Concrete Desert dmm-1

by Jon Talton

  I handed her the wallet with my star and ID.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Mapstone.” Then she lowered her sunglasses a bit and smiled-a nice smile. “Hey, you’re the history guy.”

  Yeah, I’m the history guy.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  I reached Sedona a little after 3:00 P.M., and was able to throttle back the air-conditioning, being more than three thousand feet above the desert floor that holds Phoenix. Every few miles were signs warning about the high fire danger-the biggest reminder being the plume of smoke on the northwest edge of the Verde Valley, which the radio said was part of the wildfires that had consumed a million acres of forests in the West this summer. A million acres of fire. A million dollars in the trunk of Phaedra’s car.

  I had lunch at a Mexican place on the Tlaquepaque, the town square near Oak Creek. I fortified myself with two Negra Modelos, a beer that tastes incredibly sublime when consumed with a plate of enchiladas in a dark, cool, adobe-protected space. Then I walked over to the Coconino County Sheriff’s Substation and asked for Deputy Allison Taylor. She was about my age, with light brown hair the style and texture of Lauren Hutton’s and a very large Magnum on her hip.

  “David Mapstone of the MCSO,” she said, extending a tanned, slender hand. “I’m impressed.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You’ve made it respectable to be a deputy sheriff and be intelligent.”

  I cocked an eyebrow.

  “I studied premed at Wake Forest,” she said, leading me back to a squad room cluttered with desks, paperwork, and a large, ancient fax machine. “Then I made my first trip west and decided I didn’t want to be a doctor after all.”

  “Life plays those funny tricks on us,” I said.

  “And I take it you don’t want to teach college anymore?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I love writing and teaching. I just can’t get a job.”

  “Marry a millionaire, that’s my advice.”

  “Tried it. Didn’t work.”

  She made an exaggerated O with her mouth. I liked her.

  “So you want the Townsend case,” she said, fishing in a file cabinet.

  “We think it might be tied to another homicide down in the Valley.”

  “What a big ugly city down there,” she said. “L.A. two. ’Course, I’m a small-town girl.” She handed over a sheaf of papers and photographs.

  “Not too many cases like that around here,” Allison said. “We have a permanent population in Oak Creek Canyon of about fifteen thousand. But with three million visitors a year, we get our share of crime and nuttiness. Hell, with four vortexes-to channel New Age Vibes-we get more than our share of nuttiness.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Seems execution-style,” she said. “Very ugly, though. This asshole made him put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and then pulled the trigger. What a mess.” My own mouth ached. “We hear you guys tied him into drug trafficking?”

  I told her about the DEA report and Bobby Hamid.

  “Well, there’s certainly an appetite for cocaine up here,” she said. “Wherever the beautiful people congregate, there’s that. What’s the saying? Cocaine is God’s way of letting you know you have too much money.”

  We laughed, and I asked if she’d ever run across Townsend.

  “No,” she said. “That’s a very exclusive part of the canyon. And very remote.”

  “So the neighbors didn’t hear or see anything?”

  She shook her head. “People with money like you find here don’t want embarrassing police investigations interrupting their lives. We’re supposed to keep the traffic manageable, drag off the worst fruitcakes, and keep burglars away from the art galleries. They don’t want to entertain the notion that their nice neighbor might have been a dirtbag. And we’re a small department, with not many people or much money. If you guys can help, go to it.”

  “Autopsy?” I asked, leafing through the report.

  “Still tied up in Phoenix,” she said. “It takes longer and longer to get reports back now that there are more and more exotic tests to perform.”

  I sat down to read.

  “You know,” she said, “there’s a lot about this case that’s screwy. He had a very expensive alarm system out there, and it was fully engaged when the first deputy arrived after the murder.”

  Forty-five minutes later, I was on the winding road up into the red rocks, through firs and ponderosa pines, up to Greg Townsend’s million-dollar house. It wasn’t a day very different from the first time I was here. This time, I found the place deserted, with a Sheriff’s Department NO TRESPASSING seal on the door. I used the keys given me by Allison Taylor to disengage the alarm and let myself in.

