In her dreams, Laura always heard the car’s rough idling, smelled burning oil, and felt the heat from the Chevy’s engine—details her imagination had conjured from the nightly news and one newspaper photo long ago.
Entwistle said, “No matter how old you get, you always remember.”
“Remember what?”
“The first kid in your class to die.”
Julie Marr was a transfer student from North Carolina. She had a strange accent, stranger hair, and even stranger clothes.
Laura had known what it was like to be bullied, picked on. But she’d made it to the other side; she had friends. She’d felt for Julie, but face it: She wasn’t about to put her own reputation in jeopardy.
Julie Marr lived in the same subdivision as Laura. Laura hated to admit this, but if she saw Julie walking up ahead of her, she would cross to the other side of the street so they wouldn’t end up walking together. It was her damn stride. Her natural stride was long; she covered the ground quickly. So she’d walk on the other side, her eyes straight ahead.
Like Jessica Parris, Julie Marr had disappeared between school and her house. Laura had Press Club two days a week after school. Otherwise, the orange and white car might have stopped for her.
The stiff old latches sprang back like little mouse-traps. Laura sat cross-legged on the floor of the guest bedroom, the late afternoon sun filtering in through Venetian blinds that came with the house, contemplating the old-fashioned suitcase and trying not to sneeze from the dust.
Inside were stacks of files held together by shoelaces. Most of them were marked in ballpoint ink discolored with age, usually beginning with the word “Laura.” Laura–School; Laura–Artwork; Laura–Swimming Lessons; and so on.
But some manila folders her mother had saved for herself.
There it was, toward the bottom. The word “Crime” in her mother’s spidery writing.
Laura knew exactly where to look, even though she had not seen this file in eleven years. She remembered seeing articles on Tucson murders that her mother had clipped, some of them as early as the forties, including the grisly saga of Charles Schmid, who killed three young girls in the 1960s and landed Tucson in Life magazine as the town with the “Ugliest Street in America”. A killer who wore face makeup and put crumpled-up beer cans into his boots to make him look taller.
Laura had forgotten how serious her mother had been about writing. There were three spiral notebooks full of notes, scrawled slips of paper, photos, phone numbers of detectives and police officers, lawyers and prosecutors, and six chapters of a book titled Death in the Desert: A Comprehensive Account of Tucson’s Most Infamous Murders, by Alice Cardinal.
She didn’t remember this. She had been a teenager when her mom started writing classes, involved with her own life. She hadn’t taken her mother’s interests seriously. “Author” didn’t fit with her image of her mom. Her mom was a school librarian who spent most of her time and energy trying to shape Laura’s life, not her own.
Laura looked at the first page.
Chapter One
Tucson Arizona had seen its share of murders, but none was as mysterious as the disappearance of San Pedro Middle School student Julie Marr.
On a warm day in late September, Julie Marr was walking home from school as usual when she vanished without a trace. Two days later a man named Jerry Lee, out hiking in the Redington Pass area east of town, noticed an old car that seemed to have rolled down the embankment off the road and had come to a stop in some brush and cactus. A curious sort, he bushwhacked down to the car, and was shocked by what he found. The back seat of the old car was soaked with blood.
Six chapters on Julie Marr’s disappearance, then nothing. Laura didn’t know if her mom had quit at Chapter Seven or if she’d died in the midst of writing the book, a homicide victim herself.
Laura decided she didn’t want to look at her mother’s book right now. She put the unfinished book to the side and looked through the clippings of the Julie Marr abduction. Two articles. The first declared,
“CITY-WIDE SEARCH FOR MISSING SAN PEDRO MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT”
and was accompanied by a school picture of Julie Marr. Two days later, the front page headline said “CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND.” A black-and-white photo of the 1955 Chevy Bel Air, all four doors open, a detective squatting near the driver’s side.
She skimmed the article, jotting down the facts of the case on the inside cover of the manila folder.
The car had been stolen from A&B Auto Wrecking on South Park Avenue. The Bel Air had been in an accident, but was still driveable.
Blood-typing indicated that the blood in the backseat belonged to Julie Marr. From the amount of blood, the detectives were sure she was either gravely injured or dead. The lead detective on the case was Barry Fruchtendler of TPD.
Corroborating her mother’s account, the article detailed the discovery of the car off Redington Pass Road in the Tanque Verde Mountains east of town. It had been pushed off the road at a curve. The way the road was banked made it impossible for it to be seen from a vehicle driving up or down the mountain.
The search had been concentrated there, but no body, no grave, had been found.
Because Julie Marr’s body could be anywhere in rugged, almost inaccessible country, the search was called off the next day.
Julie Marr’s parents, George and Natalie Marr, were quoted as saying that if the police had taken her disappearance more seriously, Julie might be alive today.
Laura put the suitcase away, but took the file, including her mother’s chapters, with her. She dropped it on the kitchen table. An interesting trip down memory lane, but she didn’t see any relevance to Jessica’s case.
It was possible the killer could have lived here in Tucson all those years ago and killed both Julie Marr and Jessica Parris. But that seemed unlikely, given the number of years that had gone by and the fact that Jessica was strangled, while Julie Marr had been killed even more violently. It pointed to a different kind of killer; one organized, the other out of control.
Laura called the Tucson Police Department and asked to speak with Detective Barry Fruchtendler. No one there by that name.
Probably retired.
She looked for his name in the phone book and was stymied again. That didn’t mean much; cops usually had unlisted numbers. She’d call one of her friends at TPD tomorrow and see if he was still around.
But not now.
She put on a fresh blouse, locked up, and took the path over the hill to Tom’s house.
26
Jay Ramsey had almost managed to pull his plate onto his lap when it slipped out of his hands and crashed to the flagstones.
“You see?” Freddy said primly as he picked up the pieces of bone china. “You’ve been out here too long.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“This was your mother’s favorite pattern. You know when you start dropping things—“
“Freddy, enough.”
“Fine, if that’s what you want.” Freddy whisked around them, clearing plates and brushing away crumbs from the tablecloth.