The Laura Cardinal Novels (53 page)

“Uh-huh. Then I’m going home.”

“Why?”

“Sheriff’s deputies nailed Hector Lopez at a trailer in San Simon. I’ve got to be there.”

“What about this case?”

“You’re doing pretty good on your own.”

“Did you clear this with Jerry?”

“What do you think? Look, I’ve got to go. Looks like I’ll get to see my kid tonight after all.”

“You could have told me—”

But he’d already hung up.

In retrospect, Laura thought this might be a good thing. She and Richie hadn’t spent a lot of time working together on this case; he had gone his way and she had gone hers. So there was already something of a disconnect. Now she had the whole enchilada. A double-check with her sergeant, Jerry Grimes, verified that Hector Lopez, a big-time people smuggler—a
coyote—
had been captured today. Lopez had run a one-stop shop that moved large numbers of illegal aliens over the border, providing them with forged documents and licenses. He had also held some of the illegals hostage, charging their families exorbitant prices to release them. A couple of his people had gotten into a gunfight on Interstate 10 with a rival gang of
coyotes
, resulting in the death of a citizen whose car had been caught in the crossfire.

Jerry said, “It’s Richie’s case. We need him. Is that going to be a problem?”

“No problem I can see.”

“That’s good.” She heard the relief in his voice. “To tell you the truth we’re kind of stretched thin at the moment. Everybody’s doubling up. Are you anywhere near wrapping this thing up?” His voice hopeful.

“You need me now?”

“No,” he said hastily. “Just hoping we can get a solve on this. I mean, two college kids … you know.”

“I have some things to work on.”

“The lieutenant says whatever you need within limits. This is an important one.”

Laura wanted to say every case was important, but she knew better than to argue with him. The idea of two young college students being ambushed as they slept in a campground would make everyone nervous. The sooner they found whoever did it, the better. And Jerry was a good guy, the best kind of sergeant. He let her do her thing, even if sometimes her thing was unconventional. He depended on her, trusted her. Maybe the only one left in the department who
did
trust her.

So Laura said, “I’ll do my best,” and left it at that.

She walked three blocks to the Safeway and bought some supplies: a couple of sheets of white poster board and two dolls, Barbie and Ken, on sale for $4.99 each.

Laura had never played with dolls when she was a little girl, never even owned a Barbie. But tonight Barbie and Ken would suit her purposes perfectly.

As Laura walked back outside into the almost-dark, she felt the stress of the last few days easing. She wasn’t surprised at the little tug of excitement. She savored the feeling.

An only child, Laura had always been good at doing things on her own, so used to entertaining herself that she didn’t need anyone to bounce her ideas off. It was her version of the nesting instinct. Some women liked to clean house; she liked to get all the materials she needed to do her work and burrow down into it. She looked forward to doing that now.

Laura stopped at a fast-food place and, instead of ordering what she really wanted—something loaded with fat and grease—she got a salad that tasted like cardboard. She even used the low-fat dressing. It filled her, but didn’t satisfy her.

Back inside the room, she taped the two poster board sheets together, overlapping by about a foot, and spread it out on the round table by the window. She gathered her autopsy notes and the mapping work she and Richie had done on the buckshot, put them on one of the two chairs, and sat in the other.

She drew a large circle, representing the tent, on the contact paper. Then she removed (with difficulty) Barbie and Ken from their respective boxes and placed them inside the tent, their feet toward the tent entrance. She put Ken on his back and Barbie on her side, facing him. Laura tried to raise Ken up on his elbows, but the plastic limbs were resistant. She guessed that Dan had heard a sound and raised up on his elbows just before the first shot blasted through the tent. From the evidence, it appeared that after the first shotgun blast and the buckshot penetrating his foot, Dan had moved quickly, shoving Kellee to the right side of the tent. There had been little blood in the area where their feet would be, just a small blood trail as he whipped his leg to the side.

The ME had gone through all the wounds with her, Laura charting them on a legal pad: three rounds, nine projectiles each, sixteen of twenty-seven shots accounted for.

