by Betty Webb
“She had a bad dream, that’s all,” my seat mate explained. The others were staring at him, not me. Why? I was the one who had screamed.
Oh. Right. A Middle Eastern man on a plane, sitting next to a screaming woman.
Before the air marshal could take action against my seat mate, I raised my hands and said, “Please, he’s telling the truth. It was just a bad dream. I have them a lot.”
For a moment the air marshal’s expression did not change as he looked back and forth between my seat mate and me, but then he shrugged and returned to his own seat. The flight attendants did too, but not before throwing me a matched set of frowns.
Releasing a relieved sigh, my seat mate sat back. “I am sorry for your bad dream, Miss. Do you wish to speak of it? They say that telling another our nightmares can help.”
I stared out the window, where filmy white clouds trailed along the plane’s wings. “Thanks, but no.”
Nothing would ever help.
Chapter Seventeen
A few minutes past five Southwest Air’s landing gear touched down in Tucson, with me remaining resolutely awake. On the way to my Jeep, I checked my messages. The first was from Warren, telling me how much he loved me and how much he missed me and how certain he was we could work out our relationship problems and so on and so on. By the way, he added, after ending this stream of bullshit, he’d changed his mind about the Apache Wars documentary—somebody had to tell the real story about Geronimo—and planned to start filming in Arizona within the month.
In fact, his message continued, he’d probably be spending so much time in Arizona, buying a home there would be a smart business move, and since I knew the area so well, could I help him house hunt?
Furious, I pressed the delete button and punched up the next message. It was Jimmy, saying he had information on Reverend Hall. I started to return his call, then realized that if I hustled, I could make it to Apache Chemical before management went home for the day. I threw the cell into my carry-all, hurried to my Jeep, and peeled out of the lot.
Forty minutes later I sat in the small Apache Chemical reception room, waiting for Lee Casey to emerge from his office. The longer I sat there, the less likely my new theory seemed. The plant didn’t appear large enough to be involved in secret government research. Not only that, I had seen day care centers with tighter security.
Only one guard had questioned me when I arrived at the main gate, and after a cursory glance at my driver’s license, he’d waved me straight through. To reach the executive offices, I had wandered unchallenged past a deserted loading dock. Only when I entered the plant itself was I provided with an escort, an annoyed man in a gray jumpsuit with JEFFREY embroidered over the pocket. Jeffrey ushered me into Casey’s outer office, where he summarily left me.
The secretary, whose name plate announced she was JO ELLEN WOOTEN, was a pretty but vacuous young woman who didn’t bother to ask for my I.D. She seemed more interested in her People magazine than worried about me running off with secret biological weapons.
“Shoulda made an appointment,” she said, staring dreamily at a picture of Brad Pitt.
“Probably.”
“Mr. Casey’s a busy man.”
“I’m sure he is.”
She cracked her gum. “Just so you know.”
While she was mooning over Pitt, the door opened and a frowning man in his late fifties stepped out. He was tall and broad-shouldered, but a considerable paunch marred his otherwise athletic physique. “Jo Ellen, you messaged that someone wants to see me?”
“Her.” She pointed.
His frown disappeared when he saw me. “Well, how nice! I always have time for pretty ladies.”
Casey’s office was no more elegant than the reception area. The walls needed painting and the furniture looked like he’d picked it up at a garage sale. A framed diploma from NAU, several tennis trophies, and plaques from various civic groups tried to lend importance to the room but failed. On the desk sat a photograph of Casey with his arm around a heavy-set blond woman. Surrounding the couple were—I counted—eight children, evenly split between boys and girls. In age, they ranged from the tow-headed toddler on the woman’s lap, all the way up to two gawky teens. Their dated clothing revealed that the picture was at least a decade old. The last family portrait taken before the wife died in that car accident?
Casey’s smile grew broader. “So, Miss, um, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
When I handed over my I.D., he raised his eyebrows. “Lena Jones. Private investigator. Yeah, I heard one was in town. You’re investigating the murder of that poor little girl, aren’t you? Well, I wish you every success.”
