The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  A carnival would be a perfect place for a serial killer. Serial killers, as a rule, loved to travel. A nomadic existence suited them well, the major reason why so many murders went unsolved. Hard to follow a shadow across the country, completely free to go where he wished. Serial killers were as efficient as any other predator. They killed and then just went on to the next victim.

  Her head ached. She did not want to think about it.

  She got a few baby carrots from the fridge and walked onto the porch, listening to the crickets and enjoying the view of the dark mesquite forest that made up the front yard. She let herself out the creaking gate and followed the well-worn path down toward the corral.

  As she crossed the small wooden bridge over the irrigation ditch, the air dropped five or six degrees, because of the trees and the proximity to a spring.

  There had been a path like this on the ranch where she used to keep her first horse, when she was going to college and engaged to Billy Linton. It had been a time full of hope and promise, but it had ended way too soon.

  That youthful bliss had ended on a hot night in May when two homicide cops had shown up at her dorm room at the University of Arizona.

  Laura fed Calliope's Music the baby carrots one at a time, her mind still on the other horse and the other time. Remembering what it was like to be young and in love and have the whole world in front of you. She didn't realize then that it all could implode at an instant.

  Laura knew that being young and in love wasn't enough when your life was rocked by tragedy. No matter how hard you tried to make it work.

  A bright green light rocketed out into the sky in the direction of the Santa Catalina Mountains, flashed briefly past the red radio tower lights, and turned the mountain peaks into a silhouette.

  Laura remembered her stint at a summer camp on Mt. Lemmon—another memory turned to ashes. Summerhaven all burned up now.

  Sometimes it seemed that the good moments were only a prelude to tragedy. That sooner or later, even the lucky ones ran out of time.

  Chapter 7

  The squad bay at the Department of Public Safety was upstairs. DPS had four squads of four criminal investigators each. The desks in Laura's squad bay were arranged near the corners—every man an island. Laura was more of an island because she was the only female.

  Laura got in to work at six thirty. She liked to come in early because she had the place to herself more often than not and could hear herself think

  The map of southern Arizona was already pinned up on the bulletin board above her desk. Laura would work out from there in concentric circles, looking for the girl Micaela Brashear had described.

  Laura couldn't stop thinking about The Missing Girl. She thought of her name just like that, with capital letters. Laura decided she would call at least five jurisdictions a day, starting with Tucson and working her way to the outlying areas: Marana PD; Oro Valley PD; Sahuarita PD; the Tohono O'odham Tribal Police. Like a rock thrown into a pond, the circles would spread. She wouldn't stop at the Arizona border. She knew someone in Mexico. She knew someone in New Mexico.

  It was ineffably sad to think that a child could not leave even a small footprint on the earth. At the very least, Laura would learn who this girl was. And if possible, she would find her and bring her home.

  By seven thirty, the other members of her squad had trickled in. Victor Celaya, the detective she partnered with most often, stopped by her desk. “How's the case coming? The reporters after you yet?”

  He held his coffee mug out and away from his crisply-ironed chinos. The mug had a picture of a gun pointing outward and the legend: Better judged by twelve than carried by six.

  “Not me, but the lieutenant's holding a press conference at noon.”

  He whistled. “Sounds to me like somebody's starstruck.”

  Laura laughed. In truth, there was little reason for a press conference at this juncture. No suspects, no leads, very little information that could be released to the press.

  Victor's phone rang. He backed up to his desk and picked up, sloshing his coffee onto some papers. Held them up with two fingers, grimacing, as he listened to whoever was on the line. He glanced down at his slacks, and she heard him say, “Can you hold for a minute?” He left the squad bay and returned a few minutes later rubbing at the stain with a wet paper towel before picking up the phone again. Victor hated messes—except for the romantic kind. He had a wife, a mistress, and fling going with a waitress at a restaurant in South Tucson.

  If you overlooked that, he was a great guy.

