by Jon Talton
Even though the county was chronically short on office space, my end of the building was deserted. It involved some ancient dispute between this and that department over the offices, with neither winning. It was a shame because the renovation had restored the 1929 beauty to the place, with dark wooden doors and transoms, pebbled glass, and dignified light globes. Many days the custodians don’t even turn on the hall lights and today was no exception. That’s why the light at the end of the corridor made me slow my pace. My door was standing open. It was probably a lazy cleaning crew. But given my luck lately, I pulled out the Python. My footsteps suddenly sounded horrendously loud. Another five steps and I came in the door with the revolver in one hand and a Starbucks cup in the other. I swept the room until the barrel rested on the compact form of Kate Vare.
“You look ridiculous,” she said. “Put that away. They shouldn’t even let you be armed. You could be like Barney Fife, and Peralta could keep one bullet for you in his pocket.”
I tended to like cops, but in Vare’s case it was easy to make an exception. As Phoenix PD’s top cold-case expert, she was convinced I was always on her turf. It didn’t help that she had the personality of my vinegar-faced fourth-grade teacher, who, come to think of it, she rather dressed like today. She wore a dark plaid skirt and high-necked blouse. Unlike Mrs. Mulcahey of the fourth grade, Kate had ash blond hair in a Martha Stewart style, and carried a 9-mm Glock on her hip. She sat on my desk, absently twirling her black pump on her right toe.
“Why are you here?” I demanded. “Why don’t you ever knock? Did you just break in?”
“Somebody did,” she said.
I turned back to the door. The lock had been completely removed, as if some tunneling device had bored right through it. I noticed it lying in pieces on the wood floor.
“Very professional job, too,” she said.
I looked around, and the office looked much like I had left it on Friday. If someone had been inside, he had been very careful, or been interrupted before he could ransack it.
“What are you working on?” Vare asked coyly.
“What business is it of yours?” I walked around, inspecting shelves, opening file drawers, feeling the vague shock and violation of the burglarized.
“You are such a bastard, Mapstone,” she said. Her bony lower jaw worked silently. “I know you were down at headquarters last week.”
“I’m compiling a manuscript,” I said grudgingly. “About the historic cases. Peralta wants it.”
She laughed loudly, a surprisingly humorless sound coming from Kate. “You are such a bad liar, Mapstone. You were looking at the Alan Cordesman homicide file.”
I could feel my face flushing. David Mapstone, master of deceit. Wait until Lindsey asked me if I kissed her sister or let her massage my crotch. Yes, while I was at the PD working on the book, I had stopped by Homicide and asked to see the file.
“Why do you care?” I said, finally sitting at my desk. I sipped the mocha, which was starting to go room temperature.
“Prove to me that I shouldn’t,” she said. “For all I know, Cordesman ties back to a cold case, and you’re doing one of your famous end-runs. All the glory to Mapstone and the Sheriff’s Office.”
“I’ve never…”
“What the hell are you holding out?” she demanded. “I swear to God I’ll complain to Chief Wilson, get a court order, arrest your ass right this second!”
Now it was her turn to flush. I thought she was going to have a stroke right there on the desktop.
“Kate, you really need to relax. I don’t have anything. The guy was killed a block away from my house. I was curious.”
“You discovered the body,” she said.
“I was called by a neighbor who discov…”
“You should have been arrested as a material witness. That’s what I would have done.”
I said, “You really have this thing about handcuffs…”
“You know something,” she went on. “I don’t know what the hell it is. I went through the computer, checked all my red-flag files. I can’t find anything that involves an ice pick through the ear. But I obviously missed something.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “There’s no historic case involved.”
“Yeah, well, then without that there’s no case for the state,” she said, leaning forward, her small hands on her lap. She went on, “The county attorney’s not going to prosecute this. There’s no physical evidence linking Esparza to the Cordesman crime scene, like there is with Louis Bell. Not one hair. Not one fiber. Not one print.”
“Well, I didn’t think Esparza did either one.”
“You bastard,” she said quietly, standing. “I knew you were holding out.”
“I’m not!” I nearly shouted. “Esparza has the mind of an eight-year-old, and this is a smart crime. Sure, they caught the kid with the wallet. But none of the rest of it adds up. And why would the kid kill these two very different victims in such different places?” I didn’t mention Dana or the fake letter that led me to the dead brother in the desert.
“Esparza is a burglar,” she said.
“That just makes my point. Cordesman wasn’t missing anything.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Not true, Mapstone. Burglary got a call from an insurance company on Friday. Their initial inventory of his possessions had been wrong. Cordesman owned a diamond ring. It belonged to his great-grandmother, and it was insured for twenty-five thousand dollars. It’s missing.”
“That’s it? From what I could see, he had some expensive electronics, a computer, stuff you could fence easily. Why leave all that and take the ring?”
“You tell me, Barney Fife.”
I felt my stomach aching that Kate Vare ache. I said, “Maybe he lost it. Maybe he pawned it.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I called Cordesman’s brother in Reno. He’s the beneficiary. Apparently Alan had a new girlfriend. But he didn’t tell his brother her name or anything about her. Maybe he gave it to the girlfriend. Or maybe she took it after she shoved the ice pick in his brain.”
