I don’t want to die like this.
Even with the incredible noise of the flames, she heard the click of the lock to Summer’s shackles. Buddy cursing, praying, his breath hitching. Summer whimpering.
Laura, trying to remember where the doorway was because the air was now black except for the oily flames. Crawling, pushing her body to move.
Buddy running past her. She didn’t see him, but heard his boots on the glass, felt the wind of his passing, something soft passing across her face—the dress?
Fire feeding on oxygen. Blowing toward her—she could feel it on her feet, her back. Going toward the air? Or was that wrong? She couldn’t think. Maybe she was going in the wrong direction. Where was the doorway? I should have reached Mickey by now. Her throat clogging up, her chest seizing with the need to breathe—
Banging, loud voices.
“Police!”
People in the room. Noise, men, legs, guns, SWAT.
Eyes stinging. Harder to breathe. Gasping for air. She could be dead any moment. Grateful that she lay on her face away from the smoke, that they were here. They were here, they would get her out now.
Legs milling, but no one coming to her.
What about me?
Entwistle looking down at her, his expression sorrowful.
Someone else—SWAT?—crouching down. Then she was borne up and carried like a bird in the grip of a hawk, up and out into the air, rushing headlong through the hurtling dark, the clean bright stars overhead.
57
Five days, twelve interviews, three interrogations, and reams of paperwork later, Laura decided she’d had enough. She had to go home and not just for a few hours of sleep. They were at the point in the investigation where it was all mopping up and putting it in one place for the County attorney. Down the line, she would have to make another trip back to Florida to testify in a related case, the death of Andrew Descartes, but not now.
That was good. Laura could barely wrap her mind around Andy Descartes’s death. She had erred seriously in not asking assistance from SWAT. She could rationalize all she wanted about giving the Apalachicola PD the benefit of the doubt, and that was true to a certain extent. But the real reason she had gone in that day with Chief Redbone and his two officers was hubris; she did not want to give up control of her case.
All the pieces of her case were falling into place. Mickey Harmon had survived the shooting, and he was talking—about his friendship with Galaz and Ramsey that had spanned twenty years, his lucrative position as Galaz’s bodyguard, their blackmailing scheme. He catalogued a string of killings going back eighteen years, giving Victor the address of a warehouse in Phoenix where Galaz had plied his brand of sexual sadism while he worked his way up through DPS and planned a political career.
Dale Lundy—Musicman—confessed to killing four girls. He came off as beleaguered and confused. Laura thought his lawyer would argue for not guilty by mental defect, but after seeing what he’d done, she doubted any jury would go for it.
Victor was the lead on both the Harmon and Lundy interrogations. Laura sat in the room, watching Musicman, trying to figure the man out, but she couldn’t. He gave them nothing—nothing except his “poor me” act. Unfailingly polite, small, insignificant, hands folded prissily on the table, he reminded her of a decent, church-going lady mortified at being placed in such an untenable situation.
Laura asked him why he booby-trapped the tunnel.
He turned moist, frightened eyes on her. “Can I have a glass of water?”
After he had his water, she asked him again: “Why did you booby-trap the tunnel in your kitchen, but not the other house? What made you do that?”
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
She asked it another way. “You didn’t booby trap the front door, the back door, anything in the other house, so what was your reasoning? Why was that entrance so important to you when the others weren’t?”
He gave a small shrug.
“I just felt like it.”
I just felt like it. Laura had tried staring into his eyes, but there were no answers there. If she’d hoped for an explanation for Andrew Descartes’s death, something real she could hold on to that gave this tragedy some kind of design, she wouldn’t get it from Dale Lundy.
Buddy Holland was placed on administrative leave by the Bisbee Police Department. An Officer Involved Shooting investigation was the least of his troubles. Luring Dale Lundy to Bisbee would likely cost him his job. Fortunately, he had his pension from TPD. He was a young enough man he could find a good job somewhere in law enforcement.
“I hear Dynever Security is hiring,” he’d joked.
He told Laura he was moving back to Tucson so he could be close to his daughter.
