Taped to the door’s window was a faded poster depicting whirling leaves on a dark sidewalk. Laura remembered it from her childhood, the cover of Ray Bradbury’s book, Something Wicked this Way Comes.
Evil had visited Bisbee in the middle of the night, like the locomotive in Bradbury’s book, bringing the dark carnival to the edge of town.
She knocked on the door and it rattled in the frame. No one answered.
The shop next door was open, though—a tattoo parlor. Laura asked the proprietor about Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and Emporium.
The heavyset woman looked up from tattooing the Virgin of Guadalupe on her customer’s forearm. “Oh, that place. Guy doesn’t show up much, kind of like a lot of shop owners around here. No set hours, just every once in a while the door’s open. Name’s Ted." She shrugged. “That’s all I know.”
Laura could find out who owned the shop tomorrow. All it would take was a look at the city records. She was about to walk out when another thought occurred to her. “Did you do the tattoo for Jessica Parris?”
“Hold her steady, Ramon." The woman put down a tool that looked like a dentist’s drill and bustled over to a filing cabinet behind the counter, handed Laura the file. “She wanted the butterfly—very popular with young girls. Turned out real nice.”
“Don’t you have to get parental permission to tattoo a minor?”
She gave Laura a look. “In this case, her mama brought her in. Her mama and her boyfriend.”
Jessica had a boyfriend? “You know his name?”
“Cary Statler. He lives with them. They took him in when his own mom left town.”
“So what do we know about this guy?” Chief Ducotte said.
Laura, Victor Celaya, and the eight members of the Bisbee PD were crammed around a table in the Bisbee Police Department conference room, an airless cubicle smelling of microwaved pizza.
“The creep likes to play dress-up,” muttered Sergeant Nesmith.
Nervous laughter.
“I bet he’s done it before,” said someone behind Laura. Sandwiched as she was between a young police officer named Noone and Detective Holland, she’d have to turn herself inside out to see who had spoken. Holland had thrown his weight around, literally, making the most of his space and practically pushing Laura into Noone’s lap. The molded plastic chair didn’t help her back much either.
She didn’t mind the chair so much as the feeling that this briefing was an exercise in futility. Chief Ducotte had asked that the briefing include all of the Bisbee Police Department. Laura remembered his exact words: He wanted “to foster an inclusive atmosphere” and make sure that everybody “was on the same page.”
Bottom line: He didn’t want his people to feel left out. Even though they would be.
Laura was well aware of the pressures the chief faced. The safety of a city dependent on tourism had suddenly been breached, and logical or not, the chief would be blamed. His job was to keep the town running smoothly, bring in revenue in the form of traffic tickets and fines, and maintain a comforting presence in the community. These were his priorities, and he needed to get the town back up on the rails as quickly as possible. That meant he had to get his cops back out on the street.
But he also had to think about morale.
In Laura’s opinion, this briefing was unwise; it would raise expectations in the rank-and-file that they would be integral to the case, and other than helping in minor ways, that just wasn’t true.
Officer Billings, one of the few here who had seen Jessica Parris’s body, was enjoying his three minutes of fame. “You know what she looked like?" He paused dramatically. “Judy Garland in the The Wizard of Oz. The girl was too old for a baby-doll dress like that … damn, it was spooky.”
Sergeant Nesmith leaned back and folded his arms over his considerable bulk. “Haven’t heard of nobody dressing ‘em up like that. Sounds like something you’d see on Most Wanted.”
What no one said but everyone thought: This guy might be a serial killer. Either there had been other murders before this, or Jessica Parris was the first. Everyone here had some knowledge of FBI profile techniques. They knew as well as she did that when a person employed ritual in his killing, he would do it again.
Victor said, “The dress was too small. He must have had the dress first. Why’d he have the dress first?”
“Maybe that’s all he could find,” said a scrawny cop with a rust-colored, handlebar mustache like Wyatt Earp’s. His nameplate said Danehill.
Laura said, “We need to check the resale and antique shops in the area.”
“He could have gotten the dress anywhere,” said Victor. “Also, there was no tag on the collar.”
“Maybe he tore it off.”
“Or it could be homemade.”
“What, you mean like sewed? From a pattern or something?”
“My wife sews,” Sergeant Nesmith said. “If I could get a look at the dress, I could probably tell. I could get on the Internet, check out dresses like that, see if there are any patterns.”
Laura shifted in her seat to relieve the pain in her back, caught Officer Heather Duffy’s eye. Duffy was glaring at her.
Victor crossed his leg at the knee, played with the tassel on his Italian loafers. “We’ll get photos of the dress and pass them around to everyone. I wonder what he did with her clothes?”
“Took ‘em for a souvenir?” suggested Officer Billings. “A trophy?”
“Or threw them away.”
Chief Ducotte said, “You have someone on that? Checking all the garbage cans around here?”
“We’re on it,” said Nesmith.
They discussed the mesquite leaf found on Jessica Parris’s neck, stuck like a piece of confetti behind her ear—something the killer had missed. This pointed to the possibility that the girl had been killed outside of Bisbee, since mesquite trees were rarely found above five-thousand feet. Unfortunately, the surrounding valleys—some of them only a mile or two away—were thick with them.
Then they came to the doll at Cooger & Darks. “I’m going by there tomorrow and talk to the owner,” Laura told them. “Maybe he saw somebody, someone too interested in the display.”
Chief Ducotte nodded, blinking his rabbity eyes.
Victor said, “Another thing, we’re all agreed he took her up there after she was dead. That means we have three crime scenes. The one where she was abducted, the one where he killed her, and the band shell. Any ideas on that?”
“His house?”
“A motel, if he isn’t from around here.”
Laura glanced in Duffy’s direction and noticed she was looking at Noone with an odd expression. She tried to pigeonhole it: Longing? Anger? Something in between? Duffy’s short, compact body looked like it was about to explode.
Something between Duffy and Noone.
Buddy Holland, who’d seemed preoccupied throughout the proceedings, followed Laura’s gaze. One corner of his mouth came up. Whatever was going on with Duffy and Noone, he knew about it.
Victor was saying, “Motels, bed and breakfasts, apartments, what else?”
“If it’s his crib it’d be pretty much impossible to find,” said Danehill.
“I got some photographs of the crowd by the crime scene tape this morning,” Laura said. “Our guy might not have been able to stay away. As soon as we have them, I want to canvass the neighborhood again. Maybe somebody noticed something unusual, maybe someone they knew did something outside their routine. That is, if he’s local. But I have my doubts about that.”
Detective Holland picked at some invisible lint on his sleeve, stretched his long blue jean-clad legs out and stared at his feet. “I think he is local.”
“You do?” asked Noone. “From here in Bisbee?”
Holland shrugged. His watchful eyes scanned the room, landed on Laura. “Why would he come here? We’re a little off the beaten path. It just doesn’t compute.”