by Louise Ure
She continued to shake her head, either weary of the burden of her sadness or in negative reply to my questions. My photo array would do no good here. I said a quiet good-bye and left. The dead bolt slid home before I stepped off the porch.
I decided to visit Amy on the way home and followed Grant Road to the east. I snuck in without anyone asking about overdue bills and promised checks, and heard a baby in Amy’s room. Amy’s roommate, Mrs. Pilker, had her whole family visiting.
“Hi, little one.” I smiled down at the baby, who was playing at the foot of Mrs. Pilker’s bed.
“This is Emily, Nana’s great granddaughter,” a young woman said without introducing herself.
“She looks just like her,” I said, hoping this was a compliment. I’m sure Mrs. Pilker would have loved the visit, but she slept through it.
A few moments with Amy and the Pilker family brought the comfort I needed. A little life and love after dipping into the dark world of rape.
The second woman on my list, Miranda Lang, lived in Phoenix, and she would have to wait until tomorrow. I took a quick shower and put on an oversized white shirt that draped longer than my shorts. Selena was due back within an hour, so I brought in the gallon jar of sun tea I’d left to brew in the backyard and clipped a fistful of mint from under the bedroom window. I was laying out a plate of nopalitos when I heard Selena’s car pull up outside. The vinegary strands of pickled cactus were her favorite snack, and I owed her for all the driving she’d done today.
“Hold on, I’m coming!” I called in answer to her knock. I had the plate of nopalitos in my left hand and used my mint-laden right hand to open the door. The crushed leaves gave a fresh, green fragrance to the air.
Selena leaned against the doorjamb, rivulets of sweat framing her face. She did a fake stagger into the room as if she had been wandering in the desert for three days, then inhaled deeply of the herbal aroma and crossed into the living room. Her huaraches squeaked with every step across the tiled floor, the thin braids of rawhide contracting in the cool room.
“Take your shoes off and come sit under the misters,” I said, guiding her outside to the ocotillo ramada, where the misters were going full blast. “How about a big glass of iced tea?”
“Yes to the tea, but that’s just to take the edge off. What I really want is a beer.”
I went back inside for the beer and a bucket of ice. Selena was fanning herself with a palm-size notebook when I returned.
“I only found one of the three women I was looking for,” she said. “But she said that Cates might have been her attacker.”
I pressed the bottle of beer to my forehead but felt a shiver that was caused by more than the cold glass. “Tell me.”
“Well, I started in Marana. I thought I’d start in the north and then head south to meet the others. The Marana victim is Christie Parstac, the student nurse. She’s an RN now, married, with a two-year-old boy and another on the way. She didn’t want to talk to me—said she was trying to put it all behind her. But she seemed to understand that we were trying to catch someone who might still be out there hurting women.
“Her attack was at the end of the school year six years ago. Geez, after six years you can still see the scar of rope marks around her neck. She’d gone out with two girlfriends and met this guy at a bar near campus. She told her friends she was going to stay for a while after they left. She had another couple of drinks with him, then he drove her out past the airport, strangled her, and raped her with a beer bottle.”
I cringed. “If she spent time with him at the bar, then she got a good look at him and maybe her friends did, too. What did she say about his picture?”
“Hold on, I’m getting there. Before I showed her the pictures, I asked her what she remembered about him. She said he had introduced himself as Philip Harms or Harns—she wasn’t sure. She said he had light hair and was good looking. He didn’t look threatening.”
“Did she say anything about his hands or fingers?”
Selena shook her head, then took a slug of beer and pushed her hair off her forehead.
“The sad thing is, I think Christie still blames herself for coming on to him in the bar. She still thinks she should have realized he was dangerous.
“In the end, she wasn’t sure about the photo. She said it could have been him, but she also said that picture number two could have been him. You know, the PR photo we cut out of the paper about that lawyer who had just been given a judgeship?”
