Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (29 page)

He stepped up onto the porch of Bunk 4. There was a chill, even in the middle of summer. Jake watched Steve from the safety of the ground outside. His look of doggy concern would have been laughable, if Steve himself didn't feel a tad bit unsettled.

He put his hand on the rail and stared through the open doorway. From where he stood, he could see a panel of sunlight striping the length of the floor under the windows. The place was empty and had the feeling of an abandoned nest. Shattered glass on the floor and a few broken strips from the windows, caught in a net of screen mesh. The bunks had been ripped out and removed. But he could picture them in rows down each side. He'd been to camp when he was a kid, so that was what he saw.

As he stepped up into the room, a board suddenly cracked like a shot, and his foot punched downward at least ten inches and landed in dirt. He lost his balance and nearly fell, grabbing hold of the edge of the doorway—a handful of splinters pierced his palm.

His heart beating in his chest, his head, his ears.

When he tried to pull his leg out, he couldn't. For just a second, he wondered if he would be trapped in here. He realized if he just made sure his foot was aligned with the hole where the plank had been, he would be all right. The wood scraped against his jean leg and caught his hiking boot briefly, but with an extra-hard jerk, he was free.

He wanted no more of the flooring in the bunkhouses.

Next, he looked into the mess hall. Counters toward the back, all the kitchen appliances gone. The tables and benches still there, bolted to the floor. A peg board had fallen down next to the doorway.

In the shed, he found a straw bale with target affixed. So there
had
been archery. Most of the place had been cleared out, but there were a few paint cans and remnants of an artist's easel.

Archery, volleyball, basketball, arts and crafts. A nice place for kids to spend part of their summer.

He found a frisbee sitting on a windowsill, took it out to the green, and threw it for Jake. All the time, thinking.

It was quite a hike Jenny Carmichael had made down to the stream bed near his cabin, if she had made it on her own. She'd had the book with her,
The Man in the Moon
. She could have carried it with her, but it was slightly oversized and would be awkward to take all that way.

This was assuming she had walked down under her own power. For all Steve knew, the person who killed her had been at the camp all the time. He glanced at the mess hall and the outbuildings behind it. How many workers kept a place like this going? Groundskeepers, handymen, janitors, cooks, counselors, administrators?

It could have been any of them.

He realized that he was developing a theory. Someone who worked here—probably male—had seen Jenny going off by herself and had followed her.

He was sure that Detective Cardinal and Detective Molina were already working on that theory, among others.

But now he was more than curious. The reputation of his grandfather was at stake. Also, Jenny had appeared to him. He felt he owed her something. He realized that this was what had drawn him up here. The desire to help her. To help find out who killed her.

He thought the key to it was the puppy. He tried to remember the child's exact words that day in the mist and the rain.
You're coming with
me
. You're
my
puppy now.

He threw the frisbee for Jake and watched it sail through the air, Jake
acting
like a puppy. “What do you think, Jake?” he asked. “The puppy didn't belong to her. She found him.”

That made sense.
You're my puppy now
. So if she’d found the puppy, it must have been lost—or someone had dumped him nearby. If she’d found the puppy near his cabin, the most likely scenario was that it had come from somewhere on that road. Either it had run away from someone's cabin, or it had been dumped.

Conversely, she could have found the puppy on the Camp Aratauk grounds and decided to hide him a ways from camp. Steve doubted the counselors would let her keep a puppy. It wouldn't be fair to the other girls, and these days everybody was worried about liability. What if it bit someone? So if she found the puppy, would she be savvy enough at eight years old to hide him?

He thought that she would.

Either way, she had ended up near his grandfather's cabin with the book and the puppy.

Because of the book, he thought the first scenario was the better fit. Say she had gone away to read her book and hang out by herself. She’d come across the puppy and tried to get him to go back with her. And then she’d come across the person who killed her. Either he had followed her from Camp Aratauk, or he had seen her from the road.

It was a good theory.

He wished he could talk to Laura Cardinal. He wished he could tell her about the puppy. But how would he explain it? He would only dig himself in deeper. He would have to tell her about his visions.

That, he wasn't prepared to do. Not yet anyway. He'd have to think about this.

He called to Jake, who came running, the frisbee in his mouth. “We'd better leave this here,” he said, placing it next to the flagpole.

They started back down the mountain, Steve still working it out in his mind.

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that this was what had happened. Jenny going off by herself to read, spotting the puppy, and following him. That would get her down to his grandfather's cabin.

By now they had bushwhacked down to the stream bed and were following it. Steve kept his head down to see the ground, but every once in a while he'd look up to see if he could spot the cabin.

“Detective work is harder than I thought it would be,” he said to Jake. “It's—”

He broke off as he saw a man walking down along the stream bed ahead of him, picking his way carefully, looking down.

He looked familiar, but Steve couldn't place him, especially from the back.

“Hey there!” Steve called.

The man didn't respond. He kept walking as if he didn't hear, disappearing into a copse of trees at the bend in the stream.

