ALSO BY STEVEN COOPER
Desert Remains
Published 2018 by Seventh Street Books®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Dig Your Grave. Copyright © 2018 by Steven Cooper. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Cover design by Nicole Sommer-Lecht
Cover image © Creative Market
Cover design © Prometheus Books
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cooper, Steven, 1961- author.
Title: Dig your grave : a Gus Parker and Alex Mills novel / Steven Cooper.
Description: Amherst, NY : Seventh Street Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024937 (print) | LCCN 2018026537 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884816 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884809 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Police Procedural. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.O583 (ebook) | LCC PS3603.O583 D54 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024937
Printed in the United States of America
For Paul Aaron Milliken.
Here’s the dedication you’ve been asking for.
Finally. Deserved.
CONTENTS
Cover
Also By Steven Cooper
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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19
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22
23
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25
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42
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
He’d rather be at Starbucks. Or Hava Java. Or Luci’s.
He’d rather be spending Saturday morning in a grubby sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, staring into the sleepy eyes of his beautiful wife, Kelly, while sipping steamy cups of espresso among whiskery hipsters who wear wool hats year-round. In the desert.
Yes, on a lazy Saturday morning, he’d rather be judging millennials.
He’d rather be reading. Or rereading. For his birthday, Kelly bought him a handsomely bound special edition of To Kill a Mockingbird that he’s been wanting to devour, as if for the first time.
He’d rather be tossing a ball with his son, Trevor.
Or hiking at Squaw Peak.
Detective Alex Mills of the Phoenix Police Department would rather be undergoing electrolysis of the gonads on this otherwise lazy Saturday morning than being here, doing this.
Instead of staring into Kelly’s sleepy eyes, Mills is staring into a hole in the ground. Not a very deep hole, maybe a foot and a half, a gash really, a pit. In this hole, staring back at him, is a dead John Doe, his arms and legs akimbo like an acrobat who fell to earth and missed the net. It’s eight thirty, about sixty-five cool degrees, typical for an early-March morning in the valley. The smell of death is starting to rise. Mills guesses the body has been here overnight, that John Doe was murdered shortly before midnight—but time of death is not his job; that task belongs to the Office of the Medical Examiner. Judging by the dried blood around the eyes, the black-and-purple bruises that seep from the forehead down, the corpse’s dented head, and the crater in the crown, Mills concludes that John Doe is the victim of a rather unfriendly head bashing. But cause of death is not his job either. Again, the OME. Sorry to bother the medical examiner, but the fact is Alex Mills has not been denied the piety of a lazy Saturday with his wife to perform an autopsy. He’s here for two reasons: to figure out who killed John Doe and to figure out why. Of course, that won’t happen right now, right here, at the crime scene. Mills doesn’t even know at this point if the crime scene is the place of death. Though this crime scene, it could be strongly argued, is the ultimate place of death.
Mills lifts his head from the hole in the ground. He scans the horizon. There is death everywhere. Lovely, landscaped, manicured death. Marked by statuaries of imported marble, exquisitely sculpted. Like something you’d see outside an Italian palazzo, not here at Valley Vista Memorial Gardens in Phoenix, Arizona.
A gathering of marbleized angels, birds, saints, human hands clasped in prayer, you name it—they’re all frozen in time here at Valley Vista. Samuel Shine was a golfer, apparently. Mary Harrison Delahunt was a fan of roses. Gordon D. Hancock loved dogs. With such a swanky neighborhood, the property values at Valley Vista Memorial Gardens are said to be double the value of your average Phoenix home. This is where the privileged go to rest. The same luxury had not been afforded John Doe, however. His grave is marked not by marble statuary but by a cardboard sign roughly excised from a carton that was once the home of a Whirlpool refrigerator. Add a thick tree branch and some hearty duct tape, and you have a grave marker staked into the ground that reads the following:
I’m Sorry
That I fucked over everybody
I got what I deserved
And I picked the place myself
Alex Mills is shaking his head, bewildered by the fucking crazy world that produces crazy people who do crazy things when, really, people should just go to Starbucks, or their favorite coffeehouse, and fucking relax.
“We recovered the Sharpie, Alex,” a crime scene tech tells him from above.
He looks up. “What?” he barks. “You think the murder weapon was a Sharpie?”
“No, Alex. I don’t,” the tech replies, then points to the cardboard sign. “We believe the Sharpie was the writing instrument.”
Mills nods. “Right. That. Of course. Where’d you find the marker?”
“About thirty feet down that slope,” the tech says. “It was resting in the grass.”
“Interesting,” Mills says. “Prints?”
“Hopefully.”
Mills rises to his feet, gives his legs a shake to loosen his aging knees, and says, “Nice work.”