I sipped the mocha and said nothing. Two’s company and three’s a crowd. Louis Bell and Alan Cordesman murdered in the same manner. And then there was Harry Bell, apparently dead from natural causes. But he was the bait used by Dana to draw me into…what? Something important enough to make somebody toss my office.
“Earth to Mapstone!” Vare said. She was standing before me, hands on her hips. “This is not a one-way street, Barney Fife.”
“True, Thelma Lou,” I said. She squinted and turned her small mouth down. I doubted her Mayberry knowledge was that complete. “Fair is fair, but so far there’s nothing about this case that should interest either of us…”
“Give it up, or I swear to God…”
“The only thing Louie Bell owned in the world besides a trailer by the railroad tracks was one thousand acres of land. He inherited it when his older brother died. It’s way the hell west of Tonopah, so it’s not worth that much. But the county has tax liens against it. He was way behind in paying his taxes.”
“How do you know this?”
“There was a notice from the county at his trailer. I took it when I was down there last week.” She started to speak, but I talked over her. “I talked to a neighbor kid. He told me some guy kept coming by and harassing Bell. I don’t know about what. The same guy came back, after Louie Bell was killed, and went through the trailer.”
“Did he have a description?” she demanded.
“Not much,” I said. I told her about the Dodge pickup and the man with the shaved head and tattooed shoulder. I didn’t tell her that he had tried to rearrange my brains in the glass gallery. We were even in the information swap.
She stared at me warily, slowly shaking her head.
“I just don’t trust you,” she said. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t get me anywhere. The casino case belongs to the feds. Dealing with them is even worse than dealing with you.”
25
/> The city kept growing. Slogans and euphemisms played as big a role as “Go West Young Man” did in the nineteenth century. Now it was selling a dream “set within a stunning landscape…As rare as the splendor of the Sonoran Desert…Designed for your active lifestyle…A distinctively styled collection of homes…Draped with lush greens and rolling fairways…Miles of walking paths and hiking trails.” Lowly subdivisions had been upgraded to “master-planned communities.” Add gates to the subdivision and it became even more alluring. The city grew on glowing articles in the newspaper about Phoenix leading the nation in job creation and in attracting Californians who were cashing out the equity in their houses and moving here. Other words were less welcome: the occasional warning of a real-estate bubble or threat to water supplies, the regular reports that showed per-capita income was below the national average, that most of the jobs being created paid badly, and Phoenix lacked the diverse economy needed for a big city to compete. No, this was a story about promise and hope, floated on thirty-year mortgages or ARMs. It was the American Dream. The people who moved in didn’t remember the citrus groves or desert that the houses replaced, and they didn’t miss what they couldn’t recall.
Lindsey came home on the evening of July 3. We are not a couple that meets at curbside. So when I saw her walk past the security checkpoint, in her black jeans and black top and luminous smile, I set aside all my fears and misgivings to just feel her in my arms again. This was the woman I knew. Once again, our talk was easy and comfortable, as if we’d never been apart. Then we went home, to a room lit only by a candle and the cool kiss of the air conditioning on our warm skin. Robin wasn’t around, and she found little space in our happy conversation. The newspaper was full of crisis: one of two pipelines that brought gasoline to the city had broken, and gas lines were already appearing at the pumps. Seven homeless people were dead in one day from the one-hundred-seventeen-degree heat. A shootout between rival immigrant smugglers left two children dead. But for a few hours, my life was nothing but right.
When the phone rang later, it pulled me out of such a deep sleep that at first I had the consciousness of a houseplant. By the time Lindsey handed me the receiver, I was awake enough to hear the voice of a sheriff’s office dispatcher, and she was telling me where to go.
“What is it, Dave?” Lindsey asked, looking sleepy and freshly ravished. It was a nice look for her.
“I’m supposed to meet Patrick Blair,” I said. “All she said was it’s related to a 901-H.” That was the radio code for homicide. In a two-cop household, you use jargon without even realizing it.
Fifteen minutes later, I was waiting in the deserted parking lot of Park Central, the former shopping center turned offices half a mile north of our house. The temperature seemed to have dropped below one hundred, so I lowered the air conditioning off high/max. There was no crime scene, no flashing lights. But this was where the dispatcher said Blair would meet me. I turned off the lights and sat. Leave it to Blair to ruin my romantic evening. I looked around the deserted lot. When I was a kid, this was the biggest retail center in the state besides downtown. Now all the stores had moved out, and Phoenix had all the big city retail ambiance of Fargo. My bicycle had been stolen at Park Central when I was nine, my first encounter with crime. I couldn’t say that put me on a path to become a sheriff’s deputy. But there I was, having historical thoughts—or at least the memories that come from moving back to the neighborhood where you grew up. All these thoughts were helping me avoid wondering why Patrick Blair had called me out in the middle of the night.
