Laura Cardinal - 01 - Darkness on the Edge of Town lc-1
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Suddenly he remembered the white van at the Motel 6, the one he’d flipped the bird at. He thought they were similar: a white Ford utility van with dark windows.
The van continued past, and he pulled onto the street behind it. Suddenly, it U-turned four lanes and headed in the other direction. Cretin.
Down the road from the El Rancho was the next business, the Desert Rose Motel. The Desert Rose was a horseshoe of peeling, white brick buildings around asphalt, a drained pool in the center. This was the kind of place that rented by the week. Place looked deserted, but he knew people lived here—if you could call this living. Could she have come here for help?
He swerved in off the road. He scanned the highway, the few buildings, tried to see between them at the desert. Finally he turned in and drove around the horseshoe. He didn’t see anyone—it was too hot to be outside. Still, he looked, paying particular attention to the four cars parked nose-in to the cabins. Looking for movement, looking for feet underneath.
He came back around to the road. He didn’t know what to do. She could be anywhere.
At the next street, he turned right. He cruised along slowly, watching the desert, but he was thinking about the van. There was something about it that bothered him.
It was the stripped-down version. Blackwall tires. Nothing fancy. But clean. Government? He wished he’d gotten a gander at the plates.
Were they that close? He knew the FBI was involved—had seen it on CNN—but they’d been pretty close-mouthed. Not even a press conference. If they knew what he looked like, they weren’t letting the public in on it.
Why was that?
And then it occurred to him.
His ISP.
They’d used his ISP to track him to the Motel 6.
Nobody home in the Fleetwood Pace Arrow parked at the El Rancho Trailer Court. The door was ajar, the screen door dented as if someone had bulled through it. No car, but Laura noticed a tow rack on the back.
The plates had been switched, but VIN numbers don’t lie. The motor home belonged to Lundy.
After making sure the motor home was clear, Laura and Victor took a quick look inside as they waited for the tow truck.
Laura spotted some drops of blood on the floor near the bedroom, as well as a few smears where it had been hastily wiped up with a towel. “Don’t come back here,” she said to Victor. “We’ve got some blood evidence.”
She retrieved a can of fluorescent paint from the car and spray-painted a circle around each drop of blood.
Victor said, “Not a whole lot of it.”
“Unless he got a lot up with the towel.”
“Look at this,” Victor said, showing her the padlock and the way the door was configured. “Doesn’t look anything like the floor plan we have back at the squad. The bedroom and bath have been modified. He remodeled the bedroom door into a swing-out door that locks from the outside.”
He also noted the boarded windows. “His own personal dungeon.”
Lace curtains squeezed between the window and the plywood. They looked like the ones at his mother’s house.
Laura spotted a broken table leg on the floor. She squatted on her heels and studied it. “Blood on the end of this,” she said, pointing it out to Victor.
“You think he stabbed her with it?”
“Or the other way around.”
She took photographs of the table leg while Victor went back into the living room.
“What do we have here?” he said a few minutes later. She glanced back; he was holding two round, pleated stretches of vinyl. “Wheel covers. For the spare wheel on the back.”
One of them depicted a quail under the legend THE ANDERSONS. The other, in cursive writing said: “Happy Trails! Jeff and Pat Lieber.”
He laughed. “Pretty cute. We’re looking for a motor home with THE ANDERSONS on the back, and he morphs into Jeff Lieber and his lovely wife Pat.”
“Too cute,” Laura said. “He’s a little too elaborate for his own good.”
Victor shrugged. “Seems to have worked so far.”
Laura heard gravel popping outside and ducked her head out the door. It was Buddy Holland in his plain-wrapped.
She understood why he was here, but couldn’t let him in. He wouldn’t do himself any good, and he sure wouldn’t help Summer.
“Buddy,” she said. “Two people in here is enough.”
“What did you find?” Fear and hope warring on his face.
“She’s not here.”
His relief gave way to by worry. He rubbed his hand over his eyes and then squinted into the sun. “Was she here? Did you find anything?”
“Nothing definitive,” Laura lied. “We’ll have to get prints—you know the drill.”
“Where are we going to tow it?” Victor asked Laura from inside the RV.
Laura excused herself and went back inside.
Buddy peering in at her.
“We’ve got a problem. We need to use Luminol—” Victor said. He saw her look and lowered his voice. “The DPS lab’s too small.”
In order to use Luminol to look for more blood, the motor home would have to be in complete darkness. The DPS lab would not be able to enclose a super-sized vehicle like this.
“The sheriff’s has a big room,” Victor said.
“Door’s too small. We’ll have to wait until tonight, I guess, unless we can find an airport hanger nobody’s using.”
She punched in the number for Charlie Specter. “We need to put an APB out for a 1994 white GEO Prizm with either a white male or a white male and a 12-year-old girl. Get a picture of the make and model and Lundy’s picture and get them to the media.”
