Another channel calls it, “A gruesome discovery.”
One channel, assumingly going out on a creative limb, calls it, “A grisly discovery.”
And there is the channel that starts the news like this: “Hiking Horror. Do you know where your wife is tonight?”
“I didn’t know you were such a news junkie, Beatrice,” Gus says.
“I’m not. But I got a vibe. Let’s watch.”
Beatrice switches back to Tyler Lore who is talking to a reporter in the field.
“Well, Tyler,” the reporter says. “Police tell us another hiker stumbled across the body this afternoon. They have not released the identity of the victim, and in a press conference late this afternoon, a public information sergeant would not comment on any suspects in the case. Let’s listen.”
Gus and Beatrice watch as the video plays.
“It’s far too early in the investigation to identify any suspects,” the sergeant tells the reporters.
“Any motive?” one of the reporters yells back.
“Uh, I can’t speak to a motive,” the sergeant replies.
“Can we see the crime scene?” another reporter asks.
“No,” says the sergeant emphatically. “The scene will be sealed until further notice.”
“Who’s the lead detective?”
The sergeant indicates a man standing to his left. “Alex Mills is the case agent.”
“Will he be making a statement?”
“No,” the sergeant replies.
A new voice, the agitated voice of another reporter, asks, “What does the body look like?”
“What does the body look like? It looks like a dead body,” the sergeant says. “Thanks for coming, everybody. We have nothing else to say at this time.”
Gus recognizes the man standing to the left of the sergeant, smirking, it would seem, at the absurdity of the reporter’s question. Gus knows Detective Alex Mills from several cases.
Last year it was the dead body at a horse ranch: a jilted lover.
The year before that it was a dead kid at the municipal pool: a lifeguard.
There were the dead children, five years ago, if memory serves him correct, at Phoenix Memorial: Nurse Patty Sanchez.
Gus Parker doesn’t specialize in crime. He’d rather spend more time with clients. Or Ivy. But he’s got a reputation. He’s been hired by law enforcement agencies in Seattle, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Boston, New Haven, New York, London, Dublin, Prague, and, believe it or not, Riyadh, by the Saudi royal family themselves, who will deny it of course and made Gus sign some kind of document that threatened disembowelment or dismemberment (the translator wasn’t Saudi’s finest) should he ever disclose his work in the kingdom.
It’s fine work if you can get it. It pays well. He slips in, slips out, relatively unnoticed. But the work is irregular, which is precisely how travel makes him feel, so the jet-setting psychic life is not something he really wants to rely upon to subsist. Not that he loves looking at spleens all day, but he loves the idea of seeing beyond the flesh.
Mills calls him Detective Psycho, but Gus doesn’t mind because Mills, for some reason, believes every word Gus tells him.
“Beatrice, can you rewind the newscast?”
She lifts the remote and says, “Sure.”
“There, freeze the shot.”
They’re looking again at the press conference. “You see that guy standing next to the sergeant?”
Beatrice narrows her eyes. “The guy on the left or right?”
“The left.”
“Yes. Very handsome.”
“He’s the detective I’ve worked with.” And then he asks, “Didn’t you say you had a vibe about the murder?”
She shakes her head. “I had a vibe about a big story, that’s all. Nothing specific about a murder. I just knew something big was happening.”
Gus puts his hand out for the remote, and she passes it to him. He searches, then rewinds. “This is my favorite part,” he tells Beatrice.
He hits Play. “What does the body look like?”
He hits Pause and laughs out loud. “What the hell does she think it looks like?”
Beatrice, always the beneficent one, says softly, “Maybe she’s just a new reporter, Gus. Have some compassion.”
“Do you see the look on Mills’s face?”
“Not very compassionate,” Beatrice says.
