15
OFFICER NOONE INVESTIGATES
Randall Noone—he hated the name “Randy”; people might as well just go ahead and call him “Horny”—parked a little way down and walked up to the turnout on West Boulevard. He’d just started his shift and wanted to check on the tire tracks and see if the same vehicle had come back. He was sure those tire tracks had something to do with Jessica Parris’s death. Otherwise, why would Laura Cardinal bother to take casts of them?
At seven in the morning, this part of the canyon was still deep in shadow. There was a hushed feeling to the air, which was actually cool for once, thanks to the overnight rain.
His favorite time of day.
Even though he’d enjoyed the thrill of working nights, he never could adjust completely to the night. Working the day shift in Bisbee wasn’t big on excitement, but he enjoyed talking to folks—the place was like Mayberry. He was good at giving speeding tickets, too; he made people feel so good about getting a ticket that they were practically thanking him before he was done. Randall thought that if he’d really wanted excitement, he could have joined up with the sheriff’s department, which had become a war zone in the last few years. With the Feds clamping down on the border crossings in California and Texas, Arizona was a hotbed for illegal aliens. One of his friends in the sheriff’s department had personally discovered three decomposing bodies in the desert just this year, and had nearly been run down during a routine traffic stop when a vanload of illegals jumped out after putting the van into reverse, right at him.
Nope, he liked Mayberry just fine. Especially with the baby on the way. He and Marcie had picked out the name already: Justin. A good strong name.
The only bad thing about days—Heather Duffy was on days, too.
The Duffy trouble began when his wife had a cold and couldn’t make it to the year-end party. After downing five Tabasco shooters, he’d ended up making out with Duffy, and she’d never let him forget it. She sank her teeth into him like a gila monster. When one of them clamped onto your fingers, you might as well get used to having a new clothing accessory.
He reached the yellow tape and looked at the area. He’d made a mental note of exactly how it had looked the night before and was happy to see that the area had not been disturbed.
Glancing back at the Parris house, he said a brief prayer. Man, that was tough—imagine losing your kid like that. The chief had mentioned a possible Internet connection. That was bad stuff, the way some freak with a computer could reach right into your house and lure your kid right out the front door. When Justin grew up, he’d have to watch him like a hawk. He’d get AOL. They had safeguards for stuff just like that.
He walked across the road to look at the other turnout. A raven flew over, making a nut-cracking noise deep in its throat.
As he reached the road’s shoulder, the smell hit him.
He realized that off and on yesterday afternoon he had smelled it, too, had thought it was coming from the dumpster. But it wasn’t really a garbage smell.
It was a death smell.
He looked up and down the road, but saw nothing. Probably some poor animal had been hit by a car and crawled into the underbrush.
A thick screen of trees ran along the east side of the road. His Uncle Nate called them cancer trees because they spread like a fast-moving tumor. He stepped to the side of the road and peered between the trunks. No animal that he could see, but there was something—a solid patch of gray through the trees. Couldn’t be more than ten feet from where he stood.
An abandoned shed? No, it had a pitched roof. It looked like a little cabin. Suddenly he remembered something else Uncle Nate told him, that there were some old tourist cabins around here from the twenties, back when this road was the highway through town.
As he recalled, it had an Indian name. Cochise? No. Geronimo. The Geronimo Tourist Camp.
Randall Noone squinted at the shack, holding the tree limbs away from his face. The trees made him feel claustrophobic. They gave off a cloying odor, like peanut butter, that mixed with the death smell and made his stomach queasy. Breathing through his mouth, he made his way through the underbrush, the limbs springing back like boomerangs when he let go of them, until he was standing outside the shack.
The doors and windows to the cabin were gone, leaving it open to the elements—just a shell with a rusted stove pipe lying in the corner across floorboards pretty much rotted through. Place couldn’t be much bigger than a roomy bathroom.
He noticed another ghostly square to his left, maybe fifteen feet away, and went to investigate.
This cabin looked like a kids’ hangout—there was a candle, an old rug, throw pillows, rolling papers, and a boom box. A faint odor of pot.
This was interesting.
He spotted another cabin, this one farthest away from the road and backed up against the hill. He picked his way along a faint trail littered with junk—a roll of hog wire, broken glass, a sink with a hole in it.
Darker here, shadowed by the ridge and oak trees. Damp. The raven flew to an oak and chortled at him as he approached the open doorway.
The stench hit him with almost physical force.
He stepped back, his mind reeling. Something dead here. Steeling himself, he breathed through his mouth before peering in.
At first he thought it was just a pile of black rags. No, it was jeans and a T-shirt. Naturally, his gaze wandered up the t-shirt toward the face.
His disbelieving eyes registered the green fright mask for just an instant before he reeled backwards out the door, gulping for air.
Officer Randall Noone found himself on all fours, the scrambled eggs Marcie cooked for his breakfast ending up in a steaming pile on the grass.