The Laura Cardinal Novels (87 page)

“Yeah,” Jaime said. “But that's different.”

“Maybe not. Somebody, say, who ran a concession with the carnival might have gotten a job at Sea World.”

“
Micaela
was the one who worked at Sea World, not Bill Smith.”

Rory grunted. “Bill Smith. Now there's an original name. These guys aren't very original in anything they do, you ask me. Didn't he use the old puppy ploy with the Brashear kid? Now
there's
a golden oldie.” He scratched his nose. “These days, kids are more sophisticated than that; he wouldn't get away with that now.”

That was true. A nine-year-old girl wasn't likely to fall for the lost puppy story. A five-year-old, maybe. One good thing about cable TV news, they covered abduction stories so often that almost every kid in America knew to be leery of someone looking for a lost puppy.

Laura said, “I know he worked as a short-order cook. Was anyone associated with Kristy a cook?”

“Neighbor. That was a sad story. He once pitched for the Mets, ended up slinging hash at a local diner.”

They all fell silent. The Bill Smith theory didn't make a lot of sense, especially with Smith taking Micaela all the way to Oregon and back. “Did he move at all?”

“Far as I know, he's still there. I kept track of him for a while, but it didn't pan out, and the guy was all right.”

“We need to know if he moved.”

“I can get that info for you,” Rory volunteered.

Laura said, “That's okay. We can do that.”

His joviality turned to sullenness in an instant. “That figures.”

Laura was getting tired of babying him. “What kind of restaurant did the Groves family have?”

“Deli. They didn't actually cook anything on the premises, unless you count using a microwave.”

“Did you talk to their workers?”

“What do
you
think? One was a young kid, the other was a middle-aged woman. Neither one of them struck me as the type who'd kill a little girl.”

“How old was the kid?”

“Twenty or so. But you got it wrong. He was gay as a three-dollar bill. Made me want to wash my hands afterward, just talkin' to him, he was such a fairy. Just made me a sandwich, too; when I found out he was the one who made it, I threw it in the trash.”

The more she saw of this man, the more she disliked him. She made sure to keep her expression and her voice neutral. “Just remind me. What were Kristy's actions the day she disappeared?”

“She helped prepare stuff at the deli in the morning, then she went over to her friend's house, must have been early afternoon. They hung out for a while, and she walked home. She only lived a couple of blocks away. Disappeared on the way back.”

Laura knew all this from the notes she'd been copied on. She had been over it several times since she got the cold case last year, but it was better to hear it from the investigator. She listened carefully to his inflection, so she could get a feeling for his prejudices and what interested him most. He seemed to have a low opinion of the girl, but not the parents. In his mind, the parents were hard-working and decent, and the child had let them down. Did that affect the way he saw Kristy? Did it affect how hard he had worked to find her killer? Did he think Kristy had come to a bad end due to her own actions?

Jaime shifted on his stool. Uncomfortable, Laura thought. Such a big man, he probably didn't find many chairs to accommodate him. “Nobody saw her,” he said.

“Nope. Nobody. Like she disappeared into thin air.”

Laura thought he might have said this a few times; it had the sound of a well-grooved path in his tongue.

Laura and Jaime went over the other information: Kristy's schoolmates, her boyfriends—plural, Flynn had added darkly—and the people in the neighborhood, including a registered sex offender. The registered sex offender had been in jail at the time on another charge.

Laura said, “Did you make the link to Micaela Brashear's disappearance right away?”

“Pretty much. I contacted the TPD detective, can't remember his name now—it's in the report—and it happened pretty much the way I wrote it. He wasn't very forthcoming.”

Laura had read the report several times, but wanted his answer anyway. “Why was that?”

“I think it was because Kristy was so much older. Fourteen, that's a teenager. He really got hung up on that. You know, how a lot of these creeps like kids a certain age? He had a point.”

Laura knew how particular child molesters and child killers could be. “So it went nowhere?”

“Like talking to a stone wall.”

“What about Jenny Carmichael?”

