The Fault Tree

by Louise Ure

  He snicked the truck door shut behind him.

  Now. Do it now. Before your hands start shaking and your knees give out.

  He was at the back bumper when she opened the car door. He reached in, grabbed a handful of dark hair as she turned to face him, and pulled her head back as far as the headrest would allow. He raked the knife across her pale, exposed throat.

  Blood spurted over his hands and across her shirt, deep brown-red in the dying light. She didn’t make a sound.

  Chapter 53

  I had to wait almost an hour for the cab, so it was close to eight o’clock by the time I arrived home, and then it took me a few minutes to find the right bills. I keep the singles flat in my wallet, fold the fives in half, the tens in thirds, and give the twenties one fold the long way. When I’d sorted out the right amount, I jammed the wallet back into my jeans, juggled the jasmine plant and my cane, and got out of the car. The taxi pulled away and I tapped up the gravel driveway.

  Lucy hit metal where I didn’t expect any to be. A car. An ice-edged breath, Dupree’s words of caution ringing in my ears. I patted the shape of the taillights and trailed my fingers across the length of the bumper, relaxing when I traced the raised dots on the Braille bumper sticker Juanita had put on her car in my honor: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOO CLOSE.

  “Juanita?” Maybe she was already inside.

  Then I smelled it. Coppery, metallic. I tapped around to the driver’s side and pulled the already unlatched door wide open. Something soft and wet rolled onto me and I jumped back with a scream, dropping the potted plant.

  Backpedaling across the gravel, I lost my balance and landed on my butt, my palms crushed into the sharp-edged stones. My legs were pinned by the weight that had fallen from the car. I made small mewling sounds and scooted as far away as I could.

  When I had regained my breath, I moved forward cautiously and felt the ground around me. A double-sided metal button in the gravel, like the kind you have on a jeans jacket. A denim-clad leg. The softness of a pliable, downy arm, covered by something wet and sticky. I moved my hands up the torso and read Juanita’s face with my fingers, the same way I had when I asked her what she looked like now. The wisps of hair near her ears. The almost snub nose. The generous lips.

  Then I found those other wet, leering lips on her throat, where no smile belonged.

  And tumbling from her lap, three small boxes wrapped in crinkly paper and set off by curled ribbon. Birthday presents.

  I screamed again. But this time the scream was met by an answering groan from the woman I held in my arms.

  I sat stiff and upright on the couch. Detective Dupree leaned over me and sighed.

  It hadn’t taken long to get help for Juanita. Mr. Lotz from next door heard my cries and came tearing around the side of the rosebushes so fast that I bet he was still picking the thorns out. He called 911 right away, and while it seemed like a decade before the ambulance arrived, the first cops got there in only three or four minutes.

  Police radios now echoed from a circle-the-wagons formation in front of the house. The front door stayed open with the movement of police in and out. Dupree had been talking about me rather than to me for the last few minutes. I felt like an eavesdropper. Interested but not participating. Numb.

  “Get the forensic techs in here,” Dupree said. “And get some samples from this woman so she can get cleaned up.”

  I was still covered with Juanita’s blood and held my hands, palms up on my knees, like unwelcome visitors. Someone knelt beside me, held my hand at the wrist, and scraped under my nails.

  “Ms. Moran, can you hear me?” Dupree’s voice now came at me straight on. Hunkered down in front of me. “What time did you expect Ms. Greene to get here tonight?”

  “I knew she’d probably come by—it’s my birthday—but we didn’t set a time.”

  “And when you found her, did you hear anything outside? Footsteps? Voices? Maybe a car starting up?”

  I shook my head, my cheeks wet with tears. I had nothing to tell him and I wasn’t going to play detective anymore. No more antifreeze. No more out-of-tune engines. No more California license plates. Look what happened when I tried to interfere.

  “Does she have any enemies?”

  “Just me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is my fault. He attacked her because he thought it was me.”

  Dupree’s silence told me more than any “there there” pat on the shoulder could have. It told me how close my own death had been.

