Cactus Heart

by Jon Talton

  “Look, Mapstone, this is complicated, and very confidential. This guy is a risk-taker, always pushing the envelope. We think his first victim was a street hooker that he just picked up. Then, this whole Internet thing starts, and, believe me, not all these victims are crack whores. He kept moving more upscale. In some cases, these were party girls who made a little cash on the side with freelance prostitution. But now we’ve had two victims with no known ties to prostitution. He meets them online—he can pretend to be anybody. Then they meet for real, and sayonara. This city’s on the verge of panic.”

  I took pity on him and made a new Gibson. When I came back he continued, haltingly, hating to give up so much information.

  “We heard from this guy. He sent a note, dropped it on the sidewalk in front of headquarters. He wrote that he was so powerful now he would kidnap and kill a female detective, just to show us he could. Nobody knows this outside the key investigators.”

  “So you planted the story in the paper profiling the detectives. And, wow, one of them is Lindsey, looking just the way he wants his victims. Why didn’t you just give him her address, too?”

  Peralta just stared at me.

  “Any luck?” I asked quietly.

  He shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “You could have told me.” Too many ten-ton rocks had fallen on me for one day.

  “I did tell you.”

  “You ought to run for sheriff,” I snarled. “You’re starting to lie like a politician.”

  He just sipped his Gibson calmly. “Mapstone, are you one of these knuckle-draggers who doesn’t believe in women deputies? Anyway, you told me she’s not yours. So what right do you have to interfere in her life?”

  Trumped by the notorious liberal, Mike Peralta. I went to make myself another drink. When I came back I told him about my encounter with the man in the white van.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I drove east on Camelback in the heavy clots of traffic, vaguely going to Scottsdale. It was Thursday and I had Ellington’s tribute to Strayhorn in the CD player with the volume up and the top of the car down.

  I imagined a stroke of luck that might let me slip into Scottsdale Fashion Square, find a parking place and do a little Christmas shopping. I didn’t want Christmas coming so soon. Time was moving too fast. It was 1999 and the decade, the century, the millennium were slipping away. The change was too big for me to get my mind around. I couldn’t even get my mind around the Yarnell mess. I was feeling stymied, feeling every insecurity about being a make-believe cop in over his head. Peralta had even dismissed my information about a possible encounter with the Harquahala Strangler.

  “How would he know you had anything to do with Lindsey?” Peralta had asked.

  I tried to parse that out. The newspaper article with Lindsey’s photo had come out before Thanksgiving. I saw the man in the Econoline several days later. So he could have followed Lindsey and seen us together.

  “So how did he know your name?”

  This piece of detail that chilled me simply deflated my case to Peralta.

  I did my best. “I’ve been in the paper. The guy pays attention. He wants to know about his victims, her boyfriends, where she works. He asked for directions to the Sheriff’s Office, and he asked if I was David Mapstone.” But in the end, even I couldn’t be sure. I let it drop.

  “Maybe he was one of your old students, Mapstone. He recognized you. Anyway, if I arrested every weirdo asking for directions, we’d have to build a hundred Tent Jails.”

  Now I was behind on my shopping list, especially for friends back east. Patty always gave gifts that were elaborate in their imagination and the attention they paid to the recipient’s tastes and enthusiasms. I gave too many books and CDs; it was a failing. Peralta, I could buy some cigars. Sharon, she was a book reader, thank goodness. Lorie liked jazz and I knew just what to get her. I needed something for Gretchen, something not too intimate, but intimate enough. Lindsey, well, Lindsey was out of my life.

  When I got back to the old courthouse and climbed the four flights of stairs to my corner nook, I found the door open and Sharon Peralta sitting in one of the old straightback wooden chairs.

  “The security guard said it would be okay if I waited for you,” she said, standing. I gave her a hug and we both sat down. “I also brought that in, it was in front of your door.” I opened the FedEx box and loose files cascaded out across my increasingly messy desk. It was from a graduate school friend who now taught environmental law at the University of Arizona, and he had promised to send me copies of his files on the battle over the Yarnell mine in Superior.

