by Jon Talton
“Mapstone, the responding officers found the victim’s wallet. He had a driver’s license, a debit card, twenty-two dollars, a picture of his mom, and a sheriff’s office business card with your name on it.” We paused a few feet from the school bus door, where untold numbers of children had once climbed aboard. “Why did he have your card, Mapstone?”
I looked around. The scene was a mess. The hippie rescuers had ruined any chance to get shoe imprints when they boarded the bus. Now the inside was floodlit, and I could see evidence technicians moving slowly from the rear. The seats were mostly gone, replaced by a bed, an old sofa, a table with a hotplate, and stacks of water bottles. Ah, the simple life in rural Arizona. Snyder hadn’t been exaggerating the worst. I saw two skinny legs, pushing out of dusty pants. The wheelchair was tossed aside below the bus steps. The faded vinyl seat was folded and dusty. In the background, I heard the chatter of the police radio. Many people were dying in the county tonight, whether in a robbery gone bad or a hospital bed. And I had seen death so many times as a young deputy. There was no logical reason that the death of this young man named Davey Crockett should mean more to me than any other. But a part of me wanted to cry.
I explained things to Peralta, who kept muttering under his breath, “what about the book, Mapstone…you were supposed to be working on a book.” I just talked over him. I could see the alarmed looks on young deputies and evidence techs.
“So,” Peralta said, “you put a civilian in danger.”
“I didn’t put him in danger,” I said testily. My insides weren’t so sure. I felt a wave of nausea. I swallowed heavily and made my best case, to Peralta and to my gathering guilty conscience. “He told me he felt safe. He told me the man in the truck hadn’t seen him spying on the Bell brothers. I wrote all this up and forwarded it to the detectives, and to the tribal police. I did my part, and then I went back to your book.” I emphasized the “your.”
“So what’s your hypothesis?” he said mildly.
I gave it to him as best I could. Some of it just had to be improvised. “The tattooed guy in the Dodge truck appeared to be intimidating Louie Bell. That was what Davey thought. He seems a more likely suspect for the casino murder than the pickpocket. We know he came back and went through the Bell trailer after Louie was murdered. But he still wasn’t satisfied. He was looking for something, or worried that Davey had seen him. So he came back earlier tonight.”
Blair added, “Or maybe the kid surprised him over at the Bell trailer again, and he followed him back to the school bus.”
“Go check that trailer,” Peralta ordered.
“There’s something else,” I said. “I’ve seen this man with the big tattoo on his arm.” I told Peralta about the night at El Pedregal, and the woman I was intending to meet.
His jaw tightened but he said nothing.
“The inside of the bus was pretty trashed,” Snyder said. “Somebody was taking the place apart looking for something.”
I looked over Peralta’s shoulder. “Has anybody looked in there?” I pointed to the compartment built into the side of the bus. Blair and Snyder looked at each other, then we all walked over. Snyder gave it a couple of strong pulls and the metal door fell open. A flashlight showed rusty tools, old rags, an ancient jack, and a bulky, legal-sized envelope.
Thirty minutes later, after the envelope had been photographed, logged into the chain of custody, and gone through other hoops designed to foil clever defense attorneys, its contents were spread out on the hood of a sheriff’s office SUV. I had gone from wide-awake to wired to fading in the course of a couple of hours. My body wasn’t twenty years old anymore, although Lindsey had made me feel that way a few hours before. The contents of the envelope didn’t contribute to my alertness. It looked like the kind of papers you might get at a house closing. Then I saw a name.
“Holy…”
Peralta and the Bobbseys crowded around. Everybody was sweating but Peralta. The sheriff demanded to know if I was wearing gloves.
“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck,” I grumped. My fingers were leafing through legal documents. I walked them through.
“This is a deed transfer for a piece of property in Maricopa County. The grantor is Louis Bell. The grantees are Tom and Dana Earley.”
“The supervisor?” Snyder said.
I nodded. Peralta said, “We don’t know that. It’s a common name.”