He takes in the view. It is, indeed, a vista of the valley. From this acreage of death you can look across Phoenix to the raging peaks of the Sierra Estrella mountain range and, to the left, the slightly less excited South Mountain. You can think yourself a poet, for a moment, sent here by God to interpret the erosion of time and find yourself completely inadequate, if not a fool, for presuming you can interpret anything this ancient.
What you c
an interpret, what Alex Mills is paid to interpret, is the erosion of life.
He looks at this crude grave below him once more. It was dug with irregular scoops; at least that’s what the skid marks from the shovel suggest. No one tried to be tidy. The dirt was tossed everywhere, the work of an amateur. Pebbles litter the grass. One of them snuck inside Mills’s tennis shoe and is rolling around in there like a pinball.
Befitting the clientele of Valley Vista, John Doe is wearing a suit jacket, dress shirt, no tie, as if he came from work. Or a cocktail party.
When she first inspected the victim, homicide detective Jan Powell, a former patrol officer who recently joined the Violent Crimes Bureau, had pointed to the dead man’s shoes and whispered, “Ferragamo.”
If only the body had been as easy to identify as the shoes.
No wallet. No ID. No business card. Nothing. The prints came back with no match to anything in the database.
But Alex Mills has a hunch. A good hunch. You don’t get to die in style and stay anonymous for long. John Doe is a VIP corpse. A member of the dead elite.
He has to laugh. And he does. Audibly. He drifts away, hoping his foolishness goes unnoticed. He has suddenly amused himself with the inevitable headline of the valley’s latest murder:
DEAD BODY FOUND AT CEMETERY
For once, the media will get it right.
2
Gus Parker wakes up eye level with a nipple. That’s all he sees: a big nipple in his face. He ponders the view. The entire aureole looks like some kind of solar system orbiting the sun, the individual planets obviously inspired by the hues of Mars. He’d pat himself on the back for his vivid imagination, but he doesn’t want to wake her. The nipple is the property of Billie Welch. That Billie Welch, the doe-eyed rock-and-roll legend who’s still rocking and rolling all these years after she first broke the hearts of young men and even younger boys, Gus among them. Her mysterious songs of heartbreak and solitude had been a rite of passage, had scored much of his high school encounters with love and lust, late-night drinking and drugging (nothing heavy, just the typical bong hits and shots of tequila). Eventually Gus Parker had lost track of the music of Billie Welch much the way you lose touch with an old lover. But, almost thirty years later, her career has endured and now he finds himself more often than not half-naked with her on weekend mornings.
They’ve been together for just about a year. Together—being altogether tentative. She plays New York, LA, London. He works part-time at Valley Imaging. He still lives in his little house in Arcadia. She still lives in a desert manse below Camelback Mountain, a few doors down from Beatrice Vossenheimer, through whom they met, the psychic matriarch of the Southwest and Gus Parker’s adopted “Aunt Bea.”
When she’s in town, not playing gigs, Billie likes to sleep in late. Very late. Until noon, at least. She’s a creature of the night, for sure, and Gus is learning that to be with Billie is to live within a time-zone-hopping jet lag; her world is upside down compared to his. This is why they can’t sleep together every night. He takes his mammograms and his ultrasounds very seriously. Likewise, the CT scans and the MRIs. Billie Welch may be worth many, many millions, but Gus Parker earns his living as a multi-certified imaging technician, not as a gigolo.
“You’re too old to be a gigolo,” Beatrice has told him.
In his early forties, he supposes she’s right.
But his feelings for Billie Welch have nothing to do with her fame or her fortune. His feelings for her have to do with the serenity in her eyes when she speaks, the intensity in her eyes when she sings, her laughter, her touch, and the way she acts toward others. He watches how kind and generous she is with friends and family, how patient and accommodating she is with fans. She sometimes talks in hippie poetry, much like she writes, but who is he to judge? After all, some people regard him as an aging hippie himself, what with his long, raffish hair, the beaded bracelets, the occasional yoga class, and, of course, the psychic visions. Contrary to his parents’ fears, Gus was not going mad back in his teenage years; he was going psychic. He considers it, the psychic thing, just great intuition. Others call it a “power.” Power shmower. It just is. He hears things and sees things that others don’t. He can’t control it or necessarily call upon it on cue like you might see in the movies or on TV, which is why he is reluctant to take on clients (though he does, mostly to relieve Beatrice of hers). When Gus says he has “visions,” he’s mostly referring to a visual manifestation of his intuition. Or sometimes it really is a sudden, vivid scene that plays out before his extra set of eyes, and most of the time it spooks him. When pressed, he will admit that his psychic gift has helped solve crimes. Which reminds him that he and Billie have a dinner date tonight with homicide detective Alex Mills of the Phoenix Police Department. He and Alex have worked together over the years, and they got closer, almost brotherly, on the last case.
