The Laura Cardinal Novels (114 page)

Jake's eyebrows wrinkled as he looked up again, and this time, Steve saw fear in his own dog's golden eyes.

As white-hot as his anger, the despair that settled into him was cold and deep, like a toxic lake, sinking down into his vitals, seeping into his soul.

“I'm sorry,” he said. He walked back out to the side window.

The man was popping another bottle cap. It hit the ground, winking in the sunlight, and the man leaned down to pick it up and almost fell over.

Drunk as a skunk, as his father used to say.

The Man Without a Face sat down at the table. He seemed to be staring off into the woods, and Steve got the feeling that the man was deeply wounded.

It was hard to tell for sure. Just the feeling he got. The man was drunk, the man was losing control of his emotions, even though he was simply staring at the woods. He was like a walking nerve; he seemed lurid somehow, like fresh blood bubbling up or rented flesh still curling in on itself. These images slashed across Steve's mind, and he believed they were true. He was sure of it. This was what he felt, here, behind the glass, looking at the man, who simply sat staring into the woods.

The man sitting in the woods, looking up the hill. A cloud covering the sun, a rumbling of thunder.

The man stiffening. Rising to his feet. Having to catch himself, hold on to the picnic table, which came about crotch high.

Some commotion beyond him. Screened by the limbs and pine needles. From this angle, he could only see jumbles and color. But he knew what it was. Steve was way ahead of the man. He saw the train wreck coming, but could do nothing about it.

As if it were preordained, he watched with morbid interest,
avid
interest, as the scene unfolded before him. He could have been in the darkness of a movie theater, popcorn tub in his lap, watching the big screen with rapt attention. Even though he knew the story, knew it in his bones, he watched.

As if the trees had parted, he saw the girl in the khaki uniform up by the stream bed, paging through her book.
The Man in the Moon
. The Man in the Moon Goes to a Padres Game. The Man in the Moon Gets a Lap Dance.

The Man in the Moon Gets His Lunch Eaten
.

The puppy coming for the kibble, which is strewn on one of the rocks, the granitic rock peppered with garnets, the garnets rust-colored and shaped like tiny soccer balls. He can see them. He can see the girl, too, feigning indifference, reading her book, setting the trap. The puppy coming closer, wanting the food, hungry for it, but wary, oh-so-wary. Like Jake in the bedroom is wary. Jake is wary and so is the puppy, and for an instant they blur together: the black puppy and the black dog. Jenny Carmichael's puppy and Jake.

Quick as a whip, the girl grabs the puppy's collar, and the puppy bolts. Its cry is sharp, injured.

The man is taller now, bulkier, angrier. He is outsized in his navy-blue shirt and blue jeans,
big
and angry. And when he yells, his voice magnifies in Steve's head, bouncing through his ear canals, throbbing in the spaces behind his eyeballs. LEAVE THAT PUPPY ALONE!

Leave him alone
, the man yells, his voice big and booming and frightening, the voice of a man who has been stretched by life like a rubber band to the snapping point. And Steve hears Bill Gardner snickering in his head, “Showed
that
little bastard. Thought he could bite me and get away with it? There's only one boss when it comes to dog training.”

Bill Gardner, snickering from under the covers in his wife's bed, the dark purple and gray geometric shapes, the ocean behind the window—

The long hike up the mountain. Clouds racing to cover the sky. Thunder and lightning. The steep trail in the glaring heat, the heavy backpack. Rain, hard and angry, pounding the steak left out on the picnic table into a pulp. The yelling man.

All of it converging on him at once.

And suddenly he's in the house and it's dark and it's morning and he smells bacon frying and he's lost a day, he remembers the hangover and he's lost a day, and it's the next day and he's looking out the window at the rain, the thunder and the lightning, looking at the stream bed, and at the freshly-turned earth turning black from the rain, all night in the rain, digging, digging, digging, and the man is frying bacon, and this time when Steve asks him to turn around, he does.

And the man is him.

As Laura listened to Frances Goodenough at Oro Valley PD, she started to get a bad feeling. As if she were in her car with the windows rolled up and the air at full blast, the stereo turned up all way, and someone was tapping on the window.

