Flight 12: A Novella

by J. Carson Black

  “Could we talk for a minute?”

  “Talk?”

  “You’re a police detective with DPS.” A statement, not a question. “I have a problem I was hoping you’d help me with.”

  “You live in the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should call TPD if you feel threatened.”

  She crossed her arms. “Oh, yeah, I can see that. They’ll think I’m some kind of nut.”

  Which was a wise piece of self-assessment. Laura liked people who spoke plainly about themselves, but still, she wasn’t looking for any more trouble. Especially off-the-books trouble. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”

  The young woman remained in the doorway. Laura stepped back on one foot, preparatory to bulling her way past.

  “Please!”

  Something in her tone—desperation?—made Laura stop. Whatever was dogging her, it was real.

  “Seriously, you should contact TPD or hire some protection.”

  “I don’t have the money for protection.”

  Of course she didn’t. But she could afford the gym, and she could afford top-of-the-line sports outfits, including what looked like hundred-dollar athletic shoes.

  But there was the tone. There were the dark shadows under the girl’s eyes. She looked sane, but scared. “Just five minutes, please?”

  “How did you know about me?”

  “I saw you on TV.”

  Crap.

  It had only been a sound bite after the shooting on Fourth Avenue. She’d done it only to extricate herself from the reporters the fastest way possible. Her exact words were: “You’ll have to ask our public information officer.”

  “Just five minutes—we can sit over there.” She motioned to the tables in the café bar. “Can I buy you a smoothie?”

  When they sat down at the tall round table and high chairs, the girl held out her hand. “I’m Payton.”

  Her hand was cool, smooth, and lifeless. It was like taking hold of a boat oar. Maybe Laura’s new friend saved her clasping for the dumb bells she lifted.

  Her face was smooth, too, and picture perfect. The static hand and the static face seemed to go together.

  “So, what’s the story?” Laura asked.

  “I want you to investigate my death.”

  “What?”

  “Someone is going to kill me and I want you to investigate it. I don’t want him to get away with it.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been getting threats—on my voicemail. The voice was altered so I couldn’t tell who it was. They said I was ‘dead.’ ”

  “Do you have a dog?”

  “I’m allergic to dogs.”

  “Change your locks and get an alarm.”

  “No, it won’t matter. You don’t know him.”

  “Him?”

  Her eyes slid away.

  “Is this an ex? Someone who’s threatened you?”

  “No, no. I meant in general. I assume it’s a him.”

  “You said I don’t know him. Are you afraid to say who?”

  She waved that away. “I don’t like my life anyway. To be honest, I’m not keen on hanging around.”

  Laura had interviewed hundreds of people in her job as a DPS officer and later a homicide detective, but she’d never heard anyone say that. Not the poorest of the poor, not the craziest of the crazy. There were people who threatened to kill themselves. But for the most part they were in another world. They were backed into some corner where they couldn’t get out, or they were hopped up on fear or resignation or just the need to end it. Maybe Payton was like that. Resigned. But it just sounded wrong to Laura’s ears.

  “You don’t want to fight back?” Laura realized, the moment she spoke, Payton had drawn her right into whatever passion play she was enacting.

  “It feels like I’m already dead. There’s nothing I can do. And if I do die, I want him to pay for it. I heard you were good, and I know you’re . . . you’re moral.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because you know a friend of mine. When I saw you being interviewed, I—”

  “And who is that?”

  “My friend? Steve. Steve Lawson.”

  2

  Steve Lawson.

  Driving back to her house at the foot of the Rincon Mountains, Laura tried to picture Lawson’s face, but couldn’t quite. It had been over eight years since she’d last seen him in person, and that was on the day she’d arrested him.

  He was a good-looking guy and a smart man. Two advanced degrees, one in Geology and one in Archaeology. For most of his life he’d been a solid contributor to his community, a man she’d pegged as innately decent.

  One problem, though: he’d killed a nine-year-old girl named Jenny Carmichael.

