Darkness on the Edge of Town (30 page)

“You have a brown spot in your eye,” he said.

“I know. My mom calls it my beauty mark.”

This had to be a sign from God—she was the one.  He felt the rush of joy.

Not that he believed she was Misty come back to life. That would be ridiculous. He wasn’t crazy, just nostalgic.  Still, the resemblance was heartening.

His mind was babbling now.  She was so like Misty. The spot in the eye, the words she used. Beauty mark.  The way she tilted her chin—he hadn’t noticed it before.  The cool way she looked at him.

This
time, it was going to work.  He could feel it.  Sure, he’d have to gain her confidence, her trust.  He’d have to go slow.  But this time would be different from the others.

“Would you like something to eat?” he asked.  “I can cook anything you want.  I’ll make you something special.”

Laura got in at two-thirty in the morning.  Victor Celaya and Buddy Holland were waiting for her, Holland humming like a power line.  He had his keys in his hand as they walked down the steps toward the exit, his stride lengthening so he was way ahead of them, looking back periodically, impatient for them to catch up.

“He must be going out of his mind,” Laura said.

“Jesus, can you imagine what he’s thinking?  What if it’s Lundy.”

Laura said nothing, because she thought it
was
Lundy.

She remembered what Jay Ramsey had said before she left for Florida—there had  been another girl. “How old is Summer?”

“Twelve.” 

“She lives with her mother?  In Tucson?”

“Uh-huh.” 

The heat hit the moment they were through the automatic doors, a hot dry wind seizing the breath from her lips and nostrils. She’d gone from sauna to oven.  It seemed to her it got hotter every year, the monsoon seasons of her memory dwindling down to a few thunderstorms, terminal humidity, and a plague of mosquitos.  Maybe it was all due to global warming.

They drove the one long block to DPS headquarters. Laura had come back empty-handed.  Nothing to check into evidence—that was still being decided in Tallahassee.  Who got what, when.  They headed upstairs to the squad bay, took chairs in the conference room.  Buddy sat opposite Laura, and Victor sat between them at the head of the table.   

Victor nodded to Buddy.  “Okay.  She’s here.  What was it you wanted to talk about?”

Buddy stretched his long legs out in front of him and stared at his feet.  Laura thought he had aged ten years.

Victor said to Laura, “He won’t tell me what’s going on. He said he wanted to wait for you. So give it up, Buddy, what is it?”

Buddy’s face was pale, his eyes like dark stones.  He opened his mouth to speak, then abruptly launched himself out of his chair and started pacing.

“Come on, Buddy.  What’s so important we have to beg for it?”

He stopped and took a breath.

“I think I brought him here.” 

Laura wondered if she heard right.

“What do you mean, you brought him here?” demanded Victor. 

Buddy started pacing again, head scrupulously turned away from them. He said, “I brought him here. It was me.”

“How’d you do that?” Victor’s voice loud in the small room. 

“I found out my daughter was talking to this guy on the Internet.  He sent her stuff—an MP3 player, earrings—“

Laura thought about Endicott’s evidence list. She had been right.  It was Lundy.  She looked at Buddy, who was still talking. It took her a moment to catch up with his words.

“…decided to intercept his messages.  I knew he was a bad guy, a sexual predator.  I’d been on the chief to let us start our own Internet sexual predator task force, but he wouldn’t go for it.  This guy was out there, and I couldn’t just let him get away.  So we set him up.”

“Set him up how?” Victor asked.

“I took over for my daughter. Pretended I was her.”

Victor whistled.

Laura said, “We?  You said we set him up.”

“Me and Duffy.”

Duffy?  Jesus. 

Buddy slung himself into a chair.  Now that he was talking, it all came out. How he and Heather Duffy had planned a sting, setting up a meeting with Lundy in City Park.  “But he never showed.  I think he saw something that tipped him off.”

Laura thought: Duffy would look like a cop even in a negligee.

“He made you,” Victor said. “He made you and he bolted, and on his way out of town he saw Jessica Parris.  And you kept this secret all this time?  What about Lehman?”

“I thought it could be him.”

“That’s a huge coincidence, man.”

“Hey, his prints were on her
lipstick
.”  For a moment, the arrogant Buddy was back.  “It could have been an unrelated crime.”

“Come on!  You expect us to believe that?”

