Mortal Crimes 1 Read online

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Laura said. “It won’t take long.”

  “Okay.”

  “May we stay?” Mrs. Brashear said.

  “As long as Micaela’s comfortable with it, I don’t mind.”

  Nina Brashear sat down, layering her skirt gently over her nyloned legs.

  Dr. Brashear said abruptly, “I don’t see what this has to do with that girl they found yesterday. Seems to me it’s like apples and oranges.”

  “Colin,” Nina said quietly. “Please.”

  Laura looked at Micaela.

  “It’s fine with me if they stay.”

  Brashear said, “I don’t want to hear all this again. Call me when you’re done.” He shot his cuffs and strode out the door without a backward look.

  Nina Brashear looked at Laura. “He’s upset about what happened to Micaela. He doesn’t like to think about it.”

  “Understandable,” Laura murmured.

  “We all want closure, to just forget about it, but if this can help in any way…” She let her gaze drop to her knees. Laura thought, I hope I have knees like that when I’m fifty-four.

  She looked at Micaela. “Let’s start from the beginning.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Micaela Brashear had been on her way home from a friend’s house when she’d seen the man stapling a sheet of paper to a telephone pole. The paper had said “Lost Dog” with a photocopy of a dog sitting in a basket.

  The man had introduced himself as Bill, asked her to come closer to look at the picture. Told her the dog was on medication, the dog could die if he wasn’t found. Micaela had walked over to peer at the photocopy, barely aware of the man or the fact that his car was still running. The next thing she’d known, he’d pulled her inside his vehicle, driving off so fast the door had slammed on its own. “I know, real dumb,” she said. Her voice matter-of-fact.

  Not looking for sympathy, but not blaming herself either.

  She told them she’d looked for a way to escape, had planned to jump out of the car when he slowed down at a light. But the door handle on the passenger side had been missing. She’d had no time anyway. He’d driven into an alley, knocked her out with a tire iron. Next thing she remembered was waking up handcuffed in the basement.

  Laura made note of that. There weren’t many basements in Tucson. She asked Micaela if she had any idea what part of town she had been in.

  Micaela shook her head. Without windows, the basement’s only furnishing had been a mattress on the floor.

  What had ensued was terrorization on a level Laura didn’t want to imagine. At least this time, the victim had come out of it alive.

  Micaela Brashear’s captor alternately had threatened to kill her, then had told her she would be his wife on earth and for eternity. Laura admired the girl’s self-possession. She spoke objectively, as if these things had happened to someone else. Victims of violent crimes often withdrew from reality, even looked down on the proceedings in real time, seeing their victimization from outside themselves. But Micaela’s story moved seamlessly, heaping more and more terror and abuse onto herself with every incident she recounted.

  There had been the time when he’d made her dial her parents, making her stay silent, a knife to her throat, her mother calling out, “Who is this?”

  Laura glanced at Nina Brashear. An unguarded moment, her expression troubled.

  “Sometimes while he was raping me, I saw the virgin floating above me raining roses down on me from her cloak. I knew then I’d survive.”

  Survive. Laura wondering, how does one child live and another one die?

  She said to Micaela, “What did Bill look like?” Although she remembered the composite drawing from the news stories, she wanted to hear it from Micaela herself.

  “He was older. Forty or fifty at least. And his eyes…” She shuddered. “His eyes were crazy.”

  She described him as bald with a few strands of hair, worn long.

  “How long were you at the house?”

  “Just a few days. Then he took me to San Diego. We camped out in Yosemite for a couple of weeks. Then we went to San Diego. And then we went up to northern California, I think Oregon.” She paused. “I thought about trying to escape. But…” She reached up and hooked a strand of black hair behind her ear, looked at the floor. Shrugged. “It just didn’t work out. He was always watching. I couldn’t do anything.”

  Laura suddenly felt claustrophobic. Maybe it was the oppressive darkness of the wood-paneled library. Or maybe she was taking Micaela’s fear into herself, the panic of knowing her life had changed forever.

  Micaela said, “It took me years to plan my escape. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It was like … there’s some kind of thing I read about somewhere, Stockman’s Syndrome…”

  “She means Stockholm Syndrome,” Nina Brashear said.

  “I could have gotten away plenty of times. He gave me lots of responsibility. I shopped for groceries. I cooked all his dinners, mostly frozen dinners, but I could make hot dogs. Chili dogs—we lived on chili dogs.” Laura noticed that she gestured with her hands a great deal. “He even let me get a job. I know I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my fault, but there’s always a reason to feel guilty … I was afraid for my parents. Bill threatened to kill them, said he’d drive all the way back and take me with him just for fun … What would I do if he did that? It just broke my will, so I didn’t even try…”

  Her hands suddenly falling silently to her lap. Her eyes sad.

  Laura wanting to comfort her, but that wasn’t her job. “But you did escape,” she said. “How did you finally do that?”

  “I met this lady in the laundry room of one of the apartments we lived in when I worked at Sea World…”

  Laura wrote in her notebook: Social Security number? If the girl worked at Sea World, they would have had to come up with a fake name and a social.

