The same age as Kellee and Dan.
Dan and Kellee’s tent had been reduced to a forlorn circle of nylon, the vibrant color bleached away, but not enough to banish the ghost map of their blood. The material was punctured in several places—grouped shots.
Laura and Richie spent an hour marking the places where the buckshot had penetrated the tent floor, then digging in the ground for pellets, putting each pea-sized piece of shot into pill vials, bedding them in cotton.
They worked in silence. Laura finally asked Richie why he wouldn’t ride in her car.
He sat back on his heels, looking at her as if it were self-explanatory. “It’s a Toyota.”
“What’s wrong with a Toyota?”
He shrugged.
“No. Really. What’s wrong with a Toyota? They’re the most reliable cars there are. I have a friend who owns a Camry; it’s still going strong at two hundred thousand miles.”
She saw both pity and smugness in the look he gave her. You don’t know anything.
She almost said something about the NASCAR race, but didn’t. Instead, she stood up and ironed out her back. Hurting again. She sat down on one of the big rocks of the fire ring, watching as Richie rolled up the tent floor. Clasped her hands around her knees, pulled them to her chest, felt the pain in her back ease. Her eyes focused downward on the dirt, the slightly charred look to it, the white and gray rock surfaces bright in the sunlight.
She dusted her hands together, feeling gritty. Placed her hands on the rocks on either side of her, straightened her back, stretching.
Richie glanced at her as he carried the tent floor up to the car, the bag containing the buckshot vials in the other hand. “You coming?”
“I’ll be along in a while.”
“Wish this thing would wind up. It’s my kid’s birthday. I don’t like being away on their birthdays.”
“I know.” Feeling weary herself.
He rubbed the back of his neck, which had a healthy sunburn—high altitude. “I’ve got a feeling about Jessup. I spent the morning asking around about him while you were at the ME’s. It’s like he disappeared into thin air. If we could find him, I’d bet he’d give us something to chew on. Oh well.” He started for his car. “See you back at the ranch.”
Laura heard his car start up, the roar startling a flock of ravens. Then he was gone and she had the lake and the campground to herself.
She closed her eyes and absorbed the good feeling of the sun on her face. Thinking about Luke Jessup disappearing. Thinking about Shana selling her horse and trailer for a good bit of cash. Thinking about Jamie Cottle and his brother. Looking out at the smooth, blue surface of the lake, wondering where T.J. Cottle dove in. Maybe there was more to the story—an argument, maybe, between teacher and pupil? She looked down at her hand, palm flat against on the big rocks. Her nails were dirty from crawling around in the dirt and picking out buckshot from the ground.
She made a mental note to ask for the file on T.J. Cottle’s death.
Looking at her nails again, her eyes straying to the crack that resulted from the juxtaposition of three big stones, a wedge of darkness that looked perfectly round.
So round she had the childlike urge to put her finger down it. Her finger would definitely fit; the hole was the size of a man’s finger. But she didn’t. There could be anything down there, specifically spiders. Having suffered the effects of a black widow bite, she sure as hell didn’t want to go there again.
She got up and headed for her car.
13
The layout of the Blue Lagoon Hotel and Casino was an endless labyrinth that always delivered you to the same place, or at least it looked like the same place. Easy to get lost, each room a cacophony of repeating chimes and pelting coins, all embedded into clockless, busily patterned areas designed to keep people there as long as their money held out. The blue-green color and shifting lights that were supposed to represent water reflections were all part of the theme, along with the repeating coconut palms on the carpet and the water slide from the third to second floor. Plenty of jungle stuff—vines hanging from the ceiling, themed restaurants like the Keel-Haul Saloon, little grass huts for the cashiers, roving cocktail servers dressed in loincloths or grass skirts, depending on their sex. Pretty girls and even prettier boys. All of it blurring together in Bobby Burdette’s mind.
Work first: Scope out the parking lots, get up on the roof. Reluctant to give up the helicopter idea, but it was looking more and more like he’d have to. It would look great in a movie, but it was problematic; there were too many ways for them to cheat. Best to do it the smart way, even if it wasn’t dramatic.
The goal was to survive. Survive and thrive.
Still, he went up on the roof—managed it quite easily. Security wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, even though he saw his share of men in suits bending into their collars and touching their earpieces.
All for show. Just like Las Vegas itself.
After the reconnaissance tour, it was time to lounge by the pool, play the slots, hit the craps table, and eat as much shrimp cocktail as he could.
He’d earned a vacation.
He managed to lose himself in the games for a couple of hours, but when he came out from under them, he thought about Shana again.
When he called her yesterday, she’d seemed distracted.
It wasn’t his imagination. She was definitely trying to get off the phone with him, making transparent excuses. He’d even mentioned that he was going to spend the following night at a brand new Las Vegas casino, knowing she’d ask if she could meet him there. But she didn’t.
“I thought you were in Kingman” was all she said.
“Nope, I’m having a mini-vacation. Don’t ask if you can come—I’m only going to be there one night.”
She didn’t say anything.
