It still felt shameful. That must be in my head now, the craven hope that I can dodge the next challenge. That’s why I dreamed it that way. What if I lose my nerve over this? She shook herself. Maybe I do need to talk to somebody.
Moretti had cautioned her not to come to the workplace or discuss the case with her fellow officers. ‘You got that?’ he’d said when she’d been in his office. ‘I know you’ll be anxious to know how the case is progressing, but you must keep hands off. There’ll be an official hearing down the line somewhere, and you can say anything you want to say about this incident then. In the meantime, keep out of it and let the system work.’
She knew better than to argue with the Chief of Police, but back in Delaney’s office she’d said, ‘Boss, there are things you don’t know that you’re going to need.’
‘Finish the incident report,’ he’d said. ‘You can do that at home, can’t you? After I’ve read it I’ll be in touch. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Be patient, Sarah. I have to follow protocols.’
‘I know you do. I don’t mean to make more trouble for you than you’ve got already. I just feel like—’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Go home.’
At home with her family, after she’d told her story she said, ‘Now I’m not supposed to talk about the case. But it’s the only thing on my mind right now, so I hope you’ll understand if I keep talking about it. I don’t think I can avoid it.’
Will said, ‘No, you can’t. Just don’t do it in public. I have access to most of the computers in Arizona. I’ll bring you everything I can find and of course we’ll talk about it.’
To help finance the many family needs they had agreed to carry together, Will had retired from the Tucson Police Department as soon as he was eligible, and gone to work as an investigator for the County Attorney’s office. Sarah had never thought much about his second-dipping job, except to love the Blessed Second Paycheck. Now she began to see what a great stroke of luck it was that his job gave him wide access to what she had always called ‘the punitive wing of law enforcement.’
‘Tell me about it, Will,’ she said. ‘You get to stick your nose in everything, do you? How much do you, you know, know?’
‘Sarah, now,’ Will said, holding up a hand, ‘I’ll do what I can to keep you from dying of curiosity, but we gotta keep it legal.’
‘Sure, sure. But you can’t expect me to stand right next to the candy store and not even sniff. So please be thinking about this: the man I just killed – who is he and what was he doing there? I mean, obviously he and his buddy were there to grab DeShawn. But what did they want him for and how did they find him so fast? It all says good connections, a big network. But it comes armed with nothing but a tricky knife and a wheelchair? And back to what Ollie said, why are stone killers chasing this two-bit drug deal?’
‘Stop,’ Will said, looking grave. ‘This isn’t the time or the place.’ He rolled his eyes sideways and Sarah, looking around, saw her mother and Denny watching her, Denny with rapt attention and Aggie looking about ready to faint.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what’s on TV.’
Aggie came in from her casita Wednesday morning and floated an idea. ‘Sarah, it seems to me you should try to think of this leave as a chance to do some of the things you never have time to do.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, for instance, you used to read a lot. Why not get your library card limbered up again? I could make a list for you to choose from, and we can talk about it.’
‘OK. You remember a lot of book titles, do you?’
‘Sweetie, I probably could give you fifty just offhand without looking anything up.’
‘Wow. Impressive.’ Look at her, all smiles. I should have a disaster more often.
‘Besides, it’s September,’ Aggie went on. ‘Almost the right time to plant bulbs. Wouldn’t it be grand to have tulips coming up by the kitchen door next spring?’
‘Ah, Mama, tulip fever strikes again, eh?’ She told Denny, ‘That’s what your grandpa used to call it.’ She told her niece how often Aggie had campaigned, during Sarah’s childhood, for bushes and flowerbeds to brighten the austere practicality of the farmyard. Sarah’s father had always promised to bring in his plow and tractor and make it happen, ‘as soon as I have the time,’ but the ranch work always intervened.
Sarah asked her mother, ‘Have you got a catalog for tulips too?’
‘Just happens I do.’
‘I’ve got an edger,’ Will said. ‘Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll dig a trench.’
Denny said, ‘And hey, Aunt Sarah, any idle hours you can’t fill, I can always use a little help with math.’
‘Oh, math help from Aunt Sarah, won’t that be the day,’ Sarah said. ‘You went past me like a rocket early last year.’ Given enough home support to allow full concentration, Denny had uncovered a talent for math and shot right to the top of her class. She was beginning to talk about a degree in one of the hard sciences, staying vague about how she intended to wedge it in alongside the career in law enforcement she had been aiming at for years.
But she could use a little attention to body parts, Sarah decided, noticing how much her niece was filling out. Those pants are too tight, and it’s time she got out of braids. I’ll take her to my stylist and get her a hairdo.
After Will and Denny got away to work and school, Sarah spent an hour over catalogs with Aggie and they ordered bulbs online. Then she said, ‘Now, since I have the computer all warmed up, I’d like to get on with that incident report I promised Delaney, while it’s fresh in my mind. Will you be OK till lunchtime?’
