MacKinnon 02 Dead Copy

by Kit Frazier

  “I expect he’s proud right about now. It’s your mother you got to worry about.”

  “Well, I vote that none of us tell her,” I said, yanking my shoelaces into a double knot with a lot of unnecessary force.

  Ethan still looked shell-shocked, so I laced his Converses for him.

  “I expect you can get it expunged, if he even filed it at all,” Cantu said.

  “How come he’s keeping Josh?” I said, giving E’s laces a double knot, too.

  Cantu shrugged. “Said he had to talk to him. Take care of some business.”

  “Can he do that?” I frowned, and Cantu nodded. Resigned for now, I muttered, “Thanks for baling us out.” Cantu nodded.

  “You call Logan?” he said, and I blushed. “Got his voice mail.”

  Cantu nodded. “You really think this girl is missing?”

  “I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right. And up until Hollis handcuffed us, he didn’t seem to think checking on Faith was a big deal.”

  “What makes you think it is a big deal?”

  “Well, let’s see. Her brother got shot. Someone burned down his trailer. Nobody has seen or talked to her since last night…shall I go on?”

  Cantu rubbed the back of his neck. “And this Josh character is stalking her?”

  “I’m not sure he’s actually stalking her. I think he’s just worried about her,” I said, and Cantu looked at me skeptically.

  He pulled up in front of my Jeep, which was still in front of Faith’s trailer.

  “What does it take to put out a missing persons report?” Ethan asked. He’d been listening, quiet, so he didn’t miss anything.

  Cantu shrugged. “Usually a family member contacts the appropriate law enforcement agency to file an MPR. They get entered into the National Crime Information Center files by the agency who took the report,” Cantu said.

  “And in this case, the agency would be Hollis and his merry band of nitwits?” I said.

  ” “Fraid so.”

  “Hollis said it hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet,” Ethan said, and Cantu nodded.

  “Well, that’s where it gets sticky,” he said. “Doesn’t matter how long it’s been, but cops tend to take in the circumstances before they get excited about a missing person. With a kid, it’s different, usually under the age of fifteen. They call the dogs and the ‘copters and light a fire under the media. But with older kids and adults, it’s wait and see.’

  “Why?” Ethan was leaning forward now, white-knuckling the console.

  Cantu sighed. “Because some people say they’ve been abducted to explain a big chunk of time they were doing something they shouldn’t have been doing.”

  Ethan looked scandalized.

  Cantu shook his head. “Happens a lot more often than you think. Don’t guess I could talk you into staying out of this,” Cantu said. “Hollis isn’t a good cop, but he’s lead dog in his county. Probably not a good idea to start a war with him.”

  “I think I already did.”

  Cantu sighed. “What are you going to do now?” he said.

  “I don’t know. What kind of misdemeanor is stealing a dog?”

  *

  It was late when I got home, and I owed Ethan big-time for taking Tarrantino, the cat from hell, off my hands. I called Logan and left him a message telling him the cat was at Ethan’s until he got back. I told him Faith was missing, conveniently leaving out the part about breaking and entering, then assaulting a police officer and getting fingerprinted at the Dawes County jail.

  I fed Muse and took Marlowe for a short walk, too tired to encourage him to pee on the Bobs’ rosemary bush. It was well past dark but still hot. Marlowe and I went through the garage and out the back to turn on the hose.

  Within moments, five deer peered from the shelter of the live oaks at the rim of the back canyon. I knew there were more that I couldn’t see, waiting for the forward scouts to flash them their white-tailed okay sign. Two of the deer had thick necks and velvety antlers allies on the hunt for food. In two more months they’d be rivals, fighting for territory and females. I shook my head. Men.

  I filled Daddy’s battered old green Coleman cooler with water, then sat with Marlowe on the back porch, watching in the high blue light of the swollen moon. Muse sat in the windowsill, flicking her calico tail. She wanted to see the deer but declined coming outside, still in a snit over Puck’s one-eyed orange cat.

  I gazed out at the deer. The Bobs were always on me about watering them, blowing steam about survival of the fittest and all that crap. Who would have thought the Bible-thumping Bobs would be standard-bearers for Darwinism?

