Darkness on the Edge of Town (Laura Cardinal Series)

by J. Carson Black

  Billings’s voice trailed off into silence.

  Inside the bandshell, propped up against the back wall, was a tiny forlorn figure. At first glance, it looked like a doll. From where she was, Laura couldn’t see features, details, but she could see the figure’s static nature, its lack of life. She felt the shocked presence of the men with her. The whole canyon seemed quiet, insulated from the world like a soundproof room.

  She wiped sweat out of her eyes. Suddenly she wished the storm would come, bringing with it cool rain.

  After a moment that seemed like a prayer, they continued up the hill. Sunlight glared off silver-painted roofs down below on the Gulch. Laura realized how thirsty she was. When they got back down she’d ask for someone to send up some bottled water. They followed the wrought iron fence, looking at everything, paying particular attention to the ground. She could hear her own ragged breathing; they were up at five thousand feet. They could see into the bandshell, the horror closer now. It was unsettling how much the girl looked like a doll. Still too far away to be sure if she was real.

  At the top of the road, they reached the flight of stairs that descended the hill along the south side of the park. If they walked down these stairs they would have gone full circle. In the corner, next to the steps, the tarpaper roof of the bandshell gleamed in the sun, a shallow puddle from a recent thunderstorm in the center. Beneath, unseen, was the girl. The stench of death condensed in the humid air, cloying and undeniable.

  The three of them stood at the top of the concrete steps, looking down at Brewery Gulch below.

  A breeze touched Laura’s face and she smelled wild fennel. Behind her Buddy said, “I don’t think he came from up here. He’d block the road. It would be hard to get in and out. He’d have more of a chance of being seen.”

  Laura thought he was probably right

  A cicada buzzed, hard and violent.

  She was aware of the two of them looking at her. “Let’s go down the stairs.”

  As they entered the park, Officer Billings headed for the bandshell steps.

  “Officer,” Laura said. “Stay with us.”

  He blushed at his lapse of judgment. “Sorry,” he said, quickly rejoining them at the entrance.

  Laura stood still, facing out into the park. The body of the little girl would wait. Wordlessly, the two men stayed with her. She could see Detective Holland out of the corner of her eye. She hated dividing her attention between two people she didn’t know and the crime scene. If she had it her way, she’d be here alone.

  Looking at the park with her back to the bandshell, she measured with her eye the distance to the other end--approximately two hundred feet, maybe a little more. Inside the long oval of the park, the basketball court formed a smaller, concentric one. Near the wrought iron fences there were cookie-cutter scraps of dirt, where the trees grew. She realized that she was in a natural amphitheatre, houses all around, many of them looking down from the tall hills—a ready-made audience.

  Laura closed her eyes, trying to summon the thoughts of a killer. Sometimes, if she narrowed her field of vision enough, she could see things from his perspective.

  Laura knew he craved an audience, knew it from the evidence he’d left behind. Even as she tried to draw him in, think like him, her analytical mind ticked away underneath, logically picking up and discarding theories--the easiest way for him to enter the park, if the girl was dead or alive when he brought her here, and what he did last, just before he left.

  The reason he had to dress her up like a doll.

  A scrape of shoe on cement—Holland or Billings. Whoever it was, her concentration broke. The killer had something to say to her, but she couldn’t hear him. Maybe it was Detective Holland, his disapproval of her jamming the frequencies.

  She would come back later, alone.

  She turned and faced the bandshell.

  The 1916-era bandshell was small and shabby—stuccoed-over cement. The stage apron stood a little over waist-high. Under the arch, the shallow interior had been painted pale blue--to represent the sky?—but was now overpowered by graffiti.

  The body of the girl had been placed in the center, propped against the wall, legs out. Flies zoomed around her.

  Finally, Laura looked directly into the girl’s face. Shocked, she thought: I know her.

  4

  The barriers of time and place dissolved, and she saw the grainy newspaper photo of the two-tone sedan and the headline above it: CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND.

