Crimson Lake Road (Desert Plains) Read online

  PRAISE FOR VICTOR METHOS

  A Killer’s Wife

  “A Killer’s Wife is a high-stakes legal thriller loaded with intense courtroom drama, compelling characters, and surprising twists that will keep you turning the pages at breakneck speed.”

  —T. R. Ragan, New York Times bestselling author

  “Exquisitely paced and skillfully crafted, A Killer’s Wife delivers a wicked psychological suspense wrapped around a hypnotic legal thriller. One cleverly designed twist after another kept me saying, ‘I did not see that coming.’”

  —Steven Konkoly, Wall Street Journal bestselling author

  “A gripping thriller that doesn’t let up for a single page. Surprising twists with a hero you care about. I read the whole book in one sitting!”

  —Chad Zunker, bestselling author of An Equal Justice

  OTHER TITLES BY VICTOR METHOS

  Desert Plains Series

  A Killer’s Wife

  Other Titles

  The Hallows

  The Shotgun Lawyer

  A Gambler’s Jury

  An Invisible Client

  Neon Lawyer Series

  Mercy

  The Neon Lawyer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Victor Methos

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542020947

  ISBN-10: 1542020948

  Cover design by Christopher Lin

  CONTENTS

  1

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  3

  4

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  6

  7

  8

  9

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  11

  12

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  36

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  42

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  44

  45

  46

  47

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  49

  50

  51

  52

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  80

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  FBI special agent Cason Baldwin withdrew his firearm as he leaned against the exterior of the cabin. He took several deep breaths to calm himself, but still the jittery rush of adrenaline coursed through him. He glanced toward the sheriff’s deputies silhouetted in the darkness behind him and nodded.

  He held up three fingers . . . then two . . . then one.

  Heaving a battering ram, Detective Lucas Garrett smashed through the front door, then leapt aside. Everyone else poured into the cabin. The abandoned structure had no electricity, and barely any moonlight shone through the windows. Baldwin lifted his flashlight with his free hand.

  Shouts of “Clear!” echoed through the cabin as each room was searched.

  “Got something!” a voice shouted from the kitchen. Baldwin made his way over.

  She was laid out on the kitchen table, a young uniformed deputy standing beside her. He looked petrified, which Baldwin could understand—it wasn’t every day the locals, or even the FBI, came across something as monstrous as this.

  Garrett came up behind Baldwin and said, “Rest of the house is empty. No sign of him.” That he barely glanced at the body was no surprise—Baldwin had long known Garrett, a former army drill instructor and now a veteran homicide detective with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office, to be unresponsive to horrific crime scenes.

  “We got any floodlights?” Baldwin asked as he trained his flashlight along the body. The victim wore a black tunic that went from the base of her neck down to just below her upper thighs. Her head was completely wrapped in white bandages, and the bandages were soaked through with blood over the face. She had beautifully detailed tattoos running up and down her arms.

  “Got a deputy bringing some up.”

  It was hard to tell in this light, but Baldwin wondered if she had been beaten before death. The pathologist had suggested that the first victim, Kathy Pharr, had been beaten before dying.

  Underneath the bandages on Kathy Pharr, who they’d found four weeks ago, the killer had sliced between her eyebrows with a razor, wide enough to ensure the blood soaked the thick white dressings. The single cut had split open the skin so that it appeared almost like a third eye.

  Garrett sighed. “I’m getting sick of this shit, Cason. Been doin’ this too long.”

  Baldwin ran the beam of light over the victim’s bare feet. “You and me both, brother.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of taking off? Took you as a Bureau lifer, through and through.”

  Baldwin glanced toward the door, where some of the deputies had gathered and were talking in hushed but excited tones. Where was the damn floodlight? “Don’t know what I’m thinking. But seeing this”—he motioned to the body—“every day for the rest of my life is not how I want to spend my golden years.”

  Garrett nodded. “Helluva way to go.” He bent down near the bandages over the face and said, “Hope you went quick, little gal.”

  The body violently bucked to life.

  It nearly fell off the table as it thrashed and sucked for breath, a muted scream emanating from underneath the bandages. Garrett jumped backward and tripped over a chair, slamming against the wall as he fell. The young deputy lifted his weapon and put his finger on the trigger. Baldwin held out his hand and bellowed, “Lower your weapon, damn it!”

  The deputy—eyes wide, hands trembling—lowered the firearm as Garrett got to his feet, uttering a string of profanities.

  “I’m going to touch your shoulders now,” Baldwin said to the woman. He laid her back down on the table as she fought him, trying to claw at his face. “Hold her arms.”

  The deputy stood there a second, and Baldwin said, “Deputy, pull it together. I need you to hold her arms.”

