by Jon Talton
The idea of serial killers didn’t enter the popular imagination until the late 1970s, but there were earlier examples of madmen who killed again and again such as the Boston Strangler. Yet there was nothing, on paper at least, that indicated the investigating officers were tying the cases together. And yet the victims were all young, single, middle-class working women with fair hair-two redheads and three blondes. I thought about what Opal Harvey had said about the city’s powerful citizens being terrified that the killings would hurt economic growth. History was full of stranger motivations behind cover-ups.
The contents of the reports were only a start, though. I was beginning to realize how incomplete, and sometimes misleading, police reports could be. I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning trying to find other people involved in the Stokes case. Forty-plus years can erase a lot of lives. I got another break when I tracked down a retired Phoenix cop whose name had appeared on the initial report of Rebecca’s disappearance.
John Rogers was an enormous man, a Navajo, who was squeezed into a wheelchair in the lobby of a middling nursing home on the west side. His grip was very strong and his gaze very direct.
“You look too damned smart to be a deputy,” he said. “When I was on the job, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was a joke. Bunch of fat boys running the jail.”
I showed him my ID, but he waved it away.
“Hell, I’d see you even if you weren’t a cop,” he said. “First visit I’ve had in four years. My family, shit. My son’s a lawyer in L.A., and my daughter’s in detox somewhere. I guess they don’t want to smell the shit and piss here. You married?”
I shook my head.
“You’re lucky.”
I told him why I was there, watching my story register in the ruin of cracks that encased his old eyes. A Phoenix cop to the end, he wanted to know why MCSO was investigating, and I reminded him that the bodies had been found in the county.
He closed his eyes for a moment and then said, “I took that missing person’s report. From her uncle, the governor. He was a very worried man. The girl was supposed to have come home on the Golden State Limited the night before. She never went into work the next day.”
I heard a woman’s voice wailing off down a corridor.
“They found her about two weeks later,” he went on, cocking his massive head. “A Public Service crew, as I remember it. Then they turned it over to the detectives, and that was that.”
“If that was that, why do you remember it?”
“Oh, an old man’s memory,” he said. “She seemed so pretty, from her pictures. And back in those days, things like that hardly ever happened. It just stayed with me.”
“Did you feel any pressure from the governor’s office to keep the case quiet?”
“We were told by our sergeant not to say a word about it. The newspapers never said she was old man McConnico’s niece.”
I asked him if he remembered any other cases like it, and his face changed a bit, collapsed a little on itself.
“There were some others around that time.”
“The Creeper?” I ventured.
“Whatever,” John Rogers said. “I know that’s what some cops were talking about. Shit, I was just a patrolman. Only Indian on the force. First Indian on the force.”
I listed the other four body drops and asked why the detectives hadn’t linked the cases.
“Who the hell knows?” he rasped, angry now. “Who knows why detectives do anything? No offense.”
“None taken,” I said. “Did you respond to any Creeper calls?”
“Not that I know of. But there were always prowlers, and some might have been him, if there was a Creeper. Nobody really knew.”
“What did you think?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “What did I think? Let me tell you something. When that second girl was killed-Leslie was her name, I think-they found a Mexican who worked for the family gardener, and they thought they had their man. He’d been looking at her through the window at night; we knew that. Took him up to the fourth floor and beat him with saps for an hour, and he was ready to confess to anything. That’s how it was done then. The dicks thought they had solved that one, so how could the cases be linked?”
“So why isn’t that in the reports?”
“Because they beat him to death. Internal bleeding, didn’t show up at first. He died in the city jail overnight. They put him in a pauper’s grave, and that was that.”
***
Tuesday night, I stayed home to write an update for Peralta. I also needed to go over my lecture notes for the American history survey I was teaching at Phoenix College-another few bucks for my dwindling bank account. And I wanted to rewire the back porch light. So I got comfort food-chilies rellenos from Ramiro’s-settled behind Grandfather’s old desk in the study off the living room, and booted up the PowerBook. That’s when the doorbell rang.
Once again, Julie Riding was on my doorstep. This time, she wore a light blue denim shirt and blue jeans. Her hair was pulled back, and she looked startlingly like the Julie I had known twenty years before.
“I know I’m bothering you,” she said. I said something polite and invited her in.
Back in the facing chairs, I told Julie what I had found out about her sister, which wasn’t much. Her eyes were dreamy, unfocused, and she seemed drunk.
“I brought you something,” she said, handing over an envelope. “It has some of Phaedra’s things. Photos, an address book. That kind of thing.”
In my mind, I was still back in the fifties-with young John Rogers and Opal Harvey and Rebecca Stokes-and the dissonance of being pulled back made me a little cross.
“Julie, I can’t search for Phaedra,” I said. “I’m barely making a living. I said I’d make some inquiries, and I did. No Jane Does who match her description in the postmortem lab. No body drops…”
When I looked up, Julie’s face had reddened and she was crying. I instantly felt terrible.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to-”
“Goddamn you,” she said, sniffling. “You are still angry with me after twenty years.”
I poured us both a McClelland’s. She lighted a smoke.
“Do you know what happened after I left you?” she said.
