Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (5 page)

Laura thought how sharp this girl was. “That's what I mean.”

Micaela looked at Laura. Laura got the feeling that the Brashear girl was looking down at her from above, detached. Her eyes had taken on an odd sheen.

“Yes,” she said. “There was another girl.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Another girl?”

Laura felt as if she'd fallen down the White Rabbit's bolt hole. There had been no mention of another girl in the newspaper accounts she had seen. She looked at Micaela, careful to keep her expression neutral. The rest of the room faded—it was just the two of them now. “You're sure?”

Micaela Brashear's odd eyes seemed to hook into her. “I'm sure. He took her out into the desert.”

Laura's mind racing. “Where was this?”

“Here, in Tucson.”

Could she be talking about Kristy Groves or Jenny Carmichael? Laura glanced at Jaime. He had straightened up in the chair, both feet planted on the floor. As surprised as she was, but his heavy-lidded eyes veiled his emotions.

“When did this happen?” Laura asked.

“Soon after we came back from San Diego,” she said, adding, “The first time we went there.”

“How old was she?”

“I think she was my age.”

That let out Kristy Groves, who was fourteen at the time of her disappearance.

“When would this have been?”

The girl shook her head. “I can't remember. Some time that year.”

“'96 or '97?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Were you there when he met her?”

She shook her head. “No. He said he picked her up outside a 7-Eleven. I don't know which one.”

This did not sound like the Jenny Carmichael abduction. Jenny had disappeared from the Catalina Mountains in 1997. There were no 7-Elevens up on the mountain.

" Where were you at the time he picked her up?”

“At his house.”

“Did you meet her?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What did she look like?”

“She had dark hair.”

It wasn't Jenny. Jenny was blond. “Do you remember what she wore?”

Micaela shook her head.

“What happened to this girl?”

“I think she died.” She added, “Maybe that was a dream, though. It's hard to know what was a dream and what was reality. I blacked out a lot. I know that because I was so scared. And I know he drugged me.”

“He drugged you? When was this?”

“From the beginning. He'd give me shots. I fought him, but it did no good. I saw him do it to that other girl. After a while, he didn't have to drug me anymore—I was pretty cooperative. I cooperated because I had loved ones. That was always at the back of my mind, the way he held it over my head.”

Laura was trying to get an overview, but it kept slipping out of focus. Micaela's speech hung her up a little, her occasionally stilted way of speaking: “I cooperated because I had loved ones.”

Laura said, “You met this girl after you left town and came back?”

“I think so.”

“How long ago was this?”

She shook her head. “I can't remember. It
seemed
like it was weeks, or even months. But I remember the girl. He kept telling her she wasn't wife material.”

“Not wife material?”

“He meant she wasn't going to be with us very long. That turned out to be what happened. I was there when he took her out to the desert.”

Laura asked, “What places around Tucson can you remember going to?”

“We never went anywhere.”

“But you said you were there at the desert when he took her out there.”

“That was the one time.” She twisted sideways in her chair, pulled her knees up and cradled them with her arms. “Usually, whenever he went somewhere, he'd leave me alone in the basement.”

“Why did he have you go with him that time?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe he wanted to show me what could happen to me if I didn't do what he said.”

Laura switched tacks. “Do you know who owned the house?”

Micaela shook her head.

“Could it have belonged to someone else? Like a relative?”

Micaela looked at her with her strange eyes. “I don't know. He always blindfolded me until we got to the basement.”

“When you went with him and he took the other girl out into the desert? Do you remember where you went?”

She shook her head. “We drove around and around that night, I'm not sure where it was, just some desert somewhere. I was scared he was going to kill both of us, but he told me to sit still. He took her out by the arm and she was crying. She was pleading and begging, ‘please don't kill me, please don't kill me!’ It just made him madder. He took her by the arm and dragged her out of the car. It was horrible. Then he came back and acted like nothing ever happened. I asked him where she was, and he just said, ‘You better do exactly what I say or you'll end up like her.’”

“What did you do while he took her into the desert?”

“What could I do? I couldn't do anything. I closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears and tried not to hear it.”

“You remember plugging your ears?”

She nodded. “It was like a nightmare, but I know it was real. And then, when he was done … we drove away. That was the night we left. He wanted to go back to San Diego. I was so scared.”

Her hands weaving in and out of the air again.

“I was afraid he'd kill me next. I prayed and prayed. I prayed for her, and I prayed just to stay alive.”

“Did you hear anything? When he took her out into the desert?”

“Like what? A gunshot?”

“Anything at all?”

“Just the girl pleading for her life.
Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me.
”

________

“You think it was
another
girl?” Jaime Molina asked Laura as they walked out to the car. “Someone we don't know about?”

“The age doesn't fit with Kristy, and Jenny had blond hair.”

“He could have killed Kristy, though. Picked her up when Micaela wasn't around.”

“You mean, so she didn't know about it?”

Jaime said, “This whole thing is weird. This guy. The way he kept her and didn't keep the others.”

“It had to be another girl, one we don't know about,” Laura said. Wondering how the previous investigator had overlooked a missing kid. The only cases she knew of were the ones she'd put together for her cold case file: Kristy Groves, Jenny Carmichael, and Micaela Brashear.

