Missing White Girl Read online

  “When is she coming?”

  The fact that he has begun to stock up on supplies makes her think he intends to keep her here for some time.

  What seems like once every hour or so, he asks the same question, the same thing he’s been asking since he brought her here.

  “When is she coming?”

  “I don’t know who you mean,” Lulu says.

  “When is she coming?”

  “Who?”

  “The white girl. When is the white girl coming?”

  After this happened a few times, Lulu figured out who he meant. Still, she hasn’t let on to him that she knows, continues to play ignorant. At first she might have told him, but not now. Now she has had time to reconsider that idea. As long as he wants something from her, she judges, he will keep her alive. When he has the information he wants, then he will kill her like she believes he did the rest of her family…

  MISSING WHITE GIRL

  JEFFREY J. MARIOTTE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  MISSING WHITE GIRL

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2007 by Jeffrey J. Mariotte.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  Cover photograph of “Barbed wire” by Atli Mar/Nordic Photos/Getty; cover photograph of “Young

  woman standing behind net curtain” by Will Sanders/Stone/Getty.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1501-2

  JOVE®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “J” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  To Maryelizabeth, Holly, and David

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  DAY ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Interlude: 1536

  DAY TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Interlude: 1536

  DAY THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Interlude: 1536

  DAY FOUR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  A novel like this couldn’t be written without the assistance of the many people who provide factual information, moral support, and generally good company. Of course, factual information can be twisted for fictional effect, so anything that’s right in here can be credited to the following people, while anything that’s wrong should be blamed solely on the author. That said, I’d like to thank Mario Escalante and Ulysses Duronslet of the U.S. Border Patrol; Carol Capas of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office; Xavier Zaragoza of the Douglas, Arizona, Daily Dispatch; Glenda, Curtis and the crew at the Douglas branch of the Cochise County Library; Robin Brekhus of the Gadsden Hotel; J. Carson Black; Cindy Chapman; Howard Morhaim; Ginjer Buchanan; and Maryelizabeth Hart for the contributions they made to this effort.

  DAY ONE

  1

  The back of a van or a truck, she guesses, but hard, anyway, and ridged. She rolls on the turns, slams into solid steel when the vehicle brakes suddenly. A hump that keeps ramming into her spine might be a wheel well. Head pounding, blindfolded. Duct tape holds an awful rag stuffed in her mouth and straps down her hair, bites her flesh.

  No idea how long she’s been riding, or who took her.

  Or why.

  No idea….

  2

  Any other time, there would have been cameras there, a press corps. An American family murdered in their home—that was newsworthy, Patrol Lieutenant Buck Shelton knew, even in today’s world.

  Except this wasn’t any other time. This was week two of the disappearance of Elayne Lippincott. Because she was sixteen, blond, popular in school and had two local modeling jobs under her belt, Elayne’s kidnapping had drawn hundreds of reporters to Cochise County in Arizona’s southeast corner. Buck had been out to the Lippincott estate and seen the satellite trucks corkscrewing the sky and the white vans emblazoned with network logos jammed together on the sweeping paved driveway, evidence of America’s obsession with the case.

  Victor Lippincott, Elayne’s father, was a prominent banker in Sierra Vista. His wife Beatrice would likely have been referred to, in a more urban setting, as a “socialite.”
Their Santa Fe–style adobe mansion was surrounded by a broad expanse of lawn that summer’s rains and a gardener’s careful attention had left uniformly green. On that lawn a white tent had been erected to shield the press corps from Arizona’s sun and the monsoon rains. Red ribbons tied to the guy lines fluttered pennantlike in the stiff wind, while beneath the tent’s peaked roof, reporters and crews flocked together like too many ducks crowding a too small pond. Every time the Lippincotts showed themselves, the reporters waiting outside pelted them with questions. At night the crews thinned but didn’t dissipate altogether, as the well known and well paid visited local restaurants and hotels, only to return in the morning, rested and fed, to continue their slow-motion stalking.