  Before she knew about that, she had flirted with him, and he’d flirted with her, and for a while there Laura had thought maybe this was the guy. At the time she’d arrested him, she’d felt like the biggest dupe in history, but the thing was, he was the second-biggest dupe.

  Steve Lawson wasn’t in his right mind at the time of the alleged killing. He’d had some kind of mental break. The incident had been wiped from his mind—this, she’d gathered from her own observation—but still, a little girl was dead. He’d initially confessed to killing her, but his high-priced lawyer got him to retract his confession. A grand jury indicted him for second degree murder, but in the end there was not enough evidence for the jury to convict.

  Laura had been at the trial, and seen how the jury warmed to the man. She had warmed to him herself, and even imagined a life with him. Steve Lawson really was a nice guy, if you took away the fact that he had killed a little girl.

  She turned into the yard of her little desert paradise. The house was early 1960s ranch, renovated unevenly whenever a little extra money was available. The property was on five acres, a lot of it hill, populated by three horses, one goat, two cats, a dog, and one soul mate—her fiancé Matt, who was away at a trade show for firefighters and emergency services in Las Vegas.

  As she pulled under the carport, which looked exactly like a Navajo’s lean-to, a large black dog stood up in the shade of the house and walked toward her, tail wagging.

  She reached down to rub his butt, which made the flat-coated retriever wriggle with happiness.

  Jake was Steve Lawson’s dog. At the time Laura went up to the cabin on Mt. Lemmon to arrest him, he’d asked her to take him for her own. She’d had him seven years now, one year longer than she’d been with Matt.

  “Hey, kiddo,” a gruff voice said behind her. “You ain’t gonna help the kid out?”

  “Jesus, Frank, do you have to sneak up on me like that?” Laura pressed her hand against her heart, hoping the ghost of her former mentor would get the hint. “You scared me.”

  “Hey,” Frank Entwistle said. “It’s what we do. Boo.”

  She tried to hide her smile, but couldn’t. “Why do I get the feeling you’re just phoning it in?”

  “Now don’t go talking like that, kiddo. Just think of me as your conscience speaking.”

  “I have a conscience, thanks.”

  “You’re gonna let that girl twist in the wind?”

  “I told her where to go, who to talk to.”

  “You know you sound just like Pontius Pilate?” Frank grunted as he sank into the old armchair by the back door of the house, his Sansabelt slacks poofing like a deflated basketball around his lap. The rust-colored trousers clashed with the gray and white striped button-down shirt he wore, not to mention the black lace-up shoes. He’d never been a fashion plate. Not in life, and certainly not in death. Frank’s color didn’t look good, even for a ghost. Judging from the ammonia smell of a McDonald’s Big Mac underlying a membrane of Tanqueray gin, he’d been channeling lunch.

  Laura said, “For all I know she made the story up. If you know so much about it, you’d know she asked me to investigate her murder after she died.”

  “Sounds like
a cry for help.”

  “Right. So what am I supposed to do? Put on my Nancy Drew penny loafers and start sleuthing? She didn’t tell me anything.”

  “What about Steve?”

  “What about him?”

  “Maybe you should talk to him. You know, clear the air. You never did get it straight about your relationship.”

  “Relationship? We had no relationship.”

  But that wasn’t entirely true. Laura was fooling herself if she didn’t admit the attraction they’d had for each other. She never would have pegged him for the kind of creep who would choke a little girl—and in a way, she’d been right.

  “You were pretty broke up at the time, kiddo.” He rubbed his knee through the cheap material of the slacks. Her old partner had always had a bum knee, but Laura couldn’t remember which one. It didn’t seem important now—he’d been dead going on ten years.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, kid, but this ain’t over.”

  “I hope it is,” Laura said. “I’d hate to think of the alternative.”

  “You don’ see me, generally, right? So maybe, just maybe, I’m the harbinger of doom.”

