Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (28 page)

He handed her the other sheets of paper. “Mrs. Groves, please look at each of them carefully. I know it's been a long time—”

Patsy Groves sat down heavily on the unmade bed. Her face had turned a pale color, like putty.

“That was hers.” She clenched the paper between two fingers, causing it to bend, then wilt.

Jaime standing over her, leaning at the waist. Again, reminding Laura of a giant draft horse who didn't know where to put his feet. “Which one, ma'am?” he asked gently.

Mrs. Groves touched the sheet with the index finger of her other hand, and the sheet of paper rattled. “
That
one.”

Laura and Jaime looked.

“The charm bracelet?” Jaime asked.

Patsy Groves nodded. She was already crying.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded again. Her face suffused with redness, already congested with tears.

Laura stared at the fax. It was hard to tell, but she guessed the bracelet was silver. There were six charms on it. All of them were shoes. Intricately-made, perfect little shoes. High heels, pumps, shoes from the turn of the century.

“See those little baby shoes? I gave her those. I looked all over for them. They were real silver.”

Laura looked at Jaime and he looked at her.

Both of them feeling the same thing. Sadness for Patsy Groves—and exhilaration.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Feeling restless, Steve had to do something, so he took a hike up to Camp Aratauk. The air was fresh, the sky an incredible, pulsing blue above the pine tops, which at eight in the morning were green-gold, individual pine needles catching the light like tinsel. Their scent overpowering.

He'd relented and let Jake come along. Packed two bottles of water in his day-pack and a nylon bag which magically turned into a dog's water dish when he opened it up.

A rushed feeling—that was the best way he could describe it—seemed to propel him through the forest. Every sense alive. He felt impatient, anxious, as if everything else was unimportant. It felt as if he were just marking time, that what he did up here on the mountain was just something to be gotten through so he could start his real life.

He recognized the symptoms.

“What do you think, buddy?” he asked Jake. “You think it's mutual?”

Jake was digging under a grapevine, so he didn't answer. But Steve thought Detective Cardinal was as attracted to him as he was to her. He doubted she would act on it, though. She'd have to get the case behind her. She'd have to find out who killed Jenny Carmichael before he could so much as ask her to dinner.

Right now it was only attraction, but he couldn't help but jump ahead.

Steve had been in love—truly in love—twice before. Julie—that was bad for a while, but he had gotten over it. They were friends now. But Linda … that still ate at him. Linda and Bill Gardner.

Bill Gardner, the dog trainer. You couldn't really call him a dog trainer, though. He used to hold Doberman pups up by their choke collars to punish them. Hang them until they became docile. Until they feared him.

In the time that Steve had known Bill Gardner, two of his dogs had died in “accidents.”

But Linda had liked him. She’d liked him so much she had taken him to bed—
their
bed, the one they'd bought at Bed World. He remembered bouncing up and down on the mattress in the show room, then lying flat, and when they’d thought no one was looking, they'd even made out on it, the bed with the super-ultra-spring-air-astro-sponge mattress. They'd also bought the bedding there—one-stop shopping. A black and purple and gray comforter and matching sheet set, a jumble of rectangles and circles, which had looked pretty sharp against the window behind it, the window looking out at the ocean, if you squinted past the two blocks of houses that ran down each side of the street.

Their marriage bed. Bespoiled by Bill Gardner, the dog trainer. Involuntarily, his hands clenched into fists.

Lighten up
, he told himself. It was a long time ago. No use thinking about it.

Jake had stopped up the trail ahead of him, waiting. Hard to believe Jake was well into middle-age and rounding in on old.

“No gray hairs on your muzzle anyway,” Steve said. As he shifted the backpack to make himself more comfortable, an image flashed across his vision: a hotter, steeper climb. Standing in the shade of a twisted oak tree, trying to cool down.

The image was gone as soon as it came. A jay scolded him from a tree, and Steve looked up, inexplicably irritated. The jay must have sensed his ill will; it stopped suddenly and fluttered away.

Jake paused on the hill above him, his expression plain:
What's the hold up?

“You keep going like that, you're going to be dragging your tongue before we're through.”

Jake lifted his leg on a tree trunk for answer and trotted on.

Steve followed Jake onto the graded dirt road. The road was level, so for a while it was easy. He spotted the area he had bushwhacked through earlier and stepped up into the trees.

He pushed through the screen of underbrush, and there it was. Camp Aratauk.

