He had other plans for his life.
His mother would have socked him one for even thinking that. Her favorite expression was “Don’t blow your own horn.” But ever since he was a little kid, he was certain he’d make a name for himself. Sure, if you looked at it from the outside, if you were a stranger, you wouldn’t think much of that prediction. But he was just getting started.
He cruised back down the highway through the warm, velvet dark, The Mean Green’s windows open. Singing along with a Little Feat CD, shouting the lyrics into the desert air: “ ‘When the Feats are on the box, the speed just slips my mind, I start to sing along, tap my toe and slap the dash in time.’ ”
The Texas ranger in the song, who stopped the car, telling the guy: “Son those Feat done steered you wrong this time. Those Feat’ll steer you wrong sometimes.” Easy to get steered wrong; life surely was a slippery slope. He himself had spent most of the second half of his life trying to get out of the trouble he caused for himself in the first half.
But when God blew through your soul and told you it was your time, you heard it. And if you were any kind of man at all, you did something about it.
Back in Pahrump, he hit the slots at the casino. Thinking of all the people on the street and in this place. Wondering: Did they know how it could all change for them in an instant? Did they have any concept of God’s stern and unyielding judgment coming for them, rolling down the highway?
More than likely, they had their blinders on, like everybody else on the planet. Looking around at the people here filling their time, throwing their money away with both hands, he knew that was true. All most people did was try to get from one hour to the next.
Bobby quit while he was slightly ahead and went back to his room. Looked at his maps, thought about what he’d do the next day. Scouting mostly. And planning.
He thought about Death Valley just across the line—how appropriate was that? And the desolate stretch of road, the airplane hangar rotting in the sun, stark against the desert brush, noticeable and unnoticeable at the same time. And he, Bobby Burdette, looking cool and tough in his dark glasses.
2
SATURDAY—WILLIAMS, ARIZONA
There were two cops at the campsite when Laura Cardinal arrived at the scene, one of them looking at the tent as if he were trying to figure out how to pack it up.
The opening to the red, two-man dome tent was unzipped, the nylon door piece lying on the forest floor like a tongue. From this angle, Laura could see at least half the interior. The backside of the tent glowed orange-red where it was lit from behind by the sun. Sunlight poured in through a fist-sized hole in the fabric. She could see little of the tent floor, but what she saw was empty and soaked with blood.
Warren Janes, the sergeant who had accompanied her to the scene, had to walk fast to keep up with her. “This is the second time something like this’s happened,” he said. “A kid drowned in the lake at the beginning of the summer.”
Laura was half listening. Her instincts had kicked up into high gear, and what they were telling her wasn’t good. Something wrong here. Not that there wasn’t plenty wrong to begin with—two college kids shot to death while sleeping in their tent.
“What happened?” she asked, her gaze still fixed on the campsite.
“Well, that’s the weird thing. Kid was with his teacher, Mr. Garatano, late at night. What Mr. Garatano said was the kid wanted to swim so he dove off of the boat. He never came up.”
“How old was the kid?”
“Fourteen.”
She stopped. “What were they doing out in a boat late at night?”
Janes shrugged. “He said they were fishing, but we all wondered about that. Mr. Garatano got fired not too long after that. We investigated, turned out the kid got tangled up in some weeds and drowned.”
Interesting, Laura thought, but she had other worries. Despite the perfect late-summer day and the reasonable assumption that the Williams PD cops had preserved the scene, Laura had the feeling there was something she didn’t know. And then it came to her.
She voiced her suspicions to Janes. “The bodies are still in the tent, aren’t they?”
He cleared his throat.
At that moment, she saw the younger cop reach down to pull one of the tent pegs out of the ground.
“Officer! Don’t do that!”
He straightened up, uncertain. Little more than a kid—maybe only a year or two out of high school. He stepped back from the tent as if it were a snake, his movement quick and athletic.
The older cop started in their direction, as if trying to ward them off. “The ME’s people were just here. I tried to stall them, but they couldn’t wait any longer.”
“They took the bodies,” Laura said. She wanted to a punch a wall—or something. Or someone.
The cop had stopped in front of them, hands on his hips, as if the altitude bothered him. “They were so busy in Flag this weekend—there was a pileup on the freeway—this was the only time they could cut someone loose to come get them.”
Laura resigned herself to the reality of the situation. This was bad, but she would have to work around it. She and Victor, her usual partner, had a saying when things went wrong at a crime scene: That’s showbiz.
Laura motioned to the younger cop to join them. She noticed he was careful to follow the prints the officers had made entering the scene, adhering to the “one way in, one way out” rule. This surprised her. After seeing him reach for the tent peg, she’d expected him to be impulsive.
Sergeant Janes made the introductions. “This is criminal investigator Laura Cardinal with the Department of Public Safety,” Janes said. He glanced at her. “Have I got that right?”
“Detective’s fine.” Thinking: Where the hell is Richie? If he’d been here earlier, he could have stopped them from taking the bodies.
