Darkness on the Edge of Town (2 page)

The Bisbee PD detective straightened up from the tree trunk on which he had been leaning, his face instantly animated.  “Buddy Holland.”

They shook hands like long-lost brothers.  Victor had an unerring sense for which person in a crowd needed to be won over.  Now he paused and shot a glance at Laura, just to be sure she was still charmed by him.  Impossible not to be.

It was decided that Laura, Detective Holland and Officer Billings would walk the crime scene and Victor would interview the two female witnesses, detained in a conference room at the Copper Queen Hotel. Victor usually did the interviews.  He was the best interviewer/interrogator in the unit. 

Laura glanced up the street lined by two-story brick buildings: Brewery Gulch. From their vantage point on OK Street, news photographers aimed their telephotos down the hill at the park. OK Street marked the eastern boundary of Bisbee; after that, there was no place to go but straight up.  This odd topography had the effect of making the corner of Brewery Gulch and Main Street both the city center and the edge of town.

They walked up the Gulch, Officer Duffy leading the way. The narrow canyon seemed to telescope until Laura’s gaze was trained solely on the blue uniform of Duffy ahead of her, twenty pounds of duty belt and service weapon and flashlight and handcuffs shifting from side to side on her compact girl-body.  Duffy seemed sure of herself, as if she knew exactly where she was going.  Laura got the impression it wasn’t just Bisbee the officer was sure of, but her future as well.  Laura envied the girl’s certainty.  Her own future seemed to disappear somewhere up ahead in the mist; she’d suffered too many body blows to take anything for granted in her personal life. Or maybe her personal life and her professional life were one and the same.  The only thing she seemed to be good at was this job.

Ahead, yellow crime scene tape blocked the road, leaving space for people to turn their cars around.  Their little group passed the open door to a bar.  The beer smell billowed out, enveloping Laura in a dank, underworldly current. 

The closer she got, the greater the dread she felt. The game of push and pull went on full force inside her: the urgency to see the scene, the equally strong desire to turn away.  Whatever Jessica Parris had been thinking, feeling, or doing—stuff as simple as hanging out with a friend or planning what to do for the weekend—all of it had been cut short like a snipped thread. 

At least nothing could hurt the girl anymore.  Her family was another matter.  In the aftermath of the tornado that took their daughter’s life, their entire world would be blown apart, shattered into tiny pieces.  Laura knew from experience that you could pick up the pieces but you could never put them back together.  She was here to get Jessica’s family the only thing left that had any meaning: Justice.   

A knot of people had gathered at the edge of the tape. A uniform held them back, unassailable as a block of granite.  She saw he had been assigned to keep the crime log. 

Laura took photographs of the people crowded near the tape, making sure to get every face.  You never knew who would be there, thinking they were invisible.

A hot wind spiraled up the canyon, bringing with it the smell of impending rain.  

She let the camera hang down from the ribbon around her neck.

Her stomach tightened.

Time to begin.

When she was in grade school, Laura’s parents took her to the Tucson Metro Ice Rink for ice-skating lessons.  She remembered walking gingerly on her blades across the black rubber apron to the edge of the rink. The delineation between rubber and ice was inviolate, a law of nature.  First you were clumping, and then you were gliding. 

Like an ice rink, a crime scene was something apart. City Park had been transformed forever from what it had once been.  The evil that had visited here would linger in the hearts and the minds of the people who frequented it, long after the body was carted away and the crime scene tape taken down.  Legends would grow up around it. The crime scene was hallowed ground.

Laura was about to step across the threshold into a new world with new rules, and she saw what she did there as a sacred duty.  Mistakes could never be recalled, so she had to take her time and do it right.  She ducked under the tape, followed by Holland and Billings.  Officer Duffy followed suit.

“Officer Duffy,” Laura said firmly, “It will be just the three of us.”

Duffy blushed furiously and stepped back.  Laura didn’t bother to explain something the officer should already know: The fewer people inside a crime scene, the better.  Cops were the worst offenders when it came to trampling evidence, drinking from water fountains or flushing toilets at a crime scene. 

