Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  Right at the moment, I looked like I’d been dragged through a coal mine; a sixty-dollar pair of corduroy pants ruined and it wasn’t as if I were still married to a millionaire’s daughter. Only Sharon Peralta still looked reasonably put together, preppy and professional in chinos and white blouse, with her black hair pulled back and a flush of exasperation in her fine cheekbones. She regarded us as one would a curious and potentially dangerous tribe.

  “I was thinking about hockey as a complex adaptive system for controlled violence, but then I stepped out on the street with the Mod Squad.” She turned to Lindsey. “That’s a baby boomer pop-culture reference.” Lindsey ignored her.

  “It’s Mapstone,” Peralta groaned, waving his hand at me. “He spent fifteen years teaching college and now he just can’t get enough action.”

  “Stop,” I said. It hurt to smile.

  “He’s right, Dave.” Lindsey stroked my un-bruised hand. “You seem to be a magnet for this kind of thing.”

  “I’ve never seen you draw down before.”

  “I’ve never had to before,” she said quietly.

  We were right across from Union Station, a charming Spanish mission-style building from the 1920s that sat dark and closed. The last passenger train had been canceled a few years ago. The building’s old stucco front glowed yellow-white in the reflected light of the street lamps. Off behind it, a freight train slowly trundled along, steel wheels clanking across steel rails. Several police cars and a fire truck were arrayed on the street in front of us. The cops were all in the building and the firemen, tall and bulked up, milled awkwardly around their truck, not sure whether to go or stay. A figure slumped in the back seat of one of the PPD cars, safely behind locked doors and Plexiglas prisoner screen: my antagonist from the elevator shaft.

  Peralta and Lindsey filled me in on what had happened. They saw the bad guy too late, as he jumped out of the darkness and landed on me. It hurt all over again to hear them describe our roll into the wooden gate of the elevator shaft, and then through it. About that time, the guy’s partner took a shot at Peralta and got the hell out of the building before Peralta canceled his ticket for good.

  Somewhere in the melee Peralta tore a nasty gash in his arm. Then there was nothing to do but try to get me out of the elevator shaft, a task that had to wait for the fire department. It was a good fifteen feet down there. Somehow I got out with just a twisted ankle, some bruises, and a black eye.

  “At least we got two of the dirtbags,” Peralta said. “With any luck, PPD can find out who their friend is. They say there’s been a smash-and-grab gang of carjackers working downtown for a month. This is probably them.”

  Peralta sniffed. “So much for their little bicycle patrols. You want a job done, call a deputy sheriff.”

  “What about the women in the Benz?” I asked.

  “The one on the passenger side went to the hospital unconscious,” Sharon said. “The only place you can beat somebody that badly and she ends up fine is in the cartoons.”

  “Two doctors’ wives out on the town,” Lindsey said. “Just stopped at a traffic light. Wrong place, wrong time, adios.”

  Mike and Sharon were bickering over whether he should get a tetanus shot when a young, crew-cut PPD sergeant stepped out.

  “Chief.” He approached Peralta tentatively. “Don’t mean to bother you, but there’s something in here you’d better take a look at.”

  If Lindsey and I had gotten into this mess alone, the city cops might have treated us with annoyance. Our escapade would have caused much report writing by our colleagues in blue and they wouldn’t have appreciated the county mounties butting into their jurisdiction. But Peralta was chief deputy of Maricopa County and a presence that could impress, intimidate, and manipulate just by walking in a room. He looked at the sergeant, rose stiffly from the squad car bumper, and suddenly his stride was all business. I followed them back toward the building. Just standing up caused my face to start throbbing painfully.

  “This building has been abandoned for years,” the sergeant was telling Peralta. “Looks like the last use was as some kind of warehouse.”

  “It was once a hotel, back in the twenties, when the railroad station opened,” I said.

  Peralta flashed me a look of annoyance. “I hurt too much for history lessons, Mapstone.”

  We stepped around old packing cartons and rotting wooden pallets. The fire department had set up some emergency lighting; it cast a harsh halogen glare and stark shadows around the big room. At the mouth of the elevator shaft, a ladder provided easier access than I had found an hour before. The sergeant climbed down, followed by Peralta. I went next, then Lindsey. Sharon, I noticed, stayed outside.