  Buck (given name Hawthorn, God only knew why) had heard the term “media circus,” seen some on TV surrounding the O. J. Simpson, Laci Peterson and Robert Blake cases, and others. But he had never imagined that sleepy Cochise County would host one.

  So while papers from nearby Douglas and Bisbee would send reporters out, the national press was too consumed by the latest missing white girl to pay any attention to the wholesale slaughter of a black father and a Mexican mother and their mixed-race kids. Buck didn’t know if race entered into the decision to ignore the murders, but it for sure owned responsibility for all the fuss over Elayne Lippincott. Nothing, he had observed, boosted news ratings like a story about a missing white girl.

  Trouble was, law enforcement and local officials paid attention to where the media spotlight fell. Cochise County’s sheriff, Ed Gatlin, had become a regular face on The Today Show, Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, Larry King Live and half a dozen other news programs. As a result, he had marshaled the full resources of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, as well as officers loaned by the Arizona Department of Public Safety, to find Elayne Lippincott.

  Twelve days later, Elayne hadn’t turned up. And Buck Shelton had a houseful of bodies on his hands.

  The Lavender house was a single-story Territorial adobe, decades old and showing the years; not something that would ever grace the pages of Su Casa magazine, the way the Lippincotts’ showpiece had. All it had in common with the Lippincott home, which nestled against the southeastern flank of the Huachuca Mountains with a view all the way across the San Pedro Valley, was that it was made of mud, as houses had been in this region for a thousand years, and flat-roofed, with wooden vigas and ceiling beams. It was a working ranch house squatting tentatively on a patch of high desert scrub, not an ornament at the end of a sweeping paved driveway. There wasn’t a Kokopelli or a coyote wearing a bandanna or one of those fake pueblo-style ladders or a wagon wheel to be seen, but up against the corrugated metal barn was a tire that had come off a tractor sometime in the last decade.

  Somehow, the house’s plain facade almost made it worse that its interior held five dead bodies. These were not rich people who’d led charmed lives, but hardworking folks, and they’d ended up butchered just like their own stock.

  Buck shook his head sadly. He had known the Lavenders since they’d moved into the area seven years before. They raised goats and geese, some swine, ran a few head of cattle. They had planted an orchard that threw a few apples their way, once in a while. Mesquite erupted from the grassy fields like the splashing drops of the devil’s own rainstorm, and they cut some of it, selling it to El Real Mexican Fine Foods for stove wood.

  He glanced at the vast blue bowl of the Arizona sky. Towering clouds marched in from the southeast, some shredding at their bottom edges, dumping rain down in Douglas, no doubt. The summer monsoon. The morning had been still and hot, but a wind was working itself up and those clouds would be here within the hour. They’d not only slice several degrees off the day’s temperature, but also wash away any footprints or evidence that might have been left behind outside by the killer or killers. Buck longed for one of those professional crime scene teams you saw on TV, trained scientists with their flashlights and evidence kits. He had a kit of his own, but it wasn’t one of the glossy, high-tech-looking things on the tube, and he didn’t have any beautiful young people to examine the scene for him. He had himself and Scoot Brown, the young deputy who had been first on the scene, and neither was anyone’s idea of a beauty queen.

  Responding to a call from a UPS driver, Scoot had gone into the house, then stumbled back out and puked onto the ground, kicking dirt over it when he was finished. Now he sat inside his car looking green, and the delivery guy leaned against his brown truck with his arms folded over his chest and a bitter expression on his tanned face. Not much help there.

  Nodding to Scoot, Buck approached the house. Scoot had tacked a sign-in sheet by the front door, and Buck wrote his name on it. He’d rubbed on some apple-scented lip balm and touched a dab of it on his mustache, just below his nose—not enough to mask any evidentiary odors, but enough, he hoped, to lessen the impact of human bodies cut open and left to rot.

