Darkness on the Edge of Town (6 page)

On the left side of the road just before the hairpin turn were a couple of houses.  It might be worth talking to the owners of those houses, to find out if they saw anything.  She’d do that after her interview with the family.

It was going on nine in the morning.  She’d debated calling first, but decided it was better to just show up.  In her job, Laura always looked for the upper hand with everyone—victim or perpetrator—so she could get a better read on the personalities involved.

The Parris house, a craftsman bungalow, h
ad a three-foot-high base of dark volcanic rock, with red brick above that. The porch, windows and doors were painted white. A picket fence flickered in and out of the shadow of a massive sycamore tree, and an American flag hung dispiritedly from the porch roof.  Blinds in the front windows were shut tight. 

The day was steamy after the rain and the sun blindingly bright.  Laura was grateful for the shade of the porch.  She used the deerhead knocker, preparing herself. 

No answer.  A breeze shuttled a few oak leaves across the floorboards. She knocked again, scanning the street while she waited, then tried the doorbell. 

“They’re out.”

Laura looked up and saw a bare-chested man watering his plants nextdoor.  Was this the neighbor Victor had told her about?

“You with the police department?” he asked.

“Laura Cardinal, Department of Public Safety.”  She held her wallet badge up for him to see and approached the fence. 

She studied him as he looked at her badge: Five-feet-nine, average build, tattoos on his arms, head like a bullet.  Intense eyes. 

He shook her hand over the fence.  A grip like a mountain climber.  “Chuck Lehman.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“Dave mentioned making funeral arrangements yesterday, so I’m guessing they’re at the funeral home.  You just missed them.”

Laura tried not to show her disappointment.  “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

He picked up the hose and started watering again.  “Sure, go ahead.”

“Did you notice Jessica coming home from school day before yesterday?”

“Nope.  I was in the back room, on the computer.  Stock trading.”

“You didn’t hear anything, see anything?  Maybe earlier?  A car you didn’t recognize, maybe going slow?  Someone hanging around?”

She was plowing old ground; Victor had already asked him questions like this, but she wanted to hear his answers for herself. 

Chuck Lehman was willing.  He gave her a thumbnail sketch of the family (father, authoritarian; mother, a pretty doormat; boyfriend, probably will end up being gay; Jessica, a “cute kid”; younger brother, a little shit).  He pondered at length how her agency could use its resources to better advantage, they needed to get the media involved “on a national level”, put up roadblocks. “You don’t even have the Amber Alert.”

“You sound like you’re in law enforcement.”

“Me?  No. I’m a carpenter.”  He touched his forehead.  “But I have good powers of observation.”

She noticed the tautness in his face, the slight trembling in his body—he seemed to be on an adrenaline high.  Was he excited about being included, or covering up something?

“Did you talk to Jessica much?” 

“Me?  No.” He waved at the air vaguely.  “Hardly ever saw her.”    Mister Amiable, suddenly closing up. 

“You know of any of her friends I could talk to?”

“How would I know that?  If you haven’t noticed, I’m a
big
kid.” Confident smile.

“All the days she’s walked home from school, nobody, nothing stuck out in your mind?”  

“I don’t notice who comes and goes.  They’re just kids.”

He seemed increasingly uncomfortable. It occurred to her that he could be hiding an interest in young girls. 

Something not right about him. She remembered what Buddy Holland had said, that CRZYGRL 12 could be an e-mail address or a chat room name.  She lowered her voice, her inflection friendly: You and me in his together. “You said you have a computer.  Do you know anyone with the e-mail address Crazygirl 12?”

He blinked. “What?”

“Crazygirl 12?  Maybe Jessica’s e-mail?  You wouldn’t know if she had a computer, would you?”

“Why would I know that?”

Angry.
Offense was the best defense
.

Without conscious thought, Laura shifted her weight to her back leg.  Aware of the gun under her jacket.  She made her voice even quieter, non-threatening.  “Sir, could you tell me about your conviction?”

His eyes turned hard.   “You can call my probation officer.”

She waited.

“Criminal damage,” he said, his voice as hard as his eyes.  “I broke into my ex wife’s house and tore up her clothes.”

