The Laura Cardinal Novels (116 page)

Laura continued to read her her rights, then radioed their location to Victor.

As Laura placed Angela into the patrol car, she asked, “What did you do to Lily?”

Angela smirked. “Nothing. I made her up.”

Laura nodded. It was the answer she'd expected.

Laura was bone-tired. It was going on four in the morning at the excavation site outside the farm machinery building on Trinidad Ranch, and her body ached from standing around.

Only one human skeleton had been found so far. Dental records confirmed that the bones in the grave belonged to Micaela Brashear. Heywood and Angela had probably tortured the girl here in the farm building, then buried her when they she was of no more use.

According to his wife, Clinton Purvis was hard of hearing and stayed close to his trailer and his dogs. But Tom Purvis must have figured it out. Tom Purvis might have planned to blackmail them or might have wanted to join in. Either way, Heywood and Santero had different plans for him.

All of the bones, all of the burial sites, were beginning to blur for Laura. She was sleepy. The heavy-duty lights lit the area like a stadium. She stifled a yawn, felt the breeze pick up. At four in the morning in late July, the heat only abated about this time and only for a little while. Usually any relief came in the form of a breeze.

This breeze was dry and redolent of death. She tried to smell autumn in it, but of course that was too far away.

Although Angela had told them nothing about what she had done between the time she took Purvis's truck and her encounter with Laura, they were able to piece it together by talking to the witnesses: the elderly couple who owned the truck Angela had stolen. When Angela couldn't dig herself out, she'd walked up the wash, just as Laura did. Unlike Laura, Angela had found the ranch house. She’d told the rancher and his wife that her truck was stranded in the wash, and she needed to call someone to pick her up. Once inside, Angela had shot the man in the knee, pistol-whipped him, and tied him up with the phone cord. Then she’d forced the woman to drive her to an ATM, and there, used the couple's credit card to get more money.

The way to the ATM machine had taken Angela and the woman past Hennessy's Steak House. When Angela saw the cop cars out front, her plans changed. She went back to the ranch house, tied the woman up along with her husband, then ransacked the place for money and jewelry. She'd been on her way out to the highway when she saw Laura walking up the wash.

Laura would always wonder why Angela didn't just take the road in the other direction. If she had, she'd be in Phoenix by now, impossible to find.

Instead, she'd tried to run Laura down. That impulse had cost Angela her freedom.

When the FA signaled the techs to pack up the bones, Laura drove home to her apartment at the Village Square, home to the $95-down move-in special.

For the first time since she had moved into the Village Square, Laura felt glad to be home.

Laura still wanted to tie Heywood and Santero to the murder of Jenny Carmichael, so later that morning, she faxed the trophy list to Mary Carmichael. Mary called her back ten minutes later.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “But none of the pictures you sent me looks familiar. None of those things belonged to Jenny.”

Laura set the phone down, feeling deep disappointment. Perhaps there was no definitive way to link Angela to Jenny's murder. She wished she could add Jenny's name, get her her own measure of justice, but that seemed impossible at the moment. She stared at her kitchen table, which had become her desk. Jerry said she could come back to work, but since she hadn't had any sleep for almost two days, she'd decided to work from here.

Laura was sad about Jenny, but realized she'd just have to let that one go. There was more than enough evidence to put Angela and her mother away for a very long time, probably for life. And Laura would never forget Jenny, never forget what had happened to her.

She realized she still had Mary Carmichael's boxes of photos and articles documenting Jenny's disappearance. It was time to give them back.

She went down to the car to make sure she had all three boxes. She'd left them there because, up until now, she hadn't had time to look at them. Laura supposed she owed Jenny's mother some consideration for what had happened, a look through the material Mrs. Carmichael had painstakingly compiled. And so, one by one, she brought the boxes up to the apartment and looked at them.

By early afternoon, her eyes were glazing over, but she decided to look at the photo album Mary had put together of the search. A big blue loose-leaf notebook full of newspaper articles and photos Mary Carmichael had taken of the searchers walking the grid.

