The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  “This would be the seventh of July,” Jaime said.

  “July fourth we were in Phoenix—at the Desert View Air Park. It was a big event.”

  “Did you stay in Phoenix?”

  “I can't remember. Carl might know. I'm pretty sure we didn't come back down to Tucson then, though.”

  Laura thinking it was unlikely that Jenny Carmichael would have run into anyone from this carnival. She had already been up on Mt. Lemmon for two weeks by that time.

  As they were leaving, Laura asked Trudy, “Just curious, what's a hanky pank?”

  “It's a game where you always win a prize, and it's also what we call the game's operator.”

  Jaime said, “What's the value of the prize compared to what you pay to play?”

  Trudy smiled. She had a beautiful smile. “Ah,” she said. “There's the rub.”

  The sun was setting as they drove down US 80 under the overarching ash and walnut trees, the bloodshot eye of the sun tracking them.

  Jaime said, “Doesn't sound like the carnival was here when Jenny Carmichael was kidnapped.”

  “No, it doesn't.”

  “And that guy Heywood—he wasn't the guy who took Micaela Brashear.”

  “I know.”

  “So. What are the odds?”

  Laura knew what Jaime was thinking: that whoever this Heywood guy was, he was a false lead.

  Micaela had been kidnapped by Bill Smith. Laura knew that even in a good-sized city like Tucson, the idea that two sexual predators were working the same area at the same time was unlikely.

  “You don't think there's anything there? With Heywood?” Laura asked Jaime.

  He looked straight ahead, the top of his head brushing the Yukon's ceiling. The Incredible Hulk. “I don't know. What do you think?”

  Laura sighed. “Probably not. I think we should run it down, though. You want to do it, or should I?”

  “Why don't you take it? I'm going to have my hands full running down Dave Groves. He isn't here in this town.”

  She was glad he'd suggested it. Finding Heywood might not amount to anything, but at least she could eliminate him.

  Jaime said, “About the carnival. You know who we could ask. I don't think anybody ever thought to ask her that, first time around.”

  “Mrs. Carmichael,” Laura said.

  “It's been a couple weeks.”

  “She should be over it by now, is that what you're saying?” It had just slipped out. She glanced at him, hoping he hadn't taken offense.

  “Hey, I don't want to do it either. But you can bet she knows about Kristy—it's been all over the news. Plus, it's what she does.”

  “I know we're going to have to talk to her. Let's see what tomorrow looks like.”

  Jaime shoved the passenger-side visor down to block the sun. “There are some things about this job I really hate,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  Steve Lawson glanced at the passenger seat of his purple car. On it were three articles he'd photocopied from newspaper articles at the Historical Society about Jenny Carmichael's disappearance and the ensuing search for her. A black-and-white Xerox of the photograph in the paper on top. Much better than the yellowed, creased photo from the newspaper he'd pulled down from the porch rafters.

  It was the girl he'd met by the stream bed.

  No doubt about it.

  Jenny Carmichael disappeared from a Rose Canyon Lake picnic area on the ninth of July, 1997. Jenny, twelve other campers, and two camp counselors had been driven to the lake in two vans. She had not been missed until hours after the whole crew had gone back to Camp Aratauk after a sudden thunderstorm cut short the outing.

  A camp counselor was quoted as saying that Jenny “liked to explore,” and was “always going off by herself.” It sounded like an excuse to him.

  The search continued for nearly two weeks. Volunteers converged on the mountain, which had been gridded into search areas. They dragged the lake.

  At first it was thought that Jenny Carmichael was lost, but a few days later a witness came forward and told authorities she had seen a man talking to a little blond girl on Mt. Lemmon Highway near the entrance to the Rose Canyon Lake campground. She described a white car, but was unable to give any more detail except that the girl wore a uniform.

  Rose Canyon Lake was a half dozen miles from the camp and the stream bed where Steve had encountered—

  Might as well say it: Where he had encountered her ghost.

  In one of the articles, Jenny's mother and older brother talked about how they feared for the girl's life. That was the story with the school picture. She looked out at him with those serious eyes, the sprinkling of freckles on her nose. A really good-looking kid.