“Her underpants,” Laura said, sounding as if it was something that happened every day.

“Right. Her underpants.  Satisfied?” Anger radiated from him, making him seem bigger. 

She stepped back, hand near her hip.  “Sir—“

Suddenly he crossed the space between them, so quick she had to back up another  couple of steps.  His chin thrust out like a drill sergeant.  “I
said
, are you satisfied?”

“Yes,” she said.  Keeping the calm in her voice, though she was anything but.

He glared at her, his eyes like twin blue flames.

“Good.” With a jerk of the head for emphasis, he walked into his house and slammed the door. 

Laura stood there for almost a minute, shame and anger riding a river of adrenaline.  She had reacted in an acceptible way—stepping back to allow space between them so that she had room to draw her weapon—but couldn’t help feeling she’d looked weak.  Would Victor have retreated like that? 

Lehman got a big charge out of intimidating her—in his mind, he had won.  She looked back at the Lehman house. One of the blinds moved in the front window.  He was watching her.  She straightened her back, trying to ignore him. She’d planned to do something.  What was it?

The houses at the hairpin. That was it.  Someone there might have seen something. 

She started up the road, careful to stay to the asphalt, scanning the ground on either side.  She doubted she’d find anything; the general consensus was that Jessica had been picked up coming home from school, which would mean she didn’t get this far.  But Laura looked at the ground anyway, trying to concentrate.  Trying not to think of Lehman staring at her back.  A hundred yards up, she noted a clearing on the left side of the road, and another turnout on the corresponding side. Several cars had turned around there.  

A dog barked at her from behind the redwood fence of the first house.   She knocked and got no answer, stuck her card in the door with a request that the homeowner contact her when they got home.

The second house was set back from the road, a faded green cinderblock.  The drapes were closed.  A swamp box cooler rattled like a cement mixer.  She thought she heard a TV set going, but no one answered her knock.  Many people these days didn’t answer their doors—a safety issue.  She left another card.

On the way back to the car, Laura stopped at the turnout and examined the tire tracks.  Many of them overlapped.  One set of tread marks in particular caught her attention.  A heavy vehicle, judging from the way the tracks sank into the ground.  She could see corresponding tread marks on the other side of the road; he’d had to back and fill.

The mud had dried, hardening into bas-relief.  They’d make excellent plaster casts.

She squatted down and stared at them.  Double wheels.  From looking at both turnouts, she thought the vehicle had a big wheelbase. 

Like a motorhome.

The sun bore down on her neck like an iron and flies buzzed around, lighting on her face and arms, tickling her.  No telling if the tracks here belonged to a motorhome at all, let alone the one Jeeter had seen on the Gulch.  She knew what Frank Entwistle would say. When in doubt, be thorough.

She walked back to the 4Runner and got a spool of yellow crime scene tape and blocked off the area around both turnouts.  She called the station and asked to be patched through to Officer Noone.

“What are you doing?” she asked him when he answered.

“Looking up motorhomes.”  He added hastily, “The chief said I could.” 

Laura glanced at her watch. She had to be at Cooger & Dark’s in ten minutes. “I’ve taped off some tire tracks up at the end of West Boulevard,” she said.  “I want you to come up here and keep an eye on them until I get back.  Can you do that?”

“Yes, ma’am.  I’m on my way.”

Ted Olsen, the owner of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and Emporium, looked nothing like his Viking name.  He was a short balding man with a ZZ Top beard that had been buttoned into the neck of his short-sleeved shirt, as if he wanted to keep it out of the way.

Cooger & Dark’s shelves were cluttered with fringed lamp shades, art deco radios, and old lunch boxes.  A gas pump from the early part of the century stood in the corner. But Laura’s attention was on the dolls suspended from the ceiling.  They made her think of trapeze artists caught in mid-swoop.

They reminded her of the Cabbage Patch craze years ago, only bigger.  Much bigger, their long flour-white limbs like sausages.  They were dressed in gingham pinafores, dotted Swiss babydoll dresses, gunny-sack dresses.  White, pink, yellow.

“You’ve got a lot of dolls,” she said as Olsen went through the shop turning on lights.

“You like them?”

“Very nice.”  Actually, they creeped her out.

