The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

“How are you doing?” Laura asked.

  Mrs. Parris checked the heat on the oven. “We’re okay. I mean. It’s horrible, but …" She wiped a strand of red hair from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry, but I have some more questions.” Laura set her mini-cassette recorder on the kitchen counter.

  “I know you have to ask your questions. We want to find the guy who did this.” She said this last brightly.

  “Mrs. Parris, do you know if she used a computer at school?”

  Her brow wrinkled. “I think so.”

  “She never talked about it? You know, texting her friends?”

  “I wouldn’t know email from a hole in the wall. I’m not the least bit technical.” She stared at the oven. “Jessica loved to bake cookies. That’s why I’m doing it today. Kind of in her memory.”

  “Where’s Cary?"

  “Cary?” Linda Parris looked stunned.

  “Her boyfriend. Doesn’t he live here?”

  “Oh." She floundered for a moment, as if she’d dropped a thought and had to consciously pick it up again. “We’re kind of like his foster parents, even though there’s nothing official. You must think that odd, but it really isn’t. He needs us. We love him as if he’s our own son.”

  “He and Jessica were boyfriend and girlfriend, though?”

  “I know what you’re thinking. We had very strict rules, her father did. Cary lives in our travel trailer out back. Not in the house. But he’s a nice boy.”

  “Were they sexually active?”

  Defiance. “Yes. I found out about that a couple of months ago. And you know what I did? I marched her down to Planned Parenthood and got her birth control pills. You might think I’m a bad mother, but I did what I had to do, and I didn’t want our child having a child.”

  “I’m not judging you, Mrs. Parris.”

  “Please don’t say anything to her father. He’d have a fit if he knew.”

  Laura thought that he probably did know. “I see no reason to tell him. So you don’t know where Cary is?”

  Mrs. Parris frowned. “Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “Since Jessica was missing?”

  “I’m not …" She didn’t finish her thought.

  “You don’t know when he was here last?”

  “He comes and goes. He has an uncle in Tucson—sometimes he stays there weeks at a time, especially after—“ she stopped. Her eyes widened slightly.

  “After what?”

  “After a fight.” Linda Parris looked past Laura, out the window.

  Laura took note of the present tense and decided to stick with it. “With Jessica? Do they fight a lot?”

  “No, no, nothing like what you’re thinking. Just arguments. Jessica can be—she could get dramatic. Cary just stayed out of her way, let her cool down. That’s all it was.”

  “When was their last fight?”

  “I know they weren’t talking earlier in the week.”

  “And you haven’t seen him since?”

  “It’s not like that. David and I would never bring someone into our home that we thought would be dangerous to our daughter.”

  “Mrs. Parris, I have to know. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “I think it was … two, three days ago. But it’s not what you think. He keeps to himself a lot, likes to go for long walks. Sometimes he stays with friends. That’s what Jessica loves most about him, even though it drove her crazy sometimes. She said he was a free spirit. I know what you’re hinting at and you’re wrong. We would never put our own daughter in danger.”

  “I understand that, but it’s important I talk to him. It’s very likely he doesn’t know Jessica is gone. Don’t you agree he should know?”

  She nodded reluctantly. Laura asked for the uncle’s address and phone number, and Linda Parris found it in her address book and copied it on paper from the memo pad stuck to the refrigerator, a flag at the top above the phrase “United We Stand”.

  Linda moved back to the sink and carefully washed the mixing bowl and set it in the dishwasher. She stared out the window again. “We had so many good times. Last Saturday we spent the morning weeding. Jessie and her dad went to the Arctic Circle for hamburgers. She got mine with mustard, but not ketchup—she knew I didn’t like ketchup. That was a great day.”

  She continued to stare out the window.

  Something brushed Laura’s ankles. She looked down. A Siamese cat rubbed against her trouser legs.

  Laura was attracted to animals the way some people were attracted to babies. She hunkered down and stroked the cat.

