by Jon Talton
The gate was no problem. Although it still kept watch with a rusty chain and padlock, one post had pulled away enough for me to slip through. I walked along a trail toward the butte. Sure, I could have tried to bring out a team of forensic specialists. But that would have required permission from Peralta. And I was supposed to be writing his damned book. And I didn’t know what I thought of the letter. An old man’s ravings—stranger things had been imagined by the dying and committed to paper. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
The trail took me through the cactus stands and across the undulating, sunblasted ground. In a few months, it could be fatal to be out here. Today, it was cool—almost chilly to thin-blooded Arizonans. I liked it, though. The old Boy Scout in me couldn’t help but think of rattlesnakes and listen for a telltale sound. But the snakes were hibernating, and all I heard was the breeze through the arms of the ocotillo and my boots scuffing against the rocks and sand. The ground was dry. The rain of the previous night had spurned this place. I walked alone surrounded by nothing made by man.
My plan was to look around. Look around, go back and talk to Dana. And then turn her over to the sheriff’s detectives. Maybe Peralta was right—I was doing any task to avoid sitting before that blank computer screen and writing. A task like seeking an old homicide victim in a thousand acres of wilderness. But the instructions in the letter were true. I walked a couple of hundred yards on the trail, heading for the butte. Then, as promised, I found a metal fence post, alone in the ground. Turning left, I could see an odd break in the ground, off to my right.
I wandered toward it, and in a moment an arroyo appeared. It was maybe 20 feet deep and held a dry wash. But its walls were steep and sudden. I didn’t want to stand too close to the edge. The arroyo’s edge was flush with the desert floor. A casual hiker would never know it was here. I started thinking of the hidden canyons where the Apache had eluded the cavalry. And then I saw a formation of bowling-ball-sized rocks exactly the shape and size of a man. They were maybe ten feet from the arroyo edge, and on the hard dirt of the desert floor. I looked around for similar sized stones, and none were nearby. These had been placed here. For a grave.
That was when I heard footsteps.
“This is private property.”
The voice went with a giant. I’m six feet two, and I swear my eyes were on the level of his chest. With him, was a skinny kid wearing a football jersey bearing the lettering ghetto.
I started to speak and the giant shoved me to the ground. My hand blazed in pain at breaking my fall against an outcropping of shale. But that was nothing compared to the kick in the ribs, and then I felt cholla biting into my arm. The kid was laughing, a high-pitched keening. I tried to roll off the cactus, but something sharp erupted into my stomach. I saw a large hiking boot flash between the ground and me.
Then I wasn’t seeing anything.
6
By the time I made it home, the sky was rippling in deep scarlets and oranges. It would be a sunset for the record books, but right that moment I just wanted a martini with Lindsey. My right hand was on fire from the jumping cactus, and my left side felt as if it had been caved in by a rockslide. I kept touching it, and was surprised my ribs were still there. But every time I touched it, a bolt of pain zagged across my chest and up my neck. So much for helping old students. No good deed goes unpunished.
The lights were already on, glowing warmly through the picture window that faces Cypress Street. But when I came through the door, I heard muffled sobs. A look around the archway into the living room, and I saw Lindsey and Robin sitting close. Lindsey’s arm was around her sister, who had her head down and was hunched forward on her elbows. I quietly closed and locked the front door, and took the right turn into the hallway that led to our bedroom, there, to pick out the remaining cactus spines with tweezers and take stock of my mess of an afternoon.
When I’d come to, I was about an inch from the edge of the arroyo. I was still woozy, and the wrong twist would have deposited me two stories down into the wash bed. I was surprised my attackers hadn’t thought of it. But they were gone. As I spat a mouthful of bile into the sand and tried to rise, I could hear a distant buzz. Motorcycles, or all-terrain vehicles. Fading away.
By the time Lindsey came in, I had washed the worst of the desert off me. I managed to kiss her and let her snuggle into my arms without getting my ribs involved or letting her take hold of my injured hand. She offered to make martinis, and I let her.