“Sometimes the private sector can succeed where government officials fail,” I fished.
He bit. “No lie there, Ms. Jones. The sheriff is hamstrung by so much red tape he couldn’t find his own ass at high noon, let alone a child-killer.” He shot a worried look at the photograph on his desk. Whatever the man was really like underneath all that phony bonhomie, he did care for the welfare of his own children.
“Sheriff Avery does seem to be overwhelmed,” I agreed.
“Issuing parking tickets overwhelms that guy.”
Remembering that Selma had told me Casey liked to drive fast, I wondered how many speeding tickets he had accumulated. An abundance of them might explain his hostility toward the sheriff. Or was there something deeper?
While I was considering this, he asked, “Anyway, why the visit?”
I decided to be as forthright as he was, minus the smarm. “There’s a theory floating around town that Precious Doe might be Somali. Don’t you have Somalis working for you?”
His smile vanished. “None of them are missing any kids, and believe me, I would know. My workers are my family.”
“Really? I heard one of your ‘family’ threatened you with a lawsuit recently.”
“Oh, I see. You’ve been talking to Selma Mann. Running that big ranch, you’d think she’d have better things to do than obsess about what goes on in my life. Some women just can’t handle rejection, I guess.”
The statement seemed so strange I repeated it. “Can’t handle rejection?”
He smoothed his salt-and-pepper hair, an oddly vain gesture for a man of his bulk. “We dated for a while but the relationship didn’t pan out so I stopped seeing her. She wasn’t happy about that.”
Selma had dated the sheriff and Casey? For a rancher, she sure got around. “When was this?”
“Five, six, seven years ago. I can’t remember exactly.” He folded his hands over his ample stomach and relaxed in his chair.
“Before or after 9/11?”
“Like I said, I can’t remember.”
Nine-eleven had cut a dividing line through everyone’s life. There was what had happened before 9/11, and what happened after. Despite Casey’s obvious lie, I found his description of Selma as a spurned woman interesting, so I played along. “You might be right about her. She did exhibit a certain amount of emotion when she talked about you.”
He seemed pleased.
“Another thing, Mr. Casey. Didn’t the father of that missing girl, Tujin Rafik, work at Apache Chemical?”
He seemed less pleased. “What are you getting at?”
Now that I’d unsettled him, I eased up again, an old interviewer’s trick. “Nothing, really. The coincidence just struck me. By the way, I was surprised to find a chemical plant all the way out here. How did that come about?”
Offered safer ground, he opened up, and with growing enthusiasm, told me about his days at NAU, his degree in chemical engineering, his marriage, the birth of his children, the death of his wife, the startup of his company. “Because of the San Pedro River, there’s a lot of nearby farming, but we’re surrounded by desert, and our unique soil conditions create special challenges, as do our desert insects. I’m proud to say I’ve devised a formula that meets those challenges, an all-purpose insecticide and our own brand of fertilizer, Apache Grow-Pro. Maybe you�
�ve seen our commercial?”
I shook my head. I always muted commercials.
Undeterred, he continued, “Picture this. A Bedouin stands in the middle of the Sahara Desert with his camel. The camel says—the commercial is animated, obviously—the camel says, ‘If Apache Grow-Pro can grow stuff here, it can grow stuff anywhere.’ Then the Bedouin sprinkles some Apache Grow-Pro on the sand, and giant roses spring up, singing ‘Apache Grow-Pro makes us tall, Apache Grow-Pro makes us strong, Apache Grow-Pro makes us bloom and bloom, all the summer long!’ After a test run on a Phoenix station, Arizona sales jumped twenty-two point one percent. Isn’t that something? We’re taking it national next month.”
I tried to appear impressed. “That’s something, all right. How about the government? You do any contract work for them?”
He blinked.“Why would the government care about roses?”
The muscles around my mouth were growing tired of maintaining my artificial smile. “Not in growing roses, certainly, but I thought they might be interested in various applications for your insecticide.”