Now they were standing at the entrance to City Park, which was actually one story above them and accessed by a flight of dingy brown steps climbing up to the street above.  Bisbee was built on hills and concrete stairs like these were everywhere, connecting to the winding roads above and below like a game of Chutes and Ladders. 

According to Officer Billings, there was an entrance into the park halfway up.  The witness had led Billings up this way.  The place made Laura think of the inner city, Chicago or New York—a park made of concrete, suspended above the street on the backs of three locked-tight shops, their windows blank.

She looked up and saw the finials of a wrought iron fence and some treetops.  Wondered how trees could grow there.  She glanced at Officer Billings.  “That street, where does it go?” She pointed to a street that curved up the hill around the edge of the park.

“Opera Drive?  It makes a half-circle around City Park, doubles back up there.” He motioned to the road above, high on the mountain.  Houses were strewn down the hill like items in a jumble sale.

“Let’s start here and walk the perimeter,” Laura said. Behind her, Buddy Holland snapped on latex gloves and young Billings followed suit. Buddy looked over at Laura, then pointedly back at his hands.  Laura crossed her arms, tucking her hands under her armpits.  She didn’t wear gloves until it was time to collect the evidence; wearing them tended to make her complacent.

They walked north on Brewery Gulch and followed the curving street up the hill, Billings filling them in on the witnesses’ discovery of the body and his subsequent trip back with them to the bandshell—any and all observations, large and small.  Halfway up the curve they came to an entrance into the park.  From here Laura could see a long concrete oval with a basketball court, a playground, cement bleachers cutting into the hill on the right, and the bandshell.

Billings’s voice trailed off into silence.

Inside the bandshell, propped up against the back wall, was a tiny forlorn figure.  At first glance, it looked like a doll. From where she was, Laura couldn’t see features, details, but she could see the figure’s static nature, its lack of life. She felt the shocked presence of the men with her. The whole canyon seemed quiet, insulated from the world like a soundproof room.

She wiped sweat out of her eyes.  Suddenly she wished the storm would come, bringing with it cool rain.

After a moment that seemed like a prayer, they continued up the hill. Sunlight glared off silver-painted roofs down below on the Gulch.  Laura realized how thirsty she was.  When they got back down she’d ask for someone to send up some bottled water.  They followed the wrought iron fence, looking at everything, paying particular attention to the ground.  She could hear her own ragged breathing; they were up at five thousand feet. They could see into the bandshell, the horror closer now.  It was unsettling how much the girl looked like a doll.  Still too far away to be sure if she was real.

At the top of the road, they reached the flight of stairs that descended the hill along the south side of the park.  If they walked down these stairs they would have gone full circle.  In the corner, next to the steps, the tarpaper roof of the bandshell gleamed in the sun, a shallow puddle from a recent thunderstorm in the center.  Beneath, unseen, was the girl.  The stench of death condensed in the humid air, cloying and undeniable.

The three of them stood at the top of the concrete steps, looking down at Brewery Gulch below. 

A breeze touched Laura’s face and she smelled wild fennel.  Behind her Buddy said, “I don’t think he came from up here.  He’d block the road.  It would be hard to get in and out.  He’d have more of a chance of being seen.”

Laura thought he was probably right

A cicada buzzed, hard and violent.

She was aware of the two of them looking at her.  “Let’s go down the stairs.”

As they entered the park, Officer Billings headed for the bandshell steps. 

“Officer,” Laura said.  “Stay with us.”

He blushed at his lapse of judgment.  “Sorry,” he said, quickly rejoining them at the entrance.

Laura stood still, facing out into the park. The body of the little girl would wait.  Wordlessly, the two men stayed with her.  She could see Detective Holland out of the corner of her eye. She hated dividing her attention between two people she didn’t know and the crime scene.  If she had it her way, she’d be here alone. 

Looking at the park with her back to the bandshell, she measured with her eye the distance to the other end—approximately two hundred feet, maybe a little more.  Inside the long oval of the park, the basketball court formed a smaller, concentric one.  Near the wrought iron fences there were cookie-cutter scraps of dirt, where the trees grew.  She realized that she was in a natural amphitheatre, houses all around, many of them looking down from the tall hills—a ready-made audience.