“Do you feel better about Robin now?” I asked, after we had settled on the leather sofa that faced the picture window.
“Oh, Dave,” she said, a small smile. She lithely swung her legs onto my lap while hanging onto her drink, and lolled her head back against the arm of the sofa.
“Are you all right?” She must have noticed I winced. I said I was. I was getting better at least. Despite a kick in the stomach, my system eagerly accepted the gin.
She said, “I guess I feel a little better. I know I’ve been acting weird. Seeing her for the first time in years…it brought back a lot. But time really can help things.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Dave, you know I have to tell you everything.” She sipped her drink and ran one of her long, elegant fingers around the rim of her glass. “She’s my half-sister, you know? She had a different dad. She’s two years younger, but by the time she came along, Linda was already living with some new guy. I know you think it’s weird to call my mother by her first name…”
“No,” I said. “From the way you describe it, you kind of had to raise her.”
“The dutiful daughter Lindsey,” she said, an ambiguous shade in her voice. “Robin was a sweet girl, so creative. That all changed. She got into drugs by the time she was about thirteen. It didn’t help that we moved to a new school every year, and Linda always had some new man she was self-destructing over. You’ve heard this a million times.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” I said gently.
She sighed. “I know. I’m sorry.” I stroked her feet with my free hand. In a moment, she continued. “For so many years, I felt like an orphan. When I found you, I just didn’t want to dredge all that up. I never thought I’d see her again.” She took an uncharacteristic gulp of her drink. “When I was twenty-five, I was leaving the Air Force. And Robin showed up. It was bad. She was still doing drugs, lying. Oh, Dave. My family sounds like a white trash reality show. I’m not like them. But I knew Robin was going to turn out just like Linda. God, I knew that when I was fifteen years old.” By this time her eyes were full of tears.
“We don’t choose our families, darling,” I said. “I was lucky. But even so, I lost my parents when I was a baby. Then I lost my grandparents. Sometimes I almost wish some long lost brother or sister would arrive.”
“I chose you,” she said. “And I had a good visit with Robin. Maybe she has changed. Everybody gets older, and some people even grow up. She went back to college. My gosh, she’s lived in New York and Paris. She sounds very accomplished.”
“I’d call that a change for the better.”
“Me, too,” she said. “So when Robin showed up at the door today, I either had to treat her like the enemy, or like my sister.” Lindsey says “eye-ther” and I say “eeth-er”; somehow we worked the whole thing out. She said, “So I invited her in, and we talked. I always wanted to save Robin. But I couldn’t make her save herself. Now I think that’s happened. Do you think I’m a fool?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “You have a kind heart that I love.”
“Oh, Dave…” And she was in my arms before I knew it. I let out something between a gasp and a yelp, and the remains of the martini flew onto the floor.
“Dave, what’s wrong? Stop that—leave the martini glass alone. I’ll get that later. What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“No…yes…” And so I told her.
“Oh, my God…we’re going to the ER…” This as she was taking an inventory of the dark red crescent spreading
across my side and my swollen hand and arm. Then we fussed back and forth—I wasn’t going to wait for eight hours in an overrun Phoenix emergency room. I promised I’d call the doctor in the morning if things got worse. Lindsey said I’d call the doctor no matter what.
“I feel like such a dolt,” I said.
“They assaulted a deputy sheriff!”
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Tough Cop.”
“Were you armed, Dave?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, God, they might have killed you. What if they had been armed?”
Then I tried to distract her by making a fresh martini for me, while telling her about the visit from Dana Underwood and her father’s letter.
“Do you remember her?”
I shook my head. “Maybe I remember her voice. I don’t know.”
“She’s a strawberry blonde, Dave,” Lindsey teased. “You used to have a weakness for those strumpets.”
“I have a weakness for you. And she looks like some soccer mom from Ahwatukee.”
“Soccer moms can be hot,” she said.
I said, “Cherchez la femme.” Lindsey wrinkled her nose. “Look for the woman. The subtle power of a woman.”
