The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  “What did she look like?”

  “She had dark hair.”

  It wasn't Jenny. Jenny was blond. “Do you remember what she wore?”

  Micaela shook her head.

  “What happened to this girl?”

  “I think she died.” She added, “Maybe that was a dream, though. It's hard to know what was a dream and what was reality. I blacked out a lot. I know that because I was so scared. And I know he drugged me.”

  “He drugged you? When was this?”

  “From the beginning. He'd give me shots. I fought him, but it did no good. I saw him do it to that other girl. After a while, he didn't have to drug me anymore—I was pretty cooperative. I cooperated because I had loved ones. That was always at the back of my mind, the way he held it over my head.”

  Laura was trying to get an overview, but it kept slipping out of focus. Micaela's speech hung her up a little, her occasionally stilted way of speaking: “I cooperated because I had loved ones.”

  Laura said, “You met this girl after you left town and came back?”

  “I think so.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  She shook her head. “I can't remember. It seemed like it was weeks, or even months. But I remember the girl. He kept telling her she wasn't wife material.”

  “Not wife material?”

  “He meant she wasn't going to be with us very long. That turned out to be what happened. I was there when he took her out to the desert.”

  Laura asked, “What places around Tucson can you remember going to?”

  “We never went anywhere.”

  “But you said you were there at the desert when he took her out there.”

  “That was the one time.” She twisted sideways in her chair, pulled her knees up and cradled them with her arms. “Usually, whenever he went somewhere, he'd leave me alone in the basement.”

  “Why did he have you go with him that time?”

  She shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe he wanted to show me what could happen to me if I didn't do what he said.”

  Laura switched tacks. “Do you know who owned the house?”

  Micaela shook her head.

  “Could it have belonged to someone else? Like a relative?”

  Micaela looked at her with her strange eyes. “I don't know. He always blindfolded me until we got to the basement.”

  “When you went with him and he took the other girl out into the desert? Do you remember where you went?”

  She shook her head. “We drove around and around that night, I'm not sure where it was, just some desert somewhere. I was scared he was going to kill both of us, but he told me to sit still. He took her out by the arm and she was crying. She was pleading and begging, ‘please don't kill me, please don't kill me!’ It just made him madder. He took her by the arm and dragged her out of the car. It was horrible. Then he came back and acted like nothing ever happened. I asked him where she was, and he just said, ‘You better do exactly what I say or you'll end up like her.’”

  “What did you do while he took her into the desert?”

  “What could I do? I couldn't do anything. I closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears and tried not to hear it.”

  “You remember plugging your ears?”

  She nodded. “It was like a nightmare, but I know it was real. And then, when he was done . . . we drove away. That was the night we left. He wanted to go back to San Diego. I was so scared.”

  Her hands weaving in and out of the air again.

  “I was afraid he'd kill me next. I prayed and prayed. I prayed for her, and I prayed just to stay alive.”

  “Did you hear anything? When he took her out into the desert?”

  “Like what? A gunshot?”

  “Anything at all?”

  “Just the girl pleading for her life. Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me.”

  “You think it was another girl?” Jaime Molina asked Laura as they walked out to the car. “Someone we don't know about?”

  “The age doesn't fit with Kristy, and Jenny had blond hair.”

  “He could have killed Kristy, though. Picked her up when Micaela wasn't around.”

  “You mean, so she didn't know about it?”

  Jaime said, “This whole thing is weird. This guy. The way he kept her and didn't keep the others.”

  “It had to be another girl, one we don't know about,” Laura said. Wondering how the previous investigator had overlooked a missing kid. The only cases she knew of were the ones she'd put together for her cold case file: Kristy Groves, Jenny Carmichael, and Micaela Brashear.

  She'd go back and check the records for ‘96 and ‘97, enlarge the search to ‘98. The following year was a real possibility since Micaela had been vague about the time frame. She'd call other jurisdictions, too—Santa Cruz County, Pinal County. Check with missing persons. Maybe some girl thought to be a runaway was Bill Smith's victim.

