Laura Cardinal - 01 - Darkness on the Edge of Town lc-1

by J. Carson Black

  Lots of it. That didn’t show up in black and white either.

  She got on the road early the next morning. The faded moon hung in a clear indigo sky as she drove off the ranch and through the little town of Vail, over the railroad tracks and onto the freeway going east toward Bisbee. Ahead, there was a blush over the far mountains. Julie Marr’s death faded from her mind like an old photograph in a scrapbook.

  15

  OFFICER NOONE INVESTIGATES

  Randall Noone—he hated the name “Randy”; people might as well just go ahead and call him “Horny”—parked a little way down and walked up to the turnout on West Boulevard. He’d just started his shift and wanted to check on the tire tracks and see if the same vehicle had come back. He was sure those tire tracks had something to do with Jessica Parris’s death. Otherwise, why would Laura Cardinal bother to take casts of them?

  At seven in the morning, this part of the canyon was still deep in shadow. There was a hushed feeling to the air, which was actually cool for once, thanks to the overnight rain.

  His favorite time of day.

  Even though he’d enjoyed the thrill of working nights, he never could adjust completely to the night. Working the day shift in Bisbee wasn’t big on excitement, but he enjoyed talking to folks—the place was like Mayberry. He was good at giving speeding tickets, too; he made people feel so good about getting a ticket that they were practically thanking him before he was done. Randall thought that if he’d really wanted excitement, he could have joined up with the sheriff’s department, which had become a war zone in the last few years. With the Feds clamping down on the border crossings in California and Texas, Arizona was a hotbed for illegal aliens. One of his friends in the sheriff’s department had personally discovered three decomposing bodies in the desert just this year, and had nearly been run down during a routine traffic stop when a vanload of illegals jumped out after putting the van into reverse, right at him.

  Nope, he liked Mayberry just fine. Especially with the baby on the way. He and Marcie had picked out the name already: Justin. A good strong name.

  The only bad thing about days—Heather Duffy was on days, too.

  The Duffy trouble began when his wife had a cold and couldn’t make it to the year-end party. After downing five Tabasco shooters, he’d ended up making out with Duffy, and she’d never let him forget it. She sank her teeth into him like a gila monster. When one of them clamped onto your fingers, you might as well get used to having a new clothing accessory.

  He reached the yellow tape and looked at the area. He’d made a mental note of exactly how it had looked the night before and was happy to see that the area had not been disturbed.

  Glancing back at the Parris house, he said a brief prayer. Man, that was tough—imagine losing your kid like that. The chief had mentioned a possible Internet connection. That was bad stuff, the way some freak with a computer could reach right into your house and lure your kid right out the front door. When Justin grew up, he’d have to watch him like a hawk. He’d get AOL. They had safeguards for stuff just like that.

  He walked across the road to look at the other turnout. A raven flew over, making a nut-cracking noise deep in its throat.

  As he reached the road’s shoulder, the smell hit him.

  He realized that off and on yesterday afternoon he had smelled it, too, had thought it was coming from the dumpster. But it wasn’t really a garbage smell.

  It was a death smell.

  He looked up and down the road, but saw nothing. Probably some poor animal had been hit by a car and crawled into the underbrush.

  A thick screen of trees ran along the east side of the road. His Uncle Nate called them cancer trees because they spread like a fast-moving tumor. He stepped to the side of the road and peered between the trunks. No animal that he could see, but there was something—a solid patch of gray through the trees. Couldn’t be more than ten feet from where he stood.

  An abandoned shed? No, it had a pitched roof. It looked like a little cabin. Suddenly he remembered something else Uncle Nate told him, that there were some old tourist cabins around here from the twenties, back when this road was the highway through town.

  As he recalled, it had an Indian name. Cochise? No. Geronimo. The Geronimo Tourist Camp.