By the time Steve got to the bend, the man was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The Lariat Motel was located on Miracle Mile. Actually, the name “Miracle Mile,” which was a fantastical promotional name in the thirties, forties, and fifties, had been officially changed to “Oracle” in the nineties. The reason: The motels that were so popular in the motor hotel era had deteriorated to the point that they catered to a lot more Pretty Women than Griswolds. Drug deals were done on every street corner.

And so the city fathers decided that a name change would help the businesses.

Robert Heywood was definitely not good for business.

The Lariat Motel was a horseshoe-shaped, brick motor court painted a peeling white with a swimming pool in the center. The swimming pool was drained and surrounded by a fence, the flagstone pavers around it cracked. On the good side, the asphalt had just been resurfaced, and the diagonal stripes in front of each of the ten rooms had been repainted.

In one of these parking places was Robert Heywood's truck—the big Dodge Ram.

Not for the first time, Laura wondered how a convict just off parole had managed to buy a truck like that. She guessed that Sandy Heywood had credit. She was probably hocked to her eyebrows to pay for it.

The truck wore a thin veneer of dust, and the back gate was striped with crime scene tape that had been strung from one porch support to another, forming a triangle. The bulk of the vehicle hid the scene from view, but Laura knew where Robert Heywood would be.

A police officer with a clipboard stopped Laura and Jaime at the entrance to the crime scene. After they produced their shields, he held up the tape—POLICE, DO NOT CROSS—for them to duck under.

Fortunately, there were only the two homicide detectives inside the crime scene itself. And Heywood.

Heywood lay just inside the doorway.

“It's ten twenty-three,” Laura said. She glanced at the curb and wrote down both the time and the address in her notebook.

After introductions to the two TPD Detectives, Barry Schubert and Jesse Blaine, Laura tuned everything else out as she looked at the scene.

Laura recognized him from his picture. Robert Heywood had sustained two gunshot wounds to the face: one between the mouth and nose, the other beneath the left eye. From the size of the two holes and the stippling of gunpowder on the face, neck, and chest, Laura guessed he had been shot by a large caliber weapon from approximately two feet away. Although the edges of the wounds were jagged, there was little bleeding; she thought that the heat of the bullets had sealed the blood vessels.

Heywood appeared to have been shot as he answered the door. He'd fallen back against the motel room door, which opened inward. There were brown swipes of blood where he had bumped into the door as he fell backwards. Beneath his head on the brownish-green carpet, a lake of blood had already cooled—there was a skin on it, like the skin on pudding. A frothy mixture of blood, brains, and bone from the back of his skull had soaked into the carpet, giving it a pinkish tinge.

Heywood's body blocked the door from closing. He wore faded jeans and a T-shirt that said, “Hasta La Vista, Baby!” and showed a gun pointed outward. Prophetic.

One of the TPD detectives, Barry Schubert, was crouched like a catcher, looking down at the victim's head. “Looks to me like whoever shot him was shorter than him. The back of his skull is shattered. An upward trajectory would do that.”

Jaime said, “Do you have a positive ID?”

“Haven't looked yet. The truck belongs to Heywood. He signed his name in the motel register Robert H. Wood.”

“Original,” Jaime said.

Laura stood absolutely still, her hands tucked under her arms to avoid touching anything. Her eye recording everything, large and small.

Urine blotted the Y between Heywood's legs and along the fly. The pungent odor of pee mingled with gun powder, but the smell that overpowered them both was the stink of meat left out too long. It reminded her of some markets she had been to down in Mexico, and for a moment, her stomach turned.

She could see the soles of his sneakers. Little pebbles stuck in the treads. One shoelace untied. Could he have been dressing when he was summoned to the door?

Laura looked at the lintel, made note of the blood spatters. She wished she had her camera with her, but it was back in the Yukon at DPS. This was not her homicide case; she and Jaime were in a grey area, jurisdictionally, where the two cases intersected; TPD would call the shots.

Rigor had not set in. A couple of hours, tops. Somebody gets shot in the middle of the morning, it was likely another guest would hear. Someone in the rooms on either side, someone walking by to get ice. Somebody parking his car.

Laura scanned the concrete walkway, both ways. The drapes to the rooms on either side were closed. There were no cars in front of these rooms. In fact, there were no cars in front of any of the rooms, except for the truck. Laura wondered if the people who stayed here—she guessed they paid by the week or the month—had all taken off. She guessed most of the people who stayed at the Lariat would be in trouble with the law one way or the other.

“Who reported it?” she asked Detective Schubert. His partner, Baines, had left to talk to the manager of the motel.

Schubert nodded toward the street. “Somebody stopped at the light, a man named Charles Bader, saw him lying here in the doorway and called it in. We've already talked to him.”

Jaime said, “Did anybody come or go after you got here?”

“No,” Schubert said. “It was just like it is now—quiet.”

“Rats leaving a sinking ship,” muttered the first officer at the scene.

They ignored him.

Laura waited a beat, then said to the first officer, “How about you? Did you see anybody come or go?”

“No, ma'am. The only thing I saw when I got here was a maid. She was down at the end, cleaning that room.”

“Did you interview her?”