My spirits sank. Christie might have been our best lead. A student nurse, like Amy, and she got a good look at him. The circumstances were at least similar: two women out celebrating in a public place. If she couldn’t confirm Cates as her attacker, then who could? Maybe the real rapist was someone who vaguely resembled Cates. I jotted a note to follow up with the friends she’d been with at the bar. Maybe we’d get lucky and find someone with a photographic memory or an amateur video from that night. Right. Fat chance.
We decided to continue the conversation over dinner, and Selena followed me into the house and perched on one of the kitchen barstools while I worked. I would have loved to put chicken or strips of beef in the quesadillas, but after splurging on steak for the Fourth of July party, chiles and cheese were all my budget could afford.
“What was your next stop after Marana?” I asked, crumbling the queso fresco and Monterey Jack.
“I went to Sells, but no luck there.” Selena said. That was another sixty-five miles to the west and south of the city. No wonder she looked hot and tired when she showed up.
I didn’t remember many details about the Sells victim from my cursory review of Enrique’s notes. “She was attacked in a parking lot, right?”
“Right. A grocery store parking lot in Sells. But the family’s moved away. The neighbors think they went back to Mexico, but they don’t know which city.”
“Almost ten years ago. She probably wouldn’t have been able to help us anyway.” I sprinkled green chiles and cheese on a tortilla.
“I can keep looking if you want,” Selena said.
I shook my head and plopped the tortilla in the hot pan. Selena got tomatoes and guacamole out of the refrigerator, and I chopped the cilantro.
“What about the third one?” I asked, flipping the quesadillas.
“No luck on that one either. That was Sharon Hamishfender, the stripper who was attacked leaving work. She’s moved from the address that was shown in the phone book, and none of her neighbors has a forwarding address for her. But I haven’t given up on her. One of the neighbors said that she came from Patagonia, like Cates did.”
“She did?” I grabbed the chart of victims and crimes that we’d prepared and added the notation “Patagonia” under Hamishfender’s name. “Let’s see, she’d be thirty-four now, four years younger than Cates. They probably didn’t go to school together.”
“Maybe not. But Patagonia’s a small town. They might have known each other.”
“Let’s see if there’s any family left there. And try an Internet search for her,” I said, placing the plates on the table. “With a last name that unusual, we might be able to track her down.”
“Unless she’s changed her name or gone underground as a result of the rape,” Selena answered, cutting into the warm quesadilla. Molten white cheese oozed out on the plate.
Selena was right. Many of the women on the sheet had unlisted phone numbers now or were only listed as initials or under their husbands’ names. Without cribbing from Enrique’s notes, we wouldn’t have been able to find most of them.
When we finished eating, I walked Selena out to her car. “Thank you, chica,” I said with a good-bye hug. “You’ve done me a world of good today.”
“I’m not sure these women we talked to would agree with you. Christie Parstac, the nurse, wasn’t even sure she wanted the guy caught. Didn’t want to bring it all back.”
“I know.” But sometimes looking under the bed is the only way to know the bogeyman’s gone.
> 13
On Saturday morning I decided to travel to Phoenix without first phoning Miranda Lang. I didn’t know if she would see me, but if not, the four-hour round-trip still wouldn’t be wasted. I could use the thinking time. I slid a cassette of the Mariachis Cobres’s twenty-fifth anniversary album into the Jeep’s tape player and listened to the sweet duet of the Carillo brothers on “Maria Elena” as I joined I-10 and drove north.
When I was growing up, the road between Tucson and Phoenix was a vast and empty landscape defined only by car-size tumbleweeds and barbed-wire fences. Now both cities were edging in from the north and south, but it still left almost a hundred-mile stretch of Indian reservations, six-foot mesquite trees, and isolated saguaros, like lonely sentries, in between.
I passed the airplane graveyard not far out of town; the bodies of the abandoned planes on the horizon looked like an unsuccessful alien invasion. Ten miles beyond that, at the base of Picacho Peak, was an ostrich ranch whose long-legged inhabitants could have been the stunned passengers from those downed alien crafts. I don’t know how they were tolerating the one-hundred-andfive-degree day; there wasn’t a patch of shade in sight.
