by Betty Webb
I gave him a conditional promise. “If what you say is true, I’ll keep quiet. But if there’s the slightest hint that kids are being exploited, I’ll tell every law officer in the state.”
He nodded. “You’ll see.”
Before I left, I asked, “Do you have a photograph of Nicole? I don’t even know what she looks like.”
He tugged a fat wallet out of his pocket and opened it. Several packets of plastic sleeves were filled with pictures of Nicole, both casual and posed. Here was Nicole as a freckled child of around ten, her glossy brown hair in braids. There was Nicole a few years older, in braids again but somehow much more mature, a secretive smile playing around her heart-shaped lips. Then Nicole as a middle-schooler, the freckles gone, her hair shorter, spirit evident in lively brown eyes.
The last few pictures were taken outside a supermarket as Nicole helped her mother load groceries into a car. Seemingly unaware of her photographer, Nicole, now around sixteen, wore a dress as shapeless as the older woman’s, and her beautiful hair was twisted into a severe bun. Her eyes were dull.
Peggy Binder had been right: Nicole’s light had dimmed.
“May I have one of these if I promise to bring it back?” I asked Raymundo, but he snatched the wallet away, as if fearing I’d run off with it. I told him I understood, then gathered my things.
The expression on Raymundo’s face just about broke my heart. “Ma’am, if you find her before she calls me again, tell her…” He stopped, as if he was having trouble expressing himself, then finished with a simple, “Tell her I still love her.”
***
When three o’clock rolled around, I headed over to Herschel Berklee’s house. As his Molson-drinking uncle had informed me, the medical examiner’s assistant lived in a tract of homes so alike only their inhabitants could tell them apart. Fortunately, Herschel’s house was situated on a corner, its address painted both on the curb and emblazoned in three-inch-high numerals on a front porch post. Like many savvy health care workers, he’d made certain the EMTs would find his house in case of emergency.
It took a while for Herschel to answer the door, and when he did, he looked like he’d just crawled out of bed. An even scrawnier version of his uncle, his hair stood on end, and rumpled pajamas peeked out from under a moth-eaten bathrobe.
His bleary eyes gave me a slow up-and-down. “Honey, if you’re sellin’, I’m sure buyin’.”
When I flashed my I.D. and told him his uncle sent me over, his leer faded. “You don’t exactly look like Mickey Spillane, but come on in. Just don’t expect any smarts on my part. I worked fourteen hours straight last night. I’m so damned tired I can barely think.”
Like his uncle, Herschel’s wolfishness was all talk, no action. With an almost formal politeness, he led me to a comfortable chair in a newspaper-littered living room, then offered me coffee. “Bought one of them new machines puts it on a timer, so when I crawl outta bed, it’s fresh ground and hotter’n a whore on payday.” He flushed. “Oops.”
To settle him down, I said coffee sounded fine, and when he hustled into the kitchen, I took a look around. Like most bachelor pads, the room was devoid of decorations except for the two photographs of a dark-complexioned little girl that rested on an end table. In one, she smiled in his arms. In the other, she wore a soccer uniform and a determinedly fierce expression. His daughter?
Shortly, Herschel returned with two steaming mugs. As I sipped, I tasted mocha hazelnut with a sprinkling of cinnamon. Quite the gourmet.
“What can I do for ya? Uncle Clive didn’t send you over just to say hi.”
After I explained my connection to the Precious Doe case, he said, “Musta been rough. Guy who did that to her, I hope he slow-boils in Hell.” Then his face changed. “Hey, wait a minute! You came over here to pump me about the autopsy, didn’t you? Dr. Lanphear warned me some nosy woman’s been asking questions around the hospital. Was that you?”
I admitted it. “Every killer, especially a child killer, has an individual M.O. that helps investigating officers link one crime to another.” Knowing there had been scant publicity about the Juarez killings, I filled him in on the hundreds of young Mexican women who had been mutilated and murdered in Juarez. There might be a link, I pointed out.
“You saying there’s hardly been any investigation over there?” He looked furious.
“Correct.”
“Let me guess. Nobody cares because the girls are just Mexicans, right?”