She wondered: Could this be the guy?  She didn’t get anything from him except matter-of-factness, but she wasn’t psychic.

“Where did you get them?” she asked.

“My girls?  I make them.”

“You do?”  Her next question would naturally be: Why?  Instead she asked him if anyone had shown interest in the doll in the window.

“She’s not one of mine.  She’s plastic.  I use only natural materials.”

“But has anyone asked about it?  Or any of your dolls?”

“Tourists.”

“Any men?”

“Men?” He stroked his beard.  “Usually the men are interested in stuff like that gas pump.  I can’t recall anyone…”  He coughed up something into a handkerchief that he kept in his gray pants, pants that reminded Laura of the custodian at her high school years ago.  “There
was
a guy interested in a dress.  Wanted to buy it.”

“Why?”

“People never cease to amaze me.  Been in this business for twenty years, and you never can figure out what they’re gonna ask for.  He wanted to take that dress up there right off Daisy, but I told him no.”

Laura’s gaze followed his long crooked finger.

The doll wore a pale pink tulle dress with babydoll sleeves. 

“If I sold him the dress, Daisy would have been left in her birthday suit,” Olsen explained.  ‘I couldn’t do that.  When I explained it to him, he got mad.”

“Mad?”

“He didn’t make a scene but you could tell he was steaming.  Like he was counting to ten.”

“Can I see the doll?”

“Sure.”  He grabbed a long pole with a hook on the end of it and pulled at a rope hanging down behind him.  Laura realized that it was a pulley system, kind of like at a dry cleaner’s, from which the dolls were suspended.  He pulled the doll around, then expertly hooked her off by the neck and set her down on the counter.  She noticed he had a US Marines tattoo on one arm.

Laura eyeballed Daisy, thinking she was approximately the same size as Jessica Parris—one big damn doll.  “What size dress is that?”

“Size 3, junior.”

“What age would that fit?”

“Thirteen, fourteen years old.”

 “Tell me about the guy.”

According to Ted Olsen, the man was white, average-looking except for a black mustache, and he had blue eyes.  Olsen remembered the eyes because the guy was so mad.  Asked to describe his clothing, Olsen thought he might have been wearing a ballcap, and “probably jeans”. 

“Nothing seemed unusual about him?”

“When he first came in, he didn’t seem like somebody who would get so mad.”

“So how did he strike you?  When he first came in?”

“Well, see, I didn’t really notice him until he found me.  He was the kind who blends in—just a regular guy.”

“When did he come in?”

“Day before yesterday.  I was open that night, which I do sometimes when I’m working on a doll in back.  Stayed open until nine o’clock.”

Nine o’clock: three to four hours after Jessica Parris was last seen. 

Laura told him she’d be back with a photograph of the dress Jessica Parris had worn, in case he recognized the style.  “In the meantime, if you remember anything else about this guy, please call me.”  She handed him her card.

As she crossed the street to her car, she finally got hold of Buddy Holland. 

“Where are you? I’ve been looking for you.”

“Running down some things on my own.”

And avoiding her, she thought.  “We need to compare notes.  I’m headed up to take some plaster casts on West Boulevard right now, but—”

“I’ll meet you there.  I’m going up there anyway.”

“You are?”

“I just talked to Dave Parris.  Thought it would be a good idea if we took a look at the girl’s room. Unless you’re too busy.”

The window to Jessica Parris’s room was open, sunlight pouring in along with the warm summer air.  It was clear from the posters on the wall that Jessica favored Josh Hartnett, Shakira, and Nelly.  Laura had done stupid things in her teenage years, but worshipping a guy who wore a Band Aid on his cheek wasn’t one of them. 

Someone had written all over Jessica’s sheets with permanent markers, “Stay cool!” “You’re my best friend ever,” “You and Cary are the coolest people I know”.

“Her friends wrote those things,” Mrs. Parris said from the doorway.  “We had a slumber party and they helped her decorate her room.” She hugged herself as if by doing so she might hold herself together, her nervous gaze straying to Buddy Holland, who was poking around the room as if it were a garbage dump.  “Do you need anything else?”

Laura said, “I notice she doesn’t have a computer.  Do you or your husband?”