The Laura Cardinal Novels (78 page)

Did Bobby Burdette believe them?

She had no way of knowing.

The hostage negotiator had taken to using the megaphone, but there was no answer.

It was quiet except for the wind. When the sun went down it would be cold, too. Someone had set up lights, which made things eerier, the shadows stretching out along the road. It felt like a stadium. And this was the sport.

Peltier pacing back and forth, looking at his watch. Suddenly he stopped, looked at Handley, the negotiator, and made a cutting motion to his throat. He strode over, took the megaphone.

“Bobby Burdette, throw out your keys and come out, hands on your head. Come out now!”

No reply.

“If you don’t come out now, we will take you. I have a sniper on you. Throw out your keys! Do it now!”

Silence. The truck standing there in the glare of the high-intensity lights. Immovable. Light flaring off the windshield, making it opaque. Impossible to see in.

“Throw out your keys! Do. It. Now.”

Laura was aware of an almost imperceptible movement among the SWAT team, like a breeze through a cornfield. And then, stillness.

“Bobby Burdette—”

The rest of Peltier’s words were drowned out in the explosion.

The shock stayed with Laura long after the debriefing, which took them well into the night. The memory still raw, the way they cleared out—fast—a panicked rear guard action. An orderly retreat. There would be cleanup, but not by them. There would be crime scene investigation, but not by them.

The incredible media circus.

The hours at the FBI headquarters in Vegas. All of them, including Peltier, seemingly lost and trying to focus. Shocked. Peltier’s arrogance gone. And through it all, the scene kept replaying itself in Laura’s mind. She had seen the detonation before she had heard it: the almost incremental rise of the truck’s hood in slow motion, lifting up along with the top of the cab, starting to settle into new, less-familiar lines—before disintegrating into spouts of shooting flame and boiling black smoke, an oily miasma filling the red-stained sky. The sound deafening.

Debris raining down, all of them enveloped in smoke. Laura’s first panicked thought was also the one that stayed with her:
What if Glenn Traywick had lied?

And another question: What could they have done different? That was the big question, and one that had no answer.

For Laura’s part, she thought there was nothing they could have done to make it turn out differently.

Bobby Burdette’s big moment had come, and he had not flinched from it. He’d had his chance at immortality, and he took it.

Everything she had been told about him this long day backed up that hypothesis.

Laura boarded the DPS helicopter just before dawn, weary to the bone. The word that had come in from the cleanup crews was good. There were small traces of radioactivity, but nothing commensurate with a tank of transuranic waste. But even so, the fear had worn itself a path into Laura.

Flying back in the pure pink light of dawn, the desert floor warming to the sun, the shadows deep, the land below them like a nubby blanket of sage, Laura could see the trucks, the tankers, the men in white suits and masks, the piles of white plastic bags. Working their way through the charred ruins of the Fleet truck and the Trupact-II containers.

The containers were intact. Bobby’s explosives, it seemed, hadn’t made a dent in them. They lay like beer kegs after an all-night party, scattered on the desert earth’s surface.

Not enough explosive to do the job. Bobby Burdette must have known that.

When Laura got to Flagstaff, she checked into the motel, closed the drapes, stripped off all her clothes, and crawled under the sheets. She did not wake until late that evening.

She was hungry, but when the food came at the same coffee shop she’d eaten at before, it didn’t look good to her. Looking down at the steak and potato (
“watch out, the plate is hot”
) she called her house and got her machine. Needing to talk to Tom after what had happened. Still seeing Bobby’s truck disintegrating, then turning into a missile.

No one there to pick up. This was the third time she’d called and left a message.

When her cell phone rang a few seconds later, she felt almost giddy. “Tom?”

“Uh, no. This is Brandon. Brandon Terry.” Dan Yates’s roommate. “You wanted to talk to me?”

Laura swallowed her disappointment and asked him a few questions, more to wrap things up than anything else. He had little to add to Steve Banks’s account of the day Dan and Kellee left for Las Vegas.

“There’s nothing that stands out?” she asked wearily, feeling like a broken record. How many times had she asked that question?

“I can’t think of anything …”

“Well, thanks for—”

“A friend of his showed up later that day. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”

“When?”

