The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  It was the discovery of Kristy Groves's body in her desert grave that brought Laura Cardinal and Jaime Molina to this house, looking for answers.

  Until yesterday, Kristy Groves's disappearance was a cold case. Lately, Laura had been inundated with them because the new lieutenant of Criminal Investigations in the Tucson sector wanted to raise the Arizona Department of Public Safety's profile in the community. The best way to do that was to start an Open Unsolved Unit and put a woman's face on it. Lieutenant Wiese thought Laura was photogenic and well-spoken—an excellent representative of the department.

  But cold cases were . . . cold, and most of them never went anywhere. Laura had not worked a regular homicide case in months.

  When the Kristy Groves case broke, she couldn't help but feel this was her chance. Over the space of a few minutes yesterday morning, when a construction worker uncovered part of fourteen-year-old Kristy's skeleton, Laura's cold case became a hot case. She was back in the game.

  Or she was until this morning, when her sergeant, Jerry Grimes, called her into his office. His first question: did she know the genesis of the case?

  “Genesis?” Feeling the first stirrings of unease.

  “It was Pima County's originally.”

  Laura's stomach seemed to plummet from a great height. She said carefully, “But it's been mine for almost a year.”

  Jerry had the grace to look sheepish. “Yeah, but the thing is, the sheriff wants it back.”

  Of course he would. It had been all over the news. Now the Groves case was high-profile, and the Pima County sheriff liked high profile. He liked the spotlight.

  “But it's my case,” Laura said, knowing she sounded stubborn.

  Jerry leaned forward, clasping his small, blunt hands on the desk. “Look, Laura, I did my best to give you a piece of this. So don't bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “What do you mean, a piece?”

  “Just what I said. You're still on it, but you've got a new partner.” He pushed a slip of paper with a name and phone number on it across the desk. “Name's Detective Jaime Molina.”

  As Laura took the paper and started out the door, Jerry added, “Make sure you work and play well with others.”

  The reason Laura had gotten the case at all was because meth labs and murder victims were springing up in the boonies like mushrooms after a rain. The Pima County sheriff's office had its hands full with the meth wars, so they shunted some of its old cases to the Department of Public Safety.

  If Kristy Groves's body hadn't been found, the case would still be exclusively Laura's.

  As she stepped from the car, she heard a voice drifting out of the house. It sounded like opera—a soprano's voice.

  The Brashears were prominent members of the community. Dr. Brashear founded and ran the Tucson Heart Health Clinic, and Nina Lantz-Brashear was an accomplished opera singer who had sung at the Met.

  “Do you want to take the lead?” Laura asked as they approached the house.

  “You go ahead.”

  “You think it's a one-shot deal.”

  He coughed.

  “I know it's a long shot.”

  He nodded, his eyes indifferent.

  Three girls had been kidnapped in the course of one year—October of 1996 to July of 1997—and Micaela Brashear was one of them. Laura didn't think Micaela's abduction would turn out to be related to the Groves case. But the thing was, you never knew.

  Jaime pressed the bell, and it bonged through the house. A maid wearing a white skirt, Keds, and a knit shirt bearing the Tucson Heart Health Clinic insignia answered the door. Jaime and the maid conversed in Spanish as they walked through the foyer.

  The Brashear family was grouped inside a mahogany-timbered study. A young woman stood just inside the doorway, while another woman—Laura guessed she was Nina Lantz-Brashear—spoke. “Think at the front of your forehead. When you go up an octave, you want lots of air bouncing around up there.” Her delicate hands opening into the air, describing graceful arcs.

  The young woman nodded earnestly.

  “See you next week,” Nina Lantz-Brashear said. A clear dismissal. She turned to Laura and Jaime, and a few moments later, Laura heard the front door close. Laura looked at the three people who were left.

  Laura was a little disconcerted by the tableau the Brashear family made. They looked as if they were posing for a magazine. Dr. Colin Brashear leaned against his desk, feet crossed and arms folded. His pale eyes were bored and impatient. Laura had read that he was a marathon runner, and he did seem lean to the point of gaunt.

