Second Grave on the Left

Chapter Nine

Two hours later, Cookie and I sat in her office, marveling at what we’d found via the class rosters and the Internet. In the last month, six former students of Ruiz High had either died or gone missing. The casualties included a murder, a car accident, two apparent suicides, an accidental death by drowning, and a missing person: Mimi.

“Okay,” Cookie said, studying her list, “every one of these people not only matriculated from Ruiz High, but they had all been within one or two grades of one another.”

“And we could be missing someone. We don’t have any married names on the women.”

“I’ll have to run a check on those,” she said.

“Considering there were only about a hundred students in the entire high school, the odds of something like this happening by chance are astronomical. There has to be another connection. I doubt our guy is out to just kill every kid he went to high school with. If he were a serial killer, there would be a pattern, similar deaths in a contained area, most likely. Whoever is behind this is trying to make them look like accidents or suicides, for the most part.”

“Maybe Warren’s threatening Tommy Zapata offered the guy an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, Tommy and Mimi, while shifting the suspicion to Warren,” Cookie said.

“And since the others were ruled accidental, someone is getting away with murder.”

“You know,” Cookie said, studying the roster again, “Mimi’s name isn’t on here. This roster must be from after Mimi moved.”

“Okay, let’s do this,” I said, thinking aloud. “You search the Ruiz police records for anything amiss from the time Mimi moved, working backwards to about a month or two prior. Although the odds are against it, something could have landed on the sheriff’s radar.”

“Got it. I’ll also run a check on the married names of some of these women, just in case.”

“And while you’re at it,” I said, piling on the work, “you might call and see if you can get an earlier roster.”

“Yep, already have that down. Hey, what are you going to do?”

Reyes had a sister in a screwed-up, kidnapped kind of way. When Kim was two, she had been dumped on Earl Walker’s doorstep by a drug-addicted mother mere days before the woman died of complications due to an HIV infection. I could only hope that had Kim’s mother known what kind of monster Earl Walker was, she would never have left her daughter with him, suspected father or not. And while Walker didn’t sexually abuse her as I’d feared, he did the next best thing. He used her to control Reyes. He starved her to get what he wanted out of him. And what he wanted from Reyes was all kinds of evil.

“I’m going to go talk to Reyes’s sister, Kim.”

Cookie’s expression transformed to one of hope. “Do you think she knows where he might be?”

“Sadly, no, but it’s worth a shot.”

“Are you going to contact Mistress Marigold?” she asked with a teasing grin. “’Cause that if-you’re-the-grim-reaper thing is just too weird.”

“Tell me about it. And I haven’t decided yet.”

“How about I do it for you? Holy cannoli,” she said, glancing at the roster again.

“What?” I hopped up to read over her shoulder.

“Mimi went to high school with Kyle Kirsch. I just made the connection.”

“The congressman? The same congressman who recently announced his plans to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate?”

“Yes. His first name is Benjamin. It’s listed as Benjamin Kyle Kirsch. The Benjamin threw me. He must go by his middle name.”

I leaned in, leveled a pointed stare on her. “The same congressman who announced his plans to run for the U.S. Senate one month ago?”

Cookie’s jaw fell open. “Holy cannoli,” she repeated.

She had a way with words.

A congressman. A freaking congressman. Somebody, and I wasn’t naming any names, but somebody had at least one major-ass skeleton in his closet. Like King Kong major. A skeleton he didn’t want to escape. Possibly ’cause nothing was scarier than giant skeletons running amok. And my money, all forty-seven dollars and fifty-eight cents, was on Kyle Kirsch. Congressman. U.S. Senate hopeful. Murderer.

Then again, it could all be some wild coincidence, some bizarre chain of events that just happened to revolve around a group of teens from Ruiz, New Mexico, and a man who just happened to announce his candidacy around the same time his classmates started dropping like fruit flies in September. And I could be crowned Miss Finland before the year was out.

