Desert Rage

by Betty Webb

Question: what is a mother?

  Answer: the woman who worries about you.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” I lied.

  Jimmy’s welcoming smile turned sour. “She has sixteen staples in her scalp.”

  Madeline sat down and put her arm around me. “Oh, Lena.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  “The crazy woman tried to kill her,” Jimmy continued. “Back in jail now, bail revoked, cooling her heels at Tent City where it’s a hundred and fifteen in the shade.”

  “Good!” Spleen vented, Madeline gave me a thoughtful look. “You’ve lost weight, too, Sweetie. Are you eating right?”

  I thought of my usual diet of ramen noodles, topped off every now and then with a raspberry jelly doughnut from Bosa’s. “Of course I am. In my business, you have to keep up your strength.”

  “Speaking of eating…” Jimmy said, stepping over to the trailer’s tiny refrigerator. “I’d already made some Pima stew—mutton, you know—before you called, but I’ve put together a nice big salad for you.”

  “How thoughtful of you, Jimmy.” Madeline had been a vegetarian for as long as I could remember.

  We ate more or less in silence until Madeline brought up the issue I’d so desperately avoided thinking about. “Jimmy said the woman who attacked you used steroids.”

  “Sure looks like it.”

  “Intramuscular?”

  “Probably.”

  She took a deep breath, then finally got around to it. “Lena, Jimmy told me that since you got her blood in your mouth, they’ll have to test you for HIV.”

  For a moment I hated my partner for sharing so much. Didn’t he know what a worrywart Madeline was? “Oh, sure, but it’s just a matter of routine. While I was in the ER, they took a base blood sample from me, and just to be on the safe side, I’ll get tested again after a month. Then again after another two months. If Monster Woman is HIV positive, which I doubt she is, I’ll take one final test around the six-month mark. No big deal. This sort of thing happens all the time, and in ninety-nine percent of cases, everyone’s in the clear.” An exaggeration there, but what the hell.

  “They tested her, too? This…this ‘Monster Woman,’ as you call her?”

  I sighed. “Actual name, Terry Jardine. Since there was a lot of blood flying around, they probably gave her a viral load test, but those results won’t be available right away. In the meantime…”

  “In the meantime, we worry,” Jimmy muttered.

  “Not me,” I lied again. “I’m too busy working the Cameron case to worry about anything else.”

  This started another discussion, an abbreviated one, since there was little I wanted to share with Madeline, including Juliana Thorsson’s identity. After I’d finished my recital of the basic facts of the case, Madeline said, “That poor child. Well, at least she has someone who’ll take care of her, love her.”

  I thought about Ali’s uncle, about her egg donor.

  “Maybe,” was all I said.

  ***

  An hour later, her concern about me somewhat abated, Madeline left for her studio in Florence, abandoning me with Jimmy. I wasn’t happy and neither was he. I looked longingly at my laptop, which Jimmy had thoughtfully retrieved from my motel room. It was all I could do not to rush over and fire it up.

  Jimmy caught me looking. “Lena, go back to bed and get some rest.” He’d already refused to let me help with the dishes, leaving me alone at the table, watching him as he put away the last dried dish.

  “I’m rested enough to be bored out of my mind,” I complained. “Tell me what you’ve dug up on the Cameron suspects.”

  “Forget about work. You look awfully pale.”

  “I’m a natural blonde and wear lots of sunblock. Tell me about Kenny Dean Hopper’s family. Any other murderers lurking around in their gene pool?”

  “They’re the salt of the Earth.” Yet something in his expression told me there was more to the story.

  “But? C’mon, Jimmy. I met Kenny’s father. The man has a temper.”

  “The problem isn’t the father.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “His mother?”

  “Oh, all right. Let me go into the office, get the printouts…”

  “I’ll go with you.” I rose from my seat.

  He stepped in front of me and crossed his arms across his broad chest. “Absolutely not. It’s too cold in there and I’m not taking any chances with you, so sit your ass back down.”

  I’d never heard Jimmy swear before; Pimas were known for their clean speech. Out of shock, I sat my ass back down.

