The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  Laura couldn't help feeling that Micaela wasn't being completely forthright. It was possible the girl had sublimated significant portions of her ordeal. That there were experiences she couldn't bring herself to face. Laura got the feeling that Micaela had met Robert Heywood, even if the girl herself wasn't able to acknowledge it on a conscious level. It was just a feeling she had. Maybe it had been a flicker in the girl's eyes when she saw Heywood's photograph.

  She wanted to talk to Clinton Purvis. She wanted to know if he knew a Bill Smith. But there were more important things to do at the moment. She checked her watch—almost eight a.m. Patsy Groves was leaving for home today.

  Laura and Jaime arrived just as Patsy Groves finished packing. When she opened the door to her room and saw them, she looked annoyed: Now what?

  Jaime handed her the trophy list.

  “Could any of these items belong to Kristy?”

  Mrs. Groves stared at the list. “A few of them. The pink underpants, the earrings, the charm bracelet.”

  He handed her the other sheets of paper. “Mrs. Groves, please look at each of them carefully. I know it's been a long time—”

  Patsy Groves sat down heavily on the unmade bed. Her face had turned a pale color, like putty.

  “That was hers.” She clenched the paper between two fingers, causing it to bend, then wilt.

  Jaime standing over her, leaning at the waist. Again, reminding Laura of a giant draft horse who didn't know where to put his feet. “Which one, ma'am?” he asked gently.

  Mrs. Groves touched the sheet with the index finger of her other hand, and the sheet of paper rattled. “That one.”

  Laura and Jaime looked.

  “The charm bracelet?” Jaime asked.

  Patsy Groves nodded. She was already crying.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded again. Her face suffused with redness, already congested with tears.

  Laura stared at the fax. It was hard to tell, but she guessed the bracelet was silver. There were six charms on it. All of them were shoes. Intricately-made, perfect little shoes. High heels, pumps, shoes from the turn of the century.

  “See those little baby shoes? I gave her those. I looked all over for them. They were real silver.”

  Laura looked at Jaime and he looked at her.

  Both of them feeling the same thing. Sadness for Patsy Groves—and exhilaration.

  Chapter 30

  Feeling restless, Steve had to do something, so he took a hike up to Camp Aratauk. The air was fresh, the sky an incredible, pulsing blue above the pine tops, which at eight in the morning were green-gold, individual pine needles catching the light like tinsel. Their scent overpowering.

  He'd relented and let Jake come along. Packed two bottles of water in his day-pack and a nylon bag which magically turned into a dog's water dish when he opened it up.

  A rushed feeling—that was the best way he could describe it—seemed to propel him through the forest. Every sense alive. He felt impatient, anxious, as if everything else was unimportant. It felt as if he were just marking time, that what he did up here on the mountain was just something to be gotten through so he could start his real life.

  He recognized the symptoms.

  “What do you think, buddy?” he asked Jake. “You think it's mutual?”

  Jake was digging under a grapevine, so he didn't answer. But Steve thought Detective Cardinal was as attracted to him as he was to her. He doubted she would act on it, though. She'd have to get the case behind her. She'd have to find out who killed Jenny Carmichael before he could so much as ask her to dinner.

  Right now it was only attraction, but he couldn't help but jump ahead.

  Steve had been in love—truly in love—twice before. Julie—that was bad for a while, but he had gotten over it. They were friends now. But Linda . . . that still ate at him. Linda and Bill Gardner.

  Bill Gardner, the dog trainer. You couldn't really call him a dog trainer, though. He used to hold Doberman pups up by their choke collars to punish them. Hang them until they became docile. Until they feared him.

  In the time that Steve had known Bill Gardner, two of his dogs had died in “accidents.”

