Mortal Crimes 1 Page 12

  “All sorts of bullshit. He was just messing around, trying to get a rise out of you. Thought he’d show you the knife and see if he could freak you out. That kind of thing. Said you cut your finger yourself.”

  “How’d I do that?”

  “He said, and I quote, ‘she fucking wigged out.’ All he did was take the knife out to show it to you like he’d show it to anybody, and you panicked. He said you tried to grab the knife and that was how you hurt yourself. He really freaked out when you went for your gun for no reason.”

  “You believe any of that?”

  “Of course not—“

  “Who hacked that door to bits?”

  “It’s not what I think. It’s what Jimmy Rutan thinks. Jimmy loves drug busts, the flashier the better. I think he’s going to bag the ag assault and go for the drugs.”

  Jaime called from Mt. Lemmon and suggested they meet at the Cowboy Corral for breakfast. Sounded good to her; she was in the mood for Eggs Benedict. Bad news made her hungry.

  On the way over, she told herself she’d have to come to grips with the fact that Sean Grady’s assault on her would probably go away. She could forget about her fraud case, too.

  Dave said Grady had almost convinced him his side of the story was true. Interviewing a sociopath could be an out-of-body experience. People like Sean Grady were believable, no matter what line of bullshit they were peddling. Laura had found herself being pulled in by Grady herself even though she knew better.

  It felt different when the sociopath was coming after you. And that was what this felt like—Grady coming after her. Trying to make her look bad to the people she worked with and probably succeeding.

  Trivializing his attack on her.

  And Jimmy Rutan would help him do it.

  Laura didn’t know what she could do, so she did what she always did when she didn’t want to think about something: stuffed it down the basement and slammed the trapdoor shut.

  Jaime pulled into the parking lot of the Cowboy Corral just as Laura locked her car. Someone with him, a young Hispanic woman in a brown tunic and slacks—a Cowboy Corral waitress uniform. The girl’s brown hair was caught up in a ponytail. Her arm was in a cast and sling.

  Jaime said, “This is my niece Christine. She’s taking the Academy exam next month.” He looked from Christine to Laura, her own brown hair in a ponytail and her arm in a sling, and added, “Hey, you two could be twins. The Broken Wing Sisters.”

  “If I was still in my twenties,” Laura said.

  Christine smiled shyly.

  Jaime said, “Christine broke her arm playing soccer. You should see her—she’s the reigning queen of Las Estrellas.”

  Christine asked Laura, “What happened to you?”

  “My chair fell over. I hit my elbow—it’s nothing serious.”

  “That’s the short version,” Jaime said. He looked like a draft horse next to a Thoroughbred. “Cause for a celebration, here. This is Chris’s last week as a Cowboy Corral employee.”

  Christine glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go, Tio. ” She flashed Laura a shy grin. “Nice to meet you.” She went inside.

  “Good kid,” Jaime said. “She wanted to meet a real live female detective in the flesh—I’m glad you obliged. Wanted to be a sheriff’s detective ever since she was this high. Esther—my wife’s sister—tried to steer her away from it, but she’s determined.” He held the door for her as they walked inside. “Esther’s old-fashioned. Doesn’t think that’s the right thing for a young lady to do. But times, they are a’changing. Kid’s been at me to go on a ride along forever. Told her she didn’t want to go with me—all she’d see was paper-shuffling—so last month I set her up with one of the deputies. It was all she ever talked about. She decided then and there to go to the Academy.” They picked a booth by the window. “What happened with Mrs. Carmichael?”

  Laura ran it down for him and supplied him with her notes. For a while, they tried to puzzle out the idea that Jenny might have been driven back to camp and been killed there. Jaime didn’t see the transporting of the book as an issue. “My guess is he lured her down there. If she wanted to bring along her book, I don’t think he’d make a big deal of it.

  “Tell you what, I’ll see if I can hunt down the Camp Aratauk staff—what’s left of them.” Jaime took a bite of his omelette, talking with his mouth full. “What do you think of Steve Lawson?”

  “It’s possible he could have picked her up by the lake and driven her up there.”

  Jaime nodded. “It would explain how she ended up so close to the cabin.”

