The Laura Cardinal Novels (19 page)

In her dreams, Laura always heard the car’s rough idling, smelled burning oil, and felt the heat from the Chevy’s engine—details her imagination had conjured from the nightly news and one newspaper photo long ago.

Entwistle said, “No matter how old you get, you always remember.”

“Remember what?”

“The first kid in your class to die.”

Julie Marr was a transfer student from North Carolina. She had a strange accent, stranger hair, and even stranger clothes.

Laura had known what it was like to be bullied, picked on. But she’d made it to the other side; she had friends. She’d felt for Julie, but face it: She wasn’t about to put her own reputation in jeopardy.

Julie Marr lived in the same subdivision as Laura. Laura hated to admit this, but if she saw Julie walking up ahead of her, she would cross to the other side of the street so they wouldn’t end up walking together. It was her damn stride. Her natural stride was long; she covered the ground quickly. So she’d walk on the other side, her eyes straight ahead.

Like Jessica Parris, Julie Marr had disappeared between school and her house. Laura had Press Club two days a week after school. Otherwise, the orange and white car might have stopped for her.

The stiff old latches sprang back like little mouse-traps. Laura sat cross-legged on the floor of the guest bedroom, the late afternoon sun filtering in through Venetian blinds that came with the house, contemplating the old-fashioned suitcase and trying not to sneeze from the dust.

Inside were stacks of files held together by shoelaces. Most of them were marked in ballpoint ink discolored with age, usually beginning with the word “Laura.” Laura–School; Laura–Artwork; Laura–Swimming Lessons; and so on.

But some manila folders her mother had saved for herself.

There it was, toward the bottom. The word “Crime” in her mother’s spidery writing.

Laura knew exactly where to look, even though she had not seen this file in eleven years. She remembered seeing articles on Tucson murders that her mother had clipped, some of them as early as the forties, including the grisly saga of Charles Schmid, who killed three young girls in the 1960s and landed Tucson in
Life
magazine as the town with the “Ugliest Street in America”. A killer who wore face makeup and put crumpled-up beer cans into his boots to make him look taller.

Laura had forgotten how serious her mother had been about writing. There were three spiral notebooks full of notes, scrawled slips of paper, photos, phone numbers of detectives and police officers, lawyers and prosecutors, and six chapters of a book titled
Death in the Desert: A Comprehensive Account of Tucson’s Most Infamous Murders
, by Alice Cardinal.

She didn’t remember this. She had been a teenager when her mom started writing classes, involved with her own life. She hadn’t taken her mother’s interests seriously. “Author” didn’t fit with her image of her mom. Her mom was a school librarian who spent most of her time and energy trying to shape Laura’s life, not her own.

Laura looked at the first page.

Chapter One

Tucson Arizona had seen its share of murders, but none was as mysterious as the disappearance of San Pedro Middle School student Julie Marr.

On a warm day in late September, Julie Marr was walking home from school as usual when she vanished without a trace. Two days later a man named Jerry Lee, out hiking in the Redington Pass area east of town, noticed an old car that seemed to have rolled down the embankment off the road and had come to a stop in some brush and cactus. A curious sort, he bushwhacked down to the car, and was shocked by what he found. The back seat of the old car was soaked with blood.

Six chapters on Julie Marr’s disappearance, then nothing. Laura didn’t know if her mom had quit at Chapter Seven or if she’d died in the midst of writing the book, a homicide victim herself.

Laura decided she didn’t want to look at her mother’s book right now. She put the unfinished book to the side and looked through the clippings of the Julie Marr abduction. Two articles. The first declared,

“CITY-WIDE SEARCH FOR MISSING SAN PEDRO MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT”

and was accompanied by a school picture of Julie Marr. Two days later, the front page headline said
“CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND.”
A black-and-white photo of the 1955 Chevy Bel Air, all four doors open, a detective squatting near the driver’s side.

She skimmed the article, jotting down the facts of the case on the inside cover of the manila folder.

The car had been stolen from A&B Auto Wrecking on South Park Avenue. The Bel Air had been in an accident, but was still driveable.

