Darkness on the Edge of Town (10 page)

“No, we don’t know he was the one who put it there.  We have to consider it, though.  We have to consider everything.  This might have something to do with the Internet.”

“That’s how he could have met her.”

“But you think he knew her from here.” 

“He knew her from here and he knew her on the Internet. They were probably e-mail buddies.”

She could tell he was getting steamed.  She saw Victor grin; the first time today. Victor understood Buddy’s frustration, maybe even sympathized. He’d often said she was
too
even-handed.

“Besides,” Buddy said. “I talked to her teachers.  She was carefully supervised and never left alone on the computers.  No way someone could have reached her—they’d know.  I think crazy girl 12 doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

Laura didn’t bother to reply.  Instead, she stepped outside the cabin. She couldn’t stand the stench in there and she couldn’t stand Buddy Holland’s attitude.  His barely-veiled belligerence.  His hints that she’d planted the matchbook. 

Concentrate
 

She walked out beyond the crime scene tape.  From here, she could see the Dumpster near the road. The lab techs had removed the Dumpster’s contents and already taken it to the crime lab in Tucson, even though they had found nothing overtly related to Cary’s murder. 

What Laura hoped for was a blood-stained towel or t-shirt.  There had been evidence that Cary’s head had been wrapped in something to keep his blood from getting all over.  This dovetailed with her theory that Cary was moved to the cabin from the spot where he’d been killed.

The killer had probably taken the shirt or towel with him.  Maybe he knew that it was possible to get latents from cloth.  Or maybe it was his natural neatness. 

He was still being careful.

She did agree with Buddy on one thing: Cary had been in the way, and the killer had not foreseen this. He had taken some pains to hide Cary’s body, but had been too much in a hurry to clean up.

He had made a big mistake. 

She caught a movement down below: Chuck Lehman walking in the direction of the crime scene tape stretching across the road.  An unleashed Rottweiler accompanied him.   

Officer Noone walked down to meet him. Reporters zeroed in on him like ducks after bread. Voices drifted up but she couldn’t hear them. She didn’t need to; Officer Noone was telling Lehman he couldn’t go past the tape. 

Lehman whistled to his dog and turned on his heel.  He walked back in the direction of his house but didn’t go far. Arms folded over his chest, he watched the ME’s van pull up behind the other vehicles.  Laura couldn’t see his expression, but she could sense his excitement even from here.  It was evident in the tense way he held his body, pitched slightly forward, as if he were absorbing everything about the scene with all his senses. 

She thought about the word Victor had used to describe him.

Avid.

After the body was removed, Laura,Victor and Buddy headed down to the road.  As they reached the crime scene tape, a female reporter thrust a microphone in Laura’s face.

“Is it true the body you found belongs to Cary Statler, Jessica Parris’s boyfriend?”

“We don’t have a positive I.D. yet,” Laura said. 

“But you’re pretty sure it’s Cary Statler?”

“We won’t know that until we get a positive I.D.”

“If it was Cary Statler, can you comment on what they were doing in here?”

Someone else shouted, “Did he die trying to save Jessica’s life?”

“We don’t know what happened. We’re just beginning this investigation.”

“But Jessica Parris was here?”

“It’s too early to tell that.”

She finally got past them and walked to her car.

It was going on three o’clock when the news vans pulled out, following the ME’s van down the road.  Laura scrubbed her hands and face with hand sanitizer and applied lip balm to her lips. Then she reached into the back seat and tore open the plastic covering on the case of water bottles she carried there, grabbed a new bottle and drank. Water never tasted so sweet.  Ducking into the back of the 4Runner, she stripped off her shirt and replaced it with the blouse she kept on a hanger for emergencies.  She ran a brush through her hair, hoping she was respectable enough to meet people.

Victor took the houses on the east side of the street, and Buddy took the houses on the west.  Laura headed up to the two houses at the bend in the road.

Again, she got no answer at the first house.  But a man answered the door to the green house.  Frail and thin, he was bent over a walker. It was clear he was not going to invite her in.  The house smelled of boiled cabbage and unclean catboxes.  A TV set blared in the background.  She asked him if he had seen or heard anything unusual the last few nights. 

