Mortal Crimes 1 Page 10

  Just as they were finishing up, her phone rang. She got it with her left hand, trying to hear over the dieseling ambulance. It was Jaime, calling her from DPS where he had gone to meet her after the autopsy.

  “Are you okay?” His concern for her audible.

  At the sound of his voice, she wanted to cry.

  ________

  Heart hammering in his chest, Steve jogged back to the house to get his new paint brushes. Urgency ignited goosebumps like ant bites up and down his arms and across his back. Excitement and fear, both.

  Because he knew what he’d found.

  He knew the shape. Elliptical, definitely bone. He had found a skull. A small human skull.

  The minute the shovel blade had touched bone, he’d stopped what he was doing. Even though his shovel had only tapped the skull lightly, the feel of the blade had shuddered straight up his arm, as if he’d hit the hammer on the high striker at the county fair. It had runneled its way right into his soul. He’d immediately thrown the shovel aside, got down on his knees, and brushed away the dirt. He was afraid there would be a mark on the brown, convex bone, but there wasn’t. Not so much as a scratch, thanks to the dirt compacted on top.

  Steve felt both anguish and an odd kind of triumph. He knew in his heart who the skull belonged to. He saw her in his mind’s eye, her hair capturing the sun, a sheaf of wheat. The serious eyes watching him, watching Jake. The khaki uniform, the tanned arms and legs.

  He knew it was her.

  He was not crazy. He was not seeing things: it was her. He had met a ghost. He’d have to come to grips with that. He’d met her by the stream bed and she’d pushed him into uncovering her after all these years.

  As he reached the cabin, Steve realized that he would have, as Ricky Ricardo would say, “some ‘splainin’ to do.” The police would ask him questions. Why was he digging up the property? What was he looking for? Did he know what he would find before he found it?

  He knew how it would look. He’d seen it often enough on the nightly news: a man weighed down by the guilty secret in his backyard finally confesses. He says he’s just digging for heck of it, but you could drive a Mack truck right through that explanation. He would be the prime suspect. He knew a few cops in LA and knew that was how they would see it.

  Right now, he didn’t want to think about that.

  He went inside and grabbed the paintbrushes, which he’d left on the kitchen counter by the sink, price stickers still on them, still tucked into the flat brown paper bag. He chose the smaller one. He knew he should leave it alone, call the authorities now, but it was still light and he wanted to at least get the shape of it, see if he was seeing things or not.

  Could be he’d go back there and it would all be a dream. Something he’d made up in his head. He’d been awfully strange up there by the stream bed, working like a manic railroad laborer.

  The way time had seemed to stretch, then telescope. The way the hole had seemed wide and deep, then turned out to be only a couple of feet down—two-and-a-half feet at the most.

  His fingers caressed the paintbrush bristles, mind racing.

  Where had he been back in 1997 when Jenny Carmichael had gone missing? He’d been living in LA at the time, working for the U.S. Geological Survey. Had he come out here at all that summer? He was sure he hadn’t, but that summer was a blur. He and Linda had broken it off, and their breakup had consumed him. It had been a long, hard summer, and he’d been obsessed with his work. Work had been good; it’d gotten his mind off their failed relationship. Long hours, late nights, extended trips. No time to come out here.

  There had been a time, back in the nineties, when he hadn’t seen his grandfather for a few years.

  As he opened the door, Jake dashed out like a black streak. He took off up the hill toward the stream bed, toward the excavation, barking joyously as he ran.

  Looking like he had when he was two or three years old.

  Steve should stop him, but he couldn’t. He felt frozen, holding on to the paintbrush. Another thought occurring to him.

  His grandfather had been ninety-five when he died a few weeks ago. He would have been eighty-five when Jenny Carmichael went missing. Too old, he thought. Too old for what he was thinking.

  He felt like a bastard for even entertaining the notion. His grandfather had been a gentle, inquisitive man. He would no more molest a child than hack off his own hands.

  But it was his property, the nasty little voice in his head insinuated.