  Laura pulled her hair up off her neck and let the cool air get to it, suddenly feeling weary. “I’ll take that under advisement,” she said.

  3

  Three days later, Laura was fully reinstated to the Arizona Department of Public Safety as a criminal investigator.

  No denying how sweet it was to hand over the imposter replacement weapon and slip her own SIG Sauer into the paddle holster clipped to the waistband of her slacks.

  Anthony, her partner, gave her the high five once they were back in Homicide.

  “No more Doris,” he said, his eye straying to the hallway where Anthony’s replacement partner was talking earnestly to the Lieutenant. No doubt wondering where she’d land next.

  Laura glanced at Anthony. Her partner was one tall drink of water and about as pale as one. His head was meticulously shaved, and he sported a neat goatee and a pirate earring. He wore richly-colored shirts right out of Esquire, and his mission in life was to become the next Martin Scorsese.

  Laura said. “Admit it, Doris wasn’t so bad.”

  “Jesus, you haven’t gotten close enough to smell her breath. It’s like something crawled in and died there. The brass should hang crime scene tape from her nose to her chin. And people wonder why her interviews with victims are so short.”

  One glance at the two talking in the hallway confirmed Anthony’s observation. The Lieut was leaning away from the woman.

  Anthony was talking, and Laura tuned in. He was telling her about his screenplay based on the Madera Canyon homicide they’d worked last May. “I’m thinking of calling it ‘The Liars Club—’ ”

  “But that’s taken.”

  “Yeah, I know. But you can’t copyright titles.” He pushed his Nicolo Aristides sunglasses up above his forehead. “How about ‘Lie, Cheat and Steele?”

  Steele was the name of his intrepid detective, who was also bald, tall, lanky, and had clothes sense—go figure.

  Laura patted his cheek. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “I wrote in a bit part for you. It’s just a walk-on, but enough time to strut your stuff.”

  “I’ll have my people call your people.”

  4

  A cold front had come in two days before Thanksgiving. Gray skies, drizzling rain. By Thanksgiving Day, the cold dug its heels in and stayed for a while. The drizzle up in the Santa Catalina Mountains above Tucson turned to sleet and then to snow.

  Two days after that, blue skies returned.

  Over Thanksgiving, a twenty-two-year-old man named Garret Weems went missing. He’d gone to a Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s cabin up on Mount Lemmon. There had been plenty of imbibing by everyone, but no one but Garret Weems left the cabin to drive home in a snow storm. Despite the fact that snow was coming down hard, and the fact that Weems had no concept of how to drive in snow and didn’t have chains for his car, he decided to take the back way down the mountain—Control Road 38. Control Road 38 was a precarious, axle-busting, hardpan dirt road gouged into rock, ending outside the town of Oracle, on the other side of the mountain range.

  That was the last his friends and family heard of him.

  When he turned up missing, a search ensued.

  A week later, a forest ranger spotted wreckage in the canyon below one of the hairpin turns.

  He described it as a “Plymouth Valiant crossed with a tin can.”

  Cop humor.

  There were jurisdictional issues—two counties, one incorporated town, and the U.S. Forest Service—so it was decided that Laura and Anthony would play peacemaker. They would assist the investigation—which really meant they’d take it over.

  Bad as things were, they were about to get even messier.

  Another wreck lay virtually underneath the old Valiant—a newer car, equally-crumpled, but dark metallic green, the same color as the oaks that had hidden it from view.

  Garret’s car had rolled before landing on top of the other wreck, throwing the kid inside around like a ragdoll. A bottle of Coors had shattered on the floorboard (which was now the roof). The kid had smashed into the car’s ceiling, since he’d declined to use the car’s shoulder harness. As fools went, he was a purist.

  The second car was a 2011 Honda Accord.

  The driver had worn her shoulder harness. The airbag had deployed, as it was supposed to do, but it had not saved the sole occupant of the car. Her body had been worked over by predators and the elements, even though she couldn’t have been there that long. Laura knew she hadn’t been there all that long because she’d talked to her only a few weeks before.