  A minute later I held a stack of printouts in my hand. I stared at the pages for a few moments, then confessed, “I can’t read this.”

  “Vision still blurry, huh? Well, that’s what you get with a concussion.” He took the papers from me and set them on the table. “I’ll sum up, then. When Estella Hopper, Kenny’s mother, was sixteen—she was Estella Vargas then—she and her boyfriend, one Sean McKitteridge, got drunk at one of those desert parties and stole a cherry 1968 Jag XKE and wrapped it around a telephone pole on Camelback and Thirty-fifth Avenue. Sean died at the scene, Estella escaped with minor injuries. She wound up serving six months.”

  I digested that for a moment. “But she wasn’t driving.”

  “They popped her for car theft and underage drinking.”

  “Still, a pretty stiff sentence for that, considering she was a minor and all.”

  “Not when there’s a vehicular homicide involved.”

  “More like vehicular suicide,” I muttered. “Anything else?”

  “Not so much as a blip on the radar. Looks like she stopped going to desert parties, and a few years later, while working on her AA at Phoenix College, she met and married Emery Hopper, who became the father of the ill-fated Kenny Dean. But like I said, Emery’s clean as a whistle, never so much as received a parking ticket.”

  If it wasn’t for bad luck, Mrs. Hopper would have no luck at all. First her boyfriend gets himself killed drunk driving, then her son murders five people and she and her husband have to attend his execution. What a life.

  “Next?”

  A wry smile. “Ah, yes. That would be the Family Hoyt, they of the attack dogs and the baseball bat-swinging Bubba. How much do you want to know? Their list of transgressions is lengthy.”

  I put my hand to my staples. They still throbbed. “Read on, big man. I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  He cleared his throat. “It’ll be easier if I take them one by one, according to the severity of the crimes. Sidney Hoyt you already know about. He burned his wife and babies alive to collect on the insurance, thus earning a visit from the esteemed Dr. Arthur Cameron in the Death House. Sidney’s previous crimes included a nickel in Arizona State Prison for three Circle K robberies. In the last, he shot and wounded the female clerk, but the clerk—unlike Sidney’s unfortunate wife and children—recovered. By the way, Sidney’s brother Horace, who I’m betting is the one you refer to as Bat Boy, played backup in the robbery, and he, too, wound up doing five years. Horace has had several more scrapes with the law since then: three DUIs, two Assaults with Intent, one Resisting Arrest, and a half-dozen or so domestic violence calls before his wife—Edith is her name—sent him home to Mama Hoyt. I’ll get to Mama later.”

  Oh, great. Even the mother had a sheet. “There were two more brothers, I believe.”

  “Yes indeedy. Gilman Hoyt, the baby of the family, blew himself up in a meth lab he was running in a Phoenix apartment. Once he was released from the hospital, he served seven years.

  “And then there’s Chester, the eldest. A failed liquor store robbery, for which he did two years. He is now suspected of running a dog-fighting ring, but they haven’t found the venue yet. At one point, all four Hoyt brothers were residents of the state pen at the same time, which made
it kind of homey in a way. Which brings me to Mama Hoyt.”

  “Wait a minute. Where’s Papa? Something tells me the four brothers weren’t virgin births.”

  “Mr. Something is right.” A small smile. “Earl Hoyt was beaten to death in a barroom brawl one month before the birth of bouncing baby Gilman.”

  “A Hoyt as victim. What a refreshing change.”

  He shook his head. “Not really. Earl started the fight, which spread to such an extent that the detectives couldn’t figure out who supplied the fatal blow. He’d cold-cocked a man who innocently brushed up against him on the way to the men’s room, and a couple of the guy’s buddies didn’t take kindly to that. You ready for Mama now?”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “Two shoplifting convictions, earning her a thirty-day stay for each in Tent City, and one three-year-long visit to Perryville for identity theft. She’s on parole as we speak. Oh, and you’ll like this, she’s currently the Maricopa County president of M.W.A.—Mothers for a White America.”

