Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (9 page)

“You said not at the time? Did you resent them later?”

“No, I just meant…” She fiddled with her hair, then let her hand drop to her lap. “Later on, after Kristy went missing, Greg took against me. Like it was my fault. Which it wasn't. She was fourteen years old, you'd think she could walk one block home. Dave and Joanne didn't once come to my defense, even though they could see what a handful she was.”

“You feel you got all the blame?”

“Darn right I did, and it wasn't fair.”

Interesting, Laura thought, that she expected her husband's brother and his wife to take her side.

Jaime shifted forward in his chair. “How would you characterize your husband's relationship with his daughter?”

“He always took up for her. I was the one who expected her to do her homework, her chores, so I was the one she got mad at. She was a regular Daddy's Girl. In her eyes, he could do no wrong.”

Jaime leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together. “How about Dave? Did he and Kristy get along?”

She looked at him. “You're not saying—" She stopped, swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “There's no way.” Her tone defiant. “To Dave, she was an annoyance. He hardly noticed her at all except when she got obnoxious—you know how teenagers are—and you could tell he was put off. He never had kids. You're barking up the wrong tree if you think he did anything with her.” She paused, looked at both of them with a mixture of resentment and disappointment. “Besides, I thought it was a serial killer.”

“We have to cover all the bases,” Jaime said quietly.

“Well, it
was
a serial killer, wasn't it? Had to be. What about those other girls? You don't have to worry about Greg or Dave. They were both fine with her. They weren't so fine with me, but that's another story.”

Jaime asked her about their trip to the county fair.

“There was a guy. He was talking to her outside one of the bathrooms. I could tell he was trying to pick her up. She looked older than her age. Kristy was fourteen going on thirty. But I stopped that. I walked right up to them.”

“What happened then?”

“The man turned around and left. Just like that. Before I even got there.”

“What did he look like?”

“All I remember were his eyes. The look he gave me before he left. Of course, Kristy was mad at me for spoiling her fun. Talking to a complete stranger at the fair. I always get the blame.”

Jaime tried to find out more about the man talking to Kristy, but that was all she could give them. “You entered a sweepstakes for a Ford Explorer,” he added. “Do you remember that?”

She looked at them blankly. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Someone could have gotten your address from the entry blank.”

Patsy Groves had nothing to say to that, but the look in her eyes told them this was just one more piece of blame she'd have to shoulder alone.

Jaime left to meet the forensic anthropologist, Jean Cox, at the crime scene. They would look for graves they might have overlooked. Laura stayed behind to run down the carnival Micaela Brashear and Kristy Groves had attended shortly before their disappearances.

The carnival that worked the Pima County Fair was easy to track—it took one phone call to the Southwestern Fair Commission, which put on the Pima County Fair every year. Behr Family Amusements, which had done the fair for the last eighteen years, was one of the biggest carnivals in the country.

According to their website, BFA's regular route for the past fifteen years took them to Riverside, California, at the end of October. If Kristy Groves had met someone with the carnival, it would have been this one. But it also meant that Behr Family Amusements would have been in California when Micaela went to the carnival the previous October.

Patsy Groves described the man trying to pick Kristy up as young. Smith was in his forties and balding. That was a discrepancy, but Laura couldn't ignore the carnival link. Maybe other men had spoken to Kristy.

She called the carnival HR department (amazed that a carnival had a Human Resources person) and asked if they had ever hired a Bill Smith. The name was such an obvious alias, Laura expected her hear they'd hired several Bill Smiths. She gave the woman Micaela's description of him.

“Offhand, I can't think of anyone like that, not with that name. But let me look in our files and I'll get back to you.”

It went downhill from there. Laura spent an exasperating half hour trying to learn if any permits had been issued to carnivals in the last two weeks of October when Micaela disappeared. She called the city office where temporary business permits were issued; development services (electrical and schematic inspections); and the health department (food booth inspections). None of these panned out. Records of these kinds of permits were uniformly expunged from the system after five years. It also turned out, to her dismay, that Arizona was one of a dozen states that did not require ride safety inspections.

Laura realized she needed to talk to Micaela Brashear again. She thought about calling Jaime, but he would be wrapped up at the crime scene for a while. She could talk to Micaela by phone, but it was always preferable to do interviews in person. A face-to-face interview allowed her to use all her senses.

The weather disturbance that had infused the Tucson valley with the promise of rain was gone, leaving a blue sky hard as glazed crockery. Since there were a couple of cars in the driveway, Laura parked on the road. The heat swarmed around her face like bees, stealing her breath from the moment she left her car; even a thirty-yard walk in this heat was daunting. Her pace quickened under the full sun and slowed when she reached the shade thrown by the royal palms. She thought about the illegal immigrants sixty miles from here on the border, walking for miles. Many of them dying in the desert. It wouldn't take very long for
her
to die—not long at all.

She rang the bell and found herself waiting a long time. The front door was under an arched alcove and additionally cooled by the shade of an alligator juniper tree. A mockingbird sang from the tree's branch, and Laura thought about her own mockingbirds back on the Bosque Escondido.

They were wild birds, but Laura had named them after they had stayed through their first winter with her three years ago: Buster and Blanca. She'd put out water for them, which they viewed as their own private watering hole, and watched them raise generations of fledglings.

