Second Grave on the Left cd-2

by Darynda Jones

  “Hopefully, we’ll have those class rosters this morning and I can start searching Mimi’s classmates, see if any of them have met with similar fates.”

  “You mean death?”

  “Pretty much,” she said.

  We took the outside stairs to the office. While I made a beeline for the coffeepot to prep for the day, Cookie checked the fax machine.

  “They’re here,” she said excitedly.

  “The class rosters? Already?” That was fast.

  Cookie turned on her computer and plopped down in front of her desk. “I’m going to do some hunting, see what I come up with.”

  The front door to Cook’s office opened, and a hesitant head popped in. “Are you open?” a man asked. He looked about sixty turned sideways as he was.

  “Sure,” I said, inviting him in with a wave. “What can we do for you?”

  He straightened and entered, followed by a woman about the same age. He wore a dark blue blazer and reminded me of a sportscaster, his gray hair perfectly combed. And she wore an only-slightly-out-of-date khaki pantsuit that matched her light hair. A cloud of grief, thick and palpable, followed in their wake. They were hurting.

  “Are either of you Charley Davidson?” the man asked.

  “I’m Charley.”

  He gripped my hand like I was humanity’s last hope. If that were the case, humanity was in a lot of trouble. The woman did the same, her fragile hand a shaking mass of nerves. “Ms. Davidson,” the gentleman said, his expensive cologne wafting toward me, “we’re Mimi’s parents.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised. “Please, come on back.” I gestured for Cookie to join us, then led them to my office. Ever efficient, she grabbed a notepad to take notes.

  “You must be Cookie,” the man said. He took her hand.

  “Yes, sir, I am, Mr. Marshal.” She took the woman’s in turn. “Mrs. Marshal. I’m so sorry about everything.”

  “Please, call me Wanda. This is Harold. Mimi has told us all about you.”

  Cookie’s smile wavered between appreciation and horror before she gestured for them to sit. I’d have to get the lowdown later.

  I pulled up a chair for her, then settled behind my desk. “I don’t guess you know where she is?” I asked, taking a wild-assed shot.

  Harold’s eyes met mine, his gaze sad but knowing. I could feel the helplessness roll off him, but he had a sense of hope as well, one that Mimi’s husband, Warren, didn’t. I had a sneaking suspicion he might know more than the average bear. “I’ll pay anything, Ms. Davidson. I’ve heard good things about you.”

  That was different. People rarely had good things to say about me, unless “certifiable nutcase” had finally shed its bad rep. “Mr. Marshal—”

  “Harold,” he insisted.

  “Harold, I read people pretty well — it’s part of what I do — and you seem more than just hopeful that Mimi is all right. You seem almost expectant, as if you know something no one else does.”

  The couple glanced at each other. I could see the doubt in their eyes. They were wondering if they could trust me.

  “Let me see if I can help,” I offered.

  With a hesitant nod, he gave me the go-ahead.

  “Okay. Mimi started acting strange a few weeks ago, but she wouldn’t tell you what was bothering her.”

  “That’s right,” Wanda said, clutching her handbag in her lap. “I tried to get her to open up when she came for her visit — she brings the kids for an overnight stay on the first of every month — but … she just…” Her voice cracked, and she paused to dab at her eyes with a tissue before looking back at me. Her husband covered her hands with one of his.

  “But she told you something. Maybe it seemed strange at the time, but when she disappeared, you put it together.”

  Wanda gasped. “Yes, she did, and I didn’t understand…” She’d trailed off again.

  “Can you tell me what she said?”

  She lowered her lashes, reluctant. I could feel a desire to trust me radiate out of her, but whatever Mimi had said had her doubting everything. Everyone.

  “Wanda,” Cookie said, leaning forward, her expression filled with concern, “if there is any one person on this planet I would trust with my life, it is the woman sitting across from you right now. She will do everything humanly possible — and even a little inhumanly — to get your daughter back safely.”

