The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  She knew about terror—felt it now, rising like a high water mark in her chest—something that happened these days at the drop of a hat.

  Kellee Taylor had come to rest against the edge of the tent, curled into a fetal position, her face shoved down into the tent floor. Dan Yates’s body surrounding her, partially covering her with his right leg and arm.

  He had done his best to protect her.

  They’d had enough time between the first shot and the second to move as far to the right as they could, hoping they could evade the next round.

  Laura guessed that by then the killer was already walking around the tent to the right.

  By reacting the way they did, Dan and Kellee had unwittingly put themselves directly into the line of fire.

  4

  A stray breeze fluttered a fast-food receipt poking out of the trash bag. Laura had set the bag on the ramada picnic table near the campsite and had been going through its contents. Suddenly she felt a twinge in the small of her back—a leftover from a car accident when she was in the Highway Patrol. She massaged the spot with a Latex-gloved hand.

  Officers Tagg and Wingate had been dispatched to canvass the houses along the road near Cataract Lake Park to find out what the neighbors had heard or seen last night. The sergeant, Warren Janes, remained behind. At the moment, he was leaning against his patrol car, eating his lunch. Content to let her do her thing.

  Laura knew he’d been told by the Williams police chief, who was currently on his way from an interrupted fishing trip in Montana, to “render unto Caesar.” Caesar, in this case, being the state law enforcement agency she worked for, the Department of Public Safety. Apparently Sergeant Janes had no trouble with that, which surprised her. Usually the cops she dealt with in small towns wanted in, not out.

  Still no sign of Richie Lockhart. Calls to his cell phone netted only his voice mail. He didn’t answer his pager.

  Laura thought about calling her sergeant, but she didn’t want to bother him, or worse, let him think she was bothered. Telling him she couldn’t keep track of her own partner wouldn’t look good. Something her old mentor, Frank Entwistle, had drilled into her: Never show weakness. Her squad was just like grade school—all the subtle forms of tyranny, petty triumphs, and slights, subtle but clear.

  Lately, though, everyone in the Criminal Investigations Division had been nice to her. Too nice actually. Solicitous, tiptoeing around her as if she were a new-laid egg. Jerry Grimes, her sergeant, had given her two soft assignments in a row—white-collar crimes.

  Taking her out of the game.

  She closed her eyes against the sun, which had slowly moved through the ramada as morning turned to afternoon. It was going on three thirty. The air smelled of pine duff, warm earth, blood, and garbage.

  Carefully, she replaced the stone over the trash bag and walked out into the clearing. She stared at the lake—a blue sliver cutting through the pale green-gold grasses sloping down from the pines. She needed to breathe the air, feel the sun on her back, give her mind a chance to absorb what she had learned so far.

  Today was Saturday and it felt like a Saturday. When Laura was a girl, she loved Saturday mornings. On Saturdays the world was full of possibilities. She was free for the whole weekend, she could do anything she wanted. But by Sunday afternoon, the small, white cloud was on the horizon; she knew the storm was coming, that her freedom was about to end. By dinner time, the cloud was bigger and darker, and by nighttime, the whole sky was black.

  The next morning, it was back to school to face the bullies.

  With this job—with this calling—she had finally found her clan. She’d always considered herself one of the boys. Now she was one apart again, and she didn’t like it. She especially didn’t like coming around a corner and running into friends and colleagues who immediately stopped talking mid-conversation.

  Laura could smell a charcoal grill somewhere. A warm, Indian-summer day in the high country, the droning of lawn mowers, people taking care of the stuff they’d had to put off all week. Saturday.

  Saturday had a meaning in this case, because it was the weekend, and Dan and Kellee had used the extra time to travel. She wondered if they had cut classes on Friday to come out here and spend the night, or if they had waited until the end of the day.

