Laura Cardinal 01 Darkness on the Edge of Town

by J. Carson Black

  Bobby wondered if he should fake it like his girlfriend did, or just quit. But he was stubborn; he wanted his money’s worth. So he decided to put his mind to it, and with intense concentration, managed to put it over the top, just as the egg timer by the side of the bed rang.

  It was the hardest work he’d done all day.

  Feeling good about getting it done, he said, “How was that, sweetness?”

  “Oh, it was great.”

  The way she said it made him want to slap her. That tone in her voice. He’d heard that tone all his life, and every time, it said he wasn’t worth talking to or listening to or even lying to. The way women could put you down just by the inflection.

  Just once, he’d like to see something on a woman’s face besides contempt, disappointment, greed, or want.

  “The tip jar’s over there,” Goth said.

  For a moment he saw himself picking up the jar and tossing it into the mirrored closet doors, but then he remembered that he shouldn’t do anything memorable. He had to think about the big picture. He wanted to be like those two agents—anonymous in their dark glasses and their clipped haircuts.

  He put a dollar in her jar and said, “Sorry to overtip you, but I don’t have any loose change.”

  She slammed the door after him with her foot.

  The Mean Green sat patiently outside, his only friend.

  Well, his girlfriend thought she was his friend. She thought she was more than that. But the more she loved him, the less he felt like loving her. Human nature was funny that way. It had always been like that with him. He knew it, but still he kept digging himself into these holes. Now he was going to meet her in Vegas, and he knew what was coming. All these wedding chapels going to waste.

  He had other plans for his life.

  His mother would have socked him one for even thinking that. Her favorite expression was “Don’t blow your own horn.” But ever since he was a little kid, he was certain he’d make a name for himself. Sure, if you looked at it from the outside, if you were a stranger, you wouldn’t think much of that prediction. But he was just getting started.

  He cruised back down the highway through the warm, velvet dark, The Mean Green’s windows open. Singing along with a Little Feat CD, shouting the lyrics into the desert air: “ ‘When the Feats are on the box, the speed just slips my mind, I start to sing along, tap my toe and slap the dash in time.’ ”

  The Texas ranger in the song, who stopped the car, telling the guy: “Son those Feat done steered you wrong this time. Those Feat’ll steer you wrong sometimes.” Easy to get steered wrong; life surely was a slippery slope. He himself had spent most of the second half of his life trying to get out of the trouble he caused for himself in the first half.

  But when God blew through your soul and told you it was your time, you heard it. And if you were any kind of man at all, you did something about it.

  Back in Pahrump, he hit the slots at the casino. Thinking of all the people on the street and in this place. Wondering: Did they know how it could all change for them in an instant? Did they have any concept of God’s stern and unyielding judgment coming for them, rolling down the highway?

  More than likely, they had their blinders on, like everybody else on the planet. Looking around at the people here filling their time, throwing their money away with both hands, he knew that was true. All most people did was try to get from one hour to the next.

  Bobby quit while he was slightly ahead and went back to his room. Looked at his maps, thought about what he’d do the next day. Scouting mostly. And planning.

  He thought about Death Valley just across the line—how appropriate was that? And the desolate stretch of road, the airplane hangar rotting in the sun, stark against the desert brush, noticeable and unnoticeable at the same time. And he, Bobby Burdette, looking cool and tough in his dark glasses.

  2

  SATURDAY—WILLIAMS, ARIZONA

  There were two cops at the campsite when Laura Cardinal arrived at the scene, one of them looking at the tent as if he were trying to figure out how to pack it up.

  The opening to the red, two-man dome tent was unzipped, the nylon door piece lying on the forest floor like a tongue. From this angle, Laura could see at least half the interior. The backside of the tent glowed orange-red where it was lit from the behind by the sun. Sunlight poured in through a fist-sized hole in the fabric. She could see little of the tent floor, but what she saw was empty and soaked with blood.

  Warren Janes, the sergeant who had accompanied her to the scene, had to walk fast to keep up with her. “This is the second time something like this’s happened,” he said. “A kid drowned in the lake at the beginning of the summer.”

  Laura was half listening. Her instincts had kicked up into high gear, and what they were telling her wasn’t good. Something wrong here. Not that there wasn’t plenty wrong to begin with—two college kids shot to death while sleeping in their tent.

  “What happened?” she asked, her gaze still fixed on the campsite.

  “Well, that’s the weird thing. Kid was with his teacher, Mr. Garatano, late at night. What Mr. Garatano said was the kid wanted to swim so he dove off of the boat. He never came up.”

  “How old was the kid?”

  “Fourteen.”

  She stopped. “What were they doing out in a boat late at night?”

  Janes shrugged. “He said they were fishing, but we all wondered about that. Mr. Garatano got fired not too long after that. We investigated, turned out the kid got tangled up in some weeds and drowned.”

  Interesting, Laura thought, but she had other worries. Despite the perfect late-summer day and the reasonable assumption that the Williams PD cops had preserved the scene, Laura had the feeling there was something she didn’t know. And then it came to her.

  She voiced her suspicions to Janes.“The bodies are still in the tent, aren’t they?”

  He cleared his throat.

  At that moment, she saw the younger cop reach down to pull one of the tent pegs out of the ground.

  “Officer! Don’t do that!”

  He straightened up, uncertain. Little more than a kid—maybe only a year or two out of high school. He stepped back from the tent as if it were a snake, his movement quick and athletic.