  Steve had an answer for that. Most of the year, his grandfather had lived down in Tucson.

  Not in the summer, though.

  No, not in the summer.

  Steve knew his grandfather’d had a lot of friends, friends from the old days. And as he’d gotten older, they’d dropped away, casualties of old age. It’s like a steeplechase, his grandfather used to say. A few falls at every fence. But there had been a whole heck of a lot more falls in the later years, as his grandfather lost his friends one by one to death.

  His grandfather had known a lot of people on the mountain, though. Neighbors would check in on him from time to time. Steve remembered hearing about so-and-so and his wife inviting him over for dinner, about somebody else he had played chess with. Maybe his grandfather had been friendly with someone unsavory. Someone who had taken advantage of his hospitality to—

  You’re jumping the gun, he told himself. The skull might not belong to Jenny Carmichael at all. People have inhabited the mountain for, well, centuries. First indigenous people, then settlers.

  But he didn’t really believe that.

  He glanced in the direction of the incline, and saw Jake furiously digging.

  No need for a paintbrush now.

  He wondered if he’d let the dog out on purpose, to cover up his own excavation.

  As if it could.

  ________

  As she reached the house, Laura’s pager went off. It was not a number she recognized. She shoved open the door and grabbed her phone, stabbed the number in with her left index finger.

  A man identifying himself as Rudy Valenzuela, a detective-sergeant with the Pima County Sheriff’s office, answered. He told her that he had talked with Jaime Molina and learned that she was working the Kristy Groves homicide and related cases.

  Laura was aware she was squeezing the phone in a death grip—something important going on.

  “A cabin owner found some bones on Mt. Lemmon,” Valenzuela said. “They’re small—we believe they belong to a child.”

  Laura’s first thought: It might be Jenny Carmichael.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jenny Carmichael’s mother was a fighter. At the time of her daughter’s disappearance, she was a single mother with another child to raise, Jenny’s older brother, Gage. Gage was older by two years, which would have made him twenty if he had lived.

  Two weeks ago, Marine Lance Corporal Gage Carmichael died in Afghanistan.

  As Laura drove up Mt. Lemmon, she thought about the dove-like woman who had become a soldier on the front line of victims’ rights. The woman whose organization, Survivors of Homicide, grew out of a spare bedroom in her house. Mary Carmichael had changed at least one Arizona law restricting the movement of sexual predators and had testified before the US Congress.

  Now she would have a gold star in her window.

  Laura and Jaime had planned to interview Mary Carmichael, later rather than sooner, in light of the devastating loss she had suffered. But if the bones by the stream bed on Mt. Lemmon were Jenny’s, Laura and Jaime would be the ones to tell her.

  Thinking about how she would face Mrs. Carmichael so soon after the death of her son might be premature. It was quite possible the bones near the cabin belonged to someone other than Jenny.

  As Laura reached Summerhaven, she spotted a sheriff’s patrol car parked across from the Mt. Lemmon Café.

  She made a U-turn, pulled in behind him, and flashed her lights. He drove out and she followed. They went back down Mt. Lemmon
Highway for a mile or so before turning off on a road near the Inspiration Rock area.

  Blacktop turned to dirt, the dust of the patrol car kicking up a white haze. The road turned rough, Laura’s Yukon jouncing through ruts and over rocks, the beams from her headlights ricocheting off the pine trees. Ahead, parked down from a small cabin, Laura saw two sheriff’s vehicles: Jaime’s unmarked and the white van belonging to the forensic anthropologist.

  Laura thinking: This cold case is exploding. If it was Jenny Carmichael, she had turned up far from where she had gone missing.

  Beyond the cabin, the place where the bones had been found was lit like Dodger Stadium. Powered by a noisy generator, bright 750-watt lights lit up the area, filtering down like moon rays through the trees.

  The sheriff’s car parked just off the road, and Laura followed suit. He was out in a flash to greet her, a tall man with a broad, friendly face.