  “We don't have to be at the airport until eight thirty,” Jaime was saying. He'd asked her something, but she hadn't heard him.

  “I'm sorry,” Laura said. “I was elsewhere. What did you say?”

  Jaime slid into the car, reached over, and pushed open her car door. “My sergeant's throwing a Fourth of July party. I promised I'd put in an appearance.”

  “You're asking me to go?”

  He shrugged, his heavy-lidded eyes slipping to half-mast. “No, just telling you what I'm gonna do.”

  Going to a party in the middle of an investigation. Cold case or not, they had finally made some headway. “I think I'll go back and see if I can get a handle on this missing girl.”

  “Rory Flynn will be there.”

  Rory Flynn was the retired sheriff's detective who had originally worked the Kristy Groves case. Laura asked, “You sure?”

  “He never misses a party. Thought it might be a good idea to talk to him in an unthreatening setting, you know?”

  He was smarter than she'd given him credit for. Laura knew Rory Flynn would resent them. Nobody liked to give up a case, even when he was retired. And they especially hated not being consulted. This would be an ideal situation for them to touch base with him without making it official.

  “We have to stop at my place first,” Jaime said, driving west on Broadway past downtown, following Congress over the Santa Cruz River. “My wife made potato salad.”

  “It's a potluck?”

  “Hey, you don't get catering on a cop's salary.” He turned right on Grande.

  “You live in Barrio Hollywood?”

  “Yup.”

  They passed Pat's Drive-in. Laura thought longingly of chili cheese dogs with diced onions.

  Jaime Molina's house was an adobe brick ranch with a carport on the side. The pink brick used for the house also walled the front yard, alternating with panels of decorative wrought iron. A chinaberry tree threw deep shade on the walkway.

  In the left corner of the yard was a shrine to the Virgen de Guadalupe, the inside wall painted turquoise, the Virgen tucked inside. A massive new Chevy truck sat in the driveway. The back window was a mural of an eagle rampant against an American flag.

  Inside, the swamp box cooler sounded like a cement mixer, but did little to cool the house this close to the monsoon season. Drapes pulled, a big plasma TV on one end and a brick fireplace on the other. On the mantel were several framed photographs.

  Laura looked at the photographs while Jaime rounded the kitchen counter and opened the refrigerator.

  “Your wife have a special recipe?” she asked.

  “Between you and me, she bought two tubs of potato salad, put them in her favorite bowl, and sprinkled paprika and parsley on top.”

  “Sounds like my kind of woman.” Laura leaned closer to look at two of the formal portraits, each of a young lady wearing a floor-length gown. Their quinceañeras: coming-of-age celebrations girls went through when they reached fifteen years of age. “You have two daughters?”

  Jaime came around the counter holdin
g a large Pyrex bowl. “Uh-huh. That's Gloria and that's our baby, Valerie.” Puffing with pride—pretty dangerous when you were six three and close to three-hundred pounds. “Gloria's at the U of A. Valerie's a junior at Salpointe.”

  “They're beautiful. How come your wife's not going to the party?”

  “She's at a baby shower for my niece.”

  “Ah.” She stared at Valerie in her pink dress sitting on a chair in the middle of what looked like a dance floor. People standing back against the walls. Jaime, resplendent in a tuxedo, knelt before her, removing a dance slipper from one foot and replacing it with a pink high-heeled shoe: the stiletto heel being the modern symbol of coming-of-age for the fifteen-year-old Mexican girl.

  Laura noticed that in the picture, Jaime Molina's eyes were unusually bright. She thought he was holding back tears. His smile as big as the room.

  Suddenly she thought of Micaela Brashear and the way she had come of age at nine years old.

  And Kristy Groves, who never had come of age at all.

  Jaime said behind her, “Want to see my snakes?”

  “What?” It sounded like a come-on. She realized she was automatically adjusting her impression of him as she got more information. Something women seemed to do naturally with male members of the species they didn't know. Trust, but verify.