  “Why don’t you go get cleaned up? We’ll need your clothes bagged for evidence. And don’t worry, we’ll have a police vehicle outside the house tonight.”

  I rose like a sleepwalker, followed the female officer Dupree had assigned to me, and shut the bedroom door behind us.

  I started to unbutton my shirt, but my fingers froze into icy sticks. My imagination had always been much sharper than my eyesight and now I relived Juanita’s attack as if I had witnessed it. Strong hands bared a throat. Eyes opened wide. A burning, tearing, severing across the neck. Not even enough time to scream. The loop played without ceasing behind my open eyes.

  I knew that if I hadn’t told the police I’d heard that scream, this wouldn’t have happened. If I hadn’t insisted I could identify the car, everything would still be okay. If I hadn’t made Juanita call in the license plate number, my friend wouldn’t be in a hospital bed now, fighting for her life.

  I asked my patrol woman-babysitter to check on Juanita. She came back into the room a moment later, saying that she was still in emergency care, but, barring any complications, she was expected to live.

  I wished I could say the same about myself. Even Dupree’s promise of a police guard didn’t seem like enough. The madman had found me three times now. And all three times it had ended in near death.

  What was to stop him from coming back to finish the job? I wrapped my arms around myself but kept shuddering.

  Chapter 54

  Dupree ran a hand through his thinning hair and glanced out Cadence Moran’s living room window. The swirling police lights gave it a carnival atmosphere outside. Squawks and bleats from the police communications channel echoed from the radio he had clipped to his belt, the volume lowered to such a level that it sounded like a faraway storm.

  He shook his head and went to join Nellis in the front yard.

  “Think it’s the same guy?” Nellis asked.

  “Unless we can turn up some crazed ex-boyfriend or someone with a grudge against Juanita Greene. You find anything out here?” Juanita Greene had been loaded on a gurney and hustled to the hospital within moments of the ambulance’s arrival. All that was left in the driveway was her Toyota and a dark stain that had already seeped into the gravel.

  “She lost a lot of blood, but it looks like she might have been turning her head, so she avoided the worst of it. EMT says she’ll probably make it.”

  “Just one across the throat?” Dupree thought of her bright smile. The cockeyed way she’d look at you when she really disagreed with your train of thought but wanted to be polite.

  “Yeah, looks like he was aiming for the carotid but was in a hurry. Maybe a hunting knife—the lab might be able to tell us more,” Nellis said.

  “Anything from the canvass?”

  “The neighbor who called 911 remembers a car waiting at the curb a couple of days ago, but nothing today.” Nellis gestured to a uniformed policeman unfurling yellow crime scene tape across the front of the yard. “He talked to the lady across the way. She says there was a light-colored vehicle parked down the street for a while. Doesn’t remember much about it but says it wasn’t familiar to her. Whoever it was, it’s gone now.”

  “I suppose asking for a plate number is a waste of time?”

  “Maybe we’ve already got it,” Nellis said.

  Dupree turned away from the pulsing police lights and back toward the house.

  “Keep the press away. We don’t want him to know she
’s still alive.”

  Chapter 55

  I had given the policewoman my bloodstained clothes but couldn’t make myself lie still in bed. I grabbed fresh clothes from the closet and rejoined Dupree at the front door.

  “Detective?” I stood in the open doorway and tugged the T-shirt down over my sweatpants.

  “What is it, Ms. Moran?” Dupree’s soft voice.

  My God. I just wanted out of this. But if there was even the slimmest wisp of hope that it would help them find the man who did this…

  “Over by the driver’s door. In the gravel. I just remembered. There’s a metal button—from a denim jacket, I think. It doesn’t feel like the same kind of button I have on my jacket, and Juanita wasn’t wearing one.”

  Dupree told his partner to look for the button. Nellis’s cigarette-laden voice called back to him a moment later. “Got it.”

  A gust of desert night air swept across the back of my neck like bat wings.