Casey’s earlier caution reappeared. “Such as spraying it on terrorists? As much as I like the concept, no. Sad to say, the Feds haven’t approached me. If they were into that kind of thing, and I wouldn’t put it past them, they’d develop it at their own facilities, not here in Los Perdidos where nosy people might ask too many questions.” The room chilled further as he added, “Nosy people like pretty private investigators.”
With that, he stood up and offered his hand. “While I’ve enjoyed your visit, Ms. Jones, I really need to get back to work. But feel free to stop by any time. We have no secrets at Apache Chemical.”
When I shook his hand, he gripped mine so hard it hurt. Before I could respond in kind, he escorted me out the door and called to his secretary, who was packing up to leave, “Have Jeffrey accompany Ms. Jones out of the building. It would be a shame if she got her pretty face splashed with something. She already has one scar too many.”
Then he closed the door.
Outside in the parking lot, where Jeffrey watched me climb into my Jeep, I thought about Lee Casey’s final words.
A warning?
By now it was well after seven, so once Apache Chemical lay safely behind me, I pulled off on the shoulder of the highway and called my partner on his cell. As twilight deepened, traffic slowed to a trickle. A pickup truck, its bed loaded with day laborers, swerved around several crows picking at their supper of road kill. Racoon? Coatimundi?
Jimmy answered on the first ring. After a few pleasantries, he said, “That Reverend Hall guy? I pulled up some interesting stuff on him, but before you get all excited, he’s never been convicted of anything.”
As Jimmy ran down his finds for me, I listened with increasing suspicion. Hall, the son of a Presbyterian minister, had attended a fundamentalist theological seminary in Kentucky, but left after one semester.
“Woman problems?” I asked. “Man problems?” Recent events had shown the world that sinning reverends might swing either way. Or both ways at the same time.
“Neither,” Jimmy chuckled. “The so-called ‘secure site’ I accessed just stated that he had, ‘a turn of mind not desirable in a pastoral candidate.’ Anyway, after Hall left Kentucky, he received a theology degree by mail from one of those diploma mills and found work at a series of small churches in Mississippi, Alabama, Idaho, and Utah, but never stayed any place long. I talked to a Deacon Wheeler at God’s Light Tabernacle in Idaho, who remembers Hall quite well. He gave me an earful. Still mad, I figure.”
Besides the various sexual sins, I could only think of one other sin that would piss off a deacon. “Embezzlement?”
“Naw. He just said that Hall’s personal beliefs were too fundamentalist for their particular denomination. This from a guy who came right out and asked me if I was married, and when I said I wasn’t, wanted to know if I was gay, because if I was, I would burn in Hell for eternity.”
In the past, Jimmy’s soft voice and polite demeanor, common Pima Indian traits, had led other Anglos to jump to the same conclusion.
“Nasty,” I observed.
Jimmy chuckled again. “But interesting, don’t you think? When a guy that far to the religious right accuses Hall of being too fundamentalist, it kinda grabs your attention.”
That it did. While I didn’t follow any particular religion myself, I allowed that there was room enough in the world for every belief, no matter how oddball or mean-spirited. As Hall’s Women For Freedom group proved, some people liked to be led. It absolved them of the responsibility of thinking for themselves.
On the highway next to me, another truck, this one loaded with cattle, swept by, briefly scattering the crows. As soon as it was gone, they returned to peck at the road kill, now flattened beyond recognition. “One last question, Jimmy. Any arrests with charges dropped, that sort of thing? Kid trouble?”
“No on both counts, just gossip. Wheeler told me Hall’s wife was somewhat less than ‘chaste,’ as he so charmingly put it, and said the daughter didn’t look anything like him.”
“Maybe she was adopted.”
“Nope. The daughter was born during Hall’s stay in Idaho. Wheeler and his wife even visited Mrs. Hall at the hospital. The Halls wound up staying at that church for five years, long enough for Wheeler to notice that the girl couldn’t possibly be Hall’s. And before you ask, that particular denomination doesn’t believe in artificial insemination or embryonic implantation, either. Eventually, the girl did grow to look a lot like her mother, although Wheeler said something about her eyes being wrong. Do you know what that’s about?”
