A small black wallet held her driver’s license. He used his penlight to read the name: Raina Hughes. Her birthday put her at age twenty. Damn. She wasn’t even old enough to buy alcohol, and she had never had a chance to vote. An image of her parents standing in the doorway of their home as he tried to tell them what had happened to their daughter played in his mind. He could see the anguish on their faces as they realized their world had crumpled. For a moment, the body under the blanket was Katie, and Jackson was paralyzed with his own anguish. Oh, he dreaded telling her parents.
“Hey Jackson, want to step back and let me do my job?” Only Rich Gunderson, the medical examiner, talked to him like that. Purse and wallet clutched tightly in gloved hand, Jackson backed out of the car.
“Might as well, since you finally got here.” He gave Gunderson a grim smile. The man was dressed in his usual black-on-black Johnny Cash look. Cash would not have approved of Gunderson’s gray ponytail though.
“What did you mess with this time?”
“Peeled the blanket back. Touched her neck and hands.”
Gunderson grunted, then stuck his head into the Volvo. Jackson started for his cruiser, as a place to sit and look through the purse, but Parker called him over. “This dent is new, and this orange paint is an aftermarket color. I’ll call all the body shops tomorrow and try to track it down.”
“Thanks. Anything else notable on the exterior of the car?”
“The front left tire is a spare and doesn’t match the others.”
“Time to look in the trunk.”
The original tire had been tossed carelessly on top of an assorted collection of blankets, jackets, sweaters, and other warm clothing. None of the items looked new nor as if they belonged to the same person; it was more like a collection on its way to a charity organization. Jackson stared at the strange configuration of stuff. Then he pressed hard against the tire, which gave way under his thumb. Of course, it was flat, that’s why it was in the trunk. He took pictures, then made notes. Blankets, jackets for charity? Homeless shelter? Why the tire on top? When did it go flat? It seemed odd that someone who was thoughtful enough to collect blankets for needy people would also mindlessly throw a dirty flat tire on the pile. Who was this young woman? Jackson took her purse to his car, climbed in, and turned on the engine for heat.
Raina Hughes carried little besides a wallet. A hairbrush, lip balm, a packet of tissues, and a small notepad with a short list of things to do: schedule haircut, study for psych exam, drop off/Shelter Care. Jackson looked for names and phone numbers but didn’t see any. Where was her cell phone? Where were her pants?
A rap on the window startled him, and he looked out to see Detective Lara Evans. On most occasions she was an attractive woman, but tonight was not one of them. She was scowling, had no makeup on, and her short, light-brown hair was tucked under a wool cap. Jackson joined her in the cold parking lot. “Thanks for coming out, Evans. You okay?”
“I’m fine, but I think I’m catching a virus. What have we got?”
“Twenty-year-old female with a major head injury and possible sexual assault. She’s on the floor in the back seat, covered in a blanket, but naked from the waist down.” Jackson tucked Raina’s purse into a brown paper evidence bag. Where was Schak? And the assistant DA who usually came out on homicides? Had they turned off their phones because it was Valentine’s Day?
“Let’s go see if Gunderson has anything to tell us.”
The medical examiner was laying a tarp on the asphalt beside the Volvo. Parker had climbed into the backseat and positioned herself for the lift. There was no easy way to do it. Her end of the body transfer would be challenging.
“Can I assist?” Jackson asked, hurrying over.
Gunderson grunted. “Maybe support the middle as she comes out.” He handed Parker a large flat brown bag. “Fold it gently, please.”
“Always.” Parker didn’t look up or smile as she carefully removed the plaid blanket and placed it in the bag.
As Gunderson lifted and pulled under the victim’s shoulders, Jackson slid his arms under her buttocks, careful not to touch her with his hands. He wore gloves, but still, he didn’t want to dislodge any potential evidence. Parker quickly let go, unable to squat and crawl from the car while holding the weight of the body. Jackson held the bulk of her weight as they laid her down.
The sight of her small pale figure against the black tarp gave Jackson another bad moment. Ever since he had seen one of his daughter’s friends lying dead in a dumpster, he kept visualizing and internalizing Katie’s death. Now all he could think was, Oh God, it could have been Katie.
“Jackson?” Evans nudged him. “Where would you like me to start?”
After a moment, he said, “Find the car’s registration, insurance information, anything of interest. Search the glove box, under the seat, everywhere. I want her cell phone.”
As Gunderson plunged a sharp thermal probe into the girl’s hip flesh in search of a core temperature, Jackson looked away. He spotted a pair of faded jeans on the floor of the Volvo’s back seat. The pants had been under the body. A quick check revealed nothing in the pockets, except a gas receipt. Jackson jotted down the day and time, February 13, 4:45 p.m., and made note of the station, which was just down the road on the corner of Greenhill and Highway 126. The jeans had no stains, no semen that he could see. Jackson put each piece of evidence into its own bag, filled in the preprinted labels, and handed both to Parker. All the evidence, except DNA, now went to the new forensics building for processing. He remembered the blood on the girl’s inner thighs and turned to Gunderson. “Was she raped?”