  The house was still immaculate and spectacular, but there’s something about a place that has been violated by murder: a smell real or imagined, brutal memories in the walls, uneasy ghosts. Lindsey had offered to take the day off and come up with me, and I found myself wishing she were here. I picked up the phone and called down to Phoenix, getting her voice mail. I left a message and remembered how she’d felt in bed just hours earlier.

  Although it’s commonplace today to read nothing more than the TV screen, it still jarred me to see no books. But it went with the expensively austere theme of the decorator. I looked over the photos on his shelves and noted once again that there were no photos of him and Phaedra. There were pictures of him with other women, kayaking, on the beach, rock climbing, in the cockpit of a small airplane. I had definitely lived too sedentary a life.

  The master bedroom had been stripped of furniture, but the walls were still stained with blood-lots of it. I stepped inside. The bed must have faced the door. He would have seen his assailant coming, if he had been awake, if he had been expecting trouble. It was so quiet, I jumped when the phone began to ring. When no answering machine picked up, I lifted the receiver and placed it to my ear. Whoever was on the other end hung up, saying nothing.

  Townsend had been very neat, precise. So, too, had his murderer. Nothing was out of place in the office. Even the stunning Navajo rug that dominated the room was hung with obsessive care on the wall. I sat at his desk, tried not to let the view of Oak Creek Canyon distract me, and went through the drawers. Bills, blank stationery, a checkbook, some computer disks that I fed into the IBM clone nearby, which yielded holistic healing techniques, FAA flight-plan regulations, some computer games, maps of the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in Colorado. I was not finding that “I am a drug dealer” file. Then I reached under the computer table and felt a slender journal taped to the underside. Life was getting interesting.

  It was full of columns of numbers and letters, a code of some kind. Pages and pages of it in a simple binder, noted in a precise hand in black ink, always black ink. Maybe it had something to do with Sedona’s psychic voltage. Or maybe it tracked drug shipments and payments for Bobby Hamid. I took it with me and walked back to the Blazer.

  I walked around the grounds, hoping for footprints, shotgun shells, Baggies of dope, signed confessions. I wasn’t proud at this stage. The place was so remote, clinging as it did to the side of the mountain, it was easy to see why no one would have seen anything. Through the pines, I could see little but hillside, while at my back was the blue of the canyon sky. It was a fabulous place, a “babe lair,” as my male students would have said, a place sure to have impressed a young woman who was attracted to the quirky, the beautiful, and the expensive.

  In a clearing, someone had laid out a medicine wheel in the red dirt. Some Indian tribes used them for their spiritual powers, but they had been co-opted by the New Agers. This one was probably fake, but it did make me look in a certain direction. Something glinted at me from an outcropping about fifty yards above, up the mountainside. I negotiated some boulders and climbed, pulling myself up on fir branches, crossing a fallen aspen trunk. The rocks and soil were the color of the sunset and covered with pine needles. My legs were feeling the angle of the climb by the time I pulled myself
up on the ledge and found a door.

  A door. And a cabin. There was an adobe wall maybe twenty feet across, set neatly into the rock. The cabin was obviously fairly new and had a commanding view of Greg Townsend’s house and the canyon and forest reaching below and off to the horizon. Yet from even a few feet below, it was nearly invisible. I was preparing to show my star and knock on the door, when it opened and there stood Julie.

  “David, I hoped you wouldn’t come up here.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Julie walked back inside the cabin, and I followed her. It was a foolhardy thing to do. But I was feeling foolhardy. Homer tells of how the Greek soldiers before Troy lost their senses and became drunk for war. I suppose it was that way for me, only I was drunk with a kind of flinty curiosity-I had to know; I had to know.

  “I keep wondering what you said to Phaedra the night before she died,” I said. “When you met her at the coffee shop on Mill Avenue. What you said that upset her so much.”