  She absorbed the sun, thinking about what she had found so far in Dan Yates’s truck: A tea-length dress, cream-colored, hung in a garment bag from the window of the Extra cab, along with a man’s suit. Cream-colored pumps to match the dress. A man’s dress shoes had been shoehorned behind the front seat, rolled-up dark socks inside. A tie lay on the back seat. Sometime on this trip, Dan Yates and Kellee Taylor had gone somewhere where they’d had to dress up.

  Put that together with what she had found in the top half of the garbage bin near the ramada—a cardboard box containing remnants of white frosting and chocolate cake, a boxful of candles, sandwich wrappers, an empty bottle of sparkling cider, and two plastic screw-on champagne glasses—and she was beginning to see a pattern.

  A dress-up, and a celebration.

  A breeze ruffled the impassive face of Cataract Lake, shadows combing across the shimmering blue surface. She thought it would be beautiful at night, too. She wondered what it was like out here the night the boy drowned.

  Lakes were deceptive. This lake, in particular, appeared open and friendly. And tiny. It would seem to be an easy task to swim across Cataract Lake. But underneath the placid blue surface were weeds, rocks, fishing line, and junk.

  Laura glanced at the sky, so blue it seemed to pulsate. The golden grama grass threading itself through the shadows of the ponderosa pines. A wood chipper alternately droned and whined somewhere to the north, changing its tone depending on what was being devoured.

  It was clear that Dan and Kellee had not just gone out on a camping trip. They had been somewhere where they had to dress up. Afterwards, they had changed back, Dan discarding his tie on the back seat, rolling his socks and sticking them in his shoes. They had come here to camp. She guessed that the pink cake box, the sparkling cider, was theirs.

  The rest of the evidence was more straightforward. There were the usual items you’d want on a camping trip, all of them packed haphazardly in the black duffle inside the tent, one edge soaked in blood. A green cooler. A college text of Oedipus Rex, Kellee’s name and phone number neatly written inside the front cover. Her purse—a couple of credit cards, some money, a few receipts, hairbrush, etc., nothing earth-shattering but worth noting, including a stub for a roll of film. The film had gone to the local Safeway.

  Unfortunately, Dan’s wallet was missing, and Laura got confirmation from Janes that one of his officers had checked it, then returned it to the pocket of his jeans. It had gone off to the medical examiner in Flagstaff.

  It was the first time she’d come even close to losing it. She didn’t, though; she just calmly asked him to send an officer to drive up and get it, and reviewed with him that it must be put into an evidence bag, signed and sealed, and brought back to her. Janes had been pretty annoyed at her walking him through it, but to his credit, he didn’t say anything.

  She finished up with the trash bag, sealing and marking her finds in plastic or paper evidence envelopes, depending on whether the garbage was wet or dry. The old paper-or-plastic question with a twist: Wet stuff, like blood, went into paper; dry, into plastic.

  Lots of blood in the tent. Which reminded her, she needed to figure out how to transport the tent to the Department of Public Safety crime lab in Phoenix.

  She’d just started working on that problem when the silence was shattered by a loud car engine reverberating through the forest. She glanced up and saw the sun flash off the windshield of a red Monte Carlo as it turned off the road into the Cataract Lake campground.

  Richie Lockhart, her new partner, was here at last.

  5

  The engine fell silent, the quiet returning to the forest like a soft snowfall. A car door slammed, loud in the open spac
e. Briefcase in hand, Richie Lockhart started down the road, the sun catching his prematurely white hair.

  He was short and shaped like Gumby, his body the same thickness all the way down. His face open and sunny. He didn’t walk; he sauntered.

  The anger simmering inside Laura all day threatened to boil over. She’d clamped the lid down tight because she had never worked on a case with him before and wanted to keep an open mind. But now she was mad. Two people were dead. You didn’t treat it like a walk in the park.

  Sergeant Janes detached himself from the fender of his patrol car and walked up the road to meet Lockhart. They met on the cinder road, then started walking down together. Richie stopped next to Dan Yates’s truck, looking it over, his admiration obvious.

  The two men were talking when Laura reached them.

  Warren Janes looked at her with new eyes. “Now I know where I heard your name,” he said. “Nice work.”