  Jimmy was right. I liked it. I liked it so much it made the staples in my head hurt, and only with difficulty did I finally manage to stop laughing.

  “The best and the brightest,” I said, winding down to a snicker.

  He snickered back. “Yea, verily.” Then his voice turned solemn. “The Youngs, different story. Before Maleese Young was executed for capital murder, he’d received two parking tickets, one for double parking after he’d stopped to help a cat that’d been hit by a car. The cat survived. He took it home and gave it to his daughter Janeese. As for his wife, not even a parking ticket. Same with the daughter. Both of them clean right down the line, no ties to any fringe organization, unless you count the mother’s membership in United Methodist Women as ‘fringe.’ And before you ask, it’s the same story with the DuCharmes, the DuCharme chocolates family. Other than the cop-killing Blaine, who went nuts after he got hooked on crystal meth, no one in the family has ever had a police record. Their memberships are confined to Kiwanis and Rotary, and they’re regular contributors to several charities, among them St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, Meals On Wheels, and Adopt-A-Pet. Good people, it sounds like.”

  Good on paper, anyway. Ted Bundy had been good on paper, too.

  Call me cynical.

  “Where’s Papa DuCharme?”

  “Dead. But Mrs. DuCharme is the brains behind the company. Has been since it started.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Anything irregular about Mr. DuCharme’s death?”

  “Slipped in the bathtub, cracked his skull open, drowned. Nobody home at the time. And before your suspicious mind goes into overdrive, I checked. Mrs. DuCharme and the kiddies were in the Bahamas waiting for Mr. DuCharme to join them as soon as he finished supervising the installation of some new factory equipment. When he didn’t show at the airport or answer his phone, his wife called Scottsdale PD and asked for a welfare check. Cops found the body, and you know what they say.”

  “What do they say?”

  “At least fifty percent of the time, and I’m quoting the most excellent Lena Jones here, the person who finds a dead body is the person responsible for helping it get dead in the first place.”

  “Gee, you sound just like a detective.”

  A big smile.

  Time to get serious again. “How about Felix, Beulah Phelps’ son?” Not that I believed the grossly overweight man could have had anything to do with the torture-killings of the Cameron family. He was too sick to do it himself, too poor to hire it done.

  “As a juvenile, Mr. Phelps stayed off the radar until his mother went down for multiple homicides. While in foster care, he went on a shoplifting binge, did a six-months’ stint in juvie, came out, was transferred to a group home, got some therapy, and stayed clean after that.”

  Clean but doomed.

  “One other thing. While you were sleeping, I took a call from Valerie. She’d forgotten about this while she was talking to you over at Good Sam, but this morning she remembered that Dr. Cameron was instrumental in getting a nurse fired. You might want to call her, get the story yourself. But why don’t you wait until you’re feeling…”

  His voice trailed away as I scrambled for my cell phone.

  Valerie’s story went like this: Approximately a year before the murders, Dr. Cameron complained that some prescribed Oxycodone hadn’t made it to his patients. The following investigation revealed that Wanda Dorset, R.N., had hijacked their medications for her own use. After she refused rehab, Cameron pushed to have her terminated, and she was. Since word of drug addiction and pilferage sweeps like wildfire through the medical community, she couldn’t find another nursing job.

  “Lance, that’s her husband, he was already out of work,” Valerie said. “You know, one of those ‘furlough’ things with no end in sight. They were already on thin financial ice, so once Wanda’s paycheck vanished, they lost their house. I hear he even came down to the hospital—I wasn’t there that night, so I missed the drama—somehow made it into the ER and had it out with Dr. Cameron. Some shoving was involved. Security broke it up and tossed him out before it got too physical.”

  “Wanda’s husband, he a big guy?”

  “Better believe it. Because they were down to the one car, Lance always picked her up at the end of her shift, and we all met him at one time or other. That’s how he got his nickname, The Hulk. Man looked like he never met a set of heavy weights he didn’t like.”

  I winced. Just what the Cameron case needed: another suspect.