Laura closed her eyes, trying to summon the thoughts of a killer.  Sometimes, if she narrowed her field of vision enough, she could see things from his perspective.   

Laura knew he craved an audience, knew it from the evidence he’d left behind.  Even as she tried to draw him in,
think
like him, her analytical mind ticked away underneath, logically picking up and discarding theories—the easiest way for him to enter the park, if the girl was dead or alive when he brought her here, and what he did last, just before he left.

The reason he had to dress her up like a doll.

A scrape of shoe on cement—Holland or Billings.  Whoever it was, her concentration broke.  The killer had something to say to her, but she couldn’t hear him.  Maybe it was Detective Holland, his disapproval of her jamming the frequencies. 

She would come back later, alone.

She turned and faced the bandshell.

The 1916-era bandshell was small and shabby—stuccoed-over cement.  The stage apron stood a little over waist-high.  Under the arch, the shallow interior had been painted pale blue—to represent the sky?—but was now overpowered by graffiti.

The body of the girl had been placed in the center, propped against the wall, legs out.  Flies zoomed around her. 

Finally, Laura looked directly into the girl’s face.  Shocked, she thought: I know her.

The barriers of time and place dissolved, and she saw the grainy newspaper photo of the two-tone sedan and the headline above it: CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND.

It wasn’t Julie, though.  Of course not; it couldn’t be.  And now that she really looked, she saw that the girl was not an exact match.

Laura owed it to this girl not to get sidetracked.  Her resemblance to Julie Marr was just a coincidence. Looking for a distraction, she glanced at Buddy Holland.

His face had turned deep crimson. He stared at the child, eyes fixed, a vein pulsing in his jaw.  For a moment she wondered if he was having a heart attack.  She opened her mouth to ask him if he was all right.

He turned his head to look at her.  For a moment the bleakness in his eyes reminded her of Frank Entwistle staring across the hospital bed at his own death—what one guy in her squad referred to as the thousand-yard stare.  Then his eyes turned stony, unreadable. 

Laura looked at the girl.  She was barefoot and dressed in an old-fashioned white dress.  A little girl’s dress—babyish.  Something a seven-year-old would wear to First Communion.  If this girl really was Jessica Parris, she was fourteen years old—far too old to wear a dress like this.

“I wonder where he got the dress,” Laura said.  “Who would sell dresses like that for a girl that age?”

“It looks small on her,” Buddy Holland said.  His voice was thick with emotion. She liked him better.

Laura took inventory: The girl’s hands had been placed neatly in her lap.  Her fingers were clasped together.  Her hair had been brushed.  Her legs had been slightly but not overtly spread.  This last could indicate sexual motivation.  Dressing her up was also most likely sexually motivated. 

She had been arranged in a tableau.

Buddy’s voice echoed her own thoughts.  “He staged this—put her on display.  I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts he’s done this before.”     

“Probably.” Either the bad guy had killed before or he had worked his way up to this, probably with rape. 

God, she wished she had some water.  She led the way to the bandshell steps on the other side farthest from the street, the ones she believed the killer did not take. 

She was pretty sure the guy had come up from below.  That would have been easiest.  He would have come up the steps from the Gulch, entered the park and headed right up the steps to the bandshell. 

Up on the concrete stage, Laura scanned the inside walls.  There was a door opposite, probably a storage area, padlocked closed.  On the padlock someone had written FTW—Fuck the World.  Bad guys, but likely not the ones she was looking for.

The floor was so clean it might have been swept. Clearly, he was an organized offender.  He made very few mistakes. The guy she was looking for had probably read the same books she had, books on criminal investigation and forensic science. Laura stared across at the entrance to the park, just down the steps from the bandshell, already picturing him coming up from the street.  It would take him ten minutes, tops, and that included clasping the hands. 

In, out. 

Arms still folded, she hunkered down next to the girl in a catcher’s stance.