  The occupant of the car was Payton Hatcher. She had the same dark blonde hair. The same movie star thin body, what was left of it. She still had her purse and her wallet and her phone.

  She also had a gunshot wound above her right ear, and a corresponding exit wound—a chunky mass of blood, flesh, and fragmented bone extruding onto the driver’s side window, which had shattered into a mass of blood-smeared diamonds.

  Hatcher was pretty banged up and the elements had been to her, but Laura could see the stippling effect of gunpowder—a contact wound. Someone had put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.

  Laura held the driver’s license in her latex-gloved hand, remembering Payton’s exact words:

  I want you to investigate my death.

  5

  Anthony met the DPS helicopter at the helipad at the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter astronomy facility, and went up in the chopper to photograph the scene from the air. They had blocked off the road above and below with sawhorses and crime scene tape. Laura had photographed the skid marks on the dirt and hardpan (very hard to see, and virtually impossible to distinguish, since one had overlapped the other and many vehicles had gone past on the road in between) and had calculated distances. She’d estimated the point where Weems’s vehicle had left the road, how far it had traveled, where it hit, where it rolled, and how it came to rest on top of the already-crumpled Accord belonging to Hatcher.

  Laura realized she had used “Hatcher” in a sentence way too many times, that she’d avoided using her first name, Payton. This was not like her. Usually she had a connection with the victims.

  She knew it was because she felt guilty. The bad feeling had solidified in her gut, as if a brick had sunk to the bottom of her stomach and stayed there. Payton had come to her for help, and now—what a coincidence—they were about to drag her body up out of a ravine.

  I want you to investigate my death.

  Both corpses were photographed in situ. The car on top would have to be pulled up first. Fortunately it had smashed down on the trunk and the back window of the Accord, leaving the rest of it relatively intact.

  For now, they had to keep as few people in the crime scene as possible, and document, document, document. Anthony above in the helo, Laura here on the ground.

  T
hey would need an expert to make sense of the trajectories of each car, how fast they were going, how many times they rolled. Early in her career with DPS, Laura had worked the interstates and state highways as a Highway Patrol officer for five years, so she was pretty good at eyeballing speed, as well as working accident scenes. Her guestimate was that Weems’ car had been going between fifteen and twenty an hour when it left the road. They marked every scuff on stone and piece of potential evidence with colored flags on short wires. Some evidence she marked with iridescent orange spray paint.

  Laura wondered if the person who shot Payton Hatcher had ridden all the way down with her, or managed to shove the door open and fall out onto the road. If he had, there was nothing obvious to indicate where he’d fallen. At the point where the car had swerved off, the road was mostly rock.

  Going on three-thirty in the afternoon, the sun starting its slow arc down the sky. Laura tried to remain in the sun, looking for places where the shooter had climbed up. Outside the path where two cars had rolled down there were broken stems of grass, crushed flower petals. One scuff mark of what might have been a sneaker on rock, and a partial footprint on the loose gravel part of the road. Laura photographed the footprint and spray-painted a circle around it: a man’s shoe. From the scuff, she extrapolated a man’s size twelve. But there were no footprints on the road. At least she couldn’t see any, and soon it would be dark.

  Laura didn’t touch anything for a long time, despite the fact that she had gloved up. She photographed everything in the car. A deputy asked her if she wanted Payton Hatcher’s smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S5. It had already been removed from the car by the first officer at the scene, a Sheriff’s deputy—a remarkably handsome young guy named Terry Keogh. Terry had used the phone to see if there was someone he could call—her next of kin—but he’d been unsuccessful. Fortunately, he’d used gloves. Laura held the phone at the edges and looked at the directory. Like many people in this paranoid age, Payton had listed her contacts not by name, but by her relation to them—a way to avoid giving their full names. Instead of family members, she’d listed “Landlord” and “True Love.”