Whatever religious blinders Wheeler wore, he was an observant man. As I had noted earlier myself, Hall and his wife both had light-colored eyes, but Nicole’s were dark brown. Hall couldn’t possibly be the biological father. In the face of such obvious adultery, how had he dealt with his wife? Prayed? Beat the crap out of her? As for Nicole herself, how had he treated the girl, especially when she became pregnant by her boyfriend?
Then again, maybe I judged the good reverend too severely, and his over-controlling behavior was merely an attempt to keep his wandering females in line.
“Were you able to talk to anyone else, Jimmy?”
“Sorry. Other than Wheeler, religious types tend to be tighter-lipped than the National Security Agency. But I think something weird’s going on with Hall, because with the exception of the Idaho church, he’s never stayed in one place for more than a year or two. He’s bounced from place to place, and frankly, most of the places he’s been affiliated with sound more like cults than churches. Not all, though. Before Idaho, he did manage to snag a placement with one of the more traditional denominations, the Church of the Nazarene. They sent him to the Somalia-Kenya border with a group of missionaries. Very brave missionaries. Do you know what’s been going on there with all the warlords and stuff?”
“Yeah, murdered nuns and burned bodies dragged through the streets. That’s why so many Somalis are trying to get the hell out of Dodge. Sad as that is, right now I’m more curious about Reverend Hall.”
“Gotcha. Okay. Hall didn’t stay long, Lena. After only a few months the Nazarenes yanked him back to the U.S. and left the other missionaries in place, so it sounds like he wore out his welcome again. I couldn’t find out the reason, but I’m still checking. Anyway, after his African adventure, Hall dropped out of sight until he re-emerged in Los Perdidos and built Freedom Temple. Nobody’s run him out of town yet, so maybe he’s mellowed.”
I doubted it. Leopards and jackals didn’t change their spots. However, Jimmy’s mention of Somalia did remind me of something. “I have a couple of new names for you. Jwahir Hassan and his family. They’re Somali. They immigrated to the U.S. a few years ago and before moving to Phoenix, lived in Los Perdidos. The father lost his hand in an industrial accident at Apache Chemical and received a financial settlement. I want to know how much. Also, the Hassans supposedly have three daughters.
Make certain they’re okay and have actually been seen since Precious Doe turned up dead. There’s an outside chance one of the girls might be her.”
Our connection was good enough that I heard his intake of breath. “If that’s true, why didn’t the family report her missing?”
“Good question. Here’s another name. Lee Casey. He owns Apache Chemical Company. He graduated from NAU, where he married a rich girl maiden name of Somers who died in a car accident a few years back. See if you can find the accident report.”
“He inherit?”
“Yep.” The crows in the road began fighting over a piece of intestine. Wincing—the scenario reminded me too much of my dream on the plane—I turned my head.
“Wait a minute,” Jimmy said. “Isn’t Fort Huachuca near Los Perdidos? And that Army Intelligence installation?”
Great minds think alike. “Yep again.”
“The plot thickens. Okay, I’ll get right on it.”
We chatted for a few more minutes until he said he had a date and needed to get cleaned up.
“Another date? With the same woman?”
“That’s right, Mommy. Another date with Lydianna.”
Thankfully, he couldn’t see my blush. “I’m not nagging.” No, not at all. Just trying to keep my partner out of trouble because he had no judgement whatsoever when it came to the opposite sex.
Sarcasm is not common to Pimas, but every now and then they indulge. “Coulda fooled me, Lena. By the way, how’s things with Warren?”
I recognized the tit for tat. “Warren’s fine.” Before Jimmy could ask for details, I disconnected and sat there for a few minutes, watching the crows in the failing light. I decided that the object of their culinary affections was more likely a raccoon than a coatimundi. Coatis ranged further south. Or they used to, anyway. Mostly found in South and Central America, a few had even been spotted north of Tucson. Animals, like people, were changing their migratory patterns. Not me. I was staying right here in Arizona, even though experience had shown me that Arizona cowboys were no more faithful than Hollywood directors.