“Not when it’s Tom married to a woman named Dana,” I said. “And look, here’s their address in Gilbert. It’s the same guy.” I flipped pages. “But look. It was never signed by Bell, never filed.”
“What property is it?” Peralta asked, pushing closer to the documents on the SUV hood. “You’ll have to go online. Maybe go down to the plat books at the county.”
“I already know the plat number,” I said. “It’s the Bell land west of Tonopah.”
“Where the old guy wanted to be buried,” Snyder said.
Peralta had a letter in his hands. I read over his shoulder. It was from the Earleys’ lawyer. “They had a tentative deal, and then Bell refused to sign,” Peralta said. It was dated two weeks before Louie Bell was murdered.
“I know what you’re thinking, Mapstone,” he said. “Stop.”
I leafed through the other contents of the legal-sized envelope. If there was any doubt remaining, there were two Tom Earley business cards. One in his role as president of Earley Development Group, and the other as Maricopa County supervisor. A color brochure of the Arizona Dreams development was stapled to another business card, for someone named Shelley Baker. On a single sheet of legal paper the name Earl Rice was written in pencil, and underlined.
“Look at this.” Blair was talking. He pointed to the signature of the lawyer for Louis Bell, at the bottom of the deed transfer. My spine expanded at least an inch: the name was Alan Cordesman, and the date of the document was a month before he was found murdered in Willo.
“We need a warrant tonight,” Blair said. “We’ve got to get access to the Earley house before they realize we know, and start destroying evidence.”
“Wait,” Peralta said.
“Earley and his wife are connected to three homicides by these documents,” Blair said. “This is what the suspect was looking for. Bell probably gave this to Davey Crockett for safekeeping. Earley clearly had a financial interest…”
“No,” Peralta said.
“Blair’s right,” I said quietly. Deputies were crowded around us, nervously fingering their leather belt accessories, snapping and unsnapping items in the timeless fidgeting of cops. Peralta glared at me. “I want that evidence sealed for now,” he said. “Mapstone, you can go.”
I didn’t move. He glared at me more. His face would have been at home among the heads on Easter Island. It didn’t intimidate me. We had been patrol deputies in another life, and I claimed some prerogatives of a former partner. I looked him back in the eye. No one spoke. After what seemed like five minutes, he said, “Talk to me over here for a minute,” and stalked out to the road. Then he walked fast out into the night. I had to trot at first to keep up. The air was cooler than in the city, and as we gained distance from the floodlights, the canopy of stars emerged. Grand eternity enveloped us, courtesy of the dry atmosphere. On the earth, we might as well have been a hundred miles from even a drink of water. The empty land cascaded outward in every direction, contained only by the eerie black shapes of mountains and buttes that occluded the fantastic constellations and billions of distant suns that lit our walk.
“Tell me a historical story, Mapstone,” Peralta said. “That’s what you’re supposed to be here for.”
“You’d be bored.” I was all out of history for the moment. Davey Crockett was dead and the Alamo had fallen.
We walked on in silence. Finally, I said, “We’re not too far from the site of the Oatman massacre. It was 1851, I think. An Apache war party attacked a group of settlers headed for California. A little girl named Olive Oatman was kidnapped. She was late
r sold to the Mohave Indians, and then…”
“What have you gotten us into, Mapstone?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer.
“This man is a very powerful politician,” he said.
“You’re the most powerful politician in the county,” I said.
“Times change,” he replied.
“What do you mean times change?”
“Mapstone, look at who’s running the country. People like Tom Earley. These are the kind of people that don’t sweat when they fuck. Understand? But I have to get along with them.”
I stopped and stared at him. I could only see the wide planes of his face illuminated by starlight. “Are you telling me you’re afraid to investigate this?”
“I am afraid,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. This is political dynamite. Even if I decided the evidence was worth looking at, I’d have to turn it over to another law enforcement agency. DPS or the Pima County sheriff. There can’t be any charge of conflict of interest.”