“I don’t know, I was just getting ready to go to class. Quarter of eleven, maybe?”

“Which friend was this?” Laura picturing thirty-eight-year-old Bobby Burdette, all swagger and dark sunglasses.

“I don’t know. Probably someone he knew from class.”

Class?

“Can you describe him?”

“He was my age—”

Laura straightened. “Your age? What did he look like?”

“Just your average guy. I do remember he was upset, though. Really mad he missed Dan. You could tell he was pissed.”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know. He was just upset. The way he acted.”

“Did he give you a name?”

“He did, but I can’t remember it.”

Laura asked him a few more questions, but he couldn’t think of anything else.

A kid looking for Dan. It could mean nothing. Probably meant nothing. But she’d give a great deal to know who it was.

The ophthalmologist was cute. Not good-looking—cute. He was in his mid-thirties, and had an open, friendly face. His brown hair flopped in a bang over his forehead as he scooted around the darkened room on his little rolling chair, his quickness and the lab coat reminding her of some long-ago movie starring Groucho Marx.

He asked her to recount the last couple of instances when her vision went haywire. She did. A stickler for detail, she even told him about the ice.

“Ice? Oh, for those circles under your eyes.” He had been looking at her chart on the low table by the door. Now he zoomed across the space between them, looming up close to her face, his eyes searching. Shining a light on her face. “You know, we can fix that.”

“What?”

“Just a little snip here and pull this tight—it’s a simple operation.”

Laura felt something shake loose inside her. If he was talking plastic surgery, the prognosis couldn’t be that bad.

“I used to do that kind of work, but now I’m strictly ophthalmology But I know a good guy who could do it. Let me know if you want his name. Insurance doesn’t cover it, though …” He tapped the chart against his knee, thinking.

She wanted to scream,
What’s wrong with my eyes?

“You probably want to know what’s going on.”

Duh
.

“You’ve got ocular migraines. It’s obvious—it’s either that or a brain tumor.”

“I
don’t
have a brain tumor?”

He shook his head. “Not likely.”

He told her about ocular migraines. They were like migraines, but instead of giving her headaches and nausea, they caused a halo effect around her vision. “Harmless, but a pain in the ass. Stress brings them on, so if you can eliminate stressors, you’re home free.”

How simple it sounded. Eliminate stressors. Right.

“Also, if I were you, I’d stop using ice. No wonder you got ocular migraines—you must have frozen half your cranium.”

Laura had made the appointment from the Tucson airport and gone straight there. Debated going home, but there were too many things she had to do, so she drove back to DPS afterward.

Richie gave her the bad news as soon as she came in.

“The shell cartridge doesn’t match Bobby Burdette’s shotgun.”

“He had other guns.”

“None of them were 12-gauge.”

“He could have ditched it.”

Richie nodded. “But that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. Anyway, the dirtbag’s dead, so it’s a moot point.”

“Swell.” She walked to her desk. Five or six “While You Were Out” slips sitting there waiting for her. She looked through them all, hoping one of them was from Tom.

No such luck.

She sat down, feeling oddly disconnected. From the place, from the other detectives, from the world. At least her eyes were all right.

She closed said eyes now, feeling disoriented. That familiar tightness in her chest. The need to know what was going on with Tom, needing to pinpoint the source of bad feelings rising up in her throat. Maybe it was just what she’d seen: Bobby Burdette’s truck rearranging itself in the air over the Mojave.

She sat there for a few minutes. Remembering the billboard she’d seen on the way to the airport in Flagstaff this morning: CHOOSE LIFE.

The people who paid for the billboard were referring to abortion. But it made her think of Bobby Burdette. He’d had an image to protect; he’d seen himself a certain way. She thought that picture of himself was more important to him than the reality.

Given that, it was easy to see why he had killed himself. In his mind, he’d had no choice.

But she did.

She walked downstairs to Jerry’s office, knocked on the doorjamb. Jerry stood up from his desk, grizzled and smiling. “Congratulations are in order. That was some wild ride you went for up there. Looks like you closed this case and then some.”

