The Laura Cardinal Novels (94 page)

There was a short hallway on the right, no doubt led to a bathroom and one or two bedrooms. As a way of escape, it could be a dead end. The tiny kitchen was separated from the rest of room by a counter. The upright wood planks of the counter might be solid enough to provide concealment, but probably would not stop a bullet. The appliances were old and white. A Formica-topped table and four mismatched chairs formed a breakfast nook near one window. Knotty pine paneling, dark with age, throughout.

There were a lot of boxes. And a lot of junk, most of it relegated to one side of the room: an old lamp, bric-a-brac, towering stacks of papers threatening to spill over. Laura glanced at the top one:
Geology of the Santa Catalina Mountains
by Benjamin Rogers Luce. Written on a typewriter.

Lawson motioned to an Early American couch and two chairs—typical cabin furniture—near a stone fireplace. Laura noted a western bronze on the mantel, a cowboy roping a devil. Looked expensive. She chose the couch where she could see the front door, and Jaime took the chair where he could see the back, which put Steve Lawson between them. This they did automatically. She guessed that their host was none the wiser.

Laura set her tape recorder on the table between them, gave her name, badge number, time, date, and Lawson's name. Then she asked him,“How was the skull uncovered?”

“It's hard to explain.” He drifted off.

Laura waited.

“I'm a hydrologist for the US Geological Service,” Steve Lawson said. “But my background is in geology. This area is a very interesting spot geologically, pockets of Leatherwood granodiorite—granite—interspersed with wilderness granite, and I've been interested in where and how this happens.” He launched into a description of the geology of the Catalina Mountains and this area in particular. Laura tried to follow him, but found her mind wandering. She had taken geology in college, but she had difficulty grasping the geometric concepts—that one rock could be older than another rock, yet be closer to the surface of the earth. Geology took things and twisted them, squeezed them like toothpaste, jammed them up, revolved them on their axes, and put them on their sides. It was the revolving on the axis part she couldn't get her mind around, no matter how many times or in how many ways it was explained to her.

I've been digging up and down the hill out there—there are extruded pegmatite dikes all over this area. I've been following a very nice vein of quartzite pegmatite . . .

The man talking as if the subject was the most compelling thing in the world. She listened as Lawson droned on, using terms like mid-Tertiary granite and detachment fault—a snowstorm of words.

And suddenly she wondered if he really
was
snowing them.

Laura didn't know diddly about geology, but she knew something about human nature. She watched him with renewed interest, looking for something in his eyes, listening for changes in the tone of his voice, watching his body language. But there was nothing to tell her he wasn't genuinely fascinated by the subject. Not just fascinated, but
consumed
. She recognized the phenomenon in herself; she had been consumed by her own work many times.

As much as she admired his passion, though, she needed to retain control of the interview. “So that was what led you to dig in that area?”

He focused on her, his eyes serious behind his glasses. “Yes, that's right.”

“You dug at that spot?”

“In that area—I'm pretty sure it was in that spot.” He paused. “I didn't find what I was looking for, but later on, when I let Jake out, I noticed he was sniffing around out there. Out of curiosity, I went out to take a look. Anyway, he dug up this.” He set the book down on the oak coffee table.

Jaime got up to see better, craning his neck over Laura's shoulder. Neither of them touched it. Laura pulled gloves out of her back pocket and put them on.

It was a flat, wide book called
The Man in the Moon
. A child's book. Laura looked at Steve. “You found this up there? Where the bones were buried?”

“That's right. I looked it up on Amazon.” He pulled out a folded piece of paper from one pocket. It was a printout from Amazon showing a picture of the book and the information on it. Laura saw there were other books, too. She looked at the age recommendation: four to eight. Jenny Carmichael was eight years old.

Laura made a note to ask Mrs. Carmichael about the book. “Did you dig anymore after that?”

“After I found the skull? No.”

“How long did it take you to dig until you came to the bone?”

“It must have been an hour.”

“An hour? Are you sure?”

He nodded, flicked a glance at the window. Something he wasn't telling them . . .