Gus is about to shut the TV off when he notices something. There is a woman on the screen. She’s not a reporter. She’s not a witness. She’s in the video of the press conference, standing there behind Alex Mills, looking grave and aloof. It’s an alluring combination on her face, but that’s not what draws Gus Parker to this woman. Instead he sees a dangerous energy roiling toward her body, like a shock wave invisible to the naked eye but visible to him. First, it’s the turbulence of desert heat rising from the pavement, shimmering like a mirage. Then it explodes outward, deadly rings of it, and Gus can see that if she doesn’t get out of the way this woman will be consumed. Gus hits the remote and pauses the picture. That’s it. That’s it right there. This woman, whoever she is, is being watched by the killer right now. Right now. The killer has tuned in to study just how well the crime fighters appreciate his work; he has picked the woman out of the crowd, and Gus knows that he has chosen to stalk her. The killer is the shock wave creeping toward her. She’s on his list.
Whoever she is.
Gus studies her. She must be one of Mills’s colleagues, maybe a detective he hasn’t met. She’s standing beside one of the police officers, a brawny ex-Marine type. Gus tries to intuit how she fits or where she fits in the law enforcement hierarchy surrounding the sergeant, but he cannot. He’s a bit distracted by her beauty. Her beauty is slightly off focus, slightly out of frame, given the camera’s zoom into the sergeant, but Gus Parker can make out the intensity of those eyes, the passive-aggressive sensuality of her lips, a sort of flirtatious demand to be parted, a sort of stoic, guarded desire. She has black hair. A chiseled gully of a neck. Here he is unable to infer who she is but clearly able to intuit where her statute falls under the laws of attraction. I am such an idiot, he says to himself. A fucking idiot. The screen is frozen. Gus is frozen. Gus hopes it’s not too late.
“Gus?”
Beatrice is standing over him. “What?” he says, startled.
“Can you help me with the plates? We have to leave in a few. Are you all right?”
Gus points out the woman in the video and describes his reading of her peril.
Beatrice peers at the screen again, really searches it for a clue. “You may be right, Gus. I’m picking up a vibe but nothing that specific.”
“Really?” he asks, his face imploring.
“Really,” she tells him, her eyes faraway.
“Should I call Mills?”
“Absolutely,” she says.
“I don’t know if I still have him in my contacts,” he says as he digs his phone out of his pocket. He scrolls down to the M entries and is relieved to see the detective’s name on the list. Next to the name there’s a note: Never returned book. That’s right. Detective Alex Mills is the guy who borrowed Gus’s copy of Great Expectations and never brought it back.
The call goes right to voice mail.
“Hey, Detective, it’s Gus Parker. You know, Detective Psycho. Look, I was watching that press conference from South Mountain just now. I’ve got to talk to you. This is important. I’m getting a vibe. And it’s not a good one. Please call me whenever you get this. Oh, yes, and you owe me a book.”
Beatrice and Gus finish cleaning the kitchen and leave for the bookstore.
3
Everyone showed up at South Mountain. Like a flash mob. Like a headache.
As if Detective Alex Mills had sent one of those annoying E-vites to the entire department.
Mills didn’t really need any help, but he doesn’t work well with the media, so it’s just as well that others showed up to produce the dog and pony show. De
ad body! No suspects! In broad daylight! Yeah, the body was found in broad daylight. We have no idea when she was killed. Doesn’t matter. The media is a circus of hashtags and alliteration, teeming with “journalists” who’d rather read about the sisters Kardashian than The Brothers Karamazov. So, along came homicide sergeant Jacob Woods joined by Josh Grady, a public information sergeant who does all the talking, and the lovely frost queen Bridget Mulroney, one of the city’s media relations hacks. She ducked her head into the cave.
“Good evening, Detective Mills,” she said, her demureness implied.
He was on his hands and knees again studying Elizabeth Spears. He didn’t look up. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I’m here to handle the press so you don’t have to,” she told him.
“That was a rhetorical question,” Mills said. “I know what your job is. But my department has Grady and Woods to handle the press. Who asked for the city?”
“It’s a city park,” she retorted. “I’ll need some information.”
“We don’t have much.”
“We don’t need much,” she said, tying the score. And then, “Ick, look at all that blood!”
“I’ll be with you in a few.”
She laughed. “Don’t keep me waiting for long. The reporters are restless.”
