The Laura Cardinal Novels (42 page)

“Let’s backtrack, see how far this goes.”

She followed the path back out and ducked under the tape, Wingate her quick shadow.

They walked just outside the perimeter of the swept area. The killer had been thorough and tricky. There were several places where pine duff had piled up underneath the trees. At any one of these spots he could have walked out on the hard-packed needles. They followed each possible trail, radiating outward like spokes on a wheel, but found nothing.

Officer Wingate took his cue from her, sticking close, but sure to walk behind her, in her footsteps, keeping his thoughts to himself. She could see out of the corner of her eye that his legs were shaking. Adrenaline. His body finally getting the message, the aftermath to finding his best friend from high school shot to death.

Amazing what guns could do. All the shotgun deaths she’d seen, she never got used to it.

She had already formed at least one impression of the killer. Unfortunately, that impression was mixed. Shooting into a tent without opening the flap pointed at a killer who didn’t know his victims. She thought there was a lack of curiosity, as if he couldn’t care less whether the people in the tent lived or died. The fact he didn’t open the tent, didn’t look inside to make sure they were dead, that pointed to someone who had no stake in the outcome. That pointed to a random shooting But if it was a random shooting, why go to such pains to obliterate his presence?

It was almost as if there were two different people at work here.

They now stood directly behind the tent, approximately fifteen feet away, on mildly undulating ground. Officer Wingate careful to stay behind her.

It looked to Laura as if the killer had shot three times—one round going through the front flap, one on the right side, and one in the back. Judging from the size of the holes in the tent, she guessed he’d shot from about this distance: fifteen feet give or take. She pictured him circling the tent, walking and shooting, walking and shooting, walking and shooting.

She said to Officer Wingate, “People would have heard the shots.” Even though it was a rural neighborhood, there were houses scattered around the area.

“Yeah, but they’d probably think someone was jacklighting deer.”

She almost stepped on a partial print, realized it belonged to Wingate. “What time did you spot the truck?”

“This morning, around seven. Maybe closer to seven thirty. My mom wanted me to help her unload some hay, and then she was going to make me breakfast.”

“And you stopped then?” she said as she took several photographs of the ground and the tent. “Or did you stop on the way back?”

“It was on the way to my mom’s—I never got there.” He motioned up the road to the gate. “I parked right behind his truck.”

“And then what did you do?”

He told her how he had gone around the gate and walked down toward the lake. “Their tent was the only one here. It wasn’t hard to figure out it was them.”

“You recognized the tent?”

He looked at her, confused momentarily. Trying hard to be accurate. “No. I mean I knew it belonged to whoever had the truck.”

Trying hard to be precise. He reminded her a little of Andrew Descartes, although his hair was close-cropped and blond and Andy had been dark.

They worked their way in toward the tent. Laura asked, “Which way did you come in?”

He pointed to the stampede of tracks. “That way, just down from the road. I made note of where I went in and went out the same way.”

“I see that. It’s made my job easier.”

“Thanks.” His eyes brimming over with pain.

She tried to ignore that. “Then what?”

“The tent was torn like that—my first thought was bear, but then when I got closer I knew it was gunshot.”

“Then what did you do?”

He stared into the middle distance, as if seeing it all again. “I just stood there, tried to get my bearings. My first thought was that they—Dan—went somewhere, and somebody used the tent for target practice. You know, vandals.”

Laura understood that. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, it was almost impossible for the human mind to make the logical leap that someone you knew could be dead.

“But I think I knew, even then.” His voice seemed to come from high in his chest—agitated.

“What did you do then?”

“I called Danny’s name a few times. He didn’t answer. So I walked over and checked it out.”

He paused, but Laura didn’t prompt him. The hot sun pounded down on her head as she waited for him to continue.

“That hole in the door flap—thing was hanging by a thread. I looked just enough to see they were dead. Then I backed away from there and made the call.”

“Did you recognize them?”

“I knew it was Dan.” He cleared his throat.

“Can you show me where they were?”