  Laura heard a scrape of a shoe and looked up. Jaime was here, the ID he'd been given dangling from a lanyard around his neck. “We'd better hurry if we don't want to miss Patsy Groves's plane,” he said by way of greeting.

  This time, Laura drove. The new airport looked like all the other airports in the country. Laura missed the cowtown feel of the old one, even if it had been stuck in the sixties. She missed the sun coming in through the windows, the small plane hanging above the up escalator, the batwing-doored saloon on the second floor. Now TIA could have been transplanted to anywhere in the country—generic purple and gray.

  Laura had seen a picture of Patsy Groves and her husband Greg in a clipping from a newspaper article. The picture was several years old, but Laura recognized Mrs. Groves as she came down the ramp.

  She looked like a yellow crayon worn down to a nub. Her short hair was yellow, her Capri pants and top were yellow, her complexion sallow. If she wore yellow to cheer herself up, it didn't appear to be working.

  She made a beeline for them, her hand wrapped tightly around the handle of her pull-along suitcase, determination in every bone.

  “You must be the detectives,” she said, planting herself in front of them. “Were you the ones who found Kristy?”

  “No, ma'am,” Jaime said. “But we are the ones you want to talk to.”

  “I don't want to see her.”

  “Well, you don't have to—“

  “I want to remember her the way she was.”

  They started walking toward the baggage carousel, Jaime saying, “I'll bet Tennessee's a heck of lot cooler than here.”

  She touched her yellow hair. “Everything's blooming. I have allergies, but it's worth it.”

  “Bet you don't miss the heat.”

  “I hate this place. Thought I'd never have to come back here again.”

  “That's understandable,” Laura said.

  Patsy Groves shot her a look that said she didn't understand at all.

  A beep sounded, and the carousel they stood before started to move. Jaime's shins up against the carousel, watching for the bags to come out, Patsy Groves standing beside him. A partnership of sorts. Jaime kept her talking, chivalrously lifting one bag after another and setting them on the purple carpet. “Is that it?”

  “One more. I always overpack,” Patsy Groves added, her tone confidential.

  After they picked up the last bag, Laura handed the keys to Jaime. “Why don't you get the car?”

  “No hay problema.” He took the keys and threw them up in the air, caught them with a flourish.

  Laura tried to engage Mrs. Groves in small talk as they headed out to the street. She noticed the answers she got were monosyllabic. When Jaime drove up, Patsy looked genuinely glad to see him.

  They drove the one long block to the DPS building. Laura led the way to the conference room upstairs off the squad bay. She tried to catch Jaime's eye, wanting to get it straight between them that he would be the lead, but he seemed immersed in his conversation with Mrs. Groves. As Laura thought about how to signal her intention, Jaime reached past her for a chair and pulled it across the floor. He motioned Mrs. Groves to sit, then pulled another chair away from the table and sat down so that he was facing her.

  Laura had not needed to tell him after all. She admired the smooth way he did it, as if they had been partners for years. She'd underestimated him. She took another chair and parked herself at the short end of the
table, off to Mrs. Groves's left side. That way she'd be close enough to witness the interview, but wouldn't intrude.

  “Mrs. Groves,” Jaime said, “can I call you Patsy?”

  Patsy Groves rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Call me Pat.”

  “Pat, first, I want to say how sorry I am for . . . what happened with Kristy. If you need anything—a drink of water? Anything like that, I'll get it for you.”

  Patsy Groves nodded again, her eyes never leaving his.

  Laura was impressed with the easy way he created intimacy. Even though he was a big man, he gave the impression of being much smaller. His shoulders slumped forward, his knees seemed to come up, and he shrank two sizes. He had already gained Patsy Groves's confidence, even though Laura had pegged her as the suspicious type.

  “Before we start,” Jaime said, “do you have any questions?”

  Mrs. Groves said, “When will they release the body?”

  Laura was surprised at her terminology. Wondered if it was a way to distance herself from the tragedy.