  I could feel his presence as cold and hard as that metal button in the detective’s hand.

  Chapter 56

  Juanita’s brother Books came by to pick me up the next morning. I made sure I recognized his voice before I opened the door. Juanita had been moved from intensive care. It looked like the worst was over.

  Like Juanita, Books had his father to thank for his height, but some long-recessive gene had given him a soft voice to go with it. I strained to hear him over the traffic noise.

  “Can she talk yet?”

  “Just a little bit. She asked to see you.”

  “What do the doctors think?”

  “That she was damn lucky. He hit her just as she was opening the car door, and she must have turned her head or she would have died right there. But she’ll make it. She’s a real fighter.”

  I turned to the window so Books couldn’t see my face. I agreed with his assessment of Juanita’s strength, but “a real fighter” had been one of his sister’s “phrases most in need of eradication.” “Did you ever hear somebody say, ‘He won’t make it, he’s always been a wimp—never could stand pain’?” she would ask. “Nope, it’s always, ‘He’s a real fighter, he won’t give up that easy.’ Where are all the Caspar Milquetoasts of the world? Where are the guys who say, ‘Hoo-boy, I didn’t bargain for this—I’m checking out?”

  “What do the police think?” I asked.

  “They’re not coming right out with it, but I think they believe the guy was after you. That he made a mistake.”

  I knew he was right. “We look like twins,” Juanita had said, not recognizing it for the dark prophecy it was. We rode another few minutes in silence.

  He waited until he’d turned into the hospital parking lot and shut off the engine.

  “Juanita told us to take care of you.”

  Rooster, Books, Cahill, and Chance, like all the John Wayne movie posters rolled into one. Juanita’s brothers would be a formidable defense if I needed one. All but Chance had been football players in college, and two of them had gone on to pro ball for a while. Part of me wanted to nestle in their protective arms, have them surround me, keep me from harm.

  “I appreciate that, but Detective Dupree said they’d put a police watch on the house. And this guy would have to be really stupid to come back and try it again. He’d have to know I’d be on alert for him.”

  “Begging your pardon, Cadence, but it’s not easy to be prepared for an attack when you’re blind.” A soft-voiced rebuff.

  I knew he was right. Early on in my darkness, I’d almost walked into an open elevator shaft in an office building downtown. It was only the change of air—a subtle, cool drift against my face at the last minute—that kept me from taking that next step. With this killer, I wouldn’t even know what direction danger was coming from. He could be waiting inside my house, or leaning against a telephone pole on the corner. He could be the pizza delivery guy or someone bringing a car to Walt’s for repair.

  Books offered his arm to escort me into the hospital.

  We crossed a lobby awash in foreign sounds. A rondo of words in what sounded like Tagalog off to my side. In front of me, a soft conversation in Spanish between two young voices. More of Juanita’s family?

  “We’re heading upstairs for a minute,” Books told them, then directed me to an elevator on the right.

  A swish of soft cloth and the scent of floral perfume when we entered the hospital room. Juanita’s mother. I held out my hand. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Greene.”

  She took my hand with one arm and hugged me with the other. “Gracias a Dios. She’s going to be okay.”

  Another smell among the strident hospital odors: nicotine and spearmint gum. “Detective Nellis?”

  “Yes. Detective Dupree and I are both here. Can you join us for a few minutes, Ms. Moran? We have some questions for both you and Ms. Greene.”

  “We’ll be outside,” Books said, moving his mother toward the door.

  “Juanita?” I approached the bed and felt the blanketed shape in front of me, then skated delicately over the IV attached to the back of her hand. “Don’t try to talk.”

  “Ummmm.”

  I traced the heavy gauze packing under her chin and the puffiness over her temple.

  “Water.”

  Nellis put a plastic mug in my hand and I guided its straw to her lips.

  “Do you think you’re up to a few questions, Juanita?” Dupree asked.

  The straw dipped with her nod.

  “What time did you get to Ms. Moran’s house last night?”