The two officers were Tagg and Wingate. The older cop, Tagg, smelled of cigarette smoke. Wingate seemed on edge, adrenaline running through him like a muscular river. Laura guessed this was the first time he’d seen anything like this.
Janes said, “I want you to give her and her partner everything you’ve got.”
Tagg was looking at her as if trying to place her. “I’ve heard your name before. Aren’t you—?”
Laura didn’t reply directly to his question. Instead, she motioned toward a blue truck parked behind them on the forest road, just outside the campground gate. “Is that the victims’ vehicle?”
“That’s right,” said Janes. “Thought we’d leave it for you to process.”
“I’ll need a warrant.” Even though the truck belonged to the crime scene, Laura wanted to be on the safe side, go ahead and get the warrant. Depending on where they were, even crime scenes required warrants, which Laura thought was just plain nutty. “Is there a justice of the peace or judge you like to go to?”
Janes motioned to his patrol car. “I have his number on the computer. We can do it telephonically.”
“Do we have photographs?”
“The medical examiner’s office took some, but they’re in Flagstaff.”
“I took some Polaroids,” Wingate volunteered. He trotted up the red cinder road to one of two Williams PD police cars and returned a moment later.
Four Polaroids. “That’s all the film I had.”
Laura held each one of them in the shade of her body, squinting against the brightness.
Hard to tell what was what; the colors were faded and the shapes indistinct. Yellow hair in a tangle. Pale flesh clotted with blood. The boy behind the girl; half-in, half-out of the sleeping bag. Spoon fashion, his right arm over her body. The sleeping bag and walls of the tent soaked with blood.
The top of the boy’s head gone.
All four Polaroids had been taken through the holes in the tent, from different angles.
“Is that one sleeping bag, or two?” Laura asked
“Well, technically, there’re two,” Tagg said. “They zipped ‘em together. You can do
that with Cabela’s.”
Tagg added, “Double-ought buckshot. Shot right through the tent flap and two other sides.”
“He didn’t see them then?”
“He could’ve seen them through the holes in the tent, but he didn’t bother to open up the door flap. We had to open it to get the bodies—” Tagg glanced at Wingate. “—the victims out.”
“Josh’s the one who found them,” Sergeant Janes explained. “He knew Dan.”
Josh Wingate was staring at the tent. The high-voltage energy field surrounding him had not abated; in fact, it seemed to be getting stronger. “We were best friends in high school,” he said.
Laura looked at him with new interest. No wonder he seemed so off balance. His eyes were like shards of cut green glass, pulverized with hurt, but she noticed his posture was straight and he held his chin high. Almost defiant.
She remembered a shabby kitchen in Florida, how it felt to see someone you knew die right in front of you. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s bad,” Josh Wingate replied, “but I’m okay.”
Laura had her doubts about that.“You found them?”
“My mom lives up that road.” He pointed to Country Club Road behind them. “I was on my way over when I saw his truck.”
“How’d you know it was his?”
“We used to camp out here a lot when we were kids. Plus, the bumper sticker.”
Laura glanced at the truck, a late-model GMC Sierra, the same medium-blue sheen as Cataract Lake. A common enough color in trucks. The bumper sticker said COWBOY UP. There was an NAU sticker on the windshield. Dan Yates and Kellee Taylor both had attended Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.
“They weren’t supposed to be here,” Sergeant Janes said. “The campground’s been closed since Labor Day for repairs.”
It was the third week of September now. Laura looked out at the quiet lake, the pines. The grass going tawny, the palette of wildflowers fading to tarnished glory. After Labor Day, the north country seemed to give up on tourists until ski season. “We’re kind of far from town, aren’t we?” she said. “I would expect this to be the sheriff’s jurisdiction.”
“The city annexed this area last year. There’s plans to build at least one hotel and restaurant around here, what with the lake and all.”
Laura continued to stare at the lake. Wondering again, where was Richie Lockhart? Sergeant Janes hadn’t heard from him, and neither had she.
Well, she didn’t have the luxury to wait for him. Whatever she did now, she had to do right. Her crime scene—she always thought of a crime scene as hers—had been compromised by the removal of the bodies. She had to go with what she had.
Officer Wingate had been the first on the scene. He was friends with at least one of the victims, which might influence his memory in ways she couldn’t fathom, but he was still her best bet. He would have to be her eyes and ears.
3
The first thing Laura did was clear out a space in the dirt. She said to Officer Wingate, “Why don’t you step right here?” He looked at her, uncertain, then planted his foot on the ground. Laura put a red and white ruler beside his footprint, then photographed the print and the ruler with her Canon digital SLR camera. Then she cleared another space in the ground, placed her own foot in the center, and photographed that.
“I see what you’re doing,” Wingate said. “Now we’ll know our own footprints.”
As they entered the area inside the crime scene tape, one thing was clear to Laura immediately. She said to Officer Wingate, “Look at the ground. Do you see anything unusual?”
“No, ma’am.” And then, “Wait.” Careful to stay on the path trampled by the Williams PD officers, he hunkered down and scanned the ground. “Looks like they covered their tracks.”
