Flight 12: A Novella

by J. Carson Black

  Laura called to Luke Bollings, the deputy. “How many of these did you call?”

  “Just the landlord. It went to voicemail.”

  Laura nodded. She was looking at “True Love.”

  She had just started to punch in the number when someone called her from down in the ravine, wanting to know if Hatcher was okayed for transport.

  She dropped the phone into an evidence bag and sealed it. There was an eight-month backlog in Forensics, and Laura didn’t want to send the phone to No Man’s Land just yet, but what choice did she have? She attached a note asking Jim Donnelly at the lab to move the phone to the top of the queue. She would call him, too.

  Laura went down for a final look. It saddened her. She remembered Payton’s trim body, her almost fragile beauty. And of course Laura remembered what Hatcher herself had told her—that she had been marked for death.

  Laura oversaw the crime tech as he bagged Payton’s hands, remembering how they had seemed lifeless when she’d shaken hands with her at the gym. Now she realized how wrong she had been about that. There was nothing more inanimate than a corpse.

  The techs put Payton Hatcher onto a stretcher and hoisted her up the steep hill to the road, where they laid her onto a body bag on the collapsible gurney and zipped her in.

  Going on four p.m. The sun slanted to the west, filtering down through the ponderosa needles. Some places were now deep in shade, and it was cold in these patches.

  The Accord was winched up and onto the second flatbed—headed to the DPS lab to be gone over. Laura had no idea how the big truck had made it down this road. But it lumbered away in a funnel of dust.

  The deputy said, “I’m gonna go now. I’ll send you my report.”

  Laura nodded. He left in another puff of dust and she stood there watching him go before walking back to her own car.

  The drive back was crowded. Frank Entwistle materialized almost immediately. This time he gnawed on a polish sausage from a white wrapper. “Hey, kiddo, talk about coincidence.”

  “If it is a coincidence.” Laura couldn’t quite figure out why her former mentor was around her so much these days. Maybe he was lonely. Did ghosts get lonely? She thought he just wanted to stay in the game. He’d done his twenty with the DPS and then some, most of that time as a homicide detective, and Laura knew he’d had a hard time letting go. She was the only person he’d appeared to, as far as she knew. And to be honest, she liked having him around.

  “What d’ya mean if? Looks pretty straightforward to me. Right there where the road curves is a perfect place for someone to go off. You don’t think the kid in the Valiant was tryin’ to commit suicide, do you?”

  His words echoed her thoughts. “No. I’m just shaken up, because I met her and she told me she was going to die—that someone was going to kill her.”

  Frank buzzed down the window and cocked an elbow on the door. “Yeah, small world, ain’t it? So you end up getting assigned to the case and you get there and you suddenly got two scenes. All my years in homicide, I never seen anything like it.”

  “Weems was probably an accident.”

  “You read that story a while back, didn’t you? About that Oklahoma lake where they found that car with those kids in it—three kids missing since the seventies—”

  “The Camaro, right.”

  “An’ right next to it was that truck with that couple in it. Old truck, as I recall, from the fifties. Two vehicles right at the end of the pier, which tells you one thing.”

  “And that is?”

  “Oklahoma lakes sure are silty.”

  “Funny,” Laura said. “But I get your point. Two vehicles went off at the same point years apart.”

  “Right. It was a good place to go off the road.”

  Laura silently agreed. The slide down to the dry riverbed was a little more gradual there. She also pictured that spot in the road, the way the roadbed was slanted—slightly tilted upward near the edge. You’d really have to strain to see anything below.

  She thought about it. “Maybe no one was supposed to find her. For a long time.”

  Frank lit up a Lucky Strike. “Could be, kiddo. Could be.”

  But it turned out that Laura was wrong.

  Getting dark by the time Laura reached the main highway down the mountain. A few lights were coming on in Summerhaven.

  She was thinking about Steve Lawson.

  Interesting, that Payton Hatcher had mentioned him. What had she said? That Steve had mentioned Laura to her.

  Steve Lawson once lived in a cabin on the mountain. She was coming up on it now. On an impulse, she turned onto the road leading into the pines. The sky turning light now in preparation for sundown, twinkling through the ponderosas. Here and there were cabins, most of them closed for the winter. Only one had lights in the windows and a car out front.

  She remembered the last time she’d been here. His hands had been cuffed then. She’d put her hand on his arm to balance him. He’d turned to her and said, Will you take my dog?

  Laura followed the rutted lane up through the pines. The dark bulk of the cabin came in to view. A realty sign creaked in the light wind. It had been planted there years ago, but there were no takers. Rust-red pine needles covered the roof. The cottage had a neglected, and vaguely scary air, like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel.

  Hansel and Gretel wasn’t far off. Steve Lawson had killed a child. He’d confessed to Laura, and she had believed him. The man had been drinking, out of his fevered mind—but that didn’t alter the fact that he’d killed a child. Ultimately, he’d been found not guilty—there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. Laura hadn’t heard his name in years until Payton Hatcher approached her at the gym.

  “And so we meet again,” she said to the darkness.