  Watching the drought-stricken deer drink thirstily from the cooler, I thought about Puck and Josh. I thought about the way Logan had stood up for them. He’d made sticking up for the little guy his whole life. I smiled. Captain America incarnate.

  Marlowe sat beside me, the moon glinting blue off his white face, his white chest puffed, the tip of his tongue showing as he watched the deer. There was no animosity between him and the foraging animals.

  “All creatures great and small,” I told him. He didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “Ya know, you’re supposed to be search and rescue. We’ve got to do something about Faith and Sheriff Hollis’ poor dog.”

  He bumped me with his pointy white nose, and I stroked his ears. “People are saying Faith’s not missing and that Hollis’s dog is none of my business.”

  Marlowe stared at me without blinking.

  “Well, buddy, I told Logan I’d watch out for Faith.” I turned off the porch light. “I’m about to make it our business.”

  Despite the fact that I was so tired I thought my bones might fuse together, I couldn’t sleep. Much to Muse’s discontent, Marlowe and I sacked out on the sofa, numbing out in the black-and-white clarity of an Ingrid Bergman marathon on Turner Classics. Gaslight was playing, and obsessive Charles Boyer had Bergman trapped in her own home, convincing her she was a danger to herself and too crazy to leave him.

  Marlowe took up more than his half of the sofa, his head on my legs, while Muse perched on the back of the sofa, tail twitching her displeasure. Marlowe grumbled, settling in.

  “Don’t worry,” I said to Marlowe. “Ingrid Bergman always gets the right guy. Sometimes she gets two.”

  I watched as the movie flickered in the dark and realized that’s not what I liked about the film. It was the fact that Bergman found a hidden strength a courage she didn’t realize she had. She stepped up to her abusive husband and made the final call.

  Onscreen, Bergman and Cotten watched as the bobbies carted the crazed, evil husband off to get his just deserts.

  I stared at the television. “You ever notice how Ingrid Bergman has guys falling all over her while the rest of us wind up sleeping on the sofa with a dog?”

  Marlowe didn’t answer, but Muse huffed. She leapt from the back of the sofa, landing on the hardwood floor like a horse. She shot me a pitying look that reminded me of the look Aunt Kat gives me when she’s lecturing me on the ways of men.

  “You scoff,” I said to the cat as she sashayed down the back hall, heading for bed. “I have a man. Sort of. Somewhere.

  “Maybe that’s the book I should write,” I said to Marlowe. “Everything I Know About Men I Learned from My Aunt’s Cat.”

  Marlowe snorted, and I sighed. “Everyone’s a critic.”

  Annoyed, restless, and tired, I resorted to abusing Benadryl at approximately two in the morning and dreamed of Ingrid Bergman trapped by a man gone mad with obsession, power, and lust.

  The phone rang and I woke with a yelp, snatching the sheet up to my chin. The phone rang again, and Marlowe growled. So it was with great displeasure that I fished the phone from beneath his pillow.

  “Somebody better be dead,” I growled into the receiver.

  “Close,” Cantu’s voice sounded tired and grim,

  I waited.

  “Cauley,” he said. “There’s been another
fire.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The smell of burning flesh is something you never forget.

  When I was a little girl, not more than four, Daddy came home very late one night.

  I stood upstairs at the railing, quiet, watching as every light in the house blinked on. Mama hurried Daddy into the kitchen and sat him at the table and put some tea on to boil.

  He was in uniform, but it was torn and charred.

  His handsome, dark head rested in his hands, his elbows braced on the table. Mama, dressed in a flowing white peignoir, had his cheek pressed to her breast, her pretty blond head resting lightly on his.

  She was crying and crooning something I couldn’t hear. I crept down the stairs and into the archway, silent in my little pink footie pajamas, into the kitchen. And then it hit me.

  A smell like nothing else on this earth. Sickening and strangely sweet, like burning hair and rotten pork, but worse, so much worse something primal about it said Danger here, stay away.

  I vomited all over my footie pajamas.