He did so, using his hands to illustrate. Laura could see it. The sleeping bag had started out in the center, perpendicular to the tent door. The top half of the bag had been skewed sideways, though, as Dan and Kellee rolled to the right. Burrowing into the tent wall, as tight in as they could get.

Laura looked in through the front, took pictures of the floor, the walls. Then she carefully zipped up what was left of the front flap, so she could look at the hole. She looked at each of the three holes in the tent, thinking trajectories.

Narrowing her focus down to the two people trapped inside, their movements, even their thoughts. Their terror seeping into her own soul like poison gas.

She knew about terror—felt it now, rising like a high water mark in her chest—something that happened these days at the drop of a hat.

Kellee Taylor had come to rest against the edge of the tent, curled into a fetal position, her face shoved down into the tent floor. Dan Yates’s body surrounding her, partially covering her with his right leg and arm.

He had done his best to protect her.

They’d had enough time between the first shot and the second to move as far to the right as they could, hoping they could evade the next round.

Laura guessed that by then the killer was already walking around the tent to the right.

By reacting the way they did, Dan and Kellee had unwittingly put themselves directly into the line of fire.

A stray breeze fluttered a fast-food receipt poking out of the trash bag. Laura had set the bag on the ramada picnic table near the campsite and had been going through its contents. Suddenly she felt a twinge in the small of her back—a leftover from a car accident when she was in the Highway Patrol. She massaged the spot with a Latex-gloved hand.

Officers Tagg and Wingate had been dispatched to canvass the houses along the road near Cataract Lake Park to find out what the neighbors had heard or seen last night. The sergeant, Warren Janes, remained behind. At the moment, he was leaning against his patrol car, eating his lunch. Content to let her do her thing.

Laura knew he’d been told by the Williams police chief, who was currently on his way from an interrupted fishing trip in Montana, to “render unto Caesar.” Caesar, in this case, being the state law enforcement agency she worked for, the Department of Public Safety. Apparently Sergeant Janes had no trouble with that, which surprised her. Usually the cops she dealt with in small towns wanted in, not out.

Still no sign of Richie Lockhart. Calls to his cell phone netted only his voice mail. He didn’t answer his pager.

Laura thought about calling her sergeant, but she didn’t want to bother him, or worse, let him think
she
was bothered. Telling him she couldn’t keep track of her own partner wouldn’t look good. Something her old mentor, Frank Entwistle, had drilled into her: Never show weakness. Her squad was just like grade school—all the subtle forms of tyranny, petty triumphs, and slights, subtle but clear.

Lately, though, everyone in the Criminal Investigations Division had been nice to her. Too nice actually. Solicitous, tiptoeing around her as if she were a new-laid egg. Jerry Grimes, her sergeant, had given her two soft assignments in a row—white-collar crimes.

Taking her out of the game.

She closed her eyes against the sun, which had slowly moved through the ramada as morning turned to afternoon. It was going on three thirty. The air smelled of pine duff, warm earth, blood, and garbage.

Carefully, she replaced the stone over the trash bag and walked out into the clearing. She stared at the lake—a blue sliver cutting through the pale green-gold grasses sloping down from the pines. She needed to breathe the air, feel the sun on her back, give her mind a chance to absorb what she had learned so far.

Today was Saturday and it
felt
like a Saturday. When Laura was a girl, she loved Saturday mornings. On Saturdays the world was full of possibilities. She was free for the whole weekend, she could do anything she wanted. But by Sunday afternoon, the small, white cloud was on the horizon; she knew the storm was coming, that her freedom was about to end. By dinner time, the cloud was bigger and darker, and by nighttime, the whole sky was black.

The next morning, it was back to school to face the bullies.

With this job—with this
calling
—she had finally found her clan. She’d always considered herself one of the boys. Now she was one apart again, and she didn’t like it. She especially didn’t like coming around a corner and running into friends and colleagues who immediately stopped talking mid-conversation.

Laura could smell a charcoal grill somewhere. A warm, Indian-summer day in the high country, the droning of lawn mowers, people taking care of the stuff they’d had to put off all week. Saturday.