She nodded. A large area had been smoothed over, probably with a push broom. The random pattern of pine duff carpeting the ground had been replaced by a layer of ponderosa needles and dirt mixed together, the grama grass and purple asters and few green strands of meadow grass poking up dusty, dispirited heads. She took several photographs of the ground.
Laura scanned the area, looking for the glint of metal, and saw none. She guessed that whoever had covered his tracks had picked up his shell casings, too.
She breathed in the sun-warmed tang of pine. This altitude, the sun was hot on her back, her neck, her hair. She wished she had a hat.
“Let’s backtrack, see how far this goes.”
She followed the path back out and ducked under the tape, Wingate her quick shadow.
They walked just outside the perimeter of the swept area. The killer had been thorough and tricky. There were several places where pine duff had piled up underneath the trees. At any one of these spots he could have walked out on the hard-packed needles. They followed each possible trail, radiating outward like spokes on a wheel, but found nothing.
Officer Wingate took his cue from her, sticking close, but sure to walk behind her, in her footsteps, keeping his thoughts to himself. She could see out of the corner of her eye that his legs were shaking. Adrenaline. His body finally getting the message, the aftermath to finding his best friend from high school shot to death.
Amazing what guns could do. All the shotgun deaths she’d seen, she never got used to it.
She had already formed at least one impression of the killer. Unfortunately, that impression was mixed. Shooting into a tent without opening the flap pointed at a killer who didn’t know his victims. She thought there was a lack of curiosity, as if he couldn’t care less whether the people in the tent lived or died. The fact he didn’t open the tent, didn’t look inside to make sure they were dead, that pointed to someone who had no stake in the outcome. That pointed to a random shooting
But if it was a random shooting, why go to such pains to obliterate his presence?
It was almost as if there were two different people at work here.
They now stood directly behind the tent, approximately fifteen feet away, on mildly undulating ground. Officer Wingate careful to stay behind her.
It looked to Laura as if the killer had shot three times—one round going through the front flap, one on the right side, and one in the back. Judging from the size of the holes in the tent, she guessed he’d shot from about this distance: fifteen feet give or take. She pictured him circling the tent, walking and shooting, walking and shooting, walking and shooting.
She said to Officer Wingate, “People would have heard the shots.” Even though it was a rural neighborhood, there were houses scattered around the area.
“Yeah, but they’d probably think someone was jacklighting deer.”
She almost stepped on a partial print, realized it belonged to Wingate. “What time did you spot the truck?”
“This morning, around seven. Maybe closer to seven thirty. My mom wanted me to help her unload some hay, and then she was going to make me breakfast.”
“And you stopped then?” she said as she took several photographs of the ground and the tent. “Or did you stop on the way back?”
“It was on the way to my mom’s—I never got there.” He motioned up the road to the gate. “I parked right behind his truck.”
“And then what did you do?”
He told her how he had gone around the gate and walked down toward the lake. “Their tent was the only one here. It wasn’t hard to figure out it was them.”
“You recognized the tent?”
He looked at her, confused momentarily. Trying hard to be accurate. “No. I mean I knew it belonged to whoever had the truck.”
Trying hard to be precise. He reminded her a little of Andrew Descartes, although his hair was close-cropped and blond and Andy had been dark.
They worked their way in toward the tent. Laura asked, “Which way did you come in?”
He pointed to the stampede of tracks. “That way, just down from the road. I made note of where I went in and went out the same way.”
“I see that. It’s made my job
easier.”
“Thanks.” His eyes brimming over with pain.
She tried to ignore that. “Then what?”
“The tent was torn like that—my first thought was bear, but then when I got closer I knew it was gunshot.”
“Then what did you do?”
He stared into the middle distance, as if seeing it all again. “I just stood there, tried to get my bearings. My first thought was that they—Dan—went somewhere, and somebody used the tent for target practice. You know, vandals.”
Laura understood that. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it was almost impossible for the human mind to make the logical leap that someone you knew could be dead.
“But I think I knew, even then.” His voice seemed to come from high in his chest—agitated.
“What did you do then?”
“I called Danny’s name a few times. He didn’t answer. So I walked over and checked it out.”
He paused, but Laura didn’t prompt him. The hot sun pounded down on her head as she waited for him to continue.
“That hole in the door flap—thing was hanging by a thread. I looked just enough to see they were dead. Then I backed away from there and made the call.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“I knew it was Dan.” He cleared his throat.
“Can you show me where they were?”
He did so, using his hands to illustrate. Laura could see it. The sleeping bag had started out in the center, perpendicular to the tent door. The top half of the bag had been skewed sideways, though, as Dan and Kellee rolled to the right. Burrowing into the tent wall, as tight in as they could get.
Laura looked in through the front, took pictures of the floor, the walls. Then she carefully zipped up what was left of the front flap, so she could look at the hole. She looked at each of the three holes in the tent, thinking trajectories.
Narrowing her focus down to the two people trapped inside, their movements, even their thoughts. Their terror seeping into her own soul like poison gas.
The Laura Cardinal Novels Page 33