By the time I reached Tempe, on the outskirts of Phoenix, I had put most of the gruesome details of my conversation with Selena behind me, but Phoenix traffic was driving my blood pressure up instead. Even on a Saturday morning, six lanes roared thick with chrome and steel and exhaust fumes. I exited on Seventh Street and headed toward the center of town.
Miranda Lang lived in a small group of tidy, two-story condominiums on Central, only a mile or so from the high-rises downtown. Faux-Mexican beams stuck out near the roofline, and a small metal sculpture of an owl perched on the roof to drive away over-friendly pigeons. Eucalyptus trees and shoulder-high palms had been planted between the condos for shade and privacy. Open carports took up half of each unit’s ground-floor space, and concrete steps led up from the sidewalk to the entryways.
Her door opened just as I raised my hand to knock. She had her backpack strap over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand.
“Oh!” She stepped back into the entryway. “I didn’t know anyone was there.”
Miranda Lang was chiseled, with a face like a clenched fist. She was a small woman with spiky black hair and a sharp nose. The sports bra and Lycra shorts she wore left no question about the rock-hard state of her conditioning. Her calf muscles were well defined, divided like the heart shape of a cleaved apple, and her stomach muscles rippled and tightened into ropes. Even her fingers looked strong.
“Ms. Lang, I’m Calla Gentry. I’ve come up from Tucson to talk to you.”
She cocked her head but didn’t respond. When she juggled her keys from her left hand to her right, I noticed the small atomizer of mace attached to the key ring.
“I need to talk to you about your rape last year. The same thing happened to my sister, and I’m trying to find the man who did this.” I waited for a response. A bead of sweat dripped down my temple.
She hesitated for so long that I thought I’d lost her. Then she pushed past me and headed down the concrete steps. “Follow me.”
She got into the black Saab in the carport and gunned the car out of the parking lot. I had to hurry to get my car backed out before I lost her at the corner. She didn’t go far, turning into a strip mall a half mile down the street and waiting for me at the entrance to a Jamba Juice.
“Wait here,” she said, gesturing to the small wrought-iron table on the sidewalk. “Can I get you something?”
The place looked far too healthy for me, so I asked for bottled water. She came out a few minutes later with my water and something deep green and frothy for herself. Kryptonite, probably. With a booster shot of Invincibility.
She dropped the backpack from her shoulder to the ground. The chained connection between the wooden dowels of a pair of nunchucks stuck out from the top.
“Nunchucks?” I asked. “You’re into martial arts?”
“I’m into anything that will protect me,” she said. The muscles around her eyes and mouth tightened.
She didn’t look anything like the photo Enrique had included with his notes. That woman had dark hair that swooped under her chin. Her lips had shown a trace of tawny lipstick, and she had worn teardrop-shaped turquoise earrings. Of course, in that photo she also had a split lip and a raw cut under her eye. Miranda Lang had made herself over, in more ways than one.
I explained the circumstances of Amy’s attack. “I don’t know if this is the same man who assaulted you. Right now I’m trying to get as much information as possible. Anything you can tell me about that night will help. Even the smallest detail might be important.”
She stirred her drink, then gave a powerful suck on the straw, but the thick green slush didn’t make it all the way to the top. She stirred it again.
“It was thirteen months and twenty-two days ago,” she began. But who’s counting.
“I own an art gallery here in town. I thought I’d mix business with pleasure and go to Tucson to meet with one of my artists, then go to the Mariachi Festival downtown.” The International Mariachi Conference was well known in Tucson. It had promoted and fostered the traditional sones and canciónes rancheras style of mariachi music for almost twenty years, and it drew appreciative crowds from all across the country.
“The concert ended about ten thirty at night, and I was alone walking back to my car. I had arrived late and was parked almost a half mile away.” She measured her words like a metronome.
“A thunderstorm was brewing—kind of unusual for that time of year—and it started bucketing down rain. I had started to sprint to my car, when a man pulled up in a Lincoln Town Car and offered me a ride.” She stared into her drink as if it held the next sentence in her story.
