Mortal Crimes 1

by Various Authors

  As she disappeared around the building, Waddell removed his sunglasses and sighed. “Sorry you didn’t get a chance to talk to her.”

  Laura ignored his apology. “He has trophies?”

  “She only called that once, but I think she knows. They’re trophies he kept in a storage facility for four years. He made a point of telling her to sell off or get rid of everything except what was in this one suitcase. So she opens it up, and she sees all these articles that belong to women or girls. I’d give anything to get my hands on that suitcase.”

  “Does she still have it?”

  He shrugged. “My guess is he took it back from her the minute he got out of prison. Probably stashed it somewhere. I just keep pushing with her. She’s got the lid down pretty tight, but I keep prying, a little bit at a time.”

  “If it’s gone, though … ”

  Waddell said, “Then there’s nothing we can do. We don’t have enough for a search warrant. He’s off parole, and as far as the law is concerned, he’s paid his debt to society, blah blah blah. I think Sandy knows a lot more than she’s telling. Either that or she’s rationalizing. Hard to tell with her.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Waddell had given Laura what he had on the little girl who was kidnapped from her own bedroom. She sat at her desk, staring at Elaine Feustel’s pretty, open face.

  Ten years old.

  There was no doubt in Laura’s mind that Elaine Feustel was dead.

  She wondered if Sandy Heywood had come to the same conclusion, how she lived with it if she had. Laura was also willing to bet that Sandy knew what the articles of clothing and jewelry in Heywood’s suitcase meant. But as long as it wasn’t spelled out for her, she could choose to ignore it.

  Ah, love. She’d been blinded by it herself a few times. She’d married a guy who wanted her to support him, but in light of Sandy Heywood’s choices, that didn’t seem to be such a big deal.

  As she got up to make photocopies of Waddell’s report, Laura bumped her elbow on the chair rest, the shock going up her arm.

  She still had the sling. This morning before work she’d gone to her regular doctor and he’d told her to keep the sling on for another few days. He’d prescribed alternating ice and heat treatments and told her it was possible she could sustain long-term damage from the blow to her radial nerve. Great.

  When she returned to her desk, Jaime was waiting for her.

  “What’s new?” she asked him.

  “While you were frolicking at the beach and shopping on Rodeo Drive, I was busy interviewing Sherri D’Agnostino.”

  Jaime set his mini-recorder on Laura’s desk and played the interview. His voice sounded different on the tape recorder, his accent pronounced. Laura had no idea why this was. Maybe he did it on purpose. Or maybe seeing him in person, she got the whole package. In person, he sounded Anglo. In fact, sometimes he sounded like New Jersey.

  Jaime went through the usual introduction, then asked Sherri D’Agnostino—her name was Sherri Giles now—for some background.

  She’d been seventeen at the time of the tragedy.

  She’d worked at the camp two years running.

  She’d been in charge of six girls in Bunk 4, including Jenny Carmichael.

  She felt horrible about Jenny’s abduction, said, “I blame myself.”

  Jaime had her describe the day’s outing. They had left at eight thirty in the morning, and the girls had spent time exploring and enjoying the lake. The picnic had been around noon. A thunderstorm had come up, so they’d piled the girls in the vans and driven back up to Camp Aratauk. Sherri Giles was sure that Jenny had been on her van.

  JAIME: Was there a reason you didn’t wait the storm out?

  SHERRI: It was pouring. There was thunder and lightning—really close. We didn’t want to stay out under the ramada in a thunderstorm, so we went back.

  JAIME: Was Jenny at the cookout?

  SHERRI: Yes. I’m sure she was there.

  JAIME: You saw her there? At the cookout?

  SHERRI: I’m sure I did. It’s hard to remember after all this time.

  Laura said to Jaime, “Could you play that for me again?”

  “Sure.” He rewound a little, punched STOP, and then PLAY.

  I’m sure I did. It’s hard to remember after all this time.