Laura pressed him. “And you kept digging because . . .?”

He shrugged. “I was curious, I guess. Why the book was buried there and why Jake dug it up in the first place.”

“How long have you owned the property?”

“Three weeks.”

“Three weeks?”

“Officially. I inherited the property from my grandfather.”

Laura asked him how long his grandfather had owned it. Thirty-seven years, until his death a month ago at the age of ninety-five. He had been in an Alzheimer's home for almost a year before he died.

“Do you spend a lot of time here?”

“Haven't been up here in at least ten, twelve years. Since I moved to LA and came back.”

“How long were you in LA?” Laura asked.

“I was there for most of the nineties, came back in two thousand.”

“Why didn't you come up here?” Laura motioned to the window. “If I had a cabin, I'd be up here all the time.”

“I don't know. I just didn't. My work with USGS takes me all over.” He leaned forward, hands clasped on his knees. “But that's not really it. It's hard to explain. It wasn't the same with my grandfather not here. I didn't want to . . . I felt it was disloyal to him being up here.” He cleared this throat, his eyes going back to Jaime. “I'm not explaining this very well. All the good times I spent up here when I was a kid, my grandfather was a big part of it. It was just too sad.”

“But now you own the property.”

He rubbed his nose. “It seems . . . I don't know . . . cleaner. He's gone, he died just as we all will, and now I can think of the cabin as mine. Mine and my sisters'.”

Laura understood that. “You share this property with your sisters?”

“No. He left the cabin to me. I'm the only one living in Tucson, and he wanted whoever inherited it to get their use out of the place. But he made sure they were taken care of. My sister Danielle has his house in Laguna. If either of my sisters ever wants to come back here, they can stay here whenever they want.”

“When you were in LA in the mid-nineties, did you ever come back for a visit?”

“A couple of times.” He added, “I'm pretty sure I didn't come up here, though. If I came to town at all, it was usually for the weekend. We wouldn't have the time.”

“How about the summer of 1997? Did you come to Tucson during that time span?”

“I honestly can't remember.”

“Could you think about it and let us know?”

He nodded.

“Are there any other cabins close by?”

“The nearest cabin is probably half a mile over that hill,” he said, pointing behind him.

Laura followed the direction of his hand—north—which would put that cabin closer to Camp Aratauk.

“Do you know who the cabin belongs to?”

He shook his head. “I'm just getting to know people up here.”

“What kind of car did you have in 1997?”

“’97?” He thought about it. “I had a GMC truck. Why?”

His eyes leveled on her. Laura met him halfway. “We're asking everybody we interview that.”

“Have you interviewed anybody else?”

That made her smile. “You're the first.” She glanced down at her flip-top notebook. “What about your grandfather? What kind of car did he have?”

He rubbed his jaw. “That would be his last car—he had it until he went to . . . Palmcrest Village. It was a white Chrysler.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Laura noticed Jaime sit a little straighter. “Did you ever drive it?”

“Sure, when I'd come out here. If I flew in, and even when I didn't. He liked me to drive his car—said it saved me wear and tear on mine.”

He continued to meet her eyes, almost as if he were trying to prove some kind of point. Again she got the feeling that he knew a lot more than he was saying.

“Can you get me the paperwork on it? Who your grandfather sold it to?”

“I think I can do that, yes.” His look wary.

She handed him her card, and they made small talk as he escorted them out.

“What do you think?” Jaime asked as they walked back up to the excavation.

“What he said was plausible enough.”

“The geology stuff? Yeah, but he could have been making it all up, for all we know.”

“That occurred to me.”

Jaime shook his head. “The one girl's bones being found down in the valley, and then three days later, he digs up this skeleton? That sure sends off warning bells in my head.”

Laura agreed, but said, “We don't know if it is Jenny Carmichael.”

