Phoenix Noir

by Patrick Millikin

  PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

  BY LEE CHILD

  Chandler

  He said he wouldn’t talk to me. I asked him why. He said because he was a cop and I was a journalist. I said he sounded like a guy with something to hide. He said no, he had nothing to hide.

  “So talk to me,” I said, and I knew he would.

  He scuffed around for a minute more, hands on the top of the bar, drumming his fingers, moving a little on his stool. I knew him fairly well. He was edging out of the summer of his career and entering the autumn. His best years were behind him. He was in the valley, facing a long ten years before his pension. He liked winning, but losing didn’t worry him too much. He was a realistic man. But he liked to be sure. What he hated was not really knowing whether he had won or lost.

  “From the top,” I said.

  He shrugged and took a sip of his beer and sighed and blew fumes toward the mirror facing us. Then he started with the 911 call. The house, out beyond Chandler, south and east of the city. A long low ranch, prosperous, walled in, the unlit pool, the darkness. The parents, arriving home from a party. The silence. The busted window, the empty bed. The trail of blood through the hallway. The daughter’s body, all ripped up. Fourteen years old, damaged in a way he still wasn’t prepared to discuss.

  I said, “There were details that you withheld.”

  He asked, “How do you know?”

  “You guys always do that. To evaluate the confessions.”

  He nodded.

  I asked, “How many confessions did you get?”

  “A hundred and eight.”

  “All phony?”

  “Of course.”

  “What information did you withhold?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Why not? You not sure you got the right guy?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  So he did. The scene was clearly fresh. The parents had gotten back maybe moments after the perpetrator had exited. Police response had been fast. The blood on the hallway carpet was still liquid. Dark red, not black, against the kid’s pale skin. The kid’s pale skin was a problem from the start. They all knew it. They were in a position to act fast and heavy, so they were going to, and they knew it would be claimed later that the speed was all about the kid being white, not black or brown. It wasn’t. It was a question of luck and timing. They got a fresh scene, and they got a couple of breaks. I nodded, like I accepted his view. Which I did. I was a journalist, and I liked mischief as much as the next guy, but sometimes things were straightforward.

  “Go on,” I said.

  There were photographs of the kid all over the house. She was an only child. She was luminous and beautiful. She was stupefying, the way fourteen-year-old white Arizona girls often are.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The first break had been the weather. There had been torrential rain two days previously, and then the heat had come back with a vengeance. The rain had skimmed the street with sand and mud and the heat had baked it to a film of dust, and the dust showed no tire tracks other than those from the parents’ vehicle and the cop cars and the ambulance. Therefore the perpetrator had arrived on foot. And left on foot. There were clear marks in the dust. Sneakers, maybe size ten, fairly generic soles. The prints were photographed and e-mailed and everyone was confident that in the fullness of time some database somewhere would match a brand and a style. But what was more important was that they had a suspect recently departed from a live scene on foot, in a landscape where no one walked. So APBs and be-on-the-lookouts were broadcast for a two-mile radius. It was midnight and more than a hundred degrees and pedestrians were going to be rare. It was simply too hot for walking. Certainly too hot for running. Any kind of sustained physical activity would be close to a suicide attempt. Greater Phoenix was that kind of place, especially in the summer.

  Ten minutes passed and no fugitives were found.

  Then they got their second break. The parents were reasonably lucid. In between all the bawling and screaming they noticed their daughter’s cell phone was missing. It had been her pride and joy. An iPhone, with an AT&T contract that gave her unlimited minutes, which she exploited to the max. Back then iPhones were new and cool. The cops figured the perp had stolen it. They figured the kind of guy who had no car in Arizona would have been entranced by a small shiny object like an iPhone. Or else if he was some kind of big-time deviant, maybe he collected souvenirs. Maybe the cache of photographs of the kid’s friends was exciting. Or the text messages stored in the memory.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The third break was all about middle-class parents and fourteen-year-old daughters. The parents had signed up for a service whereby they could track the GPS chip in the iPhone on their home computer. Not cheap, but they were the kind of people who wanted to know their kid was telling the truth when she said she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house or riding with a buddy to the library. The cops got the password and logged on right there and then and saw the phone moving slowly north, toward Tempe. Too fast for walking. Too fast for running. Too slow to be in a car.

  “Bike?” one of them said.

  “Too hot,” another answered. “Plus no tire tracks in the driveway.”

  The guy telling the story next to me on his stool had been the one who had understood.

  “Bus,” he said. “The perp is on the bus.”

  Greater Phoenix had a lot of buses. They were for workers paid too little to own cars. They shuttled folks around, especially early in the morning and late at night. The giant city would have ground to a halt without them. Meals would have gone unserved, pools uncleaned, beds unmade, trash not collected. Immediately all the cops as one imagined a rough profile. A dark-skinned man, probably small, probably crazy, rocking on a seat as a bus headed north. Fiddling with the iPhone, checking the music library, looking at the pictures. Maybe with the knife still in his pocket, although surely that was too much to ask.

