All the pieces of her case were falling into place. Mickey Harmon had survived the shooting, and he was talking—about his friendship with Galaz and Ramsey that had spanned twenty years, his lucrative position as Galaz’s bodyguard, their blackmailing scheme. He catalogued a string of killings going back eighteen years, giving Victor the address of a warehouse in Phoenix where Galaz had plied his brand of sexual sadism while he worked his way up through DPS and planned a political career.
Dale Lundy—Musicman—confessed to killing four girls. He came off as beleaguered and confused. Laura thought his lawyer would argue for not guilty by mental defect, but after seeing what he’d done, she doubted any jury would go for it.
Victor was the lead on both the Harmon and Lundy interrogations. Laura sat in the room, watching Musicman, trying to figure the man out, but she couldn’t. He gave them nothing—nothing except his “poor me” act. Unfailingly polite, small, insignificant, hands folded prissily on the table, he reminded her of a decent, church-going lady mortified at being placed in such an untenable situation.
Laura asked him why he booby-trapped the tunnel.
He turned moist, frightened eyes on her. “Can I have a glass of water?”
After he had his water, she asked him again: “Why did you booby-trap the tunnel in your kitchen, but not the other house? What made you do that?”
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
She asked it another way. “You didn’t booby trap the front door, the back door, anything in the other house, so what was your reasoning? Why was that entrance so important to you when the others weren’t?”
He gave a small shrug.
“I just felt like it.”
I just felt like it. Laura had tried staring into his eyes, but there were no answers there. If she’d hoped for an explanation for Andrew Descartes’s death, something real she could hold on to that gave this tragedy some kind of design, she wouldn’t get it from Dale Lundy.
Buddy Holland was placed on administrative leave by the Bisbee Police Department. An Officer Involved Shooting investigation was the least of his troubles. Luring Dale Lundy to Bisbee would likely cost him his job. Fortunately, he had his pension from TPD. He was a young enough man he could find a good job somewhere in law enforcement.
“I hear Dynever Security is hiring,” he’d joked.
He told Laura he was moving back to Tucson so he could be close to his daughter.
Laura had seen a lot of him lately. Summer had to give her statement, and Buddy was there with her. They went back and forth to DPS, to the courthouse—Buddy, Summer, and Beth.
Laura found herself envying Buddy Holland his family. Watching the bond between them. She remembered what it was like to have that kind of love, the love of her parents.
It wasn’t over yet for them, though. Summer would need a lot of help to overcome what she had seen, what she had experienced, first at the hands of Musicman, and then Galaz. Unharmed physically, but emotionally devastated. Left alone in that room with the photos of the tortured women—knowing she would be next. Laura thought with time Summer would heal. She would need counseling and her family every step of the way, but she could heal.
Laura went to Jay Ramsey’s funeral. It was sparsely attended. She recognized the younger brother, whom she had met only once close to twenty years ago. She noticed no one was with him—not a wife, not a child. He looked lost. Laura felt an odd kinship with him. He had no family left. She could tell from the shock on his face that he had never expected to be alone in this way.
He gave her a Post-it note that Jay had apparently intended for her. It had been pasted to his computer, Laura’s name scribbled at the top. Below that it said: “Barbara Stanley” followed by a phone number. And the words: “Calliope’s Music, 9 yr. old TB mare”.
Laura thanked him and took the note, putting it in a special compartment in her wallet. She didn’t know what to do with the information right now, so she would leave it there until she did.
After attending the funeral that morning, the fifth day after the Chiricahua Paint Company fire, Laura gathered up some of the paperwork that had yet to be done and told Victor she was going home.
“See you tomorrow?”
“I don’t think so.”
She headed home to the Bosque Escondido, after stopping at a little store squeezed into the middle of a strip mall on the south side.
58
“Where should I put the dishes?” asked Tom, carrying the box up onto the front porch.
Laura knew which dishes he meant. Cheap china, a brown and yellow design of bees and flowers. Tom had gotten them from a grocery store give-away—buy so many groceries and pay a dollar for each dish. They went well with his two jelly glasses. “Couldn’t we store those?”
“Sure. I’ll put it with my sheets, my rug, my couch—“
“This is my nidito. You’re just—“
“What? What am I?”
He stood there, looking at her, still holding the box. The man she had invited to live with her.
She thought of her nice FiestaWare. Thought of them nested one into the other, their fine sold colors, dark blue, green, tangerine, dark red. Okay, so there would be bees and flowers, too. She sighed. “Okay. Put them in the cupboard near the fridge.”
Still holding the box, he bent awkwardly and kissed her on the forehead. “You’re doing pretty well.”
“You think so?”
“You’ve lived alone for a long time.”
“So have you.”
“But I’m not territorial like you are.”
It was true. As he let the screen door close behind him, Laura realized this would not be easy. When she’d agreed to try it, in the middle of the night three days ago, it had seemed absolutely right. Love was love. It was supposed to conquer all.
But she’d seen him leave towels on the floor of his bathroom.
The morning after Tom Lightfoot moved in, Laura awakened to rain tapping on the roof just before dawn. It seemed to her that the temperature had dropped ten degrees. She crept out of bed, careful not to wake him. Looking down at him and thinking that this was how it would be from now on. She found herself thinking of Buddy and Beth. Were they healing the rift between them? Or would Buddy get a place nearby and hover around his daughter like a guardian angel?
She brewed some coffee and went outside, sitting down on the old steel glider, swinging back and forth. She’d found the Art Deco glider at a yard sale, complete with the original striped canvas cushion. Here on the porch of a house built in the twenties, the scent of the desert around her, she could pretend this was the early part of the twentieth century.
There were serial killers then—though not as many—and plenty of pedophiles, but people didn’t know about it. How nice for them.
The rain was soft and steady—what the Navajos called a female rain. Water dripped off the eaves and splashed on the brick pavement in the few places the porch roof leaked. The smell of wet creosote wafting in, the trunks of the big old mesquites gleaming black as seal skin. The coolness good on her face, a balm to her singed eyebrows and the burn on her cheek.
Now was as good a time as any. She went inside, got her mother’s old electric typewriter and set it on the wood, drop-leaf table on the other end of the porch. She needed an extension cord to plug it in.
It took her a moment or two to figure out how to install the ribbon she’d bought from Hart Brothers Business Machines. The guy had one ribbon left, taking up dust in a back aisle, saying it was fortunate for her this was a common typewriter in its day.