Laura Cardinal - 01 - Darkness on the Edge of Town

“Well, that’s the weird thing. Kid was with his teacher, Mr. Garatano, late at night. What Mr. Garatano said was the kid wanted to swim so he dove off of the boat. He never came up.”

“How old was the kid?”

“Fourteen.”

She stopped. “What were they doing out in a boat late at night?”

Janes shrugged. “He said they were fishing, but we all wondered about that. Mr. Garatano got fired not too long after that. We investigated, turned out the kid got tangled up in some weeds and drowned.”

Interesting, Laura thought, but she had other worries. Despite the perfect late- summer day and the reasonable assumption that the Williams PD cops had preserved the scene, Laura had the feeling there was something she didn’t know. And then it came to her.

She voiced her suspicions to Janes.“The bodies are still in the tent, aren’t they?”

He cleared his throat.

At that moment, she saw the younger cop reach down to pull one of the tent pegs out of the ground.

“Officer! Don’t do that!”

He straightened up, uncertain. Little more than a kid—maybe only a year or two out of high school. He stepped back from the tent as if it were a snake, his movement quick and athletic.

The older cop started in their direction, as if trying to ward them off. “The ME’s people were just here. I tried to stall them, but they couldn’t wait any longer.”

“They took the bodies,” Laura said. She wanted to a punch a wall—or something. Or someone.

The cop had stopped in front of them, hands on his hips, as if the altitude bothered him. “They were so busy in Flag this weekend—there was a pileup on the freeway—this was the only time they could cut someone loose to come get them.”

Laura resigned herself to the reality of the situation. This was bad, but she would have to work around it. She and Victor, her usual partner, had a saying when things went wrong at a crime scene: That’s showbiz.

Laura motioned to the younger cop to join them. She noticed he was careful to follow the prints the officers had made entering the scene, adhering to the “one way in, one way out” rule. This surprised her. After seeing him reach for the tent peg, she’d expected him to be impulsive.

Sergeant Janes made the introductions. “This is criminal investigator Laura Cardinal with the Department of Public Safety,” Janes said. He glanced at her. “Have I got that right?”

“Detective’s fine.” Thinking: Where the hell is Richie? If he’d been here earlier, he could have stopped them from taking the bodies.

The two officers were Tagg and Wingate. The older cop, Tagg, smelled of cigarette smoke. Wingate seemed on edge, adrenaline running through him like a muscular river. Laura guessed this was the first time he’d seen anything like this.

Janes said, “I want you to give her and her partner everything you’ve got.”

Tagg was looking at her as if trying to place her. “I’ve heard your name before. Aren’t you—?”

Laura didn’t reply directly to his question. Instead, she motioned toward a blue truck parked behind them on the forest road, just outside the campground gate. “Is that the victims’ vehicle?”

“That’s right,” said Janes. “Thought we’d leave it for you to process.”

“I’ll need a warrant.” Even though the truck belonged to the crime scene, Laura wanted to be on the safe side, go ahead and get the warrant. Depending on where they were, even crime scenes required warrants, which Laura thought was just plain nutty. “Is there a justice of the peace or judge you like to go to?”

Janes motioned to his patrol car. “I have his number on the computer. We can do it telephonically.”

“Do we have photographs?”

“The medical examiner’s office took some, but they’re in Flagstaff.”

“I took some Polaroids,” Wingate volunteered. He trotted up the red cinder road to one of two Williams PD police cars and returned a moment later.

Four Polaroids. “That’s all the film I had.”

Laura held each one of them in the shade of her body, squinting against the brightness.

Hard to tell what was what; the colors were faded and the shapes indistinct. Yellow hair in a tangle. Pale flesh clotted with blood. The boy behind the girl; half-in, half-out of the sleeping bag. Spoon fashion, his right arm over her body. The sleeping bag and walls of the tent soaked with blood.

The top of the boy’s head gone.

All four Polaroids had been taken through the holes in the tent, from different angles.

“Is that one sleeping bag, or two?” Laura asked

“Well, technically, there’re two,” Tagg said. “They zipped ‘em together. You can do that with Cabela’s.”

Tagg added, “Double-ought buckshot. Shot right through the tent flap and two other sides.”

“He didn’t see them then?”

“He could’ve seen them through the holes in the tent, but he didn’t bother to open up the door flap. We had to