The Laura Cardinal Novels (86 page)

A guy on the other side of the keg said, “I know you.”

Laura looked at him. He wore a navy knit shirt with an alligator logo on it. Older guy, his ginger hair sprinkled with gray and down to his collar.

“You do?”

“Yeah, you're the one who does the cold cases.” He was looking at her as if she was an insect under glass. “You've seen her, right? On the news?” he said to the guy next to him. “Some woman gets offed by her boyfriend in 1947 and DPS is on the case!”

Just then Jaime showed up at her elbow with a cup of water. He had a soda in the other hand. “You met my new partner?”

“Partner?” Knit Shirt said. “You calling her your partner now? What, you gone over to the dark side?”

Jaime said, “We're working the Kristy Groves homicide.”

Hawaiian Shirt whistled. “Holy shit, did you luck out or what?”

A big man sitting on one of the lawn chairs suddenly lumbered to his feet and came their way. Late sixties, with a broad angry face the color and consistency of mortadella.

He was in Laura's face in an instant. “
You're
Laura Cardinal?”

Laura stepped back under the assault of his breath. Bourbon, if she wasn't mistaken. “That's right. And you are?”

Jaime cleared his throat to say something, but the man stepped forward again, mad as a bull. “Don't you answer your phone calls? I've tried to reach you all day. Unless you don't want to know what the lead investigator on the Groves case has to say.”

Laura smiled, tried to make herself non-threatening. “You must be Detective Flynn.”

Jaime said, “Rory, man—“

The older man waved him away. “You don't know anything about Kristy Groves.”

Laura said, “I don't know enough, that's for sure. I could use your help.”

“You're shining me on. I know when someone is shining me on.”

He was very drunk. Laura wasn't sure there was a way to reason with him, but she'd try. “I think we need to go to a quiet place and go over everything we've got. I want to get your take on—“

“Oh, cut the crap. You think I haven't used that bullshit a thousand times?” He waved an arm, fixed his glare at Jaime. “You should have warned me what was gonna happen. Now I'm cut out of this, and you've got this woman here calling all the shots—“

“Hey, man, you're retired,” Jaime said. “You know that?”

“I know that. You think I'm stupid? I
thought
I could work with someone, like Jimbo or Ralph;
they
wouldn't shut me out . . .
dam
mit.” Winding down like a watch. “Either one of them would know you talk to the initial investigator.” He wiped his lips and fixed Laura with a baleful stare. “This has just gone to shit.”

Laura tried one more time. “Jaime and I planned to interview—“

“Can it. You don't
interview
me. You don't treat me like a witness. I worked the goddamn case. No, what you do, lady, is you ask my goddamn advice!” He spun around and started to walk away, then turned back. Jabbed a finger into the air. “You don't cut me out of the loop and think you can get me to do all the work for you at the same time.”

Jaime said, “Hey, man, you don't need to talk to her that way.”

“It's okay,” Laura said. Knowing that she had to de-escalate the situation. The only way she could think of to do that was to take herself out of it. “Look, I've got to hit the ladies room. You two sort it out, okay?”

When she came back out, Jaime was waiting for her. “Rory and those guys took off. Drunker'n shit. They're heading over to the crime scene.”

Just what she needed. Even though the forensic anthropologist was done with the scene, Laura didn't like the idea of a bunch of drunks trampling all over it. Shoot, it was like an archeological dig over there. One of them could step into a hole and break his leg—-that was, providing any of them got there before wrapping themselves around a light pole.

“Why didn't you stop them?”

Jaime shrugged. “They were bigger than me.”

“Not many people bigger than you,” Laura muttered as she walked past him.

“I heard that.” He followed her, ponderous. “You want to go get 'em?”

“Might as well go see what kind of damage they've done.”

Laura and Jaime caught up with them at the railroad tracks as they waited for a long freight train to pass by. Jaime recognized the older Jeep Cherokee—it belonged to Rory Flynn. In the horizontal light of the lowering sun, Laura could see four shapes: two people up front and two in the back. When the gate went up, the Cherokee crossed over and took off down the road.

No way to tell that this was a drunk driver. Taking the curve past the tracks like a pro, straightening out, not a hair over the speed limit.