  “Sorry this place is kind of a mess,” I said. “I’m behind.”

  “It has real charm,” she smiled. “I do love the big windows.”

  “I bought you a Christmas present,” I said. “But I have to wrap it.”

  We sat enveloped in the long silence of high-ceilinged rooms. I hadn’t seen Sharon since Thanksgiving. Today, she was turned out smartly in a charcoal pinstripe pant suit, set off with a simple, crew-neck white blouse. Phoenicians don’t know how to dress. Sharon is an exception.

  “So how is he?”

  I leaned back in my chair and told her he was all right. How could you tell with Peralta?

  “I assumed he’d come to you,” she said, clasping her hands over a slender knee.

  That silence again. I started to say something about not wanting to be caught in the middle of a battle between my two oldest friends in the world. But she beat me to the verbal draw.

  “So how’s your mystery?”

  Was this how she relaxed her patients? “Getting better,” I lied. “We know now those skeletons we found were Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell.”

  “Seems like a long time ago,” she said, her voice different, losing a little of its high sheen. She sighed. “How’s Lindsey?”

  “She left me,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. Overshare.

  “Maybe it’s the season. She was probably a transitional affair, anyway, David. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you know.”

  I looked into the desktop. “How are you?”

  She made a stretching move with her head, making her lustrous black hair wave about. Sharon never touched her hair when she was nervous.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with him?” she said, speaking quickly. “I mean, really live with him. It’s not like he beats me or is really emotionally abusive. But he’s just like this supernova of a personality, and underneath it’s really needy, incredibly needy. But it’s not like the need can ever be met.”

  Then she suddenly stopped. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’m not trying to involve you in our troubles.”

  “It’s delicate. I care about you both.”

  She watched me with large, dark eyes. “I’m not seeking your approval.”

  Bam! That one landed in my lap. Later, I would think of all sorts of witty comebacks for this conversation, but for now all I could manage was a mute awkwardness.

  “Do you know how long we’ve known each other?” she asked. “You and I?”

  “Twenty years?”

  “Twenty years, David Mapstone. In that time, I put myself through school, raised two daughters, who turned into people I admire. I built a practice, learned to appreciate jazz from you, taught myself Navajo sand painting. I wrote a book. I faced down my fears.”

  She was off on the kind of riff that marital discord breeds; I’d been there. But it’s true that Sharon had made the most amazing transformation from the first time I met her as Mike’s shy, working-class wife to the role model she is today.

  She stopped, then added. “He hasn’t changed at all.”

  I let it lie in the silence between us like a wounded soldier in no-man’s land. It was true.

  Then she said, in a voice merry with ironic self-knowledge, “How does it feel to be ad hoc counselor to Dr. Sharon?”

  “I wouldn’t presume,” I vent
ured gallantly, failing.

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t.” She looked at me with something unreadable and incendiary in the large, dark eyes.

  So I told her about the Yarnells, the family curse and the secret covenant. Then I told her about Max Yarnell. I told her about the attempt on James Yarnell. I told her about Jack Talbott’s death row statement that never made it into the newspapers.

  “This family is hiding so much,” Sharon said. “From you, from each other.”

  “Is that a professional opinion?”

  “It’s my opinion,” she said. “There’s something dangerous, something treacherous hiding in all this.”

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t know. “Why would somebody leave a doll at a murder scene, with his hands bloody?”

  “The message isn’t subtle. The killer thinks the victim has bloody hands. It’s vengeance. Or maybe it’s a childhood issue out of the killer’s life. I’m not a criminal psychologist.”

  “And an identical doll was left here in my office, without the bloody hands.”

  “David, good lord. This is a disturbed person, if the murder itself wasn’t enough to tell you that.”