  But Linda had liked him. She’d liked him so much she had taken him to bed—their bed, the one they'd bought at Bed World. He remembered bouncing up and down on the mattress in the show room, then lying flat, and when they’d thought no one was looking, they'd even made out on it, the bed with the super-ultra-spring-air-astro-sponge mattress. They'd also bought the bedding there—one-stop shopping. A black and purple and gray comforter and matching sheet set, a jumble of rectangles and circles, which had looked pretty sharp against the window behind it, the window looking out at the ocean, if you squinted past the two blocks of houses that ran down each side of the street.

  Their marriage bed. Bespoiled by Bill Gardner, the dog trainer. Involuntarily, his hands clenched into fists.

  Lighten up, he told himself. It was a long time ago. No use thinking about it.

  Jake had stopped up the trail ahead of him, waiting. Hard to believe Jake was well into middle-age and rounding in on old.

  “No gray hairs on your muzzle anyway,” Steve said. As he shifted the backpack to make himself more comfortable, an image flashed across his vision: a hotter, steeper climb. Standing in the shade of a twisted oak tree, trying to cool down.

  The image was gone as soon as it came. A jay scolded him from a tree, and Steve looked up, inexplicably irritated. The jay must have sensed his ill will; it stopped suddenly and fluttered away.

  Jake paused on the hill above him, his expression plain: What's the hold up?

  “You keep going like that, you're going to be dragging your tongue before we're through.”

  Jake lifted his leg on a tree trunk for answer and trotted on.

  Steve followed Jake onto the graded dirt road. The road was level, so for a while it was easy. He spotted the area he had bushwhacked through earlier and stepped up into the trees.

  He pushed through the screen of underbrush, and there it was. Camp Aratauk.

  Jenny Carmichael standing under the overhang of Bunk 4 in the recessed darkness.

  Chapter 31

  From the airport hotel, Laura and Jaime drove out to Mrs. Carmichael's house. She wasn't home, so Laura left a card in her screen door, asking her to call them.

  Next they went to see Elke Hofmanns, the witness who had seen the man, the white car, and the girl back in 1997. She lived in the El Encanto neighborhood in central Tucson, not far from the Brashears. This was another wealthy area, differentiated from Colonia Solana mostly by the landscaping; here there were deep green lawns, lots of palm trees, orange trees, and riots of bougainvillea. It looked a lot like southern California.

  As they approached the house, she threw open the door to her pink mini-mansion, and two dogs of indeterminate lineage hurtled out onto the front lawn. One large and wire-haired, the other small with a short coat.

  Elke Hofmanns was dressed for a trip to the park—a blinding white large T-shirt over turquoise nylon shorts. Ball cap, ponytail, dark glasses. She dressed younger than she was. Up close, her skin was the color and consistency of beef jerky, and her square-jawed face was scored with lines.

  They talked out in front of the house, dogs milling around them.

  Jaime asked the questions. It soon became clear that Elke had not been a reliable witness. She had not seen the man and the white car near Rose Canyon Lake. In Jaime's questioning, it came out that the car, the girl, and the man were parked much farther up the mountain, near the ranger's station at Palisades.

  In her defense, Mrs. Hofmanns said, “It was only a few months after I came here from Germany. Peter—he died last year—was the one you should have talked to. He always was more observant than me.” Too late now.

  Jaime asked her to describe the girl.

  “I only saw her for a blink of an eye. We were driving.”

  “Did you notice the color of her hair?”r />
  “She was blond. That is my recollection.”

  “You said she wore a uniform.”

  “Ya, it was a uniform. I'm sure of that. That is what made me call. I thought it would help. Brownie! Come back here!” she yelled at the bigger dog, who was lifting his leg on the neighbor's lawn jockey.

  “Could you describe the uniform?” Jaime asked, ignoring the circus going on around them. Patience was his strong suit.

  “It was green. Mint green? I think so.”

  “Green?”

  She nodded. “Green.”

  Laura and Jaime looked at each other.

  The ranger station by Palisades was a stone's throw from the Girl Scout camp. Girl Scouts wore green. “Probably a man and his daughter,” Jaime said as they drove out of the neighborhood, out onto Country Club.

  “How did Art Schiller miss it?” Laura said.

  “Maybe because he just wanted it to work out.”