  Randall Noone squinted at the shack, holding the tree limbs away from his face. The trees made him feel claustrophobic. They gave off a cloying odor, like peanut butter, that mixed with the death smell and made his stomach queasy. Breathing through his mouth, he made his way through the underbrush, the limbs springing back like boomerangs when he let go of them, until he was standing outside the shack.

  The doors and windows to the cabin were gone, leaving it open to the elements—just a shell with a rusted stove pipe lying in the corner across floorboards pretty much rotted through. Place couldn’t be much bigger than a roomy bathroom.

  He noticed another ghostly square to his left, maybe fifteen feet away, and went to investigate.

  This cabin looked like a kids’ hangout—there was a candle, an old rug, throw pillows, rolling papers, and a boom box. A faint odor of pot.

  This was interesting.

  He spotted another cabin, this one farthest away from the road and backed up against the hill. He picked his way along a faint trail littered with junk—a roll of hog wire, broken glass, a sink with a hole in it.

  Darker here, shadowed by the ridge and oak trees. Damp. The raven flew to an oak and chortled at him as he approached the open doorway.

  The stench hit him with almost physical force.

  He stepped back, his mind reeling. Something dead here. Steeling himself, he breathed through his mouth before peering in.

  At first he thought it was just a pile of black rags. No, it was jeans and a T-shirt. Naturally, his gaze wandered up the t-shirt toward the face.

  His disbelieving eyes registered the green fright mask for just an instant before he reeled backwards out the door, gulping for air.

  Officer Randall Noone found himself on all fours, the scrambled eggs Marcie cooked for his breakfast ending up in a steaming pile on the grass.

  16

  “What do you think?” Laura asked Victor. Early afternoon now, and the crime lab techs had finished collecting evidence and the ME’s people were on their way to remove the body of Cary Statler.

  Victor sighed. “Whoever killed Jessica probably killed him.”

  Laura knew what he was thinking: more trouble. Just seven hours ago he’d been making arrangements for a studio portrait of his family, including his new daughter, and now he’d been dragged back here in this heat to look at the corpse of Cary Statler, which in his view only complicated the case.

  Laura agreed with Victor that there was a high probability that Jessica and Cary had been attacked at the same time. With a body this far gone, it would be impossible to fix a definitive time of death, but Laura didn’t believe in coincidences. The fact that Cary Statler and Jessica Parris had both been victims of homicide was just too big a coincidence to ignore.

  Detective Holland said, “He wanted the girl and this poor sad bastard was in the way. So he bashed him in the head and took the girl where he could have his fun without being rushed.”

  Laura kept her gaze on Statler, although it was hard to do. He was riddled with maggots. One eye had been pecked out, and several fingers had been torn from one hand, probably dragged off by animals. It was fortunate he had ID on him, because skin slippage and a hardening and darkening of his complexion made his features unrecognizable—his face was marbled lime-green and black.

  But Laura knew who it was the moment she saw the Megadeth tee and the yellow pineapple hair.

  She straightened up, feeling the twinge in her back. The shade, which had stayed with them most of the day, had given way to full sunlight coming in through the southern window. The air was stifling; the stench almost unbearable. Victor and Buddy had shared dabs of Victor’s jar of mentholatum to block out the smell, but Laura had made i
t a policy not to use the stuff, since she knew from experience that the stink would linger in the mentholatum long after she had left the scene. She breathed through her mouth, but could still feel death lying on the membranes on her tongue, in her nostrils, on her skin.

  Victor cocked his head. “Man, that was some hit he took.” The force of the blow had broken Cary Statler’s neck, even though the wound itself had been higher up to the side of the head. One blow. It had come close to separating his head from his body.

  “Had to be someone who knew about this place,” Buddy was saying. “You can’t even see these cabins from the road.”

  “Could be.” Laura kept her voice neutral.

  Buddy had the ball and he ran with it. “I think he knew them. He wanted Jessica, she fit his fantasy. My guess is he followed them, or knew about their little hangout—“

  “If it was their hangout.” Laura could feel sweat trickling under her hair. She wanted out of this cabin now. She desperately wanted to go back to the car and get to her purse, scrub her face and hands with hand sanitizer, and salve her dry lips.