Jenny Carmichael standing under the overhang of Bunk 4 in the recessed darkness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

From the airport hotel, Laura and Jaime drove out to Mrs. Carmichael's house. She wasn't home, so Laura left a card in her screen door, asking her to call them.

Next they went to see Elke Hofmanns, the witness who had seen the man, the white car, and the girl back in 1997. She lived in the El Encanto neighborhood in central Tucson, not far from the Brashears. This was another wealthy area, differentiated from Colonia Solana mostly by the landscaping; here there were deep green lawns, lots of palm trees, orange trees, and riots of bougainvillea. It looked a lot like southern California.

As they approached the house, she threw open the door to her pink mini-mansion, and two dogs of indeterminate lineage hurtled out onto the front lawn. One large and wire-haired, the other small with a short coat.

Elke Hofmanns was dressed for a trip to the park—a blinding white large T-shirt over turquoise nylon shorts. Ball cap, ponytail, dark glasses. She dressed younger than she was. Up close, her skin was the color and consistency of beef jerky, and her square-jawed face was scored with lines.

They talked out in front of the house, dogs milling around them.

Jaime asked the questions. It soon became clear that Elke had not been a reliable witness. She had not seen the man and the white car near Rose Canyon Lake. In Jaime's questioning, it came out that the car, the girl, and the man were parked much farther up the mountain, near the ranger's station at Palisades.

In her defense, Mrs. Hofmanns said, “It was only a few months after I came here from Germany. Peter—he died last year—was the one you should have talked to. He always was more observant than me.” Too late now.

Jaime asked her to describe the girl.

“I only saw her for a blink of an eye. We were driving.”

“Did you notice the color of her hair?”

“She was blond. That is my recollection.”

“You said she wore a uniform.”

“
Ya
, it was a uniform. I'm sure of that. That is what made me call. I thought it would help. Brownie! Come back here!” she yelled at the bigger dog, who was lifting his leg on the neighbor's lawn jockey.

“Could you describe the uniform?” Jaime asked, ignoring the circus going on around them. Patience was his strong suit.

“It was green. Mint green? I think so.”

“Green?”

She nodded. “Green.”

Laura and Jaime looked at each other.

The ranger station by Palisades was a stone's throw from the Girl Scout camp. Girl Scouts wore green. “Probably a man and his daughter,” Jaime said as they drove out of the neighborhood, out onto Country Club.

“How did Art Schiller miss it?” Laura said.

“Maybe because he just wanted it to work out.”

They both knew how that felt.

Laura said, “So what does this mean?”

He scratched his head and the odor of Brylcreem filled the car. “Guess it means the white car theory is out the window.”

“Uh-huh.”

Suddenly, Laura's phone rang.

“Is this Detective Cardinal?” a voice asked on the other end. Laura could hear noise in the background—the sigh of constant traffic, punctuated by the garble of a patrol car radio, and voices in the background.

Laura held the phone harder to her ear. The caller introduced himself as a TPD detective sergeant named Ashburn.

“You put out an Attempt to Locate on a Robert Heywood?” He read off a description of the truck and the license plate number.

Jaime said, “What is it?”

Laura waved her hand at him. “Yes? Have you found him? Is he in custody?”

“In a manner of speaking. We've got him all right. Only he's dead.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Steve felt weak with relief. It wasn't Jenny after all. An Emory oak obscured part of the entrance to Bunk 4. What he'd seen was the early light touching on a few dry oak leaves, which along with the shadow pattern on the wood, looked remarkably like a girl's face and hair.

Just a step sideways and the illusion vanished.

Steve spent the better part of an hour exploring the camp.

Camp Aratauk was laid out in a circle around a central area like a village green. A dirt road split at the bottom of the green, forming a roundabout. At the top of the roundabout was the mess hall. To the right of the mess hall, set back a little, was the office, which looked like every other bunkhouse only bigger. The bunkhouses were ranged on either side of the green. Behind the mess hall, Steve could see outbuildings, likely the works of the camp: equipment sheds, a place for the workers to stay, bathrooms, and showers.

Even though ponderosa pine woods were not, by nature, encroaching, he got that feeling here. A lot of undergrowth had sprung up over the past decade, and the area had more than its share of dry-looking oaks, many of them festooned with wild grapevines. Bunk 4 in particular looked dark. It made him think of a picture in one of the books his mother had read to him as a child. The house in Hansel and Gretel. Whoever the artist was, he'd made a woodcut that was old-fashioned, quaint, and spooky as hell.