  It wasn’t Julie, though. Of course not; it couldn’t be. And now that she really looked, she saw that the girl was not an exact match.

  Laura owed it to this girl not to get sidetracked. Her resemblance to Julie Marr was just a coincidence. Looking for a distraction, she glanced at Buddy Holland.

  His face had turned deep crimson. He stared at the child, eyes fixed, a vein pulsing in his jaw. For a moment she wondered if he was having a heart attack. She opened her mouth to ask him if he was all right.

  He turned his head to look at her. For a moment the bleakness in his eyes reminded her of Frank Entwistle staring across the hospital bed at his own death--what one guy in her squad referred to as the thousand-yard stare. Then his eyes turned stony, unreadable.

  Laura looked at the girl. She was barefoot and dressed in an old-fashioned white dress. A little girl’s dress—babyish. Something a seven-year-old would wear to First Communion. If this girl really was Jessica Parris, she was fourteen years old—far too old to wear a dress like this.

  “I wonder where he got the dress,” Laura said. “Who would sell dresses like that for a girl that age?”

  “It looks small on her,” Buddy Holland said. His voice was thick with emotion. She liked him better.

  Laura took inventory: The girl’s hands had been placed neatly in her lap. Her fingers were clasped together. Her hair had been brushed. Her legs had been slightly but not overtly spread. This last could indicate sexual motivation. Dressing her up was also most likely sexually motivated.

  She had been arranged in a tableau.

  Buddy’s voice echoed her own thoughts. “He staged this--put her on display. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts he’s done this before.”

  “Probably.” Either the bad guy had killed before or he had worked his way up to this, probably with rape.

  God, she wished she had some water. She led the way to the bandshell steps on the other side farthest from the street, the ones she believed the killer did not take.

  She was pretty sure the guy had come up from below. That would have been easiest. He would have come up the steps from the Gulch, entered the park and headed right up the steps to the bandshell.

  Up on the concrete stage, Laura scanned the inside walls. There was a door opposite, probably a storage area, padlocked closed. On the padlock someone had written FTW—Fuck the World. Bad guys, but likely not the ones she was looking for.

  The floor was so clean it might have been swept. Clearly, he was an organized offender. He made very few mistakes. The guy she was looking for had probably read the same books she had, books on criminal investigation and forensic science. Laura stared across at the entrance to the park, just down the steps from the bandshell, already picturing him coming up from the street. It would take him ten minutes, tops, and that included clasping the hands.

  In, out.

  Arms still folded, she hunkered down next to the girl in a catcher’s stance.

  The girl looked nothing like Julie from this angle. Her eyes were too close together. Her hair was a lighter blond. It looked dyed. There were holes in her earlobes, but no earrings. Did he take them? There was a tiny butterfly tattoo on the fleshy part of the right hand, just below the thumb. At odds with the dress. The dress itself was white but appeared shop-soiled, as if it had been packed away for a while. She could see the creases. She leaned to look at where the girl’s back departed from the wall. The dress had been zipped up only halfway. No tag.

  Laura took a de
ep breath and looked into the girl’s eyes.

  She had seen many people who had died violently. It seemed to her that the eyes of a large percentage of these victims had been stamped with fathomless terror, as if they had seen their deaths coming for them.

  But in this girl’s eyes Laura saw no emotion, just broken blood vessels in the whites—petechia—which hinted at death by strangulation. Brown and brittle as acorn hulls, the girl’s eyes showed nothing at all.

  Laura hoped it meant she hadn’t suffered, but the petechia told her otherwise. Either way, she would never know the truth for sure.

  She stood up and walked around to the other side, looking at the girl from that angle.

  Laura always felt that the victim could tell her something. There was usually some evidence that the dead kept to themselves, a secret that they had taken with them, a secret the killer forgot. In every homicide case she’d investigated, there had been something that the dead had held back. She just had to find it. To recognize it when it looked her in the face.