  “If it was Cary’s hangout, this guy would know they hung out there. He’d be able to keep tabs on them, look for his opportunity. I think he planned it,” Buddy said.

  “What I still can’t figure out though—why the dress?” Victor asked. “Why did he do all that? He leaves the kid here, like so much garbage dumped out by the side of the road, but he’s careful about the evidence with her.”

  Buddy said, “He didn’t think anyone would find the kid. That’s why he brought him to this cabin, farthest from the road. Nobody comes out here. That’s also why I think he’s local. He knows this place. He had to act fast and move this kid, and he knew exactly where to put him.”

  “And then what?” asked Laura.

  Buddy looked at her and his eyes narrowed. “He takes her to his place.”

  “So he’s parked up on the road?”

  “I guess he would be.”

  “Wouldn’t he be afraid that someone would see his car? Or see him come up to the road with the girl?”

  “He’s pretty bold—you said so yourself, dressing her up like that and putting her in City Park. If you don’t like him taking him somewhere, he could have killed and raped her up here, came back later that night, cleaned her up and planted her in City Park.”

  “Why?”

  “To taunt the police. To show us up.”

  Buddy’s theory was logical. Still, something about it bothered her. She had spent a large part of yesterday talking to various law enforcement agencies in Arizona. No one she’d talked to could even remember a case like this one, but there was the phone call from that detective—Endicott—in Indio, California. She’d tried him twice today, would have to keep trying.

  If he was a local, she guessed that he had not lived here long. A year or two at the most. She knew he had done this before. He had built up to this.

  The mesquite leaf, too, bothered her. She didn’t recall seeing a mesquite tree anywhere up here; it was too high up.

  And there was the matchbook she’d found at the bandshell, CRZYGRL12 written in block letters on the inside cover. “Why would he leave the matchbook behind?”

  Buddy stared at her. “We don’t know for sure it was his.”

  Gauging her reaction.

  “No, we don’t know he was the one who put it there. We have to consider it, though. We have to consider everything. This might have something to do with the Internet.”

  “That’s how he could have met her.”

  “But you think he knew her from here.”

  “He knew her from here and he knew her on the Internet. They were probably e-mail buddies.”

  She could tell he was getting steamed. She saw Victor grin—the first time today. Victor understood Buddy’s frustration, maybe even sympathized. He’d often said she was too even-handed.

  “Besides,” Buddy said, “I talked to her teachers. She was carefully supervised and never left alone on the computers. No way someone could have reached her—they’d know. I think CRZYGIRL12 doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Laura didn’t bother to reply. Instead, she stepped outside the cabin. She couldn’t stand the stench in there, and she couldn’t stand Buddy Holland’s attitude. His barely-veiled belligerence. His hints that she’d planted the matchbook.

  Concentrate.

  She walked out beyond the crime scene tape. From here, she could see the dumpster near the road. The lab techs had removed the dumpster’s contents and already taken it to the crime lab in Tucson, even though they had found nothing overtly related to Cary’s murder.

  What Laura hoped for was a blood-stained towel or T-shirt. There had been evidence that Cary’s head had been wrapped in something to keep his blood from getting all over. This dovetailed with her theory that Cary was moved to the cabin from the spot where he’d been killed.

  The killer had probably taken the shirt or towel with him. Maybe he knew that it was possible to get latents from cloth. Or maybe it was his natural neatness.

  He was still being careful.

  She did agree with Buddy on one thing: Cary had been in the way, and the killer had not foreseen this. He had taken some pains to hide Cary’s body, but had been too much in a hurry to clean up.

  He had made a big mistake.

  She caught a movement down below: Chuck Lehman walking in the direction of the crime scene tape stretching across the road. An unleashed Rottweiler accompanied him.