Blood-typing indicated that the blood in the backseat belonged to Julie Marr. From the amount of blood, the detectives were sure she was either gravely injured or dead. The lead detective on the case was Barry Fruchtendler of TPD.

Corroborating her mother’s account, the article detailed the discovery of the car off Redington Pass Road in the Tanque Verde Mountains east of town. It had been pushed off the road at a curve. The way the road was banked made it impossible for it to be seen from a vehicle driving up or down the mountain.

The search had been concentrated there, but no body, no grave, had been found.

Because Julie Marr’s body could be anywhere in rugged, almost inaccessible country, the search was called off the next day.

Julie Marr’s parents, George and Natalie Marr, were quoted as saying that if the police had taken her disappearance more seriously, Julie might be alive today.

Laura put the suitcase away, but took the file, including her mother’s chapters, with her. She dropped it on the kitchen table. An interesting trip down memory lane, but she didn’t see any relevance to Jessica’s case.

It was possible the killer could have lived here in Tucson all those years ago and killed both Julie Marr and Jessica Parris. But that seemed unlikely, given the number of years that had gone by and the fact that Jessica was strangled, while Julie Marr had been killed even more violently. It pointed to a different kind of killer; one organized, the other out of control.

Laura called the Tucson Police Department and asked to speak with Detective Barry Fruchtendler. No one there by that name.

Probably retired.

She looked for his name in the phone book and was stymied again. That didn’t mean much; cops usually had unlisted numbers. She’d call one of her friends at TPD tomorrow and see if he was still around.

But not now.

She put on a fresh blouse, locked up, and took the path over the hill to Tom’s house.

Jay Ramsey had almost managed to pull his plate onto his lap when it slipped out of his hands and crashed to the flagstones.

“You see?” Freddy said primly as he picked up the pieces of bone china. “You’ve been out here too long.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“This was your mother’s favorite pattern. You know when you start dropping things—“

“Freddy, enough.”

“Fine, if that’s what you want." Freddy whisked around them, clearing plates and brushing away crumbs from the tablecloth.

Jay had invited Laura to breakfast. She was happy to get out here early, anxious as she was to get Jay on the Internet and see him work the magic Galaz had promised her, but here they sat. She kept thinking about Alison Burns lying on the bed in the abandoned motel room. And Jessica Parris, posed like a doll in the City Park band shell.

She had to admit, it was pleasant here—lush plants and deep shade. Misters on the porch roof cooled the terrace. Across the lane stood the high hedge lining the tennis court where Jay Ramsey used to play. Laura, a kid, a horse groom, walking by, hoping she’d catch his eye.

Now she had his full attention. Strange how wants and hopes changed over the years.

Freddy was back from the kitchen. He nodded at the thermometer tacked to the pepper tree near the pool. “It’s eighty-seven degrees. You’ve been out here well over an hour.”

“I’m fine.”

“You won’t be so cocky if your bladder lets go in front of company.”

Jay saw Laura’s discomfort and grinned. “Freddy’s afraid I’ll get overheated. That can lead to dysreflexia, which—“

“Could send his blood pressure sky-high,” Freddy said.

Jay leaned toward Laura, his voice conspiratorial.

“You know what you have to do if you start to get overheated? Piss your pants.” He laughed. “When quads get overheated, sometimes their bladders can back up. You don’t want that to happen, so you have a little accident. Relieves the pressure. You have to train yourself to do it—it’s amazing how stubborn the mind can be, all that potty training you have to overcome.”

Freddy took his stack of still-intact dishes and retreated into the house with a martyr’s sigh.

Jay said, “The minute I saw you on the news, I knew I had to meet you. Maybe because we never did.” Saw her confusion and added, “Never met.”

The Ramseys had been clear from the beginning: They didn’t want any visitors. “I understood that. Your parents were looking out for—”

“She was never going to let that happen,” Jay said. “Even though you saved my life, she didn’t want a relationship." He sipped his mimosa. “That’s why she paid you off.”

Told to her this way, it made her angry all over again.

“You should see your face. I don’t blame you for being mad. I would be livid. Especially when she took the horse back. A couple of years down the line, when she saw just how much my condition changed my life—her life—she wasn’t so thankful anymore.”