  Nina Brashear had moved from the doorway and stood facing them, all grace and good posture. Flawless makeup that made her seem much younger than her age, fifty-four.

  “You must be detectives Cardinal and Molina. Would you like to sit down?”

  “Thanks,” Laura said. She took a wing chair opposite the person who interested her most.

  Despite Nina Lantz-Brashear's classic good looks and Dr. Brashear's stony presence, the person in the room who commanded the most attention was Micaela.

  She was pretty in a dark, almost angular way. Slim with fine features and a pointed chin, she wore jeans; a camisole top of soft, clingy material; and tall, cork-soled sandals. Physically, she should have appeared small in the big leather chair, but somehow she didn't.

  Despite her slumped posture, her legs stretched out and crossed at the feet, Micaela Brashear drew Laura in. Perhaps it was her stillness. Or her eyes. Ordinary brown eyes, but there was something different about them.

  Laura realized that Micaela had a very slight cast to one eye. So slight it wasn't a blemish; rather it conspired to make both eyes more beautiful. Exotic even.

  Those eyes regarded Laura frankly, as if taking her measure.

  A tough kid, grown into a tough young adult.

  A survivor.

  Then the girl drew her legs in, sat up, and smiled. And the sense Laura had that she had been scrutinized vanished.

  Laura glanced at Jaime to gauge his reaction to Micaela Brashear. He sat there like a lump, his giant body dwarfing the other wing chair. Head and neck growing out of his ill-fitting suit like the Prudential rock. He gave her the impression of someone waiting for a train.

  “We'd like to ask you a few questions,” Laura said. “It won't take long.”

  “Okay.”

  “May we stay?” Mrs. Brashear said.

  “As long as Micaela's comfortable with it, I don't mind.”

  Nina Brashear sat down, layering her skirt gently over her nyloned legs.

  Dr. Brashear said abruptly, “I don't see what this has to do with that girl they found yesterday. Seems to me it's like apples and oranges.”

  “Colin,” Nina said quietly. “Please.”

  Laura looked at Micaela.

  “It's fine with me if they stay.”

  Brashear said, “I don't want to hear all this again. Call me when you're done.” He shot his cuffs and strode out the door without a backward look.

  Nina Brashear looked at Laura. “He's upset about what happened to Micaela. He doesn't like to think about it.”

  “Understandable,” Laura murmured.

  “We all want closure, to just forget about it, but if this can help in any way . . .” She let her gaze drop to her knees. Laura thought, I hope I have knees like that when I'm fifty-four.

  She looked at Micaela. “Let's start from the beginning.”

  Chapter 4

  Micaela Brashear had been on her way home from a friend's house when she’d seen the man stapling a sheet of paper to a telephone pole. The paper had said “Lost Dog” with a photocopy of a dog sitting in a basket.

  The man had introduced himself as Bill, asked her to come closer to look at the picture. Told her the dog was on medication, the dog could die if he wasn't found. Micaela had walked over to peer at the photocopy, barely aware of the man or the fact that his car was still running. The next thing she’d known, he'd pulled her inside his vehicle, dr
iving off so fast the door had slammed on its own. “I know, real dumb,” she said. Her voice matter-of-fact.

  Not looking for sympathy, but not blaming herself either.

  She told them she’d looked for a way to escape, had planned to jump out of the car when he slowed down at a light. But the door handle on the passenger side had been missing. She’d had no time anyway. He’d driven into an alley, knocked her out with a tire iron. Next thing she remembered was waking up handcuffed in the basement.

  Laura made note of that. There weren't many basements in Tucson. She asked Micaela if she had any idea what part of town she had been in.

  Micaela shook her head. Without windows, the basement’s only furnishing had been a mattress on the floor.

  What had ensued was terrorization on a level Laura didn't want to imagine. At least this time, the victim had come out of it alive.

