bracelets—nothing that interested him, too easily identifiable. He returned the jewelry to the pouch.
Behind him he heard a faint sound, like a snort, then all was quiet. He turned his head slowly, saw the old lady sitting straight up in bed. She stared at him, her eyes enormous in her pale, thin face. From across the room he could see in her expression confusion, disbelief, and fear. The fear was unmistakable. It was that particular raw fear that he could see and sometimes smell, that gave him a delicious sense of superiority, a sense of power.
If he decided to walk out of this room right now, in all likelihood he would get away scot-free. Although their paths had crossed earlier in the day when she had asked him to direct her to her room, it was doubtful she had yet made the connection.
Carefully replacing the jewelry pouch in the purse, the Monk turned slowly and moved toward the bed. Her wide-eyed gaze did not leave his until he reached her side, at which time she glanced askew at something on the nightstand.
The thin beam of his penlight crawled over the objects there. Hearing aid, eyeglasses, an open pill vial, and the telephone.
He lifted the vial. A dozen tiny white pills. Nitroglycerin? He closed his fingers around the vial, looked at her.
One puffy-veined hand went to her chest and the other instinctively reached for her medication. Recognition suddenly sprang into her eyes and her hand froze in midair. He was no longer a stranger to her.
He waited for her to make the first move.
For an old woman with a bum heart and bad eyesight she surprised him with the swiftness in which she left the bed and darted across the room toward the door. He should have known better than to underestimate a gambling junkie, he thought as he lunged after her.
He caught her at the door, pulling her away as she clawed at the handle. Her body was light and as fragile as a sparrow’s. As she struggled against him, he hoped her bones weren’t as brittle as they felt, that they wouldn’t snap under the slightest pressure, that she didn’t bruise easily. This death, he decided, would have to look natural.
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