Saturday had a meaning in this case, because it was the weekend, and Dan and Kellee had used the extra time to travel. She wondered if they had cut classes on Friday to come out here and spend the night, or if they had waited until the end of the day.

She absorbed the sun, thinking about what she had found so far in Dan Yates’s truck: A tea-length dress, cream-colored, hung in a garment bag from the window of the Extra cab, along with a man’s suit. Cream-colored pumps to match the dress. A man’s dress shoes had been shoehorned behind the front seat, rolled-up dark socks inside. A tie lay on the back seat. Sometime on this trip, Dan Yates and Kellee Taylor had gone somewhere where they’d had to dress up.

Put that together with what she had found in the top half of the garbage bin near the ramada—a cardboard box containing remnants of white frosting and chocolate cake, a boxful of candles, sandwich wrappers, an empty bottle of sparkling cider, and two plastic screw-on champagne glasses—and she was beginning to see a pattern.

A dress-up, and a celebration.

A breeze ruffled the impassive face of Cataract Lake, shadows combing across the shimmering blue surface. She thought it would be beautiful at night, too. She wondered what it was like out here the night the boy drowned.

Lakes were deceptive. This lake, in particular, appeared open and friendly. And tiny. It would seem to be an easy task to swim across Cataract Lake. But underneath the placid blue surface were weeds, rocks, fishing line, and junk.

Laura glanced at the sky, so blue it seemed to pulsate. The golden grama grass threading itself through the shadows of the ponderosa pines. A wood chipper alternately droned and whined somewhere to the north, changing its tone depending on what was being devoured.

It was clear that Dan and Kellee had not just gone out on a camping trip. They had been somewhere where they had to dress up. Afterwards, they had changed back, Dan discarding his tie on the back seat, rolling his socks and sticking them in his shoes. They had come here to camp. She guessed that the pink cake box, the sparkling cider, was theirs.

The rest of the evidence was more straightforward. There were the usual items you’d want on a camping trip, all of them packed haphazardly in the black duffle inside the tent, one edge soaked in blood. A green cooler. A college text of
Oedipus Rex
, Kellee’s name and phone number neatly written inside the front cover. Her purse—a couple of credit cards, some money, a few receipts, hairbrush, etc., nothing earth-shattering but worth noting, including a stub for a roll of film. The film had gone to the local Safeway.

Unfortunately, Dan’s wallet was missing, and Laura got confirmation from Janes that one of his officers had checked it, then returned it to the pocket of his jeans. It had gone off to the medical examiner in Flagstaff.

It was the first time she’d come even close to losing it. She didn’t, though; she just calmly asked him to send an officer to drive up and get it, and reviewed with him that it must be put into an evidence bag, signed and sealed, and brought back to her. Janes had been pretty annoyed at her walking him through it, but to his credit, he didn’t say anything.

She finished up with the trash bag, sealing and marking her finds in plastic or paper evidence envelopes, depending on whether the garbage was wet or dry. The old paper-or-plastic question with a twist: Wet stuff, like blood, went into paper; dry, into plastic.

Lots
of blood in the tent. Which reminded her, she needed to figure out how to transport the tent to the Department of Public Safety crime lab in Phoenix.

She’d just started working on that problem when the silence was shattered by a loud car engine reverberating through the forest. She glanced up and saw the sun flash off the windshield of a red Monte Carlo as it turned off the road into the Cataract Lake campground.

Richie Lockhart, her new partner, was here at last.

The engine fell silent, the quiet returning to the forest like a soft snowfall. A car door slammed, loud in the open space. Briefcase in hand, Richie Lockhart started down the road, the sun catching his prematurely white hair.

He was short and shaped like Gumby, his body the same thickness all the way down. His face open and sunny. He didn’t walk; he
sauntered
.

The anger simmering inside Laura all day threatened to boil over. She’d clamped the lid down tight because she had never worked on a case with him before and wanted to keep an open mind. But now she was mad. Two people were dead. You didn’t treat it like a walk in the park.