The killer had shot through the front of the tent first, from approximately fifteen feet away. Laura marked the shots this way: 1-1—took off male victim’s right big toe

1-2—shatters right shin

1-3—tears right calf

1-4—goes through right heel into floor of the tent

She added the other five shots that had not hit Dan, but penetrated the tent floor: 1-5—hole to the right

1-6—ditto

1-7—hole to the left

1-8—ditto

1-9—ditto

She rearranged Ken and Barbie, pushing them over onto their sides, nudging them up against the line representing the right edge of the tent. Turned the contact paper one quarter turn clockwise. Now the couple was horizontal to her, and she was in the shoes of the killer.

She logged the rounds Dan and Kellee had received this time: 2-1—severs female victim’s carotid

2-2—breaks female’s right collarbone

2-3—female–chest below collarbone

2-4—male, below right nipple, destroys heart

2-5—through his forearm and into female victim

2-6—into her Adam’s apple

2-7—through her right arm, passes alongside bone, into his right rib cage, breaks rib, travels back and embeds in male’s spine 2-8—below her right nipple 2 inches toward midline

2-9—back of male’s right hand, into her chest cavity, lacerating her aorta According to the ME, all nine shots stayed inside the bodies.

This was the killing shot. Dan Yates’s heart destroyed, Kellee’s carotid severed.

Kellee’s aorta lacerated.

Buckshot lodged in Dan’s spine.

Buckshot lodged in Kellee’s throat.

Once again, she moved the paper. This time she was facing the tops of the victims’ heads.

She filled in the last round:

3-1—into the ground to the right of Dan Yates

3-2—ditto

3-3—ditto

3-4—ditto

3-5—ditto

3-6—ditto

All of these shots missed the victims, penetrating the floor of the tent and the ground. Laura had recovered all of them.

Shots 3-7 to 3-9 were grouped, within the radius of a tennis ball, and all hit Dan Yates in the back of the head.

3-7—rode the curve of the brainpan and back into the brainstem 3-8—shattered the back of the skull

3-9—also penetrated the back of the skull

With the shots 3-8 and 3-9, there was a large outshoot—lots of blood and brain matter spraying the floor and sides of the tent.

She stared at her diagram, the list of shots.

The numbers on the sheet of paper looked cold, clinical, but the effects of the damage piled up. It spread out like a poisonous lake in her stomach, a flat hard pain. The salad felt like crumpled paper, all rough edges.

Amazing what guns could do. She’d been to so many scenes where someone had shot in anger, before they had a chance to think, to realize what they were doing. Homicide detectives actually liked these cases because they were easy solves.

Laura hated them. She hated seeing ordinary people, people who thought of themselves as good, suddenly confronting an evil in themselves they could not previously imagine. Coming face-to-face with the kind of damage they could do, there was inevitably deep shock. Shock and anguish. A decent person up until then, now desperately wishing he could call the bullet back.

People who would have to build, in their minds, a whole new house for their souls.

That was not the case here. The message she got from this guy was he didn’t care.

He didn’t care, but then again, he did.

He didn’t care enough to look inside the tent, but he cared enough to make sure they were dead. That was where the overkill came in.

He had walked all the way around the tent and shot into three sides. This struck her as deliberate, methodical. But there was a rage component, too.

Thinking about it, looking at the damage, Laura was sure he had known them.

The room was airless. Laura got up and opened the door. A cool breeze slipped in, eddying around her bare ankles, and she thought of Frank Entwistle. No sign of him tonight, even though he might have made himself useful, brainstorming with her as he did in the old days whenever she had a case that bothered her. Even though he was TPD retired, and she was a detective with the state police—rival agencies—Frank had always been her mentor. But these days, Frank Entwistle appeared where and when he wanted to, and there was no way Laura could conjure him up. The man who boasted that he was related to Peg Entwistle, the young starlet from the 1930s who committed suicide by jumping off the H on the Hollywood sign, liked to make dramatic flourishes of his own.