  Jaime said, “The autopsy is scheduled for tomorrow, but it might be a few days until you can take her home.”

  “I'll have to stay here then?” Laura caught a quick flash of panic in her eyes.

  “I'm afraid so,” Jaime said. He shifted in his seat and leaned forward—her confidante. “Can you tell us, in your own words, what you remember?”

  He took her through it gently. There was no deviation from her initial statement. Kristy had worked at the deli in the morning, then gone to see a friend named Taylor McCaffrey, who lived less than a block away. Somewhere between Jessica's house and the Groves home, Kristy had disappeared.

  “She make that walk often?” Jaime asked.

  “Every day. She kept complaining about it, was looking forward to getting her learner's permit so she could drive over.”

  Pat first noticed her daughter was missing around dinnertime. Her husband was home that night; his brother Dave was working at the deli.

  Laura had read Flynn's report twice now, and knew that Greg's brother, David Groves, shared in the ownership of the restaurant.

  “Do you know where David Groves is now?” asked Jaime.

  “I wouldn't know. When Greg and I got divorced, we cut all ties. We didn't have anything in common anymore.”

  That statement hung in the air, a bitter commentary on what tragedy can do to a marriage.

  “Greg's not coming here, is he?” Patsy added, looking from one to the other of them.

  “He declined to come,” Jaime said.

  “Good.”

  Laura thought that this lady liked to close doors. She didn't want to view her daughter's bones, and she didn't want to see the man she had married and with whom she had borne a child. There were a lot of people like that; in fact, Laura counted herself among them. Close the door on the pain and you never had to think about it. You could go on as if nothing happened.

  It worked to a point. But after a while, Laura had found that she closed the door on more and more things, and pretty soon there were very few places she could go.

  Jaime said, “Could you describe the relationship between your family and Greg's brother Dave?”

  “We all got along fine.”

  Jaime consulted his notes. “His wife's name's Joanne, right? Says here they stayed with you for almost a year. Did you mind?”

  She looked at him. “Not at the time. He was useful around the house—really good at fixing things.”

  “You said not at the time? Did you resent them later?”

  “No, I just meant . . .” She fiddled with her hair, then let her hand drop to her lap. “Later on, after Kristy went missing, Greg took against me. Like it was my fault. Which it wasn't. She was fourteen years old, you'd think she could walk one block home. Dave and Joanne didn't once come to my defense, even though they could see what a handful she was.”

  “You feel you got all the blame?”

  “Darn right I did, and it wasn't fair.”

  Interesting, Laura thought, that she expected her husband's brother and his wife to take her side.

  Jaime shifted forward in his chair. “How would you characterize your husband's relationship with his daughter?”

  “He always took up for her. I was the one who expected her to do her homework, her chores, so I was the one she got mad at. She was a regular Daddy's Girl. In her eyes, he could do no wrong.”

  Jaime leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. “How about Dave? Did he and Kristy get along?”

  She looked at him. “You're not saying—" She stopped, swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “There's no way.” Her tone defiant. “To Dave, she was an annoyance. He hardly noticed her at all except when she got obnoxious—you know how teenagers are—and you could tell he was put off. He never had kids. You're barking up the wrong tree if you think he did anything with her.” She paused, looked at both of them with a mixture of resentment and disappointment. “Besides, I thought it was a serial killer.”

  “We have to cover all the bases,” Jaime said quietly.

  “Well, it was a serial killer, wasn't it? Had to be. What about those other girls? You don't have to worry about Greg or Dave. They were both fine with her. They weren't so fine with me, but that's another story.”

  Jaime asked her about their trip to the county fair.

  “There was a guy. He was talking to her outside one of the bathrooms. I could tell he was trying to pick her up. She looked older than her age. Kristy was fourteen going on thirty. But I stopped that. I walked right up to them.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The man turned around and left. Just like that. Before I even got there.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “All I remember were his eyes. The look he gave me before he left. Of course, Kristy was mad at me for spoiling her fun. Talking to a complete stranger at the fair. I always get the blame.”

