Desert Remains

by Steven Cooper

  Myers is trudging behind them.

  “You okay?” Mills calls back.

  Myers clears his throat and says, “Yeah, sure. Don’t worry.”

  Chase puts a smirk on his face that Mills would like to defy with a swift right hook.

  They reach the so-called Petroglyph Plaza, and Mills looks at the ancient artwork with a different understanding. The way Chase had described the rock drawings that morning to the sergeant makes the petroglyphs sound like stone-aged graffiti, but Mills can see that these rock drawings took hard work, hours of dedication, maybe longer; they had to mean something. To him, the drawings are like primitive newspapers, recording life events or observations; they’re the documentation of plants, animals, strangers, and storms that passed through. The killer must see the murders as news events in his life. Mills senses something coming together, something vague, but something prompted by the old news stories Gus Parker rattled off this morning.

  A few minutes later they round a bend and find two deputies standing with a small circle of hikers. Witnesses.

  “Howdy, guys,” Chase says. “What do we have here?”

  A tall, reedy-looking deputy turns and comes forward. “Hey, Detectives. Mitch Jefferson.” Mills doesn’t recognize him. “We just briefed your techs. They’re with the body.”

  “Thanks,” Chase says. “Call came in as a female hiker or jogger. Was she alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who are the witnesses?”

  “We got the spotter. He went behind those boulders to take a leak and found the victim,” the man says, outstretching a thin branch of an arm to indicate the massive boulders at the side of the trail. “The two others were hiking together, and they saw him come running back onto the trail all crazy and blathering. He does have a rather odd story to tell.”

  The detectives look beyond Jefferson, squinting into the sunlight at the tableau of witnesses assembled with the other deputy. Mills’s jaw recoils.

  “Do you see what I see?” Chase asks.

  “Willis,” Mills says tonelessly.

  “You guys know him?” the deputy asks.

  “You might say so,” Chase replies.

  They approach the witnesses: a tall redhead probably in her late twenties, clad in Spandex, and her hiking partner, a shorter woman, kitten-like, also in Spandex. Then they turn to Bobby Willis.

  “I don’t think the cops believe me,” the red-eyed man says. A big teardrop stain of sweat covers his T-shirt. He’s breathless.

  “Believe you?” Chase asks.

  “I told them I was meeting Detective Myers out here.”

  “What?” Myers asks. “What did you say?”

  Willis shuffles his feet in the dirt and says, “That I got your call and I came rushing out here to meet you.”

  Mills asks the deputy to guide the women away for a moment.

  “What exactly are you pulling, Willis?” Chase asks when they have the man cornered.

  “Pulling? I’m not pulling anything. Myers here called me and told me you all found big evidence about Andrea’s murder.”

  Myers emits a short squeak of surprise and says, “No, no, no. I never called this guy. Never.”

  “Yeah you did, about an hour and a half ago. You told me to meet you up here to see the evidence.”

  Chase and Mills turn to Morton Myers who is just standing there shaking his head. Then Chase and Mills look at each other. Mills’s brain is working overtime, the inner eye darting back and forth at possibilities, none of which add up.

  “You have a cell phone with you?” Chase asks the man.

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it over.”

  Mills watches Willis nervously wrestle the phone from his pocket and, his hand in little human earthquakes, turn it over to Chase, no thought in the world of a search warrant or a lawyer.

  “You have two calls from blocked numbers,” Chase says.

  “Right. Myers called back to make sure I was here, and I said I was but I had to piss really badly so he told me he always pisses behind the boulders here when he’s hiking. So I did. And then I saw the body back there.”

  Myers steps between Willis and Chase. “I never hike out here. I never hike. Look at me,” he says, pointing to his ample waist.

  “Then who called me?” Willis asks.

  “Well, certain calls from the PD would read as blocked numbers,” Preston concedes. “But thousands of people block their numbers. Does Detective Myers sound like the caller on the phone?”

  Willis scrunches up his face into a beaten ball of confusion and says, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It sounded like he was on speakerphone or in a bathroom. But he knew about me and Andrea.”