  His eyes narrowed, and she realized that he had caught her inflection. “Since I'm here, I want to check on my snakes. See if they've eaten. Thought you might like to see them.” He added, “Only take a minute, or you can wait here.”

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  Jaime led her down a long hallway lined with more portraits and family pictures. He opened the door at the end.

  Covering the entire right-hand wall was a mural depicting snakes and lizards of every description. Laura recognized a western diamondback, a black-tailed rattlesnake, and a coral snake. Dominating the mural was a snake Laura did not recognize. It reared up, enormous, dead center. A gray viper, its mouth hinged so wide open it made her think of the puppet Elmo. The metallic gray scales were like polished tile, and the lidless eyes were flat, shiny extensions of those tiles. The snake was about to strike, but she couldn't get past the shiny black of its eyes. Nothing there but indifference. Indifference and cold efficiency.

  “Scary, huh?” Jaime said. “That's a black mamba. Probably the most dangerous snake there is. If one of them bites you, you got a half hour to live.”

  “It's not black. It's gray.”

  He looked at her. “It's named for the way it looks when it opens its mouth—that big, black hole.”

  “Oh.”

  Jaime moved away from her, checking his snakes. Laura followed him, almost reluctant to turn her back on the mural. On the mamba.

  Jaime said, “I had an encounter with one of them once. This guy was selling them. No way I was going to buy one—I'm not crazy—but I did want to see it. He took it out and the thing just got away from him. Man, it still makes me hyperventilate just thinking about it.”

  He described those few wild moments when the agitated mamba rose up like a golf club, seeking. “And then it cruised—man, you wouldn't believe how fast it was. Both of us climbed up on a table. It was looking for us. I swear that thing wanted my blood—it could smell me.”

  Fortunately, the snake's keeper managed to get the drop on it and tossed it back in its terrarium.

  “After he caught him, he got down on his knees and threw up all over the floor. One drop of that venom and we'd be dead. I still don't know how we made it out of there alive.”

  After that, the lazily-curled diamondbacks, mojaves, and sidewinders in his terrariums seemed tame. They were sluggish in this weather. One of them had sullenly turned its back on the little white mouse huddled in the corner.

  Laura felt bad for the mouse. For a second, she entertained opening the lid and scooping it out.

  But then what? Where would she put it—in her purse? She and Jaime would get into a fight over it. She'd have to get a terrarium; she couldn't let it go. Plus, mice were fed to snakes every day. She'd only be substituting this mouse's life for another.

  Moral clarity sure wasn't what it used to be.

  They got out of there, Laura's mind going back to the mural, the mamba's open, black maw.

  The party was at a house on the west side, one of a vast raft of beige houses that had gone up in the last year or so, the whole subdivision surrounded by a high wall to keep out the riffraff or the desert, maybe both. Lots of big trucks parked on the block—Dodge Rams, Fords, and Chevys. A skinny blonde of about forty in shorts and a halter top answered the door and led them through to the tiny yard outside. A square of green lawn was dominated by one scrawny sapling braced by two stakes. Most of the people outside were male, sitting on plastic chairs under the narrow shade of the overhang or standing around the keg. Lots of the guys in knit shirts and chinos, many of them tall, almost all of them sporting short hair and mustaches. A couple of ponytails, graying.

  A sheriff's party, but all law enforcement officers were brothers and sisters under the skin. Sort of.

  Jaime, the genial guest-turned-host, asked what she wanted to drink. “Water's good,” she said to his disappearing back. Found herself alone with all these people she didn't know, standing around the keg in the wilting heat.

  “You with Jaime?” asked a heavy-set guy in a Hawaiian shirt holding a red plastic cup. A yeasty beer smell coming off him—he'd had a lot more than one.

  “You could say that.” Not wanting the femme fatale part, but reluctant to dive in and give her name, rank, and serial number. If he really wanted to know what she was, he could look at the shield clipped to her belt.

  He didn't bother. “Who you work for?”