  Officer Noone walked down to meet him. Reporters zeroed in on him like ducks after bread. Voices drifted up, but she couldn’t hear them. She didn’t need to—Officer Noone was telling Lehman he couldn’t go past the tape.

  Lehman whistled to his dog and turned on his heel. He walked back in the direction of his house, but didn’t go far. Arms folded over his chest, he watched the ME’s van pull up behind the other vehicles. Laura couldn’t see his expression, but she could sense his excitement even from here. It was evident in the tense way he held his body, pitched slightly forward, as if he were absorbing everything about the scene with all his senses.

  She thought about the word Victor had used to describe him.

  Avid.

  After the body was removed, Laura,Victor, and Buddy headed down to the road. As they reached the crime scene tape, a female reporter thrust a microphone in Laura’s face.

  “Is it true the body you found belongs to Cary Statler, Jessica Parris’s boyfriend?”

  “We don’t have a positive ID yet,” Laura said.

  “But you’re pretty sure it’s Cary Statler?”

  “We won’t know that until we get a positive ID.”

  “If it was Cary Statler, can you comment on what they were doing in here?”

  Someone else shouted, “Did he die trying to save Jessica’s life?”

  “We don’t know what happened. We’re just beginning this investigation.”

  “But Jessica Parris was here?”

  “It’s too early to tell that.”

  She finally got past them and walked to her car.

  It was going on three o’clock when the news vans pulled out, following the ME’s van down the road. Laura scrubbed her hands and face with hand sanitizer and applied lip balm to her lips. Then she reached into the back seat and tore open the plastic covering on the case of water bottles she carried there, grabbed a new bottle, and drank. Water never tasted so sweet. Ducking into the back of the 4Runner, she stripped off her shirt and replaced it with the blouse she kept on a hanger for emergencies. She ran a brush through her hair, hoping she was respectable enough to meet people.

  Victor took the houses on the east side of the street, and Buddy took the houses on the west. Laura headed up to the two houses at the bend in the road.

  Again, she got no answer at the first house. But a man answered the door to the green house. Frail and thin, he was bent over a walker. It was clear he was not going to invite her in. The house smelled of boiled
cabbage and unclean cat boxes. A TV set blared in the background. She asked him if he had seen or heard anything unusual the last few nights.

  He looked at her blankly. “I’ve been in bed all week with a septic throat.”

  He hadn’t heard anything and didn’t know Cary Statler or the Parris family. Laura asked him her whole list of questions, but it was clear he didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know anything.

  “Does anyone else live here?”

  “Nope. Have a girl comes in three times a week.”

  Laura finally nailed it down: The “girl” worked on the day Jessica had been kidnapped. When Laura asked for her name and phone number, the man sighed and clacked his way into the darkness, returning with a slip of paper that had been torn off the edge of a TV Guide, one inch by one-half inch.

  “Is that it?” he demanded. “I’m not supposed to be out of bed.”

  “Have you noticed any unusual vehicles drive this road in the last few days?”

  “I keep my drapes drawn. Don’t want to fade the furniture.” The door closed in her face.

  From her vantage point in the 4Runner, Laura watched Victor get in his vehicle and drive off, and then Buddy. Neither one approached her, even though she was in plain sight. She assumed Victor was going back to the Copper Queen Hotel for a swim and to call his wife. They would meet later at the hotel restaurant and compare notes.

  Buddy—who knew what he was going to do?

  Laura took out her camera and stepped onto the road. She wanted to be in this canyon at the time of day that Cary died and Jessica was taken.

  She guessed that Cary had been killed somewhere between five and seven o’clock in the evening on the day Jessica disappeared. This would fit the timeline for Jessica’s abduction.

  The shadows stretched down from Mule Pass, coming from the opposite direction they had been this morning. The trees on the left side of the road were all in shadow now.

  Laura stepped into the wood and worked her way over to the cabin that had contained the drug paraphernalia.