  Micaela Brashear's captor alternately had threatened to kill her, then had told her she would be his wife on earth and for eternity. Laura admired the girl's self-possession. She spoke objectively, as if these things had happened to someone else. Victims of violent crimes often withdrew from reality, even looked down on the proceedings in real time, seeing their victimization from outside themselves. But Micaela's story moved seamlessly, heaping more and more terror and abuse onto herself with every incident she recounted.

  There had been the time when he’d made her dial her parents, making her stay silent, a knife to her throat, her mother calling out, “Who is this?”

  Laura glanced at Nina Brashear. An unguarded moment, her expression troubled.

  “Sometimes while he was raping me, I saw the virgin floating above me raining roses down on me from her cloak. I knew then I'd survive.”

  Survive. Laura wondering, how does one child live and another one die?

  She said to Micaela, “What did Bill look like?” Although she remembered the composite drawing from the news stories, she wanted to hear it from Micaela herself.

  “He was older. Forty or fifty at least. And his eyes . . .” She shuddered. “His eyes were crazy.”

  She described him as bald with a few strands of hair, worn long.

  “How long were you at the house?”

  “Just a few days. Then he took me to San Diego. We camped out in Yosemite for a couple of weeks. Then we went to San Diego. And then we went up to northern California, I think Oregon.” She paused. “I thought about trying to escape. But . . .” She reached up and hooked a strand of black hair behind her ear, looked at the floor. Shrugged. “It just didn't work out. He was always watching. I couldn't do anything.”

  Laura suddenly felt claustrophobic. Maybe it was the oppressive darkness of the wood-paneled library. Or maybe she was taking Micaela's fear into herself, the panic of knowing her life had changed forever.

  Micaela said, “It took me years to plan my escape. I wanted to, but I couldn't. It was like . . . there's some kind of thing I read about somewhere, Stockman's Syndrome . . .”

  “She means Stockholm Syndrome,” Nina Brashear said.

  “I could have gotten away plenty of times. He gave me lots of responsibility. I shopped for groceries. I cooked all his dinners, mostly frozen dinners, but I could make hot dogs. Chili dogs—we lived on chili dogs.” Laura noticed that she gestured with her hands a great deal. “He even let me get a job. I know I didn't do anything wrong. It's not my fault, but there's always a reason to feel guilty . . . I was afraid for my parents. Bill threatened to kill them, said he'd drive all the way back and take me with him just for fun . . . What would I do if he did that? It just broke my will, so I didn't even try . . .”

  Her hands suddenly falling silently to her lap. Her eyes sad.

  Laura wanting to comfort her, but that wasn't her job. “But you did escape,” she said. “How did you finally do that?”

  “I met this lady in the laundry room of one of the apartments we lived in when I worked at Sea World . . .”

  Laura wrote in her notebook: Social Security number? If the girl worked at Sea World, they would have had to come up with a fake name and a social.

  Micaela was saying, “She could tell right away that something was wrong.” Her hands up and moving again, as if she needed them to put her point across. “She was an old lady. She escaped from the Holocaust when she was a little kid—it was just terrible. A tragedy. She saw her parents die right in front of her eyes. I couldn't stop thinking about that. I loved my mom and dad so much, and I never stopped praying I'd get home someday . . . She said she had money and could help me.”

  “You told her what was going on?”

  “Not at first, but after a while I grew to trust her. So we made a plaque.”

  Laura realized she meant “pact.”

  “One day I went off to work as usual, but this time I went to the bus station and that's how . . . that's how I made it back here. She gave me the money.”

  Nina Brashear said, “I couldn't believe it when she called. She called us from the bus station.”

  Micaela laughed. “You should have heard my mom. She thought it was a crank call.”

  “That was only for the first few minutes, Mickey. You can hardly blame us, coming out of the blue like that.”

  Defensive.

  Laura wondered what it would be like to hear from your child after all these years. Nina Lantz-Brashear must have been convinced that Micaela was dead.