  “I figure the lividity points to the fact that she was moved,” Officer Billings said behind her. “Down by her ears, the bottom of her neck, see?”

  She tried to block him out, concentrate on the girl.

  “Looks to me like she was prostate when she was killed.”

  “Prostrate,” Laura said.

  “Prostrate, sorry.” He laughed nervously. “That’s funny, prostate. Anyway, I knew it the minute I saw her.”

  “Would you shut the fuck up?” Buddy Holland snapped.

  Hurt, Billings said, “Hey, I was just—“

  “I don’t fucking want to hear it.”

  Laura was aware of Buddy’s legs, spread in a fighter’s stance. She thought he was very close to the edge. When the chief introduced them, he’d mentioned that Buddy Holland had been with the Tucson PD a long time before coming to Bisbee. Why did this death affect him so much? He must have seen his share of corpses—even young girls.

  He squatted down beside her. She could feel his breath as she studied the girl’s hair near her ear.

  That was when she saw it.

  You slick son of a bitch, she thought.

  You missed something.

  5

  After Musicman logged on at the Earthling Café, the first thing he did was check his mail.

  There were two messages from CRZYGRL12@ synerG.net.

  Fingers tapping rapidly on the table, he tried to think it through. Hard, because his mind was rushing a mile a minute. Although his rage had not abated one bit, he felt the overwhelming need to know what happened.

  Out front, another police car went by, this one from the sheriffs department.

  He tapped his fingers some more and then brought her picture up on the screen. Maybe he could find a clue in her eyes.

  The waitress, a scarf-haired girl wearing heavy white linen tied around her waist, set his iced tea down. She glanced at the picture. “That your daughter?”

  He lowered the laptop lid so she couldn’t see. “Uh-huh.”

  “Pretty girl.”

  He nodded, acknowledging but not friendly. She took the hint and threaded her way back through the cramped cafe to the stand-up counter. Only then did he push the laptop’s lid back up.

  She smiled out at him--his girl.

  Like a tidal wave, the desire—the need—came rumbling up from deep inside him. He could feel it in the trembling of his hands, the prickling saliva in the corners of his mouth. The adrenaline rush, the beating of his heart, the answering chime in his groin.

  If she was his girl.

  He had to know. No way could he leave it like this—not when he was this close.

  He opened the first message.

  Where wer u? I waited 1 hr. I thought for sure this was the day and I walked 3 Miles. Did I get the wrong day? Let me know. Luv, Your Muse. PS I looked it up, it’s really cool to be your muse.

  He closed the first email without replying and opened the second one.

  Y haven’t I heard from u? Write me!

  The same. She was the same. Or at least she seemed the same.

  Another cop car went by, lights on but silent. That was seven, total, since he’d been here. He poured two packets of sugar into his glass and stirred, having to use a regular teaspoon because they didn’t have the long ones.

  Suddenly, he wanted to throw the goddamn spoon across the room.

  His girl. Who was he fooling?

  He wasn’t stupid—far from it. He knew he couldn’t dismiss what he’d seen. There came a time when you had to trust your instincts. He had always been fully aware of the dangers, and that was why he was so careful. He’d always had a sixth sense for trouble.

  Until now.

  6

  Dusk had fallen by the time one of the lab techs, Danny Urquides, motioned to Laura from the bandshell stage. “The ME’s gonna take her now.”

  For the last half hour, Laura had been waiting for the crime scene techs to finish their work. Now she realized how dry her lips were—a chronic problem. She fumbled in the pocket of her slacks, momentarily afraid she’d left her lip balm in the car, relieved and grateful when her hand closed around the small tin. When she worked a crime scene her field of vision narrowed so much she forgot about things like thirst, hunger, and dry lips.