“I don’t usually take rides from strangers,” she said, looking up at me. “But it was a nice car, he was well dressed and friendly—you know, not giving me a come on, just being helpful—and it was raining hard. I got into the car.”
“What happened then?” I didn’t want to break the spell of her narrative. She seemed to have to tell this in her own way, at her own pace. My questions could wait.
The sunny sidewalk, the Jamba Juice, and the nunchucks had disappeared. Miranda was back in the Town Car on a rainy Saturday night in April.
“I told him where my car was parked, and he turned in that direction. When we got there, he asked if I’d like to join him for a drink. He seemed nice enough, so I said yes.” She paused while she tried to figure out how to explain her actions. “I don’t know Tucson very well, so it was several minutes before I realized that we were headed out of town and not toward any lighted area or bar.”
Enrique’s notes said that she, like Lydia Chavez, had been discovered at Gates Pass, a saddlelike route through the Tucson Mountains that leads to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the Western movie location, Old Tucson. It offered breathtaking views of the city lights as well as the darkness and privacy to commit just about any heinous act. Dozens of bodies had been discovered at the pass over the years, mostly the result of drug deals gone bad.
“I still didn’t get too worried. He said he wanted to show me the lights of Tucson, and then we’d head to a bar he knew out that way.” She shook her head, marveling at her own naiveté.
“He waited until we got out of the car. Then he hit me in the face with his fist. I was so dazed—I don’t think I lost consciousness, but my reactions were slow. He tied my hands behind my back with his belt. I remember the buckle digging into my spine. It was both rounded and sharp. Like a fan. Then he raped me.”
She stopped. It wasn’t the end of the story. It was the end of the part that was easy to say out loud.
“I was told he used a broomstick on you.”
She gave a grunt. “Is that what it said? Maybe they were just being polite. Or maybe they didn’t know when the officer filled out the form.” She waited until a triad of teenagers pushed past us on the sidewalk
, chattering like birds.
Her voice lowered to a whisper, and she hunched toward the table. Her finely developed muscles, grown to protect her in times of attack, were covered in goose bumps.
“It was an ocotillo cactus.”
I held myself still. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t react. I pictured the ocotillo branches: stiff, whip-like stems that grew over ten feet long and were covered with thick, brittle thorns. I’d always imagined that they used an ocotillo for the crown of thorns at the Crucifixion.
“Did he rape you himself as well? I mean—”
“No. He stood over me giving himself a hand job. But I don’t think he ever got hard. He grunted once, then turned away and broke off the branch from an ocotillo.”
I leaned across the table to put my arms around her shoulders. She started to shrug them off, then buried her head in the crook of my neck and started to cry.
“Damn,” she said through the tears. “I promised myself I would never cry again. I’ve worked so hard. Nobody was ever going to hurt me again.”
“I’m so sorry to bring this all up for you again.” I meant it. What was I doing? Finding Amy’s attacker wasn’t going to help my sister get better. All I was doing was bringing the pain back for a lot of women who were trying to get on with their lives.
And what was it doing to me? I knew now that my sister had lied to me. That she hadn’t had enough faith in me to tell me how the attack had really happened. What would have been wrong with saying that she had been attacked and forced into the motel room? That she had maybe even gone willingly into that room? I wouldn’t have thought less of her, and the crime would have been no less vicious.
Miranda dried the corners of her eyes with the sweatband on her wrist and struggled to compose herself.
“Have you talked to anyone?” I asked. “Any professionals, I mean. This must have been a terrible thing for you to go through. Maybe somebody can help.” I wasn’t a big believer in therapy, but there were some things the human mind couldn’t be expected to get through without help.
She hiccuped a small laugh. “Oh, yeah, I’ve talked to professionals. Talked till I’m blue in the face. Then I decided to take matters into my own hands and joined a martial-arts studio. It may not help, but at least I have an outlet for my aggression.”