I made no response.
“I went to San Diego for a week with Chet, whom you were so threatened by.…”
“Yeah, he was a wealthy heart surgeon, and I was a college student and part-time deputy making ten thousand dollars a year,” I said.
“And after a week, he told me he was going back to his wife. So I came back to Phoenix and started waiting tables.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Julie ignored me. “You thought I had this great life because of my looks.”
I started to protest, but she cut me off. “Yes, you did,” she said. “But it wasn’t a great life. I was so young, and I was just…just…overwhelmed by it all. All these men, all of them after me. I know you think it would be wonderful to be so desired, but it wasn’t that way. You’ll never know how lonely it is when somebody just wants to fuck you. I was just too young to know any better.”
I don’t know why I asked this, but it just came out: “Did you ever care about me?”
“Oh, David,” she said in a voice I had heard so many times before. “That’s history.”
She drank the scotch. “I was so fucked up then. Nobody should have wanted me.”
“I did,” I ventured.
“You didn’t know me,” she said. Fair enough, I thought.
“We had a very unhappy home life,” she went on. “I moved out when I was sixteen just to get away. I tried to keep you away from that. I was afraid if you knew, really knew about me, you’d just hate me.”
“I would never have hated you. All those years, I wondered about you.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, her voice a mix of anger and irony. “Do you really want to know? All those years I spent in dead-end jobs, a prett
y ornament on some guy’s arm. I got into cocaine, and God, I loved it.”
She stubbed out the cigarette and drank the last of her scotch. “There was always some asshole, thinking with his cock, who would buy it for me. Before he left me. Then I married a lawyer; God, what a mistake. He controlled me with coke and beat the shit out of me when I mouthed off to him. It was hell, but it was really hard to give up, too. Does that make any sense to you? I loved the money and the beautiful people and the feeling that the drugs gave me.”
I walked to her chair, put my hand on her shoulder, and she came into my arms. I held her a long time while she cried silently, angrily.
“I’m a mess, David,” she said finally. “Everything I touch turns bad.”
Chapter Five
“She got the looks in the family,” Julie said. “And the brains.”
We had moved over to the sofa, where the pictures were spread between us. I used Kleenex and scotch to nurse Julie through the tears; then I put a Charlie Parker CD on low and we got to work. I knew she was mind-fucking me, but, hell, I was lonely and it was nice to be needed, if only for the moment and on unreliable terms.
The photos showed a young woman, pretty in a fair, red-haired way that stood out in Phoenix, with its battalions of tanned hotties. Her finely boned face had an intensely direct stare. Her smile had that ironic, mocking quality that reminded me of Julie long ago. And that hair: the natural shade of flame titian. Phaedra was beautiful in a way that would have been dangerous to me, but I was always a sucker for redheads.
Julie blew her nose and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Lights. “You’re sure this is okay?”
“It was never a problem,” I said, and she lighted it. “If I were more politically correct, I’d have tenure.” I poured two more glasses of McClelland’s and asked her to walk me through the past year of Phaedra’s life.
“She’d been living with a man in Sedona. His name is Greg Townsend. Twenty years older. His father made a fortune in real estate. Very well-off.”
“Takes after her older sister?” I have such a mouth.
Julie smiled unhappily. “Anyway, they’d been living together for about three months.”
“They met how?”
“Oh, who knows,” Julie said. “She just told me she was in love, and that she was moving to Sedona.”
“How did he treat her?”
“Oh, he took her to London, Paris. Mexico every other weekend, seemed like. He had his own airplane. Bought her clothes, Indian art, whatever she wanted, I guess. But who knows what he was really like. Some real bastards can spend lots of money on you.”
“You two talked?”
“She’d call.”
“Did she seem happy?”
“It was always hard to tell with Phaedra. At first, yes.”
“Did he abuse her? Hurt her physically? Make threats?”
“No,” Julie said, leaning forward, seeming to search for the words. “She never mentioned anything like that, although she had been in a relationship like that a few years ago. Greg was-I don’t know, he seemed like a flake to me. New Age. One of these going-to-extremes athletes. Lots of money. But nothing real underneath.”
“Well, you know what they say, ‘No money, no life.’ How’d it end?”
“Let me put it this way, David. Phaedra was always good at making her escape. I think she looked at Mom and Dad together, looked at all my disasters in love-God, what a bunch of role models! — and she decided she was never going to be trapped. Never going to be dependent on a man. She walked. Her relationships always had a short half-life. Greg was no different. Phaedra called me one Sunday and said she was back in Phoenix, asked if she could stay with me a few days.”
“That was when?”
“In the spring. April, I guess.”
Julie said her sister got a job as an assistant to a photographer who had done some work for the Phoenician. I jotted the photographer’s name below Greg Townsend’s on the envelope. Phaedra started seeing a therapist and attending family gatherings again. She found a one-bedroom apartment in Scottsdale. She and Julie talked on the phone almost every night.
“Did she meet anybody else?”
“Nobody serious,” Julie said.
“Flirtations? One-night stands?”
Julie shrugged like an older sister. “She was fairly burned out on relationships. She felt very suffocated by Greg.”