  It wasn’t.

  Later on, Sheriff Gatlin might be able to kick loose a team of criminalists from Bisbee. But for now, Buck and Scoot Brown were the only resources the sheriff felt he could spare. They were two-fifths of the staff of the Elfrida substation. Buck was the senior officer and he wanted to check out the scene for himself. The coroner’s people, if they came at all, would stand up numbered cards and take pictures and measurements. Finally they would haul out the bodies. Before all that happened, Buck wanted to form his own impressions of what had happened to the Lavender family. He knew these people. Someone had murdered them. He didn’t want to leave to strangers the task of finding out who.

  The front door opened into a living room. The Lavenders had a couple of dogs, as most everyone in these parts did, and the dogs tracked mud in, especially this time of year, but Manuela Morales Lavender followed behind them with a vacuum cleaner as best she could. The dogs, a yellow Lab and a mutt who was part shepherd with a lot of other parts mixed in, were tied to the fence now, and if they had seen anything, they weren’t telling.

  The furniture inside was old but clean. A brown cloth couch was worn on the seat cushions and frayed at the arms. An oak coffee table served as resting place for a coffee can that held remote controls for a TV, a DVD player and a boombox stereo system all arrayed against the opposite wall on a discount-store entertainment center made of pressboard and covered in wood-grain paper that peeled at the corners. Some of it, near the floor, looked as if it had been gnawed away, possibly by one of the dogs. The light brown carpet it all sat on had eroded in the high-traffic areas, like a field overgrazed by livestock, but under the entertainment center and the coffee table and near the walls it was still full and unfaded. Green leafy houseplants were scattered around the room, as if the foliage outdoors stole inside when no one was looking.

  Pictures had been hung almost randomly on the white interior walls; most were the type you could buy, already framed, at Target or Kmart. The largest was an aerial photograph of the Waikiki coastline at dusk, with Diamond Head brooding in the background. Buck noticed a smear on the wall near the photo, which hung off to one side of the entertainment center, almost in the hallway. Too high up to be from a dog’s paw, unless one of the mutts had stood on his hind legs to reach up the wall. And though it was turning brown, as if the wall had begun to rust, liquid red shone at its core. Someone with blood on his hand had touched there, steadying himself maybe. Buck turned away from the dining room and kitchen, which Scoot had already told him were empty, and forced himself into the hallway.

  The smells that had assaulted him as soon as he passed through the door were worse. Lemon Pledge fought a losing battle with the slaughterhouse smells of blood and shit and raw meat. Nothing he hadn’t encountered before, but rarely to such a degree and in such a confined space. This was no slaughterhouse, but a small ranch house. He let his mouth hang open, breathing through it.

  A longer streak of blood marred the wall at the same height from the ground as the first one. He found another on a doorjamb. Clicking on a flashlight so he didn’t
have to touch light switches, Buck shone it through the door, revealing a bathroom. Dark stains on the sink faucet showed that the killer had washed his hands. The sink was wiped clean, but not the handle. On top of the toilet tank was a box of tissues with a minute stain near the perforated opening. Probably the killer had used those to swab out the sink, then flushed them. They could be recovered from the septic tank, if absolutely necessary, but the blood on them would be from the Lavenders, and any transfer from the killer would probably have been washed out by the flushing or contaminated beyond usefulness.

  He skipped the next two doors. The kids’ rooms, he was sure. He wasn’t ready to face those. The door at the end of the hallway led into the master bedroom, and horrible as it would be, at least he would probably find adults in there.

  The master bedroom had its own bath and a large closet. It was the kind of room that country-style decorators tried to emulate, but this one was the real deal. A quilt covered the brass-framed bed, and another one, in process, was draped over a wooden quilt rack near one wall. A big cedar chest crouched at the foot of the bed. A couple of paintings decorated the wall, landscapes that had probably been in the family for so long their subjects no longer had any particular meaning to anybody.