The Laura Cardinal Novels (43 page)

Sergeant Janes detached himself from the fender of his patrol car and walked up the road to meet Lockhart. They met on the cinder road, then started walking down together. Richie stopped next to Dan Yates’s truck, looking it over, his admiration obvious.

The two men were talking when Laura reached them.

Warren Janes looked at her with new eyes. “Now I know where I heard your name,” he said. “Nice work.”

She didn’t know if he was referring to her capture of a serial sexual predator and killer named Musicman or the effect his capture had on DPS, the ramifications radiating outward like circles in the wake of a rock thrown into a lake.

She had thrown the rock.

“I wouldn’t want to be you, though,” Janes added.

Richie beamed. “I think it’s fair to say that all of us—to a man—are proud of the way Laura here stepped up.”

Laura said to Richie, “I thought you were flying up.”

“The plane had mechanical problems. I waited all morning, at
least
two hours, before they told me to go ahead and drive up.”

She didn’t ask him why he’d turned off his mobile and didn’t answer his pager.

“So what’ve we got?” Richie asked.

Laura ran it down briefly: the young couple, college kids, killed by a shotgun in their tent.

Richie was turned slightly toward Janes in such a way that he was cutting Laura out of the loop. Or at least that was how it looked. “Why did they camp here?” he asked Janes.

“The boy—Dan—his family lives here. We think it was someplace familiar, they probably camped here because they have before.” Janes was talking to Richie, but looking at Laura. Wondering perhaps what it was like to be a standout in an agency that encouraged invisibility.

“Anything else I should know?” Richie asked.

Laura said, “The bodies are gone.”

That threw him. He wiped the back of his hand across the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. “There much left to see?”

Laura told him about the cake box in the garbage can, the dress-up clothes in the truck. The bloody tent. As Laura described the scene, her mind, which had been working on how to move the tent, suddenly came up with an answer.

She turned to Sergeant Janes. “Can you get me a body bag?”

Janes looked uncertain. “A body bag? I guess so, sure.”

She took out the small notebook she always carried, wrote down a list of things she’d need, and handed it to him. “I’m going to need a DPS officer to transport it to the crime lab in Phoenix.”

“No problem there.” He nodded in the direction of Interstate 40, a corridor Laura had once worked when she was in the Highway Patrol Division of DPS. “We’re thick with them—you excuse the expression.”

“Good. We want to get this done before dark.”

“What’s this about?” asked Richie, falling into step with her as she walked back toward the campsite.

“We have to move the tent.”

“Yeah. So?”

She stopped to explain. “I want to get the tent floor, so we can diagram where each pellet went into the ground.”

“I know that,” Richie said impatiently.

She ignored his testiness. “So we roll it up, as loosely as we can, and put it in a body bag.”

“Why can’t we put the whole tent on a flatbed?”

“On the freeway? Going seventy-five miles an hour? The thing is falling apart.”

For a minute she thought he was going to argue, but he just shrugged and said, “You da boss.”

It didn’t take them as long as Laura thought it would. With spray paint, they marked circles around each gunshot hole in the sides of the tent before cutting around them and placing them on a picnic table to be transported separately. Next, they cut the tent body away from the floor.

“Oh, shit!” Richie said, looking at the swipe of blood on his elbow. “I hope neither one of them had AIDS.” He glared at Laura. “We should have thought of this.”

Meaning
she
should have thought of this.

Although they wore gloves, it was impossible to avoid getting some blood on their arms and clothing, even though most of it was dry or nearly dry. Laura could have asked Williams PD or the sheriff’s department for HazMat gowns and masks, but hadn’t wanted to wait; she’d wanted to get the tent floor out of here before dark. And so she had taken a calculated risk that Dan and Kellee were AIDS-free.

This was not like her. Like most cops, Laura was overly cautious by most lights. But lately she’d been taking little risks—in traffic, attempting fix-its at home that could and did backfire on her. She had garnered an impressive array of cuts, bruises, and blood blisters in the last few weeks.

She’d been impatient lately. With herself and with others. Little things got to her more, and she wanted to burn through the day-to-day boring stuff of life as quickly as possible. But when it came to this case, she needed to slow down and let herself think. Do something off-the-wall here, and you could never go back. Evidence was easy to misplace or mess up, and she didn’t want to create a loophole for the killer’s lawyer to exploit down the line.