  “Detective Cardinal?” he asked. They shook hands, Laura feeling awkward using her left hand. Thinking she was getting a much better reception from Detective Sergeant Rudy Valenzuela than she had from the men at the party the other night. He glanced at her sling.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said. “I’m only wearing it because I’ve been told to, as a precaution.”

  “Jaime’s up at the site. I’ll take you up there.”

  Valenzuela filled her in as they walked past the cabin and up the short incline. The cabin old and built of fieldstone and wood. The muffled sound of a dog barking came from inside. As they went up the hill, the noise receded until it sounded like somebody sawing wood.

  She followed Valenzuela along the stream bed, picking her way carefully over the uneven ground. Glad for the bright light, which threw every rock into relief.

  She saw a huddle of people in the bright glare. A large shape detached itself from the group and lumbered over. “Looks like a child’s skull,” Jaime said. “Jean just got here, so you know she’s not going to commit. But it looks like a child’s skull to me.”

  “How was she found?”

  “Guy who owns the cabin said his dog dug her up.”

  Laura stopped, dismayed. “So it was recent?”

  “Doesn’t look that way to me. Those are bones—it’s not a body.”

  Laura wondered how a dog would find a skeleton that old. She supposed there could be some lingering putrefaction in skeletal remains, but from eleven years ago?

  Laura glanced at her notes. “The owner of the cabin is Steve Lawson, right?”

  “Yeah, that guy over there. The one with the glasses? He’s a geologist or hydrologist, something like that. Works for USGS.”

  Laura looked at the group of people. Two uniforms—one sheriff’s, the other with the Forest Service—Jean Cox, and a couple of other people.

  One of them looked like a geologist. From here she could see the gold glint of his wire-rimmed glasses, but even without them she’d know. Guy wore a dark green, long-sleeved shirt with button-flap, double chest-pockets, jeans, a thick leather belt, and desert boots. Clearly, he knew which pack he belonged to.

  She assessed the potential suspect. Nice enough looking in a scholarly way—he could have posed for the Cabela’s catalog. She thought he was probably ten years older than she.

  “You want to take this one?” Jaime said.

  Laura nodded. She did want to take this one. It intrigued her, the guy letting his dog dig up these bones only days after Kristy Groves’s skeletal remains were found down in the valley.

  ________

  Steve Lawson led Laura and Jaime to his cabin, where they could talk without distraction. Laura wanted to get Lawson’s statement as soon as possible. She noticed a picnic bench shoved up against the screen door of the porch, spotted the picnic table and remaining bench under a ponderosa pine.

  “I blocked the door so the dog couldn’t get out.”

  “What kind of dog?” Jaime asked, using a standard confidence-builder. People loved to talk about their animals, and Steve Lawson was no different.

  “He’s a black lab.”

  The minute he opened the door, the dog stopped barking and started wriggling, dancing a jitterbug of extreme happiness. “Hey, buddy,” Steve said, holding both sides of the dog’s head and rubbing his ears.

  “What’s his name?” Laura asked, holding out her hand for the dog to sniff.

  “Jake.”

  Laura bent over the lab, running her hands over his gyrating body. He was one of those dogs who loved to have their hips rubbed. If anything could win the man’s trust, making a fuss of his dog would. “Jake?”

  “At the time, TNT was running the mini-series Lonesome Dove. For some reason, the character in the movie reminded me of Jake, so that’s the name I gave him.”

  Jaime said, “Wasn’t that the guy they hung?”

  “Hanged.” Laura and Steve Lawson had said it at the same time.

  Looked at each other.

  She thought he cracked a grin, but she wasn’t sure.

  They entered the cabin. Laura scanned the room: cover, concealment, escape. Following that rule had already served her well today, and she was glad that it had become such an ingrained habit. Glancing at Jaime, she saw he was doing the same.