“Oh, it is. Not to mention,” Jaime added, grabbing a ponderosa sapling to help him negotiate a tough spot in the trail, “Micaela Brashear comes home six months ago. All that time these kids have been gone, and now they're popping up like mushrooms after a rain. And his grandfather had a white car. He could have driven up here for the weekend. Can't you just picture him in his grandfather's car, talking to that little girl over by Rose Canyon? I can.” Jaime jerked his head in the direction of the cabin. “You ask me, Mr. Rockhound in there is the prime suspect. Probably has a guilty conscience, and when he heard about Kristy Groves on the news, it triggered something in him.”

“Could be. But what about Bill Smith?”

“What about him? I don't know, maybe Lawson's only good for these two. The Brashear girl's abduction could be unrelated.”

Laura thought about the missing girl, Lily. And Jaime's own theory that there couldn't be two serial killers working in the same area at the same time—it defied the odds. “That would be a huge coincidence.”

He shrugged. “We've got coincidences any way you slice it.” He glanced back at the cabin. “But that's the guy who dug up Jenny Carmichael.”

The lights were blinding; the generator snorted and growled and gave off gas fumes; and bugs zipped and lighted on them as they watched the excavation grow slowly. The grave had been widened and deepened according to its place on the grid. The rectangle had been divided into thirds, each area marked off by yellow string. It was slow work. Two assistants sifted the earth into buckets.

Many of the bones had been disarticulated, but the grave was deep enough that they were all pretty much in the same place. Strands of dirty, blond hair clung to what was left of the scalp and the brown skull. The clothing was degraded and missing in places, but it was there. Mud-colored, but Laura recognized the canvas uniform shorts and the navy piping around the collar of the camp shirt. And the belt, which lay almost entwined with the rubberized portions of the girl's underwear. Laura knew the uniform because she had once worn it herself. A shiver ran up her back as she thought about that.

From the placement of the bones and clothing, it appeared that the girl might have been fully-clothed—including hiking boots and socks on her feet.

Jean Cox had already matched the dental charts to the tiny skeleton's teeth by the time they got back to the site.

They had indeed found Jenny Carmichael. She'd come a long way from Rose Canyon Lake.

Laura was aware of movement down by the cabin below. Steve Lawson coming up the hill, light glinting off his gold rims.

He stopped just short of the lit area, hands in his pockets. Laura was aware of his presence, his stillness, and found herself thinking two ways about him. He could be the guy who just continued digging where his dog had left off, or he could be the guy who killed Jenny.

Lawson was an enigma. Laura found herself liking him, but was bothered by the fact that he had managed to dig right in the spot where a little girl was buried. What were the odds of that happening?

She was sure he was holding something back. He didn't act guilty, but she knew that guilt wasn't always an indicator of behavior. Look at Sean Grady.

Now he hung back at the edge of her vision outside the crime scene tape, making sure he wasn't a nuisance. His property—he had a right to be on it. So quiet, at the edge of the light, that everybody seemed to forget about him.

Everybody except her.

It got cold toward dawn. Laura went down to the Yukon and got herself a jacket and another bottle of water. She was stiff and sore, and the small of her back hurt a little. She'd spent most of her time leaning against a pine-tree trunk or in a catcher's position.

Jaime had long ago sat down against a rock and drifted off to sleep. Jean Cox, who was energized by a scene like this, was at her best. The work was painstaking, but she was efficient and gentle, making certain each piece of recovered bone was placed carefully inside the body bag.

Laura looked at her watch under the door light of the Yukon. Four-fifteen. Most of the skeleton had been recovered, and a coroner's van was awaiting transport, two men leaning against its doors, talking quietly and smoking.

She headed down the mountain. She wanted to be at the Carmichael house early, before Mrs. Carmichael woke up. The local news came on at six o'clock in the morning, and Laura knew there would be a reference to the bones found on Mt. Lemmon. She wanted to be the one to tell Mary Carmichael—if she didn't know already.

She parked outside Mrs. Carmichael's house while it was still dark, waiting for a light to go on.

The lights were off, but Laura wondered if Mary Carmichael was really sleeping. She might be sitting there in the dark, thinking about the loss of her son. If she
was
sleeping, Laura didn't want to wake her. She knew what it was like to awaken to a terrible void, to realize in the first moments of waking that her life would never be the same again.