She'd go back and check the records for ‘96 and ‘97, enlarge the search to ‘98. The following year was a real possibility since Micaela had been vague about the time frame. She'd call other jurisdictions, too—Santa Cruz County, Pinal County. Check with missing persons. Maybe some girl thought to be a runaway was Bill Smith's victim.

“We don't have to be at the airport until eight thirty,” Jaime was saying. He'd asked her something, but she hadn't heard him.

“I'm sorry,” Laura said. “I was elsewhere. What did you say?”

Jaime slid into the car, reached over, and pushed open her car door. “My sergeant's throwing a Fourth of July party. I promised I'd put in an appearance.”

“You're asking me to go?”

He shrugged, his heavy-lidded eyes slipping to half-mast. “No, just telling you what I'm gonna do.”

Going to a party in the middle of an investigation. Cold case or not, they had finally made some headway. “I think I'll go back and see if I can get a handle on this missing girl.”

“Rory Flynn will be there.”

Rory Flynn was the retired sheriff's detective who had originally worked the Kristy Groves case. Laura asked, “You sure?”

“He never misses a party. Thought it might be a good idea to talk to him in an unthreatening setting, you know?”

He was smarter than she'd given him credit for. Laura knew Rory Flynn would resent them. Nobody liked to give up a case, even when he was retired. And they especially hated not being consulted. This would be an ideal situation for them to touch base with him without making it official.

“We have to stop at my place first,” Jaime said, driving west on Broadway past downtown, following Congress over the Santa Cruz River. “My wife made potato salad.”

“It's a potluck?”

“Hey, you don't get catering on a cop's salary.” He turned right on Grande.

“You live in Barrio Hollywood?”

“Yup.”

They passed Pat's Drive-in. Laura thought longingly of chili cheese dogs with diced onions.

Jaime Molina's house was an adobe brick ranch with a carport on the side. The pink brick used for the house also walled the front yard, alternating with panels of decorative wrought iron. A chinaberry tree threw deep shade on the walkway.

In the left corner of the yard was a shrine to the
Virgen de Guadalupe
, the inside wall painted turquoise, the
Virgen
tucked inside. A massive new Chevy truck sat in the driveway. The back window was a mural of an eagle rampant against an American flag.

Inside, the swamp box cooler sounded like a cement mixer, but did little to cool the house this close to the monsoon season. Drapes pulled, a big plasma TV on one end and a brick fireplace on the other. On the mantel were several framed photographs.

Laura looked at the photographs while Jaime rounded the kitchen counter and opened the refrigerator.

“Your wife have a special recipe?” she asked.

“Between you and me, she bought two tubs of potato salad, put them in her favorite bowl, and sprinkled paprika and parsley on top.”

“Sounds like my kind of woman.” Laura leaned closer to look at two of the formal portraits, each of a young lady wearing a floor-length gown. Their
quinceañeras:
coming-of-age celebrations girls went through when they reached fifteen years of age. “You have two daughters?”

Jaime came around the counter holding a large Pyrex bowl. “Uh-huh. That's Gloria and that's our baby, Valerie.” Puffing with pride—pretty dangerous when you were six three and close to three-hundred pounds. “Gloria's at the U of A. Valerie's a junior at Salpointe.”

“They're beautiful. How come your wife's not going to the party?”

“She's at a baby shower for my niece.”

“Ah.” She stared at Valerie in her pink dress sitting on a chair in the middle of what looked like a dance floor. People standing back against the walls. Jaime, resplendent in a tuxedo, knelt before her, removing a dance slipper from one foot and replacing it with a pink high-heeled shoe: the stiletto heel being the modern symbol of coming-of-age for the fifteen-year-old Mexican girl.

Laura noticed that in the picture, Jaime Molina's eyes were unusually bright. She thought he was holding back tears. His smile as big as the room.

Suddenly she thought of Micaela Brashear and the way she had come of age at nine years old.

And Kristy Groves, who never had come of age at all.

Jaime said behind her, “Want to see my snakes?”

“What?” It sounded like a come-on. She realized she was automatically adjusting her impression of him as she got more information. Something women seemed to do naturally with male members of the species they didn't know. Trust, but verify.

His eyes narrowed, and she realized that he had caught her inflection. “Since I'm here, I want to check on my snakes. See if they've eaten. Thought you might like to see them.” He added, “Only take a minute, or you can wait here.”

“Uh … sure.”

Jaime led her down a long hallway lined with more portraits and family pictures. He opened the door at the end.

Covering the entire right-hand wall was a mural depicting snakes and lizards of every description. Laura recognized a western diamondback, a black-tailed rattlesnake, and a coral snake. Dominating the mural was a snake Laura did not recognize. It reared up, enormous, dead center. A gray viper, its mouth hinged so wide open it made her think of the puppet Elmo. The metallic gray scales were like polished tile, and the lidless eyes were flat, shiny extensions of those tiles. The snake was about to strike, but she couldn't get past the shiny black of its eyes. Nothing there but indifference. Indifference and cold efficiency.