Laura had seen a lot of him lately. Summer had to give her statement, and Buddy was there with her. They went back and forth to DPS, to the courthouse—Buddy, Summer, and Beth.
Laura found herself envying Buddy Holland his family. Watching the bond between them. She remembered what it was like to have that kind of love, the love of her parents.
It wasn’t over yet for them, though. Summer would need a lot of help to overcome what she had seen, what she had experienced, first at the hands of Musicman, and then Galaz. Unharmed physically, but emotionally devastated. Left alone in that room with the photos of the tortured women—knowing she would be next. Laura thought with time Summer would heal. She would need counseling and her family every step of the way, but she could heal.
Laura went to Jay Ramsey’s funeral. It was sparsely attended. She recognized the younger brother, whom she had met only once close to twenty years ago. She noticed no one was with him—not a wife, not a child. He looked lost. Laura felt an odd kinship with him. He had no family left. She could tell from the shock on his face that he had never expected to be alone in this way.
He gave her a Post-it note that Jay had apparently intended for her. It had been pasted to his computer, Laura’s name scribbled at the top. Below that it said: “Barbara Stanley” followed by a phone number. And the words: “Calliope’s Music, 9 yr. old TB mare”.
Laura thanked him and took the note, putting it in a special compartment in her wallet. She didn’t know what to do with the information right now, so she would leave it there until she did.
After attending the funeral that morning, the fifth day after the Chiricahua Paint Company fire, Laura gathered up some of the paperwork that had yet to be done and told Victor she was going home.
“See you tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so.”
She headed home to the Bosque Escondido, after stopping at a little store squeezed into the middle of a strip mall on the south side.
58
“Where should I put the dishes?” asked Tom, carrying the box up onto the front porch.
Laura knew which dishes he meant. Cheap china, a brown and yellow design of bees and flowers. Tom had gotten them from a grocery store give-away—buy so many groceries and pay a dollar for each dish. They went well with his two jelly glasses. “Couldn’t we store those?”
“Sure. I’ll put it with my sheets, my rug, my couch—“
“This is my nidito. You’re just—“
“What? What am I?”
He stood there, looking at her, still holding the box. The man she had invited to live with her.
She thought of her nice FiestaWare. Thought of them nested one into the other, their fine sold colors, dark blue, green, tangerine, dark red. Okay, so there would be bees and flowers, too. She sighed. “Okay. Put them in the cupboard near the fridge.”
Still holding the box, he bent awkwardly and kissed her on the forehead. “You’re doing pretty well.”
“You think so?”
“You’ve lived alone for a long time.”
“So have you.”
“But I’m not territorial like you are.”
It was true. As he let the screen door close behind him, Laura realized this would not be easy. When she�
��d agreed to try it, in the middle of the night three days ago, it had seemed absolutely right. Love was love. It was supposed to conquer all.
But she’d seen him leave towels on the floor of his bathroom.
The morning after Tom Lightfoot moved in, Laura awakened to rain tapping on the roof just before dawn. It seemed to her that the temperature had dropped ten degrees. She crept out of bed, careful not to wake him. Looking down at him and thinking that this was how it would be from now on. She found herself thinking of Buddy and Beth. Were they healing the rift between them? Or would Buddy get a place nearby and hover around his daughter like a guardian angel?
She brewed some coffee and went outside, sitting down on the old steel glider, swinging back and forth. She’d found the Art Deco glider at a yard sale, complete with the original striped canvas cushion. Here on the porch of a house built in the twenties, the scent of the desert around her, she could pretend this was the early part of the twentieth century.
There were serial killers then—though not as many—and plenty of pedophiles, but people didn’t know about it. How nice for them.
The rain was soft and steady—what the Navajos called a female rain. Water dripped off the eaves and splashed on the brick pavement in the few places the porch roof leaked. The smell of wet creosote wafting in, the trunks of the big old mesquites gleaming black as seal skin. The coolness good on her face, a balm to her singed eyebrows and the burn on her cheek.
Now was as good a time as any. She went inside, got her mother’s old electric typewriter and set it on the wood, drop-leaf table on the other end of the porch. She needed an extension cord to plug it in.