“Salivating, I’m sure.”
Bridget Mulroney is a former TV reporter, herself, and one of the newest members of the city’s PR team who most often tries to upstage the department’s own public information officers; the officers normally don’t complain because they’re overall a jovial bunch who would, if given the chance, like to screw her. Bridget had a brief, if not notorious, career with a local television station before taking the media relations job with the city. Mills has come to understand that most reporters take similar jobs when their careers come grinding to a halt. Bridget’s, by all accounts, came smashing to a halt like a wrecking ball. Something about sleeping with the station’s general manager to save her job after she had been caught plagiarizing Stephen King for a story about a local prom. Her liaison with the GM lasted a few months until his wife found Bridget fellating him on the elevator between the executive offices and the newsroom. You would think the GM’s wife might be okay with that, considering theirs was a Mormon marriage, but Bridget was fired. So was the GM. He now runs a franchise of doughnut shops. At least that’s the story as Mills has heard it through the lard-fueled rumor mill around the station.
He felt her coming closer, inching this time across the threshold of the cave. “You can’t come in here,” Mills warned her. “You should know that. Wait outside.”
She complied with his order but ignored his reprimand. When he turned to her, her jaw was defiant. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” she asked, pointing to the murderer’s petroglyph.
“Not sure,” Mills replied. “No word of it to the media, Bridget.”
“What are you releasing?”
“Dead female. Found this afternoon. Twenty-seven years old. White. Presumably a jogger or hiker. Knife wounds. No weapon recovered.” He brushed dirt from his uniform. “We think she’s from the surrounding neighborhood. I’m sending Myers to the address on her license. We haven’t identified next of kin.”
“I think that’ll give the sergeant enough to say. He’s a man of few words, you know,” she said with a wink.
Oh, please don’t try to fuck him.
Mills didn’t know Bridget Mulroney well, but what he did know he didn’t like. A daddy’s princess from a well-connected family, still playing dress up, still the debutante. She struts around on five-inch heels, damn noisy heels, and luxuriates in every second of being noticed. He’s heard that she is batshit crazy (as if the elevator blowjob was not evidence enough), and he’s never understood, save for Daddy’s influence, how the woman has stayed employed.
“As far as I’m concerned, Bridget, what you saw in here you didn’t see,” he reminded her. “You don’t repeat or report any more than I’ve told you. That’s it. We’re done.”
Later he joined the formal semicircle of law enforcement flanking Woods and the department mouthpiece as the press fired questions. The tableau included Mills, Myers, Mulroney (an alliteration orgasm that even the press couldn’t fake), and Chase. They all took turns rolling their eyes at the brazen stupidity of the questions. When one reporter asked, “What did the body look like?” Mills could actually feel the seismic wave of stifled laughter quake through the group.
The media was slow to disperse. Most of the photographers were waiting to get the money shot of the medical examiner’s van, the official hearse of murder, driving the mystery of death from the scene. It was all very dramatic.
Turns out that Nightbird Trail address is a house Elizabeth Spears rented with a coworker. After the press conference Mills had sent Detective Myers to check. Myers is back now, clutching his notes in one hand and a Twinkie in the other. They’re leaning against Mills’s car in the South Mountain parking lot.
“The roommate says she hasn’t seen the victim for a couple of days,” Myers reports. “But she told me that’s not unusual because she often stays with her boyfriend.”
“Who does? The roommate, or Ms. Spears?”
“The roommate,” Myers replies, slack-jawed. “Maybe both.”
“Did you ask if our victim had a boyfriend?”
“No, sir. I did not. But I did get a phone number for the victim’s parents,” he tells Mills. “I didn’t want to ask too many questions. I could tell she was nervous. And it was obvious she didn’t see the news tonight.”
“It’s more or less your job to ask questions, Myers,” Mills reminds him.
“You sent me over there to confirm where the victim lived.”
“Oh, God, never mind.”
“Fine,” Myers mumbles. “You want me to find the address that goes with the parents’ phone number?”
“I do,” Mills says.