  Laura knew they had to look at it. Steve Lawson’s story barely hung together. Laura had to separate her first impressions of the man from the facts. He didn’t act like a man with a guilty conscience, but that meant less than nothing. Neither had Sean Grady.

  “More I think of it, the more I’m sure he’s the one,” Jaime said. LA’s only twelve hours away. He could’ve driven out here, stayed at his grandfather’s cabin. He goes for a drive in his grandfather’s car, spots her by the road, offers to take her back to the camp, but he takes her to the cabin instead.”

  “And digs her up for us to find eleven years later?”

  Jaime leaned back, pushed his plate away. “People have done a lot weirder things.”

  ________

  There was a While You Were Out note stuck on the spindle on her desk. It was from Helen Desormeaux, the HR person at Behr Family Amusements, calling to tell her she had gone through their files and had no record of Bill Smith ever working for them.

  Feeling awkward in her sling, Laura crooked the phone under her left ear to call her back. She didn’t hear as well from that side. She knew it was only because she was used to hearing with her right ear.

  When Laura reached Helen Desormeaux, she asked her if BFA had ever employed a man named Robert Heywood.

  “I remember that name,” Helen Desormeaux said. “Let me look it up.”

  She came back a few minutes later. “Yes, he worked here from January 1997 to June of 1999.”

  Laura asked Helen to fax the information, and “Do you have a picture?”

  “This was awhile ago, so I’m going to have to go through our files. I’ll fax you what I have.”

  “Thanks.”

  Laura set down the phone. Bill Smith wasn’t an employee, but Robert Heywood had been at both carnivals; he had been with G&H Kiddieland and Shows at the time of Micaela’s disappearance and with Behr Family Amusements when Kristy went missing.

  Laura tapped her pencil against the blotter.

  If Heywood was around in July of 1997, he could have been here for all three abductions.

  She ran Heywood on NCIC, the National Crime information Center. It didn’t take long for the answer to come back. The dot matrix started up with a clank, squeaking like a garbage truck back-up horn as it fed the paper out.

  THIS INTERSTATE IDENTIFICATION INDEX RESPONSE IS THE RESULT OF YOUR RECORD REQUEST FOR FBI.

  Trudy was right; Heywood did have a criminal record. He had a drug charge, a probation violation, a misdemeanor lewd and lascivious. Sex with a minor.

  Exposing himself, escalating to kidnapping. From the information she had before her now, she knew exactly what kind of man Heywood was. Heywood was a sexual predator.

  She contacted Heywood’s parole officer in LA, a man named Chuck Dumphy. Dumphy told Laura that Heywood had successfully completed his parole a few months ago and that they had not spoken since. He gave her the address where he was currently living in Fullerton, California.

  “By current, I mean to the end of his parole. He can go anywhere now,.” Dumphy said.

  “You know him. What do you think?”

  “He’s got a wife, and the apartment is in her name. He gave me the impression that he’s happily married, but you know how it is.”

  He agreed to fax her a photo of Heywood. “If we’re lucky, it should come through in a few minutes. Never know with the equipment we’ve got here.” />
  The fax started up just as Jaime came in. He motioned to an extra chair by Victor Celaya’s empty desk and Laura nodded.

  He rolled the chair up beside her, peered down at the photo coming through. “Who’s that?”

  Laura told him, saw the flicker of surprise in his eyes. Jaime stared at the photo. “You’re thinking he’s the guy was the one Patsy saw with Kristy Groves?”

  “Could be.”

  Jaime leaned forward, squinted. “Looks like a child molester.”

  The photo was actually two mug shots, front and side. Heywood’s age was listed as thirty-four, but he looked older—he could have been in his mid-forties. His gaunt face was bisected by a thick mustache that straddled his mouth like a large moth. His cheeks were like angular apples, hard and shiny. Dark bushy hair, parted at the side. He had the deep tan of someone who worked outdoors. Cleft chin. Spindly neck. White T-shirt.

  His eyes, like so many eyes she’d seen looking out of mug shots, were dead.

  Laura plucked the photo out of the tray and stood up. “Patsy Groves hasn’t flown out yet, has she?”

