The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  On cue, a gust of wind moaned as it moved through the shadows of a nearby slot canyon. I love the desert. Sometimes I think it loves me back. Like now.

  “How do you arrange these sound effects?” Rox asked, glaring into the canyon as if sheer attitude could intimidate the wind. “And what does Lilith have to do with the Sword of Heaven?”

  “Who knows? The sword is the destruction that wiped out Edom, and then the poet stuck Lilith there along with the jackals, dragons, and owls just to show that’s where an untamable woman belongs. In a wasteland, a hell.”

  “Owls?” Rox said as something swooshed above our heads.

  “Owls were sacred to the old religions, so the biblical writers had to make them look bad,” I said. “But what you just felt flying above us was no owl. That was a bat, Rox.”

  Her ensuing silence was eloquent.

  “From the size, I’d guess it was a western mastiff. Largest bat in the U.S.”

  “You can’t know what this means to me,” she said in a voice that was beginning to replicate the one she’d first used on Rathbone. The one that could cinderize cottage cheese. I know when to quit.

  “They eat moths and sip nectar from desert flowers,” I explained quickly. “Think of them as flying mice with elegant food preferences.”

  “I think of them as miniature vampires who carry rabies,” Rox answered through clenched teeth.

  “Myth,” I said definitively, hanging a comforting arm over her shoulders. “There are only about five cases of rabies in the entire United States per year, and those cases are usually from skunk bites, not bats. I took some classes from the rangers when I moved out here from San Diego. That’s where I learned to love them.”

  “The bats or the rangers?”

  “The bats.”

  Rox cast her eyes dramatically toward the sky and rattled the beads in her hair. ”What am I doing with a woman who loves bats?” she whispered.

  I smiled to demonstrate my enormous tolerance for people who don’t like bats and then ran a few hundred yards up a dry wash where Brontë was snuffing at something wedged in a crevice between two boulders. In the beam of the penlight I’d pulled from my waist pack I saw a small dark eye beneath a scaly brow ridge. An equally scaly five-fingered hand was pushing against the ground as the creature inflated one side of its body in order to push the other side farther into the crevice.

  “It’s a chuckwalla, Brontë,” I told my Doberman. The bloated lizard looked like a small hot-water bottle with scales, trying to cram itself into the sort of thin box smoked salmon comes in. “Let’s go. Leave it alone.”

  As I distracted Brontë by throwing a palo verde twig for her to chase, something occurred to me.

  “Rox,” I began after scrambling back down the wash, “what if Rathbone’s hunch is right and there’s some connection between this evangelist, Ruby Emerald, who wound up in the hospital tonight, and the deaths of Grossinger and Ross? What if Sword of Heaven did something to Emerald as well?”

  “Rathbone’s looking for pattern, Blue,” she said. “It’s what cops do, what we all do in one way or another. He’s looking for m.o. in the same way I might look for diagnostic criteria or you for statistical similarities. Three prominent women on his beat dead or hospitalized with similar symptoms within weeks, followed by a threat against two of them would seem significant to him. That doesn’t mean it is significant. Probably this Emerald woman just came down with a case of stage fright like the paramedics suggested. It’s not unusual. Anxiety attacks in performers, I mean. Pretty common. Some of them say it’s anxiety that gives them their edge, boosts their ability to project themselves to an audience. So what’s your idea?”

  “Just that dad said Sword has probably been around some fringe religious group. Maybe Emerald’s revivals qualify as fringe.”

  “So Emerald’s preaching this stuff from Isaiah about swords from heaven demolishing little countries because the little countries make statues of pregnant women,” Rox began. “And somebody hears this and decides to start murdering women in a nearly impossible way, also announcing this decision to the police. This same person then decides to kill the preacher who’s preaching the message in the first place. Blue, it doesn’t make sense.”

  And it didn’t. Although, I was sure, it would.

