Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

There was a screeching in the console, and I remembered the cellular phone Peralta had given me last week. I pulled it out and activated it.

  “Mapstone.” It was Peralta. “Where the hell have you been? What’s your ten-twenty?”

  Nobody had spoken radio code to me for fifteen years. “I’m just south of Black Canyon City on I-Seventeen.”

  “Get on I-Ten,” he commanded. “Head out past the White Tanks to Tonopah, then follow the dirt road three miles.” I told him to slow down, then grabbed a pad and wrote it down.

  “What’s up?” I asked. But somehow I already knew.

  “We found your girl,” Peralta said, his voice cutting in and out. “Phaedra, like Phoenix.”

  I knew what he meant. But he said it anyway.

  “Body dump.”

  Chapter Ten

  It is more than a hundred miles from the edge of the Valley’s civilizing sprawl to the Colorado River and the border of California. Today, Interstate 10 runs through it like a straightedge, connecting Los Angeles with its ambitious New West offspring, Phoenix. But on both sides of the freeway is some of the most desolate territory on the planet. The La Posa Plain, the Ranegras Plain, the Kofa Wilderness. The abandoned bed of a long-lost inland sea. Bounded on both sides by bare, ragged mountains with names like Eagletail Peak, Signal Mountain, and Fourth of July Butte. Until the mid-1970s, even travelers between Phoenix and L.A. avoided these badlands. The railroad ran south and west, through Yuma, or north and west through Wickenburg. The old highway took an out-of-the-way route north, for otherwise there would have been no towns and no water for travelers. And even now, with all our mastery of nature, with all of Phoenix’s seemingly invincible growth, the Harquahala Desert is a forbidding place.

  I drove for an hour on freeways, first south into the city and then west into the sun. I slowed down to let a dust devil twist across the interstate, knowing these whirlwinds were capable of overturning tractor-trailer rigs. At the little hamlet of Tonopah, I got onto surface streets and then dirt roads as the last subdivisions gave way to scattered ranch houses and then trailers and finally nothing but chaparral and cactus amid the endless cracked blond dirt of the desert. I played the CD Lindsey had given me and then I sat in silence. A sheet of sweat would not evaporate from my skin.

  I tried not to think, but of course I did. By the time I’d left the Sheriff’s Office years ago, I had built the necessary nonchalance about finding dead bodies. But it hadn’t always been that way. There was the night I was a twenty-year-old rookie serving a warrant with Peralta to an old hotel in the Deuce and finding a forgotten dead man instead. Peralta called it a “stinker.” I stumbled back down the stairs and onto the street, vomiting my dinner onto the hot sidewalk. For years, I had been ashamed of that, but at least it was human.

  There were dusty sheriff’s cruisers on both sides of the trail. I parked behind the last one, adjusted my sunglasses, and stepped out into the heat. It was like walking into an oven set on high, under a brilliant blue sky, with a cactus wren cooing off in the distance.

  “You Mapstone?” a young deputy asked. I said I was and showed my ID. She nodded and led me off into the desert. We walked maybe a quarter of a mile, over soil hard and ancient, down a wash and back up into a thicket of mesquite and cholla, which was now roped off with crime-scene tape that looked weirdly out of place here. Tall uniformed men in sunglasses milled around. I pulled out my badge and hung it on my belt, feeling strangely at home.

  “She hasn’t been here long,” Peralta said. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the logo MSCO CHAIN GANG-one of the sheriff’s marketing coups-his Glock 9-mm pistol restraining his belly. He led me under the tape. We were careful to walk single file in case other footprints might be found around the scene.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “She disappeared a month ago.”

  “Look,” he said. Suddenly, we were there, beside a small bluff, under a creosote bush, pulling back a plastic blanket, looking at a pale, red-haired young woman.

  Peralta read my mind. “Nobody looks that good if they’ve been in the desert six days, much less six weeks. I think she was dumped in the last few hours.”

  I asked, “Who found her?” but I was hardly listening when Peralta said, “Anonymous call to the nine-one-one operator.” I was looking at Phaedra. Her eyes were still staring, dead now, at whoever had killed her and brought her here. I did not know her. And yet I did.