  Laura heard it in Sherri’s voice: avoidance, wiggle room. Sherri’s words “I’m sure” qualified “I did.” Sherri also said that it was hard to remember. Laura thought that the day Jenny Carmichael disappeared would be the one day Sherri Giles would remember. Forever.

  A little further on, Sherri Giles admitted to Jaime that she couldn’t actually remember having seen Jenny at the lake.

  She admitted that she had asked Jenny’s best friend, Dawn, where Jenny was. She had been told Jenny was in the bathroom.

  Then the rain had come—hard—visibility only a few feet. All the girls had piled in the vans. Sherri D’Agnostino told Jaime she’d taken a head count on one van and then the other. The numbers had seemed to match up.

  JAIME: You say they’d “seemed to match up.” What do you mean by that?

  SHERRI: There was a lot … of chaos. Dawn told me Jenny was in the bathroom and so I told her to, uh, go get her, then I went to the other van. I think that’s what happened. I did a head count at the other van, and then I went back to the van Dawn was on.

  JAIME: You counted heads?

  SHERRI: Yes. I’m pretty sure … No—wait. We were in a hurry, visibility was so bad, we wanted to get everybody back to the camp—I counted …

  There was a pause. Laura heard the tape reel turning, the fuzzy sound of the wheels turning.

  SHERRI: I called out their names.

  JAIME: You called out their names and did a head count?

  SHERRI: No. I was wrong—I just called out their names.

  JAIME: Did everyone answer?

  SHERRI: Yes.

  JAIME: How many girls were on the van?

  SHERRI: Twelve on one van and eleven on the other.

  JAIME: And all of them answered? On both vans?

  SHERRI: Everyone said, “Here!” I remember that.

  Jaime stopped the tape and looked at Laura. “She didn’t check the tags. She didn’t even count heads.”

  Sherri had mentioned the tags, and they were in Jenny’s case file as well. Laura remembered them from her own stint at Camp Aratauk. The tags were like metal pet tags, stamped with numbers. Each camper was assigned a number. The tags were kept on a pegboard in the mess hall, and every time the girls went on an outing, they pinned the tags to their uniform shirts. The counselors were supposed to keep track of them by writing down each number. That didn’t happen this time.

  Jaime played the rest of the tape. Sherri told him that after they’d returned, all the girls had gone to their bunkhouses to change clothes. Everybody had been soaking wet. But she’d told all of them to hang their tags up on the pegboard.

  “Jenny’s tag was on the board,” Sherri Giles told him. “She obviously came back with us. We didn’t even notice she was gone until dinnertime.”

  That seemed to be a discrepancy with what the CEO of Camp Aratauk had told Art Schiller. Laura looked it up.

  “She’s shading the truth again,” Laura said. “Says right here that it wasn’t long after they got back that they realized Jenny was missing.”

  “They thought she went off by herself,” Jaime said.

  “Yes. They called her the wanderer. Jenny the wanderer.”

  Jaime said, “It sounds to me like everybody was covering their own ass. We don’t know when she disappeared. At dinnertime? Before the picnic? After the picnic? Christ, did they just leave her behind?”

  “She was found not a mile from the camp,” Laura said. “So maybe she never left.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Dave Toch questioned Sean Grady at the downtown TPD station. In the fluorescent light of the interview room, Grady’s face looked pasty. His lawyer’s face, if possible
, was even pastier; she looked as if she’d gone ten rounds in the ring and lost.

  The light turned Grady’s forehead into a shelf over two dark hollows for eyes.

  “Tell me again how it happened,” Toch said.

  The lawyer opened her mouth to say something, but Sean just stared at her. His stare said “butt out.”

  “I’m acting against the advice of my lawyer, talking to you guys, but I’m doing this because I’m innocent. This is bogus, and I’m going to prove it.”

  “Let’s start with the knifing.”

  His sigh had the tone of the long-suffering. “How many times and in how many ways do I have to say it? There was no knifing. If she hadn’t charged at me, she wouldn’t have hurt her hand. It’s that simple.” His expression earnest. “I didn’t lay a finger on her. She’s imagining things. She really needs some help.”

  “You said you showed her the knife. Why did you do that?”