  “That’s Princess, Jessie’s cat,” Linda Parris’s voice broke. “Jessie found her in a dumpster at the school. Half-starved, sick. Her father told her Princess was her responsibility—she couldn’t keep her unless she did everything. Feed her, clean the cat box, use her allowance to get her spayed …" She was rambling.

  The cat climbed up into Laura’s arms and onto her shoulder. It felt natural to Laura; the small vibrating body, the warmth. Comforting.

  Holding the cat, she thought of Jessica. Jessica, who liked Josh Hartnett and Nelly. Jessica, who took such good care of her cat. Something crumbled in her chest, and tears pricked the corner of her eyes.

  She turned away so the mother couldn’t see and set the cat down.

  As Laura left through the front door, she glanced up the street at the roped-off area where the turnouts were. Officer Noone stood in the road, hands on his waist above his heavy duty belt, the yellow crime scene tape quivering behind him. When he saw her he waved. If he was bored by his new duty— waiting for the tire cast to dry—he didn’t show it.

  Buddy appeared from around the corner of the house, where David Parris, Jessica’s father, was hammering away at something.

  Buddy nodded toward Noone. “You about done up there?”

  “Might be another half hour. How’s Mr. Parris?”

  “Wouldn’t talk to me. We put up three sections of rain gutter, though.”

  “Wouldn’t talk at all?”

  “The only thing he said was, if Cary Statler ever showed his face around here again, he’d kill him.”

  As Laura reached the turnout, Noone said, “They’re almost dry.”

  Beside the metal-framed cast lay a couple of sticks, all that was left of a sampling of twigs, grass, and debris Laura had instructed Noone to collect from around the site. These Laura had used to reinforce the plaster. Not only would it make the cast stronger, but it would also supply a soil and debris sample for the crime lab. Laura picked up a stout twig and wrote her initials onto the cast, along with the case number.

  “I never saw anyone take a tire cast before. It’s pretty interesting,” Noone offered. “Too bad there weren’t any footprints.”

  It was clear Officer Noone had made the leap from the motor home sighting on Brewery Gulch to the abduction of Jessica Parris on West Boulevard, concluding that the killer had used a motor home.

  “These tracks could belong to anyone. I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

  “But it could be his.”

  “Could be.” Emphasis on the could.

  12

  To business.

  Musicman wrote: “D—Your shipment has come in.”

  Immediately, a reply popped up.

  DARK MOONDANCER: Hello, friend.

  Musicman’s fingers flew over the keys.

  MUSICMAN: I have that special order you requested.

  DARK MOONDANCER: Same price?

  MUSICMAN: Two thousand more.

  DARK MOONDANCER: Verification?

  MUSICMAN: Turn on the local news.

  DARK MOONDANCER: That one? You’re in my jurisdiction! Let’s meet.

  MUSICMAN: I never meet my clientele. It’s not good to mix business with pleasure.

  DARK MOONDANCER: You do it all the time, mix business with pleasure. LOL. But seriously, we are an exclusive club, you and I. Please come visit. Bring a friend.

  MUSICMAN: M
y plans are fluid at the moment.

  DARK MOONDANCER: Fluid? There’s a pun. So you are still here. I would have thought you’d be a thousand miles away by now.

  MUSICMAN: Parting is such sweet sorrow.

  DARK MOONDANCER: Don’t be cryptic. I’d love to know what’s going on in your mind.

  MUSICMAN: Shall I make the shipment or not?

  DARK MOONDANCER: By all means. As before, payment is forthcoming. But if you’re planning an extended stay, do give serious thought to my invitation. You might not come this way again.

  Musicman thought: We have less in common than you think.

  Dark Moondancer’s desires were base, his enthusiasm clumsy. He didn’t get the subtle distinctions; he was just another cretin saturated with blood lust, looking for a vicarious thrill. The guy reminded him of a comic book character—way over the top.

  Still, he paid the bills.