Middle-of-the-night anxieties weren’t long in coming. What about Robin’s information that Blair had been in Washington at the same time that Lindsey was there? A man she liked and defended, an old beau perhaps. She had given me no reason to mistrust her. Robin was playing a game. I wanted to think so, but the nervous shaking of my right leg indicated otherwise. Maybe Lindsey’s passionate return to me had been fueled by guilt. Maybe that night with Robin I had been angry enough with Lindsey to earn some guilt myself. I could still feel the distinct contours of Robin’s breasts against me. I shook my head, hard. What the hell would Dr. Sharon say? She’d say I was tired and acting silly.
To the west, I saw the landing lights of a helicopter, bringing some poor soul into the trauma center at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I glanced over at the hospital’s rooftop helipad, which already held two choppers. Soon the rotor noise and lights were insistently in my face. Then the Prelude’s windows were vibrating and the car was being rocked by rotor wash. I had just enough time to imagine a medical helicopter crashing on the asphalt in front of me, when the chopper descended to a level where I could see the sheriff’s star and insignia on the side. Then it was on the ground, a compact steel insect with some kind of jet stabilizer that eliminated the need for a tail rotor. It sent out a wave of gritty dust, and when the rotors stopped a man stepped out and motioned me over.
“What’s up, Blair?”
“Sorry to get you out,” he said, with just the solicitous manner of someone who had cuckolded me. I tried to put that aside. He asked, “You know a kid who lives in a school bus, out near Hyder?”
“Yeah, he calls himself Davey Crockett. He was near Louie Bell’s trailer, gave me the description of the guy in the Dodge truck who might have been…”
Blair’s look stopped me. He said, “The kid’s dead. Homicide. Tony’s already out there. It’s apparently pretty bad. The sheriff wants us both out there as soon as possible.”
We were already walking to the helicopter. The air took on the scent of aviation fuel.
I had not been a passenger in what was called “Peralta’s air force,” and given my unease even in an airliner, I had no desire to go. But damned if I would let Patrick Blair know it. So I gamely boarded, and took a seat in the back, pulling the harnesses tight. Blair retook his seat beside the pilot, the engines loudly engaged, and we quickly lifted off. It was too loud to talk. We went straight up, shimmied a little and turned southwest. I held onto the seat, feeling vaguely dizzy as every air pocket and wind gust seemed magnified by the small airframe. I was steady, though. As had been true since I was young, real crisis calmed me. It was only in silence, in repose, what most people called “peace,” that I was vulnerable.
I recalled Davey Crockett’s small, fragile face and imagined what we might find. Out the window, the world was sharply divided between dark and light. A dense galaxy of city lights flowed out beyond the horizon. But we were low enough to make out the details on skyscrapers—the window-washing rig sat on the top of the Viad Tower—and the red and green of traffic lights. Low-riders chased their headlight beams along McDowell Road. In the distance came the telltale talisman flash of red TV tower lights on the South Mountains. After a few minutes, we left the center of the galaxy and what remained were a few arms of stars that were subdivisions, and finally the wayward outlying solar systems of the few remaining farmers’ lights. Then we were in darkness. It was a moonless night and the earth was void. I could only imagine the empty desert below as we felt the updrafts from the mountains. Now light came from real stars above. It was a shame we couldn’t just ride in the night and enjoy the view.
We touched down on the road a ways from the Bell trailer, and walked toward the old school bus that had been Davey’s home. It was lit up like a movie location set at night, and the characters moving about were all wearing the tan uniforms of the MCSO. I walked beside Blair, hooking my star over my belt like a real cop.
“How was your trip to Washington?” I asked him.
“What are you talking about?” he said. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. He continued, “The only trip I’ve had in the past year was one to bring back a murderer from Yuma.”
By that time, we had reached a perimeter of yellow tape and uniformed deputies. Tony Snyder, Blair’s male model Bobbsey Twin partner, met us with latex gloves on his hands. He was drinking out of a liter-sized bottle of Arrowhead water. I was instantly feeling dehydrated.
>
“His brains are beaten out all over the inside of that school bus,” Snyder said. “Roof, windows, floor. It’s a hell of a fucking mess. My wife wanted me to look at new houses later today, and I’m on brain cleanup detail.” We stood looking at the bus. Its long side faced the road, but was set back maybe fifty feet. It had been decades since it had been painted, but you could make out casa grande schools on the side. Snyder was still talking: “Whoever did it was interrupted. There’s all these old hippies who live out here. Guy drives by and hears screaming coming from the bus. So he stops and yells, ‘Hey, you all right in there?’ Somebody from inside takes a shot at him, so he high-tails it to Hyder and gets some buddies. They call us and come back with guns. But by then, it’s too late. What a mess. We’re looking for a pipe or something like that, whatever was used to beat him.”
“You won’t find it,” I said. “And it wasn’t a pipe. It was a sap.”
“A what?”
“A blackjack.”
“How do you…?”
I was about to tell him when I heard Peralta’s heavy, even tread.
26
The sheriff walked with us toward the school bus. He was wearing black slacks and a black polo shirt that blended him in with the desert night. As we walked into the bright floodlights, I could see the anger percolating at the sides of his large eyes. He ignored Blair and Snyder, walking with a meaty hand on my shoulder.