  When we got back there was a message from BB on my machine, describing perhaps more colorfully than was necessary his thoughts on the appropriate fate of police in general and Detective Sergeant Wes Rathbone in particular. Incendiary devices and bodily orifices figured largely in the narrative. It seems he’d planned to meet the radical preacher from Kate’s fundraiser for coffee, and Rathbone had left him in a holding cell at the police station for three hours until two other detectives interrogated him for another hour before allowing him to go. He’d missed meeting the preacher at the appointed time and was embarrassed to call and explain why the police could pick him up and hold him whenever they wanted to.

  “What’s the dude gonna think?” his voice growled from my answering machine. “Jus’ the thing, right? Coffee with some nigga ex-con that don’t show up ’cause he sittin’ in some piss-smellin’ tank with three winos and a crack pimp and ain’t nuthin’ he can do about it. Shee-it!”

  Roxie had met BB when he was still in prison at Donovan on a drug charge. He’d been processed through her office for a routine psychiatric evaluation, but the two had connected in some way I never quite understood. They’d become friends, but despite that Rox never stepped outside appropriate professional boundaries with him. When he was released from prison she helped him find a job, which was where I came in. I was consulting on the redesign of a strip mall in a bad area plagued with crime and I needed a mall manager. Rox answered my ad and offered BB, who opened a resale clothing boutique called Death Row and policed the turf with an ex-con’s edge. It was an experiment, but it worked. At least until tonight.

  “Uh-oh,” she said after hearing the rage in his voice. “Trouble.”

  “You’d better call him,” I thought aloud. “BB’s only twenty-seven. His testosterone levels are still too high for anything resembling rational behavior when he’s humiliated and angry, given his history. He’s likely to do something stupid and wind up back in prison.”

  Roxie gave me a look that suggested I shut up.

  “Girl,” she said with a vicious sweetness, “what did you think I meant by ‘trouble’? That he might say something naughty over tea with the vicar?”

  “Look, I care about BB, too,” I snapped back. “You think I don’t feel bad about what the police did to him? I do. But it’s not my fault, Rox. And I can’t always say things in just the way you’d like. I’m not black, but I’m not blind, either. I can see what’s happened, how he must feel, and I hate it. All I said was call him. That’s all I said.”

  With that I stormed into the inadequate bathroom off my bedroom and drained three inches of lukewarm water from the tank behind the motel into the tub. It’s difficult to make dramatic gestures in the space of only two rooms without breaking something. In the tub I tried to compensate for that by elaborate splashing, an endeavor also doomed by the need to conserve water.

  The reason I live in a half-built motel is that it has no piped-in water and so I was able to buy it for practically nothing. But trucked-in water is expensive, hence the three-inch bath limit. I felt like a giraffe in a wading pool as I strained to hear whether or not Rox was talking to BB. A miserable giraffe. This was our first real fight, and I wasn’t even sure what it was about.

  As I was drying off, Roxie knocked on the bathroom door.

  “It’s okay, I talked to him,” she said. “He’s not going to blow up any cops, although not because I called. Reverend Tie-Die called first. Wanna hear?”

  “What I want to hear is what we’re fighting about,” I said after opening the bathroom door as if it were made of nitroglycerin. “Then I want to hear about BB.”

  Roxie looked equally miserable as she gestured toward the windo
w and the tumble of moonlit boulders outside. She also looked lost.

  “We’re different, Blue,” she said. “Do you know how weird this place feels to me, how scared I am of you sometimes? You’re like mercury, like electricity or something. The way you think is intuitive, not rational, and even though you’re usually on target, the way you put things sounds arrogant. You just talk and move around in life, any way or anywhere you want, and it works for you because you’re marching to your own drum anyway. But it’s not like that for me and never can be. Before I met you I thought my world, my way of thinking, was all there was. It isn’t, but it’s still my world, and sometimes you just barge into it like tonight with your half-baked analysis of BB. You weren’t wrong, but you came at it wrong. Uppity. Do you know how many young black men are either in prison or on parole right now in this country, how many lives wasted?”