It took her a moment or two to figure out how to install the ribbon she’d bought from Hart Brothers Business Machines. The guy had one ribbon left, taking up dust in a back aisle, saying it was fortunate for her this was a common typewriter in its day.
As she lifted the paper bale and rolled the first sheet of paper through, she smiled, thinking how Tom had liked the idea.
Zen and the art of unfinished business. She liked it that her crazy idea had Tom’s approval. But that was predictable; he admired simplicity in all its ways.
She stared at the clean sheet of paper, then typed “Chapter Seven”. The action was strange, percussive. Both stiff and too fast for fingers used to a computer.
She was still staring at the words “Chapter Seven” forty minutes later when Tom came out and joined her. He’d brought her more coffee. He had put the right amount of half and half in it—a quick learner. She told him that.
“I read somewhere there’s a big shot designer in Hollywood who made up a swatch to show his maid what color his coffee should be. You’re not that bad.”
Glad she hadn’t said she appreciated him using her FiestaWare instead of his supermarket china.
He bent to kiss her. Soon the coffee and Chapter Seven were forgotten.
After they made love and were lying tangled together, listening to their heartbeats slowing back to normal, Laura felt a sudden strange bursting in her heart, as profound a moment as she had ever had. Tears unshed for eleven years suddenly came to the surface.
She lay in bed with Tom stroking her hair, her tears soaking the sheets and filling up her nose and throat. Enveloped in his comforting presence.
Feeling that, finally, she belonged.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mickey Harmon couldn’t sleep. He kept dreaming that Julie Marr was alive. He had to see her again to make sure. He didn’t know what he’d do if she really was alive—take her to a hospital? Maybe she’d be so grateful, she wouldn’t rat him out.
He didn’t know why he stopped by Mike Galaz’s house. Maybe it was because he’d always gone to Mike for advice. In recent months, he and Jay had gotten tired of Mike Galaz always calling the shots, always being crowned Dark Moondancer. So they’d shut him out. But this was different.
He went looking for Mike Galaz by instinct.
Taking some chick’s virginity would have been worth big points, but that didn’t matter now. Mickey Harmon was scared. He couldn’t face this alone, and he was afraid of how Jay, who had always been a mamma’s boy, might react. And so Mickey woke Mike up, and they drove out to the place where he and Jay had dumped Julie Marr.
Mickey told Galaz the story on the way, how they had meant to seduce her—his euphemism for date rape—but she’d freaked, fought them, and in slamming around the car, she’d sliced her head open. So much blood. Mickey and Jay panicked, dragging her out of the car to a mesquite tree, covering her with dirt and trash.
But now he wasn’t so sure she was dead.
It turned out that Mickey was right. Julie Marr was alive. They found her wandering dazedly in the desert, blood all over her face.
What are we going to do? asked Mickey, getting that panicky feeling.
Galaz didn’t look at him; he just walked out to meet Julie Marr. When she saw him, her face lit up with relief. Mickey could swear he saw that. She thought Mike was here to rescue her.
He wasn’t prepared for what Galaz did next.
Mickey watched in horror as Galaz raped and strangled Julie Marr. When she wouldn’t die, he stabbed her repeatedly with a knife he produced from his windbreaker.
He should have said something, but his voice was weightless, silent.
This time, they buried Julie Marr under the mesquite tree, digging a shallow grave in the caliche and rocky ground, piling up rocks to keep the animals away.
Mickey was scared.
Mike always knew what to do, though, and he already had a plan. Jay Ramsey, Mike told him, should never know that they’d found Julie Marr alive. Jay came from money and Mike Galaz saw an opportunity for blackmail, a way to control Jay Ramsey and his money.
Don’t even think about going to the police, Galaz told him. You’re as guilty as I am. We’re bound together forever the three of us. You, me, and Jay.
It was the first of many times Mickey would keep his mouth shut.
The pact Mike Galaz and Mickey Harmon made that night lasted until the summer of this year, ending with Mike Galaz’s death in a warehouse fire.