  “DPS.”

  She saw a flicker in his eyes, knew that what he was thinking came automatically to sheriff's detectives: taillight-chaser. Just as, when she'd first seen Jaime, her first thought had been: He's got friends in high places. Unlike the police department, where you had to spend a few years on the beat and take an exam to become a detective, sheriff's detectives were appointed. You had to have approval from the sheriff in order to become a detective.

  A guy on the other side of the keg said, “I know you.”

  Laura looked at him. He wore a navy knit shirt with an alligator logo on it. Older guy, his ginger hair sprinkled with gray and down to his collar.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, you're the one who does the cold cases.” He was looking at her as if she was an insect under glass. “You've seen her, right? On the news?” he said to the guy next to him. “Some woman gets offed by her boyfriend in 1947 and DPS is on the case!”

  Just then Jaime showed up at her elbow with a cup of water. He had a soda in the other hand. “You met my new partner?”

  “Partner?” Knit Shirt said. “You calling her your partner now? What, you gone over to the dark side?”

  Jaime said, “We're working the Kristy Groves homicide.”

  Hawaiian Shirt whistled. “Holy shit, did you luck out or what?”

  A big man sitting on one of the lawn chairs suddenly lumbered to his feet and came their way. Late sixties, with a broad angry face the color and consistency of mortadella.

  He was in Laura's face in an instant. “You're Laura Cardinal?”

  Laura stepped back under the assault of his breath. Bourbon, if she wasn't mistaken. “That's right. And you are?”

  Jaime cleared his throat to say something, but the man stepped forward again, mad as a bull. “Don't you answer your phone calls? I've tried to reach you all day. Unless you don't want to know what the lead investigator on the Groves case has to say.”

  Laura smiled, tried to make herself non-threatening. “You must be Detective Flynn.”

  Jaime said, “Rory, man—“

  The older man waved him away. “You don't know anything about Kristy Groves.”

  Laura said, “I don't know enough, that's for sure. I could use your help.”
r />   “You're shining me on. I know when someone is shining me on.”

  He was very drunk. Laura wasn't sure there was a way to reason with him, but she'd try. “I think we need to go to a quiet place and go over everything we've got. I want to get your take on—“

  “Oh, cut the crap. You think I haven't used that bullshit a thousand times?” He waved an arm, fixed his glare at Jaime. “You should have warned me what was gonna happen. Now I'm cut out of this, and you've got this woman here calling all the shots—“

  “Hey, man, you're retired,” Jaime said. “You know that?”

  “I know that. You think I'm stupid? I thought I could work with someone, like Jimbo or Ralph; they wouldn't shut me out . . . dammit.” Winding down like a watch. “Either one of them would know you talk to the initial investigator.” He wiped his lips and fixed Laura with a baleful stare. “This has just gone to shit.”

  Laura tried one more time. “Jaime and I planned to interview—“

  “Can it. You don't interview me. You don't treat me like a witness. I worked the goddamn case. No, what you do, lady, is you ask my goddamn advice!” He spun around and started to walk away, then turned back. Jabbed a finger into the air. “You don't cut me out of the loop and think you can get me to do all the work for you at the same time.”

  Jaime said, “Hey, man, you don't need to talk to her that way.”

  “It's okay,” Laura said. Knowing that she had to de-escalate the situation. The only way she could think of to do that was to take herself out of it. “Look, I've got to hit the ladies room. You two sort it out, okay?”

  When she came back out, Jaime was waiting for her. “Rory and those guys took off. Drunker'n shit. They're heading over to the crime scene.”

  Just what she needed. Even though the forensic anthropologist was done with the scene, Laura didn't like the idea of a bunch of drunks trampling all over it. Shoot, it was like an archeological dig over there. One of them could step into a hole and break his leg—-that was, providing any of them got there before wrapping themselves around a light pole.

  “Why didn't you stop them?”

  Jaime shrugged. “They were bigger than me.”

  “Not many people bigger than you,” Laura muttered as she walked past him.