One photo stopped her. She'd already turned the page, but there was something familiar about a man in the snapshot that nagged her. She turned back.

The man's body was turned slightly away, and he was ten years younger, but Laura knew it was him.

Steve Lawson had participated in the search for Jenny Carmichael eleven years ago.

The Devil's Hour

Summerhaven

The Day Before

He remembers it all now. Like a glacier calving. First the tiny cracks, then the fissures widening, one piece dropping off and then another, and all of a sudden an avalanche caving in on itself, down into the water, thudding downward into the milky water.

He remembers mostly his rage. It has a color: black with dots of red flickering on and off like the snow of a TV screen. He hardly sees through the rage, through the rain, as he runs across the space between himself and the girl, a few strides is all it takes, fueled by alcohol and rage and grief. A few quick strides.

The girl's fingers tightening on the collar, dragging the whimpering, terrified puppy, and he grabs her arm, her shocked face white and hurt and tearful, but behind her face there's Bill Gardner the Dog Trainer, Snickering Bill, and he's too fucking shit-faced to know the difference.

It happens so quickly. She's cowering against a tree, and he's making his point. That's all he's doing, making a point.
Don't. Ever. Do. That. Again.

That's all. Making a point.

That's all.

He doesn't know his own strength. Isn't aware of the dynamics involved, how little it takes, or he wouldn't do it,
no way
would he do a thing like that.

Just his palm. His open palm, his palm and the juncture between his thumb and forefinger. He's not strangling her. He's not smothering her. He's just making his point.
How does it feel when the shoe is on the other foot?
he demands.
You tried to hang that puppy, you puppy-hanging sonofabitch, so
now
how does it feel?

Don't. Ever. Do. That. Again.

Five words.

Pushing the palm of his hand into her throat for emphasis. That's all, really, all he is doing. It's just for emphasis.

Emphasis.

Steve sat in the living room of his grandfather's cabin. It was late afternoon. The dog was in the other room. The man was gone, if he had ever existed. It was just Steve, alone in the dark, trying to make sense of what he had seen and heard.

Had it been a dream? Was he still dreaming?

He did not believe he had it in himself to kill someone, least of all a little girl. It couldn't be true.

But on some deep level, like batter pouring slowly onto a flat surface, the realization spread across the breadth of his soul, until in fact he really
did
believe it.

He'd seen the act he had committed—seen it clearly—but now it was going, almost gone. He knew it had happened. It was like looking at the wing of an airplane and knowing that the air flowed over and under, creating lift, even if you could see nothing but the wing and the sky.

I was drunk
.

Not just drunk, he amended. Blacked out.
All these years, I had no real memory of what happened
.

There were fragments. The cookout. The beer. If his memory was reliable as to the details, he remembered the girl and the puppy. But the other things—the things The Man Without a Face had shown him—those kept slipping through the sieve of his memory. They were hard to grasp. They were evaporating like mist burned off by the sun.

He could articulate what he did. He had pushed on the girl's throat and cut off her air. He assumed she had collapsed and died. He assumed he had buried her. He didn't know when that happened. He didn't know if he had debated burying her. If he had debated calling the sheriff. If he had tried to revive her. What he had felt.

All of that was gone.

There were just the flickering images of her grabbing the puppy and his outsized anger. And his hand to her throat.

He didn't know if The Man Without a Face—the younger version of himself—had told him the truth. He didn't know if he had said those words:
Don't. Ever. Do. That. Again.

Not for sure.

And after that—

It was all blank until he had awakened with a hangover.
That
, he remembered. The pain in his head excruciating. Movement excruciating. As it had been the day after he dug for her, the day after he had found her up here on the mountain. A bloated pulsing ache all over his body, drenching him in sour-smelling sweat.