  They both knew how that felt.

  Laura said, “So what does this mean?”

  He scratched his head and the odor of Brylcreem filled the car. “Guess it means the white car theory is out the window.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Suddenly, Laura's phone rang.

  “Is this Detective Cardinal?” a voice asked on the other end. Laura could hear noise in the background—the sigh of constant traffic, punctuated by the garble of a patrol car radio, and voices in the background.

  Laura held the phone harder to her ear. The caller introduced himself as a TPD detective sergeant named Ashburn.

  “You put out an Attempt to Locate on a Robert Heywood?” He read off a description of the truck and the license plate number.

  Jaime said, “What is it?”

  Laura waved her hand at him. “Yes? Have you found him? Is he in custody?”

  “In a manner of speaking. We've got him all right. Only he's dead.”

  Chapter 32

  Steve felt weak with relief. It wasn't Jenny after all. An Emory oak obscured part of the entrance to Bunk 4. What he'd seen was the early light touching on a few dry oak leaves, which along with the shadow pattern on the wood, looked remarkably like a girl's face and hair.

  Just a step sideways and the illusion vanished.

  Steve spent the better part of an hour exploring the camp.

  Camp Aratauk was laid out in a circle around a central area like a village green. A dirt road split at the bottom of the green, forming a roundabout. At the top of the roundabout was the mess hall. To the right of the mess hall, set back a little, was the office, which looked like every other bunkhouse only bigger. The bunkhouses were ranged on either side of the green. Behind the mess hall, Steve could see outbuildings, likely the works of the camp: equipment sheds, a place for the workers to stay, bathrooms, and showers.

  Even though ponderosa pine woods were not, by nature, encroaching, he got that feeling here. A lot of undergrowth had sprung up over the past decade, and the area had more than its share of dry-looking oaks, many of them festooned with wild grapevines. Bunk 4 in particular looked dark. It made him think of a picture in one of the books his mother had read to him as a child. The house in Hansel and Gretel. Whoever the artist was, he'd made a woodcut that was old-fashioned, quaint, and spooky as hell.

  He stepped up onto the porch of Bunk 4. There was a chill, even in the middle of summer. Jake watched Steve from the safety of the ground outside. His look of doggy concern would have been laughable, if Steve himself didn't feel a tad bit unsettled.

  He put his hand on the rail and stared through the open doorway. From where he stood, he could see a panel of sunlight striping the length of the floor under the windows. The place was empty and had the feeling of an abandoned nest. Shattered glass on the floor and a few broken strips from the windows, caught in a net of screen mesh. The bunks had been ripped out and removed. But he could picture them in rows down each side. He'd been to camp when he was a kid, so that was what he saw.

  As he stepped up into the room, a board suddenly cracked like a shot, and his foot punched downward at least ten inches and landed in dirt. He lost his balance and nearly fell, grabbing hold of the edge of the doorway—a handful of splinters pierced his palm.

  His heart beating in his chest, his head, his ears.

  When he tried to pull his leg out, he couldn't. For just a second, he wondered if he would be trapped in here. He realized if he just made sure his foot was aligned with the hole where the plank had been, he would be all right. The wood scraped against his jean leg and caught his hiking boot briefly, but with an extra-hard jerk, he was free.

  He wanted no more of the flooring in the bunkhouses.

  Next, he looked into the mess hall. Counters toward the back, all the kitchen appliances gone. The tables and benches still there, bolted to the floor. A peg board had fallen down next to the doorway.

  In the shed, he found a straw bale with target affixed. So there had been archery. Most of the place had been cleared out, but there were a few paint cans and remnants of an artist's easel.

  Archery, volleyball, basketball, arts and crafts. A nice place for kids to spend part of their summer.

  He found a frisbee sitting on a windowsill, took it out to the green, and threw it for Jake. All the time, thinking.

  It was quite a hike Jenny Carmichael had made down to the stream bed near his cabin, if she had made it on her own. She'd had the book with her, The Man in the Moon. She could have carried it with her, but it was slightly oversized and would be awkward to take all that way.

