by Betty Webb
She shook her head as much as she was able to. “That courthouse was locked down tighter than a crab’s ass. They kept the kids secluded in separate rooms so they wouldn’t catch sight of each other. So, sorry. Can’t help you there.”
“Me, neither,” Delores said. “I’ve heard nothing about any of them, and most of the people involved in the trial are retired by now.”
I wasn’t too disappointed because that was pretty much what I’d expected, although it never hurt to try. “What can you tell me about that social worker, Guy DeLucca? I know he testified.”
Sergeant McCracken’ face became more lopsided when she frowned. “Poor shit was so distraught over placing you and those other kids with the Wycoffs that he shot himself a week after the trial ended. Didn’t die, from what I hear. Civilians with guns. They don’t know how to do it right.”
At that, her daughter gave her a sharp look.
McCracken caught it and laughed. There was no irony in her voice when she said, “Don’t you go worrying about me, Delores. If I’d wanted to off myself, I’d have done it years ago, and with considerable more expertise than poor old DeLucca. As it is, I’m too busy worrying about how Rhyne O’Malley’s going to react when he finds out his wife’s been cheating on him.”
It took me a second to remember that Detective Rhyne O’Malley was the protagonist in the duo’s books. “He’ll go on a bender,” I pointed out. Their sleuth had been carrying on a long love affair of his own, but with Wild Turkey.
“Oh, no, he won’t!” she cackled. “Rhyne joined AA in Death Over the Rainbow, which gets released in September, and neither Delores nor I want him falling off the wagon just yet. Three books from now, maybe, but we need him sober for a while. Our readers were beginning to worry about him.”
For the next half hour we talked crime, both fictional and real, until Sergeant McCracken’s head began to droop. As she slid off into Dreamland, I had a memory…
***
My nine-year-old self thought I’d killed him.
Children’s minds are strange things. Not being able to stand the abuse anymore, I’d begun planning Papa Brian’s murder more than a month earlier, working myself up to it a little at a time, stifling my fear, letting my hatred grow until I was ready. Then, on that terrible Thursday morning, the morning Norma volunteered at her church, I gave my dog Sandy away. Papa Brian had warned me that if I ever told anyone, he’d blind Sandy first, then kill him slowly.
So I kept quiet.
Sandy was the only thing I cared about anymore.
That day, that terrible and wonderful day, before Papa Brian came home early, as he always did on Thursdays, I went down to the kitchen and found the knife. It was the one I’d seen Mama Norma use when she cut up chickens for frying. How was I to know the blade was neither long enough or strong enough to gut a full-grown man?
But at least, an hour later, it got him away from me for good.
As Papa Brian lay screaming on the floor, I ran.
I ran, and I ran, and I ran. I ran down the block, across the park, and into the neighborhood beyond, where the houses were bigger and the alleys were wider. I was headed for the Pima Rez, having got it into my mind that I would build a teepee and live there for the rest of my life. Or at least until my parents came back for me.
I never made it.
Around 84th Street I developed a crick in my side and couldn’t run anymore. All I could do was hide myself between a large Dumpster and a cement block wall.
That’s where Officer Linda McCracken found me. She was younger then, and pretty. The bullet that came for her was still fifteen years in the future, so when she spotted me, she left her squad car idling and walked toward me slowly, using the same tone of voice I’d used with Sandy that day I found him shivering by the side of the road.
“I won’t hurt you, Honey.” McCracken’s soft voice sounded like safety, but I knew better. Papa Brian had a soft voice, too.
Giving up, not knowing what else to do anymore, I let her approach, even though I recognized the lie, even though I knew she was going to shoot me with that big gun she carried in her holster.
Officer McCracken kept her word. She didn’t shoot me. Instead, she knelt down—and not minding my bloody clothes—wrapped her strong arms around me and kissed me on the forehead.
“There, there, Honey. It’ll be all right. I promise.”
***
Before I left her house, the old sergeant’s head had sunk almost to her chest, but not so low that I couldn’t return that long-ago kiss.
Chapter Fifteen
Life isn’t fair. Everyone knows that, but every time a tragedy happens, we are stunned by the unfairness of it all. Parents disappear. Children are abused. Good cops get shot.
Juries free the guilty and convict the innocent.
I was still inwardly railing about the unfairness of life when I made it back to my apartment above Desert Investigations. Increasingly concerned about Debbie Margules and her precarious situation, I called Jimmy again and told him what I needed. Once the sputtering ended, he said, “That’s near-impossible.”
“You’ve done it before.”
“That was a wholly different situation. Give it a rest, Lena.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to if it wasn’t necessary. I’m really worried about that woman.”
“Chances are they’ll never charge her. You know as well as I do the cops won’t knock themselves out over this case, regardless of what they say in the press conferences.”
“On the off-chance you’re right, how about it?”
His silence told me it was time to soothe some ruffled feathers. “Pow wow still going fine?” I could hear drumming in the background, people clapping.