He looked at her blankly.  “I’ve been in bed all week with a septic throat.”

He hadn’t heard anything and didn’t know Cary Statler or the Parris family.  Laura asked him her whole list of questions, but it was clear he didn’t know anything and didn’t
want
to know anything.

“Does anyone else live here?”

“Nope.  Have a girl comes in three times a week.”

Laura finally nailed it down: The “girl” worked on the day Jessica had been kidnapped. When Laura asked for her name and phone number, the man sighed and clacked his way into the darkness, returning with a slip of paper that had been torn off the edge of a TV Guide, one inch by one-half inch. 

“Is that it?” he demanded.  “I’m not supposed to be out of bed.”

“Have you noticed any unusual vehicles drive this road in the last few days?”

“I keep my drapes drawn.  Don’t want to fade the furniture.” The door closed in her face.

From her vantage point in the 4Runner, Laura watched Victor get in his vehicle and drive off, and then Buddy.  Neither one approached her, even though she was in plain sight.  She assumed Victor was going back to the Copper Queen Hotel for a swim and to call his wife. They would meet later at the hotel restaurant and compare notes.

Buddy—who knew what he was going to do?

Laura took out her camera and stepped onto the road.  She wanted to be in this canyon at the time of day that Cary died and Jessica was taken.

She guessed that Cary had been killed somewhere between five and seven o’clock in the evening on the day Jessica disappeared.  This would fit the timeline for Jessica’s abduction. 

The shadows stretched down from Mule Pass, coming from the opposite direction they had been this morning.  The trees on the left side of the road were all in shadow now.

Laura stepped into the wood and worked her way over to the cabin that had contained the drug paraphernalia.

She pictured herself sneaking up on them.  Tried to move quietly, but it was impossible given the leaf litter underfoot and the whiplashing limbs. 

They would hear an intruder, but would they care?  They might not be afraid of strangers. Mellow on pot, Cary and Jessica might not see the danger until it was too late.  Would he lure them up to the other cabin, farther away from the road?

Or did he arrange to meet them here
?

She leaned in through the cabin door and inhaled the smell of pot, which to her smelled like a cross between a burnt-out campfire and old grass and gym socks in a school locker. 

The lab techs had removed the pillow, the boom box, the rolling papers, the rug, soil and debris samples—everything—as possible evidence.  They’d also vacuumed the cabin for fibers and hairs, to see if they could place Cary or Jessica or both of them here.

If he did encounter them here, how did he overpower them?  Two young, strong kids—that would be hard to do. 

She retraced her steps back to the road, looking for any sign where the killer might have come in, and nearly walked right over a couple of divots in the sand north of where she thought he would have gone in.

She squatted on her heels and examined the shallow impressions. They could be drag marks—the divots could be a sign of heels digging in. She followed the trajectory of the marks down into the trees, feeling more excited the more she saw. The leaves on the ground were scuffed, a broken line running in roughly an east-west direction.  Not, she noticed, in the direction of the hang-out.  Plenty of broken limbs and branches—the kid had been dragged by a whirlwind.  And swipes and spatters and smears of blood. 

Eventually the scuffmarks led to where she thought they would: the cabin on the hill. 

She was now sure he did not meet Cary and Jessica at the first cabin.

Laura absorbed the warm stillness of the canyon, thinking. Cary had been dragged down from the road.  That meant he had met the killer up there, or at least gone to his car.  But where was Jessica during all this?

A raven flew over and settled in a tree farther up the hill, chortling at her.

She returned to the 4Runner for latex gloves and evidence envelopes and retraced the killer’s steps up the hill. She was nearly to the cabin on the hill when she spotted something red on the ground—a rectangular plastic tab.  She recognized it as one of those savings cards people used at grocery stores—a Safeway Club Card. It fit on a keyring; the hole punch looked as if it had given out from use.

These cards had a bar code and a number, one reason Laura had never signed up for one despite the savings.  She didn’t like the idea that her purchases could be tracked by someone she didn’t know. 

She bagged the card.  At the edge of the road where Cary had been dragged into the woods, she took several soil samples and marked them as evidence. 

