by Betty Webb
“Who are your sources?”
“A Pima who lives less than a mile from El Mesquite Business Park.”
“Wolf Ramirez, then.”
“I never said that.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“If you’re acquainted with Wolf Ramirez and know where he lives, then you already knew all this. Heck, every one of those Pima bungalows are so neat and tidy they could fit right into a Scottsdale suburb, so why’d you report there was a camp nearby?”
Just as I was beginning to think she wasn’t going to answer, she grumped, “In the old days we journalists researched and wrote our own stories, but today we read from scripts prepared by someone else.”
“You’re telling me you reported something you knew wasn’t true?”
“I pointed out the misinformation in the morning’s story meeting, but was overruled.”
“The newsroom holds a vote on whether a story is accurate or not?”
“I’d love to say you’re wrong.”
“But…”
“Say, Lena, you’re living on the Rez, aren’t you? With that hunky Pima guy? Jimmy Sisser?”
“Sisiwan. I still have my apartment on Main Street.” Because I was having trouble letting go of my independence.
“But he’s building a house for you, right?”
“He’s building a house, yes, but not necessarily for me. He has his own life.”
“Don’t we all, but I’ll bet you spent last night there. And I hear you like to ride around the Rez in the morning on that fabulous spotted horse of yours.”
“Appaloosa. Polly, could you please get to the point?” Like all reporters, she didn’t give two hoots where anyone lived unless it had to do with a story, so I didn’t trust all this friendly chatter.
“I also hear you’re the person who found that woman’s body.”
So that’s why she was being so chatty. “Where’d you hear that?”
A chuckle. “You didn’t immediately deny it, so thanks for confirming what I’d already guessed. What did she look like? Same age, maybe, as that woman found up at the business park? Do you think they were both murder victims? I mean, do we have a serial killer on our hands?”
God bless the Press. Leaping to conclusions was their stock in trade. It would have been pathetic, if they weren’t so often right. “Polly, I never saw the body found in the business park, just the, ah, woman found on the reservation proper. And before you go to town on this, no, I didn’t see any blood or any other sign of violence. For all I know it was a natural death. The other one, too. Hey, are you taping me?”
“Of course I am. Tell me, Lena Jones, well-known private investigator, how within a couple of days two women of about the same age wound up dying of natural causes on or near the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation.”
“I haven’t a clue. And you can quote me on that.”
“I will. Okay, gotta go. Places to go, producers to argue with.”
Dial tone.
“Interesting day,” Jimmy said later that evening while we roasted hot dogs over the outdoor fire ring.
We hadn’t closed the office until six, too late for Jimmy to cook one of his gourmet meals, but as far as I was concerned, there was nothing like an al fresco dinner eaten while listening to the music of the desert. Across from us, the horses munched on fresh alfalfa hay, and from inside the Airstream, Snowball and his mother were yowling for another can of Gourmet Feast. In the distance, a coyote tuned up for his nightly serenade.
“Polly was right about one thing,” I said, cuddling against Jimmy. “Two Caucasian women in their twenties dead in or near the Rez within the same week. They have to be connected.”
He nibbled at my ear. “Makes sense to me.”
“And that thing with Polly Yamaguchi? I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it. She knew there was no homeless camp where she said there was, yet she went ahead and reported a false story. Doesn’t anyone care about the truth anymore?”
Jimmy’s white teeth glistened in the moonlight. “As Pilate said, ‘What is truth?’”
The evening was balmier than usual for an October night, almost sixty degrees. Overhead, stars sparkled through a deep indigo sky, and the full moon glowed so bright it cast shadows. Scenting the sizzling hot dogs, the coyote yipped closer.
After eating, we stayed cuddled by the fire until the cuddles turned into something more.
35 years earlier
When Abraham tells them to gather by the fire ring near the old mine shaft, Helen is as eager as the others to hear the wisdom he will impart. Pure in his white robe, smiling in the firelight, his first words are soft as an angel’s while he shares his latest Revelation.
“God spoke to me last night.”
“Glory be!” Helen and her friends shout. Liam remains silent, and she almost hates him for his stubbornness. Doesn’t he realize they are in the presence of God’s Anointed One?
“Our Holy Father told me what we must do to regain his favor!”
“Glory be!”
“What did the first Abraham do?” their Prophet asks.
They stand in confused silence. Only last week, Abraham had taken away their Bibles, leaving only one left in the camp: his. But that was his right, wasn’t it? Only their Abraham knew the true nature of God, and was the only person among them qualified to interpret that holy but confusing book. Only their Abraham understood every passage. He was the Anointed One, their very own prophet.
As Abraham reminds them of this, his smile is gentle. “The first Abraham, my namesake, knew there could be no salvation until we learned to obey God’s commands.” Now his voice rises. “Every! Single! Command! There must be no doubting, no looking back! No care for self, only the Lord’s Commandments!” His voice lowered. “That first Abraham walked the difficult path of pure obedience, and so he and his followers found salvation. That’s what this is all about. We, who are striving to be true servants of God, must throw down our earthly desires to walk that same glorious path.”