  Musicman pulled up the photograph he intended to use: baby ducks following their mother across a lawn. Beautiful, the play of sunlight and shadow on their soft yellow down. So innocent. And yet beneath the surface resided a dark secret.

  A secret that, truth to tell, shamed him.

  He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t need the money. So far he’d ignored Dark Moondancer’s hints about escalating the violence—it just wasn’t his way. Even with this one—who’d made him so fucking angry!—he’d stopped short of fulfilling Dark Moondancer’s requests. Partly because he didn’t like the sight of blood (although he’d proven that he could deal with it if he had to), and partly because he didn’t like Dark Moondancer or anybody else calling the shots.

  This was his show.

  Musicman knew, though, that Dark Moondancer was getting impatient. The gravy train wouldn’t last forever.

  Utilizing a user-friendly software program he had downloaded from the Internet, Musicman embedded the first photo into the picture of the baby ducks. He pulled up another scenic from his photo library—boats in a marina.

  He would send four pics in all. Each pic would be encrypted and require a password to open. Dark Moondancer would have the baby ducks, but he would not have the real picture underneath until Musicman got his payment. Only then would he send back the encrypted password.

  He pictured Dark Moondancer looking at the little duckies, wishing he could see what was underneath.

  “Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” Musicman intoned. He hit the SEND button, consigning the ducklings and their invisible cargo into the ether.

  13

  “Her hyoid was broken,” Cochise County ME Carmen Sotomayor said as she snapped off her gloves and dropped them into a BIOHAZARD container.

  The smell of sawed bone clung to Laura’s nostrils, almost as bad as the odor of death. The last thing Carmen Sotomayor had done before sewing Jessica Parris back up was to use an electric saw to open up her cranium to examine her brain.

  Laura thought the killer had been crafty, but now she knew to what extremes he had gone to avoid detection. He’d bathed the girl’s body and washed her hair, clipped her fingernails, even given her a douche.

  The douche was necessary. He had sexually assaulted his victim after death, not before. Postmortem sex was another indication that the killer didn’t want to risk abrasions to Jessica and to himself. Whoever he was, he knew something about the collection of evidence.

  She looked at Jessica Parris, small and forlorn on the stainless steel autopsy table. Gutters running around the edge of the table gleamed in the light, still holding the residue of blood from the autopsy. The girl who had reminded her yesterday of a Victorian doll now looked more like Raggedy Ann, big ugly stitches forming a Y down the length of her body.

  “When you measured her—you said she was small for her age?” Laura asked.

  “And underdeveloped.”

  “You mean more like a little girl than a teenager, anatomically?”

  “There’s a phenomenon we’re just beginning to see in the physical development in girls. They’re maturing at a faster rate than, say, when you and I were their age. But this girl is on the immature side, although it appears she had enough pubic hair for him to shave.”

  “He shaved her so he could think of her as younger,” Laura said.

  “And to destroy evidence—her pubic hair and his.” Carmen Sotomayor stared at the girl, her eyes sad. Laura noticed she had bitten her lip, a little gash, dark lipstick edging her teeth.

  Carmen added, “If he did it to make her seem younger, it wasn’t too much of a leap—she’s pretty flat up top. She wasn’t wearing a bra. You’d think a fourteen-year-old girl would wear a bra, whether she needed to or not.”

  Laura thought of the bras in the top drawer of Jessica’s dresser. “He took it.”

  “But he left the bikini underwear.”

  Laura said, “I wonder if he had a replacement pair and they didn’t fit.”

  “What would he replace them with?”

  “Maybe something more modest.”

  Two vertical lines appeared between Carmen’s dark brows. “You think so?”

  “Who knows? It was just something that occurred to me." Laura divested herself of the paper booties, gown, the gloves.

  She knew not to jump to any conclusions. Her method had always been to disprove a theory, rather than prove it. That way, she avoided making leaps in logic just to bolster a theory that might not pan out. She liked to look at evidence as if it were a disassembled car spread out on a tarp, making damn sure that whatever parts connected weren’t forced into place.

