Mortal Crimes 1 Page 2

  “No, that’s okay.”

  He hung up and stared at the book. No way for him to tell how long it had been in the earth. A month? A year? Ten years?

  With a groan, Jake rolled onto his side, stretching until his legs trembled. Steve saw no signs of the malevolence he’d felt for a brief moment up by the creek bed. Jake was just Jake, his companion—an animal Steve knew better than he knew most people.

  He must have imagined it, whatever he’d seen.

  He tapped the desk with his fingertips. Okay, what did he really have here? Some little girl, who maybe came from Camp Aratauk or possibly another camp—he remembered Mark telling him that there were so many new places up here he couldn’t keep track—this little girl, looking for her book. How it ended up buried in the stream bed near his house, he didn’t know. Maybe it got washed downstream after a rain.

  Except there hasn’t been any rain since April. And the only camp up there is deserted and has been for a long time.

  He heard a car engine, gravel popping off tires. Headlights washing across the pine wall.

  Julie.

  He picked the book up and slid it into the bookshelf by the window—hidden in plain sight. Barely aware that his heart rate had gone up, that it was imperative to him that Julie not know about the book.

  Not that she would think he was crazy. No. Julie believed in everything: astrology, palm reading, the Ouija board. She loved that stuff so much she had recently opened up a New Age gift shop on Fourth Avenue, where she could surround herself with crystals and Tarot cards.

  He didn’t know why he wanted to hide it from her. Didn’t know why he suddenly felt secretive, almost ashamed. Perhaps because he was the scientist, the one who always kept his feet solidly rooted to the earth. The anchor for Julie’s wildly tacking sailboat.

  He heard a car door slam.

  Wished he’d remembered to call her back, deflect her drive up here.

  Too late now.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A vague sense of unease followed Steve out of sleep, quickly solidifying into a bad case of guilt.

  He untangled himself from the bed sheets, donned his wire-rimmed glasses, and pulled on his jeans, making sure not to wake Julie. At the doorway, he turned back to look at her. Julie was a beautiful woman—and even more beautiful in sleep. She was petite with shoulder-length, curly, black hair that was always a bit wild, as he imagined a gypsy’s hair would be.

  The top half of her body was exposed. Her breasts were perfect globes in the soft light. For so many years, Steve had wanted her and no one else—sex had always been great between them. It still was.

  The rest of the time was the problem. Like a row of numbers that, no matter how hard you tried to make them fit, didn’t add up.

  Looking at her, he felt sorrow.

  He would have to tell her.

  She dumped you, remember? The voice in his head, the one that kept the ledger. His own little crack at double-entry bookkeeping. Always seeking balance, always trying to make it turn out right, where he was ahead or at least even.

  She had dumped him, but that didn’t change the way he felt about her now. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he knew it would never work.

  Steve didn’t know when exactly he had stopped loving her—some time before their divorce was official a year and a half ago. That was when he realized he couldn’t go back to the way it was. It was Julie who had taken up with someone else, Julie who had filed for divorce. Steve’s world was full of accepted theories and unalterable facts, so when she told him it was over, he’d had no choice but to believe her. His brain had figured it out, and now it seemed, the rest of him had followed.

  He walked into the little kitchen, which was as cluttered as everything else. His grandfather had been a historian, none too particular where he laid his books, papers, or artifacts. He’d lived alone for almost thirty years after Steve’s grandmother died, and he didn’t need to please anyone.

  Steve didn’t need to please anyone either.

  He made a cup of instant coffee.

  Jake looked up at him, the plea in his eyes.

  “Don’t go far,” Steve said, opening the back door, which in turn led onto a small screened porch. He propped open the screen door with a rock and watched as Jake trotted out into the clearing, sniffed at a few trees, and lifted his leg on the tire of Julie’s SUV. Feeling frisky, bracing himself on his front legs and scraping the pine duff with his back feet.

  Steve flashed on the dog’s frantic digging in the dark.