“That was much easier. The Brashear kid and the Carmichael kid were almost the same age. Plus Mt. Lemmon's our jurisdiction, and I worked pretty closely with Artie Schiller.”

Laura remembered how thorough Schiller's report was. He had assembled it as a case file, even though technically the child was considered missing, not dead.

“You know Artie's dead, don't you?” Rory said. “Heart attack. Guy ran in marathons and everything. Guess when it's your time, it's your time, doesn't matter how much frigging granola you eat.” He leaned back, beaming with self-satisfaction. “So what are you going to do now?” he added.

As a courtesy, Laura told him; he'd find out sooner or later anyway. “Kristy's mother is flying in, so we'll talk to her.”

“What about the other kid? The one on Mt. Lemmon? You talk to her parents yet?”

Laura hesitated.

Jaime broke in smoothly, “We're working on it.”

Rory Flynn's eyes narrowed. He knew they weren't going to share anything else with him, and he was mad about it. He tossed off a last shot and bit into a lime, then said, “Why don't you take me back to the party?”

On the drive back home, to the Bosque Escondido, Laura saw fireworks over the mountains. The official fireworks were over; these were the renegade ones—small and sporadic—but far more dangerous to the tinder-dry Tucson valley.

Fires everywhere, but people had to have their fun.

After Jaime dropped her off at the Department of Public Safety building, she'd tried to run down the missing girl. As she'd suspected, there were no missing children reported in Tucson during the years that concerned her, other than the three she knew about. There were sure to be runaways, but they would be older. She'd follow through on that tomorrow.

She and Jaime had learned little more than was in the report. They would follow up on the short order cook, but Laura doubted it would pan out. The guy who took Micaela had been driving all over hell and back.

Maybe they'd have better luck with the TPD detective who investigated Micaela Brashear's disappearance. Unfortunately, he now lived in Florida. She would have liked to talk to him face-to-face, but due to budget cuts, times were hard and money scarce.

Laura's house loomed up chalk-white in the starlight, situated on a dogleg in the ranch road. The dirt lane was lined by walnut trees, mesquite, and a stand of bamboo. The Bosque Escondido, a guest ranch sprawling across twenty acres of desert foothills, was owned by an old friend from high school. They'd worked out an agreement—she would maintain a law enforcement presence on the property, occasionally working traffic control for weddings and other events, and in return, she got to stay in the little house for minimal rent.

County land abutted the ranch on three sides. None of the ticky-tacky houses growing up over Kristy Groves's gravesite would ever set up shop in this pristine part of the world.

The house was closed up. She flipped on the pump switch for the swamp box cooler. She turned on every fan in the house and put her files on the desk in the alcove by the kitchen. Already this case was messy. Three jurisdictions, five detectives—one of them dead and another living in Florida. A tangled skein of egos, lapses in time, communication snafus, and turf battles. She needed to get control of the material, untangle all the threads. The thread she was most inclined to pull was the carnival connection. Both Micaela and Kristy Groves had been to a carnival within days of their abductions.

A carnival would be a perfect place for a serial killer. Serial killers, as a rule, loved to travel. A nomadic existence suited them well, the major reason why so many murders went unsolved. Hard to follow a shadow across the country, completely free to go where he wished. Serial killers were as efficient as any other predator. They killed and then just went on to the next victim.

Her head ached. She did not want to think about it.

She got a few baby carrots from the fridge and walked onto the porch, listening to the crickets and enjoying the view of the dark mesquite forest that made up the front yard. She let herself out the creaking gate and followed the well-worn path down toward the corral.

As she crossed the small wooden bridge over the irrigation ditch, the air dropped five or six degrees, because of the trees and the proximity to a spring.

There had been a path like this on the ranch where she used to keep her first horse, when she was going to college and engaged to Billy Linton. It had been a time full of hope and promise, but it had ended way too soon.

That youthful bliss had ended on a hot night in May when two homicide cops had shown up at her dorm room at the University of Arizona.

Laura fed Calliope's Music the baby carrots one at a time, her mind still on the other horse and the other time. Remembering what it was like to be young and in love and have the whole world in front of you. She didn't realize then that it all could implode at an instant.