“The Earleys aren’t above the law,” I protested. “Dana came to me with a fake letter from a fake father. Then she claimed she was being blackmailed. When I asked for the evidence, she wanted to meet at El Pedregal. I nearly got my brains beaten in, and she never called me again. And all you can talk about is politics?”
“Go home,” he ordered.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I erupted. “These documents link together three separate murders. When have you ever been cautious or political? You’re not. It’s why people respect you and love you. Something is going on. My office was broken into. The lock was knocked out clean as surgery. Who did that, in a guarded county building, and what were they looking for? Last time I checked you were the sheriff. And now you want to go hide behind protocol?”
“You’re out of line.”
“I know. But I’m right.”
“You sound like Sharon.”
I kicked at the sandy dirt, just to be kicking something. “You had a good thing going there, and you screwed it up. I know, I’m out of line.”
“She wanted to move on,” he said. “I was holding her back.”
I let it be. I said, “Why don’t you let Blair and Snyder look into this.”
“I can see the headline,” Peralta said. “SHERIFF INVESTIGATES POWERFUL POLITICIAN WHO IS CRITIC OF DEPARTMENT.”
“So let me quietly look into it,” I said.
“No.”
“Give me a few days.”
He repeated, “No.”
I was tired and angry, and I was rapidly pushing through the boundaries that even old partners respect. “Damn you,” I said. “That young man back there was abandoned by everybody in the world. When he fell off a roof while he was working for his father, his dad cut him loose. God, I hate what Arizona has become. And now he can’t expect justice from the Maricopa County sheriff.” I finished and bit my lip and stared out at a mass that I believed was Fourth of July Peak. It was now the Fourth of July, three in the morning. Peralta just grunted.
He asked, “What ever happened to the little girl who was kidnapped?”
“What? Oh, Olive Oatman? She was eventually rescued. She lived into her sixties.”
“How could wagon trains have come through here? It’s so barren and dry.”
“They followed the Gila River and there were a few wells along the way. It was very difficult. Stop changing the subject.”
Peralta started walking back toward the scene. “Get back to the book, Mapstone. It’ll be good for you.”
“What if I do other things on my own time?” I asked. “Check out some names. You don’t need to know anything. I’m just the crazy professor, working on his own.”
“No,” he snarled. “And I mean goddamned no!”
I let him stalk ahead. He got about ten feet and stopped, just standing there, his back toward me, his broad shoulders rigid with tension. Out into the night he said, “It might take a few days to sort everything out here. I’d say four days. You know how this damned bureaucracy works.”
He turned back to me and said, “Take Lindsey with you.” Then he walked on. A few more steps, and I heard, “And don’t be stupid.” All in all, I took that as permission from the sheriff.
Then he walked into the floodlights, and I followed to bum a ride back to the city. It was Independence Day, after all.
27
The next day, Tuesday, Lindsey and I gassed up her Prelude at the county pumps downtown and drove to north Scottsdale. The alternative was to prowl the streets looking for an open gas station, then sit in line for an hour. That was what most people were doing. The morning’s newspaper said it would be several days before the pipeline could be repaired. Until then, trucks were bringing in some gas from Tucson. People were learning that Phoenix was the nation’s fifth largest city in population only; it didn’t have a refinery, or very convenient mass transit.
Even with the shortages, traffic was heavy and tense, in the high summer way, and the air was filthy. Heat and tailpipe exhaust radiated up from the wide streets as we drove and I filled Lindsey in on the case. As usual, she asked the right questions, some I hadn’t thought about. At stoplights, when my eyes could stray from the road, I watched her, trying out my new eyes, the ones Robin had implanted while she was drunkenly wrapped around me. Maybe Robin had lied about Blair going to Washington, but what about Lindsey being a teenage mother? If it were true, it wouldn’t change anything in how I adored her. Even though the woman who claimed she trusted me with everything hadn’t trusted me with the biggest event of her life. To Robin, it was a sign Lindsey still wanted her bad boy, the father, and I was only a temporary safe harbor. None of it might be true, but those new eyes still scratched and irritated. In an hour, we reached the Scottsdale Airpark and the offices of the Arizona Dreams development.