His tone was lighter when he answered. “Yeah, and now that the Men’s Fancy Dance judging is over, I can relax. There’s Indians from all over, even a group of Mohawks from New York and some Seminoles from Florida. Talk about a great turnout! Listen, Lena, it’s been nice talking to you and all, even when you’re wanting the impossible…”
“Near impossible, you said. Remember?”
“I have to get back to my cousin’s fry bread wagon. Couple hours ago her daughter went into early labor, so she’s shorthanded.”
And that was that.
***
Frustrated, I paced back and forth around my apartment for a while, not knowing what to do next. After a half hour of that, I decided to burn off my excess energy at the gym. Today being a Scottsdale Fight Pro kind of day, I was soon flipping Sean Finnegan, my usual workout buddy, over my head. As soon as he picked himself up, he responded in kind.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said, helping me to my feet.
I flipped him again.
He took the second fall with good grace, and after we finished roughing each other up, we shared a raspberry power smoothie at the drinks bar. Sean was a firefighter, male-model handsome, and if he hadn’t been gay, I’d have been all over him. But such is life. As the Rolling Stones song goes, you can’t always get what you want.
Most of my restlessness burned away, I returned to my apartment and watched the late afternoon news. A bullet-riddled body had just been dug up near the White Tank Mountains west of Phoenix. Yesterday hikers had found two bodies in the desert less than a mile away, both having died from natural causes; one felled by a heart attack, the other from heatstroke. Same day on the other side of the Valley, at the base of Weaver’s Needle in the Superstitions, a hiker from Minneapolis had also collapsed and died from heatstroke. His golden retriever survived, but just barely. An Apache couple found the dog collapsed in the shade by its master’s body, and shared their water bottles with it, the man being beyond help.
I decided there should be signs posted at the airport saying, NEVER HIKE ALONE. IF YOU HIKE, TAKE ONE GALLON OF WATER PER PERSON WITH YOU, MORE IN JUNE, JUL
Y & AUGUST. REPEAT: NEVER HIKE ALONE.
Good ideas are nothing if not acted on, so I picked up my landline and punched in the number of my U.S. Representative. Instead of the Honorable Juliana Thorsson, whom I’d come to know during my last case, my fourteen-year-old goddaughter, Alison, picked up.
“Hi, Lena.”
“Hi, Ali. Your mom home?”
“Yeah, but she’s working.”
“She’s always working. Let me talk to her anyway.”
“She told me to screen her calls.”
“Remember that Banned Books backpack you wanted?”
“The one she said I couldn’t have because I’d copy down the titles and read my way through them?”
“Yeah, that one. I’ll get it for you if you let me talk to her.”
“MOOOOOMMMM! It’s IMPOOOORTANT!”
Juliana picked up the extension. “Stop bribing the kid, Lena.”
“What, you were eavesdropping?”
“Mothers always eavesdrop. What do you want this time?”
I told her about my idea for the Sky Harbor Airport sign, but she didn’t greet it with enthusiasm.
“You need to stop watching the news. I heard about those poor tourists, too. But we could paper the entire city with those signs and people would still go hiking out there unprepared.”
“But we should do something!”
An irritable sigh. “Do you think we haven’t tried? Signs similar to the one you’re requesting are already up at the airports and bus terminals. They’re just not being paid attention to. Now, Lena, I’m happy to know you’re concerned about the public welfare, but I’m busy putting together a piece of legislation that will tighten last year’s rewrite of the eminent domain statute, and I have to get back to work on it before I lose my train of thought. You want to talk to Ali again?”
“Put her back on.”
“I never left,” Alison said, once her mother hung up the extension. “When do I get the backpack?”
“I’ll order it tomorrow.”
“Today.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“Nothing’s closed on Sunday anymore. But it’s on sale at Amazon for $79.95, shipping free, guaranteed overnight. Oh, and I think you should get it stuffed with some of the books, like, Lady Chatterley’s Lover or something.”
“Don’t be greedy.”
We talked books for a while, then about her boyfriend, Kyle, then school. Before I ended the call, she’d cadged me out of Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. I’d been able, thank the Lord I wasn’t sure I believed in, to talk her out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
***
Talking to Ali always cheered me up, so after a quick ramen dinner, followed by a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Save Our Swirled ice cream, I felt strong enough to continue the job I’d started the evening before. Only this time I bypassed the photos and newspaper clippings and picked up the scrapbook I had begun working on during Brian Wycoff’s trial.
Fortified by the ministry of Ben & Jerry, I opened the scrapbook. The cover said: THIS IS LENA JONES’ BOOK.
The first few pages were scribbles about Brian Wycoff, what he had done to me, and how sorry I was that I failed at killing him. I had drawn a picture of him bleeding from the stomach. There was a lot of red on that page.
Toward the back of the scrapbook I saw a shaky drawing of a smiling man dressed in Jesus robes. Abraham. Vampire teeth sprouted from Abraham’s still-smiling mouth.
Near the end, I had drawn a picture of children running through trees. The children were covered by red dots.
The final page showed a red-haired man with Xs for eyes. My father. He lay on his back, surrounded by trees and red-dotted children. The children had Xs for eyes, too.
That page was the reddest of them all.
I closed the scrapbook.