Now, thanks to Kyle Kirsch, I had one more conundrum wreaking havoc on my innards. What the bloody heck did this guy do? Unless he’d partaken in ritualistic sacrifice to a dark overlord or had been an Amway rep at any point in his life, I really couldn’t justify his murdering innocent people.

He had to go down. Preferably hard.

I pulled into Kim Millar’s Pueblo-styled apartment complex and knocked on her turquoise door.

“Ms. Davidson,” Kim said when she opened the door, her eyes wide with worry. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside. “Where is he?” Her auburn hair was pulled back into a harried ponytail, and dark circles lined her silvery green eyes, making them look large and hollow. She’d looked fragile the first time I met her. Now her porcelain exterior seemed on the verge of shattering.

I took her hand into mine as she led me to a beige sofa.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” I said when we were settled.

The glimmer of hope she’d been hanging on to tooth and nail fled, placing a hairline fracture in her aura. A grayness descended, a misty overcast darkening her eyes.

I didn’t know how much to tell her. Would I want to know if my sibling were essentially committing suicide? Damn straight I would. Kim had a right to know what her pigheaded brother was up to.

“He’s very mad at me right now,” I said.

“So, you’ve seen him?”

I realized how hard their arrangement must be on her. They had a zero-contact contract. Reyes didn’t want her hurt because of him ever again, and she refused to be the leverage that got Reyes hurt in turn. No one, not even the state, knew what she was to him. Though not actually blood related, they were siblings through and through, and I had a feeling Reyes would come un-superglued if he knew I was talking to her.

“Kim, do you know what he is?”

Her brows worked themselves into a delicate knot. “No. Not really. I just know that he’s very special.”

“He is,” I said, scooting closer. Not that I was about to tell her who he really was. What he really was. “He is very special and he can leave his body.”

She swallowed hard. “I know. I’ve known for a long time. And he’s very strong. And fast.”

“Exactly. And when he leaves his body, he’s even stronger and much faster.”

With a gentle nod, she let me know she was following.

“For that reason,” I told her, hoping I wasn’t about to break her heart, “he has decided to let his corporeal body pass away.”

Her red-rimmed eyes blinked in stunned silence before my meaning sank in. When it did, a hand shot up to cover her mouth and she stared at me in disbelief. “He can’t do that,” she said, her voice airy with grief.

I squeezed the hand still nestled within mine. “I agree. I need to find him, but he won’t tell me where his body is. He’s … injured,” I said, sidestepping the truth. She didn’t need to know how dire the situation was. How much time he didn’t have.

“What? How?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “But I have to find him before it’s too late. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

“No,” she said, her voice breaking as tears ran freely down her face. “But the U.S. marshal said he’s in a lot of trouble.”

My blood turned cold in my veins. Nobody, not even the state, knew Kim was Reyes’s pseudo-sister. She was completely off the grid. No contact. Reyes had insisted. And there were absolutely no records whatsoever that would connect the two. None that I knew of, anyway.

“And now this,” she continued, unaware of my distress. “Why? Why would he just leave me like this?”

Either that marshal was very good at his job, or he had inside information. I was going with the inside information because nobody was that good.

I wrapped her hand into both of mine. “Kim, I promise I will do everything possible to find him.”

She pulled me into a hug. I squeezed gently, afraid she would break in my arms.

I zigzagged through traffic on I-40, wondering how the bloody hell a U.S. marshal found out about Kim. The thought left me boggled. She was not easy to track down, and I had known about her beforehand. There just weren’t many people on Earth who did.

My phone sang out in the ringtone version of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” I opened it, knowing Cook was on the other end. “Charley’s House of Ill Repute.”

“You need to pick me up,” she said.

“Are you trying to sell your body on the street again? Haven’t we talked about this?”

“A few weeks before Mimi moved to Albuquerque, a girl from her class disappeared.”

I downshifted and eased Misery into the right-hand lane to exit. “What happened?” I asked above the honking and shrill screams. “Need therapy much?” I yelled back.