The airpark had been the trendy corporate address for several years. Top executives could fly in and own a house in the McDowell Mountains, but otherwise keep Phoenix at arms’ length. Employees were priced out of Scottsdale, so they were forced to commute from miles away, from places like Chandler and Surprise and Glendale. The result was to make the low-density, rich paradise of Scottsdale into a sieve for the worst traffic jams in the Valley. It helped cook the smog that obscured the purple-gray undulations of the McDowells off to the northeast. The buildings weren’t much to look at, either: just dull, off-the-shelf two- and three-story tilt-up jobs found in every office park in America. They were surrounded by sidewalks that went nowhere and rock landscaping that radiated the morning heat like a convection oven. Nobody seemed to care, as more buildings went up every year.
We walked past a security guard reading a comic book—he looked about thirty—to a building directory listing nothing but builders, mortgage companies, land advisers, and Arizona Dreams LLC. Things kept coming back to this housing development. Dana Earley was the voice in their ubiquitous radio ads. I could almost recite by rote their promise of a return to real neighborhoods and genuine small-town living. Then the brochure found in the belly of the old school bus, secreted away with papers that Louis Bell might have given Davey Crockett for safekeeping. Papers so sensitive that somebody was willing to kill to find them. And the business card of Shelley Baker. We were coming without making an appointment. The building air was frigid, and felt good on my superheated skin. Lindsey, wearing a dark paisley skirt and white top, looked as fresh as morning in a place where the surface temperatures could reach one hundred forty degrees.
The company’s suite was not nearly so lax about security. The entry doors led you to a reception desk with standard-issue pleasant young woman. But off to the side was a waist-high partition, behind which sat a pair of serious-looking and well conditioned young men. Think Army Special Forces. They scowled at me. They even scowled at Lindsey. But they lost interest when we showed our badges and asked to see Ms. Baker. While we waited, there was the scale model to keep us busy. It took up a table that looked the size of our bedroom and was protecte
d by a Plexiglas shell. Inside were hundreds of tiny houses on curvy streets, golf courses, hiking trails, and desert preserve. The legend said Arizona Dreams would be one of the largest master-planned communities in the state’s history. At build-out, in 2020, it was to have 40,000 houses. I tried to imagine why Louis Bell, desert rat who lived in a trailer, would want anything to do with it. The project would go west of the White Tank Mountains, a mountain range away from the Salt River Valley. But it would still be miles east of the Bell property.
Just then a tall woman in a red suit came out and introduced herself as Shelley.
“Expecting trouble?” Lindsey nodded toward the muscle cubicle.
“Oh,” Shelley Baker said, “there have been threats from environmentalists.”
I figured there were about three environmentalists in Arizona, and they had contractor’s licenses. But I took her word for it as she led us past an inner door and down a hallway of offices to a conference room. Out the windows were the slopes of the McDowell Mountains. Running up to them were some of the priciest houses in town. I remembered going out there to target shoot as a teenager, when it had all been virgin desert. Now there was probably a kid who was doing the same thing in the empty desert west of the White Tank Mountains, and someday, when it’s chock-a-block with tract houses, he might remember.
Baker was talking. “This isn’t really the Arizona Dreams sales office. We will open that next month, along with several models.” We sat and she faced us. “But that’s not why you’re here.”
I put her around fifty, with honey-colored hair worn swept back and good features, as angular as an ironing board. The sun, of course, had done its work. Her hair was as dried as hay. Her tan was the texture and color of a saddlebag. But her face looked frozen into a perpetual look of happy curiosity—and people pay big money for these face-lifts. Maybe she was really pushing seventy, and I shouldn’t be so critical. I told her there wasn’t much I could tell her. Her business card had been found at a crime scene, a homicide. I told her where. Nothing registered on her taut skin.