She closed the phone. She would always wonder if she’d made the wrong call not going to the media. One consolation, though, was that up until an hour ago, they didn’t even know about the white GEO.
“I wonder if he bought that car here,” she said.
“The GEO? It’s got Colorado plates.”
Laura just looked at him.
“Oh.”
“Whether or not he changed the plates, we need to know the history of this car. He might have had it all along, or he might have bought it from around here.”
“If he bought it from a private party, it would be hard to find.”
“Buddy.” Laura hopped down from the motor home. “Can you get me the Sunday Star from last week? And the Citizen.” She described the car they were looking for. “Also the Sierra Vista and Bisbee papers, also last week. Oh. And a Dandy Dime.”
He gave her a dirty look, but got back into his car and took off.
It kept him away from the motor home, and the blood. For now anyway.
51
Breathing hard now, Summer ran into the subdivision. The houses looked new, a cheaper version of her mom’s townhouse in the foothills. The problem was they didn’t look moved-in yet. She heard power saws and hammering, though. Up the street, she saw construction workers up on a roof.
“Hey!” she called out, slowing to a walk. Almost safe.
One guy, up high stapling something to the wood frame of a house, looked in her direction and shouted something. She wasn’t close enough to hear, but at least he knew she was there.
She’d escaped. Hard to believe that she’d done it, but she had. Her heart started to slow. Her legs felt like lead now that she didn’t need them for running.
Tires squealed. She looked back and saw Dale’s car coming around the corner.
Desperately, she looked at the man on the roof, thinking she could climb the ladder up to him—but the house was too far away. She did the only thing that made sense—she darted between houses onto the next street.
The car kept going to the next corner. She knew he’d try to head her off.
This street was empty—she was all alone. The houses were unfinished, sitting on a pavement of dried mud. Feeling scared again, she took a deep breath and almost choked on the smell of sawdust.
He’d be driving up this street any min
ute. She had to figure out what to do. Hide? There were plenty of houses around here to hide in, but she discarded the idea—she’d be trapped. No, the best thing was to let him start up this street, then run back through to the street she was just on.
Heart thudding in her chest, she squinted up the block, first one direction, then another.
Suddenly, she heard a car coming behind her. It sounded different from Dale’s. It was a white van. It must be a construction van because the back part didn’t have windows. She stepped out onto the new asphalt of the street and waved her arms.
The van slowed. He was going to stop for her!
Suddenly, Dale’s car came around the corner at the other end of the street and accelerated. He lurched to a stop, got out, and ran toward her.
She had to turn her back on him to run to the van, but she had a good head start. Dale knew it was over, didn’t he? Still, as she ran she imagined she could feel his breath on her neck, the smell of hot oil from the stupid car, his feet pounding on the pavement. Could picture him grabbing her at the last minute—
But it didn’t happen.
A hand propped the passenger door open.
She started to say “thanks,” but the words froze in her throat. Something leaped out at her from the darkness.
Talons grabbed her, hard, pulled her around, a crushing grip around her throat as the thick arm levered her almost off the ground, elbow catching her chin and neck in a vise. She was dragged off her feet, her hip bumping hard against the side of the van. One of her sandals fell to the ground, and with cold clarity, she realized that she would never need it again. Then she was pulled in, backwards, across the seat. Struggling as the driver put the van in gear.
“No!” Dale screamed.
Just before the door slammed shut, she saw Dale Lundy’s eyes, a mirror of her own bottomless terror.
52
Laura left the motor home to Victor and drove the few blocks to DPS. Hard to believe that Lundy had been under their noses all this time. Hidden in plain sight.
Although they had cops crawling all over the Benson Highway area, FBI agents at the airport, Highway Patrol and sheriffs in four counties looking for a white GEO with a Colorado license plate, Lundy had slipped through the net.
He could be anywhere.
She went to see Charlie Specter.
He looked up from his computer. “I was just going to call you. I think Lundy’s got a soulmate.”
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
He handed her a log of incoming e-mails to Lundy’s account that his server had faxed over:
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
mortgagemike@mortgagemike.com
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
newsletter@studiomusician.com
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
darkmoondancer@livewire.net
Charlie leaned back in his chair, watching her face. “How about that? In my professional opinion, this guy is obsessive.”
“Is there a way to find him?” Laura asked.
Charlie sighed. “Livewire’s a big server with a one eight-hundred number. Which is fine—I was able to trace it to Coffee Anon, place on the west side—but these are old.”
“How old?”
“They’re from four days ago.”
“ Nothing since?”
“Unfortunately, no. Maybe they finally got together.”
“Either they connected or Dark Moondancer gave up. I want somebody to go out and talk to the people at the coffee place. Call TPD and see if they can send Barry White.”