  “Or,” Chase says, crossing his arms over his chest, “you have an accomplice who you arranged to place those calls as some kind of alibi. Amateurs never think things through.”

  Willis is shaking now from head to toe. “No. Stop! This is ridiculous. I was lured out here. Why would I kill someone and then point out the body to strangers? Please,” he begs. “Think about it.”

  “Trust me,” Chase says. “We’re thinking about it. All the angles. That’s exactly what we get paid to do, Mr. Willis.”

  “Then what goddamnit is the connection to Andrea?” the man wails.

  “You are,” Chase says. “Don’t you understand that?”

  The sun has drifted overhead farther to the west. There are shadows crisscrossing the trail.

  Willis lowers his head and buries it in his hands.

  “You wait right here,” Mills tells Willis. Then he nudges the other detectives aside. “Preston, I’d like you with the body. Go check in on the techs. Chase will be there in a minute,” he says. “And, Myers, go get a statement from the hikers.”

  “The deputies got one already,” the portly detective says.

  “Go over it with them,” Mills tells him. “Then you can let them go.”

  Myers shrugs and retreats down the trail, following Preston.

  Mills turns his eyes to Chase. “Look, we’re walking a fine line here, Tim. We got nothing on this guy but a bizarre coincidence.”

  Chase spits. “Nothing? Are you kidding me?”

  “We haven’t even seen the body. For all we know it’s been here for a week. Why would Willis be out here now?”

  “He wants to get caught,” Chase announces.

  Mills shakes his head. “Where’s the weapon? If he wants to get caught why not give up all the evidence?”

  “The weapon’s buried somewhere in the desert,” Chase says.

  “Where’s the blood?”

  “The blood?”

  “Yeah, the blood,” Mills insists. “Not a drop of blood on the guy. What was he wearing during the crime?”

  Chase studies Mills from head to toe. And then he tonelessly chants, “He was wearing clothes during the crime, then swapped them out. They’re buried with the weapon. I’ll bring in the K-9s, and they’ll find exactly what we need.”

  “Until then?”

  “We hold him. Take him down to the station. Get a confession.”

  Mills shakes his head. “Good luck with that.”

  “You got a better plan? You think Myers actually called Willis out here?”

  Mills plants himself firmly. “No, I don’t. But there’s something else here that we’re both missing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the facts, Detective,” Mills says sharply. “It’s inconvenient, but we need some facts. And nothing here adds up. I can’t point my finger on it, but this is a mind fuck. The killer is still out there, and he’s laughing at us. It’s a psychological game, Chase. And we’re losing.”

  “Maybe we are. Let’s leave Willis with Myers while we go check out the body.”

  They both look down the trail to Myers who is standing, happily it seems, with the two young hikers. Then Chase and Mills turn to each other. Their eyes do a pregnant volley in the silence. Mills looks to the ground and exhales a recalc
itrant sigh. No, he thinks, there’s no way. There’s too much paunch, too many years, and too many blissfully idiotic smiles. There have been no signals. Certainly no red flags. Myers is a good ole boy. He likes his meat and potatoes with a side of bacon. He plays bingo, goes to church, bowls, and does the toy run for Christmas. He is so above average at being average that average people are afraid of him.

  Maybe that’s what Chase has been getting at all along.

  “You think we should talk to him?” Chase asks.

  “Protocol says yes, but personally I say no.”

  “We have to.”

  “I know. But not here. We’ll catch up with him back at headquarters.”

  Myers is finishing up with the witnesses. As the women drift away, Mills escorts Bobby Willis down the trail, leaves him with Myers, and the two men immediately begin to argue about the phone call. Mills turns away, shaking his head. He rejoins Chase, and they both duck behind the boulders where they find the crime scene technicians hovering over a body.

  “Victim’s name, according to the DL, is Monica Banfield. Age thirty,” Preston tells them. “Sheriff’s office says they got a call about a missing person yesterday matching the description of the victim. Five-seven, 130 pounds, brown eyes. Tramp stamp, I mean tattoo on the very lower back.”