  Something didn’t fit here. Maybe it was the girl herself. She seemed out of place, although Laura couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was her age; maybe it was more than that.

  “That dress is homemade,” Carmen Sotomayor said. “No tag anywhere, and those darts looked like they were from a pretty simple pattern. So that ought to narrow it down.”

  By the time Laura left the ME’s office in the Sierra Vista Community Hospital, it was going on six o’clock and looked like it would storm. She rolled down the window, inhaling the scent of the impending rain on the dense air. The area had greened up a lot since she’d been down here a couple of weeks ago—johnsongrass lined both sides of the road, lush and green, soaking up the runoff. Ocotillo on the hills looked like dark green pipe cleaners.

  The evidence for the DPS Crime Lab resided in the back of the 4runner, each piece packaged separately and bearing her initials: head and pubic hair samples from Jessica, fingernail clippings, scrapings from under her fingernails, swabs from her body, and her clothing. And of course the tire tread moulage and the matchbook in its paper evidence envelope.

  He had been pretty sure of himself to go back and leave the matchbook—another taunt. He was playing with them. In a way, that was good. Laura knew that when you got cocky you made mistakes, and she intended to be there when he did.

  The dress intrigued her, the idea of it having been run up on a sewing machine from a pattern. Did that mean he could sew, like Ted Olsen? Did he have someone in his life who sewed for him—a girlfriend, wife or mother? He’d tried to buy a dress that would fit a fourteen-year-old girl because his own dress didn’t fit.

  It would be time-consuming to locate the company that produced the pattern and backtrack from there to the outlets. Laura was even less optimistic about tracing the material, the zipper, the thread, the lace, and the ribbon.

  If he didn’t purchase those in the area, you could forget about that.

  The storm hit just as she reached Tucson. She took the Valencia Road exit and drove west to the Department of Public Safety on Tucson Boulevard down the street from the Tucson International Airport.

  Lightning sizzled across the sky as she turned into the parking lot. Built in the sixties, the DPS building reminded her of a grain elevator. In the blowing rain, the concrete building darkened to the same slate color as the sky. US and Arizona flags whipped in a wind-driven frenzy, their chains rattling. Laura waited for the automatic gate to ro
ll back and drove in, taking note of the cars in the inside lot. Victor’s truck wasn’t there. She doubted she’d see anyone at this hour.

  She booked the tire moulage, the matchbook, Jessica’s clothes, and other items from the autopsy into evidence, filled out the paperwork, and requested the types of tests she wanted from the crime lab. On her way to the squad bay, she passed Mike Galaz’s office and noticed something new—two rows of photos on the wall by his door. Mostly of the Tucson social scene, Let’s Go People! and his wife standing in groups of three or four at various fundraising events. Expensive coifs, more expensive smiles.

  Laura had never been part of that social circle, and knew by now she never would be. Fortunately, she didn’t need an expensive evening gown to send her check to the Hermitage No-kill Cat Shelter.

  Everybody had gone home except for Todd Rees, the youngest and newest member of the squad. His desk was catty-corner to hers, facing the other direction. She liked that, because it kept their interaction to a minimum. He looked up and then back at his computer.

  Her plant was looking a little dry. She prodded it, filled a coffee cup with water from the bathroom sink, and gave it a drink before checking her messages and her voice mail.

  One message had been placed on the center of her desk in Rich Lockhart’s handwriting: “Call Myra Maynes at the medical examiner’s office.”

  “My remains. Very funny,” she muttered, tossing the note into the wastebasket.

  A California detective named Barry Endicott of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department had left a message on her voicemail, “regarding your child homicide in Bisbee.”

  She didn’t recognize the name. One of her contacts at another agency must have made some calls. As she picked up the phone, Todd Rees slipped on his suit jacket, picked up his briefcase, and ambled past her. He always dressed in a suit and tie.

  Tall and thin, he reminded her of a praying mantis. Now he craned his neck over her shoulder, looking at her notes.

  She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Watcha need?”