In the last few days, Laura had gradually come to the realization that Buster and Blanca were gone. She had no idea where they'd disappeared to or when exactly they'd made their departure. She'd been fooled for a while because a mockingbird still sang from the wire going into the telephone pole above the house. When it finally dawned on her that Buster and Blanca weren't coming for their water and the mocker was perched in a different spot, Laura had taken a good look at the bird. It wasn't Buster. This mockingbird looked more like the Maltese Falcon—broad-shouldered and sharp-beaked.

All this time, she'd been talking to the imposter as she watered plants or pulled up weeds. The fact that she was fooled made her feel vaguely ashamed. What kind of detective was she if she couldn't see something so patently obvious? But the two birds had sounded exactly alike, just like their cousin here in the juniper tree.

She rang the bell again. This time the door opened almost immediately. The maid she'd seen last time answered, wearing the same outfit, the knit shirt over a white skirt and Keds.

The maid let Laura into the house and motioned her to stay in the foyer. The house was cold. A female voice, singing, floated down from a room on the second floor—deeper and darker than the voice student Laura had heard before. Laura knew it was Nina Lantz-Brashear.

A few minutes later, Micaela Brashear came down the curved staircase. She wore a halter top, cropped jeans, and bejeweled flip-flops that showed off her lacquered toenails. “Hi,” she said. “You wanted to talk to me?”

“Just a couple of questions.”

The maid hovered nearby, an uncertain smile on her face.

“
Es tambien
,” Micaela told her. She led Laura through the house to a narrow room, one wall all screened windows and a pair of French doors looking to the back yard. A print of woman holding calla lilies hung from the wall opposite the windows. The floor was dark red concrete. Outside, there was a lawn, several royal palms, a swimming pool, and a cabana.

Micaela sat in a wing chair, her back to the yard, pulling her feet up and locking her arms around her knees. Laura thought again that although Micaela Brashear wasn't classically beautiful, her features were assembled in such a way that she could stop traffic with one look.

“Do you remember the carnival you went to with your friend…” Laura looked at her notes. “Lindsay Copeland? It was about a week before you were kidnapped.”

She touched one of the small golden hoops at her ear. “It was just a shopping center somewhere. We were coming back from swimming when Lindsay saw it and asked her mom if we could go in.”

“You remember the part of town?”

“Somewhere on the west side. We went to that water-slide place; it was on the way back.”

“Can you remember any cross streets?”

“It was by the freeway.”

“Did anything stand out in your memory?” Laura thinking:
If she met Bill Smith, she'd remember that.

Micaela shook her head. “Nuh-uh. The rides weren't that great. It was actually pretty bogus. There was a Tilt-a-Whirl,” she added helpfully.

“You didn't see Bill Smith?”

Micaela looked at her bright pink nails, rubbed at a spot. “No. At least I don't think I did. I guess he might have seen
me
.” She added, “Lindsay might remember more, but I don't know how to get in touch with her.”

She explained that Lindsay and her mom had moved away not long after she herself was kidnapped. “Her dad was in the Air Force, so they didn't stay in any place very long.”

“I wanted to ask you about the girl who was killed. Can you remember anything more about that night? Where you were?”

She shook her head.

Once more, Laura asked about cross streets, whether they had gone north, west, east, or south.

“I wish I could help, but I just don't remember.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

“We only talked once or twice. He kept us in different rooms. We talked through the wall one time when Bill was gone. If he heard us, he would have killed us.” Matter-of-fact. As if a man killing two girls for talking was an everyday occurrence.

“Did she tell you her name?” Laura asked.

Micaela knitted her brows together, staring at the wall beyond Laura. “I think her name was Lily.”

“Anything else you can remember? About her family, where she was from?”

But Micaela couldn't remember anything else. Frustrated, Laura thanked her, and Micaela walked her out.

As they reached the front door, Laura saw Nina Brashear coming down the stairs.

“Is everything all right?” Nina said.

“Fine,” Laura replied. “I had a couple more questions for Micaela.”

“She wanted to know about the carnival we went to,” Micaela said.

“The carnival?” Nina Brashear looked at Laura. “You think that Bill Smith might have worked there?”

“It's something to look into.”

Micaela said, “I've got to go get ready for work. Is there anything else?”

“You go ahead, Mickey,” Nina Brashear said.

“Where does she work?” Laura asked as Micaela headed up the stairs.

“A Baby Gap at the mall. It's a good summer job.” She looked vaguely embarrassed. “After she gets her GED, she'll be going to Stanford.”

“Does she know what she wants to do?”

“No, not really. She's so young, and being dragged around all over the place…” She stopped herself. “It affected a lot of things. She's very mature in some ways, and in others, I think she was left behind.”

“Hard to adjust,” Laura said.

“Yes, it's been hard. For all of us. I want to apologize for Colin, the way he acted yesterday.”

“No problem. I know this is difficult.”

“You have no idea. You spend all this time praying for something like this, even though you've given up hope. And then your dream comes true…” She waved her hand helplessly. “And it just doesn't … It's as hard for her as it is for us. Harder. I can't even think about what she went through.” She stopped abruptly. “You probably don't want to hear this. Our problems are minimal compared to what happened to that other family. Have you had any luck finding out who killed that other little girl?”

“Not yet. But we're not giving up.”

“I'm so glad of that. Not everybody can be as lucky as we were.”

As Laura stepped out onto the front step, she had a thought. “Do you give voice lessons—" She stopped, uncertain how to continue. She'd been about to say “Do you give voice lessons to anybody?” But she didn't want to say that.

Nina Brashear studied her intently. “Are you a singer?”