  Julie twirled a strand of hair and looked out the window.

  “You ask too many questions, David.”

  “I suspect she didn’t really realize what she was into even at the end,” I went on. “She was gentle and trusting and too eccentric.”

  “You were always such a sentimental sap,” Julie said. “Phaedra was a little moralizing bitch sometimes, but she knew the color of money.”

  “Even if it was money that belonged to Bobby Hamid?”

  “I don’t know who it really belonged to, but it’s mine now,” she said. “I earned it. More money than you can imagine.”

  “So that’s what you meant about us being in grave danger?”

  Julie was silent.

  “What about Phaedra? Did she realize she was in danger?”

  “You don’t want to go there, David.”

  “Oh, but I do. I am there.”

  She sighed and looked at me like some pathetic being. “No money, no life. It’s that simple.”

  “So Greg decided to rip off his employer?”

  “Not Greg,” Julie said. “Give me more credit than that.”

  I arched an eyebrow.

  “I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life working, watching the beautiful life go on all around me.” Her voice rose. “Jesus! All I had to do was walk around to see everything I couldn’t have. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be broke in Phoenix?”

  “So a million dollars in cocaine money was the ticket? You just thought you’d stay in town and everything would be fine?”

  “That was the plan,” she said.

  “The plan where Greg Townsend and Phaedra took the fall? And Julie is left with the money?” I felt an overpowering revulsion.

  “Nobody’s innocent. Everybody got what they wanted.”

  “Really?” I said. “Everyone I talked to said Phaedra hated drugs. So what did she get?”

  “She got stupid. She got in the way.”

  “She was your sister.”

  Julie clenched and unclenched her hands, but she was silent.

  “So Phaedra didn’t know about the drugs or the money?”

  “Not at first,” Julie said.

  “But she overheard.”

  Julie said, “All she had to do was be her weird, ethereal self. Always missing half the world right in front of her nose. That’s all she had to do. And nothing would have happened.”

  “But it didn’t work out that way. Phaedra heard about ripping off Bobby Hamid, taking his money and failing to deliver the product. She got scared and she ran. She stayed on the run for over a month. Were you really afraid she’d narc on you?”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Julie said.

  “So eventually, you found her. You found her, and you told her something that persuaded her to meet you, and then to follow you away from a public place. The next thing you know, she’s dead in the desert.”

  “I didn’t hurt her,” Julie said, her left eye twitching. “I couldn’t.”

  “But you found her. And she couldn’t be allowed to live, knowing what she knew.”

  There was an odd brightness in her eyes. “I had to have the money. I didn’t have any chances left. You don’t understand. With the money, I could have a life; I could get Mindy back.”

  “And buy more cocaine.”

  She let out some breath.

  “So where did I come in?”

  “You?” She sounded disoriented.

  “You came to me, remember? You asked me to look into Phaedra’s disappearance? Then you cried when I told you I’d done all I could do. So I jumped into it, up to my eyeballs.”

  “You always had a ‘white knight’ fantasy,” she said. “I knew you couldn’t resist.”

  “So you had it planned from the start. When Phaedra ran, you hoped I could help you find her. And that I could also be your cover. Your old boyfriend, who worked with the Sheriff’s Office, could muck around and draw attention away from the person who really killed Phaedra. And then I was the perfect alibi: I was the one who saw you cry at the Phoenician when I told you about Phaedra. I was the one who defended you in front of Peralta and the detectives.”

  She lit a cigarette. “You give me too much credit, David. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I imagine your sister was scared, too.”

  She was silent for a long moment. Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. “I never meant for her to get hurt.”

  “Oh, cut the shit, Julie,” I said sharply. “Turn it off. I’ve wised up about you, finally. I know about your cocaine habit. I know you had Phaedra’s car. I know you were with her the night before she was found murdered. It was all a lie: that you hadn’t seen her for weeks, that you didn’t know why she’d disappeared. And everything about us was a lie, too.”