Then, a teasing gleam came into her blue eyes: “Did you ever sleep with your students, professor?” By this time, we were at the built-in breakfast booth at the back of the kitchen.
“Do you really want to know?”
“I’m not sure.” Lindsey was something of a moralist, in a gentle way.
“Well, I didn’t sleep with my students. Although that certainly happens.”
“Dr. Mapstone, the dutiful teacher. But, Dave, you really think there’s a body out there?”
“I saw those rocks. And the father wrote in the letter that he buried this ‘Z’ under rocks. They could have sat undisturbed there for forty years, the place is so isolated.”
“Except today.”
“Except today,” I agreed. “And what the hell were they doing out there, saying ‘private property,’ when that land belongs to Dana.”
“Maybe they’re really aggressive real-estate agents.”
“Maybe,” I said, and sipped the martini. “But nobody gets killed over real estate. Not even in Arizona.”
“So what are you going to do now? Tell Peralta?”
“Are you kidding? He’ll go postal. I don’t need to be reminded again, in his special way, what a complete failure I am. I’m going to quietly turn it over to the detectives. I’m going to call her and have her come in and make a statement, then go back to my book work.”
“Well, call her now. Maybe you can find out who those goons were. Then, I can nurse you with a healthy dinner. Later, I’ll examine your privates, just to make sure they came through your ordeal. It might take some time…”
So after I finished my drink, I retrieved Dana’s phone number from my old black briefcase, and sat in the study to call her. When Lindsey came in, she saw my face.
“What’s wrong, History Shamus?”
“The number she gave me is wrong. It goes to Arturo’s Llantera in Mesa.”
“Maybe she’s a big wheel.”
“Ha-ha. I’m sure that’s the number she gave me. Now I dial it and get a hubcap store. I tried the phone book—no Dana Underwood.”
It made no damned sense, but I was already thinking what Lindsey now said.
“Maybe she didn’t want you to contact her again.”
7
I leaned against the fender of the Crown Vic and watched a county jail inmate walk past with a shovel. Except for the orange jumpsuit, he looked nice enough. Those are the ones who will bash in your brains with the shovel and drive away with your county-issue vehicle. This guy only wanted to use the latrine. He set his shovel on the ground and climbed into the porta-john with all the gravity of an astronaut preparing to leave the moon. The porta-john had a sheriff’s star on it, was painted in sheriff’s office colors, and towed by a sheriff’s cruiser. It went with the chain gang that was five hundred feet away removing the cairn-shaped boulders that might be the grave of a man known only as “Z.”
Once again the lush desert spread out in every direction, with our view drawn to the misshapen butte, the result of a lava flow that was way outside my expertise to discuss. Sweeping up toward the butte, the ground seemed planed smooth, as if carved by some desert glacier that had left behind all manner of geological debris. I kicked the heel of my boot into the soil: too hard to bury anything without heavy equipment or more time and patience with hand implements than murder usually allows. The inmate retrieved his shovel and went back to where the desert floor suddenly collapsed into the hidden arroyo. Coming from that direction was Sheriff’s Detective Patrick Blair.
“Dr. Mapstone,” he said in his annoying sportscaster voice. “I should have known you’d be to blame for this adventure.”
In his mid-thirties, Patrick Blair bore a vague resemblance to any number of dark-haired male movie stars of the moment: Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, Orlando Bloom, Matt Damon. They all ran together for me. He had definitely fallen into the deep end of the gene pool. For several years, he’d been a star of the homicide bureau. He’d worked with Lindsey on the Harquahala Strangler case, one of those cases you’d call notorious. This was when Lindsey and I were dating on and off, and then we were off for a few months. All while she was working with Patrick Blair. This left me with an irrational, childish, but unshakable dislike of the man. Seeing him, my ribs and back began to ache worse. When he got close enough, he held out the letter from Dana’s father, now enclosed in an evidence bag.
“Where did you get this?”
“I told you on the phone, Blair. A woman came to my office, said she was a former student. After her father died, she found this letter. It contained a confession for a murder in 1966 and directions to the body.”
“But you don’t know who the victim is?”