  Monica Banfield has short-cropped hair, dusty with trail dirt. Her legs are long and lean. She’s wearing purple sneakers. There’s dried-up blackish blood everywhere. Bruises tug at the corners of her mouth.

  “How many knife wounds?” Mills asks.

  “Six,” a tech says.

  Another tech is busy scraping through the dirt. She looks up and asks, “Hey, boys, did you see this?”

  She leads Mills and Chase to a lone boulder just north of the big ones, an isolated chunk of stone in the middle of a wash, with a freshly carved depiction of death on its face: the agony of Monica Banfield is the killer’s newest installation in the desert.

  “Un-fucking-believable,” Mills whispers.

  “Where are the photogs?” Chase asks.

  “They’re here,” she replies. “They got shots of it.”

  Chase taps Mills on the shoulder. “You want a closer look?”

  “No.”

  They return to the body. The male tech, Matt, is holding tweezers above the victim’s head, ready to sample tissue or something else of interest. “I don’t think the crime happened today.”

  Chase nods. “No, it doesn’t look like it did.”

  The body has been picked at.

  “Probably sometime over the weekend,” Matt tells them.

  “Probably,” Chase says.

  Some of Monica Banfield’s facial flesh is missing.

  One eye is open.

  “The OME is ten minutes out,” Preston tells them.

  There’s no weapon. Footprints of the victim and the killer, if there were any, were disturbed by onlookers, compromised by traffic back and forth to the scene; it couldn’t be helped. Besides footprints weren’t all that reliable in the desert anyway, with all the predators that scramble around at night disturbing the tracks of humans. The air is finally cooling.

  “We’ll be back later,” Mills tells Preston.

  Onlookers and other hikers are long gone when Mills and Chase return to Petroglyph Plaza. Chase tells a crumbling and bewildered Bobby Willis that he can come back to the station and answer some questions, or face arrest right there at White Tanks.

  “Do I have a choice?” Willis asks.

  “I just gave you a choice,” Chase says.

  “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “That’s your call,” Chase says. “But I bet you’ll be out of there in ten minutes if you don’t.”

  Mills says nothing.

  Then Willis removes his hands from his pockets and uses them to indicate, palms open, not a surrender but a willingness. “Whatever you need to catch Andrea’s killer,” he says. “But I guarantee you I have nothing to do with this.”

  Mills tells Myers to get the victim’s details from Preston and check out her background. Then, Chase on one side, Mills on the other, the detectives surround Bobby Willis as they descend the path to the trailhead.

  At the station Bobby Willis decides to lawyer up. Timothy Chase is about to release a Patriot missile from his head; you can just tell by the combustion in his eyes. This is not the way he had planned it. This is not the way he wanted to control it. And Alex Mills is amused watching Chase teeter as if his nerves are working their way up the Richter scale.

  Attorney Samuel Vargas arrives. He’s compact, neatly tailored, and olive-skinned. He has tiny hands.

  Before they greet him, Chase asks, “You want in on this?”

  Mills tilts his head, puts his hands on his hips, and says, “What do you think?”

  Ultimately the meeting with Vargas and Willis yields nothing. Vargas had consulted with his client in private first. Then, in the interrogation room, the lawyer went on and on about a lack of evidence, a conspiracy, a setup, and insisted there were no reasonable grounds to detain his client, and Willis said nothing. Smart man, Mills observed. Chase’s fuming was audible and visible under the malignant haze of the fluorescent lights. He tried ranting, then raving, then a passive-aggressive cast of the line verbally reminiscent of fly-fishing; he waded and waited, his questions dangling, smart, even, and casual, but no one spilled the truth. There was no catharsis. No theme song. At 4:30 p.m. Bobby Willis walked out of the Phoenix Police Department a free man.

  “For now,” Chase quipped as he and Mills watched the man and his meticulous lawyer exit into the plaza below.