  It was still gloomy and close at the bottom. Cops’ flashlights played off piles of trash and ancient, greasy cables and pulley wheels. It was maybe ten feet by ten feet. Big enough for two men to find each other in the dark. The sergeant led us through a wooden barrier on one of the shaft walls. We stepped through, crossed down maybe half a dozen small steps. That led into a narrow hallway of rough red brick and what looked like a dirt floor. I stooped to fit. Peralta filled the hallway, scraping the walls like an aircraft carrier transiting locks made for pleasure boats. Lindsey, at five-seven, could just stand up.

  “We found this when we came down,” the sergeant said. “There’s several passages down here. Looks like they might have been sealed off from the rest of the warehouse. If there’s another way up, we haven’t found it. One of my guys leaned against part of the brick and it gave way. That’s when we called the detectives.”

  We walked maybe twenty feet and made a sharp turn. Here the passage opened into a slightly larger room where four other Phoenix cops were clustered. Part of the wall had collapsed and I could see, in a flashlight beam, some debris beyond.

  We approached silently. The opening in the wall was small, just big enough to hand through a nineteen-inch TV set. The bricks had fallen in, exposing a cavity inside the wall. On the other side were some wooden framing and more old brick. The cops shone their lights and we peered in. It was a small skull, human looking, along with more bones, all a yellowish color, collapsed into a heap. There was some unidentifiable fabric or maybe leather. Then I saw another small skull.

  For a long time nobody said anything. We stooped in silence and stared through the hole in the wall, as if we expected the flashlight beams to re-animate the dead.

  “Look at that, off to the side,” Lindsey said.

  “Don’t touch anything!” It was a patrolman who looked like a young Jack Kerouac.

  “Oh, okay,” she said sweetly, her sarcasm lost on a roomful of cops. She plucked away Jack Kerouac’s flashlight and focused it on an object that looked a little larger and thicker than a silver dollar. It was metal, tarnished and brass-colored under a coating of dust. My eyes were getting too bad to make out the design on its head.

  “Pocket watch,” Peralta said. “See, there’s the watch chain off in the dust. Looks like some initials on the cover, but I can’t make ’em out.”

  “It looks like a large Y and a small H,” Lindsey said. I could hear the scratching of a cop’s pen on a notepad and a memory compartment rattled open in my head.

  “Y-H?”

  “No,” I said, absent-mindedly standing up straight, nearly cracking my head on the low ceiling. “It’s H-Y. It was a cattle brand.”

  Everybody was looking at me now, the passage thick with cologne and dust.

  “Hayden Yarnell,” I said. “The cattle baron.”

  Cop faces stared at me impatiently.

  I nodded toward the bones. “These must be the Yarnell twins. His grandsons. They were kidnapped back in the Depression and never found.”

  Lindsey whispered what we were all thinking: “Oh my God.”

  Chapter Three

  Hayden Winthrop Yarnell burst into Arizona history on an April day in 1889, the year my grandmother was born. That day, at a desolate one-shack siding on the Southern Pacific Rai
lroad grandly called Gila City, a gang of robbers attacked a train as it took on water. They wanted the express car, which they heard was carrying payroll strongboxes bound for the mines at Bisbee. The gold was there, all right, but so was Hayden Yarnell with two Colt Peacemaker revolvers.

  A photo of him taken two months later shows a clean-shaven man with delicate lips and a long, strong nose, looking uncomfortable and stern in a high collar, string tie and suit coat. But something behind his eyes burned with the obstinate clarity of the pioneer—that’s the way I’ve always pictured him at Gila City.

  The leader of the outlaws, a murderer and rustler named Three-Fingers McMackin, shot a deputy in the face and strode to the door of the express car. When Three-Fingers slid the door open, Yarnell put a .45 caliber bullet between his eyes. Another desperado nearly severed Yarnell’s left arm with a rifle shot, but the young guard managed to get back in the express car and close the door. For the next half-hour, the outlaws emptied their pistols and rifles into the car as Yarnell clung to the floor by the payroll boxes. But they didn’t have the guts to try to open the door again, so they rode away empty handed.