  One cop stayed at the house and watched the screen and called the game like a sports announcer. All the APBs and the BOLOs were canceled and every car screamed after the bus. It took ten minutes to find it. Ten seconds to stop it. It was corraled in a ring of cars. Lights were flashing and popping and cops were crouching behind hoods and doors and trunks and guns were pointing, Glocks and shotguns, dozens of them.

  The bus had a driver and three passengers aboard.

  The driver was a woman. All three passengers were women. All three were elderly. One of them was white. The driver was a skinny Latina of around thirty.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The guy beside me sipped his beer again and sighed. He had arrived at the point where the investigation was botched. They had spent close to twenty minutes questioning the four women, searching them, making them move up and down the street while the cop back at the house watched for GPS action on the screen. But the cursor didn’t move. The phone was still on the bus. But the bus was empty. They searched under the seats. Nothing. They searched the seats themselves.

  They found the phone.

  The last-but-one seat at the back on the right had been slit with a knife. The phone had been forced edgewise into the foam rubber cushion. It was hidden there and bleeping away silently. A wild goose chase. A decoy.

  The slit in the seat was rimed with faint traces of blood. The same knife.

  The driver and all three passengers recalled a white man getting on the bus south of Chandler. He had seated himself in back and gotten out again at the next stop. He was described as neatly dressed and close to middle age. He was remembered for being from the wrong demographic. Not a typical bus rider.

  The cops asked, “Was he wearing sneakers?”

  No one knew for sure.

  “Did he have blood on him?”

  No one recalled.

  The chase restarted south of Chandler. The assumption was that because the decoy had been placed to move north, then the perp was actu
ally moving south. A fine theory, but it came to nothing. No one was found. A helicopter joined the effort. The night was still dark but the helicopter had thermal imaging equipment. It was not useful. Everything single thing it saw was hot.

  Dawn came and the helicopter refueled and came back for a visual search. And again, and again, for days. At the end of a long weekend it found something.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The thing that the helicopter found was a corpse. White male, wearing sneakers. In his early twenties. He was identi-fied as a college student, last seen the day before. A day later the medical examiner issued his report. The guy had died of heat exhaustion and dehydration.

  “Consistent with running from a crime scene?” the cops asked.

  “Among other possibilities,” the medical examiner answered.

  The guy’s toxicology screen was baroque. Ecstasy, skunk, alcohol.

  “Enough to make him unstable?” the cops asked.

  “Enough to make an elephant unstable,” the medical examiner answered.

  The guy beside me finished his beer. I signaled for another.

  I asked, “Case closed?”

  The guy beside me nodded. “Because the kid was white. We needed a result.”

  “You not convinced?”

  “He wasn’t middle-aged. He wasn’t neatly dressed. His sneakers were wrong. No sign of the knife. Plus, a guy hopped-up enough to run himself to death in the heat wouldn’t have thought to set up the decoy with the phone.”

  “So who was he?”

  “Just a frat boy who liked partying a little too much.”

  “Anyone share your opinion?”

  “All of us.”

  “Anyone doing anything about it?”

  “The case is closed.”

  “So what really happened?”

  “I think the decoy indicates premeditation. And I think it was a double bluff. I think the perp got out of the bus and carried on north, maybe in a car he had parked.”

  I nodded. The perp had. Right then the car he had used was parked in the lot behind the bar. Its keys were in my pocket.

  “Win some, lose some,” I said.

  DEVIL DOLL

  BY PATRICK MILLIKIN

  Tovrea Castle

  Spoiled little assholes,” Blankenship said, looking down at the two bodies. The girl had crumpled onto her side and lay twisted on the concrete floor. The young man remained sitting but his head sagged forward, a thin line of blood trailing from his mouth. Detective Gene Conover stepped out onto the top-floor landing of the castle and stood beside the uniformed cop. It took him a moment to catch his breath.

  “What am I looking at here, Tom?” he said.

  “I’d say a murder-suicide type of setup. Sid Vicious over here put a plug in his girlfriend and then took himself out.”

  A crime scene photographer hovered, clicking shots of the dead pair from various angles. He nodded to Conover and retreated. Several other techs and uniforms hung around downstairs.

  The detective slipped on a pair of latex gloves and examined the surface of the waist-high retaining hall. He then took out his Maglite and did a complete circle of the small observation deck. Blankenship waited for him to speak.

  “ID?” Conover finally asked.

  “Nothing on Sid here, but we found the girl’s purse. Her wallet was inside. Cash and credit cards hadn’t been touched. Name’s Kelly Hodge. Mean anything to you?”

  Conover shook his head. “Not really. Does she have a sheet?”

  “Well, she doesn’t have a record exactly, but we know this girl. You’ve never seen her before, eh?”

  Conover leaned over and looked again closely at the two bodies. “I don’t think so, Tom. Should I have?”

  “She’s Ed Hodge’s little girl,” Blankenship said.

  “The liquor guy?”

  “The very same. This is gonna be a mess.”

  The detective squatted down and studied the entrance wound on the girl’s chest, noting the size and shape of the powder burns. He was careful to avoid the blood, which soaked her lower torso and pooled out on the concrete floor. Conover also recognized fresh needle marks on her arm.

