The Laura Cardinal Novels (36 page)

“You remember the mattress he bought?” Richie said. “Top of the line, twenty-five hundred dollars?”

Galaz said, “He took out of here like a bat out of hell.”

“When was this?”

“Couple days ago. Richie swears he took the message down right.”

Richie looked at her, wide eyes innocent. “My
español
isn’t that good, but I
thought
that was what she said.”

Galaz said, “You should’ve seen Victor when he got back. He was running around the squad bay screaming for Richie’s blood.”

Laura’s cell phone vibrated. She sneaked a look at the number flashing on the screen: Jay Ramsey.

“Jay?” she said, turning her back so she could hear.

“We need to talk,” Ramsey said. He sounded as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well. “I’ll be done here in an hour and a half. Why don’t I meet you at the farm in two hours. Say, six thirty? I’ll leave the gate open.”

“Six thirty, I’ll be there.”

He hung up.

That strange quality to his voice.

“What was that?” Galaz asked, his voice hopeful. “A break?”

“Nope,” Laura said. “No break.”

She stopped by the auto body shop to see how the lab techs were doing with the motor home. They were in the process of carrying out bags of evidence. There would be a lot to comb through.

Victor had gone to track down two private parties who sold white GEOs in the last week, and Buddy was about to leave. He pulled out behind her, but she lost sight of him when she headed in the direction of mid-town. She decided to stop by Mickey Harmon’s house and see if she could catch him off-guard.

Harmon lived on a quiet street in the Sam Hughes neighborhood. His house was a Spanish eclectic mansion—arched colonnades, red-tiled roof, stately palms and a lush desert garden which she could see through the gates set into the high stucco wall.

The security business must be booming. She rang the buzzer at the gate, but nothing happened.

She debated whether to go back to DPS or straight to Jay Ramsey’s house. She had a little over an hour before they were due to meet—too short a window to get anything done at DPS and get back out to mid-town. So she drove the few miles to Alamo Farm.

Unlike Harmon’s place, Ramsey’s gate was open. Maybe Jay had made it home early.

As she drove onto the property, the slanting sun poked holes through the windbreak of walnut and mesquite trees, throwing shadows on the lane like a bar code. She turned left on the lane leading to the house, driving into the sun. Dust from her car tires seemed to buzz in the air as sun and shade flickered across her eyeballs. The windshield gleamed gold and brown, like tortoiseshell.

A black SUV turned onto the lane from between the two eucalyptus trees marking the entrance to the Ramsey house. Funny. It looked like Mike Galaz’s take-home vehicle.

He stopped and she stopped, window to window. “If you’re looking for Jay,” Galaz said, “He’s not home.”

“I’m meeting him here at six thirty.”

“Have you talked to Mickey yet?”

“No.”

“Two minds with a single thought,” Galaz said. “Jay knows Mickey a lot better than I do—it occurred to me he could give us some insight.”

“Same here.” Laura stifled her resentment. She hated the idea of him micromanaging her case.

“You want me to come back with you and wait?”

“That’s not—“

“Let me turn around, okay?”

She put the 4Runner in gear and drove on without waiting for him to catch up. Why was Galaz so interested? Was it because he was so close to Jay Ramsey and Mickey Harmon? She knew Ramsey was influential in raising money for Galaz’s campaign for mayor. Maybe he was here for damage control.

She turned off at Ramsey’s house, Galaz on her tail. Trees cast long shadows across the dirt clearing, the hard-packed ground reddish gold in the dying light. No cars. Laura knocked on the door anyway, wasn’t surprised when she got no answer. Cold air leaked through the screen door as she peered in. Nobody home?

Galaz wasn’t good at waiting. He paced back and forth on the flagstone paving in front of the house, finally went around to the back. Returned and checked his watch over and over, whistling. Annoying the hell out of her.

A sprinkler stuttered noisily across the lawn, raining on a pair of shrieking grackles. Laura, grateful for the cooling mist as the water spattered near her feet.

“I don’t think he’s coming,” Galaz said after his second circuit around the house.

Laura was inclined to agree with him.

“That’s it for me.” Galaz got into his Suburban. “See you back at the ranch.”

He started his engine to cool off the Suburban, but didn’t pull out right away. She could see him talking on the phone as she walked back to her own vehicle.