  The lawyer glanced at her client, but Grady stopped her with a look. He shook his head. “Man, this is such a misunderstanding. I just bought it. I was showing it to everybody who came in. I’m like a kid with a new toy, I’ve always been that way. She just took it the wrong way.”

  Dave Toch laid a copy of a receipt he’d gotten from a Big 5 on the table beside Grady. “Says here you bought that knife last year.”

  “That was another knife.”

  “Another knife? Exactly the same make, type? Why’d you do that?”

  “Why not? It’s a free country.”

  “I’m just curious is all. Wondering why you’d buy one knife a year ago and another one recently. They’re exactly alike.”

  “We’re getting off the point here.”

  “What is the point?”

  Laura saw Grady shift slightly so that he had a direct view of the one-way glass she stood behind. He stared right at her. She knew he couldn’t see through the window, that he didn’t know for sure that she was even here. But his gaze reached out across the space between them through the wall. It made Laura think of someone probing a shell with an escargot fork, looking for the meat. Digging, digging, digging. Persistent and intrusive.

  So sure of himself.

  He leaned back but kept his eyes on the window.

  “The point is she lied. She freaked out; it was totally inappropriate; and the next thing you know, she’s shooting at me. I’ve got grounds for a lawsuit, and you’d better believe once the charges are dropped, it will be in the works.”

  He leaned toward Detective Toch, but kept his eyes on Laura.

  “I. Did. Nothing. Wrong.” He landed on each word for emphasis, his eyes never leaving Laura’s. She could swear he could see her.

  It made her want to step away; it made her want to hide.

  He smiled, as if he saw her discomfort.

  Gotcha.

  It was late afternoon by the time Laura left TPD. She had a quick dinner at Chuy’s, then drove to the Brashear house for her first voice lesson.

  The unsettled feeling went with her. Grady’s father had come up with his bond, and he was out. Not only did Sean Grady have contempt for her as a law officer, she knew he wanted to do her harm.

  Toch told her the CA was going to drop the ag assault charge all together. When Toch protested that Laura was a cop, that it would send a very bad message, Rutan had echoed Sean Grady’s own words. “We wouldn’t even be talking about this if her hand hadn’t gotten in the way.”

  So Laura was careful to watch her rearview mirror. She would be careful later tonight, too. She didn’t want Grady to know where she lived.

  As she pulled up in front of the Brashear house, though, Laura was nervous for another reason. She had not sung in front of anybody for years; she’d only sung along with her CDs at home and in the car.

  Her favorite song was “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” made famous by Bonnie Raitt. Laura had never had a voice lesson in her life, but she pictured how it would be. Nina Brashear would have her sing the song and then help her sing it better.

  That wasn’t what happened, though.

  “It’ll be awhile before you should sing that song,” Nina said, after taking Laura through fifteen minutes of scales. The scales—so many different kinds—were boring and Laura found herself getting impatient.

  They worked on “I dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair” instead. Laura liked “I dream of Jeannie,” so it was all right. She had the slightest glimmer that she was completely out of her depth, though. A sudden self-consciousness, a feeling that her voice was unnatural and untameable.

  Nina glanced at the clock. “That’s enough for today. Always warm up with these exercises. Can you remember them?”

  Laura nodded. She didn’t ask when she’d finally get to sing “I Can’t Make You Love Me”; it seemed as if would be very far away.

  Feeling a slight letdown, she walked out, wondering if this was such a good idea.

  “How are things going with Micaela?” she asked Nina as they walked to the front door.

  “She’s doing well,” Nina Brashear said. “I hope she’s been helpful.”

  “She has been.” Or at least she tried to be.

  “Well, I’ll leave you here,” Nina Brashear said. Clearly distracted.

  Suddenly Dr. Brashear appeared in the arched doorway of the kitchen. “Nina, where’s Micaela?”

  “She’s out.”

  “Just once I’d like her to have dinner with us.” He glanced at Laura, dismissed her with a look. “When are we eating?”

  “Joanie said about an hour.”

  “Where is she? I don’t see her anywhere.”