“No.”
“And you don’t know the dead father’s name?”
I shook my head. He was enjoying this too damned much.
“And now you can’t find her.”
“Right,” I said, feeling more foolish. Maybe I should have said nothing, thrown Dana’s letter in the trash, ignored the odd coincidence of getting my ass kicked in the location to which Dana—or whatever her name was—had led me. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do. “What has your chain gang found?”
“They’re just the brute labor, Mapstone,” he said. “We’ve got detectives and evidence technicians standing by if we find anything. Which seems like a hell of a long shot. Lot of county resources being diverted out here…”
“I’m sure they’d call you if you needed to go back to the city for a facial or something.”
He touched his cheek briefly. He said, “You’re an asshole. You find a lot of trouble for an egghead. I was talking to the Phoenix detectives about the murder down in the ’hood, by your house. Ice pick into the brain. That’ll do you.” I fantasized about setting his youthful face on fire and putting it out with an ice pick. He went on. “These guys said the pick had been filed down so it was about three inches, and really sharpened. Just long enough to go through the ear into the brain, stir quickly and remove. That’s cold blooded. Did you know the guy?”
I shook my head.
“He owned some check-cashing outlets,” Blair said. “You ask me, they’re bloodsuckers, taking the money of these poor Mexicans. And some of ’em are used by smugglers to launder money. So there’s your case. He pissed somebody off, and they did him.” Blair made a jab with his right hand into an imaginary head cradled in his left hand. So much for Peralta’s straight eye for the gay crime.
“Sounds like something Bobby Hamid would do,” Blair continued. “If we could ever make a charge stick against him.”
“I thought he’d become a venture capitalist,” I said. “That’s what he says.”
“Yeah, sure.” Blair made an unhandsome snorting sound. I looked to see if snot had emerged from his perfect n
ose. “He’s just as dirty as Sheriff Peralta has always said.”
“More than you would know…” I said.
He looked at me sharply, then asked, “How’s Lindsey?”
Before I could answer, or even feel a rush of male jealousy, there was a commotion off through the creosote bushes. A uniformed deputy emerged and gestured for us to come. I followed Blair, my hands instinctively pulling in, even though I was steering well clear of the numerous cholla and prickly pear. My arm was still red from cactus needles. We walked up the trail and turned at the lone, rusting metal fence post. Once again I could see the edge of the hidden drop. Now a deputy was starting to string yellow crime-scene tape, and another burly uniform with a shotgun was leading the inmates out. Seeming to follow them was a foul, telltale odor. A man who looked like Patrick Blair’s twin brother met us.
“Hello, Mapstone,” Detective Tony Snyder said, then, “Patrick, we got a body. Mapstone, you can leave. No way has he been there forty years.”
I ignored him and followed them. Approaching the dead is just another cop task, even if you’re the guy who works on forty-year-old homicides. And I’d seen some nasty scenes in the five years I spent as a patrol deputy, what now seems so many years ago. But I guess I never got used to it. My legs seemed heavier as we walked the final fifteen feet. About a third of the rocks had been removed. Most of the grave was still covered, but I guessed that Snyder had stopped the inmate labor for fear of contaminating what was now a crime scene. The excavated rocks sat lined up like deformed eggs. Beyond them, something had been uncovered. Blair was snapping on latex gloves and bending to look into a shallow pit.
I could see a head and the top of a torso, lying face up. The stones had done some damage, but enough was recognizable. It was a man with a small white moustache. Just lying there staring up at the flawless Arizona sky on a perfect winter day. Just like he was lying by the pool at the Sanctuary, waiting for a drink with an umbrella in it. Except his eyes were gone, replaced by things I didn’t want to think about too much. And his ears were well chewed. The Sonoran Desert was full of critters small enough to skitter through rocks just as if they were weaving through rush-hour traffic on the way to dinner. And his skin was green, and the consistency of a dried tortilla, something the resorts definitely frown upon. And his view was spoiled by the boyish, handsome features of Patrick Blair and Tony Snyder studying him. It was all wrong.