  6

  Laura had gotten the impression from Payton Hatcher that Steve Lawson lived in town. But his number was unlisted, and he didn’t show up on a Google search.

  Still, she was able to access his records, and found his last-known address.

  He lived in Cascabel, Arizona—a long trek from Tucson.

  She got home late. There was a bottle of pinot noir on the counter and a glass, left for her. She snacked on cheese and crackers and a glass of wine and went in to the bedroom.

  Matt was sleeping soundly. It was something he was very good at. He’d served in Iraq several years ago—a lieutenant in the U.S. Army—and had learned to fall asleep quickly and wake instantly.

  As soon as she crossed the threshold, he stirred, and then sat up. He had bed hair but otherwise he looked good enough to eat. His hair stuck up like a kid’s after a nap, but there was no missing the strength in his massive arms and chest. Matt was a big man, a tall man, and one of the few people she felt truly safe with. She could imagine how his presence comforted people who lost homes to fire, back when he was a firefighter.

  For a moment Laura remembered her attraction to Steve Lawson. He had seemed so normal—decent. A well-educated man, a geologist with a gentle sense of humor and a good dog.

  He’d completely fooled her.

  “Hey, Babe. You look like you could use a hug.”

  “I could use more than that.”

  “That can be arranged,” he said.

  Finally, she thought. Finally I found the right guy.

  Cascabel was little more than a loose collection of farms and houses east of Tucson. It took a long time to get there. In Spanish, “cascabel” meant “rattlesnake” and Laura thought of this as she drove I-10 past Benson and took the road north. Rattlesnakes wound their way through the brush and rocks, and the road out to Cascabel was similar. The drive seemed to go on forever. First on two-lane roads through the smallest of towns, then the asphalt turning into a butt-battering graded-dirt road.

  She could have taken the overland route through Redington Pass, but that road was even worse.

  At long last Laura reached the town proper—just a sprinkling of houses and outbuildings along the San Pedro Riv
er, some farmland, and a mesquite and cottonwood bosque. An artisans collective held a crafts fair here every year just before Christmas. It would be coming up soon.

  Laura stopped at the Cascabel Community Center to ask for directions to Steve Lawson's place.

  The woman, a potter hard at work, motioned up a dirt road. Across a fallow field Laura saw a ranch house—a modest pink adobe with a corrugated-steel roof, a patchwork of rust and silver.

  Laura drove through the entrance—the five-bar gate had been left open. She glanced at the two goats eating up the lawn. An older model Range Rover was parked in the carport, so dusty she couldn’t see past the back window.

  To the right was a pasture. Two horses stood at the fence corner, dispiritedly waving their tails in each other’s face. A couple of chickens pecked in the yard.

  The area was remote. Laura didn’t know what Steve Lawson was like now. She unsnapped her holster, just in case, and knocked on the door with her left hand, keeping her right hand near her hip. Staying a little back and to the side, in case she needed an advantage.

  Paranoia, thy name is Cop.

  No answer.

  She knocked on the door again. The warped screen rattled inside the frame.

  “Long time, no see,” A voice said behind her.

  He must have come from the barn. Actually, it was little more than a shed, but there were horses in it, judging from the sound of a banging pail and an equine squeal.

  Steve Lawson strode in her direction. One of the goats fell in step with him.

  Lawson shoved him away and the goat loped off. He wore a blue workshirt, Wranglers, and desert boots. He’d grown his dishwater blond hair long and tied it in a ponytail.

  “Hello, Steve,” Laura said.

  “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

  No sunglasses—his eyes were the same blue as his workshirt. He didn’t seem to have aged.

  “Did you know a woman named Payton Hatcher?”

  He remained where he was, approximately twenty feet away.

  Laura watched his hands, thinking of “the twenty-one foot rule.” A potential assailant with a knife could cover twenty-one feet before you could shoot him.

  Lawson seemed to have intuited this, because he held his empty hands apart from his body—a cross between a shrug and a question.

  “Payton Hatcher,” Laura repeated.

  “You said ‘did’ I know. Did something happen to her?”

  “Yes, she’s dead.”

  Laura waited for his reaction. There were a number of ways he could have gone. Shock, perhaps. Or worry that she was here. Or guilt.

  Instead, he said under his breath, “Figures.”

  “What figures?”

  “Tell you what. Why don’t we go inside so we don’t freak out the neighbors.”

  “What neighbors?” But Laura couldn’t help but admire his smooth way of taking over. The man she remembered had been much more reticent. Polite. And the man she’d seen last had been devastated—a shell of himself.

  This man didn’t seem to be hiding anything at all.

  He didn’t seem to be regretting anything either.

  Laura realized she’d been picturing a different person altogether. The bewildered soul who was shackled and led away from the cabin, the shocked and disoriented geologist, pale and drawn-looking, who appeared in court beside his lawyer. His hair shorn, his skin white under the fluorescents. His good looks gone.

  They were back now.

  The screen door squeaked open and he held it for her.

  “After you,” she said.

  “I see you’re still a cop.”