“Glory be!” Helen’s voice has always been the loudest, something she took pride in.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Liam frown. He alone of the other men has refused to obey Abraham’s latest Revelation.
Liam leans toward her, whispers in her ear. “We need to get out of here.”
“Don’t overreact. Abraham’s just testing us.” Her husband means well, but he is wrong.
Liam whispers again. “Helen, two days ago Abraham ordered Dale to turn his wife over to him. And yesterday he started looking at Francine.”
Helen laughs. “Francine’s beautiful. No wonder he was looking.”
“I hear he did more than look last night.”
“You need to stop listening to rumors.” Helen knows that her husband doesn’t understand Abraham like she does, and that hurts her. Abraham only wants the best for everyone.
But that night Abraham sends for Helen.
Chapter Five
Polly Yamaguchi might not have had a problem with inaccuracies, but I did. The next morning I drove up to El Mesquite Business Park. The first body dump—the newspapers had been calling her Unicorn Woman because of her tattoo—had been found fifty yards beyond the well-lit parking lot, hidden by a stand of creosote and mesquite. Unicorn Woman’s body was long gone, but pieces of yellow police tape still fluttered from the low-hanging branches of a dying tree.
Another hundred yards to the east, cars rushed unconcernedly by on Loop 101. A mile to the south rose the fifteen-stories-high Talking Stick Resort and Casino. Theoretically, this entire area would have been a bad place to get rid of a body, because during the day, the nearby parking lot was heavily trafficked and bristled with CCTV cameras.
But at night…
Studying the area, I began to wonder if the first woman had been a body dump
, too, and if we had another serial killer on the loose. Our most recent serial killer—yes, the Valley had suffered through an entire string of them—had been dubbed the Serial Street Shooter because of his practice of driving around the city until he found someone he thought would be fun to shoot. By the time his killing spree ended, he had killed nine people and wounded several others. Therein lay a coincident, if it truly was a coincidence. Before the Serial Street Shooter’s reign of terror, a man known as the Baseline Rapist had also murdered nine people before he’d been caught.
Nine.
Both serial killers used firearms to dispatch their victims, whereas neither Reservation Woman nor Unicorn Woman had been shot.
Another call to Sylvie was in order.
“You again.” Sylvie didn’t sound happy to hear my voice.
“Yep, me again. This morning I drove up to El Mesquite Business Park, where Unicorn Woman’s body was found.”
“Of course you did.”
“Anything new on the autopsy?”
“Nope.” Sylvie was a woman of few words.
“The woman had light-colored hair, right?”
“Yep.”
“Blond? Or light brown?”
“Blond,” she huffed. “Don’t go mixing up your bodies. The gal on the Rez had light brown hair; our body’s hair was frigging daisy-yellow.”
I remembered Reservation Woman’s stick-thin arms and legs. “Was Unicorn Woman malnourished?”
“Nothing but bones. Well, in a manner of speaking. She still had most of her skin.”
“Any sign of violence?”
“Nope. Except for the coyote bites.”
“What age?”
“Twentyish. Same as your gal.”
“Have any twentyish Caucasian women been reported missing in Maricopa County in the last month or so?”
“First thing we looked for, and nope.”
“Any fresh leads on her ID?”
“Nope.”
“Has the Medical Examiner’s artist finished the sketch?”
“Yep.”
“When’s it going to be released to the media?”
“Today sometime. Or maybe next year.”
“There are no homeless camps anywhere near that office complex, Sylvie.”
“I know that.”
“Are Yarnell and Telez still working that case?”
“Yeah, and they don’t like you any more than I do.”
“Could you switch me over to one of them?”
“They’re busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Breathing.”
The conversation being no longer fun, I said, “Well, thanks a million for your help.”
“We at Scottsdale PD always aim to please.”
Dial tone.
As Sylvie had promised in her own sweet way, the ME artist’s sketch was released in time to make the noon news, which I watched on my office computer. The sketch showed a bland-featured Caucasian woman with hollow cheeks, and short daisy-yellow hair swept back from her face. She bore a passing resemblance, at least in type, to Reservation Woman, which meant she could have been anyone.
Something about Unicorn Woman’s gaunt face, though…
“What?” Jimmy said, turning away from his computer.
“What do you mean ‘what’?”
“You were making a weird noise.”
“I was?”
“Not quite a grumble, but definitely not a coo.”
I gestured to the picture on my monitor. “Come over here and take a look. Ever see her before?”
After studying the face on the screen—the station kept the sketch up in the left hand corner throughout the news segment—Jimmy shook his head. “Never met her, at least not that I can remember. I don’t recall her showing up in any of our other investigations, either. Didn’t the Medical Examiner say she died from malnutrition?”
“‘Coronary brought about by malnutrition’ is the way it was worded.”
“Well, my first thought is that she looks a lot like those anorexic teens we’ve been reading about lately.”
He was right. Encouraged by a host of pro-ana—or pro-anorexia—websites and blogs, Maricopa County had recently seen several teenage girls die from what could best be described as starvation. Attempts to shut the websites down had been unsuccessful. These sites, most often run by other troubled teens, offered young girls exercise advice, purging advice, and diet advice of the food-makes-you-fat-so-don’t-eat-it kind.
