Unlucky 13(30)

Joe came into the kitchen and I whispered to him, “She’s tracking Morales.”

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.

“By herself? You gotta love her,” he said.

“And—why?” I said dubiously.

“She’s a lot like you.”

“Come on,” I said. “You really think that?”

He grinned, gave me a swat on the behind, poured coffee for himself, and went back to his office.

I called out, “Cindy, come get your mug.”

She sugared and milked her java, after which we took our mugs to the living room and assumed our former positions. She swiped at her cell phone with her thumb, and just when I was ready to scream, she got up and brought her phone over to me.

“I just got an e-mail with these attachments about three hours ago,” Cindy said. “Sometimes a picture is actually worth a thousand blah-blah-blahs.”

“What am I looking at?” I asked her.

The first photo was of three State of Wyoming Highway Patrol cars, flashers on, clumped up along the side of a highway.

The second shot showed traffic cones across the lane and a half-dozen khaki-uniformed troopers standing around what looked like a female body lying in the ditch off the shoulder of the road.

“You’re saying that’s Mackie?”

“No,” said Cindy. “Keep flipping through.”

The next photo was a tighter shot of the corpse. I thought that I was looking at a hit-and-run, but by the fourth photo, it was clear that the victim had been shot through the left temple.

“Who sent you these to you?” I asked.

“Off the record,” Cindy said, “they’re from a cop friend of mine who got the pictures from an undisclosed source. There’s no ID yet on the victim. I don’t know her, Linds,” Cindy said, “but she looks familiar.”

I looked at the close-ups of the victim. She was pretty, in her twenties, long dark hair, pale skin, slender build.

The gunshot wound to the temple made me think that if she had been a passenger, the driver could have shot her and dumped her out of the vehicle.

Or, if she had been driving and stopped her car for someone and rolled down her window, the person standing outside the car could have popped her, dragged her out, and stolen her car.

Then I came to the close-ups of the victim’s hands. All of her fingers had been cut off at the first digit—and that changed everything.

Cindy said, “Remind you of something?”

Yes. It reminded me of Randy Fish, a sexual sadist who had used different methods to kill and torture his victims. He had cut the fingers off one of his last kills with a pair of pruning shears—while the girl was alive. He’d told me all about that.

Randy Fish was dead. I was a witness to that.

But his soul mate was still alive.

Cindy said, “How could this be a coincidence? This murder looks to me like an homage to Randy Fish. And that makes me think Mackie did it.”

Might. Could be. Definite maybe. But there was no evidence that Mackie Morales was connected to this crime at all.

I asked Cindy a lot of questions: Had any ID been found on or near the victim? Were there any witnesses? Any missing persons report leading to the victim? Any anything?

Cindy said, “Linds, I’ve told you everything I know and everything I’m thinking.”

I wasn’t buying it.

Cindy was looking straight at me with her big round baby blues, but I wasn’t sure she was seeing me. Maybe she was inside her head, working on her killer story about a Mackie Morales murder spree.

Or maybe it was something else.

I said, “What is it, Cindy? What aren’t you saying?”





CHAPTER 38


CONKLIN SHOWED UP at our work space at half past nine, which was late for him. He hadn’t shaved or combed his hair, and he’d missed a couple of shirt buttons. Either he’d taken a tumble in the clothes dryer or I was looking at the hallmark of new love: late nights, morning delight.

“I just made coffee,” I said, tipping my chin toward the break room.

Conklin said, “Thank God.”

“You’re welcome.”

He headed out and then came back a minute later with a cup of Mocha Java, wrestled his chair out from under the desk, threw himself into it, and raked back his thick brown hair with the fingers of both hands.

He said, “Coffee without doughnuts is like a day without sunshine.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said.

I opened my pencil drawer, took out a packet of peanut butter crackers, and chucked them over to my partner. He caught them on the fly and opened the packet with his teeth.

“Tina and I.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She doesn’t like my politics. I never thought something like that would matter.”