“That might have something to do with it.” To everyone’s shame, including even the Mexican government’s.
He muttered something about “damn racists,” then gestured toward the photographs. “Jewell, that’s my kid, she’s half-Black. Her mother and me, my hours and some other shit split us up. I get Jewell every single weekend. I painted up her room with that special pink she’s so crazy about and put a buncha Barbies in there. My ex-wife complains I’m spoiling her rotten, but that’s my job, right? If a daddy can’t spoil his little girl, he ain’t worth being called a daddy.”
He fell silent for a moment, then asked, “You’re trying to connect Precious Doe to that Juarez mess? Seems to me Doe’s the wrong race. Those women were all Mexican.”
“I’m also interested in ruling out the connection.”
He sipped absent-mindedly at his coffee. With one last glance toward his daughter’s photographs, he said, “The sheriff sure as hell hasn’t been getting anyplace with this, so I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just swear you won’t let on where you heard it, okay? You do and my ass is fired. If that happens, I’ll come hunting you, don’t think I won’t.”
I swore eternal silence.
“Precious Doe bled to death, you know that much?”
I nodded.
“No sperm present.”
Thanks to television programs like CSI, killers had learned how not only how to clean up a crime scene, but how to keep from dirtying it in the first place. That’s why condoms were now commonplace during rape.
“Interesting. Anything else?” I waited, convinced more was on its way.
Herschel took a deeper drink of his coffee, then said, “Her killer hacked off all her external sexual organs.”
“What?!”
“All of them. Everything. He amputated her! Then, if that wasn’t enough, the sonofabitch stitched her up like he was trying to stop the bleeding or something. Stitched the vagina closed, too, after he stuck some kinda narrow tubing up in there. Stitched her up with thick black thread, the kind you’d used to fix torn upholstery. Nice touch, huh? Probably, he was just getting himself more kicks. And you wanna know the worst part? The poor thing was still alive when he did it.”
Somehow I managed to ask the next question. “Were the amputations made with something like a scalpel? Perhaps by someone with medical knowledge?”
“Didn’t you hear me? I said hacked, lady! Hacked! A real butcher job. You know what I hope?”
He took a deep breath. “I hope the perv who did that to her gets caught by some little girl’s daddy.”
Chapter Thirteen
After leaving Herschel Berklee’s house, I sat in my Jeep for a few minutes staring at nothing in particular. Cars purred along the street as the first commuters arrived home from work. Somewhere a dog barked, more in excitement than threat.
When I had calmed down as much as possible, I reached into my carry-all and pulled out the photograph of Precious Doe. Her delicate face gave no hint of the torment she had endured. Instead, she looked as serene as the angel she’d become.
Only slightly comforted by the thought that the child was long past her sufferings, I headed back to the Cochise County Observer. There I found Bernice Broussard once again manning the receptionist’s desk as she marked up the morning newspaper with a red pen.
“Tell me the truth,” I said. “You don’t really have a receptionist.”
“Not anymore, I don’t,” she grumped. “That ‘sick’ business? Turns out she went on a shopping
trip in Nogales with her boyfriend, so I told her to find another job. Not because she wanted to shop—hell, all she had to do was ask—but I can’t stand being lied to. Enough about my employee problems. What do you want this time?”
Without going into the specifics, I asked if there had been any reports of animal mutilations in the area during the past few years. She was no dummy and immediately guessed what I was getting at.
“Mutilations? Like what happened to Precious Doe?” Gold rings twinkled as she clenched her fists. “Christ, no. This isn’t Texas. Or New York.”
“How about missing pets?”
She shook her head. “Nope.” Then her face changed. “Wait, let me rephrase that. We lose a few cats and small dogs to coyotes every year, but that’s normal when the desert’s your backyard.”
In the West, people tend to attribute the loss of pets to raids by neighboring wildlife and discounted the possibility that something more sinister could be on the loose. I knew that serial killers often began with animals. “Has the number of lost pets increased lately?”
“We’re not dumb down here, Ms. Jones. If somebody in town was having that kind of serious trouble, we’d know it.”