  Nina added, “We went down right away and picked her up.”

  Micaela turned her head away from her mother.

  Tension here. Not such a big revelation—the Brashears lose their nine-year-old daughter, and she returns an adult, a completely different person. And Micaela comes home to the idyllic childhood she once had only to find that everything has changed in the interceding years. Laura would be surprised if there wasn't tension. She asked Micaela, “You worked at Sea World?”

  “When I was eighteen. I worked concessions, but after a while they let me work with the animals. I helped train the dolphins. It's my dream job. I want to go back there. After I graduate college.”

  “Did he let you keep any of the money?”

  “No, I had to give it all to him or he'd beat me.”

  “And you never told anybody until you met this lady in the laundry room?”

  She held Laura's gaze, shook her head no. “I can't explain it.”

  But she had explained it. Somewhere along the line, she'd made some effort to understand her own actions, even given them a label. The Stockholm Syndrome referred to captives who fixated on their captors, sometimes fell in love with them. They had no will to escape even when the chance presented itself.

  Nine years with the man by the time she had reached eighteen. By then, she probably saw her captor as her family and her lifestyle as normal. Normal enough to go to work at a happy place like Sea World and come back again each night. Strange, but Laura had seen a lot of strange things.

  Jaime shifted in his chair. Laura looked over at him, the question he shot her with his eyes. She nodded.

  He leaned forward, his bulk folding in on itself. “Did you have a car?” he asked, his voice soft, nonthreatening.

  “Bill had a car. He drove me to work and back.”

  “Did he work, too?”

  “He was a cook at a diner just down the street. A short-order cook,” she added.

  “That was his real name? Did you see it on the bills he got, his license?”

  “It was an alias,” Nina Brashear said, “Bill Smith. There was a big search for him, but it's as if he disappeared into thin air.”

  Laura said to Micaela, “That's how he was known to everyone you met? As Bill?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Laura had heard enough to think it unlikely that this case had anything to do with Kristy Groves's abduction and murder. It sounded as if this was indeed a one-shot deal, as far as Bill Smith was concerned. But she wanted to ask anyway.

  “Were you alone with Bill Smith all that time? Did he ever show inte
rest in anyone else?”

  “You mean, did he kidnap another girl like me?”

  Laura thought how sharp this girl was. “That's what I mean.”

  Micaela looked at Laura. Laura got the feeling that the Brashear girl was looking down at her from above, detached. Her eyes had taken on an odd sheen.

  “Yes,” she said. “There was another girl.”

  Chapter 5

  “Another girl?”

  Laura felt as if she'd fallen down the White Rabbit's bolt hole. There had been no mention of another girl in the newspaper accounts she had seen. She looked at Micaela, careful to keep her expression neutral. The rest of the room faded—it was just the two of them now. “You're sure?”

  Micaela Brashear's odd eyes seemed to hook into her. “I'm sure. He took her out into the desert.”

  Laura's mind racing. “Where was this?”

  “Here, in Tucson.”

  Could she be talking about Kristy Groves or Jenny Carmichael? Laura glanced at Jaime. He had straightened up in the chair, both feet planted on the floor. As surprised as she was, but his heavy-lidded eyes veiled his emotions.

  “When did this happen?” Laura asked.

  “Soon after we came back from San Diego,” she said, adding, “The first time we went there.”

  “How old was she?”

  “I think she was my age.”

  That let out Kristy Groves, who was fourteen at the time of her disappearance.

  “When would this have been?”

  The girl shook her head. “I can't remember. Some time that year.”

  “'96 or '97?”

  “I'm not sure.”

  “Were you there when he met her?”

  She shook her head. “No. He said he picked her up outside a 7-Eleven. I don't know which one.”

  This did not sound like the Jenny Carmichael abduction. Jenny had disappeared from the Catalina Mountains in 1997. There were no 7-Elevens up on the mountain.

  " Where were you at the time he picked her up?”

  “At his house.”

  “Did you meet her?”

  “Uh-huh.”