Laura knew that being young and in love wasn't enough when your life was rocked by tragedy. No matter how hard you tried to make it work.

A bright green light rocketed out into the sky in the direction of the Santa Catalina Mountains, flashed briefly past the red radio tower lights, and turned the mountain peaks into a silhouette.

Laura remembered her stint at a summer camp on Mt. Lemmon—another memory turned to ashes. Summerhaven all burned up now.

Sometimes it seemed that the good moments were only a prelude to tragedy. That sooner or later, even the lucky ones ran out of time.

The squad bay at the Department of Public Safety was upstairs. DPS had four squads of four criminal investigators each. The desks in Laura's squad bay were arranged near the corners—every man an island. Laura was more of an island because she was the only female.

Laura got in to work at six thirty. She liked to come in early because she had the place to herself more often than not and could hear herself think

The map of southern Arizona was already pinned up on the bulletin board above her desk. Laura would work out from there in concentric circles, looking for the girl Micaela Brashear had described.

Laura couldn't stop thinking about The Missing Girl. She thought of her name just like that, with capital letters. Laura decided she would call at least five jurisdictions a day, starting with Tucson and working her way to the outlying areas: Marana PD; Oro Valley PD; Sahuarita PD; the Tohono O'odham Tribal Police. Like a rock thrown into a pond, the circles would spread. She wouldn't stop at the Arizona border. She knew someone in Mexico. She knew someone in New Mexico.

It was ineffably sad to think that a child could not leave even a small footprint on the earth. At the very least, Laura would learn who this girl was. And if possible, she would find her and bring her home.

By seven thirty, the other members of her squad had trickled in. Victor Celaya, the detective she partnered with most often, stopped by her desk. “How's the case coming? The reporters after you yet?”

He held his coffee mug out and away from his crisply-ironed chinos. The mug had a picture of a gun pointing outward and the legend:
Better judged by twelve than carried by six.

“Not me, but the lieutenant's holding a press conference at noon.”

He whistled. “Sounds to me like somebody's starstruck.”

Laura laughed. In truth, there was little reason for a press conference at this juncture. No suspects, no leads, very little information that could be released to the press.

Victor's phone rang. He backed up to his desk and picked up, sloshing his coffee onto some papers. Held them up with two fingers, grimacing, as he listened to whoever was on the line. He glanced down at his slacks, and she heard him say, “Can you hold for a minute?” He left the squad bay and returned a few minutes later rubbing at the stain with a wet paper towel before picking up the phone again. Victor hated messes—except for the romantic kind. He had a wife, a mistress, and fling going with a waitress at a restaurant in South Tucson.

If you overlooked that, he was a great guy.

Laura heard a scrape of a shoe and looked up. Jaime was here, the ID he'd been given dangling from a lanyard around his neck. “We'd better hurry if we don't want to miss Patsy Groves's plane,” he said by way of greeting.

This time, Laura drove. The new airport looked like all the other airports in the country. Laura missed the cowtown feel of the old one, even if it had been stuck in the sixties. She missed the sun coming in through the windows, the small plane hanging above the up escalator, the batwing-doored saloon on the second floor. Now TIA could have been transplanted to anywhere in the country—generic purple and gray.

Laura had seen a picture of Patsy Groves and her husband Greg in a clipping from a newspaper article. The picture was several years old, but Laura recognized Mrs. Groves as she came down the ramp.

She looked like a yellow crayon worn down to a nub. Her short hair was yellow, her Capri pants and top were yellow, her complexion sallow. If she wore yellow to cheer herself up, it didn't appear to be working.

She made a beeline for them, her hand wrapped tightly around the handle of her pull-along suitcase, determination in every bone.

“You must be the detectives,” she said, planting herself in front of them. “Were you the ones who found Kristy?”

“No, ma'am,” Jaime said. “But we are the ones you want to talk to.”

“I don't want to see her.”

“Well, you don't have to—“

“I want to remember her the way she was.”