I pointed at the marked-up newspaper. The headline read: NO LEADS IN PRECIOUS DOE CASE. THE SUBHEAD WAS, AZIZA STILL MISSING. A separate article discussed Nicole Hall’s disappearance. “You don’t call that ‘serious trouble’?”
“You know what I meant. I’ve already told you we don’t keep our back issues here, so if you want to run the numbers on missing pets, go back to the library. Now let me do some work, all right? Apparently, I’ve hired a copy editor who doesn’t know the difference between they’re and their.”
I took her advice and drove over to the library, but even with Martha Green’s help, didn’t find what I needed. Yes, over the past few years there had been missing pets aplenty in Los Perdidos, but just as many pets were recovered as lost forever. The big dogs, German shepherds, mastiffs, and Irish wolf hounds, almost always returned home in one piece. Only the toy breeds and cats stayed gone, probably serving as some four-legged predator’s dinner.
That avenue of investigation effectively closed, I turned on my police scanner to keep me company and aimed the Jeep west toward Sierra Vista and the safe house Raymundo Mendoza told me about. It took longer to get out of town than I would have expected. With the shift at the insecticide plant ending, the main drag was clogged by battered cars filled with dark faces, the blue-black of Somalis, and the lighter hues of Middle Easterners and Hispanics. First the Irish did America’s dirty work, then the Italians, then the Puerto Ricans. Now it was everyone else’s turn.
The newer cars were driven by Anglos: management. Some things never change.
After twenty minutes of driving across the desert into a pink-streaked sky, I arrived in Sierra Vista. The city of forty thousand-plus was the home of Fort Huachuca, Arizona’s largest military instillation. Founded in 1877 as a product of the Apache Wars, the original fort had been erected to block the Apaches’ traditional escape route to Mexico. Now the U. S. Army Intelligence Center and School had taken up residence, and God only knew what those folks were up to.
The safe house existed in a much lower-tech world, ten miles beyond Sierra Vista, nestled among the low foothills of the Whetstone Mountains. The sign on the gate announced FLYING HORSE RANCH. IN THE ROSY GLOW OF SUNSET, A HERD OF WHITE-FACED CATTLE GRAZED BEHIND THE BARBED WIRE FENCE. MORE ALARMING WAS THE POSTING, PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING—THIS MEANS YOU!
After turning off the police scanner to save power, I jumped out, unlatched the gate, and turned into a dirt lane.
I didn’t get far.
Before I had driven a hundred yards, a pickup truck topped a low rise and rushed down the road toward me. As it neared, I saw a thin man in the truck bed, holding a rifle. When the truck rumbled to a stop, he drew down on me. “Can’t you read?”
A woman. The setting sun at her back cast her face in shadow, but from her voice, she was no kid. Guns have a wonderful way of reminding you of your manners, so I raised my hands. “Yes, ma’am, I can read. But I’m looking for someone, and…”
“Get off our land,” she ordered.
Forcing my hands not to tremble, I tried again. “Is Nicole Hall here, ma’am?”
The rifle didn’t waiver, neither did her voice. “Like hell you can read, and you obviously don’t understand English, either. I said get off our land.” The sunlight glanced along the rifle barrel aimed straight at my chest.
If the woman shot me, no one other than a few cows would hear, so the smart thing to do would be to follow orders, but that wouldn’t help me find out about Nicole. Ignoring the dryness in my mouth, I said, “Ma’am, if you would just help me find her? I’m a private detective from Scottsdale—not hired by the Halls, by the way—and I won’t tell her parents if she’s here.”
The truck’s driver stuck his head out of the cab window. “What’s your name?” Like the woman, he didn’t sound young.
“Lena Jones. Want to see my I.D.?”
Instead of answering, the man called to the gun-toting woman, “Get down here for a minute.”
She did, and the two of them held a low conversation. After a couple of nods, the woman, the rifle balanced along one arm and braced against her shoulder, walked toward me. She stretched out her hand. “Hand it over, but move slow.”