  “She had to pick up some things for dinner.”

  “Oh.” Dr. Brashear pulled his tie off and balled it up. “Where’s Lourdes? The study is a mess.”

  Laura felt superfluous. She didn’t like the fact that Dr. Brashear didn’t acknowledge her. He had that arrogant tone that she couldn’t stand in men.

  As she drove out, Micaela drove in, the headlights of her sporty little car bouncing off the royal palms. She turned to look at Laura, her face pale in Laura’s lights. Her lips pressed tightly together in consternation, as if she were thinking: you again?

  Laura had nothing to ask her so she didn’t bother to roll her window down. They drove past each other and into the night.

  Laura’s unease grew when she got back to the Bosque Escondido Ranch and checked her messages. No messages, just a hang-up. Whoever it was had stayed on the line for a full five seconds before hanging up. She’d timed it.

  It was just silence. Nothing more and nothing less. No way to tell if there was any animosity there. But that didn’t stop her from thinking of Grady.

  Laura had an unlisted number. She’d also installed motion detector lights, iron bars on the doors and windows, and deadbolts on every door of the house. Most people out here didn’t bother to lock their doors; Laura always did.

  From the Brashear house, she’d driven a circuitous route to the freeway, aware of the headlights in her rearview. She’d looked for a Hummer, but didn’t see one. Laura had done enough to be sure that no one had followed her out here, but she couldn’t be sure that Grady didn’t have other resources. Any private investigator would have access to her address and phone number. By law, they were not allowed to give that information out, but that meant nothing.

  ________

  Laura had only been asleep for what seemed like seconds when the phone rang. Loud. She blinked at the clock. It was two forty-five, the time of night when you got only bad news.

  She reached for the phone, but it stopped ringing. By the time she got the receiver to her ear, all she heard was a dial tone.

  Wide awake now, her heart speeding up.

  She hit Star 69, but all it showed was an unknown caller.

  She went to the window. The wind tore through the small courtyard, the trees tossing. Lightning wired itself to the ground in a hail of airborne grit and the acrid odor of the wildfire south of town. The Diamondback f
ire was now one-hundred-percent contained, but she could still smell it.

  No rain. No long-awaited monsoon. Just the wind, the heat lightning, and the thunder. Laura closed her eyes and her eyelids felt dry and brittle. She needed to sleep. If it was Grady, he was probably just playing games.

  But she brought her SIG-Sauer to bed with her anyway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Steve awoke before dawn. He felt much better. The aches were still there, but he could move pretty well. Jake lay on the floor beside the twin bed. Outside, Steve heard the faraway grumble of thunder.

  He got up, careful not to step on the dog, and walked across the wood floor to the window. He parted the drapes and stared out into the forest. Even though it was still dark, he knew it wouldn’t be a clear day. The air seemed opaque, weighed down with moisture. Dark, gloomy.

  More thunder, like a rattle of timpani—and then a rolling crack, like a whiplash.

  Jake lifted his head, looked at Steve with fleeting alarm, then put his head back down.

  “It’s okay, buddy. As long as we’re inside, we’re okay.”

  The monsoon was here at last, the rain coming down hard. Looked like he’d have to stay in this morning.

  The rain hammered on the tin roof as Steve made breakfast, the noise going from a downpour to the sound of marbles hitting hard. Hail.

  Steve took his eggs and toast to the breakfast nook where he could look out at the forest, watched as the tiny white pebbles of compressed ice bounced all over, like ping-pong balls in a lottery air mix machine.

  Thought he saw something by the tool shed. He immediately thought of the breakins. There hadn’t been any since the first two nights and no more strange phone calls either.

  The tool shed was up the hill a ways, off to the right. Partially obscured by the trees, the bottom half of the door screened from view by the propane tank near the house. But he’d definitely seen something move. He glanced up beyond the tool shed to the excavation site, the crime scene tape shivering in the pelting hail. He didn’t see anybody up there. He shifted his gaze back to the shed, but the hail had turned to a hard, misty rain. Even harder to see now.