  “I’d say whoever shot her knew what he was doing,” he said, glancing over at the gun lying next to the dead guy’s feet. One of the techs had already drawn a chalk circle around it.

  “Why, because of the pop gun?” Blankenship asked.

  “Easy to miss with a .22. The guy shot her directly in the heart. Couldn’t have been more than a foot or two away.”

  “Did himself the same way from the looks of it.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Looks pretty straightforward, Gene. Scumbag boyfriend shoots the Hodge girl, then punches his own ticket.”

  “You may be right,” Conover said. He stood up and stepped back from the two bodies. “Where are the shell casings?”

  “Bagged and tagged already.”

  “How many?”

  “Just the two, and only two missing from the clip.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “Who called it in?”

  “Bouncer over at Angels heard the shots.” Blankenship consulted his notes. “Dispatch recorded the call at 3:55 a.m. Let’s see, guy’s name is Everest or Everett. Something like that.”

  Conover looked out across the desert toward Washington. The all-nude club’s neon marquee was clearly visible a couple hundred yards away.

  Blankenship bent down on one knee and crooked his neck to the side to read what was written on the girl’s shirt. “Wonder what the hell 45 Grave means,” he said. “Some kind of satanic shit?”

  “Rock group’d be my guess,” Conover said.

  “Think they’re in some weird cult or something?” Blan-kenship frowned at the young man’s appearance. The kid looked like a collapsed marionette, dyed black hair hanging in front of his eyes, face smudged with sweat and eyeliner.

  “I seriously doubt it, Tom.”

  “Well, it looks like our boy’s shirt is pretty accurate, anyway.”

  Conover noticed the lettering on the young man’s shirt, nearly obscured by blood—Bad Brains. He humored Blanken-ship with a smirk.

  The detective glanced at his watch. It was just after 6 a.m. He’d wait for the autopsy and ballistics reports to con-firm his suspicions. In the meantime, he refrained from saying much to the uniform. Blankenship was basically a decent guy, but he wasn’t too smart and he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. This was true of a lot of cops Conover had known over the years.

  “It’s going to be hard to contain for very long. We’ll have to break the news to Hodge before the media gets wind of it,” Conover said.

  “There’s gonna be a shit-storm.”

  “Yes, I imagine there will be.”

  “Perhaps we can hold off the vultures for a bit. I’ll see what I can do,” Blankenship said.

  “I’d appreciate that, Tom.”

  The detective ducked under the crime scene tape and walked out the front door. He stood for a moment looking up at the castle. Half the windows were broken or missing and graffiti stained the stucco walls. Must have been something back in the ’30s, he thought. But that was fifty years back. These days the property’s only occupants were junkies, prostitutes, and squatters.

  Conover shook his head and proceeded down the weed-strewn path, Blankenship falling into step behind him. The sun finally appeared over the mountains to the east, and the decrepit, overgrown cactus garden lay exposed in the golden light.

  “Anybody contact the Tovrea family yet?” Conover asked.

  “We’re trying to reach the widow. She lives out in Paradise Valley.”

  “Right.” Conover walked down to where he’d parked his car, an old ’73 Dodge Polara. There were now six or seven patrol cars parked in the dirt lot, and the detective noticed the first TV news truck pulling up to the gate out on Van Buren.

  “Shit, here we go,” he muttered.

  Ron Wheeler dug working at Brookshir
e’s Coffee Shop. It was one of the few twenty-four-hour restaurants in central Phoenix and the place was always packed with good-looking chicks, especially after 1 o’clock when the bars closed. The coffee was strong and drinkable, not like that watered-down shit they served at Denny’s, and for a greasy spoon the food wasn’t bad. He’d only been there for a few months but he was already popular with the customers and the tips were great.

  Ron usually worked the graveyard shift, which suited his lifestyle. A few months back he’d moved out of his parents’ house into a studio apartment off Twenty-fourth Street and McDowell, just around the corner from the restaurant. In the evening he’d hang out with friends, maybe smoke a little weed, and practice the guitar. Then he’d work all night until 7 a.m., go home, crash until late afternoon, and do it all over again. His best friend Brian Cortaro had a bass guitar and they planned to start a band. Ron was thinking of asking his new girlfriend Kelly if she’d be interested in taking a stab at singing. He’d graduated from East High in ’82, two years back, and his twentieth birthday was coming up in a few days.

  To celebrate, Kelly had taken him to see X, one of his favorite bands, over at the Silver Dollar Club. Billy Zoom was his guitar god. Ron thought he was the epitome of cool with his slicked-back hair and silver Gretsch, his fingers racing over the fret board while he just stood there with that insane smile. Yeah, Billy Zoom was bad-ass, and Ron’s copies of Los Angeles and Under the Big Black Sun were all scratched to hell from playing them so much. He’d sit there with his crappy Memphis Les Paul copy and twenty-watt Peavey amp and try to fig-ure out the songs. Zoom’s guitar parts were deceptive—they seemed straightforward enough, but then the sneaky bastard would slip in a weird jazz chord or some damn finger-picking run that would fuck with Ron’s mind.