Something about this scene bothered her. Where was Freddy? She got out her phone and checked her messages. There was a message from Charlie Specter regarding the owner of the GEO . The man was being interviewed by Victor Celaya now. But neither Freddy nor Jay had called to cancel the meeting.

The door to the house was open; only the screen door stood between her and the inside of the house. A guy who ran an Internet security company wouldn’t leave his house wide open like that.

I’ll leave the gate open for you
.

Why? Why bother leaving the gate open when it was just as easy to do what he always did?

Abruptly, she had a bad feeling. It took her a moment to pinpoint it, although it had been in the back of her mind all afternoon.

She had interviewed and interrogated perhaps a hundred suspects and witnesses in her three years as a investigator, and in the cases where she got a confession, there was always that moment when the decision was made to capitulate. With some of them, it showed in their eyes; others, in their voices.

She had heard that kind of resignation in Jay’s voice, realized that the sound of his voice was the main reason she had come out here. The link between Dark Moondancer and Musicman was tenuous and might come to nothing. Mickey Harmon may or may have not killed Julie Marr all those years ago. What compelled her to come here was Jay Ramsey’s state of mind.

She walked back to the house, glancing at Galaz in his vehicle, still engrossed in his phone call. She thought about asking him to go with her, but discarded that notion. She didn’t know if he would be a help or a hindrance. Better to do this on her own.

“Jay?” she called. “Freddy?”

She pulled at the screen door and was surprised that it was unlocked.

Suddenly she remembered the last time she had walked into this house uninvited, the night Jay Ramsey was shot. For a moment the two incidents, decades apart, seemed to meld together into this one surreal moment. She withdrew her weapon. Heart slamming against her ribs, she cleared each room she came to. Heading down the hallway to the master bedroom, unable to shake the bad feeling growing just beneath her solar plexus. The air coming from the vents was frigid, a vapor that seemed to seep like melting ice into her bowels.

Something wrong.

The white carpet with the vacuum marks had long ago been replaced by Saltillo tile. The tiles reflected the white of the hallway walls and ceiling, gleaming yet cold; inviting yet ominous. Ahead in the half-light, Laura spotted a sheet of paper lying in the hallway. She picked it up. The freezing air coming from the vents made the paper flutter in her fingers.

“Dark Moondancer is a secret no longer worth keeping. I thought my penance was living the rest of my life as a quadriplegic, but it has become clear that I cannot live …”

The letter took up most of the page, twelve-point print. Laura returned the note to the floor where she found it. There would be plenty of time to look at it later; right now, she needed to find out if Jay was alive or dead.

She approached the open doorway to the master bedroom. The black iron dogs guarding the foot of the bed were gone, but she saw them as clearly as if they were here in real time, along with the indelible image of Jay Ramsey tangled in the sheets, bleeding onto the white carpet.

Superimposed by reality.

Now Jay Ramsey sat in his wheelchair. A bottle of whiskey and an empty pill vial lay in his lap. A plastic bag had been pulled over his head.

Laura holstered her weapon and was at Jay Ramsey’s side in three strides. The bag had already been torn by his desperate fingers, leaving a hole, probably the last thing he did before he lost consciousness—suicides often had second thoughts.

A possibility then that he was still alive—she felt for a pulse. Weak, but there.

She removed the plastic bag and checked his airway—unobstructed. Breathing through his mouth. Good, she didn’t have to give him CPR. She couldn’t risk moving a quadriplegic from his wheelchair and laying him out on the floor.

Laura fumbled for her cell phone and pressed the TALK button.

“What’s going on?" Mike Galaz called from the hallway.

“In here,” she called. “Ramsey tried to kill himself, but he’s still alive.”

Galaz appeared in the doorway, his gun out and held at his side. “Is someone on the way?”

Face pale, eyes dark in his head. Agitated. “Did you call dispatch? 911?”

“I was just going to call it i—“

He put his gun away and crossed the space between them. “Let me do it.”

Before she could object Galaz seized the phone from her hand. He looked at the screen for a moment, raised his arm, and threw the phone savagely across the room. It hit the wall and exploded into plastic shards.

Laura stared at the wall and back to Galaz.