  There was a short hallway on the right, no doubt led to a bathroom and one or two bedrooms. As a way of escape, it could be a dead end. The tiny kitchen was separated from the rest of room by a counter. The upright wood planks of the counter might be solid enough to provide concealment, but probably would not stop a bullet. The appliances were old and white. A Formica-topped table and four mismatched chairs formed a breakfast nook near one window. Knotty pine paneling, dark with age, throughout.

  There were a lot of boxes. And a lot of junk, most of it relegated to one side of the room: an old lamp, bric-a-brac, towering stacks of papers threatening to spill over. Laura glanced at the top one: Geology of the Santa Catalina Mountains by Benjamin Rogers Luce. Written on a typewriter.

  Lawson motioned to an Early American couch and two chairs—typical cabin furniture—near a stone fireplace. Laura noted a western bronze on the mantel, a cowboy roping a devil. Looked expensive. She chose the couch where she could see the front door, and Jaime took the chair where he could see the back, which put Steve Lawson between them. This they did automatically. She guessed that their host was none the wiser.

  Laura set her tape recorder on the table between them, gave her name, badge number, time, date, and Lawson’s name. Then she asked him,“How was the skull uncovered?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” He drifted off.

  Laura waited.

  “I’m a hydrologist for the US Geological Service,” Steve Lawson said. “But my background is in geology. This area is a very interesting spot geologically, pockets of Leatherwood granodiorite—granite—interspersed with wilderness granite, and I’ve been interested in where and how this happens.” He launched into a description of the geology of the Catalina Mountains and this area in particular. Laura tried to follow him, but found her mind wandering. She had taken geology in college, but she had difficulty grasping the geometric concepts—that one rock could be older than another rock, yet be closer to the surface of the earth. Geology took things and twisted them, squeezed them like toothpaste, jammed them up, revolved them on their axes, and put them on their sides. It was the revolving on the axis part she couldn’t get her mind around, no matter how many times or in how many ways it was explained to her.

  I’ve been digging up and down the hill out there—there are extruded pegmatite dikes all over this area. I’ve been following a very nice vein of quartzite pegmatite …

  The man talking as if the subject was the most compelling thing in the world. She listened as Lawson droned on, using terms like mid-Tertiary granite and detachment fault—a snowstorm of words.

  And suddenly she wondered if he really was snowing them.

  Laura didn’t know diddly about geology, but she knew something about human nature. She watched him with r
enewed interest, looking for something in his eyes, listening for changes in the tone of his voice, watching his body language. But there was nothing to tell her he wasn’t genuinely fascinated by the subject. Not just fascinated, but consumed. She recognized the phenomenon in herself; she had been consumed by her own work many times.

  As much as she admired his passion, though, she needed to retain control of the interview. “So that was what led you to dig in that area?”

  He focused on her, his eyes serious behind his glasses. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You dug at that spot?”

  “In that area—I’m pretty sure it was in that spot.” He paused. “I didn’t find what I was looking for, but later on, when I let Jake out, I noticed he was sniffing around out there. Out of curiosity, I went out to take a look. Anyway, he dug up this.” He set the book down on the oak coffee table.

  Jaime got up to see better, craning his neck over Laura’s shoulder. Neither of them touched it. Laura pulled gloves out of her back pocket and put them on.

  It was a flat, wide book called The Man in the Moon. A child’s book. Laura looked at Steve. “You found this up there? Where the bones were buried?”

  “That’s right. I looked it up on Amazon.” He pulled out a folded piece of paper from one pocket. It was a printout from Amazon showing a picture of the book and the information on it. Laura saw there were other books, too. She looked at the age recommendation: four to eight. Jenny Carmichael was eight years old.

  Laura made a note to ask Mrs. Carmichael about the book. “Did you dig anymore after that?”

  “After I found the skull? No.”

  “How long did it take you to dig until you came to the bone?”

  “It must have been an hour.”

  “An hour? Are you sure?”

  He nodded, flicked a glance at the window. Something he wasn’t telling them …

  Laura pressed him. “And you kept digging because …?”

  He shrugged. “I was curious, I guess. Why the book was buried there and why Jake dug it up in the first place.”