  “David.” Peralta was next to me. “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  He pulled down the plastic sheet. “Looks like strangulation of some kind. Note the marks on the neck-may be consistent with a utility cord or some kind of climbing rope. Only wearing a bra when she was found. Her purse had ID and fifty dollars inside. Sexual abuse not determined. Crime lab is on the way from Phoenix.”

  “What about her hands?” I said. “Check under her nails.”

  “Thank you, professor,” Peralta said, annoyed.

  I stood a bit uncertainly and stared off at a mountain in the distance, a redoubt for the apocalypse if you could only get water to it. “It’s like Stokes,” I said.

  “Huh?” Peralta said.

  “The bra. Only wearing a bra. Strangled. They’ll find she was raped, too. Like Rebecca Stokes and Leslie Reeves and Ginger Brocato and Betty Moran and Gloria Johnson. It’s the same way those homicides were done.”

  Peralta pulled me aside, pulled off his sunglasses. His brown eyes were rimmed with red cracks. “This is now and this is another Harquahala murder,” he said.

  I felt like he’d kicked me in the stomach.

  “What are you saying?” I said. “The Harquahala murders have been prostitutes, dumped in the desert. This isn’t that.”

  He only looked at me. I grabbed his shoulder.

  “This isn’t that, Mike. This is Phaedra Riding.”

  “You don’t know who Phaedra was,” Peralta said. “You didn’t know her secrets. From what you told me, she sounded like a flake.” It was too hot for long sentences.

  “She wasn’t turning tricks.”

  “You don’t know. You’re too close to this.”

  “I know that much.”

  “You need to let the homicide guys handle this now.”

  “I was the only one who cared about this case until today.”

  He looked down at my hand on his collarbone. I didn’t even realize it was there. I let it fall.

  “You are not on the case,” he said. “This is now going to the Harquahala task force.” He pointed to some men in white polo shirts and tan chinos walking the perimeter and looking at me with some hostility. “You stick to the historic cases, partner.”

  I walked away from him and knelt down by Phaedra, a rag doll on the dry ground. I tried to make myself look at her as an investigator. I covered her up too gently. Peralta’s hand was on my shoulder.

  “If you want to help, you can tell her sister and then drive her downtown to make a statement,” he said. “And I want a report from you on what you know about her.” I stood.

  “But that’s it. Otherwise, I want you to stay away from this.”

  I appeared in the posh marketing office of the Phoenician covered with sweat, my badge still hanging from my belt. I was wearing the kind of grim expression that caused a graduate assistant a few years ago to call to me “ponderous.” Julie came out to meet me, and I’m sure she knew immediately. But I silently led her out to the opulent lobby.

  “You know, Charlie Keating built this place,” she said, talking a little too fast. “That was all while you were away. Then the feds took it over in the S and L crash. Then they sold it to a Saudi sheik.” She waved her arm vaguely. “It’s like a palace. First-class all the way. The finest hotel in Phoenix. Even better than the Biltmore, I think.”

  The room felt very large around me. I said, “I have bad news.”

  “We’ve won five stars from the Mobil Guide every year, you know,” she went on, smiling. “That’s very hard to do. God, when it comes
time every year to announce the rankings, I get so nervous.”

  “It’s Phaedra.”

  She stopped talking and stared into her lap. She did a double take and her eyes filled with tears, which she anxiously rubbed away. Then she just seemed to collapse in a heap of choked sobs and melting mascara.

  “I’m sorry, Julie. We found her body. I am so sorry.”

  She was silent, rigid, and she stayed in my arms until my back began to ache from being turned the wrong way, but I didn’t move. Then I drove her downtown in a silence broken only by the strained noise of the Blazer’s air-conditioning on high. First to the morgue, then to the station. While she met with the detectives, I wandered around the building. It was after 5:00 P.M. now, and the place had that feel of weekend institutional abandonment that I remembered from universities. Closed, dark offices. Peralta’s door was closed and locked. Lindsey wasn’t in Records. I left her a note saying hi; I don’t know why. I bought a diet Coke and went back to CID to cool my heels.