  She didn’t know if he was referring to her capture of a serial sexual predator and killer named Musicman or the effect his capture had on DPS, the ramifications radiating outward like circles in the wake of a rock thrown into a lake.

  She had thrown the rock.

  “I wouldn’t want to be you, though,” Janes added.

  Richie beamed. “I think it’s fair to say that all of us—to a man—are proud of the way Laura here stepped up.”

  Laura said to Richie, “I thought you were flying up.”

  “The plane had mechanical problems. I waited all morning, at least two hours, before they told me to go ahead and drive up.”

  She didn’t ask him why he’d turned off his mobile and didn’t answer his pager.

  “So what’ve we got?” Richie asked.

  Laura ran it down briefly: the young couple, college kids, killed by a shotgun in their tent.

  Richie was turned slightly toward Janes in such a way that he was cutting Laura out of the loop. Or at least that was how it looked. “Why did they camp here?” he asked Janes.

  “The boy—Dan—his family lives here. We think it was someplace familiar, they probably camped here because they have before.” Janes was talking to Richie, but looking at Laura. Wondering perhaps what it was like to be a standout in an agency that encouraged invisibility.

  “Anything else I should know?” Richie asked.

  Laura said, “The bodies are gone.”

  That threw him. He wiped the back of his hand across the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. “There much left to see?”

  Laura told him about the cake box in the garbage can, the dress-up clothes in the truck. The bloody tent. As Laura described the scene, her mind, which had been working on how to move the tent, suddenly came up with an answer.

  She turned to Sergeant Janes. “Can you get me a body bag?”

  Janes looked uncertain. “A body bag? I guess so, sure.”

  She took out the small notebook she always carried, wrote down a list of things she’d need, and handed it to him. “I’m going to need a DPS officer to transport it to the crime lab in Phoenix.”

  “No problem there.” He nodded in the direction of Interstate 40, a corridor Laura had once worked when she was in the Highway Patrol Division of DPS. “We’re thick with them—you excuse the expression.”

  “Good. We want to get this done before dark.”

  “What’s this about?” asked Richie, falling into step with her as she walked back toward the campsite.

  “We have to move the tent.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  She stopped to explain. “I want to get the tent floor, so we can diagram where each pellet went into the ground.”

  “I know that,” Richie said impatiently.

  She ignored his testiness. “So we roll it up, as loosely as we can, and put it in a body bag.”

  “Why can’t we put the whole tent on a flatbed?”

  “On the freeway? Going seventy-five miles an hour? The thing is falling apart.”

  For a minute she thought he was going to argue, but he just shrugged and said, “You da boss.”

  It didn’t take them as long as Laura thought it would. With spray paint, they marked circles around each gunshot hole in the sides of the tent before cutting around them and placing them on a picnic table to be transported separately. Next, they cut the tent body away from the floor.

  “Oh, shit!” Richie said, looking at the swipe of blood on his elbow. “I hope neither one of them had AIDS.” He glared at Laura. “We should have thought of this.”

  Meaning she should have thought of this.

  Although they wore gloves, it was impossible to avoid getting some blood on their arms and clothing, even though most of it was dry or nearly dry. Laura could have asked Williams PD or the sheriff’s department for HazMat gowns and masks, but hadn’t wanted to wait; she’d wanted to get the tent floor out of here before dark. And so she had taken a calculated risk that Dan and Kellee were AIDS-free.

  This was not like her. Like most cops, Laura was overly cautious by most lights. But lately she’d been taking little risks—in traffic, attempting fix-its at home that could and did backfire on her. She had garnered an impressive array of cuts, bruises, and blood blisters in the last few weeks.

  She’d been impatient lately. With herself and with others. Little things got to her more, and she wanted to burn through the day-to-day boring stuff of life as quickly as possible. But when it came to this case, she needed to slow down and let herself think. Do something off-the-wall here, and you could never go back. Evidence was easy to misplace or mess up, and she didn’t want to create a loophole for the killer’s lawyer to exploit down the line.