“Nobody knows. They never found her body.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Yeah. It’s really sad. According to a five-year-old news article, her parents still live in Ruiz. They’ve lived in the same house for twenty years, hoping their daughter would find her way home.”

That was quite common, actually. When parents had no closure, they were often afraid to move for fear of their child returning to find them gone. “Closure, good or bad, is not overrated.”

“And guess what her name was.”

“Um—”

“Hana Insinga.”

Ah. The Hana part of Mimi’s message on the bathroom wall at the diner. “Be there in two,” I said before hanging up.

“Here’s the address,” Cookie said, climbing into Misery.

“Who’s going to man the phones?” I didn’t really care, but somebody had to give Cook a hard time, damn it. It may as well be me.

“I’m forwarding all the calls to my cell.” She had a stack of papers, file folders, and her laptop with her as well.

“It’s a good thing. I’m not paying you to tour the country like a rock star.”

“Do you pay me? I feel more like a slave.”

“Please, you’re way cheaper than a slave. You provide your own shelter, pay your own bills.”

Ever the multitasker, she stuck her tongue out and clicked her seat belt at the same time. Show-off. I saw an opening and floored it onto Central. Timing was everything. The files flew off Cookie’s lap. She grabbed for them then yelped. “Paper cut!”

“That’s what you get for sticking your tongue out at me.”

Sucking on the side of her finger, she cast a vicious scowl before pulling her hand back to get a good look at her injury. “Does workman’s comp cover paper cuts?”

“Do chickens lay snowballs?”

Just over two hours later, we were sitting in a charming living room in Ruiz with a lovely woman named Hy who served us Kool-Aid in teacups. Hy looked part Asian, most likely Korean, but her husband had been a blond-haired, blue-eyed pilot in the navy, and they’d met when he was on leave in Corpus Christi, Hy’s hometown set in the deep south of Texas. And she had the twang to prove it. She was tiny with a round face and graying black hair cut in a bob along her jaw. The white blouse and khaki pants she wore helped her seem younger than her years, though she looked as delicate as the teacups she handed us.

“Thank you,” I said when she offered me a napkin.

“You want cookies?” she asked, her Texas accent at odds with her Asian features.

“No, thank you,” Cookie said.

“I’ll be back.” She rushed off to the kitchen, her flip-flops padding along the carpet as she walked.

“Can I just take her home with me?” Cookie asked. “She’s adorable.”

“You can, but that’s called kidnapping and is actually frowned upon by many law enforcement agencies.” I chuckled into my teacup when she offered me a scowl. Apparently, paper cuts made her grumpy.

Hy trod back with a plate of cookies in her hands. I smiled as she handed it to me. “Thank you so much.”

“Those are good cookies,” she said, sitting in a recliner opposite us.

After placing one on my napkin, I handed the plate to Cook. “Mrs. Insinga, can you tell us what happened?”

We’d told her we were here to ask her about her daughter when we introduced ourselves on her doorstep. She was kind enough to let us in.

“That was so long ago,” she said, withdrawing inside herself. “I can still smell her hair.”

I put my cup down. “Do you have any idea what happened?”

“Nobody knows,” she said, her voice faltering. “We asked everybody. The sheriff interviewed all the kids. Nobody knew anything. She just never came home. Like she disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

“Did she go out with a friend that night?” The pain of her daughter’s disappearance resurfaced, emanated out of Hy. It was disorienting. It made my heart pound, my palms sweat.

“She wasn’t supposed to leave. She snuck out her window, so I have no idea if she was with anyone.”

Hy was struggling to control her emotions, and my heart went out to her.

“Can you tell me who her closest friends were?” I asked. Hopefully we would at least leave with a few contacts.

But Hy shook her head in disappointment. “We’d lived here only a few weeks. I hadn’t met any of her friends yet, though she did talk about a couple of girls from school. I’m not positive they were close — Hana was painfully shy — but she said one girl was very nice to her. After Hana disappeared, the girl moved to Albuquerque to live with her grandmother.”

“Mimi Marshal,” I said sadly.