  Climbing out of the Jeep in Faith’s driveway, I felt that same awful urge as I stood next to Cantu. He watched as two Dawes County deputies roped off the perimeter. The trailer was barely identifiable. It looked more like an explosion than a fire. Twisted metal littered the charred grass like aluminum confetti.

  “Marlowe, no!” I yelled as the dog dragged me toward the smoldering structure.

  Four volunteer firefighters aimed a large hose at the blaze, doing little to douse the inferno.

  Hair standing on his neck and tail out straight, Marlowe made a beeline for the area where the bedroom was, wound two tight circles, and made his peculiar little barking noise.

  Oh, hell. His alert signal. I patted Marlowe on the head and did the good dog thing, but my heart was pounding. “Is she in there?” I said, and Cantu shrugged as he jogged forward to join us.

  “Looks like your dog thinks she is,” he said, staring down at Marlowe. “The guys are around back, looking. Keep a good hold on the dog.”

  Marlowe’s ears were pricked, his body stiff as his eyes darted from me to the trailer and back.

  “Easy, boy, they’ve got it under control,” I said, the heat from the fire scorching my face.

  The night was hot, made hotter by the flames and the acrid smell of death. The fire had moved beyond the building, unleashed like a wild beast on the dry acres of prairie behind the trailer.

  My heart pounded as I craned to see into the flames. “You’re not running the scene?” I said, and Cantu shook his head.

  “Out of my jurisdiction.”

  “But you think it has something to do with Puck, who is in your jurisdiction.”

  “No such thing as coincidence.”

  The knot in my stomach tightened. “Sheriff Hollis is on the way?” Cantu nodded. His eyes swept the horizon, watching for the seen and the unseen.

  Marlowe shifted from paw to paw, waiting, listening.

  The stench was getting worse. Salt pooled in my mouth, beads of sweat formed on my upper lip. I pulled the bottom of my tee shirt up to breathe through it, hoping I wouldn’t throw up. An older man with a bushy mustache and a volunteer fire department uniform rolled another large hose from the rack of a second water truck, putting out brush fires that roared over the back pasture, which threatened the neighbors and, after that, the town.

  The trailer itself was nearly unrecognizable, and in its place was a wet, smoldering shell spilling the charred, pink remnants of pillows and curtains like entrails. Little rivers of watery, black soot washed around fire-blackened china dolls that lay cracked and broken in the rubble, wide-eyed, as though in a state of permanent shock. A memory boiled up through the flames Puck, lying on the courthouse steps, with that same look of shock.

  I missed my footie pajamas.

  Behind the remnants of the trailer, a battalion of volunteer firefighters and neighbors battled the fire as it raced across the dry grasslands, heading toward the old burned-out farmhouse and beyond.

  Near a big, gnarled pear tree at the corner of the metal frame, a tall, lanky man stood alone, staring at the fiery mess. His shoulders slumped, and he clutched the tattered remains of a black notebook. His face was dark with soot, a streak of ruddy skin showing through the dirt. Had he been crying?

  “Josh?” I said, and his head jerked up. His blue eyes were an ocean of grief, made bluer by the red-rimmed lids. “What are you doing?”

  He stared down at the remains of the notebook. “Her music,” he said, his voice rough, like he’d been chewing broken glass.

  “Probably they’re going to need that for evidence,” I said. He nodded but didn’t move.

  A voice called from the smoking, twisted metal that was once a back bedroom. “We’re bringing her out!”

  Josh dropped the notebook and ran into the wet, smoldering dregs, leaping over bent metal and rubble.

  Marlowe went wild as two EMTs dressed in fire gear picked their way through the wreckage. Marlowe circled and warbled, and through the smoke, the men carried a stretcher. Marlowe jerked hard against his leash, dragging me toward them, showing the full force of his husky heritage.

  The EMTs settled the litter near the fire truck and knelt over a small, thin body as Josh rushed forward.

  “Sir, this is a crime scene,” the older man said, his voice firm but not unkind as he held an oxygen mask over her nose.