  They marked all four sides of the tent, starting with the area where the door was. Then they marked the corresponding points on the ground with little colored flags on wires. After the fabric of the floor was rolled up—loosely, to avoid friction—Laura deposited it into the waiting body bag, zipped it up, sealed it, and wrote her name on the evidence tag.

  “I have hand cleaner in the 4Runner,” she said.

  “A little after the fact,” Richie grumbled, but he followed her up to her car.

  As he scrubbed his hands with the liquid antiseptic hand cleaner, he said, “They’re gonna look at that thing and wonder what kind of body is that. Looks like a goddamn iguana.”

  By this time, it was going on six o’clock, and the rays of the sun slanted and flashed between the trees. The Highway Patrol officer—her name tag said Marty Fields—was waiting for them up on the road. If all went well, the tent would be at the DPS crime lab in three hours.

  Richie glanced at the lowering sun. “Looks like it’s notification time.”

  Laura opened the driver’s door of the 4Runner, expecting Richie to ride along with her.

  “Let’s take my car,” he said.

  She looked at the red Monte Carlo, black and chrome strips running down the sides, a stylized silver 8 on the right front fender.

  “I’ve got all my stuff in here.”

  “We could move it.”

  “I’d feel like Starsky and Hutch riding around in that car.” Aware that Warren Janes was watching their interaction. “We’d better go in mine.”

  His face turned stony. “Tell you what. We’ll caravan.”

  She watched him scurry to his car and get in. He started it up and revved the engine, the Monte Carlo’s deep-throated roar drowning out the peace of the forest. Motioning to her to lead the way.

  Laura realized they’d be driving separately all around town, first to Safeway to pick up Kellee’s photos, then to notify the families of the victims. That did not sit well with her. Her parents had been children of the Depression and didn’t like waste, and neither did she. “Wait!”

  Richie powered his window down, but kept revving the engine, forcing her to walk over to him.

  “I’ll go with you. Let me get my stuff.”

  For answer, he popped the trunk.

  Sitting way down in the bucket seat, peering out past t
hree stickers on her side of the windshield,1, 8, and 15—no doubt they carried some deep mystical meaning—Laura avoided looking at Richie. She didn’t have to. Self-congratulation rolled off him like the Canoe cologne her first boyfriend wore for the high school dance.

  They followed the road back through the mouse-hole tunnel under the railroad tracks, then over the freeway into Williams, where the road split into two one-way streets: Railroad Avenue going west and, one block over, old US Route 66 going east.

  Modeling itself as a tourist town, Williams had two main attractions: stores exploiting the Route 66 nostalgia craze and the Grand Canyon Railway. The Grand Canyon Railway shuttled tourists back and forth to the Grand Canyon for the day. Route 66 … just was.

  The late-afternoon sun glowed off the walls of the Main Street buildings up the way. Many of them had been made of rock quarried near here—a mosaic of reds, golds and dark browns held in place by a Krazy Glue of cement. Driving through town this morning on the way to the police station, she had counted mostly curio shops and antique stores—a shop with old cameras in the window, another selling ancient radios of every description.

  Williams’s one supermarket, Safeway, was situated on the west end of town, not far from where they came in. Laura noticed a shop off to the side on one end of the parking lot. One window displayed a mannequin dressed up in camos, wielding a paintball gun; the other, a mannequin in a white wedding dress. Red letters that would glow at night spelled out the name KITTEN’S JOY SEWING SUPPLY AND DRESS SHOPPE.

  Richie disappeared while Laura waited under the harsh fluorescents at the photo kiosk for the clerk to find Kellee’s photos. Halloween decorations were already up. She’d just opened the flap when Richie returned, holding a jelly doughnut. He craned his neck to look at the photo on top, a candid shot of Kellee Taylor, looking young and healthy. “My, my.”

  Laura said, “That’s the female victim.”

  “Oh.”

  Then: “She have a sister?”