Unlike her. She always said whatever came into her empty head, which was one reason he was glad he’d never told her what he was planning. Bad enough what she did know.
The main reason he stayed with her was she was so hot-looking. When she went out with him, other men turned their heads to watch her. He knew they were thinking what it would be like to spend hours in the sack with a girl like that.
Plus, she had been in on this harebrained scheme from the beginning. Another good thing about her—he’d been able to let his guard down, not watch his words, at least about that part. But since he’d come up with his alternate plan, even that advantage had gone out the window. He had to school himself to think one way whenever he was with her—the way that led to Cottonwood Cove. Like that was the goal.
But now he sensed that something had changed between them.
He lay on a chaise, watching the parade of beautiful women modeling bikinis from Island Fashion, the hotel’s boutique. Shana would look good in one of those.
What was going on with her? She’d mentioned her brother three times.
A cocktail waitress in a grass skirt asked him if he wanted a refill. “Sure, doll,” he said, holding up his empty.
Her made-up face smoothing over into that still expression women got when they felt insulted.
Watching the water, watching the girls, but his mind on Shana. Thinking her brother’s death might have unhinged her.
How close was she to the edge?
Twenty minutes later, he was packed and standing in line waiting to check out, thinking he’d better stay close to home from now on.
Back at the motel, Laura took her second shower of the day, more to cool off on a hot, Indian-summer day than anything else, then took out her files and reviewed them, looking for anomalies—anything that might stick out. As usual, she went into a mild trance, only vaguely aware of the comings and goings outside her window. When she finished going through the murder book, it was a couple of hours later.
She went outside to stretch her legs and noticed that Richie’s car was gone. Peering into the window of his room, she spotted the motel key on the table.
P
eople left their keys inside a room when they checked out.
She called his cell. He answered, his voice almost blotted out by wind and traffic.
“Where are you?”
“Gas station in Flag.”
“Flag? What are you doing there?”
“I’m taking the tent back to the lab.”
“In Phoenix?”
“Uh-huh. Then I’m going home.”
“Why?”
“Sheriff’s deputies nailed Hector Lopez at a trailer in San Simon. I’ve got to be there.”
“What about this case?”
“You’re doing pretty good on your own.”
“Did you clear this with Jerry?”
“What do you think? Look, I’ve got to go. Looks like I’ll get to see my kid tonight after all.”
“You could have told me—”
But he’d already hung up.
In retrospect, Laura thought this might be a good thing. She and Richie hadn’t spent a lot of time working together on this case; he had gone his way and she had gone hers. So there was already something of a disconnect. Now she had the whole enchilada. A double-check with her sergeant, Jerry Grimes, verified that Hector Lopez, a big-time people smuggler—a coyote—had been captured today. Lopez had run a one-stop shop that moved large numbers of illegal aliens over the border, providing them with forged documents and licenses. He had also held some of the illegals hostage, charging their families exorbitant prices to release them. A couple of his people had gotten into a gunfight on Interstate 10 with a rival gang of coyotes, resulting in the death of a citizen whose car had been caught in the crossfire.
Jerry said, “It’s Richie’s case. We need him. Is that going to be a problem?”
“No problem I can see.”
“That’s good.” She heard the relief in his voice. “To tell you the truth we’re kind of stretched thin at the moment. Everybody’s doubling up. Are you anywhere near wrapping this thing up?” His voice hopeful.
“You need me now?”
“No,” he said hastily. “Just hoping we can get a solve on this. I mean, two college kids … you know.”
“I have some things to work on.”
“The lieutenant says whatever you need within limits. This is an important one.”
Laura wanted to say every case was important, but she knew better than to argue with him. The idea of two young college students being ambushed as they slept in a campground would make everyone nervous. The sooner they found whoever did it, the better. And Jerry was a good guy, the best kind of sergeant. He let her do her thing, even if sometimes her thing was unconventional. He depended on her, trusted her. Maybe the only one left in the department who did trust her.
So Laura said, “I’ll do my best,” and left it at that.
She walked three blocks to the Safeway and bought some supplies: a couple of sheets of white poster board and two dolls, Barbie and Ken, on sale for $4.99 each.
Laura had never played with dolls when she was a little girl, never even owned a Barbie. But tonight Barbie and Ken would suit her purposes perfectly.
As Laura walked back outside into the almost-dark, she felt the stress of the last few days easing. She wasn’t surprised at the little tug of excitement. She savored the feeling.
An only child, Laura had always been good at doing things on her own, so used to entertaining herself that she didn’t need anyone to bounce her ideas off. It was her version of the nesting instinct. Some women liked to clean house; she liked to get all the materials she needed to do her work and burrow down into it. She looked forward to doing that now.
Laura stopped at a fast-food place and, instead of ordering what she really wanted—something loaded with fat and grease—she got a salad that tasted like cardboard. She even used the low-fat dressing. It filled her, but didn’t satisfy her.