  I asked her not to tell anyone about the dolls, which was information held back from the press. Then I realized I might be sounding like her husband.

  “So tell me how David is doing. Just working?”

  “I’m fine, Sharon. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Everything is kind of chaotic right now.”

  “New love interest?”

  “I don’t know.” Why was I hedging? Was I afraid she would tell Lindsey? Why would I be afraid of that? She never would even run into Lindsey. What did it matter if Lindsey found out?

  “So is this the life you’re going to live?” she asked, in another tone of voice, higher, more detached. “David among his old paper records and his old cases, living his life between his ears.”

  “Between my ears?”

  “You have your nice house in Willo, and your little twenty-something sex machine—or you’ll find another one. You’ll cruise through your forties having affairs and witty friendships, reading books and working for the sheriff as a media celebrity.”

  “I’m not…” I protested, but the words didn’t follow.

  “You don’t want to venture anything,” she said. “Not after Patty. And you think you’ve found a little island of emotional safety where you won’t have to.”

  “What is this about?”

  “What do you want?”

  I stammered the stammer of the invaded.

  “No, dammit,” she said. “Don’t give some politically correct answer. What do you, David Mapstone, want? David Mapstone who has no family, no offspring, and is all alone in the world?”

  We stared at each other. She went on, “You’re at the age where if you don’t know that answer, you’re going to ruin the lives of a lot of women.” The last word echoed through the old sheriff’s office and dissipated in the ceiling.

  Then, she said, “Sorry, David. I’m all wound up. Mike always found me too intense, so he worked all the time so he wouldn’t have to deal with me.”

  “God, I don’t know, Sharon,” I said finally. “I want to keep you both in my life. You know very well I can’t fix whatever’s wrong between you…”

  “Like the fact that he hasn’t touched me in five years.”

  “I don’t need to know this,” I said reflexively.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  I thought about that, wrestled down the words flying through my mind, then, “I’m afraid I’ll lose you both.”

  She looked at me a long time in silence, an expression on her face I had never seen before.

  “I hope that doesn’t happen,” she said quietly and rose to leave. “Please make sure he takes his medicine,” she went on. “He has diabetes, you know.”

  I didn’t know.

  “He controls it orally,” she said. “Don’t let him cook too much. He cooks bad things for himself.”

  I followed her as she walked to the office door, her heels snapping precisely against the old hardwood floor.

  “May I ask you something?” She wheeled to face me. “Why is it, all these years, you never made a pass at me?”

  “Well, you were married.”

  “That never stops men,” she said. “I thought you guys wanted to sleep with every woman you saw.”

  “We think about it,” I said quietly.

  “So?”

  “So,” I said, “some fantasies you shouldn’t act out.”

  “That’s my line,” the doctor said, and she suddenly took my face in her hands and gave me a long, prosperous kiss on the lips. Then she slipped through the door like an apparition, leaving me leaning against the wall as the electricity coursing from my brain to my groin subsided.

  Chapter Thirty

  At nine o’clock Friday morning, twenty cops from three law enforcement agencies sardined themselves into a conference room at the sheriff’s office to compare notes on the Yarnell case: Phoenix cops, Scottsdale cops, sheriff’s detectives, and me. Being here made me uneasy for a lot of reasons. For one thing, I didn’t want to run into Lindsey and Patrick Blair. I had a big mocha from Starbucks; they all had plain joe in Styrofoam from the museum-vintage coffee machine down the hall. I sat in the back, committed to keeping my mouth shut.

  “Our part of this can be short and sweet,” said Hawkins. He leaned against a wall, wearing a rumpled, short-sleeved dress shirt and a tie that looked like it came from Sears in the 1970s. “The dental records identify the Yarnell twins. The case is closed. We’re prepared to hold a news conference and go public with that fact.”

  “We wish you’d hold off,” said one of the Scottsdale detectives, an older guy in a polo shirt and black jeans. He had a droopy mustache like an old West gunfighter and had slung one leg up on an unoccupied chair.