She nodded. “Yes. I told the sheriff they were friends. He said he questioned all the high school children. Nobody knew anything.”

I couldn’t ethically bring up Kyle Kirsch’s name. We had no evidence that he was actually involved in any of this. But I decided to approach it from a different angle. “Mrs. Insinga, were there any boys? Did she mention a boyfriend?”

Hy folded her hands in her lap. I got the feeling she didn’t want to think of her daughter in that way, but the girl was at least fifteen when she disappeared, possibly sixteen. Boys were very likely a big part of her thought process.

“I don’t know. Even if she had liked someone, she would never have told us. Her father was very strict.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said when she mentioned her husband. She’d told us he died almost two years ago.

She bowed her head in gratitude. After steering the conversation to greener fields, asking about her hometown and what she missed most about Texas, Cookie and I stood and walked to the door.

“There is something else,” she said as she led us out. Cookie was already headed toward the Jeep. “We began getting money deposited directly into our account every month about ten years ago.”

I stopped and turned to her in surprise.

“I didn’t want to believe it had anything to do with Hana, but I have to be honest with myself. Why would anyone give us money for no reason?”

That was a good question. “Is it transferred from another account?”

She shook her head. Of course not. That would have been too easy. “It’s always a night deposit,” she added. “One thousand dollars cash on the first of every month. Like clockwork.”

“And you have no idea who it is?”

“None.”

“Did you talk to the police?”

“I tried,” she said with a shrug, “but they didn’t want to waste the resources to stake out either bank location when there really wasn’t a crime being committed. Especially since we refused to file any charges.”

I nodded in understanding. It would have been a hard point to argue with the authorities.

“My husband and I had tried a few times to see who was doing it, but if we were staking out one location, the deposit was made at the other. Every time.”

“Well, it’s certainly worth looking into. May I ask you one more question?” I asked as Cookie turned at the end of the sidewalk to wait for me.

“Of course,” she said.

“Do you remember who the sheriff was at the time of Hana’s disappearance? Who the lead investigator was?”

“Oh, yes. It was Sheriff Kirsch.”

My heart skipped a beat, and a soft gasp slipped through my lips. Hoping my surprise didn’t alarm her, I said, “Thank you so much for your time, Mrs. Insinga.”

After we left, Cookie and I sat in Misery — the Jeep, not the emotion — a stunned expression on both our faces. I’d told her who the sheriff on the case had been.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to Cookie as she stared into space. “You told me Warren Jacobs is wealthy, right? He writes software programs for businesses all over the world.”

“Mm-hmm,” she hummed absently without looking at me.

“Then why does Mimi work?”

She turned to me then, her expression incredulous. “Just because her husband is wealthy, she can’t have a job? A little independence? An identity of her very own?”

I held up a palm. “Cook, can we put the feminist movement on hold for a moment? I’m asking for a reason. Hy told me someone has been making night deposits, putting a thousand bucks into her banking account on the first of every month for the last ten years. Harold and Wanda said Mimi visits them religiously. She brings the kids and stays the night with them on the first of every month. Cook, Mimi is making those deposits.”

She took a moment to think about what I said, then lowered her head and nodded in resignation. “But that would mean she feels guilty about something, wouldn’t it?”

“It would seem that way. But people feel guilty for different reasons, Cook. It doesn’t mean she did anything wrong.”

“She told her mom she’d made a mistake. Charley, what happened?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but I’ll find out. And I’d bet Garrett’s left testicle, it has something to do with our Senate hopeful.”

I turned the ignition key. Misery roared to life as Cookie stared out her plastic window.

“Do you have any idea what this means?” she asked.

“Besides the fact that Kyle Kirsch is most likely a murderer?”

“This means that we are about to bring felony charges against a United States congressman. A man who is hoping to be our next senator. A hometown hero and pillar of the community.”

Was Cookie having second thoughts because he was a bigwig? Bigwigs had to follow the constructs of the law just like medium-sized and little wigs.

She turned a starry-eyed expression on me, her aura brimming with a fiery passion. “God, I love this job.”