  Polite too. The kind of kid who would ask first if it was okay to pet your dog.

  Steve spotted an empty parking space in front of Crescent Moon Gifts on Fourth Avenue. On an impulse, he pulled in.

  He realized then that he had been planning on coming here all along.

  He needed to talk to Julie face to face, and he wanted to do this as soon as possible. His mind was running out of disk space, and he needed to free it up. He needed to think about Jenny Carmichael, needed to figure out what was going on. He was sure there was a reasonable explanation. He just had to put his mind to it. But he couldn't do that until he settled things with Julie.

  Crescent Moon Gifts smelled of incense. A loudspeaker played South American flute music. There were little alcoves everywhere—Julie called them “grottoes”—decorated with fabrics and fake twining vines and flowers. Crescent Moon sold a little bit of everything: women's clothing, New Age and feminist books, candles, jewelry, beads, and greeting cards. A section was devoted to the supernatural: Tarot cards, Ouija boards, and books on palm-reading, incantations, and spells. Not the Halloween-type stuff, though: no books on aliens, vampires, devils, or ghosts.

  Ghosts.

  The best thing about Crescent Moon was a display box of crystals in the window: microcrystalline and cryptocrystalline quartzes, obsidian, onyx. Julie saw them as “healing crystals.” Maybe they could heal. Looking at them, he could feel his heart rate go down, could feel himself responding to their beauty.

  “Can I help you?”

  A woman he didn't recognize manned the counter. She looked the part: dressed like a Medieval maiden, her graying hair caught in a long braid down her back. Romeo's Juliette, if Juliette had lived past fifty.

  “I'm looking for Julie.”

  “She's out.”

  “Did she go out for lunch?” Thinking he could find her—there weren't that many restaurants around here.

  “Nope. She's in Sedona for the day.”

  He was surprised at the let-down he experienced. He didn't like confrontation, but had been ready for this one. And now he would have to put it off.

  The nasty voice in his head snickered: Maybe she's not as hot for you as you think.

  “You want to leave your name?”

  “That's okay.”

  He found himself out on the street, blinking against the strong sunlight. Cumulus clouds were building up over the Catalinas; they'd been anchored there for days. The Diamondback fire was acrid in his nostrils. White clouds amassing to the north, dark smoke to the south. Gathering armies of good and evil.

  For now, though, the sky above him was clear and blue.

  He was about to get in his car when he noticed the hardware store across the street. Rather, he noticed the large flower containers lining the sidewalk in front, filled with geraniums.

  His grandfather's geraniums took up two wooden planters by the front door of his cabin, but they had gone wild. Steve had been meaning to cut out the dead stuff, re-pot them, and feed them. He crossed the street to the hardware store and bought Miracle Gro, potting soil and a trowel. His grandfather's trowel was broken; the handle had come off. Of course he could just go home and get his own trowel, but he was here. And this was a nice trowel, brand new. Fire Engine Red.

 
He bought a couple of paintbrushes, too. A wide brush and a much smaller one, the kind you used for edging, but he would not be doing any painting. He had something else in mind. His last purchase was an industrial-sized padlock for the tool shed. No bear was going to tear up this bag of potting soil.

  He drove back up the mountain, an impossible idea forming in the back of his mind. Jenny's face staring up at him from the bucket seat.

  Chapter 10

  “No evidence of child abuse.”

  Jean Cox, Pima County's head forensic anthropologist, was tall and raw-boned, with a gleaming helmet of gray hair. She was widely considered the best FA in the state. Laura had been to her office once. It was crammed with red hats, purple boas, and other Red Hat Society paraphernalia.

  “See?” Jean pointed to one of Kristy Groves's arm bones. “No sign of spiral breaks.”

  Spiral breaks resulted from a twisting motion, often made by an angry parent grabbing a child by the arm.

  “No skull or bone fractures either. With her bones to go by, she looks like a healthy fourteen-year-old girl, the right size for her age.”