Back inside the room, she taped the two poster board sheets together, overlapping by about a foot, and spread it out on the round table by the window. She gathered her autopsy notes and the mapping work she and Richie had done on the buckshot, put them on one of the two chairs, and sat in the other.
She drew a large circle, representing the tent, on the contact paper. Then she removed (with difficulty) Barbie and Ken from their respective boxes and placed them inside the tent, their feet toward the tent entrance. She put Ken on his back and Barbie on her side, facing him. Laura tried to raise Ken up on his elbows, but the plastic limbs were resistant. She guessed that Dan had heard a sound and raised up on his elbows just before the first shot blasted through the tent. From the evidence, it appeared that after the first shotgun blast and the buckshot penetrating his foot, Dan had moved quickly, shoving Kellee to the right side of the tent. There had been little blood in the area where their feet would be, just a small blood trail as he whipped his leg to the side.
The ME had gone through all the wounds with her, Laura charting them on a legal pad: three rounds, nine projectiles each, sixteen of twenty-seven shots accounted for.
The killer had shot through the front of the tent first, from approximately fifteen feet away. Laura marked the shots this way:
1-1—took off male victim’s right big toe
1-2—shatters right shin
1-3—tears right calf
1-4—goes through right heel into floor of the tent
She added the other five shots that had not hit Dan, but penetrated the tent floor:
1-5—hole to the right
1-6—ditto
1-7—hole to the left
1-8—ditto
1-9—ditto
She rearranged Ken and Barbie, pushing them over onto their sides, nudging them up against the line representing the right edge of the tent. Turned the contact paper one quarter turn clockwise. Now the couple was horizontal to her, and she was in the shoes of the killer.
She logged the rounds Dan and Kellee had received this time:
2-1—severs female victim’s carotid
2-2—breaks female’s right collarbone
2-3—female–chest below collarbone
2-4—male, below right nipple, destroys heart
2-5—through his forearm and into female victim
2-6—into her Adam’s apple
2-7—through her right arm, passes alongside bone, into his right rib cage, breaks rib, travels back and embeds in male’s spine
2-8—below her right nipple 2 inches toward midline
2-9—back of male’s right hand, into her chest cavity, lacerating her aorta
According to the ME, all nine shots stayed inside the bodies.
This was the killing shot. Dan Yates’s heart destroyed, Kellee’s carotid severed.
Kellee’s aorta lacerated.
Buckshot lodged in Dan’s spine.
Buckshot lodged in Kellee’s throat.
Once again, she moved the paper. This time she was facing the tops of the victims’ heads.
She filled in the last round:
3-1—into the ground to the right of Dan Yates
3-2—ditto
3-3—ditto
3-4—ditto
3-5—ditto
3-6—ditto
All of these shots missed the victims, penetrating the floor of the tent and the ground. Laura had recovered all of them.
Shots 3-7 to 3-9 were grouped, within the radius of a tennis ball, and all hit Dan Yates in the back of the head.
3-7—rode the curve of the brainpan and back into the brainstem
3-8—shattered the back of the skull
3-9—also penetrated the back of the skull
With the shots 3-8 and 3-9, there was a large outshoot—lots of blood and brain matter spraying the floor and sides of the tent.
She stared at her diagram, the list of shots.
The numbers on the sheet of paper looked cold, clinical, but the effects of the damage piled up. It spread out like a poisonous lake in her stomach, a flat hard pain. The salad felt like crumpled paper, all rough edges.
Amazing what guns could do. She’d been to so many scenes where someone had shot in anger, before they had a chance to think, to realize what they were doing. Homicide detectives actually liked these cases because they were easy solves.
Laura hated them. She hated seeing ordinary people, people who thought of themselves as good, suddenly confronting an evil in themselves they could not previously imagine. Coming face-to-face with the kind of damage they could do, there was inevitably deep shock. Shock and anguish. A decent person up until then, now desperately wishing he could call the bullet back.
People who would have to build, in their minds, a whole new house for their souls.
That was not the case here. The message she got from this guy was he didn’t care.
He didn’t care, but then again, he did.
He didn’t care enough to look inside the tent, but he cared enough to make sure they were dead. That was where the overkill came in.
He had walked all the way around the tent and shot into three sides. This struck her as deliberate, methodical. But there was a rage component, too.
Thinking about it, looking at the damage, Laura was sure he had known them.
The room was airless. Laura got up and opened the door. A cool breeze slipped in, eddying around her bare ankles, and she thought of Frank Entwistle. No sign of him tonight, even though he might have made himself useful, brainstorming with her as he did in the old days whenever she had a case that bothered her. Even though he was TPD retired, and she was a detective with the state police—rival agencies—Frank had always been her mentor. But these days, Frank Entwistle appeared where and when he wanted to, and there was no way Laura could conjure him up. The man who boasted that he was related to Peg Entwistle, the young starlet from the 1930s who committed suicide by jumping off the H on the Hollywood sign, liked to make dramatic flourishes of his own.
Laura sat back down and stared at the outline of the tent, the two dolls, pretty and blond like their human counterparts.
The Laura Cardinal Novels Page 42