  How do we arrive at life, real life? Would Dr. Sharon have the answer? For years, I imagined Julie had found a neurosurgeon and was making perfect babies in a house overlooking the Bay in San Francisco, working on her tennis swing and managing the family portfolio. But that didn’t take into account life’s misfires, did it? Like how I was going to be the great writer of popular history, the next Simon Schama or Paul Johnson. Inspire people. Make money, too. Live on a hillside in La Jolla with my beautiful, witty wife and my books and my big thoughts. Live as far away from crime-scene tape and body bags and next-of-kin notification that I could ever get. Like how Phaedra Riding came home to Phoenix to start her whole life over and ended up dead instead. This was real life, straight up.

  After about an hour, Julie came out grim-faced and red-eyed. One of the detectives, a guy named Grady, I think, told me they were done with her, and then he closed the door in my face when I started to follow him back inside. It could have pissed me off, but I was concerned about Julie. We walked out in silence. When the elevator reached the first floor, she said, “Please buy me a drink.” I needed one, too.

  “That detective kept asking me whether Phaedra had ever been involved in prostitution,” Julie was saying. “He wouldn’t tell me why; he just kept coming back to that. What’s going on, David?” She was more angry than hurt, nervously swirling the ice around in her scotch.

  “And Peralta wonders why I don’t want to be a cop again,” I said half to myself. “Phaedra was found in the desert west of the city, where they have found the bodies of several murdered prostitutes over the past eighteen months. Those detectives are part of a task force working on the Harquahala murders.”

  “Wait a minute!” Julie nearly shrieked, causing some people at nearby tables to look up. We were at a restaurant in the Arizona Center, a tony commercial office development a few blocks away from the Sheriff’s Administration Building office. Then, in a lower voice, she said, “What are you talking about? Phaedra was not a prostitute!”

  “I know that.”

  “Then why are you letting them do that?”

  “Well, they’re not exactly clamoring for my input, Julie,” I said, nursing a martini. “They have to assume the worst because of where the body was found.”

  It was as if I had physically struck her; she recoiled.

  “‘The body.’ That’s my sister.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s an old habit. A bad one.”

  Julie excused herself for a long trip to the rest room. I sipped the martini and looked out at the palm trees swaying. A storm was coming into town. Maybe we would get an hour’s break from the monotonous heat.

  When she returned, I asked, “Julie, I need to know if there’s more to this than you’ve told me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, have you told me everything?” Like when you slept with Jim Ellis after that party when we were juniors but never told me. “We don’t know yet for sure, but it seems obvious that Phaedra was alive until very recently. So where was she? Had she been in danger all this time? Had she disappeared voluntarily, or was she kidnapped? What about those men who were watching you? Is there anything you haven’t told me?”

  She shook her head, then said, “Sometimes Phaedra would just go away for a while, but never like this. It was her way of just shutting down when relationships or whatever got too intense. She might not let Mom and Dad know, but she’d always let me know.”

  “Should you notify your mom?”

  Julie’s eyes darkened and she shook her head vehemently. “You know, in a weird way, you’re lucky you never knew your parents, David. And I know how alone you must feel now that your grandparents are gone. But they did love you. I can’t say my folks ever loved any of us.”

  She swirled the golden liquid in her glass. “We were the perfect family.” She laughed unhappily. “Once, when I was about fifteen, I was out with some friends and we ran into Dad with his girlfriend. He’d screwed around for years, I guess. But that’s kind of hard to handle when you’re fifteen. Finally, he just left and never came back. Moved to Florida. Married a bimbo. Not that it really mattered, because when I was growing up, he never had anything to offer but slaps and criticism. Nothing I ever did was enough to earn his love.”

  I let the waitress refill our glasses. It had been years since I’d heard Julie talk about her father, but the bitterness was undimmed. Hers was a ghost-ridden family drowning in what Sharon Peralta would call “unresolved sorrows.” A brother killed himself when he was seventeen.