  The microwave dinged and he walked back into the kitchen, took out the mug of coffee, and sipped. He glanced at the porch, thinking about the falling-down screens at Camp Aratauk. This porch didn’t look much better. Duct tape covered the rents in the screen from the time a black bear had tried to get in. Most of the porch was stacked with books and junk; he’d need a lot more boxes. He glanced up at the wood fascia that met the roof and noticed water damage. Yellowed newspaper was crumpled between the wood and the screen to keep the weather out.

  His grandfather was old school. He believed in “making do.” Stuffing newspaper up there was just like him.

  For some unfathomable reason, Steve had the sudden, overwhelming urge to pull the newspaper out of there.

  He reached up, grabbed a corner, and pulled. The paper tore in half. He dropped it to the floorboards and reached up for the rest of it.

  When he was through, there were eight little islands of crumpled newspaper all around his feet. Now he could see the damage to the roof, and it was extensive. He’d have to replace this whole porch probably.

  He stooped down to pick up the nearest sheet and found himself uncrumpling it: the front page of a July Arizona Daily Star from eleven years ago.

  At the top he saw the words, “Search for nine-year-old Jenn…”

  The rest of the headline was missing.

  His eye was drawn to a school photo portrait at the top of the page—a girl with forthright eyes, a sprinkle of freckles across her nose, and hair that would be the exact shade of wheat if the picture were in color.

  The world tilted sideways, and for a moment, he felt he was dangling in space, holding on hard to keep from falling off the edge. He stared at the picture, trying to assimilate what he was seeing, none of it making sense, but inevitable—as if he’d known all along. His mind saying: It’s her, oh Jesus, it’s real it’s real it’s real.

  There had to be an explanation. The answer would be in the article. He took a deep breath and tried to slow his heartbeat. Read it. Just read it.

  The article started out: “The county sheriff’s office, friends, and family of Jenny Carmichael searched the area for a third straight day, fanning out over a one-square-mile area…”

  “Is Taster’s Choice all you’ve got?”

  Julie stood in the doorway, looking sleepy, and a little lost. And a lot beautiful. How he could notice that when his world was falling apart, he didn’t know. When everything he’d known to be true and right had suddenly changed like the twist of a Rubik’s Cube.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the paper in his hand.

  He looked down at it as if he were holding some foreign object, something with rough edges that cut into him. Aware he was just staring. He wadded the paper in his fist and let it drop to the floor. “Just Granddad doing his thing again.” He nodded toward the ceiling, aware that his legs were shaking, that Julie might see them. “See? He was trying to keep the rain out.”

  “With newspaper?” Julie yawned. “Is there anything for breakfast?”

  “Not here,” Steve said, his decision made. Turning his back on the porch, the newspaper at his feet—everything.

  “But we could go out,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Cold Case

  Tucson, Arizona

  July Fourth

  If not for the meth wars of 2002 and 2003, Laura Cardinal doubted she’d be sitting in the passenger seat of a Pima County sheriff’s vehicle
, trying to figure out how to unstick the air-conditioning vent, while breathing through her mouth to avoid smelling her new partner’s Brylcreem.

  Her sergeant loved old commercials and was always singing jingles. One of his favorites was from the 1960s—“Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya!” Apparently, Jaime Molina had never heard that jingle. Jaime Molina went by the philosophy that more was better.

  Middle of the day on July Fourth, and the thunderstorms were threatening, but still holding off, the air like a sauna. Even the American flag hanging from the flagpole outside the Brashear house looked wrung out and dispirited. Beyond the house, Laura saw what looked like a bank of high clouds. It was the haze from the Diamondback fire in the mountains southwest of here. Arizona was a tinderbox before the monsoon rains came.

  “Some neighborhood, huh?” Molina said as they pulled up just short of the drive.

  Some neighborhood was right. Laura had always wanted a house in Colonia Solana Estates ever since she was a kid. Forget buying one of these places on a state police salary. Maybe if she solved a high profile case and they made a movie of her life. That wasn’t likely, though.