“Violently.” Gunderson shuddered and clenched his jaw. “But I don’t see any semen. I think he used an object. Look for it in the car.”
Jackson shut down the horrific images of what had happened to this young woman and tried to be clinical. Just looking for evidence, he told himself again and again, like a mantra. As he searched under the Volvo’s seats, he thought he heard a faint whisper of Raina’s cries.
Evan’s voice broke through from her search of the front seat. “The car is registered to Raina Hughes and Martha Krell.”
So the car belonged to the victim, Jackson reasoned. Did her attacker follow her here? Or did he come with her? A date perhaps? If so, a very bad date, indeed. In that case, the killer walked away from the scene. Or was his first instinct correct, that she had been killed elsewhere and brought here.
He poked his head out of the car. “Parker, get prints off the steering wheel, please.”
“I tried. It’s been wiped down,” she called back from her photographic examination of the trunk. “I’ll do the rest of the inside of the car tomorrow in the big evidence bay.”
As Jackson processed that information, he found a bloody vibrator under the driver’s seat, wedged between a multiple-CD case and a tire jack. Making minimal contact, he bagged and tagged the hard pink shaft. He wondered if there was any chance of locating the retailer that had sold it. In addition to the several ‘adult’ stores in town, there had to be hundreds of Internet sites where anyone could buy sex toys. Hell, people could buy vibrators at parties with their friends, like they were handy kitchen appliances.
“I found a bloody vibrator,” he said as he squatted down next to Gunderson.
“Impotent freak,” Gunderson muttered. “She was dead or near dead when he used it on her.”
“When was that?”
“Her body temp is only thirty-eight, so she’s been dead, out here in the cold, for at least twenty-four hours. But her skin hasn’t started to discolor yet, so it hasn’t been much longer than that. I’d say your window is roughly between 5 and 8 p.m. last night. The pathologist might be able to narrow it down. But don’t count on it.”
So Raina had been out here all night and all day, and no one had seen her. In February, even the most devoted birdwatchers took a break. High headlights briefly illuminated the parking area. Rob Schakowski’s top-heavy body climbed out
of his truck. Schak, as everyone called him, could be obnoxious at times, but he was dedicated and thorough. He would complain about how tedious an assignment was, but he never took shortcuts.
“Shit, it’s cold out here,” Schak grumbled as he pulled on latex gloves. “Why do you always get the outside, winter victims? Lammers must still be pissed at you.”
“You think so?” Jackson meant to be flippant but his voice fell flat. He could participate in crime scene humor when the victim was an adult male, but not with a woman or child. Was that sexist? Or just human? “In summary, what we have here is a twenty-year-old female, sexually brutalized and bludgeoned to death. I need you to interview the people across the road to see if they saw or heard anything.”
“Do you think it might be the serial rapist Quince is tracking?”
“Could be. But we have new elements, one being that this victim died from the beating. If it is the same perp, his anger is escalating and his MO is changing.”
Evans backed out of the Volvo and said, “Nothing interesting in the car. A few photos in the glove box, most of the same young woman. The name Jamie is written on the back of one.”
“No cell phone?”
“Sorry.”
Damn. A person’s entire social life was often in their cell phone. Especially young people, who liked to text-message, take photos, and listen to music on their phones. Jackson hadn’t moved to that tech level yet. Occasionally he responded to his daughter’s text messages with a cryptic no or call me, but that was it. Talking was way easier than typing.
“Track down next of kin for me, please. Start with Martha Krell, the car’s co-owner.” Jackson reached out to take the pictures in Evan’s hand. “Raina’s wallet is in a bag in my car. There may be contact information there.”
Jackson felt his stomach tighten—as if he had swallowed something he couldn’t digest. This scene was off kilter; the crime had layers that would need to be peeled back one at a time. With these kinds of cases, the whole truth didn’t always emerge. Sometimes he had to settle for simply finding the perpetrator. He hated settling. Once he had examined a crime scene, he wanted to know every detail of what had transpired.
Jackson took more photos of the Volvo, even though Parker had already done the job thoroughly. He liked to have his own set to work with so he didn’t have to drive over to the evidence lockup and check the prints out. Eugene’s Public Safety Department was finally getting all the tools it needed to do its job in-house, but the buildings were scattered and chasing evidence still wasted a lot of time. Even though there was nothing else to be gained at this scene, Jackson stalled, waiting for Schak to report back from his neighborhood canvass.
As Gunderson and Parker loaded the body into the ME’s van, Jackson heard a vehicle speeding along Greenhill Road. He looked toward the sound out of habit. Suddenly, in rapid fire, two shots exploded in the parking lot.
_________________
SECRETS TO DIE FOR
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Be sure to read Book 2 and Book 3
in the Laura Cardinal Series
by J. Carson Black
Dark Side of the Moon
The Devil’s Hour
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Dark Side of the Moon
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DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
J. Carson Black
Because of the mineral show, which he had not expected, Bobby Burdette had to stay in a little hole-in-the-wall called the Mercury Motel. The Mercury Motel had a pool full of screaming kids and a plate glass office that arrowed out toward the street in a triangle—the kind of space-age dump the Jetsons would have stayed in. The motel sign, a thermometer, lit up at night: red neon mercury climbing up to the boiling point over and over again.