  They head back to White Tanks in separate cars. All Mills really wants is to see his wife and son right about now, but there’s still light in the sky, a body in the desert, and more vultures ready to swoop in and further desecrate the crime scene. His phone rings. He assumes it’s Kelly wondering where the fuck he’s been, but it’s Gus Parker wondering where the fuck he’s been.

  “I thought we were supposed to meet after work.”

  “Shit.”

  “I called you a few times but didn’t bother to leave a message.”

  “Sorry, man. Long day. We found another body.”

  “Wow,” Gus says with a gust of energy. “I knew it.”

  “Yeah. You did. It happened sometime over the weekend.”

  “Where?” Gus asks.

  “You tell me.”

  Gus offers a curtailed laugh. “Let me guess. In the desert. Off a hiking trail.”

  “White Tanks.”

  “Oh? I love White Tanks.”

  “Yep. So do I. Same pattern, Gus. You won’t learn much by watching the news. But watch anyway. I’m heading back out there now.”

  “Can we meet tomorrow? I’ve got those news clippings. I think you’ll learn a lot by reading them,” Gus suggests, an affectation of intrigue in his voice, maybe self-deprecating, maybe not.

  Mills brakes at a red light. “Right, of course,” he says, and then, “Just so you know, there’s going to be a ton of follow-up tomorrow. But I’ll try to break free for coffee or something.”

  “Okay, just call me,” Gus tells him. “And you’re fine to go right on red.”

  “You heard my brakes squeal.”

  “No, I didn’t. Now make that turn.”

  “Yeah,” Mills says and hangs up. He just wants to get the fucking day over with.

  27

  Gus is off the phone from Alex Mills for maybe two seconds when it rings.

  Ivy is sniffing at his heels. “Yes, girl, yes, we’re going for a walk!”

  The dog yelps at the word “walk.”

  “Just let me get out of these clothes.”

  His phone is still ringing. It’s a Seattle area code. He answers.

  “Gus?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s your father.”

  He had called his father last year to wish him a happy birthday but never heard back. He tries now to think, how old is the man anyw
ay? He tries to picture Warren Parker the same but older.

  “Gus?”

  “Yes, it’s me. What’s up?”

  His father takes a deep breath. “It’s your mother. She’s sick. Just wanted to let you know.”

  Gus drifts into his bedroom and sits at the edge of the bed. He pulls a sock off. “What’s wrong? Can you give me some details?”

  “She hasn’t been feeling well for about a month or two. She’s been very tired. And she’s been complaining of nausea. Violent nausea.”

  Gus nods, registering his understanding as if the man is in the room with him.

  “I couldn’t get her to the doctor. But finally she just gave in.”

  “Did she tell you I called her?”

  Silence. Then, “No. I don’t think so. When did you call?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  His father takes another breath. “Well, Gus, your mother has cancer,” he says. “We found out this morning.”

  And Gus is surprised by his own reaction. He had never stopped loving his mother; he had stopped liking her a lot. He had left home, and what is left now is the rice paper of memories, fragile etchings, tiny deaths and their inscriptions. Those memories have always been cold and wet and misty like Seattle, like portraits of regret, or something like that. And so here he is dumbfounded, floored in a physical way, as if someone pulled the rug and down he went with a thud. Sure, he had had his vision, and, yes, his heart had been a simple, bare hyphen between before and after, but here he is facing the force of nature, nascence, specifically, and a tug that, if nothing else, is a cliché of womb to child. He’s not sad, but he’s deeply saddened; there are no tears, but there is a hollow call from somewhere like his inner cave.

  “Should I come to Seattle? Would she like to see me?”

  His father murmurs. The sound is soft and distant and thoughtful. “It’s in the pancreas. Supposedly it was caught early. But she’s probably got less than two years.”

  “I can make it before then,” Gus says.

  “Of course you can,” his father replies. “She could be in the hospital another day, or another week. We really don’t know.”

  “Has anyone told Nikki?”

  “I called her this morning.”