  This wasn’t the last Arizona would hear of Hayden Yarnell. With reward money from the train robbery, he talked his way into becoming a partner in the Copper Queen mine, the legendary dig that for a time made Bisbee, Arizona, the most important city between St. Louis and San Francisco. Five years later, Yarnell cashed out a rich man, not yet thirty years old. By that time he also owned three saloons in Brewery Gulch, Bisbee’s notorious pleasure district, and was a director of the town’s biggest bank. Every history of Bisbee in the 1890s had a Hayden Yarnell story or two: about the day he faced down a gang of outlaws trying to rob the Goldwater-Castenada Department Store, his marathon poker games that would go for days, the orphanage he quietly bankrolled.

  With the Apache subdued and the coming of the railroad, a young Anglo with vision and money could build many an empire. Yarnell chose cattle, one of the touchstones of the West. His first ranch, Rancho del Cielo, spread two thousand acres across the high southern Arizona grasslands around Tombstone. Eventually, he had more than a hundred thousand head of cattle scattered across ranches and pastureland from the Mexican border into the Arizona high country two hundred miles north. And every one of them bore the distinctive brand of his initials—the large Y, the small h—looking just as we found them engraved on the pocket watch beside two small skeletons.

  I was telling this story over breakfast at one of my favorite morning spots, an unassuming little eatery on Glendale Avenue called Susan’s. It had recently been called Linda’s. Such are the comings and goings in the Valley of the Sun. Peralta sat across from me, occasionally nodding as he munched on a giant skillet breakfast, picked through that morning’s Arizona Republic and made notes in a stack of manila files spread out among the salsa, ketchup, jam, and coffee. The television was tuned to CNBC. Susan came by to fuss over my black eye.

  Peralta was decked out in Brooks Brothers and had the annoying energy of a morning person. I was in a suit, too, charcoal gray with a subdued navy tie that had been an early gift from my ex-wife, Patty. In my years away from Phoenix, I had come to love suits. Now it made me stand out as an oddball in a town of golf-course attire. I didn’t mind.

  “Mapstone, your mind is a wondrous thing.” His tone was ambiguous. “How do you know these things?”

  “I wrote a paper on Hayden Yarnell in college. Then my dissertation was on the Great Depression in the West, remember? Of course not. Anyway, he was one of the most important cattlemen in the state’s history.”

  “This Hayden Yarnell is related to Max Yarnell, the businessman?”

  “Where do you think Max got his money? Max Yarnell is a grandson. If I’m not mistaken, he’s a brother of the twins who were kidnapped.”

  Peralta crooked his mouth down and squinted at me. “So why the hell haven’t I ever heard of this Yarnell kidnapping case?”

  I shrugged. “I only know about the kidnapping because my grandparents used to talk about it. It happened in 1941, right on the eve of World War II. The cops caught the guy and he was executed, so there was no real mystery aside from where the bodies were buried. Then the war changed this town forever. You know ancient history in Phoenix is three years ago.”

  “I can’t imagine not seeing Jamie and Jennifer grow up,” he said, speaking of his grown daughters. It was a stunningly introspective remark for Peralta and I made no reply. He went on, “Don’t you want to have kids, Mapstone?” He didn’t even wait a beat. “You seem to know a lot about this case. So go down and help our friends at Phoenix PD. You can use the money.”

  It was my deal with the county: two thousand dollars if my research into an old case led to some substantial new information; five thousand if it closed the case. I did need the money. But I ate my omelet in silence, which would annoy him; he was a quick-answer man. Finally I said, “There’s nothing to be done. We have the bones. Find a Yarnell relative and test the DNA. Looks pretty open-and-shut.”

  “That’s even better,” Peralta said.

  I was losing my appetite. “This is a city case, and the only thing they want less than a sheriff’s deputy sticking his nose into it is a sheriff’s consultant.”

  Peralta shook the ketchup bottle violently and doused his concoction of eggs, ham, peppers, and potatoes. “Let me see your wallet.” I played along and handed it over. “I see a star—a good-looking badge, if I may say so—that says ‘Maricopa County Deputy Sheriff.’ I see a deputy sheriff’s ID card with your name on it.” He tossed it back at me. “As I recall, you graduated from the academy and worked on the streets for five years before thinking you wanted to go off and teach college.”