She rapped her fingers on the desk. Where to go from here? If Lundy was panicked, he might kill Summer any time and ditch her somewhere.
She stared at the screen. Dark Moondancer. The name struck her as pretentious—extravagant. Like something from a movie. A fantasy.
She had seen or heard those words somewhere before. Recently. There had been something…
The word “fantasy” struck a chord. Lords. Lords and ladies. Role-playing.
Role-playing. She remembered now.
53
Because Laura had come directly to DPS from the airport, her mother’s file and book chapters were still in her suitcase. She got them out and spread them on her desk. There it was—a notation on a scrap of notepaper: “Dk Moondancer?”
She called Barry Fruchtendler and got his machine. She pictured him out there in Montana, a beautiful sunny day, the retired cop out on a stream somewhere, casting flies.
“What’s up?” asked Charlie at her elbow. “You heard of this guy before?”
“I know what Dark Moondancer is—was.”
Charlie waited.
“A role-playing game, like Dungeons and Dragons. Knights, fairies, stuff like that. I don’t know much about it. A few kids at our school played it, but it was really more of a high school and college kid’s game.“
Mostly males. She couldn’t remember if the game was confined to Tucson or if it was popular throughout the country.
“A game?” Specter said. “You sure?”
Laura was thinking out loud. “Mark might know.” Mark Hewitt, her landlord, had gone to school with her. She grabbed the phone book and looked him up. He was home, and he did remember the game.
“The object was to become Dark Moondancer,” he said. “There were groups all over town. I think there was a point system, but it was pretty loose. Game had a bunch of different levels that you had to negotiate to get to the top, the top being the wizard, the powerful one. Only the people who made the top circle had a chance to become Moondancer. They were voted in by their peers.”
“Sounds like Survivor.”
“Long before its time. I think … I think there was a certain time span—a month? Maybe it went by moon phases. Then they’d start over.”
“How did someone get into the top circle?”
“I heard they did outrageous things.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever was outrageous when you were a kid—there were tests. Stealing something, bashing mailboxes, waiting outside a store and getting an adult to buy beer. Running naked down Speedway. Getting a popular girl to give it up.”
From buying beer to getting someone to have sex so you could get a few extra points in a game—a lot of leeway. “Did you know anyone who played?”
He rattled off a few names. Most of them were a year or two ahead and already in high school. She wrote them down.
“I’m leaving some of these guys out, I know it. I’ll call you back if I remember.” He paused. “While I’ve got you on the phone, we’re having a wedding in the butterfly garden next weekend. A big one.”
One of the conditions of living on the ranch rent-free was providing security for events whenever she could.
“I’ll look at my schedule and let you know,” she said.
Charlie looked at the list. “These the Dark Moondancer boys? You know any of them?”
“No.”
“I guess it’s something.”
Not much, though. Who knew how long that game went on? Years probably.
Laura spent an hour tracking down the names Mark had given her. Not much luck—she mostly got answering machines.
; She wondered if she was wasting her time. Would Dark Moondancer even know where Lundy was? Probably not. All those messages he’d sent—it was clear to her that in their strange cyber-relationship, Dark Moondancer was the beta dog to Musicman’s alpha. But it was possible that Charlie was right, and the messages had stopped because they had made physical contact.
Victor called in to tell her they had found an auto body shop which could be closed up and made dark so they could use Luminol.
“How’s Buddy doing?”
“Fine. There wasn’t that much blood, so he knows he didn’t kill her in there.” He added, “You won’t believe what that girl did.”
“Summer?”
“She covered that bedroom with fingerprints—light fixtures, walls, chrome, you name it. We just filled up seven cards and all of them except one were the same. Plastered all over the place.”
“How do you know they were hers?”
“Buddy picked up some prints from his wife’s house—good enough to eyeball. Plus, the few places she didn’t get to were wiped clean. Probably from the last one.”
Laura wondered if “the last one” was Alison.
“Not only that, she pulled out her hair, by the roots. Left some hair in the sink, but some she hid. Like stringing one over the curtain rod, putting one under the lamp. Blond, so they were easy to see. And a barrette Buddy remembers because he bought it for her. You should see Buddy. He’s glowing more than the Luminol. Twelve years old and she does that. She’s a cop’s daughter, all right.”
“See that the lab gets started on the blood right away. We don’t want Buddy wondering any longer than he has to—with DNA it’s going to be long enough as it is.”
“You coming down?”
Laura saw Lieutenant Galaz in her peripheral vision, holding a file folder, waiting for her to finish.
“Soon. Wait—you grew up in Tucson. Did you ever hear of a role-playing game called Dark Moondancer?”
“Dark Moondancer? That’s a silly name.”
Laura told him about the game and the Dark Moondancer who sent the e-mails to Lundy.