  That was about the sweetest thing Cookie had ever said about me. We’d have to talk later about the inhumanly comment, but she meant well. She totally needed a raise.

  “Go ahead, sweetheart,” Harold coaxed.

  Wanda’s breath hitched and she swallowed hard before speaking. “She told me she’d made an awful mistake a long time ago and that she did something horrible. I argued with her, told her it didn’t matter, but she insisted that all mistakes had to be paid for. An eye for an eye.” She looked up at me, her expression one of such desperation, it broke my heart. “I don’t want her to get into trouble. Whatever she did, or thinks she did, it was a mistake.”

  “That’s why we’re hoping she disappeared of her own accord,” Harold added. “That she planned this and that she’s safe.”

  “But she would never leave Warren and the kids without an extremely good reason, Ms. Davidson. If she did so, it’s because she felt she had no other choice.”

  Harold nodded his head in unison with his wife’s. I was glad they didn’t suspect Warren. They seemed to trust him implicitly. But I felt they should know what was happening. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Warren is being questioned.”

  Wanda pursed her lips sadly as Harold spoke. “We know, but I promise you, he had nothing to do with this. If anything, Mimi was trying to keep him out of it.”

  “Cookie and I think this might stem back to something that happened in high school.”

  “High school?” Harold asked, surprised.

  “Did she have any enemies?”

  “Mimi?” Wanda scoffed softly. “Mimi got along with everyone. She was just that kind of girl. Warmhearted and accepting.”

  “Too accepting,” Harold said. He glanced at his wife before continuing. “We never really cared for her best friend. What was her name?”

  “Janelle,” Wanda said, her expression hardening slightly.

  “Janelle York?” I asked. “They were best friends?”

  “Yes, for a couple of years. That girl was wild. Too wild.”

  After a quick glance to give Cookie a heads-up, I scooted forward and said, “Janelle York died in a car accident last week.”

  Their shocked expressions confirmed they’d had no idea. “Oh, my heavens,” Wanda said.

  “And did you know Tommy Zapata?” In small towns, everyone seemed to know everyone. Surely they’d known our dead car dealer.

  “Of course.” Harold nodded. “His father worked for the city for years. Landscaping and whatnot, mostly at the cemetery.”

  This was going to sound bad, but again, I needed them to know. I needed to find out what was going on. “Tommy Zapata was found dead yesterday morning. Murdered.”

  Their shock morphed into disbelief. They were genuinely stunned.

  “He was a year older than Mimi,” Harold said. “They went to school together.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” Wanda said, her voice laced with despair. “Anthony Richardson died last week, too, Tony Richardson’s boy. He committed suicide.”

  Cookie scribbled down the name as I asked, “Did he go to school with Mimi as well?”

  “He was in her class,” Harold said.

  Someone was cleaning house, tying up loose ends, and Mimi was obviously on his radar. Surely the Marshals knew something. Surely something had happened in high school that would pinpoint the root of all of this.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Marshal, when Mimi was in high school, she moved from Ruiz to Albuquerque to live with her grandmother. Why?”

  Wanda blinked back to me, her brows furrowed in thought. “She’d had a
fight with Janelle. We just figured she wanted to get away.”

  “Did she tell you they had a fight?”

  “No,” she said, thinking back. “Not really. They were best friends one day and enemies the next. They just seemed to drift in different directions.”

  “We were not upset by that fact,” Harold added. “We’d never approved of Mimi’s friendship with her.”

  “Did anything happen in particular to cause the rift?”

  They glanced at each other and shrugged helplessly, trying to think back.

  “Whatever happened,” Wanda said, “it caused Mimi to go into a deep depression.”

  “We would catch her crying in her room,” Harold said, his voice despondent as old memories, painful memories, resurfaced. “She stopped going out, stopped eating, stopped bathing. It got to the point where she would claim to be sick every morning, beg us not to send her to school. She missed almost three weeks straight at one point.”