At least that wasn’t a lie; even in September, it was ninety degrees after the sun went down.
The Mercury Motel was situated between a defunct filling station and a date palm orchard. The dates fell over the fence into the parking lot and onto the wax finish of his classic Dodge Challenger—The Mean Green—and got picked up by people’s shoes. At any given moment, there were a half dozen of them littering the walkway in front of the motel rooms like squashed cockroaches.
Bobby told himself he didn’t have to put up with the poor accommodations and the sickening smell of dates much longer. If things worked out the way he expected, he’d never have to stay in a shithole like this again.
There was a good side to Pahrump, though, one he hadn’t considered when he blew into town earlier today. For one thing, the plate glass office had nickel slots.
And the town had a whorehouse.
And it was legal. It was called The Bambi Ranch.
Bobby planned to bag one of those bambies.
He’d seen it on a cable show once, how the girls would parade into the parlor and line up—blondes, brunettes, redheads, wearing different outfits—and you could pick the one you wanted just like at Red Lobster. There was something about it that just got to him, somewhere deep. Like that feeling you get in your gut when you ride a rollercoaster.
The sun was going down below the far mountains when he drove The Mean Green out of the Mercury Motel parking lot, the sun flashbulbing him in the eyeballs. For such a little town, the traffic in Pahrump was hellish— mostly crawling RVs with satellite dishes on their roofs, the street lined with booths and a herd of people on the sidewalks, sometimes walking right out in front of him.
For a minute he wondered if The Mean Green was the right car to be seen in. The lime green paint and chrome wheels weren’t exactly camouflage. But everyone was so busy looking at cases full of minerals or watching their own feet, they probably wouldn’t notice a circus driving through.
Besides, he liked how ballsy it was—hiding in plain sight.
The Bambi Ranch was out of town; he knew that was a requirement of all legal brothels in Nevada. He was surprised at the size of the layout—there were five narrow buildings, like temporary offices they had at schools, only this was no school. All of them were painted lavender. As he drove over the cattle guard into the parking area, he noticed an airstrip to his right, the windsock sticking straight out like a condom. There was also a satellite dish on a balding Bermuda lawn surrounded by a white picket fence.
The place was lit up like a Christmas tree. Tiny white bulbs strung up in the Aleppo pines, colored lights all over the front office, and not the kind you got at Kmart either—these were professional quality, the kind you’d find on the front of the casinos in Vegas. All that light power on these little sorry buildings. Like the crown jewels on a ten-dollar hooker.
He’d wanted to savor the event, but it didn’t turn out that way. The women outnumbered the men, and they sure didn’t line up like he’d expected. More like they converged on him like sharks on chum.
“You want me, don’t ya sweetness?” a handsome woman in her thirties said, practically getting him in a half nelson. She smelled of heavy perfume, breath mints and gin, but her skin was smooth and her boobs were huge.
Another one said, “With me, you buy one, you get one free. Redeemable any time.” This chick was younger, with black hair and purple lips. Pale as a fish’s belly.
Then there was the brooding Russian woman who tried to smile. At least he thought she was Russian. Pale, washed out, sad. Most of them, though, they flounced and strutted and ran their fingers through his hair. When the door opened and another man came in, three of them made a beeline for him. They reminded him of the catfish he used to feed as a kid at Lake Mead: boiling up the water, their mouths avid.
The one who remained was the young chick. She had a stud in her eyebrow and looked kind of skeletal, but her skin was like cream. And she didn’t reek of booze like the older ones. She caught his look and nodded to the menu on an easel near the counter—a list of services and their prices, all nicely written up in fancy calligraphy on white
poster board. He opted for basic cable, so to speak, and paid the bored little man behind the counter in cash.
The Goth girl motioned him to follow her. She led him outside into the warm night, across the cracked walkway to the first trailer, down a hallway to a small dark room, paneled with walnut veneer.
The minute they got through the door, she removed her clothes. If you blinked, you missed it. She had on boots that zipped up the insides and a flimsy skirt with an elastic waist band. Zip, zip, and the boots were off, and then she shimmied out of the skirt and her bottom half was naked as a jaybird. She clasped her arms around his neck and pulled him down on the bed without a word.
It wasn’t as fun as he thought it would be. In fact, he found his mind drifting, thinking about tomorrow and all the days after that. Playing it out in his head. He seemed to hear her from a distance, moaning and groaning, doing her level best to get him to finish up.
But he wasn’t into it. It wasn’t anywhere near as exciting—as dirty—as he had expected it to be. The whole idea had been huge in his mind, but this—this was paltry. And so his mind wandered to something he saw on the road on the way up here today: an abandoned airplane hangar baking in the desert sun. The Goth woman whimpered about how good he was—he noticed she worked herself into more of a lather the longer it took, like jockeys waling on their horses as they neared the wire—but his mind was on the checkpoint trailer at the California border, the two Homeland Security agents in their protective vests and their dark clothing, the sun bouncing off their sunglasses, the big German shepherd between them.
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