  Josh didn’t move. We stood staring, unable to look away. The fire had disintegrated most of the girl’s clothing. The rest melted into the small islands of flesh that clung stubbornly to her bones. Her face seemed small and pinched, and what was left of it was pierced. Her dark hair was melted and charred, clinging like a Brillo pad to her scalp.

  “Is she alive?” I said, panic twisting my insides.

  “Barely,” the EMT said, his voice jagged and brusque. “We’re going to stabilize her and fly her to the burn unit at Brookes. Chopper’s on the way.”

  Josh was quiet, staring at the girl on the stretcher. I gagged at the smell and blinked back tears.

  “It’s not her,” Josh whispered. We turned to look at him.

  Josh shook his head. “That’s not Faith.”

  “You sure?” I said, and he nodded, gently touching the girl’s damaged arm.

  She stirred, but her swollen eyes were seared shut.

  He pulled up his sleeve, revealing a tattoo of half a heart; inside, green letters spelled out FAITH.

  “She has one just like this,” he said.

  “She had a scar there,” I said, remembering the pink patch of skin and the fading letters that once spelled out her first love’s name.

  He nodded. The girl’s skin was burned from her hands to her elbows, like she’d been shielding her face. There was enough fragile skin to show she hadn’t been tattooed.

  “Then who’s this?” Cantu said, nodding toward the girl on the litter.

  Josh shook his head. “I don’t know, but it’s not Faith.”

  Bare-faced and without breaking a sweat, Cantu looked more closely at the burned shape that used to be a girl.

  And then he nodded. It was a short, sharp nod, and he hit the radio on his epaulet. “Base,” he said. “It’s Cantu. Call in the dogs.”

  The first responders for Team Six arrived within thirty minutes. Olivia was first on the scene, armed with the base trailer, cases of bottled water, and two giant aluminum 100-cup coffee makers. The Army runs on its belly; SAR mainlines caffeine.

  I watched as team leaders set up for the search with that odd, breathless sense I always get when I hear the National Anthem.

  Olivia had already set up the recharge station, the area where handlers and dogs come to cool off. Even though the team would begin the procedure as a night search, temperatures wouldn’t dip below eighty. The dogs would have to be rested and rehydrated more often, whether they liked it or not.

  Olivia was busting out extra equipment and a clipboard for searchers to sign in. Apparently sh
e thought we were going to be here a while.

  A cold chill coiled in my stomach. “Whoever did this thought that was Faith, didn’t they?”

  “We don’t know it’s arson yet,” Cantu said. “But the same thing happened to her brother’s trailer two days ago, so that’d be my guess.”

  I followed Cantu to the staging area, where he barked orders into the controlled chaos as the number of responders swelled.

  Cantu had Rimmer and Moreno and their dogs out running preliminary searches, starting with the old farmhouse and then following the fence line and the creek as funnels, structures likely to influence a missing person’s travel.

  The wind was picking up, blasting the heated air around like a convection oven. My skin was dry and gritty, and I could feel my lips chapping by the moment. I made a mental note to stock lip balm along with the sunscreen and bug repellent in my SAR fanny pack.

  News crews roared onto the scene, hooking up satellite feeds in case we found a body or a clue or a map to Jimmy Hoffa.

  Miranda’s van slid into view. She stepped out, looking as flawless as ever. Journalist Barbie: comes with her own microphone and matching shoes. Probably had her own lip balm.

  I watched Cantu as he watched her brush red dust off one of her bare legs. “Hey, are you going to be ops leader?” I asked.

  He blinked and shook his head. “Dawes County jurisdiction. Six is here as a courtesy.”

  “Right,” I grumbled. That was bad news for Faith.

  Not knowing what else to do, I called Logan and left another message. It was nearly nine, and I looked up at the darkening sky and wondered where he was and if he was all right. I wondered whether he’d respond if I sent up the bat signal.

  Beside me, Marlowe whined.

  “Cauley,” Cantu said, jarring me back to the task at hand. “You’re still an apprentice. You gotta stay at base.”

  My heart dropped. “I’m not going to stand around to man communications and pass out Band-Aids,” I said.

  “You got training in media. We need you here for coms. Get photos of the girl and her stats out to every media outlet you can raise. We’ll talk about the rest.”