Suddenly, he remembered the vision he'd had on his most recent walk up to Camp Aratauk. The image of a hotter, drier hike, the heavy backpack, the trail up from Sabino Canyon.

I never hiked up here
.

But that wasn't true, was it? He
had
hiked up here, eleven years ago. He'd hiked up here because he’d been angry.

How had he forgotten that?

He had parked his car in a Sabino Canyon parking lot and hiked all the way up from the valley floor. He'd hiked because he was angry, and he'd hoped it would take the edge off. Because of Linda and that prick Gardner.

You were so angry you left your car down below, and you hiked up a whole mountain. Hiked up Sabino Canyon, all the way to the cabin
.

Now he remembered. He remembered it clearly.

Your anger was like fuel. That was what got you through that punishing hike in one-hundred-degree temperatures, the water running out halfway up. But you knew there would be plenty to drink up on top, all you had to do was get to your grandfather's cabin,there would be plenty to drink—

So much to drink, he had blacked out.

The morning following his hike, he had walked into town for picnic supplies. Steak, beer, potato salad. He'd intended to have himself what his mother used to call a “pity party,” a barbecue for one. He remembered getting pleasantly snockered—again. Maybe he'd even started to feel sorry for himself, maybe he had begun to feel the full weight of the tragedy, that the woman he loved had cheated on him with that puppy-killer Bill Gardner—

After that, though—except for a brief image of the girl, the puppy, his palm pushing at her throat—it was a blank. A blank until he woke up hurting. Going in and out of a drunken sleep throughout the day and night. Waking to thunder and lightning.

The next morning, he'd felt fine. Cooking bacon and eggs, he’d seen on the television that a little girl had gone missing from an outing at Rose Canyon Lake. And still he hadn’t remembered a thing.

How could he have forgotten a whole long weekend? How could he have forgotten driving from LA to Tucson and hiking up to the cabin in the woods?

Because if I remembered any of it, I would have to remember it all.
Coming up here was a thread in the fabric. You pulled that one thread, and everything would unravel. Everything would come apart, and he would know what he had done.

He closed his eyes. More thoughts straying into range. Walking near Rose Canyon Lake. With other people. Trucks and search-and-rescue vehicles and awnings and ice chests full of bottled water, people holding hands as they walked the grid—

He had helped them search, completely unaware that he had been the man who had killed that little girl and buried her up the hill from his cabin. All that time—

I didn't know
.

But he knew now, didn't he? It was like the wing of that airplane, shuddering slightly in the air. You couldn't see the drawn arrows above and below it, but it didn't mean they weren't there.

Steve wondered if he had really met Jenny's ghost or if she was a figment of his imagination. Was she real or was she Memorex? The detective, Laura Cardinal, had asked him why his grandfather had crammed that particular newspaper page up into the rafters.

Maybe
he
did it.

Maybe he did it to prove his guilt to himself.

And the collar. The collar in the shed. Did he put it there? Did he bury the book? Did he break into his own shed in a fugue state?

What was real? What wasn't?

He flashed on the strange phone call he'd retrieved the day he saw Jenny. Had that been him, too? Calling himself?

What else had he done?

Steve couldn't remember how he found Jake. He knew what he told people. That he had found him “under the house.” But which house? Whose house?

Had Jake been the puppy Jenny tried to rescue?

Did he find Jake under the cabin up here on Mt. Lemmon?

As hard as he tried to retrieve these memories, he couldn't access them.

So he sits in the room, unaware of time going by. Light and shadow flickering on the wooden floor, moving with the afternoon sun. The room cooling, growing darker.

What he's thinking, once he's faced up to his culpability, is this: atonement. He has to get this taken care of,
done
, before he loses his courage. It is a stain, and even though the stain will never wash away, he has to pay for it. He's
ready
to pay for it.

He is ready to confess.

He feels around in the dark and turns on the lamp and picks up the phone, suddenly shaking with adrenaline, stabbing in the number, the number he now knows by heart, Laura Cardinal's cell phone.