  “Mom was useless,” Julie said. “Pills and booze. She was worse after the divorce. And”-she choked a bit-“Phaedra got the worst of it. Phaedra always felt that abandonment, so she was determined never to trust, always to be the first to leave.”

  Outside, a sparse rain was starting to fall, hitting the palm trees with big dusty drops. It made me feel a little better. Even a little change from the constant oppression of the heat was welcome.

  “I’m so tired, David,” she said, and she looked it. “I don’t know what else to tell you right now.”

  We drank in silence. Then we walked through the dust and lightning back to the Blazer and I started to drive her to her car. Instead, we ended up at my place, where we drank too much. She cried a long time, then finally came to my bed, where we made love with the peculiar frenzy of the lost and the grief-stricken.

  Chapter Eleven

  I am running through my neighborhood in the eternal twilight of dreams. All the houses are familiar but darkened, and I can’t run fast enough to catch up with Phaedra. She has always just been there before I arrive. And she is in danger. I know this. And I run into my house, thinking I will find Mother and Dad and Grandma and Grandfather, and there is so much I need to tell them now, now that I’m a forty-year-old man.

  But the house is empty except for the twilight, the loneliest part of the day, the lonely Sunday night of the clock. But then I know I’m not alone, and I see someone, and I know we are in danger. And I fire the Python and watch as the bullet moves too slowly, too slowly, and falls to the floor.

  And then I am in bed, my legs entangled in Phaedra’s legs, exhausted from lovemaking. She laughs when she makes love. She runs that red hair across my chest. The neighbors keep pounding, pounding on the wall, but we laugh and don’t care.

  The door. I sat up and pulled away from Julie, who was still out. I looked back again. Julie Riding in my bed. Last night had really happened. I pulled on a robe and walked to the front of the house. Peralta was at the door. The clock on the wall said 2:15-in the afternoon.

  “Goddamn it, I’ve been banging on the door for fifteen minutes,” Peralta said, walking past me. “You never used to be a heavy sleeper.”

  “Good morning to you, too.” God, my head hurt.

  “It was a shitty morning, and now it’s a shitty afternoon. You have any coffee? Oh, shit, do you still not drink coffee?”

  He was wearing a dark blue suit and a crisp white shirt, a grim expre
ssion on his face. I offered to make some coffee.

  “I will.” It was Julie. She appeared in the hallway, wearing my ASU T-shirt.

  “Julie.” Peralta waved a little wave. He seemed uncharacteristically awkward.

  “Hello, Mike. Just like old times, isn’t it?” She ran a hand through her tangled brown-blond hair and padded into the kitchen. Peralta arched an eyebrow at me and nodded toward the living room.

  “Where were you yesterday morning when I called you on the cell phone?” Peralta sat heavily into the sofa.

  “I went up to Sedona to see Phaedra’s old boyfriend. I thought he might have a clue as to where she was.”

  “And what made you do that?”

  “What’s going on, Mike?” I began, but his look caught me short. “He called me the night before.”

  Peralta sighed heavily. “Greg Townsend was found dead this morning.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, David. Murdered. His cleaning lady found him this morning in the bedroom at his place in Sedona. He’d apparently been tortured with a raw electrical chord before he was given the business end of a twelve gauge. The Coconino County deputies found your name and phone number written on a pad on his desk. And naturally, they wanted to know what a Maricopa County deputy had been doing on their turf.”

  I sat carefully in the leather easy chair. I told Peralta what Townsend had told me.

  “Goddamn it, David, I told you to stay out of this case!” He was headed to the blowup point, which I didn’t want to see.

  “It wasn’t anything but a missing persons case when I talked to Townsend, and you gave me permission to look into that. Remember?”

  Julie walked in with coffee for Peralta and herself and a diet Coke for me. I patted her hand.

  “Julie, sit.” It was Peralta. “I’m really sorry about your sister. But I have to ask you this. Where were you yesterday before David brought you downtown?”

  “Is this an interrogation, Mike?” She tossed her hair a bit and sat opposite me. Her eyes were red and puffy.