  She was standing in darkness snapping and unsnapping one of the pockets of her bright blue cargo shirt, which looked gray in the gloom. Just a large, dark woman with big ears and beads in her braided hair. For a moment she seemed distant and two-dimensional, like a photo accompanying a newspaper article about black people doing something political. “Minority Business Leaders Launch Scholarship Effort.” That sort of article. The sort you never actually read.

  “Over forty percent of young black men in the U.S. are in prison or on parole right now,” I answered her question. “But my brother’s in prison, too, and he isn’t black, and I’m not responsible for any of this, but I’m doing the best I can with him and BB, and I don’t know if I can stop sounding arrogant to you, but I’ll try, Rox. I’ll let you teach me things I could easily live without ever knowing. Will you do the same for me?”

  “I am letting you teach me. I am all the time,” she answered as it happened again. That sense of walls dissolving and the slow, magnetic leaning toward something unknown. We stood that way in the dark for a long time, just looking at each other, not fighting it, rocking a little with the spin from a journey happening only inside our heads.

  “Oh, shit,” we said in unison as the phone rang.

  It was Wes Rathbone.

  “Sorry to call this late, but you’re on the payroll now so get used to it,” he said to my mumbled hello. “You’re consultants now. It’s approved as of tonight. This thing’s blowing up, Blue. Get Dr. Bouchie on the other phone, please.”

  It was apparent from his tone that waiting until tomorrow wasn’t an option.

  “It’s Rathbone,” I said, gesturing for her to pick up the phone in the living room.

  “What’s happened?” I heard her ask him seconds later.

  “Listen to this,” was all he said. There was the click and whir of a tape being played, then a voice I recognized immediately. A voice all Americans associate with the phrase, “What’s up, Doc?” Bugs Bunny’s voice. Only it wasn’t Bugs Bunny.

  “I destroyed Ruby Emerald because she was an abomination,” it said. “I am the Sword of Heaven and she was an abomination to the law. The Sword of Heaven cast her down and killed her and will kill again.”

  After that there was another click as the tape was stopped.

  “This thing came in to the local CBS affiliate shortly after the story about Emerald’s illness aired on the six o’clock news,” Rathbone explained. “It’s illegal to tape phone calls without notifying the caller, but the woman at the desk where the call got shunted has a hearing impairment, so they let her tape calls as a backup in case she misses a name or phone number. We got lucky with this one. Not that it tells us much.”

  “What happened to Emerald?” Rox asked.

  “Nothing,” Rathbone answered. “That’s what’s strange. After the TV station called us with this tape, we called the hospital. She’s fine, everything’s normal. Her doctor says there’s no reason she can’t preach at this revival tomorrow. Her p.r. people are putting it out that she had a mild case of food poisoning. The doc says it wasn’t food poisoning but declines to say what it was. Apparently our ‘Sword of Heaven’ thought she was a goner when the story hit at six, and called the station to take credit.”

  “Bugs Bunny called the station,” I reminded him.

  “That’s a voice modification device you can buy all over, mostly from mail-order catalogues. They come prepackaged. Darth Vader, Homer Simpson, the president. You speak in your normal voice into a mike that funnels the sound through a distortion program. You come out saying whatever you said, but sounding like the program you picked. This one was Bugs.”

  Wes Rathbone was not amused.

  “We’ve got a serious problem here,” he went on. “CBS didn’t keep this under wraps. The story will be on TV news tomorrow and in the papers on Monday. We’re going to be under a lot of pressure. How soon can you get us that profile?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” Rox told him. “And we’ll need a fax of the text from the tape right away. Send it here.”

  “Done,” Rathbone said, and hung up.

  Rox and I stood around watching the fax come in, saying nothing, thinking.

  “Need to review the FBI profiling protocol for serial killers and then review all the data that says the FBI profiling protocol is a pile of crap,” she muttered. “I’ll need to be in my office by seven at least. This is going to take some time.”