“Where’s Lehman now?” Laura asked.

“First place I called.  He’s at his house.  He would have had time to get her to Bisbee.  He had three hours.”

“But he didn’t,” said Laura.

Buddy looked at her defiantly.

“You didn’t go to his place, because you knew it wasn’t him.”

Buddy didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.  Laura asked, “Did he send her a picture?”

He nodded.  Didn’t look at her.

“What were you trying to do? Throw us off the track?” Victor again.

Buddy stood up and the plastic chair clattered, hit the wall.  His fists clenched, he stepped toward Victor. 

“Wait a minute!” Laura said, getting up to stand between them. “This isn’t doing us any good.  We’ve got to find this guy.”

Buddy sat back down, passed a hand over his face.  “Shit.” 

Laura cleared her throat.  “We’ve got to compare notes.  We know a lot more than we think.” She looked at Buddy. “I know stuff about this guy now.  The good news is, Jessica Parris was an anomaly.  He keeps his victims for a while.”

Buddy Holland shot her a look of gratitude.

She ran down what she’d learned, her belief that he was reliving some kind of relationship with Misty de Seroux. “That could work for us.”

“Are you telling me he’s looking for girls that looked like this Misty?” Victor asked.

“I know—weird, but you’ve seen weirder.”  She looked at Buddy.  “I don’t think he’s going to kill her—not yet.  I think we have some time.”

Buddy’s gaze locked with hers.  “Then what are we doing hanging out here?  We’ve got to get moving.”

“Where would we go? It’s better if we figure out a few things first.”

“He rapes and kills,” Buddy said bitterly. “We already know that. He’s probably already…oh, shit.”

 “If we recover her,” Laura said to Buddy, “we can work with that.  Get her counseling.”

She reached into her briefcase and removed photographs of Alison Burns, Jessica Parris, and Linnet Sobek.  And then she added a couple of candid photos Lundy had taken of Misty de Seroux.

She watched Buddy’s face.  He drew in a quick breath.

“Look at them, how much they look alike,”  Laura said quietly.  “He wants a relationship.  He wants someone like Misty.”

“You just sit down and take a load off,” Musicman said to Summer, bustling around the galley.  “How do grilled cheese sandwiches and a Coke sound?”

Summer didn’t like grilled cheese sandwiches, but she thought she’d better say she did.

He was trying to be nice to her.  He brought the grilled cheese sandwiches to the table on paper plates, the kind you got from Paper Warehouse. These plates had purple, blue and yellow fireworks and said HAPPY BIRTHDAY.  Beside her plate was a present. 

“Go ahead, open it.”

She tore off the wrapping, feeling queasy.  When did he get her a present? 

“Could you be a little more careful?” Dale said.  “We can use that paper again.”

She did as she was told, gently parting the wrapping where the Scotch tape was until it revealed her gift: A Lucite photo cube.

“Well?  Do you like it?”

“It’s great,” she said, trying to sound enthusiastic.

“That’s for our trip. Here, let me put it away so we don’t get food on it.”  He cleared the paper and put the cube away up in a top cupboard. He removed the bow from the wrapping paper and smoothed the paper out, folded it neatly, and put both the paper and the bow in a kitchen drawer. Then he sat down at the dinette table to watch her eat. 

The idea of eating anything made her want to gag, but she smiled and bit into the sandwich. It tasted like cardboard. She chewed and chewed, trying to make the food small enough to swallow, and kept smiling. That seemed to please him.  He acted like he had a crush on her—like he was shy or something.  He reminded her of Justin Teeters in fifth period, who, whenever he saw her, got this look on his face that was really comic.  She’d say “hi” and he couldn’t even answer back. 

In that way, Dale was just like Justin.  She knew he wanted to do
it
with her, but she also knew that he was holding back.  Because he was shy? 

Was he just like Justin, only older?  She closed her eyes, imagined that her power was bigger than herself.  That she was bigger and bigger and Dale was smaller and smaller.

When she opened her eyes he was looking at her.  Staring.  “How is it?” he asked.

“Mmmm.  Really good.”

“I bought ice cream for dessert. I know it’s almost breakfast time, but hey, we can do anything we want.”

Like a little kid.  Jeeze. 

“Would you like some?”

She swallowed more of the cardboard.  “Sure.”