  Juanita cleared her throat but it still came out as a croak. “Sunset.”

  That meant that she’d lain maimed and alone for almost half an hour before I found her. She must have been gasping for breath as I ploddingly unfolded and recounted my bills in the taxi. I winced with the pain of that knowledge.

  “Do you know who attacked you?”

  She didn’t respond, but I felt her cushions move and interpreted that as a small negative shake of her head.

  “Did you see anything? Can you tell us his race? Height? Did he say anything?” Nellis asked.

  “She wants the writing pad,” Dupree said. A moment later he read Juanita’s words. “Came from behind. Tall. White. Bone-handled knife.” More scratching sounds. “Stinky?” he asked. “Stinky like what?”

  It took her longer to come up with the words this time. “Rotten fruit?” Dupree read.

  “Maybe a homeless guy,” Nellis mused. “Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do With the Prentice killing at all.”

  “I don’t know,” Dupree said. “Seems to me that if we add this attack to Ms. Moran’s two hit-and-runs, and now a second similar murder, it’s unlikely that it’s just random violence.” He paused. “Juanita? Do you know anything about James McDougall, the second victim? He’s a plumber—works for Garcia Plumbing—out by Silverbell.”

  A gurgled “no” from Juanita.

  “How about you, Ms. Moran? Anything about him or his daughter, Beatrice? She’s seventeen. Here’s her picture.”

  I hoped he was showing the picture to Juanita because it wasn’t going to do me any good. “They don’t sound familiar,” I said. “And I don’t think I’ve used Garcia Plumbing.”

  Dupree scratched something into his notebook. “I was thinking, maybe there’s a way to draw this guy out. Make sure he knows that he’s got to try again…”

  Chapter 57

  Dupree, lost in planning how to attract the killer’s attention, jumped when his cell phone rang.

  “August? It’s Paul Wheeler.”

  Dupree remembered the Santa Cruz County sheriff’s deputy. They had worked a hijacking case together last year that left three people dead and almost a million dollars in stolen computer chips still on the loose. It was Paul’s insight that had tracked and then stopped the thieves, but that was almost four months later.

  “I haven’t been out there yet, but I’ve got a report from Arivaca that may be of interest to you. They found the body of a female
down there. Maybe eighteen or so. It looks like knife wounds, but maybe that’s damage from the animals that got to her.”

  Dupree cussed under his breath. When there were multiple murders like this in Tucson, the killings were most likely gang or drug related. But these three victims—Wanda Prentice and the two McDougalls—didn’t seem to fit that category. Did he have a serial killer on his hands?

  “Where’d they find her?”

  “You know the ghost town, Ruby? About ten, twelve miles from Arivaca? They found her in the abandoned schoolhouse there.”

  “You think it’s my girl?” Beatrice McDonald may have been a kidnap victim or part of the crime. Either way, she could have wound up dead.

  “Can’t say for sure. But I saw your APB on the missing seventeen-year-old and thought you ought to know.”

  Dupree had heard about the old mining town an hour south of Tucson near the Mexican border but had never been there. The town used to have as many as two thousand residents and had a short, colorful history as one of the biggest copper and silver mines in the area. But the ore ran out in the ’40s and the town didn’t last long after that. “I thought Ruby was private property now, you had to get a permit to go in.”

  “It’s easy to get through the fence. And they’re starting restoration on the buildings still standing—you know, make it a real tourist attraction—so people have been in and out of there.”

  “I can be there in an hour. Can you meet me at Arivaca Junction?”

  Interstate Highway 19 met Arivaca Road about forty miles south of Tucson. From there it would be another twenty-five miles to the ghost town, and Dupree thought the trip would be faster with someone who knew where he was going.

  “I’ll be there.” There was a moment’s silence on the line, then Wheeler said, “I hope I’m wrong about this.”

  “Me too.”

  Nellis agreed to return to the phones at headquarters, continue the search for Darren Toller’s Chevy Lumina, and follow up on any other tips for finding Beatrice.