Laura sat back down and stared at the outline of the tent, the two dolls, pretty and blond like their human counterparts.

If it was true that he knew them, the most obvious motive was jealousy.

Which brought her back to Jamie Cottle.

She knew that sometimes love—and rejection—could grow in a person’s mind until it was bigger than anything else.

The people she’d talked to thought Jamie was incapable of violence, that he was shy and quiet, unable to even tell Kellee how he felt. But they couldn’t see inside his head.

There was something that bothered her, though. How did the killer know where to find them? Dan and Kellee had run off to Vegas on a lark. Would this person, the killer, follow them all the way to Vegas and then to the Cataract Lake campground? If that were true, he’d have to pick them up in Flagstaff.

She stared at the circle, trying to empty her mind, create a vacuum for a fresh thought to come in, but all she saw was the dumb circle.

The circle bothered her.

She’d tried to draw a perfect round circle, but it hadn’t turned out that way. It bulged out on one side. Laura had never had a steady hand for that kind of work. She sketched well, but drawing a straight or curved line—it must not fit in with her personality.

She felt the urge to touch it up, make it more even.

Thinking: You wouldn’t find a perfect circle in nature.

She sat still for a moment, frozen in place by the thought. Then she grabbed her fanny pack, gun, and flashlight and headed out to her car.

Megumi Taylor awoke to an empty bed. Outside she could hear the patter of the sprinkler on the lush ground cover near the cabin. Usually that was a soothing sound. But there was something big behind the sound of the sprinklers, something outsized and bloated whose shape she sensed, but could not articulate.

It took a few minutes for her mind to catch up with the pain inside. When it did, she felt as if she had suddenly stepped on a shard of glass, it was so sharp and piercing.

The sharpness was followed by a dull void. The feeling that there was no future.

She knew that was not true. She had Jack. Jack was her life. But she also understood that their marriage, as she knew it, was over. They were no longer three. They were no longer whole. Whatever happened now, it would not be what it was.

Megumi thought she had prepared for that long ago, but now she understood you could never really prepare. As she couldn’t with her father and then her mother. There was no preparation for the ghost pain of someone you love who is no longer there.

Jack being gone from the bed was nothing new. She knew he had a secret life, friends he corresponded with on e-mail, talked to on the phone. She also knew it had nothing to do with her. She knew it was not another woman. Jack was not made that way.

Her girlfriends—if she had any left—would have scoffed at that. Would have told her that she had her head in the sand. Those were the kind of girlfriends she had when she lived in San Francisco—skeptical women. Always looking for the con behind every kind man’s act.

No, Jack loved her. But he needed something else, something that belonged to the silence late at night. It was his restless nature. He needed to move around in his skin; he needed to reach out to other friends. He used to have a HAM radio. Now he had the Internet.

Silly woman
, her friends would say.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire
.

Through the crack in the door, she saw the light on, as she had seen it countless times over the years of their marriage. She heard his voice, muted, on the phone. The clock said 1:15.

Tonight she wanted to go and see if he was all right. She knew that would break the unspoken bargain between them, but it was something she needed to do.

She sat up on the bed, her bare toes touching the rag rug carpet on the polished pine floor.

Feeling the cool air insinuate itself through her nightgown, caress the back of her calves. She rose, walked across the gleaming floor, and pushed the door open. It creaked.

He was sitting in the living room, under the old-fashioned hurricane lamp, talking on the phone. His back hunched over the phone, but she saw him stiffen slightly.

She said nothing. He knew she was here, and he did not require her comfort. Sometimes being a wife was lonely.

She walked back into the bedroom. Stood at the window, looking out at the parking area, the flower border, all leached of color, the arc of silver water jetting across the grounds.

As she looked out, the light around her grew.

He stood in the lighted doorway.

A tall silhouette, his arms hanging useless at his side. For a moment she felt a hard fear rip through her heart—there was an alien quality to the way he just stood there.

He said, “Megumi.”