  Wanda’s face saddened with the memory as well. “We took her to a doctor, who suggested we schedule an appointment with a counselor, but before we could arrange it, she asked to move to Albuquerque with my mother. She wanted to go to Saint Pius.”

  “We were thrilled that she was getting interested in her studies again. She was always a straight-A student, and Saint Pius is an excellent school.” Harold seemed to need to justify his letting her move away. I was sure they didn’t take the decision lightly.

  Wanda patted his knee reassuringly. “Quite honestly, Ms. Davidson, as bad as this will sound, we breathed a sigh of relief when she left. She completely turned around when she got here. Her grades improved, and she excelled in extracurricular activities. She was her old self again.”

  Cookie was scribbling notes as the Marshals talked. Thank goodness. My handwriting sucked.

  “From what you’ve told me,” I said, “it sounds like her worries in Ruiz were based on more than a falling-out with her best friend, like Mimi was being bullied, possibly even threatened. Or worse,” I added reluctantly. Rape was a definite possibility. “Did she mention anything? Anything at all?”

  “Nothing,” Wanda said, alarmed with my conclusion. “We tried to get her to talk about what was bothering her, but she refused. She started to turn hostile every time we brought it up. It was so unlike her.”

  Warren had used those exact words to describe Mimi’s behavior before she disappeared. So unlike her.

  “We should have been more diligent,” Harold said, his voice brimming with guilt. “We just assumed it was Janelle. You know what high school is like.”

  I did indeed.

  Chapter Nine

  UPON THE ADVICE OF MY ATTORNEY,

  MY SHIRT BEARS NO MESSAGE AT THIS TIME.

  — T-SHIRT

  Two hours later, Cookie and I sat in her office, marveling at what we’d found via the class rosters and the Internet. In the last month, six former students of Ruiz High had either died or gone missing. The casualties included a murder, a car accident, two apparent suicides, an accidental death by drowning, and a missing person: Mimi.

  “Okay,” Cookie said, studying her list, “every one of these people not only matriculated from Ruiz High, but they had all been within one or two grades of one another.”

  “And we could be missing someone. We don’t have any married names on the women.”

  “I’ll have to run a check on those,” she said.

  “Considering there were only about a hundred students in the entire high school, the odds of something like this happening by chance are astronomical. There has to be another connection. I doubt our guy is out to just kill every kid he went to high school with. If he were a serial killer, there would be a pattern, similar deaths in a contained area, most likely. Whoever is behind this is trying to make them look like accidents or suicides, for the most part.”

  “Maybe Warren’s threatening Tommy Zapata offered the guy an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, Tommy and Mimi, while shifting the suspicion to Warren,” Cookie said.

  “And since the others were ruled accidental, someone is getting away with murder.”

  “You know,” Cookie said, studying the roster again, “Mimi’s name isn’t on here. This roster must be from after Mimi moved.”

  “Okay, let’s do this,” I said, thinking aloud. “You search the Ruiz police records for anything amiss from the time Mimi moved, working backwards to about a month or two prior. Although the odds are against it, something could have landed on the sheriff’s radar.”

  “Got it. I’ll also run a check on the married names of some of these women, just in case.”

  “And while you’re at it,” I said, piling on the work, “you might call and see if you can get an earlier roster.”

  “Yep, already have that down. Hey, what are you going to do?”

  Reyes had a sister in a screwed-up, kidnapped kind of way. When Kim was two, she had been dumped on Earl Walker’s doorstep by a drug-addicted mother mere days before the woman died of complications due to an HIV infection. I could only hope that had Kim’s mother known what kind of monster Earl Walker was, she would never have left her daughter with him, suspected father or not. And while Walker didn’t sexually abuse her as I’d feared, he did the next best thing. He used her to control Reyes. He starved her to get what he wanted out of him. And what he wanted from Reyes was all kinds of evil.

  “I’m going to go talk to Reyes’s sister, Kim.”

  Cookie’s expression transformed to one of hope. “Do you think she knows where he might be?”