Now that she stood along side my Jeep and the sun was no longer at her back, I saw a woman of about sixty, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and the lined face of a long-time desert-dweller. When I reached toward my carry-all on the passenger’s seat, she brought the rifle up again. “Don’t.” I recognized the stance; she was ready to fire. Who the hell was this woman? A retired Marine?
“Ma’am, that’s where I carry my I.D.”
“Throw the bag on the ground.”
I’d seen more expression on rocks, so I did as she said, although I wasn’t happy about it. The noise my carry-all made when it landed alerted her that it held more than makeup.
“Now back up.”
I did.
Keeping her stern gaze on me, she picked up the carry-all and walked backwards to the man in the truck. He took it without a word, then rooted around until he found my .38.
“I’m a Glock man, myself,” he muttered, placing the gun on the seat next to him. Then he took out my billfold and flipped through the plastic photo folders until he found my State of Arizona P.I. card. After comparing my face to the picture, he said to the woman, “As they say at Disneyland, it’s a small world after all.”
The two held a brief consultation I couldn’t hear. The man stuck his head out of the window again. “You’re the detective who helped that little girl escape the polygamy compound, aren’t you?”
That case, which involved the forced marriage of a thirteen-year-old girl to an elderly polygamist who already had several “wives,” had earned me all kinds of publicity, some of it even positive. After ushering the girl to a save haven, I had turned over all the information I’d uncovered on the polygamy compound—forced child marriages, rampant molestation, and tens of millions of dollars in welfare fraud—to the Arizona attorney general. Prosecutions were ongoing. So were the death threats against me.
Since these people ran a safe house for runaway teens, I figured the chances of their being polygamists were zilch to zero. “Yep, that’s me,” I called to the man.
The woman shifted her stance slightly, and the rifle barrel lowered almost a whole inch. “Who told you about us?” she asked.
“Raymundo Mendoza.”
A grunt from the truck. The woman shifted the rifle all the way down, then climbed into the pickup’s bed, motioning for me to follow them. Since they had my carry-all and .38, there was little other choice. After a brief drive through increasingly bumpy ground, with the Jeep eating the pickup’s dust, we arrived at a ranch complex tucked behind a grove of ancient mesquite. Off to the right, a windmill creaked, a generator hummed, and a
satellite dish tilted up to a sky now turned scarlet. Chickens pecked in the yard, and from the barn, a cow lowed. I figured the outbuildings contained enough provisions to keep the ranch’s humans fed for a year.
Several girls flitted between the trees in the fading light, their laughter carefree. As we grew closer, I noticed they were all young teens. Even in the dimming light, their resemblance to each other was striking: polygamy runaways, the look-alike products of generations of incest. And that was why so many girls bolted: they were fleeing upcoming “marriages” to uncles and grandfathers who already had a dozen wives.
The pickup pulled to a stop in front of a sprawling ranch house, and the man exited the cab and approached. As old as the woman, his dark hair was thick and wavy, his eyes a deep hazel. The woman jumped down from the truck bed.
“I’m Victor Friedman, Ms. Jones,” the man said, handing my carry-all and handgun back to me. “Annie Oakley over there is my wife Evelyn. Let’s go inside.”
When we entered the house, I found more look-alike girls scattered around a large living room furnished with attractive, if mismatched, sofas and chairs. I didn’t see Nicole among them, but the others were watching CNN on a large-screen television set, where a female senator was making mincemeat of a male senator over proposed legislation to curb presidential powers. Amazement showed on the girls’ faces. Television—news of any kind, actually—was forbidden to women on polygamy compounds. Even more forbidden was the idea of a woman contradicting a man.
“We’ll talk in the den,” Friedman said. “Don’t want to interfere with the girls’ education, what little there’s been of it.”
The couple led me into a book-filled room furnished with a sturdy gun cabinet, a handsome leather sofa, and his-and-her desks, each with its own computer. One was a Mac, the other a PC. Friedman eased himself into a chair in front of the Mac, which was blinking out a green-bannered website called ValueLine. Stocks? Way out here in the boonies? Then I reminded myself that thanks to the Internet, you no longer had to be on Wall Street to run with the bulls.