  “You never knew me,” she said, crying now. “You never knew how awful it was growing up. How my mother never gave me-”

  I cut her off. “This isn’t about you anymore, Julie. This is about Phaedra’s murder.”

  She looked at me oddly. “What are you talking about?”

  I grabbed her and shook her hard. “I’m talking about your little sister, Phaedra. She had red hair and played the cello and was afraid to fall in love. Somebody raped her and strangled her and left her in the desert, trying to make it look like a copycat killing, a link to a 1950s murder. Why, Julie? Why?”

  Julie dropped the cigarette, grabbed my arms, and dug her nails into them. She looked at me with something wild in her eyes and crumpled slowly to the floor, shaking, hyperventilating. She wailed, “Nooooooooooo. Noooooooooooooooo. Nooooooooooo.”

  I pulled her up off the floor, a limp doll. “Stop the acting, Julie. We’re going to Phoenix.”

  The voice behind me said, “She’s not acting.”

  I turned and was looking at Greg Townsend.

  “And of course nobody’s going to Phoenix.”

  He had a pistol in his right hand, pointed at my chest.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “She has these breaks,” Greg Townsend said. Julie was on the floor, grasping my trouser leg, sobbing uncontrollably. “I don’t know if the drugs do this to her or if it’s more.” He was damned chatty for a man who had a pistol trained on me.

  “I’ll have that gun,” he said, indicating the Python. He took a step toward me, thought better of getting too close, and backed up a step. “Put it on the floor.”

  About five feet separated me from Townsend and the small black automatic he was holding. And that became my world, a small, hard place to live.

  “The gun!” he said sharply.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Old training is supposed to kick in at such times. I don’t know if that was what happened. I just remembered Peralta’s first axiom: “Never give up your gun.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Nobody gets my gun,” I said, trying not to let my voice shake. “You’re going to kill me anyway, so I may as well take you down with me.”r />
  Now his hand shook a little, and he took a step backward. “I’ve got the drop on you, pig. You’re not taking me anywhere. I’m telling you for the last time, drop your gun!”

  “You have the drop on me with a small-caliber weapon. You can shoot it and kill me. But I’ll still be able to pull out this very large-caliber revolver and put three or four hollow points into your sorry ass.” It was bravado I didn’t even believe, but I was committed now. No turning back. If my heart had beat any faster, it would have exploded.

  He said, “Why the fuck are you here, Mapstone? I thought we were rid of you.”

  “You never should have brought me into this in the first place.”

  “That was her.” He indicated Julie. “She can be quite clever when she’s lucid.”

  “And what about you? Back from the dead?”

  He smiled. “It worked. As far as that prick Bobby knows, I’m dead and his money is long gone.”

  “That’s not showing much gratitude for a man who seems to have set you up pretty damned well,” I said.

  “Entrepreneurship is the American dream,” Townsend said. “I was tired of working for someone else. And when you work for Bobby, the run is great, but it always ends. I knew it was coming to an end. I handled the high-end shipments, the big money, and the risks were just too great. Bobby would have given me up to DEA and written it off as a tax deduction. But with a million dollars in seed money and the right clients, I’d turn old Bobby over to the feds and take his business.”

  “So who died in your place?”

  He looked annoyed. “Some drifter Julie picked up down in town. We had a few drinks, found out he had no one to miss him, and in general, he did have my body type.” Townsend laughed. “Julie told him we wanted him to join a threesome.”

  “You took a chance that the cops would assume it was you.”

  “Cops get busy like everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to make this easy for them. After I had the money stashed away, I set up our drifter to look like me. I knew the cops had intelligence linking me to Bobby Hamid, so they’d assume it was a drug execution. Then I had this place, secluded, but I could watch the comings and goings down below. First the cops. Then Bobby’s people, twice. It was like ‘hide in plain sight.’ They never knew I was here.”