  ________

  They found Patsy Groves baking herself on a chaise by the pool. She wore a navy swimsuit with a flowered skirt and white sunglasses. A tropical drink on the table next to her.

  Laura remained a pace or two behind Jaime, aware that Patsy liked Jaime and didn’t seem to like her.

  “Mrs. Groves?” Jaime asked.

  Patsy Groves cupped one palm over her sunglasses and smiled at him. “Jaime? That’s your name, right? Or do you prefer to be called ‘detective’?”

  Jaime cleared his throat. “Either way is fine. Mrs. Groves—Pat—we have something we’d like you to take a look at.”

  She sat up, careful to keep her legs together. In the flat bright sunlight, her varicose veins didn’t look so bad, but Laura thought they would look a lot worse anywhere else. All that time spent working on her feet at the deli, she thought.

  Jaime handed her the sheet they had put together. It contained the photograph of Robert Heywood along with headshots of five other men.

  She looked at it briefly and pointed at the photo in the left-hand bottom corner. “That’s him.”

  Laura’s heart quickened.

  Jaime said, “This is the man you saw talking to your daughter at the Pima County Fair?”

  “I’d know him anywhere.”

  “Could you look again just to make sure?”

  “I don’t have to. I remember it like it was yesterday. He was that close.” She motioned to the glass doors opening onto the hotel bar area thirty feet away. “It was outside one of the restrooms. He was leaning against the wall, you know, in the shade, talking to Kristy.”

  Jaime said, “How old would you say he was?”

  Patsy looked at him suspiciously. “Is this a trick question?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m just—“

  “Let me look at it again.”

  He handed it to her, and this time she looked at it for a long time. At last she said, “He’s older in this picture, but other than that, he looks exactly the same.”

  How much older? Laura had to stop herself from asking. It was best to let Jaime handle Patsy Groves.

  Jaime asked the question instead.

  “I’d say he’s at least ten to fifteen years older than the guy I saw. But the thing is, he hasn’t changed.”

  “You only saw him for a few minutes. How can you be sure?”

  Patsy said, “Because when I called to Kristy, he looked at me. Took off his sunglasses and stared a hole right through me. Like he wanted me to die.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “How many times are we going to bother these people?” Jaime said as they turned off Broadway into the Colonia Solana neighborhood.

  “Until we get it right.”

  Jaime shook his head. Laura noticed that when he was upset, his Brylcreem seemed to smell more. Or maybe it was being in an enclosed vehicle with him.

  “Bill Smith was the guy who took her,” Jaime added.

  “I know.”

  “You think he and Heywood worked together? Why didn’t the Brashear kid mention him?” Jaime stared out the passenger side window. “Maybe these crimes aren’t related.”

  “We talked about that.”

  “Yeah, coincidence. Can you give me one link between these three cases?”

  Laura slowed at an intersection. The streets meandered through thickets of cactus, mesquite, and palo verde trees. Every corner was blind. “The only link is Heywood and the carnival.”

  She’d just started to crawl forward when a red car zoomed past, nearly wiping them out.

  Laura hit the brakes. “Dammit!”

  The car disappeared behind a wall of trees.

  Jaime said, “Who’d think a paradise like this would be dangerous?”

  When they reached the Brashear house, they got a surprise. The red Pontiac Solstice that had nearly wiped them out was parked in the driveway near the front door.

  Laura stopped the car on the road and watched as Micaela Brashear, wearing tiny shorts and a camisole top, emerged from the sporty little car. Her legs were a mile long. She saw them and waved. Waited for them to approach.

  As they reached the house, beads of sweat popping out on Jaime’s face. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  “I heard about that little girl. Jenny?” Micaela asked, hooking a strand of dark hair behind her ear. “Is that why you’re here?”

  She wore very dark, chic sunglasses. Too much base makeup, but girls did that these days. She looked as cool and beautiful as a young movie star in LA. Laura wondered how anyone could look so put-together in this wilting heat. “We want you to look at some photographs.”

  “Are they of Bill?”

  “No, they’re not of Bill.”

  “Oh. What happened to your arm?”

