Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (6 page)

“Scary, huh?” Jaime said. “That's a black mamba. Probably the most dangerous snake there is. If one of them bites you, you got a half hour to live.”

“It's not black. It's gray.”

He looked at her. “It's named for the way it looks when it opens its mouth—that big, black hole.”

“Oh.”

Jaime moved away from her, checking his snakes. Laura followed him, almost reluctant to turn her back on the mural. On the mamba.

Jaime said, “I had an encounter with one of them once. This guy was selling them. No way I was going to buy one—I'm not crazy—but I did want to see it. He took it out and the thing just got away from him. Man, it still makes me hyperventilate just thinking about it.”

He described those few wild moments when the agitated mamba rose up like a golf club, seeking. “And then it cruised—man, you wouldn't believe how fast it was. Both of us climbed up on a table. It was looking for us. I swear that thing wanted my blood—it could smell me.”

Fortunately, the snake's keeper managed to get the drop on it and tossed it back in its terrarium.

“After he caught him, he got down on his knees and threw up all over the floor. One drop of that venom and we'd be dead. I still don't know how we made it out of there alive.”

After that, the lazily-curled diamondbacks, mojaves, and sidewinders in his terrariums seemed tame. They were sluggish in this weather. One of them had sullenly turned its back on the little white mouse huddled in the corner.

Laura felt bad for the mouse. For a second, she entertained opening the lid and scooping it out.

But then what? Where would she put it—in her purse? She and Jaime would get into a fight over it. She'd have to get a terrarium; she couldn't let it go. Plus, mice were fed to snakes every day. She'd only be substituting this mouse's life for another.

Moral clarity sure wasn't what it used to be.

They got out of there, Laura's mind going back to the mural, the mamba's open, black maw.

The party was at a house on the west side, one of a vast raft of beige houses that had gone up in the last year or so, the whole subdivision surrounded by a high wall to keep out the riffraff or the desert, maybe both. Lots of big trucks parked on the block—Dodge Rams, Fords, and Chevys. A skinny blonde of about forty in shorts and a halter top answered the door and led them through to the tiny yard outside. A square of green lawn was dominated by one scrawny sapling braced by two stakes. Most of the people outside were male, sitting on plastic chairs under the narrow shade of the overhang or standing around the keg. Lots of the guys in knit shirts and chinos, many of them tall, almost all of them sporting short hair and mustaches. A couple of ponytails, graying.

A sheriff's party, but all law enforcement officers were brothers and sisters under the skin. Sort of.

Jaime, the genial guest-turned-host, asked what she wanted to drink. “Water's good,” she said to his disappearing back. Found herself alone with all these people she didn't know, standing around the keg in the wilting heat.

“You with Jaime?” asked a heavy-set guy in a Hawaiian shirt holding a red plastic cup. A yeasty beer smell coming off him—he'd had a lot more than one.

“You could say that.” Not wanting the
femme fatale
part, but reluctant to dive in and give her name, rank, and serial number. If he really wanted to know what she was, he could look at the shield clipped to her belt.

He didn't bother. “Who you work for?”

“DPS.”

She saw a flicker in his eyes, knew that what he was thinking came automatically to sheriff's detectives:
taillight-chaser
. Just as, when she'd first seen Jaime, her first thought had been:
He's got friends in high places
. Unlike the police department, where you had to spend a few years on the beat and take an exam to become a detective, sheriff's detectives were appointed. You had to have approval from the sheriff in order to become a detective.

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.