“Houston, we’ve got a problem!” Galaz shouted. “Do you hear me, Mickey?”

Laura heard a noise from the master bathroom and pivoted, but it was too late; her fingers had just brushed the grip of her Sig when two huge hands closed down on her wrists like a vise, wrenching her arms up against her spine. Her shoulders and neck protested as Harmon shoved his knee square in the small of her back. He pushed her hard against the bedside table with crushing force, knocking the breath right out of her. Cuffs ratcheted around her wrists.

She didn’t feel the gun being taken from the holster, but knew he had it. Smelled his sour breath: Pickles. Harmon yanked her upright, and as he did so, Galaz darted in like a bantam-weight prize fighter, jabbed her in the hip with a hypodermic needle.

He jumped back as Laura howled.

Galaz started pacing. “
Dam
mit!”

“Don’t worry, boss. We can contain it.”

“You don’t understand! She’s not some dime-a-dozen street hustler off Miracle Mile. She’s DPS. This is not going to go away!" He crossed over to Jay and fiddled with the plastic bag. “There’s a hole in this thing!" He tore the bag apart, crumpled it up and shoved it into the pocket of his slacks. Breathed deeply. “The whiskey and the pills’ll finish him off. All we needed was a little time.”

He sat down on a chair by the window. “There’s a way to do this, I just have to figure it out. I know what to do, I just need a little space. It’ll come." He checked his watch, then looked at Ramsey. “He can’t last much longer. While we’re here, we might as well stay around and make sure.”

Mickey kicked Laura’s feet out from under her, and she sat down hard on her tailbone, legs jarring as they hit the floor.

Shit-scared. What had he given her?

Galaz crossed one elegantly-trousered knee over the other and stared down his elegant nose at her. “Under the weather, Laura? You should start to feel it any time.”

“What? What did you give me?”

“Do you feel hot?”

“Hot?”

“Not hot as in
Girls Gone Wild
’—I mean hot as in burning up.”

She did feel hot. She tried to bring her legs under her to stand up and found she couldn’t. Her legs weren’t responding. They felt like wood. Rigid.

Her tailbone throbbed from the fall, and her hip hurt where the needle went in. The ache seemed to be spreading up into the small of her back. “What did you give me?”

“
Steatoda juliei
.”

“What?” Her body was clenching. Sweat popped out on her forehead, her upper lip, her arms, trickled down her sides.

“
Steatoda juliei
,” Galaz said. “It’s a neurotoxin that comes from the false black widow.”

It felt like she was cramping up—everywhere at once.

Galaz continued, “The term ‘false’ is misleading, since there are few differences between Steatoda and Latrodectus. The black widow is glossy black, as opposed to a matte finish—that’s steatoda—and the steatoda doesn’t have the hourglass on its belly, but otherwise, they’re almost identical. Especially where their neurotoxins are concerned.”

Locked in pain, Laura followed his words, but there was a lag. She could feel a buzzing in her brain and knew it was pure fear. This wasn’t just pain, it was agony, her body slippery with sweat—soaking every inch of her skin, in her eyes, blotting her blouse with it. And clenching, God, her toes were clenching and the pain just wouldn’t stop …

Galaz said, “There are variations in neurotoxins from species to species. Some are far more extreme than others. This particular neurotoxin is pretty severe, but fortunately for you, not long-lasting. One, two hours at the most, and then the effects wear off. Another choice of spider, and you could be in incredible pain for two or three days. But I chose
Steatoda juliei
because we don’t need that long.”

She looked at his crossed legs, the top leg moving back and forth. Using his knee as a fulcrum. He was smiling. “I gave this
Steatoda
its name. Since I spent months studying the effects of its venom on everything from bunny rabbits to horses, I can safely say this was an unnamed species, until now. That’s Phylum: Arthropoda; Subphylum: Celicerata; Class: Arachnida; Order: Aranae; Genus: Steatoda; Species: juliei.”

Suddenly, her lower back bloomed like a bright red flower, pain so crushing and absolute that for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

She closed her eyes and moaned. Her instinct told her to curl up in a fetal position on the floor, but her abdominal muscles were as stiff as a washboard. She gulped air, tried to roll with the cramping pain, but couldn’t: It was the bright screaming center of her brain.