  He holstered his firearm and pinned her arms to the table. Baldwin held out his hand to Garrett and said, “Hand me your knife.” Garrett passed over the knife he kept clipped to his belt. As gently as he could, Baldwin slit the bandages up the side. They slipped off a face
slick with blood. The woman opened eyes that were wide and frantic as Baldwin said, “It’s okay . . . it’s okay, you’re safe now.”

  She sobbed uncontrollably, still trying to hit him, as Baldwin shouted, “We need medical. Now!”

  2

  Reggie’s was a local Vegas cop dive owned by two former highway patrolmen. It was always crowded and stank of booze and cigarette smoke, and the food was greasy. Assistant US Attorney Jessica Yardley had been there only once, seen some vice detectives snorting cocaine off a table—no one had even glanced in their direction—and never been back.

  An elderly homeless woman stood in front of Reggie’s, begging for change. A man with two women, all of them clearly drunk already, even though it was early afternoon, held out a twenty-dollar bill for her. Her face lit up, and her smile was so big it seemed to smooth her wrinkles.

  At the last second, before her fingers could touch it, the man pulled back the bill, and the three of them laughed as they went inside. Leaving her staring at them and probably wondering why someone would be so needlessly cruel.

  Yardley took out a twenty from her purse and gave it to her.

  Baldwin sat in a booth by himself, though the light inside was so dim that Yardley had to scan the place twice before she saw him. He had a steak and beer in front of him. His jacket was off, and his biceps bulged the sleeves of his T-shirt and revealed the wiry blue veins he’d developed the last year since starting to lift weights. He’d had a problem for a while—opioids—and Yardley was glad to see him looking so healthy. Occasionally, a tug of regret would rear its head when she saw him, letting her know that there was something between them that they had missed. Something that should have been but wasn’t. She saw that something now as he smiled at her.

  She sat down on the opposite side of the booth.

  “So it’s really happening?” he said. “You’re really throwing in the towel?”

  A waitress came over, and Yardley ordered a beer and leaned back into the cushions. People erupted at the bar over a play in a basketball game on the televisions. She waited until the noise died down. “I wouldn’t describe it that way.”

  “How would you describe it?”

  “I’m just tired, Cason. You can only deal with the insane for so long before it starts seeping into you.”

  “I just had this exact conversation with a detective.” He chewed a piece of steak. “I was thinking, though. You work law enforcement or prosecution too long and you treat everything as black and white, bad guys and good guys. There’s some gray areas in the law, too. Maybe you need to transfer and work in those areas more. It might surprise you to find it’s not all black and white.”

  The beer came, and she took a sip. It was warm and frothy.

  “I have a trial coming up. A man who killed his stepson because he put a hole in the wall when he was moving a dresser. He hit him with a hammer and crushed his skull. Nothing surprises me anymore except the stupidity of the reasons people kill each other over.”

  He took a drink of his beer, his eyes never leaving hers. “Two weeks left, right?”

  She nodded.

  He took out a silver-colored thumb drive and put it on the table in front of her. “Before you leave, would you mind looking at that for me? Your replacement is probably going to be the one working it, so it’d be great if you could go through it with them.”

  “What is it?”

  “A homicide and attempted homicide. We think there was sexual assault, so the Bureau can take it if we want. It’s with the Sheriff’s Office for now, though. The cases are linked. You’ll see why when you go through my narratives.”

  “There’s no point, Cason. I’m leaving no matter what.”

  “I know. I’m not trying to scam you into staying. I just think this is something you should look at. Who is your replacement, by the way?”

  “Kyle Jax. He’s coming up from the Wyoming office. Younger prosecutor, twenty-eight, I think. He hasn’t worked Special Victims before.”

  Baldwin took a long pull off his beer, then said, “Well, this is a shit case to get as his first one, then.”

  Yardley took the long route home to White Sands, Nevada. Two weeks. It was true what she’d told Baldwin—she wasn’t having any second thoughts about leaving the US Attorney’s Office, or her house, or the area. Too many disturbing things had happened here. But there had also been wonderful things, endearing memories she would carry with her the rest of her life, and she was making an effort to let her last impressions be of those.

  Her daughter was one of those wonderful things. Seventeen and a genius. When Yardley got home, Tara went to work: an internship at a robotics company, working on machine learning algorithms. Yardley didn’t always understand Tara’s explanations about what exactly she did, but she assured her mother it was going to revolutionize the world one day. Yardley believed it, and it was one of the reasons she felt the timing was right for this move: Tara had found her footing in life.