They marked all four sides of the tent, starting with the area where the door was. Then they marked the corresponding points on the ground with little colored flags on wires. After the fabric of the floor was rolled up—loosely, to avoid friction—Laura deposited it into the waiting body bag, zipped it up, sealed it, and wrote her name on the evidence tag.

“I have hand cleaner in the 4Runner,” she said.

“A little after the fact,” Richie grumbled, but he followed her up to her car.

As he scrubbed his hands with the liquid antiseptic hand cleaner, he said, “They’re gonna look at that thing and wonder what kind of body is
that.
Looks like a goddamn iguana.”

By this time, it was going on six o’clock, and the rays of the sun slanted and flashed between the trees. The Highway Patrol officer—her name tag said Marty Fields—was waiting for them up on the road. If all went well, the tent would be at the DPS crime lab in three hours.

Richie glanced at the lowering sun. “Looks like it’s notification time.”

Laura opened the driver’s door of the 4Runner, expecting Richie to ride along with her.

“Let’s take my car,” he said.

She looked at the red Monte Carlo, black and chrome strips running down the sides, a stylized silver 8 on the right front fender.

“I’ve got all my stuff in here.”

“We could move it.”

“I’d feel like Starsky and Hutch riding around in that car.” Aware that Warren Janes was watching their interaction. “We’d better go in mine.”

His face turned stony. “Tell you what. We’ll caravan.”

She watched him scurry to his car and get in. He started it up and revved the engine, the Monte Carlo’s deep-throated roar drowning out the peace of the forest. Motioning to her to lead the way.

Laura realized they’d be driving separately all around town, first to Safeway to pick up Kellee’s photos, then to notify the families of the victims. That did not sit well with her. Her parents had been children of the Depression and didn’t like waste, and neither did she. “Wait!”

Richie powered his window down, but kept revving the engine, forcing her to walk over to him.

“I’ll go with you. Let me get my stuff.”

For answer, he popped the trunk.

Sitting way down in the bucket seat, peering out past three stickers on her side of the windshield,
1
,
8
, and
15
—no doubt they carried some deep mystical meaning—Laura avoided looking at Richie. She didn’t have to. Self-congratulation rolled off him like the Canoe cologne her first boyfriend wore for the high school dance.

They followed the road back through the mouse-hole tunnel under the railroad tracks, then over the freeway into Williams, where the road split into two one-way streets: Railroad Avenue going west and, one block over, old US Route 66 going east.

Modeling itself as a tourist town, Williams had two main attractions: stores exploiting the Route 66 nostalgia craze and the Grand Canyon Railway. The Grand Canyon Railway shuttled tourists back and forth to the Grand Canyon for the day. Route 66 … just
was
.

The late-afternoon sun glowed off the walls of the Main Street buildings up the way. Many of them had been made of rock quarried near here—a mosaic of reds, golds and dark browns held in place by a Krazy Glue of cement. Driving through town this morning on the way to the police station, she had counted mostly curio shops and antique stores—a shop with old cameras in the window, another selling ancient radios of every description.

Williams’s one supermarket, Safeway, was situated on the west end of town, not far from where they came in. Laura noticed a shop off to the side on one end of the parking lot. One window displayed a mannequin dressed up in camos, wielding a paintball gun; the other, a mannequin in a white wedding dress. Red letters that would glow at night spelled out the name KITTEN’S JOY SEWING SUPPLY AND DRESS SHOPPE.

Richie disappeared while Laura waited under the harsh fluorescents at the photo kiosk for the clerk to find Kellee’s photos. Halloween decorations were already up. She’d just opened the flap when Richie returned, holding a jelly doughnut. He craned his neck to look at the photo on top, a candid shot of Kellee Taylor, looking young and healthy. “My, my.”

Laura said, “That’s the female victim.”

“Oh.”

Then: “She have a sister?”

Cop humor. Laura ignored him, bringing her focus down to the photograph. Shutting everything else out. Well, almost everything—she did notice the powdered sugar from Richie’s doughnut raining down on the sleeve of her navy jacket.