In the aftermath of the fire, Mickey Harmon, cuffed and shackled, led the Tucson Police Department to Julie Marr’s remains. Retired detective Barry Fruchtendler was there to watch as the girl’s bones were unearthed from their shallow grave.
After eighteen years, Julie Marr was finally going home.
_________________
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
No one can write a book alone. Many people have given generously of their time and expertise to help make this book possible, including—
Florida Locations: The good folks at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Tallahassee, Florida: Jennie Khoen, former FDLE Public Information Officer; Kristen Perezluha, FDLE Public Information Officer; Mike Phillips, FDLE Special Agent Supervisor; and Apalachicola historian, Laura Roberts Moody.
Arizona Locations: Leslie Boyer, M.D., Medical Director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center; Michael Crawford of Chandler, Tullar, Udall & Redhair; Lieutenant David Denlinger, Arizona Department of Public Safety; DPS crime lab criminalists Ron Bridgemon (retired), Sue Harvey, John Maciulla, Curtis Reinbold, Seth Ruskin, and Keith Schubert; Ron Thompson, Tucson Police Department; and the folks at the La Posta Quemada Ranch (on which the Bosque Escondido is based), Karen Bachman and Pam Marlow.
Also thanks to Alice Volpe, Tracy Bernstein, Claire Zion, Leslie Gelbman, and Kara Welsh.
To my friends, family, and the people who just plain helped me out, not exclusive to but including: Sinclair Browning, J.R. Dailey, Pete Hautman, J.A. Jance, Mary Logue, Carol Davis Luce, Cliff McCreedy, Barbara Schiller and Allegra Taff; writers group members Sheila Cottrell, Elizabeth Gunn, J.M. Hayes, and E.J. McGill. And to my aunt, Evelyn Ridgway, my mother, Mary Falk, and my husband, Glenn McCreedy, the only person to read my first draft—at his peril.
Special thanks to my three go-to guys: Arizona Department of Publi
c Safety detective Terry Johnson, Tucson Police Department detective Phil Uhall, and Cops ‘n Writers consultant John Cheek (TPD retired). Without you, there would be no book.
Any and all mistakes are mine. No animals were harmed during the writing of this book. I’m available for birthday parties.
All of the above is true, except for the birthday party part.
_________________
Turn the page for a preview of
SECRETS TO DIE FOR
by L.J. Sellers
Secrets to Die For
(Detective Jackson Mystery #1)
Chapter 1
Wednesday, February 13
Raina shut off the motor and glanced up at the puke-green doublewide with a chunk of plywood over the front window. The near dusk couldn’t hide the broken dreams of the trailer’s occupants, Bruce and Cindy Gorman. Raina wasn’t here to see them. She was here for Josh, their eight-year-old son.
As a children’s support advocate, Raina had been assigned to monitor Josh six months ago, when the state of Oregon had taken temporary custody and placed the boy in foster care. Her primary responsibility was to stay in touch with Josh and to ensure the system did not fail him. During that time, the Gormans had danced all the right steps—anger management for him, parenting classes for her, and a rehab program for both. So now Josh was back in their care, and this was Raina’s last official contact…for now.
Her heart was flip-flopping, just like it did on her last day of high school. She was happy for Josh, but she despised Bruce and would be glad to never see him again, even though she knew it was petty to feel that way. Raina wished she were more mature, more objective, like the other CSA volunteers. At twenty, she and Jamie were the youngest in the group. Raina had become quite fond of Josh and would miss him terribly. She loved their long walk-and-talks along the river path, with Josh pointing out every bug he saw. It had been like having a little brother. Her counselor had been right when she’d advised Raina to do some volunteer work. Giving was the best way of receiving. Raina stepped out of the Volvo and pulled in a quick breath of frigid February air. The smell of dog shit assaulted her senses. So much for her lofty ideals. She hurried to the door, hoping the dog, a Boxer named Brat, was either locked in the bathroom or deep in the woods behind the trailer. Raina shivered in the cold foul silence. The house was at least a half mile from the nearest neighbor.
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