  Laura said, “I banged it.”

  “Oh.”

  Laura thought Micaela would invite them in, but she didn’t. They stood on the half-oval steps of the mini-mansion, wrapped in the heat. Jaime removed the six-pack of photos they had put together from the leather binder he carried. Micaela took the photos and looked at them for a good long time. “I don’t recognize any of them. Did one of them kidnap the other girls?”

  “We don’t know,” Laura said. “Could you look again?”

  Jaime shot her a look, but Laura ignored him.

  Micaela held the photo closer to her face, her lips moving as she studied the photographs. Shook her head.

  Laura was convinced that Heywood had something to do with this, that at some time or another, he’d crossed paths with Bill Smith. But there was no way she could tip her hand and let Micaela know which photo was Heywood’s. Not if she wanted it to stand up in court.

  Micaela removed her sunglasses and looked at Laura with her beautiful, slightly strange eyes. “I wish I could say I knew him, but I don’t.”

  “That’s all right. I wouldn’t want you to say something you don’t believe. Did Bill Smith ever mention a man named Robert?”

  “Robert?” She looked confused.

  “Did he ever talk to you about other people?” Laura wondering what kind of conversations they would have over their chili dogs at night. Such a bizarre situation.

  She shook her head. “There might have been a Robert, but I never heard the name.”

  Jaime shifted his stance and stared up at the juniper branch above their heads. Laura knew Jaime was worried she was pushing too hard, trying to put words in Micaela’s mouth. But she thought of Jenny’s tiny bones and had to. She thought of The Missing Girl, Lily, and had to. “Have you ever heard the name Robert Heywood?”

  Jaime standing beside her like a lump of granite. A disapproving lump of granite.

  “Not that I know of,” Micaela said. Her eyes beseeching. “I wish I could help you, but I just can’t.”

  Laura was disappointed, but tried not to show it. She thanked Micaela, and they starte
d back to the car. Perspiration trickling down her armpits under the cotton blouse. Suddenly desperately thirsty. She said to Jaime, “Let’s stop at eegee’s and get a—”

  “Detective,” Micaela called after them.

  Laura and Jaime turned back.

  “One of those men,” she said. “Did he kill the other girls?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “But he’s a suspect? Where do you think I met him?”

  Laura didn’t want to say. She didn’t want to plant something in Micaela’s mind. “He’s just someone who came up during the investigation.”

  “Oh, okay. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. If you don’t know him, you don’t know him.”

  Micaela Brashear stood there like a flamingo, her long legs flickering in the sun and shadow, one hand on the wall of the arched alcove. “Well, I don’t.”

  Laura felt the urge to again reassure her that it was okay, but didn’t.

  Jaime said, “Thanks, and I hope we didn’t mess up your day.”

  Micaela laughed. “No way that could happen.” Then she turned and let herself into the house.

  For a moment, Laura felt a pang. She wished she were that young again. Worried only about how she looked.

  She remembered how innocent she had been at twenty.

  Then she realized that Micaela Brashear was anything but.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Steve awoke to the late afternoon sun like a hot brand on his arm. He glanced at the radio clock.

  Almost four p.m.

  He’d slept all day.

  He sat up and the muscles in his arms, back, chest, and shoulders all shrieked at once. The pain was excruciating.

  Tags jingled. Jake appeared in the doorway, looking at him quizzically.

  “Hey, buddy. Long night.” Steve put his feet on the floor, wincing at the agony in his back. He’d always had a strong back and strong legs, could hunker down for hours following rock strata.

  Jake padded over to him and shoved his nose under Steve’s hand. Steve rubbed his head, but even his fingers ached—every bone, every knuckle. His head ached, too—it felt like a massive hangover.

  He’d never been much of a drinker, but there had been a time—what, over a decade ago? A time when he had drunk a little too much. This had been after his fiancée had broken it off with him, when he’d been still living in California. He’d decided pretty quickly he was heading down the wrong road and made the decision to give up alcohol entirely. It had been a simple thing to do, because he hadn’t been invested in it all that much. Looking back, those few bad months had been little more than an insignificant blip in a relatively uneventful and sober life.