  Micaela was saying, “She could tell right away that something was wrong.” Her hands up and moving again, as if she needed them to put her point across. “She was an old lady. She escaped from the Holocaust when she was a little kid—it was just terrible. A tragedy. She saw her parents die right in front of her eyes. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. I loved my mom and dad so much, and I never stopped praying I’d get home someday … She said she had money and could help me.”

  “You told her what was going on?”

  “Not at first, but after a while I grew to trust her. So we made a plaque.”

  Laura realized she meant “pact.”

  “One day I went off to work as usual, but this time I went to the bus station and that’s how … that’s how I made it back here. She gave me the money.”

  Nina Brashear said, “I couldn’t believe it when she called. She called us from the bus station.”

  Micaela laughed. “You should have heard my mom. She thought it was a crank call.”

  “That was only for the first few minutes, Mickey. You can hardly blame us, coming out of the blue like that.”

  Defensive.

  Laura wondered what it would be like to hear from your child after all these years. Nina Lantz-Brashear must have been convinced that Micaela was dead.

  Nina added, “We went down right away and picked her up.”

  Micaela turned her head away from her mother.

  Tension here. Not such a big revelation—the Brashears lose their nine-year-old daughter, and she returns an adult, a completely different person. And Micaela comes home to the idyllic childhood she once had only to find that everything has changed in the interceding years. Laura would be surprised if there wasn’t tension. She asked Micaela, “You worked at Sea World?”

  “When I was eighteen. I worked concessions, but after a while they let me work with the animals. I helped train the dolphins. It’s my dream job. I want to go back there. After I graduate college.”

  “Did he let you keep any of the money?”

  “No, I had to give it all to him or he’d b
eat me.”

  “And you never told anybody until you met this lady in the laundry room?”

  She held Laura’s gaze, shook her head no. “I can’t explain it.”

  But she had explained it. Somewhere along the line, she’d made some effort to understand her own actions, even given them a label. The Stockholm Syndrome referred to captives who fixated on their captors, sometimes fell in love with them. They had no will to escape even when the chance presented itself.

  Nine years with the man by the time she had reached eighteen. By then, she probably saw her captor as her family and her lifestyle as normal. Normal enough to go to work at a happy place like Sea World and come back again each night. Strange, but Laura had seen a lot of strange things.

  Jaime shifted in his chair. Laura looked over at him, the question he shot her with his eyes. She nodded.

  He leaned forward, his bulk folding in on itself. “Did you have a car?” he asked, his voice soft, nonthreatening.

  “Bill had a car. He drove me to work and back.”

  “Did he work, too?”

  “He was a cook at a diner just down the street. A short-order cook,” she added.

  “That was his real name? Did you see it on the bills he got, his license?”

  “It was an alias,” Nina Brashear said, “Bill Smith. There was a big search for him, but it’s as if he disappeared into thin air.”

  Laura said to Micaela, “That’s how he was known to everyone you met? As Bill?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Laura had heard enough to think it unlikely that this case had anything to do with Kristy Groves’s abduction and murder. It sounded as if this was indeed a one-shot deal, as far as Bill Smith was concerned. But she wanted to ask anyway.

  “Were you alone with Bill Smith all that time? Did he ever show interest in anyone else?”

  “You mean, did he kidnap another girl like me?”

  Laura thought how sharp this girl was. “That’s what I mean.”

  Micaela looked at Laura. Laura got the feeling that the Brashear girl was looking down at her from above, detached. Her eyes had taken on an odd sheen.

  “Yes,” she said. “There was another girl.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Another girl?”

  Laura felt as if she’d fallen down the White Rabbit’s bolt hole. There had been no mention of another girl in the newspaper accounts she had seen. She looked at Micaela, careful to keep her expression neutral. The rest of the room faded—it was just the two of them now. “You’re sure?”

  Micaela Brashear’s odd eyes seemed to hook into her. “I’m sure. He took her out into the desert.”

  Laura’s mind racing. “Where was this?”

  “Here, in Tucson.”

  Could she be talking about Kristy Groves or Jenny Carmichael? Laura glanced at Jaime. He had straightened up in the chair, both feet planted on the floor. As surprised as she was, but his heavy-lidded eyes veiled his emotions.

  “When did this happen?” Laura asked.

  “Soon after we came back from San Diego,” she said, adding, “The first time we went there.”

  “How old was she?”

  “I think she was my age.”

  That let out Kristy Groves, who was fourteen at the time of her disappearance.

  “When would this have been?”

  The girl shook her head. “I can’t remember. Some time that year.”

  “‘96 or ‘97?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Were you there when he met her?”

  She shook her head. “No. He said he picked her up outside a 7-Eleven. I don’t know which one.”

  This did not sound like the Jenny Carmichael abduction. Jenny had disappeared from the Catalina Mountains in 1997. There were no 7-Elevens up on the mountain.

  ” Where were you at the time he picked her up?”

  “At his house.”

  “Did you meet her?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She had dark hair.”