“The ME described Unicorn Woman as twentyish,” I reminded him. “Around the same age as the woman I found.”
“Teens aren’t the only people afflicted with anorexia nervosa. Or even only females. I knew a guy…” Jimmy went on to tell me about a college friend who had almost died from the complications of anorexia nervosa before his family could organize an intervention. After several months of treatment, he fought his way back to health, but at six-foot-two, weighing one hundred and ten, he’d still had a long way to go. Then, not quite a year after his hospitalization, he began starving himself again. “He died at nineteen from a coronary brought on by malnutrition. Just like Unicorn Woman. So, see? Her death could be natural causes.”
“If you can call anorexia ‘natural.’” I looked at my watch. “Hey, it’s fifteen to one. Let’s grab some lunch. I’m starved.”
After a pig-out of Thai food at Malee’s On Main, I didn’t feel like returning to the office, but as I drank a fill-up of ice tea, I saw Harold Slow Horse walking down the street with Clint Moran. Clint’s bald head gleamed in the midday sun, and he lugged an expensive-looking computer satchel.
“Here comes trouble,” I said to Jimmy.
He looked out the restaurant window and scowled. “Let’s play hooky. Maybe the staff will let us sneak out the kitchen door.” His face lit up. “It’s a beautiful day to go riding. Big Boy was saying to me just the other day that he wasn’t getting enough exercise.”
“My horse doesn’t talk to me.”
“Considering Adila’s temperament, you should probably be happy about that.”
“Don’t insult my horse.”
While we defended our respective equines, Harold and Clint stopped at Desert Investigations and peered through the closed glass door.
“Thank God we turned off the lights,” I said.
“Uh, sorry to tell you, but I left a note on the front door saying we’d be back at one-thirty.”
“What time is it?”
“One-thirty.”
Being grown-ups, we paid our check and walked across the street.
“Ya ta hay, you two,” Harold said.
“Hi, Harold,” Jimmy said. “Clint.”
Jimmy is friendlier than I am, so I only nodded at Harold, cutting the deprogrammer out of the gesture. While the computers were waking up, the two sat down: Harold by Jimmy’s desk, Clint by mine.
“I have nothing to say to you, Clint.”
“You will when you hear what I’ve found out, Lena.”
I pretended to be engrossed by the icons on my monitor.
“Don’t you want to know?”
If I ignored him, maybe he’d go away.
As Jimmy and Harold settled into a friendly chat, Clint continued to badger me by asking questions I had no intention of answering. Didn’t I want to know about the former-Phoenix Suns forward who’d just joined Kanati? Didn’t I want to know about Kanati’s mind-control methods? Didn’t I want to know about yadda yadda this, yadda yadda that?
I was getting pretty good at ignoring his listing of Kanati’s supposed recruits until he mentioned Roger Gorsky. A year earlier, Marie Gorsky, Roger’s wife, had hired Desert Investigations to locate him. As was so often the case in marital disappearances, the CEO of Neptune Computing Solutions had gone out to buy a pack of c
igarettes and never returned. We’d urged her to file a police report, but even the combined resources of Scottsdale PD and Desert Investigations hadn’t been enough to track him down. It wasn’t a money situation. Marie, the heiress to a soft drink company, had considerable financial resources of her own, but she was worried about her husband’s welfare. Although her calls to Desert Investigations had tapered off, every month or so she still called to ask if there had been any sightings. My answer had always been in the negative.
The icons on my monitor not being all that interesting, I eventually caved. “Are you going to tell me Roger Gorsky is part of that Kanati group?”
“Thought that would get ya.”
“Spit it out, Clint.”
“Yes, the famously missing Roger Gorsky, one-time high muckety-muck of Neptune Computing Solutions, has surfaced in Kanati. He’s looking terrific, believe it or not.”
Besides the fact that Marie still cared for her errant husband, the main reason she was concerned about Roger’s welfare was that he had been in poor health. Although suffering from Type 2 diabetes, he’d smoked too much, drank too much, and despite being only five-eight, tipped the scales at almost three-fifty.
Clint had never been a stickler for the truth, but ever-hopeful, I attempted to get it out of him via a little flattery. “As infamous as you’ve become these days, I know you’d never make it past the guard, so how’d you find out Gorsky was hiding out down there?”
He pulled a manila folder out of the case and handed it to me. Inside was a series of aerial photographs of the compound. In one I saw a man who looked like a thinner Roger Gorsky playing a game of croquet with a sexy, headband-wearing redhead. He was looking straight up at the camera.
“Drone,” Clint explained. “Gotta love those things.”
“You’re aching to go back to prison, aren’t you? Miss the food?” I handed the manila folder back. “Your drone’s photography skills need work. This photo is blurry.”
“Not blurry enough you can’t recognize Mr. Gorsky. When you took his case, you pretty much littered the state of Arizona with missing person fliers. One of them wound up in my hot little hands, and while I was figuring out a way to extract another missing person, Chelsea Cooper-Slow Horse, of course, I happened to spot your guy. Being the enterprising man that I am, I turned the drone around and took these beauties.” He waved the folder at me.
