“I didn’t have a say in it. As you said, he was an adult.”
Laura opened her mouth to say that Jessica wasn’t an adult—and that was when her cell phone chirped.
Sylvia Clegg, standing on a chair in the closet, felt hard plastic behind the piles of folded blankets stored for the summer.
She pulled down a videotape just as she heard the toilet flush.
The tape was called Pubic Enemy No. 1. The heart-warming story of a gangster who finds love in a hot sheet motel with two vertically-challenged girls.
“What’s that?” said Detective Buddy Holland from the doorway.
“Buddy, you didn’t use the bathroom, did you?”
He held up his hands, gloved in latex. “You gotta go, you gotta go. What’s that? Porno?”
“You’re in here now, you might as well come and look at this.”
She held the tape out to him. He didn’t touch; just looked. “What do you think?”
“Girls could be twenty, or they could be sixteen. Hard to tell these days.”
“Definitely not little girls, though." She stepped back up and reached into the closet, pulled out more of tapes.
Buddy remained in the room, hands on his hips, watching her.
“Where’s Chuck?” she asked him.
“He’s still out back, stewing." He added, “The DPS guy left, has to witness the autopsy.”
“You really aren’t supposed to be in here.”
“I know.” He made a slow circuit of the room, peering at things without touching. “Anything besides the porno?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Too bad." Buddy shone his MagLite at the back of Chuck Lehman’s dresser.
“Buddy, what are you doing?”
“There’s a gap between the dresser and the wall.”
“So?”
He looked at her. “Did you look to see if anything fell back there?”
Sylvia felt a twinge of embarrassment. “I’m not done yet.”
Buddy continued to stand over the dresser. He was looking at something.
Sylvia got down off the chair and set the videotapes down on the floor. “What is it?”
Buddy pointed his flashlight behind the dresser. She came to stand next to him and peered down. Something there. A cylinder.
She went and got a videotape, which was just narrow enough to fit behind the dresser. She caught the thing with the corner, scooting it toward her.
“Bingo,” Buddy said as a lipstick tube rolled across the floor.
20
They served the search warrant for Chuck Lehman’s house at six o’clock the next morning, pulling Lehman out of bed. He slept in something that looked like a karate gi, and for a minute Laura wondered if he was going to launch an assault at them. He looked mad enough to bust a brick with his hand.
Anger boiled out of him, his eyes burning pure hatred, like twin gas flames.
Nudging the red line.
A lot had happened since Buddy Holland found the lipstick. Most notably, a partial print on the lipstick matched Jessica Parris’s index finger from the print cards taken by the Sierra Vista Medical Examiner—an eight-point match. Laura, Buddy and Victor had spent most of the night hashing out what they wanted on the search warrant, which Laura and Buddy would get from a judge in Bisbee. It was important they didn’t leave anything out—any area not spelled out by a warrant would be inaccessible to them. And so it became a name game: books, diaries, computer disks, the computer itself. Anything in the sewing line. Makeup, hairpieces, spirit gum and false mustaches. Kites. Indoor and outdoor trash. All cleaning products. Personal grooming products and grooming products for the dog: shampoos, soap, nail scissors, pet-grooming equipment. Financial records, receipts, check books, credit card information. Tools. His car, his yard, his garden shed.
Victor remained in Tucson, catching up on the paperwork they’d accumulated so far.
Buddy took the bedroom. Laura started in the living room and moved on to the kitchen.
The stainless steel appliances would show fingerprints, smudges, if they had not been wiped clean with glass cleaner. She didn’t know if he had cleaned everything recently to cover up Jessica’s presence in his house, or if this was just the way he was. The place had been neat when they’d come here yesterday. Maybe he was just a neat kind of guy.
She got on her hands and knees, looking for hairs or other evidence. Found several graying hairs and some dog hairs but nothing long or blond. She took them as evidence.
Now for the refrigerator.
Lehman favored health foods, green leafy vegetables, white wine. A healthy guy. A neat guy and a healthy guy.
Expecting to move on pretty quickly, she slid out the crisper.
A chill crept up her back. The only occupant of the crisper was a screenplay. CANDY RIDE.
She hunkered down on her heels and aimed the MagLite at the script. After fixing its position in the crisper, she reached a gloved hand in and lifted it out.
She felt breathing on her neck. Buddy.
“Why would he keep a screenplay in the crisper?” Laura muttered.
Buddy shrugged. “To hide it, I guess. I wonder what’s so bad about it he has to hide it.”
Carefully, Laura pushed back the cardboard cover and read the first page.
Buddy, leaning over her, whistled, low.
The scene started with the abduction of a teenaged girl.
Buddy said, “Sick fuck.”
“You could look at it another way.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“He hid it in the crisper.”
Laura stared at the first page, thinking that it could go either way. People wrote what came from their imaginations; it didn’t mean that they did what they wrote about. “Maybe he’s serious. Maybe he’s trying to sell a screenplay.”
Buddy just stared at her.
“Are you done with the bedroom?” she asked.
“I wanted to tell you. Couldn’t find anything in the bedclothes. He changed the sheets.”
“You sure?”
“They were black yesterday and they’re blue plaid now.”
She absorbed this. “He was afraid we’d come back.”
Buddy looked grim, which prompted her to ask, “What else?”
“What do you mean, what else?”
“There’s something else. What is it?”
“I think he vacuumed the bedroom. Place is so clean it’s sterile.”
Laura thought about the appliance surfaces. “He could just be a neat kind of guy.”
“Yes, except I checked his vacuum cleaner. And his hand vac. New bags.”
“So what he did, the minute we left, he vacuumed." She thought of something. “Why’d he leave the screenplay in the crisper?”
“He didn’t think we’d look there.”
“If it was me, I’d get rid of any evidence of it. He’d have to know we’d look in the refrigerator. He’d have to know we’d be thorough this time around.”
“How else do you explain it, then?”
“I don’t know. Did you find any floppy disks?”
“I found a box of them. Didn’t look at them, though. Some of these guys have a program where they can destroy everything on the hard disk if someone unauthorized logs on. No way I’d turn that puppy on.”
Laura concealed her disappointment. “He could hide e-mails on those disks, right?”
“Oh, sure he could." He straightened up and she heard his knees crack.
Forensics on a computer would take weeks, sometimes months, depending how careful he was in getting rid of any incriminating evidence. Just deleting files wouldn’t protect him for very long. Most of what was on his hard drive would be retrievable through various means, but it would take a long time.
She wondered if they’d finally find CRZYGRL12.
Ted Olsen stroked the beard lying on his chest as if it were a pet ferret. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “The mustache made a big difference.”
The owner of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Show and Emporium squinted again at the row of six photographs on the table in the conference room at the Bisbee Police Department. He wore a polyester short-sleeved shirt, so thin Laura could see the individual hairs on his back. She noticed his odor, a peculiar combination of chicken soup and pencil shavings.