“And nothing struck you as strange in the days or weeks before her disappearance? Nobody new in her life? Nothing about her personality that changed? No sense she felt in danger?”
“No. She seemed to be very healthy about it all. Which was new for Phaedra, because when she’d break up with a lover, she would usually just fall apart for a while. I was very distracted, though. My ex and I were in court. Visitation, custody, all that. Work was a nightmare.”
We talked maybe another half hour. Then I walked her out to her car, just like the other night.
The sun was gone, and the street was deserted except for a few parked cars. I could hear a set of sirens over on Seventh Avenue, running north from downtown.
“I’m not trying to be a selfish bitch,” Julie said. “I just need help. Phaedra is the only family I have really. Dad died five years ago, and Mom is more and more out of it. I just feel so scared about Phaedra.”
“I understand,” I said, and realized I had stepped into something that could have a really bad ending. I pushed the thought away.
We hugged out in the ovenlike heat, and for just a moment, stroking her hair, I felt like I had twenty years ago. Then she kissed me on the mouth, a nice kiss, and she drove away.
Back inside, Charlie Parker had finished and the house felt as if it hadn’t been lived in for a hundred years. I looked around, freshly aware of how odd or brilliant Grandfather’s floor plan was. The high-ceiling living room with bookcases behind a stairway that went nowhere-well, it went to the garage apartment in back, via an open-air passage. The illusion of space, when the house only had two small bedrooms. The quirky charm of a garden courtyard off the little study that connected to the living room. I suddenly missed my grandparents so much. Wished I could walk into the dining room and find Grandmother watching her soap operas. Wished I could get a whiff of Grandfather’s pipe as he paced in his study. Even Patty had loved this house-she’d encouraged me to rent it out after my grandparents died, rather than sell. At times like this, I didn’t know if I could bear to part with it, or if I could bear another night in it.
It was not a good mind-set in which to receive a full-mouth French kiss from an old girlfriend. I poured another scotch, wished it wasn’t too hot to sit in the garden, ended up on the staircase, absently perusing the books that Grandfather, and then I, had stacked onto the old shelves.
Julie Riding was not the great love of my life. But she was my first real girlfriend. “Real” in the sense that I lost my virginity to her, at the shameful old age of nineteen. “Real” in that we stayed together, more or less, for two years and sometimes I felt like I loved her.
We built the kinds of traditions that twenty-year-olds build. I was very proud to have her on my arm. I think she thought I was “smart,” but what did that mean to a young woman like Julie? I remember she never liked books. And I wasn’t at all like the rockstar clones she seemed to moon over.
Did we love each other? Who knows? Who knows anything at that age. Who knows anything now? The heart is such a mystery.
I do remember the first time I saw her, walking away from me on the mall at ASU, all blond straight hair and long legs and youth. We would never know less sadness in our lives than that first time we stayed out all night talking, then spent the morning in each other’s arms in the safe chill of the air-conditioned darkness. Every possibility that life held was open to us. And every mistake.
I dreamed about Julie that night, dreaming in the heavy sleep that comes after a day spent in the desert heat. But whatever we said and did was forgotten in the sudden smashing of bumpers and
screeching of tires out on the street. I was immediately awake. The clock read 3:30.
My bedroom fronts the street. I could hear shouts and cursing in English and Spanish. Then threats. Then a gunshot, sharp and deep. Then another two-higher-pitched, maybe a.22.
I dropped painfully to the floor, grabbed up the cordless phone, and dialed 911. Talking to the dispatcher, I crawled over to the window and cautiously lifted one blind. They were gone, not a body left behind, not a trace. Just the vivid white circle of the streetlight. Four minutes had passed. I explained three times to the 911 operator that I hadn’t seen the incident, only heard it. I told her it wasn’t necessary for an officer to make contact.
When I was growing up in this neighborhood, even in the turmoil of the 1960s, it had seemed the safest place in the world. The biggest worry for parents was the traffic on Seventh Avenue. Now there were no safe places. I pulled on some shorts, went into the garage, and pulled a dusty, slender box out of a carton I had brought back from San Diego, along with my books and lecture notes. Inside was a Colt Python.357 with a four-inch barrel and ammunition. When I was a deputy, this had been my pride and joy-“one of the finest handguns in the world,” Peralta had pronounced-and had cost about a month’s worth of paychecks. It had less usefulness for a college professor. I hadn’t seen the revolver for a month, since I qualified at the range to get my deputy credentials and keep Peralta off my back. I took the box back inside, turned out the light, and listened a long time in the darkness until sleep came again.
Chapter Six
Phaedra Riding’s apartment sat fifty feet back from Hayden Road in south Scottsdale, on the second floor of one of the cookie-cutter stucco complexes that popped up around the city back in the 1970s. The front door faced a courtyard, with its pool, landscaping, and ornamental lights, while a rear balcony looked out on a parking lot and, beyond a stand of olive trees, the street. This part of Scottsdale lacked the moneyed glitz of the resorts and walled-off neighborhoods a few miles farther north, but it was still comfortable and pleasant. I used the key Julie had given me to let myself in.
