Mortal Crimes 1 Page 15

  Probably, it was just a raccoon or some other forest animal.

  He found his eyes drawn to the bronze on the fireplace mantel, the cowboy roping the devil. The devil’s tail lashed like an angry cat’s, seeming to transcend the metal it was made from. The bronze was called “The Devil’s Hour,” but Steve thought it should be called “The Cowboy’s Hour.” The cowboy was in the driver’s seat. The devil clearly losing.

  But then he thought about it some more and realized that maybe it was the devil’s hour after all. The cowboy had him roped, true. But why rope the devil in the first place? What would the cowboy do with him now?

  To Steve’s mind, roping the devil was just asking for trouble.

  ________

  By midmorning, the rain let up. Steve stared out the window in the direction of Camp Aratauk, felt the urge to hike up there.

  He didn’t know why it drew him. There would be nothing left, certainly not of Jenny Carmichael or her bunk mates. It was just curiosity, but it tugged at him. Strange, but he felt a nostalgia for the place, even though he’d never seen it before his walk up there a few days ago.

  He looked at the mess before him—he had so much of his grandfather’s stuff to wade through—but he shrugged on his hooded jacket anyway, put on his hiking boots.

  A telltale jingle: Jake appeared in the doorway of the bedroom.

  “Sorry. Not this time.”

  Jake’s ears went to half mast, and his golden acorn eyes turned sad.

  After closing the porch door, Steve pulled the picnic bench in front of it.

  He headed up the incline alongside the stream bed, mostly watching his feet so he could avoid the muddy patches. He didn’t spare a glance for the shed off to the right—why should he? And for a while he didn’t hear it, because of his own mushy footsteps, the water dripping from the trees, and the sound of the wind, high up in the pines. But finally it broke through to his consciousness: He heard a child crying.

  He stopped. Closed his eyes and listened, straining to hear. For a moment, there was nothing, just the water dripping off the heavy boughs: drip drip drip. Then it came again. Faint, almost not there. There was a quality to it he couldn’t quite pinpoint. It wasn’t sad crying. It wasn’t grief. It was—

  Frustration? That was the best description he could give of it.

  He glanced around, but saw nothing unusual. A mist had rolled in, clouding the trees.

  “You’re coming home with me!”

  It was a child’s voice—a girl’s voice, barely there. It could have been inside his head. It matched his mood—exasperation. Suddenly, he felt thwarted, angry. Had no idea why.

  He knew it was Jenny Carmichael. He’d known it the moment he heard the crying, which first had seemed to echo through the dark, dripping woods and then seemed to come up from the recesses of his own mind.

  He turned around, straining his eyes against the whiteness. Just trees and mist and the shed, looming up nearby.

  Close. He’d thought it was a lot farther to the right.

  Have to clean that out next, he thought. He could hear the water dripping from the eaves of the shed. Smelled the sharp scent of pine.

  “Stop it!”

  Querulous, angry. Coming from the direction of the shed. He wiped away the water beading on his eyelashes, squinted at the small structure.

  Something funny about it. He realized what it was immediately. The door wasn’t pulled to.

  It smacked him, hard, right in the chest—fear. He stayed rooted to the spot, staring at the door. There was an explanation. He had been in there the other day, looking for the trowel. Probably forgot to pull it to.

  Would he do that? It seemed to him he’d been very careful about using the new padlock, the shiny new padlock, which was now hooked over the hasp.

  He had to think about that.

  The strange noises, though … those had an explanation. It was simply the weather. The mountain was socked in, and sounds carried. There were probably pockets of sound that made it over and around the mountain—he’d heard it before. Cars starting in Summerhaven, a little over a mile away; it was a natural phenomenon.

  He breathed out his relief.

  But was it his imagination or did the door move? The side that opened inward seemed farther away, angled back. Less than an inch maybe.

  Jenny was real, the voice in his head told him. Jenny was real. What makes you think this isn’t?

  He stepped toward the door.

  It creaked open.

  He could think it was the wind, but the wind had stopped. The boughs above his head, heavily-laden with moisture, were still except for the plink, plink, plink of raindrops.

  He looked back at the shed. Now there was a black oblong in the small wooden building—the door was all the way open.

  He opened his mouth to speak. Tried, but at first his vocal cords couldn’t gain purchase. When he was able to speak, his voice was rusty. “Jenny?”

  No sound from within.

  He swallowed. “Jenny, is that you?”

  Nothing.

  He stepped toward the shed, his heart and pulse racing.

  You’re mine now.

  The words sounded distinctly inside his mind. The little girl’s voice, the girl he met by the stream bed.

  You’re my puppy now. You’re coming home with me.

  Jenny had a puppy? As he pondered this, he realized that he was now standing right in front of the door. He didn’t know how that could have happened. He’d been three or four yards back, and now, here he was. As if in a dream, he stepped up onto the cement apron.

  A calmness overcame him. He felt as if he had been wrapped in cotton and placed someplace quiet and muffled, safe from harm. He observed with clinical clarity the empty padlock latch, dark green. He registered the smell of sawdust, mixed with potting soil and wet leaves.