The more she ignored it, the louder the tapping became, until at last she had to turn off the air conditioner and the stereo and look at the window to see who was tapping so insistently.

This was what had been bothering her: Two cars had left the Brashear's house earlier this morning. The Navigator was one. The maid's car was the other.

If Lourdes had driven out under her own steam, how had Angela taken her hostage?

Laura looked at the Oro Valley PD detective. She didn't want to tread on his interview, but she had an important question.

He saw her look, and he nodded.

“You said ‘they,’” Laura said to Fran Goodenough. “You said
they
left you out in the desert. What did you mean by
they
?”

Fran Goodenough, a pale, blond woman with short hair and very pale eyes, looked at Laura, her plump face confused. “I—I meant the two of them. The one who had the gun on me and the one in the backseat, yelling at me. The little one.”

“The little one?”

“The older lady.”

Laura pictured the deputy escorting the Brashear's maid to his car. “Excuse me,” she said. She went outside and called Nina Brashear, who answered on the first ring. Laura asked how Dr. Brashear was.

“He's in surgery. That's all I know.”

“Is Lourdes with you?”

“Lourdes?” She sounded as confused as Fran Goodenough had looked.

“A sheriff's deputy dropped her off at the hospital so she could be with you.”

“I haven't seen her.”

Laura thanked her and hung up. She called the sheriff's office and was patched through to the deputy who had taken Lourdes to the hospital.

“I dropped her off at the front entrance,” he told her.

Back inside the office, Laura asked Fran Goodenough to go over her story again.

Two women had approached her as she’d prepared to unload her groceries into the trunk of her car. She’d been reaching down for the trunk lever on the driver's side when the younger woman had pushed her back into the car.

That was when she’d noticed the black SUV parked in the adjoining space. The older woman had started pulling things out of the SUV and throwing them into the Camry, all the time talking in Spanish. The younger woman had shown Frances her gun, ordering her to stay put in the driver’s seat. She’d gone around and got in on the passenger side, had pushed the gun into Frances's side and told her to drive. The older woman had gotten in the back with all the stuff she'd brought along with her.

They’d found a dirt road, and the younger girl had told told Frances to keep driving until they were hidden from view. Then they’d pushed her out, warned her not to tell anyone, left her there.

“Did the older woman talk to you?”

“She told me they would come after me and kill me if I didn't do exactly what they said.”

“She said this in English?”

“I don't speak Spanish.”

Laura had been completely fooled. Everyone had. They had taken Lourdes at face value. Perhaps it was because she was a maid; shy, cowed, seemingly unable to speak English—the kind of person who passed under the radar. No one had bothered to really look at her.

Laura blamed herself. She had not been able to look beyond the stereotype and actually see the woman.

So who was she?

Lourdes had told Frances Goodenough that her daughter would come back and kill her if she didn't cooperate. Laura remembered what Trudy Goodrich told her about the woman who ran the ringtoss, whose fifteen-year-old daughter had taken up with Robert Heywood all those years ago.

Lourdes was Angela's mother.

From the Oro Valley PD, Laura drove back to the Purvis place; she would use it as her headquarters. As she turned into the yard, Victor called. A check with Yellow Cab—the third taxi company he had contacted—yielded a fare from the University of Arizona Hospital. The taxi driver described a Hispanic woman in a maid's uniform. He'd dropped her at a parking lot in Reid Park and saw her get into a white Tempo or Topaz. The time was one fifty-four p.m.

Reid Park bordered on Colonia Solana Estates on the south. Lourdes must have driven the few blocks to the park earlier in the day and left her car there for later, in case she needed it.

“We've requested a fixed-wing aircraft from Phoenix to search for both the Mercury and the truck,” Victor said. “If they can get to I-19, it's a straight shot to Mexico. You gonna handle next of kin?”

Laura agreed that she would. At the Purvis trailer, she waited for the crime scene techs to finish (they were within minutes of her arrival) and found the phone number for Lucy Purvis, Clinton's ex-wife, on the speed-dialer of his phone. She called the number and broke the news that Clinton had been in a shooting and was in the hospital.