  “Sadly, no, but it’s worth a shot.”

  “Are you going to contact Mistress Marigold?” she asked with a teasing grin. “’Cause that if-you’re-the-grim-reaper thing is just too weird.”

  “Tell me about it. And I haven’t decided yet.”

  “How about I do it for you? Holy cannoli,” she said, glancing at the roster again.

  “What?” I hopped up to read over her shoulder.

  “Mimi went to high school with Kyle Kirsch. I just made the connection.”

  “The congressman? The same congressman who recently announced his plans to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate?”

  “Yes. His first name is Benjamin. It’s listed as Benjamin Kyle Kirsch. The Benjamin threw me. He must go by his middle name.”

  I leaned in, leveled a pointed stare on her. “The same congressman who announced his plans to run for the U.S. Senate one month ago?”

  Cookie’s jaw fell open. “Holy cannoli,” she repeated.

  She had a way with words.

  * * *

  A congressman. A freaking congressman. Somebody, and I wasn’t naming any names, but somebody had at least one major-ass skeleton in his closet. Like King Kong major. A skeleton he didn’t want to escape. Possibly ’cause nothing was scarier than giant skeletons running amok. And my money, all forty-seven dollars and fifty-eight cents, was on Kyle Kirsch. Congressman. U.S. Senate hopeful. Murderer.

  Then again, it could all be some wild coincidence, some bizarre chain of events that just happened to revolve around a group of teens from Ruiz, New Mexico, and a man who just happened to announce his candidacy around the same time his classmates started dropping like fruit flies in September. And I could be crowned Miss Finland before the year was out.

  Now, thanks to Kyle Kirsch, I had one more conundrum wreaking havoc on my innards. What the bloody heck did this guy do? Unless he’d partaken in ritualistic sacrifice to a dark overlord or had been an Amway rep at any point in his life, I really couldn’t justify his murdering innocent people.

  He had to go down. Preferably hard.

  I pulled into Kim Millar’s Pueblo-styled apartment complex and knocked on her turquoise door.

  “Ms. Davidson,” Kim said when she opened the door, her eyes wide with worry. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside. “Where is he?” Her auburn hair was pulled back into a harried ponytail, and dark circles lined her silvery green eyes, making them look large and holl
ow. She’d looked fragile the first time I met her. Now her porcelain exterior seemed on the verge of shattering.

  I took her hand into mine as she led me to a beige sofa.

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” I said when we were settled.

  The glimmer of hope she’d been hanging on to tooth and nail fled, placing a hairline fracture in her aura. A grayness descended, a misty overcast darkening her eyes.

  I didn’t know how much to tell her. Would I want to know if my sibling were essentially committing suicide? Damn straight I would. Kim had a right to know what her pigheaded brother was up to.

  “He’s very mad at me right now,” I said.

  “So, you’ve seen him?”

  I realized how hard their arrangement must be on her. They had a zero-contact contract. Reyes didn’t want her hurt because of him ever again, and she refused to be the leverage that got Reyes hurt in turn. No one, not even the state, knew what she was to him. Though not actually blood related, they were siblings through and through, and I had a feeling Reyes would come un-superglued if he knew I was talking to her.

  “Kim, do you know what he is?”

  Her brows worked themselves into a delicate knot. “No. Not really. I just know that he’s very special.”

  “He is,” I said, scooting closer. Not that I was about to tell her who he really was. What he really was. “He is very special and he can leave his body.”

  She swallowed hard. “I know. I’ve known for a long time. And he’s very strong. And fast.”

  “Exactly. And when he leaves his body, he’s even stronger and much faster.”

  With a gentle nod, she let me know she was following.

  “For that reason,” I told her, hoping I wasn’t about to break her heart, “he has decided to let his corporeal body pass away.”

  Her red-rimmed eyes blinked in stunned silence before my meaning sank in. When it did, a hand shot up to cover her mouth and she stared at me in disbelief. “He can’t do that,” she said, her voice airy with grief.