“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 acceptable 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 cinder block. 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 motor home.
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 motor home 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 motor homes.” 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 baby-doll 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 baby-doll 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 ball cap and “probably jeans.”
“Nothing seemed unusual about him?”
“When he first came in, he didn’t seem like somebody who would get so mad.”