  It had been a very long day. There had been so much to do, and she trusted no one else to do it—even the stuff some might label scutwork--because this was her case and she had to build it painstakingly. In her mind she thought of it as a Popsicle-stick house, placing one piece of evidence atop another until she had a case so tight no defense attorney could knock it down.

  One thing Frank Entwistle had drummed into her: Think about the end game. In police work, the end game was a conviction. Whatever she uncovered would have to stand up in court.

  Since this morning, she had walked the crime scene twice. She had marked and collected evidence, measured and drawn the crime scene to scale, and shot seventeen rolls of film from the ground and an additional two from the DPS helicopter. Laura hated flying in general, and flying in helicopters--where the world tilted crazily--in particular. But it was part of her job and she white-knuckled it.

  Laura dropped the lip balm into her slacks pocket and went up to supervise the removal of the body.

  A tech from the medical examiner’s office was in the process of gently moving the girl away from the wall. Laura photographed the part of her that had been concealed until now, from head to heels. Other than residue from the dirty wall, there was nothing new. The one thing the killer had missed—a mesquite leaf Laura had found on the girl’s neck--had already been photographed, bagged and removed.

  By this time they had made a positive identification: The girl was indeed Jessica Parris. Victor Celaya had made the notification earlier in the afternoon.

  A familiar twinge started in the small of her back. At five feet nine, she was on the tall side and had a long waist. A car accident during her time at the Highway Patrol had weakened her back despite the doctors’ assurances to the contrary, and she felt it every time the job required long hours and standing around. She couldn’t even lean against a wall until they were done with the crime scene.

  It had rained scantily off and on for about an hour; not much of a storm. The air smelled of wet earth and wet cement, nothing like the seductive perfume of the creosote desert where she lived. But it had cooled her down, blown some fresh air into her.

  As they lifted the girl, Laura looked at her face. Despite the deterioration already beginning to erode the hopeful image of youth, the face that once belonged to Jessica Parris seemed unconcerned with the indignities of death--as if she were already an angel.

  Laura thought of the parents, glad that they could not see her now. How did you deal with the death of your own child?

  Anguish stormed up into her chest, the wanton destruction getting to her. Why? Why take this girl’s life? She knew the conventional wisdom, the explanations given by psycho
logists and FBI profilers, the charts and statistics and probabilities, but at this moment they rang hollow.

  The firestorm of emotion took her unawares, blowing up through her soul like a crown fire. Just as quickly it burned out, leaving only cold, bitter anger.

  You think you can get away with it, she said to him. But you won’t.

  I will find you. I swear to God I will.

  I will make you pay.

  * * *

  Going back down Brewery Gulch, she passed the bar she’d gone by this morning, what seemed like a hundred years ago. Heavy metal music spilled out along with the beer smell. Several Harleys were parked out in front of the bar. Bikers, tourists, and stray dogs populated the shadowy street, flickering in and out of lights from open doorways. They were joined by hippie types who seemed at the same time flamboyant and insubstantial, slipping through the night like ghosts of a long-gone era.

  Laura was tired, dirty, drained, and hungry. Earlier today she’d seen the sign in the Copper Queen Hotel lobby for prime rib. She hoped the restaurant would still be open after the briefing at the Bisbee Police department. Maybe grab a bite with Victor. She hadn’t seen him since this morning. He’d spent most of his time canvassing the streets around the park or up at the Copper Queen Hotel conference room, doing what he did best: Talk. Interviewing witnesses, being interviewed himself by the news crews from the Tucson and Phoenix network affiliates. He could have them.

  Laura was almost past a red brick building when she saw something in the store window, partly shielded by an old-fashioned canvas awning, its candystripes faded to pink. A doll, propped up against a metal trunk, legs splayed, hands together on her lap. She wore a Victorian-style little girl’s dress. The dress looked like it had once been white but had been faded by the sun.

  The sign above the door said: Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and Emporium. The antique shop sold twentieth century kitsch. Melmac, Buck Rogers space ships. A dim light came from the back of the store.