Then I went into the kitchen and ate my way through another pint of Ben & Jerry’s Save Our Swirled.
The night was another bad one. Over and over my mother screamed, “They killed them and it’s my fault, it’s all my fault!”
So much red.
Chapter Sixteen
“Good grief, Lena, what happened to you?” Jimmy asked as he came through the office door.
I had arrived at the office earlier than usual on a Monday because at some point I’d become afraid to go back to sleep. I was on my fourth cup of high-test Graffeo Dark and even my teeth were vibrating.
“Hard workout at Scottsdale Fight Pro,” I said.
“Workouts don’t cause red eyes.”
“Insomnia.”
“That does.” The pow wow had been good for him. His bronze skin had picked up even more color from the sun and his mahogany eyes shone. Even his long black hair, now falling several inches past his shoulders, appeared glossier. I made myself look away and think about Dusty instead.
I am such a fool.
Jimmy wasn’t through with me. “This case isn’t good for you,” he said.
“It’s no different than any of the others.” Outside, a couple of tourists stopped to look at the array of turquoise jewelry in the window of Ken Littlefeather’s store. He wouldn’t open for another two hours. Name withstanding, Ken wasn’t Indian; he was Italian, from New Jersey, and his…
“The Wycoff case isn’t like any other case, Lena. It’s bringing up some bad stuff for you.”
“I can handle it.”
“Just look at yourself, woman. You’ve aged ten years in one week.”
“That’s something a woman loves to hear.”
He took two steps toward me. I took three steps back.
Dusty. Think of Dusty. Think of that cheating son of a bitch and his pistol-packing wife, the bullets that had almost struck me, think of anything, anything, but don’t ever think about letting Jimmy get any closer.
I could feel Jimmy staring at me.
“Lena, you…”
The turquoise-hunting tourists walked on to the next store, an art gallery with idealized paintings of the desert that pretended the desert was not a killing ground.
“Leave it alone, Jimmy,” I said, backing up another step, keeping my face turned toward the action on Main Street.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Jimmy shrug. Then he turned and walked over to his computer station. Sat down. Turned on his computer. “Okay. Police any closer to arresting someone in the Wycoff case?”
“Last I heard they’re still looking at Debbie.”
Even a frown couldn’t mar the perfection of his earth-colored face. “I don’t like the sound of that. From what you’ve told me, she’s had a rough enough time without winding up in a jail cell.”
“Tell me about it.” I fetched my partner a cup of coffee, which surprised him, then gave him time to settle in. A half hour later I glanced at his computer screen and saw that he was running background checks for a grocery store chain we had under contract. Background checks are our bread-and-butter, but something more immediate was on my mind.
“Jimmy?”
“What?”
“Remember what I asked you to do yesterday?”
He stopped typing. Without turning around, he said, “You wanted me to find the names of the kids on the witness list at Wycoff’s trial.”
“Right.”
“Which I told you was impossible, that the court records were sealed.”
“As much as I hate to repeat myself, you said near-impossible.”
“Same thing.”
“No it’s not.”
He finally turned around, his dark eyes serious. “Please give it a rest. There’s nothing to gain by dredging up old history. The man’s dead. He’s no longer a danger to anyone.”
“Didn’t I just tell you that Debbie Margules remains under suspicion?”
“S
o do you, probably.”
“But…”
“Tell you what. If Ms. Margules does wind up getting arrested, I’ll see what I can do. But only then. The minute I start poking into sealed court documents, red flags will go up all over the Maricopa County system, and could eventually lead to my own arrest. Having once spent some time in a jail cell myself, I’m loathe to repeat that dubious pleasure, thank you very much. Deal?”
“Deal.”
We worked in companionable silence for the next hour, me doing billing and answering phones, Jimmy continuing his background checks. Just before noon, I received a call that made my adrenalin level spike. One of my contacts had spotted Inez, client Yolanda Blanco’s runaway daughter, panhandling in front of the Greyhound Bus Depot.
“Gotta go!” I yelled at Jimmy. “Someone’s spotted Inez!”
Ten minutes later I was headed west on the I-10 toward Phoenix.
***
Most bus depots are not located in high-rent districts, but the Greyhound Depot broke the mold. Adjoining Sky Harbor Airport, it sat amidst sculpted parkland, looking more like an upscale business office. Still, bus stations don’t always attract society’s A-listers, and when I spotted the eighteen-year-old by a kiosk in front, she was surrounded by a crowd of low-lifes. It was easy to see why. A beauty by any standard, her light tan skin glowed with good health, more than making up for her scruffy Levis and torn Arcade Fire tee shirt. She had also gained a few pounds since going on the lam. They looked good on her.
But I could tell she was scared. One of the lowlifes, a big dude who towered over her by almost a foot, was tugging at her sleeve.
I slipped my .38 out of its pocket holster and exited the Jeep.
“Back off, buddy,” I told Big Dude.
“Mind your own business, bitch,” he replied. He smelled of Eau de Street, made even more pungent by the heat.
I flashed my ID and turned so he could see my .38. “This young woman is my business.”
