Read Online The Laura Cardinal Novels by J. Carson Black - Free Book Online Page A

down and stared at them. Double wheels. From looking at both turnouts, she thought the vehicle had a big wheelbase.
    Like a motor home.
    The sun bore down on her neck like an iron and flies buzzed around, lighting on her face and arms, tickling her. No telling if the tracks here belonged to a motor home at all, let alone the one Jeeter had seen on the Gulch. She knew what Frank Entwistle would say. When in doubt, be thorough.
    She walked back to the 4Runner and got a spool of yellow crime scene tape and blocked off the area around both turnouts. She called the station and asked to be patched through to Officer Noone.
    “What are you doing?” she asked him when he answered.
    “Looking up motor homes." He added hastily, “The chief said I could.”
    Laura glanced at her watch. She had to be at Cooger & Dark’s in ten minutes. “I’ve taped off some tire tracks up at the end of West Boulevard,” she said. “I want you to come up here and keep an eye on them until I get back. Can you do that?”
    “Yes ma’am. I’m on my way.”

    Ted Olsen, the owner of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and Emporium, looked nothing like his Viking name. He was a short, balding man with a ZZ Top beard that had been buttoned into the neck of his short-sleeved shirt, as if he wanted to keep it out of the way.
    Cooger & Dark’s shelves were cluttered with fringed lamp shades, art deco radios, and old lunch boxes. A gas pump from the early part of the century stood in the corner. But Laura’s attention was on the dolls suspended from the ceiling. They made her think of trapeze artists caught in mid-swoop.
    They reminded her of the Cabbage Patch craze years ago, only bigger. Much bigger, their long flour-white limbs like sausages. They were dressed in gingham pinafores, dotted Swiss baby-doll dresses, gunny-sack dresses. White, pink, yellow.
    “You’ve got a lot of dolls,” she said as Olsen went through the shop turning on lights.
    “You like them?”
    “Very nice.” Actually, they creeped her out.
    She wondered: Could this be the guy? She didn’t get anything from him except matter-of-factness, but she wasn’t psychic.
    “Where did you get them?” she asked.
    “My girls? I make them.”
    “You do?” Her next question would naturally be Why? Instead she asked him if anyone had shown interest in the doll in the window.
    “She’s not one of mine. She’s plastic. I use only natural materials.”
    “But has anyone asked about it? Or any of your dolls?”
    “Tourists.”
    “Any men?”
    “Men?” He stroked his beard. “Usually the men are interested in stuff like that gas pump. I can’t recall anyone …" He coughed up something into a handkerchief that he kept in his gray pants, pants that reminded Laura of the custodian at her high school years ago. “There was a guy interested in a dress. Wanted to buy it.”
    “Why?”
    “People never cease to amaze me. Been in this business for twenty years, and you never can figure out what they’re gonna ask for. He wanted to take that dress up there right off Daisy, but I told him no.”
    Laura’s gaze followed his long crooked finger.
    The doll wore a pale pink tulle dress with baby-doll sleeves.
    “If I sold him the dress, Daisy would have been left in her birthday suit,” Olsen explained. ‘I couldn’t do that. When I explained it to him, he got mad.”
    “Mad?”
    “He didn’t make a scene, but you could tell he was steaming. Like he was counting to ten.”
    “Can I see the doll?”
    “Sure." He grabbed a long pole with a hook on the end of it and pulled at a rope hanging down behind him. Laura realized that it was a pulley system, kind of like at a dry cleaner’s, from which the dolls were suspended. He pulled the doll around, then expertly hooked her off by the neck and set her down on the counter. She noticed he had a US Marines tattoo on one arm.
    Laura eyeballed Daisy, thinking she was approximately the same size as Jessica Parris—one big damn