  “Why?” Hawkins asked. “The Yarnell kidnapper was executed in 1942. We now have the bodies. The case is closed.”

  I tried to focus, but my mind kept wandering to my increasingly chaotic personal life. It wasn’t like me, none of it. I had never considered myself any kind of babe magnet, had gone for years without a date in my twenties. My God, the chief’s wife had kissed me.

  “What if the kidnapping is related to the murder of Max Yarnell and the attack this week on James Yarnell?” This from Kimbrough, the sheriff’s detective. He was a thirty-three-year-old buppie on the department’s fast track. Peralta expected him to make captain soon and then go into politics. He dressed the part: stylish three-button coat, worsted wool slacks, bow tie, all in colors that complemented the rich cocoa color of his skin.

  Hawkins sighed and sat down. “Whatever. I’m just telling you we’re done looking at this unless something new comes along.”

  Kimbrough said, “What about it, Mapstone?” Hard cop eyes all bored into me—and I was dressed more like Kimbrough than Hawkins. I needed the comfort of nice clothes: Brooks Brothers blazer, J. Crew white dress shirt, rep tie from Ben Silver, and pleated chinos from Banana Republic. A brand slut. All those cops knew was that I was the outsider.

  “Hayden Yarnell believed someone in the family was involved in the kidnapping,” I said. “He put a covenant in his will that’s still binding.”

  I passed around copies of the relevant page from Yarnell’s will.

  “It’s like a doomsday bomb for the Yarnell heirs if any new evidence ever implicates the family. As he was being led to the gas chamber, Jack Talbott said that the boys’ uncle put him up to the kidnapping. This uncle was in debt from his gambling, and the Yarnell company wasn’t doing great, either. So there are lots of questions.”

  “But no evidence we can take to court,” Hawkins said.

  “Right,” I admitted. “But this whole thing is hinky. The man charged in the kidnapping was booked into the city jail the day of the crime.” I wished I could find a record of his release, but I kept running into the chaos of old files. “H
e claimed he was set up. A reporter witnessed this before he was executed.”

  “They all say that,” said Hawkins.

  “Nice job saving James Yarnell the other night,” Kimbrough said, and the cops looked at me again, curious now.

  “There is one other thing,” I said. “We know Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell didn’t have the same mother as James and Max. Maybe they were adopted. Maybe Morgan Yarnell had them with another woman. We don’t know yet. It just makes me wonder…”

  “The kidnapper was convicted and executed,” Hawkins said in a low monotone. “This isn’t complicated.”

  One detective said, “My parents are getting very old. And it’s not like they’re rich or anything. But you can already see the children lining up to influence their cut of the will. I just wonder if something like that was at work here. If these twins were a factor…”

  There was a collective chair shuffling and coffee slurping, then a Scottsdale detective, a blond, lanky woman named Carrie somebody, gave the report on the James Yarnell attack. No suspects, no arrests. There were no witnesses in the area that night. The bullets recovered looked like .357 rounds, but they were badly deformed. No shell casings found. It appeared the shots came from some bushes across the street.

  “I’m not seeing any connections,” Hawkins sing-songed.

  Kimbrough sighed. “Well, you’ve got the report on Max Yarnell, what we know so far.”

  “Roust some burglars,” Hawkins said. “It was probably a burglary gone wrong.” He pointed at me. “The professor over here has got everybody paranoid. We just need to do some basic police work.”

  “Nothing appears missing from the home,” Kimbrough said.

  “So the burglar got scared and ran!” Hawkins shouted.

  “Look, Gus,” I said, “the alarm was disengaged. What if Max let somebody in, somebody he knew? He called me that night and said he needed to talk to me, in person, about something urgent. Before that, the guy didn’t want to give me the time of day.”

  Hawkins’ mouth became a lipless line of exasperation.