‘Oh, indeed,’ Aggie said. ‘Time for my morning nap.’ Sarah watched her cross the patio, thinking, How long has she been dragging her feet like that? I wonder if I could get that stopped?
She opened the daily diary that she kept at work, read the last cryptic entry: ‘Headed to St M’s w/Jason, to del arrest war DeShawn Williams, set up squad for 24/7 guard until trans to PiMa Co pris hosp.’
Reading it over, thinking, so much for good intentions, she pulled up incident report #96532 and began to type the story of yesterday’s events.
It was hard to type the killing onto the page. Revising the first paragraph for the third time, she told herself impatiently, harder to write it than it was to do it.
I need to describe exactly how he looked, coming out of that doorway so furtively with his hand in his pocket … she drudged on, setting up the scene, hoping she was being clear enough about their mission to the hospital and the shock of what really happened. She had consistently expressed the event in her mind that way – what really happened. Now as she typed it for what she hoped would be the last time, she stopped, read the phrase over and recognized it as the evasion that was bothering her. Happened, my ass. Like some mysterious third force was in control? Let’s suck it up here.
She went back again, reopened the report, and watched the plain words scroll out on the page. ‘This is my recollection of what I did when I was attacked in the hall at St. Mary’s Hospital yesterday.’ Read it over and told herself, Now you’re cookin’. After that she detailed every move made by the five people in the hall, from the time she came through the door to the ICU with Jason and the nurse.
She posted the account to the department database, then copied it again to her diary. When she finished, she closed her laptop, gently patted the lid, and said softly, ‘There you go.’
She took a big drink of ice water and walked out to find Aggie, sitting quietly in the shade outside her casita.
‘You look pretty comfy,’ Sarah said, and then sotto voce, ‘Any sign of the pesky neighbor today?’
‘The weatherman? That’s how I think of him. No, he hasn’t been around today, so far. But you’ll meet him soon, never fear. He’ll be thrilled to have a new friend to report to. “It’th a nithe bwight Mawneen, ithn’t it?”’ She imitated his weather commentary.
Sarah cringed. It wasn’t like Aggie
to do cruel imitations. This neighbor must have really tried her patience.
‘I’m raging hungry,’ Sarah said. ‘OK if we have ham and cheese sands for lunch?’
‘Fine.’
‘And after that would you like to go shopping? I need new tennies to wear around the house and so do you – the ones you’re wearing don’t seem to fit right.’
Aggie had vaguely agreed shopping might be fun, but as they finished lunch she said, ‘The shoes I’ve got fit fine if I lace them up right, but I don’t because my feet are sore.’
‘Why are they sore? Have you ever told me this? Sit here in the sunshine so I can see.’ She spent the next few minutes with her mother’s feet in her lap. Aggie had corns, bunions, at least one bone spur that she could see. ‘Ma, your feet are in terrible shape. We need to get them taken care of – why haven’t you said something?’
‘Well, I’ve had so much wrong with me lately, it seemed like it was just one doctor’s appointment after another …’
‘So you figured you’d just go limping bravely along till you were completely crippled, is that it? What happened to the mother who used to say the first thing to try after you fall off a horse is to see how fast you can get back on the horse?’
‘I was younger then,’ Aggie said. ‘Is doctoring my feet your way of getting back on your horse?’
‘I haven’t thought of it that way but it’s not a bad idea.’
‘I suppose. I hope you’re not going to try to fix everything that’s wrong with me while you’re off work. There’s a lot about old age that can’t be cured.’
‘What we can’t cure we can mitigate. I happen to know a very smart guy who swears by his podiatrist. Let’s see if we can get an appointment next week, and then we’ll go shopping for shoes.’
‘Don’t worry about me going crazy at home,’ she told Will in their bedroom that night. ‘I’m way behind with family chores.’
‘Is that right?’ Will said. ‘So you’re not in any hurry to hear about the message Banjo sent to Delaney today? Banjo’s keeping me in the loop.’
‘What?’ Sarah threw her arms around him. ‘Will, tell me everything you know about that message right now.’
‘This feels pretty good,’ Will said, nibbling her ear. ‘let’s canoodle some more before we talk.’
‘I’ve been a whole day in this house with no news, Will Dietz,’ Sarah said, dropping her arms, ‘don’t mess with me.’
‘OK, OK.’ Ever the nimble lover, he pulled a sheet of text out of his shirt pocket and read it to her. ‘We dug all the slugs out of that van, found three or four in fair condition, and the gardeners found three more casings. I’m working on all of that evidence now and should be ready to lay it out for you Friday morning. Let’s say ten a.m.’
‘Delaney’s going, and taking Bogey and Jason along,’ Will said. ‘Delaney thought you’d want to know.’
‘Do I have a great boss or what?’ Sarah said. ‘Why are you leaving? I thought we had something going on here.’