He shifted in his chair, yawned. Laura wondered if the yawning helped him in some way. “If you want to put it in a charitable light, she was impulsive. Giving you the horse on an impulse and taking it back the same way. Your good deed had outlived its usefulness.” No self-pity, just a statement of fact. “But
I’ve
never forgotten, and now I’m in a position to help you. I know how important this is to you. It would be important to anyone, but considering what you’ve been through in your own life …" He let it hover, the vague reference to the home invasion.

Laura didn’t like this. He knew too much about her life.

“I want to apologize for my mother. It’s too bad Calliope is gone—I’d give her back to you if I could. Mother sold her foals. For all I know, one of them might be in town.”

“It doesn’t matter now."

He changed the subject. “Did Mikey tell you about my background?”

“Mikey?”

“Lieutenant Galaz.”

“He told me Dynever is an Internet security company.”

“We’ve worked with the FBI on cases just like this. One in New York, a pedophile ring. One of my people pretended he was a fourteen-year-old girl.”

He wiped his forehead. His complexion looked blotchy, and he was sweating. Laura looked around, but Freddy was still inside the house.

“These guys—they build their wholes lives around getting little girls. They marry women so they can get to their children. Go into occupations where they can be around them. It’s the fantasy. They can’t resist it—they don’t want to.”

“It’s sick,” she said. She knew that technically the guy she was after wasn’t sick. He was a sociopath—perfectly sane. But calling him “sick” relieved the pressure in her head, made her feel better.

“You’d be surprised at how many people—doctors, lawyers, beggermen, chiefs—think that doing a twelve-year-old girl is acceptable. The evidence is there, staring you in the face. On the ‘net.” He set his glass down on the table, spilling orange juice and champagne over his long, elegant fingers. He didn’t seem to notice. “The web has changed everything. People used to hide the way they felt, but now there are so many of them and they’re all connected, they have strength in numbers. Now they’re legitimate. They can rationalize it.

“So my question to you, Laura, is this: If more and more people believe something, might there not be some value to it?”

Before Laura could answer Jay called out, “You win, Freddy. I’m coming in." He backed his motorized wheelchair and deftly sped up the ramp and through the French doors into the house, leaving her to follow.

Freddy insisted that Laura wait in the living room while they “took care of some essentials.”

She waited, feeling uncomfortable. Wondering if he was being cleaned up because he had overheated, wondering if he had, indeed, pissed his pants. Wondering, too, if he thought that just because a majority of people thought something was right, there was an excuse for cruelty. Did he really think that, or was he just playing devil’s advocate?

Forty minutes later, Jay Ramsey reappeared, his hair combed nicely and his color better. “Let’s get down to it, babe,” he said.

Jay situated himself in front of the computer and connected to the Internet. Laura noticed that even with his limited hand motions, he was fast with his two index fingers; they seemed to fly over the keyboard like ten digits.

Laura watched as he pulled up a no-frills site, devoid of graphics.

Ramsey said, “Welcome to WiNX. This is the quintessential Internet relay chat program.”

Laura tried to remember what Buddy Holland had told her. “Does it have something to do with Instant Messaging?”

“That’s the currency. People talking to each other in real time. You’ve probably done something like it on Facebook or Yahoo.”

“Uh no.”

He twisted in his chair a little, smiled. “The principle is really simple. You put yourself out there and pretty soon someone wants to talk to you.”

He hit a couple of keys and brought up a screen that reminded Laura of her first experience with a computer, back in the covered wagon days. “That looks like DOS.”

“See? You know more than you think. WiNX is a DOS-based system. See these?” He keyed down through several lines of old-fashioned courier print and pointed with a thumb. “These are channels—rooms where people with like tastes can meet. There’re probably 20,000 channels on WiNX right now." He flinched again, moved in his seat. Looked at her. “Am I confusing you?”

She remembered how Buddy had thrown technical terms at her without telling her what they meant. Enjoying her discomfort. She hesitated to make a fool of herself, but couldn’t help asking, “Are they kind of like TV channels?”