“No prob,” Myers says, pushing a second Hostess cake into his mouth before he’s finished chewing the first.
Notification, to Mills, is probably the only part of the investigation that he doesn’t have the stomach for. Like most homicide detectives he knows, he can see rivers of blood and scrambled guts, severed limbs and bashed-in faces, and not miss a beat, but notification is cruel and raw every time, a nauseating cocktail of queasiness and dread as he walks that gauntlet to the door that shields the next of kin. And yet notification is possibly pivotal. If a family member is at the address, the family member will be told that Elizabeth Spears has expired and here’s where it happened and when it happened and how it happened, at least according to our preliminary investigation, and please answer some questions before you completely fall apart. Then there will be an interview. It’s that clinical. Mills feels as though he’s done it a thousand times. If no family member is present, the search begins. For a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or a coworker. Inevitably, they’ll return to the Nightbird Trail address and search the house.
Mills fishes out his cell phone to call his wife. Sees a missed call. Doesn’t recognize the caller. He tells his wife, Kelly, that he’s working late.
“I saw the news,” she says.
“Did you fall in love with me all over again?”
She laughs. “No. I fell in love with Myers. Is he single?”
“He’s dating Halle Berry.”
“Shut up,” she says.
“Love you,” he says.
“Always,” she says and hangs up.
Myers is waiting by another cruiser, and he has the address.
“We’ll take my car,” Mills says.
“I’m going with you?”
“Yeah,” Mills replies. “So long as everything is sealed off and we got enough officers to maintain the perimeter. I’m leaving Chase in charge.”
Mills doesn’t love the idea of Myers notifying the next of kin, finds it an odd job, a bad match of skills for a doughnut brain like Myers, but Mills is often surpris
ed at how well Myers does this kind of work, despite the limitations in the frontal lobe. Perhaps that slack-jawed smile works to Myers’s advantage. Perhaps it brings a comfort to the next of kin, a sort of paperboy simplicity to the delivery of bad news.
On the way through Scottsdale, Mills listens to his voice mail. When he hears Gus Parker’s voice on the recording he tries not to betray his amusement to the curious Morton Myers. Detective Psycho. He doesn’t know how Gus Parker does it, but Gus Parker can see through shit that no one else can see through. The guy doesn’t really like to be called a psychic, but what else can explain the ability he has to generate leads, to see the world as only a detective could hope to see? Instinct? Luck? Witchcraft? He listens carefully to the message and is suddenly startled. A vibe about the press conference? What the hell does that mean? Parker’s voice sounds urgent, imploring. Mills feels a rising sense of dread. This can’t be good. He listens again. He analyzes the words. He meticulously combs over every sentence. He is trained to dissect, but in the end there isn’t much to dissect here but a general sense of intrigue. Of course, Gus Parker specializes in intrigue. Intrigue pays his bills.
“What’s up?” Myers asks.
“Nothing.”
“Was that anything important?”
“Not sure.” Mills hits Call Back to dial Parker’s number. He hangs up on the man’s voice mail. He studies the twinkling desert ahead of him. Out there beyond the windshield is a dark landscape littered with strip malls and subdivisions. Somewhere there are mountains that used to be blacker than the night, but now the city glow makes them impossible to see. Somewhere there is a killer who has disappeared into the night, who remains darker than the night (such is the condition of humanity, he remembers reading in one of the classics), who, despite the trespass of urban light, may be impossible to find.
Mills doesn’t like that hunch. And he thinks maybe he should make a deal with the polluted sky (shine your hazy light, I’ll find the butcher) but then opts to borrow some illumination instead. So he redials Parker. Again there’s no answer.
You don’t need broad daylight to recognize a cookie-cutter neighborhood, even an affluent one such as this. Even at night you can make out a pattern of rooflines and windows, driveways and doorways. There are the left-hand versions, and the right-hand versions, and no imagination between them. In fact, there is little between them but concrete fences and thin dashes of land, the typical developer’s dream of zero lot lines. They park in front of the Spears’ home. Mills takes a deep breath.
Desert Remains Page 2