  The older cop started in their direction, as if trying to ward them off. “The ME’s people were just here. I tried to stall them, but they couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “They took the bodies,” Laura said. She wanted to a punch a wall—or something. Or someone.

  The cop had stopped in front of them, hands on his hips, as if the altitude bothered him. “They were so busy in Flag this weekend—there was a pileup on the freeway—this was the only time they could cut someone loose to come get them.”

  Laura resigned herself to the reality of the situation. This was bad, but she would have to work around it. She and Victor, her usual partner, had a saying when things went wrong at a crime scene: That’s showbiz.

  Laura motioned to the younger cop to join them. She noticed he was careful to follow the prints the officers had made entering the scene, adhering to the “one way in, one way out” rule. This surprised her. After seeing him reach for the tent peg, she’d expected him to be impulsive.

  Sergeant Janes made the introductions. “This is criminal investigator Laura Cardinal with the Department of Public Safety,” Janes said. He glanced at her. “Have I got that right?”

  “Detective’s fine.” Thinking: Where the hell is Richie? If he’d been here earlier, he could have stopped them from taking the bodies.

  The two officers were Tagg and Wingate. The older cop, Tagg, smelled of cigarette smoke. Wingate seemed on edge, adrenaline running through him like a muscular river. Laura guessed this was the first time he’d seen anything like this.

  Janes said, “I want you to give her and her partner everything you’ve got.”

  Tagg was looking at her as if trying to place her. “I’ve heard your name before. Ar
en’t you—?”

  Laura didn’t reply directly to his question. Instead, she motioned toward a blue truck parked behind them on the forest road, just outside the campground gate. “Is that the victims’ vehicle?”

  “That’s right,” said Janes. “Thought we’d leave it for you to process.”

  “I’ll need a warrant.” Even though the truck belonged to the crime scene, Laura wanted to be on the safe side, go ahead and get the warrant. Depending on where they were, even crime scenes required warrants, which Laura thought was just plain nutty. “Is there a justice of the peace or judge you like to go to?”

  Janes motioned to his patrol car. “I have his number on the computer. We can do it telephonically.”

  “Do we have photographs?”

  “The medical examiner’s office took some, but they’re in Flagstaff.”

  “I took some Polaroids,” Wingate volunteered. He trotted up the red cinder road to one of two Williams PD police cars and returned a moment later.

  Four Polaroids. “That’s all the film I had.”

  Laura held each one of them in the shade of her body, squinting against the brightness.

  Hard to tell what was what; the colors were faded and the shapes indistinct. Yellow hair in a tangle. Pale flesh clotted with blood. The boy behind the girl; half-in, half-out of the sleeping bag. Spoon fashion, his right arm over her body. The sleeping bag and walls of the tent soaked with blood.

  The top of the boy’s head gone.

  All four Polaroids had been taken through the holes in the tent, from different angles.

  “Is that one sleeping bag, or two?” Laura asked

  “Well, technically, there’re two,” Tagg said. “They zipped ‘em together. You can do that with Cabela’s.”

  Tagg added, “Double-ought buckshot. Shot right through the tent flap and two other sides.”

  “He didn’t see them then?”

  “He could’ve seen them through the holes in the tent, but he didn’t bother to open up the door flap. We had to open it to get the bodies—” Tagg glanced at Wingate. “—the victims out.”

  “Josh’s the one who found them,” Sergeant Janes explained. “He knew Dan.”

  Josh Wingate was staring at the tent. The high-voltage energy field surrounding him had not abated; in fact, it seemed to be getting stronger. “We were best friends in high school,” he said.

  Laura looked at him with new interest. No wonder he seemed so off balance. His eyes were like shards of cut green glass, pulverized with hurt, but she noticed his posture was straight and he held his chin high. Almost defiant.

  She remembered a shabby kitchen in Florida, how it felt to see someone you knew die right in front of you. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s bad,” Josh Wingate replied, “but I’m okay.”

  Laura had her doubts about that.“You found them?”

  “My mom lives up that road.” He pointed to Country Club Road behind them. “I was on my way over when I saw his truck.”

  “How’d you know it was his?”

  “We used to camp out here a lot when we were kids. Plus, the bumper sticker.”

  Laura glanced at the truck, a late-model GMC Sierra, the same medium-blue sheen as Cataract Lake. A common enough color in trucks. The bumper sticker said COWBOY UP. There was an NAU sticker on the windshield. Dan Yates and Kellee Taylor both had attended Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

  “They weren’t supposed to be here,” Sergeant Janes said. “The campground’s been closed since Labor Day for repairs.”

  It was the third week of September now. Laura looked out at the quiet lake, the pines. The grass going tawny, the palette of wildflowers fading to tarnished glory. After Labor Day, the north country seemed to give up on tourists until ski season. “We’re kind of far from town, aren’t we?” she said. “I would expect this to be the sheriff’s jurisdiction.”

  “The city annexed this area last year. There’s plans to build at least one hotel and restaurant around here, what with the lake and all.”

  Laura continued to stare at the lake. Wondering again, where was Richie Lockhart? Sergeant Janes hadn’t heard from him, and neither had she.

  Well, she didn’t have the luxury to wait for him. Whatever she did now, she had to do right. Her crime scene—she always thought of a crime scene as hers—had been compromised by the removal of the bodies. She had to go with what she had.

  Officer Wingate had been the first on the scene. He was friends with at least one of the victims, which might influence his memory in ways she couldn’t fathom, but he was still her best bet. He would have to be her eyes and ears.

  _________________

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