Taillight-chaser that Laura was, she thought about stopping him. But they weren't that far from the crime scene, and she wanted to see what he would do when he got there. Still hoping to get him on her side. “He seemed drunk back at the party,” she said.

“Doesn't matter how drunk Rory is, when it comes to driving or shooting, the guy is perfect. He's got the reflexes of a NASCAR driver. I heard he'd do biathlons dead drunk when he was young.”

Kristy's body was found in a desert area on the west side of town. Superimposed over what was actually out here, Laura saw the area the way it used to be: a sprinkling of ranch-style houses in a rural setting, dirt roads between fallow fields, and big old tamarisk trees. Now, a massive auto mall sprawled across several acres to the south, looking more like the parking lot at LAX than a car dealership. Most of the land nearby had been scraped up. Some of the old houses were mere shells of themselves, waiting for the
coup de grâce
.

The patch of desert where Kristy had been found was still relatively untouched, but tractors and other heavy equipment were parked along the road, including a tree spade.

The tree spade had been removing a mesquite tree when a construction worker on the ground noticed something unusual hanging from one of the long blades—it had turned out to be Kristy's rib cage.

Laura watched as Rory Flynn parked behind the earthmovers. As if on cue, four doors opened and the men got out. She pulled in behind them. Not one of them looked back. They were men on a mission. They started up a dirt road bisecting the desert lot in the direction of the crime scene tape.

Their destination was a eucalyptus tree and a cement slab marking a house long gone, two rows of water-starved palms lining a dirt drive to nowhere. Nowhere except a mesquite tree torn out by its roots and tossed onto the slab, and the three-foot-deep rectangular hole where bits and pieces of Kristy Groves had been removed from the earth. First yanked out by the tree spade, then the rest of her painstakingly uncovered, bagged, and transported.

Flynn stood over the grave, his big shoulders tight, his face pale and slack in the late afternoon light, eyes only dark hollows under the heavy shelf of his brow. Beside him stood Knit Shirt and two younger men Laura thought might still be with the sheriff's office. It could have been a tableau from an old western, the four men standing over the upturned earth, heads down as if in prayer.

The mood was broken when Rory Flynn looked up and saw her coming.

“Did you look for other graves?” he demanded, kicking his foot at the yellow string that formed a grid around the excavation.

Putting himself in the role of the investigator.

Jaime said, “There weren't any.”

“Here, sure. But what about those mesquite trees back by the fence?”

Jaime's face turned red. “We're gonna get to it. We've been busy.” Which was true—they had been busy. Jean Cox, the forensic anthropologist, had made sure the crime scene technicians dug five feet in each direction from the original grave and went down as far as they could before hitting caliche, which was as hard as concrete and almost impossible to dig through. The FA had directed them to dig outward from Kristy's burial place for precisely the reason Rory Flynn was making such a stink—there might be other remains. When a killer found a good place to bury his victim, he often used it again. That had not been the case this time. They'd found nothing but Kristy Groves and the few articles of clothing that had survived the years under the earth.

Laura looked over at the mesquite trees by the fence. Rory Flynn was right: Kristy's killer might have buried other victims under those trees. They offered thick cover and would screen him from the road. After Micaela Brashear's description of the killing in the desert, Laura thought it could be more than possible.

Rory Flynn charged off in the direction of the mesquite trees, his unsteady entourage at his heels. He trudged around in the brush, shoving his way through the tree limbs, reminding Laura of an agitated bear. Stopped to look at her and Jaime.

“This guy could've buried a whole bunch of kids in here.” His voice accusatory.

Laura said, “I'll get the FA out here tomorrow.”

“A little late now, isn't it?”

No, it wasn't. Now he was just being an asshole about it.

At least there was nothing wrong with his thought processes. Laura knew what he was looking for: loose stumps or other debris that could have been used by the killer to mask a grave, anything that seemed to have been added to the natural landscape.

Jaime's phone chimed. He stepped away from her, phone pressed to his ear, listening and nodding.

A dry wind rattled the palm fronds, the lowering sun glinting off them in the yellow-pink light. The sun a baleful red eye now, about to wink out in the heat haze of the Diamondback fire.