  This was assuming she had walked down under her own power. For all Steve knew, the person who killed her had been at the camp all the time. He glanced at the mess hall and the outbuildings behind it. How many workers kept a place like this going? Groundskeepers, handymen, janitors, cooks, counselors, administrators?

  It could have been any of them.

  He realized that he was developing a theory. Someone who worked here—probably male—had seen Jenny going off by herself and had followed her.

  He was sure that Detective Cardinal and Detective Molina were already working on that theory, among others.

  But now he was more than curious. The reputation of his grandfather was at stake. Also, Jenny had appeared to him. He felt he owed her something. He realized that this was what had drawn him up here. The desire to help her. To help find out who killed her.

  He thought the key to it was the puppy. He tried to remember the child's exact words that day in the mist and the rain. You're coming with me. You're my puppy now.

  He threw the frisbee for Jake and watched it sail through the air, Jake acting like a puppy. “What do you think, Jake?” he asked. “The puppy didn't belong to her. She found him.”

  That made sense. You're my puppy now. So if she’d found the puppy, it must have been lost—or someone had dumped him nearby. If she’d found the puppy near his cabin, the most likely scenario was that it had come from somewhere on that road. Either it had run away from someone's cabin, or it had been dumped.

  Conversely, she could have found the puppy on the Camp Aratauk grounds and decided to hide him a ways from camp. Steve doubted the counselors would let her keep a puppy. It wouldn't be fair to the other girls, and these days everybody was worried about liability. What if it bit someone? So if she found the puppy, would she be savvy enough at eight years old to hide him?

  He thought that she would.

  Either way, she had ended up near his grandfather's cabin with the book and the puppy.

  Because of the book, he thought the first scenario was the better fit. Say she had gone away to read her book and hang out by herself. She’d come across the puppy and tried to get him to go back with her. And then she’d come across the person who killed her. Either he had followed her from Camp Aratauk, or he had seen her from the road.

  It was a good theory.

  He wished he could talk to Laura Cardinal. He wished he could tell her about the puppy. But how would he explain it? He would on
ly dig himself in deeper. He would have to tell her about his visions.

  That, he wasn't prepared to do. Not yet anyway. He'd have to think about this.

  He called to Jake, who came running, the frisbee in his mouth. “We'd better leave this here,” he said, placing it next to the flagpole.

  They started back down the mountain, Steve still working it out in his mind.

  The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that this was what had happened. Jenny going off by herself to read, spotting the puppy, and following him. That would get her down to his grandfather's cabin.

  By now they had bushwhacked down to the stream bed and were following it. Steve kept his head down to see the ground, but every once in a while he'd look up to see if he could spot the cabin.

  “Detective work is harder than I thought it would be,” he said to Jake. “It's—”

  He broke off as he saw a man walking down along the stream bed ahead of him, picking his way carefully, looking down.

  He looked familiar, but Steve couldn't place him, especially from the back.

  “Hey there!” Steve called.

  The man didn't respond. He kept walking as if he didn't hear, disappearing into a copse of trees at the bend in the stream.

  By the time Steve got to the bend, the man was gone.

  Chapter 33

  The Lariat Motel was located on Miracle Mile. Actually, the name “Miracle Mile,” which was a fantastical promotional name in the thirties, forties, and fifties, had been officially changed to “Oracle” in the nineties. The reason: The motels that were so popular in the motor hotel era had deteriorated to the point that they catered to a lot more Pretty Women than Griswolds. Drug deals were done on every street corner.

  And so the city fathers decided that a name change would help the businesses.

  Robert Heywood was definitely not good for business.

  The Lariat Motel was a horseshoe-shaped, brick motor court painted a peeling white with a swimming pool in the center. The swimming pool was drained and surrounded by a fence, the flagstone pavers around it cracked. On the good side, the asphalt had just been resurfaced, and the diagonal stripes in front of each of the ten rooms had been repainted.