  Jaime tried to find out more about the man talking to Kristy, but that was all she could give them. “You entered a sweepstakes for a Ford Explorer,” he added. “Do you remember that?”

  She looked at them blankly. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Someone could have gotten your address from the entry blank.”

  Patsy Groves had nothing to say to that, but the look in her eyes told them this was just one more piece of blame she'd have to shoulder alone.

  Jaime left to meet the forensic anthropologist, Jean Cox, at the crime scene. They would look for graves they might have overlooked. Laura stayed behind to run down the carnival Micaela Brashear and Kristy Groves had attended shortly before their disappearances.

  The carnival that worked the Pima County Fair was easy to track—it took one phone call to the Southwestern Fair Commission, which put on the Pima County Fair every year. Behr Family Amusements, which had done the fair for the last eighteen years, was one of the biggest carnivals in the country.

  According to their website, BFA's regular route for the past fifteen years took them to Riverside, California, at the end of October. If Kristy Groves had met someone with the carnival, it would have been this one. But it also meant that Behr Family Amusements would have been in California when Micaela went to the carnival the previous October.

  Patsy Groves described the man trying to pick Kristy up as young. Smith was in his forties and balding. That was a discrepancy, but Laura couldn't ignore the carnival link. Maybe other men had spoken to Kristy.

  She called the carnival HR department (amazed that a carnival had a Human Resources person) and asked if they had ever hired a Bill Smith. The name was such an obvious alias, Laura expected her hear they'd hired several Bill Smiths. She gave the woman Micaela's description of him.

  “Offhand, I can't think of anyone like that, not with that name. But let me look in our files and I'll get back to you.”

  It went downhill from there. Laura spent an exasperating half hour trying to learn i
f any permits had been issued to carnivals in the last two weeks of October when Micaela disappeared. She called the city office where temporary business permits were issued; development services (electrical and schematic inspections); and the health department (food booth inspections). None of these panned out. Records of these kinds of permits were uniformly expunged from the system after five years. It also turned out, to her dismay, that Arizona was one of a dozen states that did not require ride safety inspections.

  Laura realized she needed to talk to Micaela Brashear again. She thought about calling Jaime, but he would be wrapped up at the crime scene for a while. She could talk to Micaela by phone, but it was always preferable to do interviews in person. A face-to-face interview allowed her to use all her senses.

  The weather disturbance that had infused the Tucson valley with the promise of rain was gone, leaving a blue sky hard as glazed crockery. Since there were a couple of cars in the driveway, Laura parked on the road. The heat swarmed around her face like bees, stealing her breath from the moment she left her car; even a thirty-yard walk in this heat was daunting. Her pace quickened under the full sun and slowed when she reached the shade thrown by the royal palms. She thought about the illegal immigrants sixty miles from here on the border, walking for miles. Many of them dying in the desert. It wouldn't take very long for her to die—not long at all.

  She rang the bell and found herself waiting a long time. The front door was under an arched alcove and additionally cooled by the shade of an alligator juniper tree. A mockingbird sang from the tree's branch, and Laura thought about her own mockingbirds back on the Bosque Escondido.

  They were wild birds, but Laura had named them after they had stayed through their first winter with her three years ago: Buster and Blanca. She'd put out water for them, which they viewed as their own private watering hole, and watched them raise generations of fledglings.

  In the last few days, Laura had gradually come to the realization that Buster and Blanca were gone. She had no idea where they'd disappeared to or when exactly they'd made their departure. She'd been fooled for a while because a mockingbird still sang from the wire going into the telephone pole above the house. When it finally dawned on her that Buster and Blanca weren't coming for their water and the mocker was perched in a different spot, Laura had taken a good look at the bird. It wasn't Buster. This mockingbird looked more like the Maltese Falcon—broad-shouldered and sharp-beaked.