She’d shared a squad room with him for three years, but suddenly the whole Safeway was too small for the two of them. Something about him—his body language, his jelly doughnut, his
presence
—distracted her. She ignored him harder.

Richie was right about one thing: Kellee Taylor was a knockout. Fresh-faced and golden-skinned, her blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail under a ball cap, she wore an NAU baseball shirt with dark sleeves over denim shorts. She stood in front of Hoover Dam, radiating health and happiness.

Her whole life ahead of her.

Laura thought of Joshua Wingate’s Polaroids, the color and the life drained out, the vibrant cornsilk hair turned dull and greenish yellow from the flash, clotted with blood.

Laura had no idea how long ago this picture had been taken; whether it had been from this trip or from an earlier one, but it could mean that Dan and Kellee had gone to Hoover Dam as recently as yesterday.

With the next photograph, a puzzle piece clicked into place. The sign above the door read: FORGET ME NOT WEDDING CHAPEL.

That explained the cake and the wine glasses.

Dan and Kellee stood in bright sunshine, Cupid’s arrow lit up in green neon behind them. Kellee wore her cream-colored dress, and Dan looked uncomfortable in his suit. Kellee held a single red rose.

Richie Lockhart wiped his hands with the little tissue that came with the doughnut and breathed over her shoulder.“What do you know? They tied the knot."

“We’ve got the beginning of a timeline,” Laura said, thinking out loud. “That picture at Hoover Dam. What time do you think it is?”

“Could be morning or afternoon.”

“Well, let’s think about this.” She recognized the road and the way the dam curved—it was the facing the Arizona side. If her calculations were correct, the shadows were thrown by the eastern sun, not the west. “I’d say nine, ten in the morning at the latest.”

“Could be.”

“Look where the shadows are coming.”

“Okay, sure, I can see that.”

“And at the chapel, it could have been as late as one or two.”In her mind she let it play out. “They were killed sometime overnight … unless this picture was taken the day before, on Thursday.”

“Uh-huh.”

It occurred to her that she had one answer right here. She glanced at the sticker on the envelope. The date stamped there was: 9/15, 4:38 PM.

September fifteenth. Yesterday.

“Yesterday morning they drove to Vegas, got married, and made it to Williams before five.” She went through the snapshots again—a party at an apartment that Laura assumed belonged to either Dan or Kellee, and one or two of Dan that could have been on the Northern Arizona University campus. Only four photos of their wedding trip, including one outside the chapel, a group shot. People milling around. Many of them—including the bride and the groom—had their backs to the camera. A candid shot.

Whoever the photographer was at the chapel, he wasn’t a pro.

As Laura waited for Richie to pay for the jelly doughnut, she toyed with the timeline. If her calculations were correct, Dan and Kellee had left early yesterday morning to get married in Las Vegas, possibly on an impulse. They’d come back to Williams, left the roll of film at Safeway—probably bought the food for their celebration there—then settled in at the campground.

Did they go by to see Dan’s parents?

The celebration was for two, though: two wine glasses, two sandwich wrappers, a small cake.

She wondered if they had kept their wedding a secret.

Richie finished paying for the doughnut and motioned toward the restroom. Laura took the opportunity to talk to the three checkers. They were all extremely friendly and helpful, but none of them remembered the young couple. She got the name and number of the woman who had worked there yesterday, then went looking for Richie. He wasn’t in the store and he wasn’t outside.

Probably still in the bathroom. She knew he had prostate problems—like everything else, the state of his urinary health was fair game. He was the squad practical joker. The good thing was, he didn’t mind laughing at himself.

From the parking lot, Laura took another look at the old motels on Main Street. Parked along the street were plenty of beat-up old trucks, the kind construction workers drove. Hammering rang in the clear air, punctuated by the whine of a circular saw. This part of town was as busy as a beehive, even though it was after Labor Day and Laura hadn't seen many tourists. Despite the Indian-summer heat, the area felt closed-up to her, fall in the high country, which made for a strange juxtaposition with the frenetic noise down the street. The town was in the throes of a renovation boom, lots of old motels getting makeovers, but keeping the same neon nostalgic glow of their glory days.