  “Four and a half years.”

  “Any teaching jobs out there you want?”

  “I got a call from a Bible college in Houston,” I said. He almost smiled.

  “Anyway, your help on the case has been requested by Chief Wilson himself.” The big enchilada of Phoenix PD. Peralta added, “After I volunteered you. He liked the work you did on the Phaedra Riding case.”

  Peralta was just being himself, but I couldn’t hide my annoyance. “You are the master of the hidden agenda. I should have known we weren’t just having breakfast to raise our cholesterol levels and gossip.”

  “We work for America’s Toughest Sheriff, remember? So theater is important.”

  “I’m so glad I bring something useful to the department,” I said sourly.

  “You do!” he said, stuffing another forkful into his mouth. “We’ve got the chain gang, the tent jail, the women’s chain gang. And we’ve got the nation’s only cold-case expert who’s a history professor and a sworn deputy—just to show we’re gentle and intellectual, too.”

  “Oh, Christ!” I dreaded the hostility of the city cops to an outsider.

  “Just do that history thing you do.” He waved a meaty hand. “Write the local and national stuff going on at the time of the case, give a nice timeline, list of characters, new evidence, what it all probably meant, blah, blah, blah. The media eat that shit up. Your buddy Lindsey can make it a PowerPoint presentation and we can do color handouts.”

  “Blah, blah, blah,” I mocked him.

  “David.” Peralta hardly ever called me by my first name. He sighed deep within himself and his broad, expressive face seemed instantly old. He rapped his knuckle on the newspaper. “We’re taking serious heat on this serial killer. Harquahala Strangler. The media’s even given the cocksucker a name. It’s a sheriff’s investigation and we’re sucking wind.”

  “How many now?”

  “Twenty-six women. All strangled, sexually assaulted, and mutilated, dumped in the desert west of the city. Last week he murdered a housewife from Chandler.”

  “And you’ve got nothing?”

  He glared at me. “We’ve got file boxes full of reports. We’ve got computers full of reports. We ain’t got dick. We have an FBI serial-killer team living in my shit, an
d they think we’re morons.” He made an extravagant wipe with his napkin and slurped coffee. “So we need some good press. This is a notorious unsolved case, a rich family. If you help close an old kidnapping—remember, you were front-page news during the Riding case—maybe we can buy some time before the politicians start calling for our hides.”

  “The trained egghead, to the rescue.”

  We settled up and walked to the parking lot in silence, my ankle shooting pain bullets into my brain with every step. Peralta’s shiny black Ford sat officiously next to my silver BMW convertible, the flotsam of a failed marriage.

  “This car, Mapstone.”

  “Don’t start…”

  “No deputy can drive a BMW. People will think you’re dirty.”

  “Patty bought it for me. You know that.”

  “No way would I let a woman buy me a car!” Peralta snorted.

  “Your wife makes ten times what you make, and she’s bought you everything but your guns.”

  “That’s different,” he sniffed. “Anyway, Patty’s your ex now. And it’s…” He waved his hand at the car. “It’s just not what we drive in this family.”

  “I need a good beat-up jeep, huh? With a gun rack and a ‘Peace Through Superior Firepower’ bumper sticker?”

  “Exactly. You know, you could have gotten killed last night, being unarmed. It’s department policy for deputies to carry a piece at all times.”

  “Even consultants?”

  “Well, you’re kind of in a gray area.” He took off his suit coat, exposing the nine-millimeter Glock automatic in a shoulder holster. He tossed the coat into the Ford.

  Finally, he said, “That woman died.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “The doctor’s wife. She never came out of her coma. Died of massive head trauma. So now it’s a murder rap.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Peralta said, “When you and I started out in this business, the world was still safe enough that there were some places where you had to carry heat and most places where you didn’t. And you could tell the difference, know what I mean? Nowdays, hell, nobody knows when you’ll meet some sociopath who doesn’t even know enough to be afraid. Carry a gun, Mapstone. I don’t want to have to save your ass over and over. It was hard enough when you were twenty-one.”