Jaime ended the call and looked at Laura. “Patsy Groves's flight was canceled due to severe thunderstorms,” he said. “She's staying in a hotel in Atlanta for the night.”

Laura glanced at Flynn, still banging around the mesquites like a dog trying to flush birds. Looked at Jaime.

Jaime grinned. “Hey, Rory, what do you say we take you out for a drink?”

Flynn's head popped out from behind a mesquite trunk.

They'd finally found his price.

Laura, Jaime, and Rory Flynn ended up at a new Chuy's with a view of the auto mall, found a place in the corner under a plaster shark wearing a hula skirt. Rory's three buddies had decided to go back to the party, which suited Laura. It meant she didn't have to get into a fight with them. This meeting was between her, her partner, and Rory Flynn.

Now Flynn's hands were clasped around his beer chaser, the shot of tequila already knocked back and down. He'd gone from belligerent to sincere, which Laura thought was a good sign.

“All I want is to be consulted,” he said. “You understand that, right? I might know some things you don't.”

“I bet you do,” Laura said, trying to mirror his earnestness. Jaime had turned back into a statue, letting her take the lead. She wondered what he was thinking. Maybe he just wanted to see her in action.

Once Rory Flynn decided to talk, he was loquacious.

“I spent a lot of time running down leads that went nowhere. Plus, this kid Kristy didn't live in a good neighborhood, you get my drift. Talked to her schoolmates.” He scratched his head, and a few flakes drifted down onto the table. “What I got, she wasn't exactly a good girl. She was already sleeping around, was into drugs, all sorts of shit. I felt real sorry for her parents. They were just starting out, had a little restaurant on the west side, bought a deli. Probably they were spending too much time trying to make that work and weren't paying enough attention to the kid, but these days, that's pretty much par for the course. Good, honest people though. I looked real hard at the father. A lot of time, it comes down to the parent, but I never got that vibe.”

Laura said, “She disappeared in April eleven years ago. Was there anything going on at that time? With her parents, the restaurant, anything?”

“I covered that. Don't think I didn't. Day before, she went to the Pima County Fair with her parents and her older sister from out of state. Patsy Groves swore a guy was giving her daughter the eye. I checked it out, but it didn't pan out. Thing is, that's a long way from where she was found, and it was the day before. The guy would have to be pretty ambitious to drive all the way out there and look for her, you know what I mean? I had to discount it.”

Laura understood that. The fairgrounds were east of town on I-10 out in the desert. “The Groves family lived only a few blocks from I-10, though,” she said.

“I thought of that. I also figured out a way whoever it was could have gotten her address. Family entered a sweepstakes put on by the carnival to win a Ford Explorer. Name, address, everything. I questioned the folks who ran the sweepstakes, came up with snake eyes.”

“But it could have happened,” Jaime said. “Some of these guys, they'll do anything if they find a girl they like. Go all the way to Timbuktu.”

Rory glared at him. “This was almost as far. I said I interviewed all of them, and it was to my satisfaction, believe me. You're poking it in a dry hole.”

Charming.

Laura suddenly remembered something else she'd seen. Not in Kristy Groves's file, but in Micaela's. She could swear that Micaela had gone to a carnival with a friend.

That meant that two of the three girls had gone to a carnival some time in the week before they were kidnapped. That was too much of a coincidence for her. She mentioned this to Rory.

“You're kidding, right? The opera singer's kid? Nobody ever told me that. Of course, that was TPD. They wouldn't share anything with me. Guess that one's closed, though. Nice, it turned out like that.”

Laura thought of the tension in the Brashear household.

Jaime said, “There might be a connection.”

“Really? Heard it was some old fart, wanted himself a fresh young thing for his wife, kept her all this time. That doesn't square with what happened to Kristy Groves.”

Jaime told him about the other girl, the one Micaela had told them about.

Rory whistled long and low. “That puts a whole different slant on things, you know? Did this guy work for a carnival?”

Laura said, “Not that I know of. The girl—Micaela—doesn't remember a lot. She says she was drugged a lot of the time. But it's something we need to ask her about.” She added, “But Micaela did work for Sea World. That's an attraction.”