Some of the soil looked dark, almost black.  It could have been oil spots from a car. 

Or it could have been blood. 

Back at the Bisbee Police Department, Laura photocopied both sides of the Safeway Club Card, then looked up Safeway in the phone book.  There was one in Bisbee.  She took the photocopy and drove out to the strip mall where the Safeway was located.

She asked to speak to the manager.  A sallow young man with a few thin hairs on his upper lip came to meet her and they walked back to a dingy, fluorescent-lit office at the back of the store.  She guessed he was
a
manager, not
the
manager.

“Is it possible to get a name and address from this card?” she asked, handing him the photocopy.

The young man, whose nametag said “Gerald,” looked dubious.  “I don’t know…that information is confidential.”

Sure it was.  Laura knew these cards were used to track shoppers’ purchases, and that they shared this information with other companies. 

Laura had to be careful, here.  She wanted Gerald to give her the card-holder’s name without tipping him off that it involved a homicide.  She didn’t want it getting out what kind of evidence had been left at the scene—information like that would make a defense attorney’s day.  She cleared her throat. 

“I could really use your help. The person who dropped this is an important witness to a serious crime—“

The boy leaned forward.  “What kind of crime?”

“A missing person’s case.”  Technically, that was true. 

“Do you think it’s connected with those murders?”

“This concerns someone we just need to talk to. You’d really be helping me out.”

She could see the wheels going around in his head. “I think it’s against regulations, you know, unless you had a search warrant or something like that.”  He drummed a pencil on the desk blotter and looked tortured.  “Are you sure it doesn’t have anything to do with that girl getting killed?”

“We haven’t ruled that out—tangentially.”

“I thought so.”  Pleased with himself. “So you really need to talk to whoever owns this card because he might have witnessed the killing?”

“Gerald, I can’t really say.”

“Damn, that’s scary. Two people getting killed like that. I saw it on the news.”  His eyes turned regretful. “I wish I could help…”

Laura glanced at her watch.  “Damn.”

“Ma’am?”

“I’m just thinking, I’ve never run into this kind of situation before. I can get a warrant, no problem—I just hope nobody gets hurt because we took the extra time to hammer this out.”  She shook her head.  “I just can’t believe this is happening.” She stood up.  “I hope I can find a judge at this time of day.  If this turns bad, I sure don’t want this on my conscience.”

Gerald squirmed in his chair.  “Maybe I should look it up, just in case.  I can’t remember if there’s a hard and fast rule.”

“That would be a
big
help.”

Five minutes later she emerged from the Safeway into the parking lot with the name and address.  She didn’t need the address, though.  She already knew where Charles Edward Lehman lived.

Victor Celaya showed up at the Jonquil hours after their dinner at the Copper Queen Hotel.  He leaned against the doorjamb, gamma-rayed by the fluorescent light above the door to her room, waggling a sixpack of Bohemia. 

Well, almost a sixpack. One was missing.

“Can I come in?”

“Sure. Just let me wake up.”

“You were in bed already?  I’m sorry.”  He walked past her and put the sixpack on the table. 

“Want one?”

She glanced dubiously at the sixpack.

“They’re cold. Just got it from Circle K.  I’m sorry I woke you up but I had to tell you my idea.”

Laura sat on the bed, trying to focus.   She’d just made it into deep sleep when he pulled her out of it.  “What idea is that?”

“Kind of stuffy in here.  You want to go outside?”

“Sure.”  Why not?  She wasn’t going to go back to sleep now. 

Laura went into the bathroom and changed out of the long shirt she wore to bed.  Back into today’s clothes, wrinkled as they were.  She could hear Victor whistling a familiar-sounding
corrida
, pure and sweet. Wondered what his idea was and why it couldn’t wait until tomorrow. 

Whatever he’d come up with, he was excited about it.

They crossed a bridge over the narrow channel that ran through Tombstone Canyon and sat down at one of the outdoor tables. Laura was almost glad he’d awakened her; it was a beautiful night. Cool compared to Tucson.  The sky full of stars. Runoff from the rains tumbled through the canal, catching the glow of the streetlights.