Gus turns away from the nipple and looks at the time. Past noon. He senses that he’s losing the day, but then he listens to Billie breathing and realizes that he’s losing nothing. Still he thinks he ought to pick up the phone and ring the detective to confirm the where and when.
He’d like Vaguely, the best veggie restaurant in Phoenix, but he knows Alex will recoil at the suggestion (that’s not psychic; that’s just knowing Alex). Gus is not a vegetarian, so maybe he’ll suggest Tapatio Steakhouse. It’s one of the valley’s hottest restaurants (at the moment) and easily one of the best, making it nearly impossible to get a table. But if there’s one thing for which he doesn’t mind exploiting his relationship with Billie Welch, it’s getting dinner reservations.
But he better dial Alex first.
“This is Alex. You’ve reached my private line. If you’re a murderer and you’d like to confess, please dial 911. Otherwise, leave me a message, and if I’m not up to my neck in cases, I’ll call you back.” Beep.
“Yo, Alex, I’d like to report the murder of several cattle in the Northwest section of Phoenix. They will be taken to Tapatio Steakhouse tonight at seven thirty for identification and consumption by Parker, party of four. Please call to confirm.”
“Who was that, Gus?” It’s the sleepy, throaty voice of Billie Welch. She has rolled away from him now, her smooth, milky white back as beautiful as her breasts; he wants to kiss her shoulder, so he does.
“I was talking to Alex’s voice mail,” he tells her.
He likes the taste of her skin, the scent of her musky fragrance. So many men, so many men all over the world, would kill to be lying next to this woman, even now that her golden hair has silvered in places.
“Dinner plans?”
“In the works.”
Her beauty is timeless. You look into her eyes and you see years and years of everything. And yet she smiles like a little girl. Her kisses are soft and sensual. And yet she laughs like a giddy child. Her age has always been the subject of much intrigue. She liked creating mystery. Still does. Back when she first burst onto the national scene, everyone wanted to know about this doe-eyed creature with the silky voice; was she a child, or was she a woman? Gus remembers being aware of her in junior high school, fully infatuated by high school. The age thing is a moot point, after all. She’s almost eleven years older than Gus, and yet her timelessness negates the difference. She, the fantasy of so many men, and he, the surfer dude schmuck who had no idea what he was getting into, still doesn’t, only knows that she is not some kind of celebrity conquest for others to envy—she is as much a mystery to him, at times, as he is to her. She’s very much drawn to his psychic gifts, so curious, so enchanted, and yet there’s little he can explain. When people want to know about Billie Welch’s new “love interest,” Gus keeps a very low profile. And people do want to know. Fans and tabloids, alike.
She rolls over and smiles, and he can’t fathom her beauty, the alabaster skin, the moony eyes, those lips. He embraces those lips with his and holds them there until she laughs. “You’re holding my lips hostage.”
“I call it a f
rozen kiss. Maybe you can write a song about it.”
“I don’t think so,” she whispers. “How about ‘Strange Affection’? That sounds more Billie Welch.”
She refers to herself often in the third person, because Billie Welch is as much a brand as it is her name; he has come to learn that Billie Welch means many things to many people, to many people she will never know, and that’s probably as hard for him to understand as his very persuasive intuition is for her to grasp. She likes to talk about it, as if his psychic gifts are more likely to inspire a song than his kiss.
She throws her arm across his chest now, and he pulls her close.
“Tapatio is right around the corner from Valley Vista,” she says.
“Valley Vista?”
“Memorial Gardens. It’s a cemetery. I own a plot there.”
“Well, that’s pleasant.”
“Please don’t ever bury me there.”
He lifts his head and looks down into her eyes. “First of all, I’m not planning on burying you anytime soon. Second of all, if you don’t want to be buried there, why do you own a plot?”
She sighs. “Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“In case I have no heirs to carry out my true wishes, my body has a place to rest, but I hate that place. It’s way too gaudy for my liking.”
“What are your true wishes, Billie?”
“I want to be cremated with some of my music, some of the original songwriting in my journals, and I want the ashes buried here in Phoenix, maybe here at the house.”
“Not the house in Malibu? You love the ocean.”
“I love the ocean,” she purrs. “But I was born in the desert. And this is where I shall rest.”
“Okay. But I think we’re a ways off from that, Billie.”
“You never know,” she says to the ceiling. “Or do you?”
“What?”
“Do you ever know when death is imminent, Gus?” she asks, her eyes still fixed on the vaulted ceiling. “Can you see someone’s death? Can you see mine?”
“Yes, sometimes I do sense when death is imminent. I knew my mother was dying before I knew my mother was dying.”
Dig Your Grave Page 1