  Molina had the car in park, the engine running as he took a clipboard down from the dash and made a show of looking at his notes. He did not look at her. So far today, he hadn’t said much more than hello; most of his responses had been grunts. Laura wondered if he was concentrating on his notes for her benefit, perhaps wanting to keep her in this hotbox of a car a little longer.

  Laura had worked with passive-aggressive cops plenty of times. She buzzed her window down and more hot air billowed in. If he wanted to boil in this pressure cooker, fine with her. She was a native Tucsonan, and her first car didn’t have air conditioning. She decided to gather her thoughts and figure out how she would approach this interview.

  She studied the house, seeing it both in real time and from six months ago when news crews jammed the one-lane blacktop and the front yard was a ganglia of cables, TV cameras, and satellite uplink trucks.

  The Brashear home looked like a movie-star mansion on a smaller scale. Situated on two acres, the Mediterranean-style house had an old, red-tile roof and striped metal awnings. Eucalyptus and Aleppo pine rose above the white stuccoed walls, a stamp of wealth and power from a time when houses grew singly and were surrounded by desert. The royal palms lining the drive were a familiar sight to cable news junkies earlier this year.

  For a few days, Micaela Brashear’s return six months ago dominated the cable news channels. Not as big as the Elizabeth Smart story. Smart had everything: She was blond, beautiful, and had been kidnapped by a renegade Mormon polygamist. Micaela Brashear, on the other hand, was now twenty years old, Hispanic, and adopted. But for a time, she’d held the spotlight.

  What intrigued Laura most about this case was that this girl had survived at all. Most girls kidnapped by strangers didn’t make it. In fact, most girls kidnapped by strangers were killed within three to four hours of their abduction. But there had been instances of kidnappers who kept girls to adulthood. In one recent case, a school girl in Austria had been held for eight years. She’d been ten years old at the time of her kidnapping, and her abductor had kept her prisoner in a hidden room in his house. The neighbors had never guessed. Laura wondered what it was like to lead an existence like that, raped and threatened on a daily basis—and then one day, to escape and go back home.

  She also wondered why it had taken Micaela Brashear eleven years to escape her captor. These were questions that hadn’t been asked before. No one thought to ask them when Micaela was reunited with her parents. Micaela Brashear was a cold case that had solved itself. The Brashears were the lucky recipients of the odd happily-ever-after fairy tale.

  The family of Kristy Groves, a working class family struggling to stay solvent in Tucson’s tough economy—well, they got the unhappy ending.

  It was the discovery of Kristy Groves’s body in her desert grave that brought Laura Cardinal and Jaime Molina to this house, looking for answers.

  Until yesterday, Kristy Groves’s disappearance was a cold case. Lately, Laura had been inundated with them because the new lieutenant of Criminal Investigations in the Tucson sector wanted to raise the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s profile in the community. The best way to do that was to start an Open Unsolved Unit and put a woman’s face on it. Lieutenant Wiese thought Laura was photogenic and well-spoken—an excellent representative of the department.

  But cold cases were … cold, and most of them never went anywhere. Laura had not worked a regular homicide case in months.

  When the Kristy Groves case broke, she couldn’t help but feel this was her chance. Over the space of a few minutes yesterday morning, when a construction worker uncovered part of fourteen-year-old Kristy’s skeleton, Laura’s cold case became a hot case. She was back in the game.

  Or she was until this morning, when her sergeant, Jerry Grimes, called her into his office. His first question: did she know the genesis of the case?

  “Genesis?” Feeling the first stirrings of unease.

  “It was Pima County’s originally.”

  Laura’s stomach seemed to plummet from a great height. She said carefully, “But it’s been mine for almost a year.”

  Jerry had the grace to look sheepish. “Yeah, but the thing is, the sheriff wants it back.”

  Of course he would. It had been all over the news. Now the Groves case was high-profile, and the Pima County sheriff liked high profile. He liked the spotlight.

  “But it’s my case,” Laura said, knowing she sounded stubborn.

  Jerry leaned forward, clasping his small, blunt hands on the desk. “Look, Laura, I did my best to give you a piece of this. So don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

  “What do you mean, a piece?”