“I got Neopolitan,” he said shyly.  “That way you can choose what you want—chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry.”

“Cool.”

“You look so much better in that dress.”

That reminded her. “What did you do with my clothes?”

“They’re gone. Never you worry about that.  You won’t have to see them again.”

She almost said she
liked
them, but bit her tongue. 
Humor him.  Humor him until you can find a way to get out of here
.

She set the sandwich down, sipped some Coke.  Looked at him, memorizing his face.  That way, her dad would be able to track him down after she escaped.

How
she was going to escape, she didn’t know.  But the more time she spent with him, the better she felt about her chances.  He was kind of pathetic. She almost felt sorry for him. Sorry and grateful that he wasn’t the kind of kidnapper she’d seen on the Discovery channel, the ones who murdered their victims.  She couldn’t see him murdering anybody. 

“You like the sandwich?” he asked again.

“Oh, yeah. I just don’t eat a lot. I’m on a diet.”

He frowned.  “You don’t need to diet.  Why do girls do that?  You should be healthy, enjoy your life, not diet.  I told Misty that.”

“Who’s Misty?” 
Get him talking
.

“She was my first girlfriend.” 

“I bet she was pretty.”

“Oh, she was.”

“How come you aren’t still with her?”

“We grew apart.”

“I’m sorry…I don’t know why she’d want to leave someone as nice as you.  I mean, you’re really pretty cool.”

He stood up abruptly. “If you’re not going to finish that, I’ll throw it away.”

She’d made him mad. 

He shoved the picnic plates into the garbage. He wouldn’t look at her, but she could tell he was angry by the way his shoulders hunched, the way he slammed around.

Finally he turned to face her.  “Why do you have to be so
sly
?”

His face was dark red, his eyes like marbles. Suddenly he looked dangerous.

Her heart sped up.  What was he mad about? 

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” he said. 

“I just meant—“

“I know what you meant.  You think you can wrap me around your little finger? Well, that’s not going to happen.” He stepped forward, his hands clenching and unclenching.  “That makes me so mad.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Honest.”

“I think you’d better go to your room, young lady.”

“Okay.”  She slipped out from behind the dinette table, had to pass right by him to get to the bedroom.  She tried not to touch him at all, but her dress brushed against his thigh.

His hands came out and he whipped her around to face him.  Bands of steel around her upper arms, nails digging in. His hands were trembling. His head was trembling.

His face was so close. It blotted out everything.  His mouth was working, and his eyes—

His eyes were dark, like holes.  Like there wasn’t anything there behind them.  Just black space.  She opened her mouth to say she was sorry but nothing came out. 

He shook her, once, hard, and slammed her against the stove.  The edge of the stove whacked into her elbow, the shock running up her arm to her chin.  She groaned.

He continued to stare at her.  Eyes like holes.  She was distracted by the pain in her elbow. Her funny bone.

Then she saw something else way down deep in his eyes. Pain?  It was shiny, slick, desperate.  He turned around and walked away from her.  “Best get to your room,” he said without looking at her.

She bolted for the room and locked the door.

A few minutes later she heard something bang against the doorjamb, then the sound of a padlock clicking shut.

Victor, Laura, Buddy and Jerry Grimes set up a task force, calling their contacts at other law enforcement agencies—the FBI, U.S Customs, her own DPS Highway Patrol, U.S. Border Patrol, the sheriffs in all Arizona counties, the Tucson, South Tucson, Marana, Oro Valley, and Green Valley police departments.  Laura contacted the detectives she knew with these agencies.  Every agency was faxed a picture of a 1987 Fleetwood Pace Arrow, the headshot of Lundy, both names, and his license plate number.  They also contacted law enforcement in New Mexico, California, and Mexico. 

Anybody and everybody to help them out.

Buddy asked, “What about media?”

Laura was torn about that. “We have no idea if he’s still in Tucson, but if he is, we don’t want him to run.”

“I think we should keep it to law enforcement,” Victor said.

Laura agreed.

Buddy wanted the Amber Alert.

“It’s too fucking late for that,” Victor snapped.

Charlie Specter, a DPS intelligence analyst, started entering what data they had on Lundy in the Rapid Start system.  Rapid Start was a computer program developed by the FBI for just this kind of situation. He would enter the data as information came in from various law enforcement entities—one man in charge of everything.