  “I want to run vocabulary analyses of both the letter and the tape, but especially the letter,” I replied. “There may be some clues in the language of the headlines selected to glue all over the page.”

  We were working, talking to ourselves, not to each other.

  “Better get some sleep,” Roxie said.

  “You still didn’t tell me about BB and the preacher,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, the guy sounds okay. He called BB after BB called here, told him he did a chaplaincy at Sing-Sing for five years and knows everybody who makes a mistake isn’t necessarily toxic. Then he and BB went for an eight-mile run around Mission Bay, after which they had lattes and made plans to attend a gospel concert tomorrow afternoon. The run calmed our boy down. Right now he’s in an agony of indecision over what to wear to a gospel concert. When we hung up he was leaning toward a Stokely Carmichael look. Black suit, narrow tie, you know.”

  We were doing okay, I thought as I felt Rox stretch and relax into sleep beside me in my queen-size bed. Everybody in my little world was doing okay. But somebody out there wasn’t. Somebody out there was either killing or wanting to be seen as a killer. Somebody out there wanted to be a sword. The thought of that warped personality brought a bitter taste to the back of my throat. Just knowing it was out there made me happy about the Smith and Wesson now tucked snugly in my waist pack. You never know. You just really don’t.

  5

  Profiles in Deadliness

  Roxie was up at five, an hour I rarely acknowledge, much less see. For the record, in the Anza-Borrego Desert in late October, five A.M. smells like aluminum and seems to be deeply absorbed in a game that would turn out to be chess if you could see it. I sat up in bed feeling the clean desert chill and told myself a killer might strike again if I didn’t get up. Then I curled under the comforter and began a delicious drift back into sleep. Brontë, stretched across the foot of the bed, was snoring softly.

  “You and that dog were not raised on a farm,” Rox noted as she applied makeup in the bathroom.

  “Neither were you.” I yawned from beneath the comforter.

  “You and that dog do not understand the work ethic.”

  “Dogs do not have a work ethic,” I muttered, well aware that some dogs do. Border collies, for example.

  “I’ll need your analysis of the clippings that were glued to the letter by ten-thirty, Blue. That will give me a couple of hours to mesh your findings with whatever I can come up with and get the profile over to Rathbone by one. We don’t have much time.”

  “What are you going to give them?” I asked, opening my eyes in that way you know means you’re going to get up. “FBI stuff on serial killers?”

&nbs
p; Rox was bustling around my bedroom dramatically, moving the air in guilt-inducing patterns.

  “Some,” she said tersely. “Some of the Holmes serial killer typology, probably. More on the medical aspect. If somebody’s manipulating blood pressure to murder people, then that person has had some medical training. Doctor, nurse, maybe pharmacist. Or anybody in a tech support position that involves knowledge of blood chemistry and systems. We’re not looking for a dietician or an X-ray tech. We’re looking for a medical professional familiar with the circulatory system who’s cracking up. Probably not a true antisocial personality disorder, or the aberrant behavior would have shown up before or during medical training. This one’s been repressing a big rage for years. But now something’s triggered it.”

  “What about somebody who just learned about blood pressure by having it?” I offered.

  Roxie laughed as she scrounged for a shoe under the bed.

  “Blue, anybody who doesn’t have blood pressure is dead.”

  “I meant high blood pressure,” I said. I have never understood people who can use words correctly before coffee.

  “Nah,” she answered. “This is somebody who’s learned how to push blood pressure dangerously, even fatally high in perfectly healthy people. That’s not something you pick up from a pamphlet your doctor gives you as she tells you to exercise and cut down on fat.”

  I had managed to stand up and pull on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. My bare feet demanded more complicated behaviors. Finding socks, tying shoes. Feet are not something I easily deal with at five A.M. I ignored them and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Brontë followed me, clearly wondering how to feign alertness. She drank some water from her red ceramic bowl and then sat beside the refrigerator with the attitude of a dog on a mission.

  “That’s good,” I told her. “Guard the refrigerator.”