  “What else would I be?”

  “Good question. Would you like some tea?”

  “Coffee?”

  “Sorry, I don’t drink coffee. I have a lot of flavored teas, though.”

  He led the way into the kitchen, which was sunny and bright. The cabinets were old and so was the oak table. The walls were painted a bright yellow, and flower boxes crowded the windows. It was a small house, a worker’s cottage built eons ago, and the windows were paned. The center chopping table made the kitchen seem even smaller than it was.

  “So Payton’s dead.” Lawson put on some water and motioned her to sit. “Chamomile or Earl Grey? I think I have some pomegranate here somewhere.”

  All in the same judicious tone.

  They’d had chemistry once, but now Laura wondered why she’d ever found him attractive. Before his arrest, Lawson had blocked out the drunken rage that resulted in a child’s death. He’d become practiced at forgetting—until the moment when the memory had finally broken through.

  Laura said, “Chamomile.”

  “Good choice.” Now he sounded like a waiter at a high-priced restaurant. He set down the hot tea, positioned on a saucer. Ceramic, possibly from the place down the road.

  Laura set her digital audio recorder on the table. “You mind if I record this?”

  “Knock yourself out.” He sat opposite her and leaned forward, elbows on the table, his eyes on hers. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “Is there a reason why I would arrest you?”

  He shrugged. “You arrested me last time.”

  “You feeling guilty about something?”

  “No. Payton was a friend of mine. If you’re thinking this was a romance gone sour, the only feeling I had for her was protective, the way an older brother feels about his sister. I have people who can attest to that.”

  “You’ve put some thought into this.”

  Again with the shrug. “After what I went through, you get paranoid.”

  “You think it was unfair? The trial? You were acquitted.”

  “There should never have been a trial.”

  Laura felt the urge to shoot up out of her chair and grab him by the throat. “You confessed. You even rejected counsel.”

  He pointed at her. “At first. Because I felt trapped. Because I had been hallucinating. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

  There had been no drugs in his system other than alcohol.

  He added, “All water under the bridge. You duped me, but that’s what cops do. You pretended you cared about me, but all you really wanted was a confession. No hard feelings, said the frog to the scorpion. Even if you did sting me halfway across the river.”

  Laura turned on the recorder, gave the date, time, place, and the person she was interviewing. “Tell me about Payton.”

  Another shrug. “What’s to know? She was beautiful, talented. An artist. She was the kind of woman who would always put other people first. She went out of her way to be kind. She was like a sister to me. I’m sure you’re going to ask if we had a romantic relationship and, sorry to disabuse you, but the truth is we were just friends.”

  “She said you told her to come to me.”

  “I did. You’re the only cop I know.” He smiled, and she could see the message in that smile. Don’t you remember? We were practically lovers.

  She thought back to the cabin on Mount Lemmon. They had come so close.

  “Look,” he said. “Payton was in to something. Don’t ask me what, because I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. I think . . . I think she was a working girl once. Maybe you could look there. That’s a dangerous world. She told me that there were men after her. That they wanted to kill her.”

  “She said someone was going to kill her?”

  “She was sure they were going to kill her.”

  “Did she give a reason?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me. I asked her to, I told her I wanted to share the burden, but . . . ” He stared out the window. His face fell into lines of sadness. Still a handsome man.

  Despite herself, Laura had cared for him once.

  When he looked back at her his eyes were like blue marbles. His mouth was twisted into an ironic smile. “She had a troubled life. She told me she’d had enough, and if she was going to die, so be it.”

  “What are you saying? Are you saying she so
unded resigned?”

  “That’s how I would characterize it, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “My theory is she had run as far as she could, and whatever it was caught up with her. I don’t know if it was a gambling debt, or maybe someone who was stalking her and made her life hell—she kept that kind of thing to herself. But she seemed to take it for granted that her life was over, and she was . . . resolved.”

  “Resolved. How did you meet her?”

  “At a party in Tucson. Friends of the Santa Cruz River, or something like that.” “Did you have a romantic relationship?”

  “I told you, no.”

  “Were you one of her clients?”

  “Yes. I suppose you want to see the receipts?”

  She ignored that. “Were you close?”

  “We were friends.”

  “She felt she could confide in you?”

  “She did confide in me. Up to a point. Look, she was quite mysterious about what was going on. I was out of the loop. She only told me what I told you and didn’t elaborate. This was a long time ago.”

  Laura waited.

  He added, “Sometimes she could be a drama queen. At first I thought she was just saying it to get my attention.”

  “She wanted to get your attention? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe she wanted . . . ”

  “A relationship?”

  He stood up, motioned with his chin toward her tea. “You want to finish that?”

  He’d turned off like a light switch.

  “You have more questions?” he added. “Because I have to go. We’re having a square dance over at the Gentrys, and I promised to help spruce the place up.”

  He walked out of the kitchen.

  Laura followed him, feeling impotent. She could push him, but knew from experience that doing so might turn into a match of wills and then they would both be dug in. “I’d like to discuss this some more. How about I come back tomorrow?”