  You’re coming home with me.

  The same words, a faint echo.

  Something made him turn around.

  He saw her standing probably thirty feet away, over by the excavation where her bones had been interred until two nights ago. Standing there in her uniform, her serious eyes holding his.

  He’s coming home with me.

  Steve blinked, trying to clear his vision. In that blink, she was gone.

  Completely gone. He no longer felt her presence. He turned back to the shed and walked inside. It looked the same as it had two days ago: the new potting soil, a rake, a shovel, gardening implements, including the trowel with the broken handle. The wooden table still stood by the left wall, its top worn smooth with age. The hooks hanging above it, hooks for tools.

  Hanging from one of them was a small, red dog collar, frayed almost to rope.

  He didn’t remember seeing that before.

  You’re my puppy now!

  He reached over and lifted it off the hook. Someone had punched in a couple of extra holes into the collar, the buckle tongue poking through the last one, making it incredibly small. Small enough for a puppy.

  He carried the collar back out onto the front stoop. In the light, he could see that it was not only frayed into strings in places, but filthy with grease and animal hair. Mostly black hairs, forming a fuzzy matt on the inside. There were no tags.

  He looked back in the direction of Jenny’s grave, but she was gone. He knew it without looking for her. It felt as if air had gone out of his balloon. Steve was all alone.

  He closed the door to the shed and pushed the hasp home, made sure the padlock clicked home. Then he started back to the house, the little dog collar looped over his arm.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Laura didn’t get any more hangups. In retrospect, she thought that the first call was electronically generated. Thousands of calls were made per minute by call centers, and if no one picked up, the call was automatically terminated. The second time the phone rang, in the middle of the night, was probably somebody realizing they had the wrong number.

  She was spooked, though, because
of Grady.

  The day would be another hot one; it looked like all the storm had done last night was pull bark, leaves, and branches off the trees and touch off another fire, this one in the Rincons. So now the orange helicopters were flying over her house with their giant buckets of water.

  The first thing Laura did when she got in to work was make her daily calls to other jurisdictions in the state, looking for The Missing Girl, Lily. She made seven calls; none of them panned out. She crossed the latest batch of police departments and sheriff’s offices off her list and stared at her notes. So many ways to go. Jaime had told her he would start interviewing the people who worked at Camp Aratauk. Laura wanted to follow up with Robert Heywood.

  She called G&H Kiddieland and Shows. Trudy Goodrich came on the phone, sounding harried. “What is it?” she asked.

  Laura said, “Was Robert Heywood friendly with anybody in the carnival?”

  There was silence on the other end. Finally: “Tom Purvis. Tom was one of our drivers, and he also ran the shooting gallery.”

  “Do you know where Tom is now?”

  “He died several years ago, got himself into drugs; I think he had a meth lab. He died in the explosion. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.”

  Laura felt a letdown. “He was Heywood’s only friend?”

  “You have to remember, this was ten years ago. Wait a minute. He used to stay with Tom at Clinton’s place.”

  “Clinton?”

  “Clinton Purvis, Tom’s dad. He’s a clown.”

  “A clown.”

  “A really good clown, too. Ran the most popular show we had—the Weiner Dog Races. Did the state fairs, but he was also a sign painter. He did all our signs.”

  “Is he still around? Do you think Heywood would still be in touch with him?”

  “I don’t know. I can tell you where he lives, though. He’s out near Florence on Route 79. He’s the caretaker for a … I’d guess you’d call it a ranch. Piece of property this company bought back in the eighties before the boom went bust; I guess they’re still trying to figure out what to do with it. Clinton lives on a trailer on the property and makes sure nobody vandalizes anything, although there’s not much to vandalize. Just his old trailer and a big metal barn where you’d keep farm equipment.”

  Jaime came by a short while later. He’d gotten statements from the janitor and one of the groundskeepers at Camp Aratauk.

  “Nothing ground-shaking,” Laura observed.

  Jaime shrugged. “Everyone remembers what happened after Jenny disappeared, but nobody remembers seeing her around camp. They all assumed she was on the outing with the other kids. Either they didn’t see her, or it’s some kind of collective amnesia. No one remembers seeing any strangers on the property either.”

  He sighed. “There are a few differences in both their statements from 1997, but nothing that raises any red flags. Just little glitches in memory. Maybe that’ll change as we go up the food chain, but I doubt it. Hope you’ve got something better.”

  Laura’s cell rang.

  It was Detective Waddell.

  Jaime hoped she had something better. Turned out, she did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Steve Lawson sat on the sofa, turning the collar around in his hands. Jake lay at his feet. Steve’s first inclination was to call the sheriff’s department and tell them about his find. But what did he really have? He had a collar that he’d found hanging in an old shed. That was it. If you took away the ghost and the crying, that was all you had.

  Not to mention the fact that the collar had been in the shed would cast guilt in one direction: on his grandfather.

  It was impossible to think of his grandfather as a child molester, let alone a child killer. Impossible. But maybe he should think about it.