  Although I’d planned to catch up on my case notes, the ER doc was right. I ran out of steam by two thirty and shuffled off to bed, leaving Jimmy to man the fort. My nap didn’t last long. At three, blues riffs from my cell phone woke me and when I blearily looked at the display, saw Stephen Zellar’s number. Hoping for good news, I took the call.

  And was glad I did.

  In a voice more animated than usual, Ali’s attorney told me she had just been released into the custody of her uncle.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Ali

  Ali didn’t like the hotel room. It was furnished like something out of a sitcom she’d once watched with Alec on TV Land, but at least it was better than juvie. And Uncle Bradley, who she barely knew, was better than any guard, although most really weren’t all that bad, to tell the truth. But Uncle Bradley didn’t order her to do this, do that, and hurry up for Christ’s sake. If he tried to order her around, he might have to touch her, and she knew he couldn’t, like, stand the idea. It was why he didn’t do anything about the marks on her face that stupid gansta girl put there. Some doctor, right?

  But the food? Heaven.

  “Want some more ice cream, Alison?” he asked, for what had to be the umpteenth millionth time.

  “No, thanks, Uncle Bradley. I’m stuffed. Can we go shopping now? I need some clothes.” She’d walked out of juvie wearing hand-me-downs, and from the way they smelled, they’d been wadded up in some Goodwill bag for a zillion years. With rat turds.

  “Ah, about that. You see…”

  Oh, great. Here it came. Another turndown.

  She looked out the sliding glass door. They were eight stories up with a parking lot below, high enough that she’d probably die right away.

  Tonight. She’d do it tonight.

  “I don’t know anything about young ladies’ clothing and haven’t been in a mall for over a year. I wouldn’t even know where to take you, so…”

  See? Anyway, what did it matter? If she couldn’t get up enough nerve to kill herself she’d just walk around stinking for the rest of her life, and if people didn’t like it, too bad. Once your mom and dad and brother had been murdered and you saw what they looked like lying there in their own blood, there was nothing anybody could do or say to make it…

  No. Don’t think about that. Don’t think about them, not ever, or she’d star
t screaming and screaming and never stop, she’d…

  “…so I’ve asked someone else to, ah, help with that,” Uncle Bradley finished.

  “Huh?”

  “I meant to say, someone else will take you to the mall.”

  Handed off to a stranger. Well, what did she expect? The world sucked and just kept on sucking. She didn’t care. She’d never care. Caring hurt too much.

  “She’ll be here any minute.”

  She? Well, at least that was something. But if whoever it was thought she was up for any cutesy pink girlie crap, she’d better think again. It was all black for Ali, black for remembrance.

  A knock at the door, Uncle Bradley rushing to answer it, anything to keep from having to talk to her. He didn’t know she knew that about him, but she did. He couldn’t stand the sight of her and never would.

  Not that it mattered. It didn’t. Nothing mattered anymore.

  Except for Kyle, but he was still in…

  “Alison? I’d like you to meet Juliana Thorsson.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Lena

  How can a person feel exhausted and restless at the same time? After awakening un-refreshed from my second nap of the day, I found myself incapable of following the ER doc’s orders to take things easy. Instead, I wobbled over to my laptop and read through the Cameron case file. To my frustration, I found too many gaps, too many inconsistencies.

  Around sundown, Jimmy interrupted me to inform me that we could count out the Oxycodone-pilfering Wanda Dorset, R.N., as a suspect.

  “Three days after their house was repossessed, the Dorsets moved back to Malden, Missouri, their hometown,” he said. “She was offered a job as a school nurse, and not being totally drug-addled, took it. He’s working at some power plant. I seriously doubt they flew back here to slaughter the Camerons.”

  “So all’s well that ends well for them, then?”

  “Not really. They’re living with her mother.”

  I gave him a bleak smile. “Maybe she’s a sweetie.”

  He shrugged. “Anything’s possible. I’m still following up on everyone connected to the case, including Bradley Teague, Dr. Cameron’s brother. According to my sources, he really was in Kenya at the time of the murders.”