  The bones were laid out on an autopsy table. A white sheet covered the aluminum gutter which ran along the edges of the table. The gutter carried blood and other bodily fluids to a drain in the floor. There was no blood this time, only bones, brown and dry-looking and smelling of earth, even though the dirt that had clung to them had been gently brushed away.

  “The hand bones are missing from the left arm. You can see the chew marks at the bottom of the ulna.”

  Laura thought: coyotes. They had smelled Kristy under the earth, dug their way down, and torn off her hand.

  What was left of Kristy's clothing lay on a side table. A few stray rags that might have been a top. Jeans, the copper button intact. A bra and underpants. Both the bra and underwear were in tatters, but due to the rubberized portions, remained in one continuous piece. Leather sandals, mostly intact.

  No purse, no backpack—nothing a girl of fourteen would normally carry with her. Laura remembered Patsy Groves had said that Kristy didn't bother to take a purse with her when she walked over to Jessica's house, but there could be another explanation: whoever had killed Kristy had taken her purse or backpack or ID, either to hide her identity or for a trophy.

  Despite the lack of ID, the identification of Kristy's remains had been delayed by only an hour or so. The first detective on the scene, a sheriff's detective, knew about the Groves case and knew the girl had lived in that general area. He'd been the one to contact DPS and asked Laura to bring the missing person report with her to the scene. They'd been able to identify Kristy immediately by her dental charts, and at that moment, the case had gone to DPS. There’d been no need for the expensive and time-consuming last resort of DNA testing.

  “Broken hyoid,” Jean Cox said. “See? There's a break in the bone. Lucky it's in the bone itself—if the break was in the joints, we wouldn't see it. A fourteen-year-old girl isn't through growing, so the bone hasn't fused yet.”

  “So we wouldn't know she was strangled if the break happened in one of the joints?” Jaime asked.

  “Even a broken hyoid doesn't necessarily mean she was strangled, but it does point in that direction.”

  Jaime said, “I thought that was how you could tell.”

  “Technically, that's not true. You can't tell if anyone cut off her air. All we can tell from this is that her hyoid bone was broken.”

  Laura's cell phone vibrated. She recognized the caller: Melissa Stevens. After a short conversation, she asked the FA if they were almost through.

  “We'd better be. I have another post in ten minutes.”

  “Then I have to go. I've got another case I've been wrapping up.” She looked at Jaime.

  “Don't worry about it,” Jaime said.

  As Laura walked out into the glaring sunlight, a helicopter carrying a massive bucket of water flew over, the noise deafening. The Diamondback fire was forty percent contained, but there had been a flare-up during the night.

  She burned her hand on the seatbelt latch. No matter how carefully she put up the windshield sunscreen, the blasted piece of metal heated up like a stove.

  Melissa Stevens worked for the Arizona Copier Company. Arizona Copier prided itself on its customer service. Melissa Stevens visited every one of her accounts weekly, dropping by to ask how things were going, to perform simple maintenance on the machines under her care, and once a year, to talk her customers into upgrading.

  Melissa stopped off to see one client, Gerald Grady Insurance, more often.

  The sole occupant of the Gerald Grady Insurance satellite office was Sean Grady, Gerald Grady's only son. Sean Grady was in his mid-thirties, good-looking in a meaty, athlete-gone-to-seed kind of way, and had arresting blue eyes that made you feel as if you were the most fascinating person in the world.

  Sean Grady was a sociopath.

  According to Melissa, Grady had been in love with her even though he was engaged to the daughter of a prominent Tucson attorney. He had indeed loved Melissa—on the desk, on the office chairs, on her copy machine, and over the bathroom sink. Each incident had held a special place in Melissa's heart, and the day she talked to Laura, she’d been in a mood to share.

  On one of her regular visits, Melissa had spotted a woman buttoning her blouse through the tinted plate glass windows of the insurance company. The woman's crew cut had stood up on her head like a bleached, stiff brush.

  When Melissa had entered the office, the woman had pushed past her as if she were a turnstile. Melissa could have sworn she smelled sex. But Sean, a smooth and inventive liar, had put her mind at ease. Even so, she wouldn't forget Flattop's mannish clothes and open-air jeep.