  Steve had read countless stories in newspapers and magazines about people who had turned out to be child molesters, and it seemed in all of them somebody said, “I never would have suspected him.” But in accepting the possibility that his grandfather was a child molester, Steve needed more evidence than the fact that he lived alone near where Jenny’s bones had been buried.

  The only other empirical evidence he had was his own experience and that of his sisters.

  Steve had never once felt uncomfortable in his grandfather’s presence. Never once been touched in any way other than what was normal for grandfathers and grandsons. Never once had an inkling of anything deeper than the typical love of a man for his grandson.

  Maybe, though, his experience was unique. Maybe his grandfather’s taste ran to his two sisters.

  If it had, he had been unaware of it.

  He glanced at the clock; it was the same time in California as it was here. Two o’clock in the afternoon. His sister could be doing anything. Her time was both unstructured and chaotic; she had two small children.

  She answered on the first ring, sounding harried. “Yes?”

  “Dani? It’s me, Steve.”

  “Steve! Are you in town?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve got to be at Mrs. Mitchell’s in fifteen minutes. Can I call you back?”

  “Yes. But it’s important.”

  “Fifteen minutes. Make that twenty-five. I don’t like talking on the cell phone when the kids are in the car. Twenty-five minutes.”

  She hung up. Steve thought Mrs. Mitchell must be the kids’ swimming instructor. Either that or their karate coach.

  Next he called Karen.

  Karen’s kids were older, and Karen herself was not as chaotically inclined as Dani.

  “I have something to ask you,” he told her. “Just keep an open mind, and please be honest.”

  “Uh … okay.” Her voice wary.

  Steve glanced at Jake. Jake’s eyebrows wrinkled as he looked up. “I know this sounds funny, but—“

  “Spit it out, Steve, all right?”

  Good old Karen. No-nonsense and down-to-earth.

  “All those times we were with grandpa,” Steve said. “Did he—were you ever uncomfortable around him?”

  Silence on the other end.

  “Karen? I need to know.”

  “You’re wondering if he molested us? Me? No way.”

  Steve opened his mouth to apologize, but she cut him off.

  “No damn way.”

  “I had to ask—“

  “Why?”

  He told her about Jenny Carmichael’s bones being found on the property. He didn’t mention Jenny’s ghost, though. He didn’t mention hearing Jenny talking to the phantom puppy. He didn’t mention the collar hanging in the shed.

  There was another pause, and then she said, “That’s really weak, Steve. Just because somebody buried her near your cabin, doesn’t mean grandpa had anything to do with it. I mean, the man was in his eighties.”

  “I know.”

  “You knew him. What do you think? You really think he would molest a little girl? Don’t you know him any better than that?”

  “I do know him better than that.”

  “Then why’d you call?”

  “I’m just compiling the evidence to make sure the police don’t suspect him.”

  He didn’t mention that they were probably more interested in him.

  “You think they’re going to call me?”

  “They could.”

  “Well then, I’ll tell them the same thing I told you. Only I didn’t think I’d have to say it to you.”

  ________

  After talking to Danielle—it went a little better because Danielle was so harried, she hardly heard a word he said—Steve decided that he’d been right all along: There was no way his grandfather would have molested an eight-year-old girl and then killed her.

  Where was his faith, though? Why had he even considered it? What kind of person did that make him?

  And what would he do now? Jenny’s ghost was obviously trying to tell him something. Clearly, she had been down here, not at Rose Canyon Lake with the other campers. All along, the searcher
s had been looking in the wrong area.

  Which meant that someone, somehow, had overlooked the fact that she was not at the picnic.

  Was that important in the scheme of things? Obviously, the investigators knew that Jenny had been killed near the camp and would be centering their investigation not around Rose Canyon Lake, but here. And he guessed they were already checking out his story with the U.S. Geological Survey.

  Which was fine with him, because he was sure he had not even come to Tucson that summer. And he was damn sure he had not molested and then killed a little girl.

  As he had grown older, Steve had become more cynical, but he was not yet at the point where he believed an innocent man could be convicted of a crime he did not commit.

  Make that this innocent man. He was well aware of the many innocent men and women who languished away in prison for years—some of them even put to death—for crimes they did not commit. The governor of one state, he couldn’t remember if it was Indiana or Illinois, had placed a moratorium on executions for just that reason. People were actually being proven innocent all over the country, thanks to the DNA Project. So, yes, theoretically, it was true that he, Steve Lawson, could be railroaded for Jenny Carmichael’s murder.

  But in his heart, he didn’t believe it.

  Maybe that was a mistake. He knew that he was a suspect. He thought, though, that he was a mild suspect, that he was only being considered a “person of interest” because of his proximity to the burial site and because they didn’t have anyone else.

  Steve thought about the two detectives: the sheriff’s detective and the investigator with the Department of Public Safety office.

  They seemed sensible. He liked them both. He knew that the one—Molina—was more suspicious of him than the other one.

  He liked them both, but he liked Laura Cardinal better.

  He thought she was not only sensible, but capable. She had a no-frills way of doing things that he admired. She went about her job in a professional manner. He had felt, too, that she really cared about the little girl buried near the stream bed. That it was important to her to find who killed Jenny, not just because it was her job, but because it was the right thing.