He cradled the coffee mug in both hands. “I hope you don’t mind me dropping by like this.”
“No, of course not." But she started to feel nervous again.
Galaz sipped his coffee. “A shame you couldn’t meet Jay.”
“Jay?”
“Head of Dynever Security. The main reason I had the party, for you and him to meet.”
He was mad after all. What she was about to say would make him a lot madder. “About that.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea to get them involved.”
“Because of the chain of custody? Is that what’s bothering you?”
“You know what a defense attorney might do with that.”
He stared at her, his dark eyes inscrutable. “You’re a good detective, Laura. You always think ahead. I like that.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “But you’ve got to give me some credit. There’s no way I’d jeopardize this investigation. If you’re worried about the forensics on the computer, of course our crime lab does that. No way I’d farm that out. I’m just talking about the cyber stuff. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just air.”
Air that can kill, Laura thought.
Galaz leaned back, and the Mexican chair creaked. “I thought you had your doubts about it being Lehman.”
“I have questions.”
“I saw the autopsy report. That part about the frying pan. I find it hard to believe Lehman would walk up the road looking for those two kids.”
“I can’t speak for Victor, but I bet he’d say that Lehman killed Cary in his house and dragged him up to the cabin at night.”
At the mention of Victor, Galaz’s eyes turned stony. Something between them. She remembered what Victor had called him—a control freak.
He crossed one knee over the other and said, “What do you think?”
“I didn’t see any blood evidence of that, and there would have been a lot of blood. Even when you clean a place really well, there’s always some residual blood. Nothing came up when we used Luminol.”
“CRZYGRL12. That bothers me, too. You said yourself Detective Holland hasn’t done much.”
“To be fair, we’ve been kept pretty busy.”
“But bottom line, you’ve got your doubts.”
She nodded.
He set his coffee mug down. “I think we should try this. Before he gets another girl. Victor and Buddy can work the Lehman angle.” He saw her expression and added, “I promise you, there won’t be any repercussions.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“Yes, I can. I’ll take the blame if it goes wrong, but it won’t go wrong. This guy is good. You’ll like him.”
She noticed his word tenses. Past the negotiation phase. As far as he was concerned, it was a done deal. It would have been a done deal last night, but she’d messed that up by not showing.
She realized that if she had gone last night, this conversation wouldn’t be taking place. He would have asked her in front of this man Jay, and she would have had to agree. In the DPS—as in any law enforcement agency— you never made your boss look weak. Never.
Maybe Victor was right about the lieutenant’s need for control. He certainly had it now. Might as well get it over with. She could make a token effort, talk to the guy, then tell Galaz it didn’t work out. “Okay, I’ll talk to him.”
“Good." Galaz reached into his wallet and removed a card, set it on the table.
The card said Dynever Security — Michael J. Ramsey II, CEO.
She stared down at the pale gray velum, the embossed letters. Heat suffused her face and her heart started to pound.
“Jay Ramsey?” she said. Her tongue felt stiff.
“You know him,” Galaz said. Not a question.
“No, not really. I only met him once.”
“Met” wasn’t strictly accurate. She’d noticed him plenty.
Watching him whack tennis balls at the Ramseys’ tennis court down the road from the stables. Watching him go from the house to his Range Rover, hanging with his friends, driving by in a cloud of dust.
“He asked about you,” Galaz said. “He thinks of you often.”
Occasionally, he’d look her way and nod.
“But of course that goes without saying,” Galaz added.
23
Galaz left soon after. Feeling as if she’d been whacked by a two-by-four, Laura walked out onto the porch, wondering what this all meant.
She had no particular objection to seeing Jay Ramsey. She didn’t know the man. But it had been eleven years since she had been in that part of town. There were so many memories …
Mrs. Ramsey, handing her the papers: We wanted you to have her. As a thank you.
A fifty-thousand-dollar thank you.
The phone rang and she jumped.
It was Barry Endicott, the sheriff’s detective from Indio. “Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you,” he said. “I’ve been working a case that’s taken all my time.”
“That’s okay.” Aware of her own breathing.
“I heard you had a girl,” he said. “Dressed up and posed, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“So did we, five months ago. Girl named Alison Burns.”
“What was she wearing?”
“She was dressed up like a flower girl and posed on a bed at a motel slated for demolition. It was pure luck we found her at all. It was kind of opportunistic—guy that found her was taking pictures of abandoned buildings. He said he had his eye on the place and as soon as they cleared out, he went in before it could be boarded up. He was our main suspect for a while, but turns out he was in Monterey around the time the girl was killed—at a photographer’s workshop.”
“How old was she?”
“Twelve. How old was yours?”
“Fourteen.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, probably pondering the disparity in their ages. Laura pressed him for details.
“She was left there after they officially closed the place, but before they removed the beds. The fact the guy found her that early gave us a better fix on time of death.”
According to Endicott, Alison Burns had been smothered. She had traces of Rohypnol, the date rape drug, in her system.
“We figured the guy gave her the Rohypnol, then soft-smothered her, but that’s only a theory. We think from the stomach contents that he held a little party for her.”
Laura said, “What?”
“We think he took her to McDonalds. Happy Meal, soft drink, Baskin Robbins after that. There were balloons in the room and a new teddy bear.”
Stranger and stranger. “Like a birthday celebration?”
“Like one. Her birthday wasn’t anywhere around that time. We think he made her last day a good one.”
Laura was aware how tightly she gripped the phone.
“That’s conjecture on our part, though.”
“He soft-smothered her?”
“We think he wanted to quote unquote ‘ease her into sleep.’”
“Was she molested?”
“Oh yeah. For days.”
“Days? He didn’t kill her right away?”
“We think he had her four days, maybe five.”
Jessica’s killer had kept her only a few hours tops, and raped her postmortem. Maybe this wasn’t the same guy. “Could I see the evidence list?”
“We’ll need a written request.”
“I’ll fax you one, but is there any way we can expedite this?”
“I’ll see what I can do. Go ahead and send your request. Make sure you ask for a detailed list. You’ll want to ask for photos of the dress, the digital camera—“
“What camera?”
“The one he sent her.”
“He sent her a camera?”
“Among other things.” He paused. “We think he got to her over the Internet.”
Twenty minutes later, Laura got the first fax: A photograph of Alison Burns’s dress.