  “Just what I said. You’re still on it, but you’ve got a new partner.” He pushed a slip of paper with a name and phone number on it across the desk. “Name’s Detective Jaime Molina.”

  As Laura took the paper and started out the door, Jerry added, “Make sure you work and play well with others.”

  ________

  The reason Laura had gotten the case at all was because meth labs and murder victims were springing up in the boonies like mushrooms after a rain. The Pima County sheriff’s office had its hands full with the meth wars, so they shunted some of its old cases to the Department of Public Safety.

  If Kristy Groves’s body hadn’t been found, the case would still be exclusively Laura’s.

  As she stepped from the car, she heard a voice drifting out of the house. It sounded like opera—a soprano’s voice.

  The Brashears were prominent members of the community. Dr. Brashear founded and ran the Tucson Heart Health Clinic, and Nina Lantz-Brashear was an accomplished opera singer who had sung at the Met.

  “Do you want to take the lead?” Laura asked as they approached the house.

  “You go ahead.”

  “You think it’s a one-shot deal.”

  He coughed.

  “I know it’s a long shot.”

  He nodded, his eyes indifferent.

  Three girls had been kidnapped in the course of one year—October of 1996 to July of 1997—and Micaela Brashear was one of them. Laura didn’t think Micaela’s abduction would turn out to be related to the Groves case. But the thing was, you never knew.

  Jaime pressed the bell, and it bonged through the house. A maid wearing a white skirt, Keds, and a knit shirt bearing the Tucson Heart Health Clinic insignia answered the door. Jaime and the maid conversed in Spanish as they walked through the foyer.

  The Brashear family was grouped inside a mahogany-timbered study. A young woman stood just inside the doorway, while another woman—Laura guessed she was Nina Lantz-Brashear—spoke. “Think at the front of your forehead. When you go up an octave, you want lots of air bouncing around up there.” Her delicate hands opening into the air, describing graceful arcs.

  The young woman nodded earnestl
y.

  “See you next week,” Nina Lantz-Brashear said. A clear dismissal. She turned to Laura and Jaime, and a few moments later, Laura heard the front door close. Laura looked at the three people who were left.

  Laura was a little disconcerted by the tableau the Brashear family made. They looked as if they were posing for a magazine. Dr. Colin Brashear leaned against his desk, feet crossed and arms folded. His pale eyes were bored and impatient. Laura had read that he was a marathon runner, and he did seem lean to the point of gaunt.

  Nina Brashear had moved from the doorway and stood facing them, all grace and good posture. Flawless makeup that made her seem much younger than her age, fifty-four.

  “You must be detectives Cardinal and Molina. Would you like to sit down?”

  “Thanks,” Laura said. She took a wing chair opposite the person who interested her most.

  Despite Nina Lantz-Brashear’s classic good looks and Dr. Brashear’s stony presence, the person in the room who commanded the most attention was Micaela.

  She was pretty in a dark, almost angular way. Slim with fine features and a pointed chin, she wore jeans; a camisole top of soft, clingy material; and tall, cork-soled sandals. Physically, she should have appeared small in the big leather chair, but somehow she didn’t.

  Despite her slumped posture, her legs stretched out and crossed at the feet, Micaela Brashear drew Laura in. Perhaps it was her stillness. Or her eyes. Ordinary brown eyes, but there was something different about them.

  Laura realized that Micaela had a very slight cast to one eye. So slight it wasn’t a blemish; rather it conspired to make both eyes more beautiful. Exotic even.

  Those eyes regarded Laura frankly, as if taking her measure.

  A tough kid, grown into a tough young adult.

  A survivor.

  Then the girl drew her legs in, sat up, and smiled. And the sense Laura had that she had been scrutinized vanished.

  Laura glanced at Jaime to gauge his reaction to Micaela Brashear. He sat there like a lump, his giant body dwarfing the other wing chair. Head and neck growing out of his ill-fitting suit like the Prudential rock. He gave her the impression of someone waiting for a train.