“He'll be all right, won't he?” Mrs. Purvis asked her.

“We think so.” Laura gave her the information, then asked her about Angela's mother and started to describe her.

“I can do you one better,” Mrs. Purvis said. “I have a photo of them from the carnival. I know exactly where it is—it's in a photo album in the den. Let me scan it, and I'll send it to you.”

Twenty minutes later, Laura was looking at a photo of Lourdes and Angela on her cell phone. Lourdes was a younger version of the Brashears's maid. Angela was in her teens, but she hadn't changed all that much.

Lucy Purvis said to Laura, “I knew there was something bad about Angela from the very beginning. The way she'd suck up to you if she wanted something, and other times, she'd look right through you as if you didn't exist. She and her mother were always plotting something. Lourdes had a reputation as a flattie.”

“A flattie?”

“I heard she flattened the games sometimes—if there was a mark with some obvious cash she wouldn't let him win, she'd go for all the money she could get and leave him flat broke. She was very smooth about it. Had that look down to a T. ”

“What look?” Laura asked.

“That defenseless, oh-poor-me look. People always underestimated her. And Angela. She never got into trouble herself, but she got plenty of the other kids in hot water. She always made me think of the cat who drank the cream. That
smile
on her face. As if she was so superior. You really think she helped Heywood kill Tom?”

“I do think that, but I don't know that we could prove it.”

Lucy said, “I
knew
it.”

Laura checked the farm building she and Jaime had looked at on their earlier trip out here, thinking that while Lourdes was going into her terrified maid act, Angela had to hide somewhere until she could escape. Laura entered the cavernous building and walked straight to the tractor. She had to stand on her tiptoes to peer into the interior. The windows were dusty and grimy, and she could see only part of the floor. Laura went around to the other side and got up on what passed for a running board. She was about to touch the glass when she saw the four fingertip prints stark against the dust.

She stepped back down from the tractor and called for the DPS fingerprint tech, who was currently driving back to Tucson. Then she waited in the relative cool of the farm shed. Before she'd seen the prints and backed off, Laura had managed to angle her gaze toward the floor of the tractor. An old blanket lay on the floorboard. She surmised that Angela had used the blanket to cover herself up.

Angela could have easily sneaked out the back door of the machinery shed.

She called the deputy who had arrived on the scene first. “Did you see Purvis's truck?” she asked him.

“The green Ford F-250? No. I thought the suspect took it.”

“Did you see any vehicles other than the Camry?”

He thought about it. “No.”

“I'd like to ask the other deputies at the scene—could you have them call me asap?” She gave him her number.

“I could ask them all and call you back with a report.”

“No, I want to talk to each of them separately. Just have them call me.”

She sat down on the concrete lip in the shade of the farm machinery building, out of the oppressive heat, staring at the dogs' graves, but thinking about Angela.

Thinking about everything that had happened today. It appeared that twenty-five-year-old Angela had managed to convince everyone she was twenty-year-old Micaela Brashear—easy enough to do.

But would they ever find the
real
Micaela?

Laura watched as Dan Montes, one of the lab techs, stowed his equipment into the back of his van. Her mind going back to Micaela—another lost girl. Probably buried somewhere in the desert.

And what about Lily? Was Lily real or just someone Angela had made up for her own amusement? As she had made up Bill Smith, the paper tiger of kidnappers. Laura's gaze strayed to the graves again. She noticed that a couple of the wooden signs—the two at the end— had nothing written on them.

Dan Montes had just opened the door to his van when Laura yelled out for him to come over to the shed and bring his shovel.

Laura was supervising the excavation of the dog graves when her phone chirped. She answered, thinking it would be one of the sheriff's deputies calling her back about the truck. She'd already seen the tire tracks on the far side of the farm machinery building. If the truck had been parked there when the sheriff's deputies arrived, it would have been invisible from the mobile home. All Micaela would have to do was wait until the techs were inside the trailer before driving away.