  Sean had denied flatly that they'd had sex. The lady had offered, but he'd turned her down. She'd undone the buttons of her khaki shirt and given him a peek—that was all. “I didn't bite,” he had told Melissa, a trifle wickedly.

  Melissa had believed him. Especially when he’d shown her the check for a thousand dollars.

  “Not bad for a day's work.” He had waved it at her, the air conditioner kiting it upward so it flew out of his hands and drifted down, briefly touching Melissa's cheek before it landed on the dark gray carpet. “How'd you like to go to Vegas?”

  “Vegas?”

  “A thousand bucks would go a long way in Vegas. You and I both need a vacation. We can stay at the Bellagio, see some shows, eat some fancy dinners, and you know . . .”

  “But that check's for an insurance policy.”

  “Well, it was,” he’d said, deliberately picking up the two copies of the life insurance policy and tearing them down the middle.

  So they’d gone to Vegas.

  A month later, he’d broken it off with her. He'd looked through her as if she didn't exist, just the way Flattop had on that terrible day Melissa had walked into Sean Grady's insurance office and caught her buttoning her shirt.

  Melissa had then contacted DPS. She’d briefly told Laura about Sean Grady's trip to Vegas at Flattop's expense, neglecting to mention that she had gone with him.

  Laura would have considered Melissa a scorned woman, but she was sensitive about categorizations like that. She could have been called a scorned woman herself a few times.

  Flattop was easy to find, thanks to the vanity plate identification Melissa had given Laura—ARABLVR. Laura was pretty certain Flattop wasn't enamored with the men of the Middle East, but with Arabian horses. This was borne out later, when Laura finally met her. Doris Spitzer-Malveaux drove a canvas-topped, open-air jeep with a horse head logo on the door. The horse logo belonged to Bahar Shumaal Arabian Horse Farm, where she worked as a horse trainer.

  Before contacting Ms. Spitzer-Malveaux, though, the first thing Laura did was to call a Texas Ranger pal of hers who worked out of Houston, where the policy was issued. He reached the company that was supposed to have underwritten the life insurance policy, a company called Sam Houston Fidelity. They had no s
uch policy on file.

  Laura got a grand jury subpoena for all Gerald Grady Insurance Company records for that office, including the business checking account, and flagged several policies. She looked for withdrawals in round numbers on the days he deposited insurance policy checks. In the same transaction, he would deposit a check in the amount of $1,242.33 and make a withdrawal of $1,200.00. The juxtaposition of deposits and withdrawals were easy to spot; Grady had made these kinds of transactions eight times in the last six months.

  Laura went over all the bank statements, looking at the amounts and thinking of his office expenditures. There shouldn't be many of those. Sean Grady was the sole proprietor of the midtown office. His overhead was low: bottled water, paper, toner, ink cartridges, miscellaneous office supplies, phone, electric.

  Pursuant to the subpoena, Laura requested copies of the suspicious checks. She also explored Grady's cash machine transactions and made sure she had photos of him at the ATM machines, so he couldn't claim later that someone had stolen his ATM card and made the withdrawals.

  Fraud was a lot of work. Tracking numbers, looking at bank accounts. Some of her fellow squad members lived for it. It worked their little gray cells like nothing else. But as far as Laura was concerned, they could have it.

  She loved the hunt. She loved homicide.

  After investigating Grady for several weeks, Laura had a list of thirteen victims.

  She interviewed Doris Spitzer-Malveaux, the first victim. At the end of the interview Laura had been wrung out. She would never want to make an enemy of Ms. Spitzer-Malveaux.

  Laura visited Sean Grady and asked him about the specific policies. He gave her a song and dance—a very good one. He'd recently moved offices; there was upheaval in both the insurance industry in general and in his own office. That they had to sever connections with one policy underwriter, and regarding a new Texas-based company, Sam Houston Fidelity, there had been some anomalies they were currently working out. He was sure it could be cleared up.