  When Yardley was alone, she took a long, hot shower and then got into sweats and poured a glass of white wine. She sat at the computer in her home office and stared at the thumb drive Baldwin had given her, running her fingers over the smooth plastic.

  A deep sigh escaped her, and she leaned back in the chair and gazed at the ceiling. She thought about the new home she was buying in a small city called Santa Bonita. A tree outside in the front yard was so massive it prevented sunlight from entering the front of the house. She wondered why the current owners had never cut it down, but it was the first thing she planned to do. She wanted sunlight in her new life, not black and white, not even gray areas.

  Two weeks.

  She plugged the thumb drive into her computer. She would read the reports, but she wasn’t going to do more than that. She had neither the will nor the energy.

  The reports were succinct. Two victims: Kathy Pharr, who had died, and Angela River, who was found alive less than a mile from where Kathy Pharr’s body was discovered. Both women had been placed in black tunics, their heads wrapped with white bandages. Their attacker had slit open their brows with what the pathologist guessed was a razor, soaking the bandages in blood. The SAFE kits and examinations revealed some evidence of sexual assault: some injuries seen with a colposcope, and semen found inside Kathy Pharr’s vaginal canal. Both victims had been beaten.

  All Angela River remembered was a blinding pain in her head from something hard slamming into her skull as she came out to her car in a mall parking lot, and then waking up on a table. Unable to breathe and thinking she was blind until Baldwin cut the bandages off. Traces of bleach had been found on both women’s skin. Their nails had been clipped and hair trimmed. The killer, or killers, had wanted them pristine before death.

  Kathy Pharr had been found sitting in a wooden chair inside an empty cabin. Medical glue, a type they couldn’t identify by brand, had been used on her skin to keep the body in place. The autopsy revealed the cause of death as organ failure, though the cause of the organ failure was as yet undetermined. The blood panels had shown nothing but alcohol and prescription medications for depression and anxiety in Kathy Pharr’s blood, and nothing in Angela River’s.

  Both crimes had occurred in an unincorporated area outside of Las Vegas known as Crimson Lake Road.

  Yardley opened the folder with the photos and videos the forensic technicians had taken.

  The first photo was Kathy Pharr in a chair. Yardley’s heart skipped a beat, and she let out a quiet gasp. She moved quickly to the sketches of how Angela River had been posed. After staring at them for what seemed like a long time, she texted Baldwin:

  We need to meet right now.

  3

  The Low Desert Plains Correctional Institute looked like a bunker meant to withstand an atomic blast. Tara Yardley stared at it from the parking lot as she finished a soda and some fries.

  She tossed the empty containers into a trash bin on the way into the facility. She liked coming during the last hour of open visitor
s’ hours. The guards were just going through the motions by then and never looked too closely at her ID or asked many questions.

  Her mother thought she was at her internship, and she always had a twinge of guilt when she was here because she had to lie. But she was doing this for her mother and knew it was good for both of them long term, even if her mother would be horrified.

  After checking in with the front desk staff and being searched, she was allowed through the metal detectors. They held on to her ID—a good fake, stating she was twenty-two—as well as the forged press badge proclaiming her a reporter with the Las Vegas Sun. She had, briefly, considered becoming a journalist. The thrill of bouncing around the world investigating stories sounded exciting, but ultimately she knew the job would become irrelevant. None of the old professions would exist in the near future: Machines and machine learning were on the cusp of taking over. More and more, they would overtake all functions in society, and she was glad for it. Machines were indifferent. Machines couldn’t choose to be evil.

  Death row was rarely quiet, but today it seemed completely subdued. Perhaps it was the weather. She had read weather deeply affected the moods of death row inmates, and she was curious what the weather had been like on the day of their crimes. Dark and gloomy, she guessed.

  The room was cold, and the metal stool she sat on was uncomfortable. It didn’t matter. Nothing in this facility was comfortable, or meant to be.

  Eddie Cal was brought out a few moments later. He sat down across the plastic-covered glass divider. She stared at his graying hair and the pale forearms that had been thicker and more muscular last year. Age was slowly eating away at him. Her father, the loathsome murderer of a dozen people, the Dark Casanova who’d terrorized Las Vegas for over three years, was being humbled by time just like everyone else.

  Tara waited until the guard left the room and then took a small device out of a secret pocket in her purse and set it on her lap. Something she had designed herself. It let out a high frequency static sound—nothing any of the guards would hear, but the only thing the audio devices in this room would be recording was a grainy hiss.

  “Did you find him?” Cal said.

  “Yes. Did you get the food I sent?”

  “I did, thank you. The guards eat at least half of everything before it gets to me, but I still enjoy the surprise of seeing what’s in the box. I have little surprise in my days anymore.”