“Looks like it.” Although now she wasn’t so sure. “What I came in to ask you—I’d like to take a couple of days off. I haven’t had much sleep—”

Jerry sat back down, his blueberry eyes assessing. “I think that’s a good idea. You’ve been through a lot.”

“So, it’s okay? I can leave now?”

“I think you should.”

Laura turned back at the doorway. “I think I’m going to need some counseling, too.”

She was almost to the turn-off to Vail, to the Bosque Escondido and her reunion with Tom Lightfoot—however that might turn out—when her cell rang.

It was the chief of police in Lordsburg, New Mexico.

“Laura Cardinal? I understand you know a Jamie Cottle from Williams, Arizona?”

“Yes—”

“We have him here at the jail. He asked to talk to you.”

“Jail?”

“He was following a schoolteacher around, Richard Garatano.”

Laura saw the Wentworth Road exit sign come up, then flash by. She glanced across the median at the mesquites, the road arrowing through the desert beyond. The road to home.

She pushed the 4Runner up to eighty.

It was only another one hundred and forty miles or so to Lordsburg, if she kept going straight on I-10.

By the time Laura got to Lordsburg just over the state line, the lowering sun was hanging on by its fingernails, staining the world red under streaky dark high clouds, the glow almost blinding in her rearview. Red suffused everything: the houses on the outskirts dotting the high grassy plain, the reflective signs, the bargain motels, fast food places, truck stops. The town seeming to stretch out on the left side of the interstate like a giant motherboard. Car lights flashed on as she took exit 22, drove under the overpass, and tracked her way up State Route 70 to Wabash Street.

She gave her name and badge number into the speaker set into the plastic window dividing the police department from the public. A few moments later Chief Thaddeus Farnsworth himself met her in the small lobby and led her back. Chief Farnsworth was a tall man, a rancher. Square face, square hands, the wrinkles webbing his sure-shooter blue eyes like a badge of honor. He smelled of nicotine and Juicy Fruit.

“Kid is something else,” he said as he led her to the interrogation room. Laura looked in the window: the boy inside looking small and helpless, even though he was tall for his age. His dark hair flopping over his face.

“You said he was following Garatano?”

“I’d say ‘stalking’ is more like it. We confiscated a 12-gauge shotgun from the gun rack in his truck.”

“Truck?” Laura asked. “He owns a car.”

“It’s registered to his parents.”

“What exactly was he doing?”

The chief summarized the events of the last day and a half. The first time Richard Garatano noticed Jamie Cottle was when he went to the Pizza Hut with his wife and baby boy. He sensed the kid watching him. When he got a good look, he knew right away who it was.

Apparently, Cottle had followed him around in Williams, too. Ran into him a lot, never said anything, just gave him the Evil Eye.

“When Garatano saw Cottle here in Lordsburg, it threw the fear of God into him. He called us. By the time we got there, the kid was gone. We didn’t take a report. Last I checked, a cat can look at a king.”

Laura smiled at that. “Do you know Mr. Garatano’s history?”

“We do now. I talked to the Williams PD yesterday. Bad situation.” He paused a beat—“poor kid, let him rest in peace. Drowned in Cataract Lake.“ Anyway, two nights ago, Cottle spent the night in his truck outside the Garatano residence. Garatano twice asked him to leave, and Cottle told him what I just told you: ‘A cat can look at a king.’ ”

Garatano was now teaching at Royal’s Academy, a charter school here in town.

Jamie Cottle parked outside the school, stayed there all day. When Garatano came out, Cottle got out of his truck and asked him if he’d found another boy. “This was when school was letting out and there were lots of kids around to hear it. According to Garatano, Cottle threatened him, said he better not touch another boy or he’d regret it. Since there were witnesses, we had enough to bring him in for questioning. It was a clear threat.”

“How did he react when you brought him in?”

“He seemed happy.”

“Happy?”

“Said he wanted to make Garatano’s life miserable, and it looked like he was succeeding.

“As I understand it, he’s got a real beef, though. After what happened to his brother. Jesus.” He touched his nose. “Chief Loffgren and I go way back. He said this kid had a crush on the girl who was shot up there a week or so ago? She was killed by a 12-gauge shotgun, wasn’t she?”