  It wasn’t Jenny. Jenny was blond. “Do you remember what she wore?”

  Micaela shook her head.

  “What happened to this girl?”

  “I think she died.” She added, “Maybe that was a dream, though. It’s hard to know what was a dream and what was reality. I blacked out a lot. I know that because I was so scared. And I know he drugged me.”

  “He drugged you? When was this?”

  “From the beginning. He’d give me shots. I fought him, but it did no good. I saw him do it to that other girl. After a while, he didn’t have to drug me anymore—I was pretty cooperative. I cooperated because I had loved ones. That was always at the back of my mind, the way he held it over my head.”

  Laura was trying to get an overview, but it kept slipping out of focus. Micaela’s speech hung her up a little, her occasionally stilted way of speaking: “I cooperated because I had loved ones.”

  Laura said, “You met this girl after you left town and came back?”

  “I think so.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t remember. It seemed like it was weeks, or even months. But I remember the girl. He kept telling her she wasn’t wife material.”

  “Not wife material?”

  “He meant she wasn’t going to be with us very long. That turned out to be what happened. I was there when he took her out to the desert.”

  Laura asked, “What places around Tucson can you remember going to?”

  “We never went anywhere.”

  “But you said you were there at the desert when he took her out there.”

  “That was the one time.” She twisted sideways in her chair, pulled her knees up and cradled them with her arms. “Usually, whenever he went somewhere, he’d leave me alone in the basement.”

  “Why did he have you go with him that time?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to show me what could happen to me if I didn’t do what he said.”

  Laura switched tacks. “Do you know who owned the house?”

  Micaela shook her head.

  “Could it have belonged to someone else? Like a relative?”

  Micaela looked at her with her strange eyes. “I don’t know. He always blindfolded me until we got to the basement.”

  “When you went with him and he took the other girl out into the desert? Do you remember where you went?”

  She shook her head. “We drove around and around that night, I’m not sure where it was, just some desert somewhere. I was scared he was going to kill both of us, but he told me to sit still. He took her out by the arm and she was crying. She was pleading and begging, ‘please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me!’ It just made him madder. He took her by the arm and dragged her out of the car. It was horrible. Then he came back and acted like nothing ever happened. I asked him where she was, and he just said, ‘You better do exactly what I say or you’ll end up like her.’”

  “What did you do while he took her into the desert?”

  “What could I do? I couldn’t do anything. I closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears and tried not to hear it.”

  “You remember plugging your ears?”

  She nodded. “It was like a nightmare, but I know it was real. And then, when he was done … we drove away. That was the night we left. He wanted to go back to San Diego. I was so scared.”

  Her hands weaving in and out of the air again.

  “I was afraid he’d kill me next. I prayed and prayed. I prayed for her, and I prayed just to stay alive.”

  “Did you hear anything? When he took her out into the desert?”

  “Like what? A gunshot?”

  “Anything at all?”

  “Just the girl pleading for her life. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”

  ________

  “You think it was another girl?” Jaime Molina asked Laura as they walked out to t
he car. “Someone we don’t know about?”

  “The age doesn’t fit with Kristy, and Jenny had blond hair.”

  “He could have killed Kristy, though. Picked her up when Micaela wasn’t around.”

  “You mean, so she didn’t know about it?”

  Jaime said, “This whole thing is weird. This guy. The way he kept her and didn’t keep the others.”

  “It had to be another girl, one we don’t know about,” Laura said. Wondering how the previous investigator had overlooked a missing kid. The only cases she knew of were the ones she’d put together for her cold case file: Kristy Groves, Jenny Carmichael, and Micaela Brashear.

  She’d go back and check the records for ‘96 and ‘97, enlarge the search to ‘98. The following year was a real possibility since Micaela had been vague about the time frame. She’d call other jurisdictions, too—Santa Cruz County, Pinal County. Check with missing persons. Maybe some girl thought to be a runaway was Bill Smith’s victim.

  “We don’t have to be at the airport until eight thirty,” Jaime was saying. He’d asked her something, but she hadn’t heard him.

  “I’m sorry,” Laura said. “I was elsewhere. What did you say?”

  Jaime slid into the car, reached over, and pushed open her car door. “My sergeant’s throwing a Fourth of July party. I promised I’d put in an appearance.”

  “You’re asking me to go?”

  He shrugged, his heavy-lidded eyes slipping to half-mast. “No, just telling you what I’m gonna do.”

  Going to a party in the middle of an investigation. Cold case or not, they had finally made some headway. “I think I’ll go back and see if I can get a handle on this missing girl.”

  “Rory Flynn will be there.”

  Rory Flynn was the retired sheriff’s detective who had originally worked the Kristy Groves case. Laura asked, “You sure?”

  “He never misses a party. Thought it might be a good idea to talk to him in an unthreatening setting, you know?”

  He was smarter than she’d given him credit for. Laura knew Rory Flynn would resent them. Nobody liked to give up a case, even when he was retired. And they especially hated not being consulted. This would be an ideal situation for them to touch base with him without making it official.