‘We do,’ Dietz said. ‘Come to bed.’
SEVEN
Friday–Sunday
Sarah and Aggie spent Friday morning scoping out the best spots around the yard for the tulips, daffodils, and half a dozen other spring blossoms whose gorgeous pictures they had not been able to resist.
‘We kind of went crazy over that catalog, didn’t we?’ Aggie said.
‘Now don’t get buyer’s remorse. We’ve hardly spent anything on this yard since we moved in and we’re going to love watching these beauties come up.’
‘I’m thinking we may not love getting so many bulbs planted in one fall season.’
‘Hey, this is Arizona. We don’t have to worry about freezing till Christmas. And don’t forget, we have Will Dietz to help.’
‘He did make that offer, didn’t he? And I’m just wimpy enough to hold him to it. Let’s draw the rest of the iris into this patch by the carport and have lunch.’ They were making a chart on squared graph paper, using colored pencils to code for the half dozen blooms they had chosen.
‘It looks beautiful on paper,’ Aggie said, admiring their handiwork back in the kitchen. ‘What if they don’t all come up, though? We’ll have cleared off all the gravel and we’ll end up with bare spots.’ Having finally won the landscaping battle she had been waging for four decades, she was now beset by doubts.
‘We’ll go out to Desert Survivors and buy some of those colored grasses to fill in. Ma, we’re finally planting the flowers you’ve always wanted, why are you going all negative on me?’
‘I’m sorry, I think I’ve kind of got out of the habit of being optimistic. Is that the phone?’ She grabbed it off the wall. ‘Why isn’t it working out here?’ She stood holding the wall phone while a ring tone sounded from the family room.
‘It’s my cell,’ Sarah said. She quit spreading mayo and sprinted to the dining table in the bay window. ‘I didn’t expect it to ring today so I left it on the – oh, it’s an email from Will.’ She read the first sentence. ‘Well … it’s a forward.’ After a quick scan, she added, ‘No hurry about an answer. I’ll study it after we eat.’
As soon as the meal ended Aggie said, ‘Let me clean up. You’ve got police business on your mind now, haven’t you?’
‘All the time now,’ Sarah said. ‘Turns out there’s nothing like a paid vacation to make you think about your job.’
Will had forwarded an email from Banjo Bailey, with a note that said, ‘There’s plenty to think about here, and we can talk about it tonight. But I thought you’d like to see the science ASAP.’
Banjo’s message read, ‘The casings we retrieved from the grounds at Fairweather Farm are all .223 REM, hollow point, made by Winchester. We could not lift any fingerprints off the casings.
‘Most of the bullets we got out of the chassis were too squashed to be useful, but the two we pried out of the insulation over the windshield were in fair condition. There was some distortion, but I can declare with about ninety percent certainty that they were fired by a Colt AR-15, one of the early models. The two we have here are the Colt AR-15 SPI and the BushMaster XM-15. Lands and grooves were close but not an exact match on each of those. A colleague in the Phoenix crime lab has an M16, recently acquired after a robbery that was successfully interrupted. It’s an early version of this rifle that was made for the military. That’s a long shot as there are very few in civilian hands now, but just in case, I’m going to borrow it and try a comparison. If that’s not a match I’ll keep looking. Be patient, there are a lot of AR-15s out there. Meantime, materials and photo studies are available here and all hands are welcome in the lab if/when you have questions.’
She read over Banjo’s report twice, sat back and stared at the newel post on the stairs to Denny’s room for ten minutes. Nothing popped up. An old model of America’s most popular rifle. Standard-issue ammunition. It felt like an odd fit with the mad-dog driving and shooting the gardeners had described. She scrolled back in her diary to the account on the day of the killing, the way the gardeners described the attack car, hot on the chase, oblivious to anything but their quarry until the police cars turned onto the highway with sirens screaming.
Then, according to the story, the shooters took off right away, yelling at each other. No, yelling to each other. She remembered asking, ‘What did they say?’ and Jacob saying, ‘No idea.’ Both men shrugging and Henry adding, ‘Spanish.’ Jacob nodding yes, and later mentioning Mex lingo.
She sat up straighter in her chair then, comparing that memory with the new one that kept coming back to her – her own red blood dripping onto the face of the man she had just killed. The wan face with the sneer going out of it, softer and younger than when it first came at her alongside the knife – a face, she clearly remembered, devoid of obvious ethnicity – but probably northern European in origin – German, Polish, Hungarian? Anyway, not a Hispanic face.
Frustrating. Every new piece of information she got seemed to move her farther from a coheren
t answer to the puzzle of Enrique’s death.
She decided to take a break. Made a cup of tea and carried it out onto the patio. The heat was tolerable in the shade, and she thought a change of scene might help her quiet the jumble in her brain. She pushed a lounge chair into deeper shade and stretched her legs out, sipping tea and telling herself to quit gritting her teeth. But she was too accustomed to being indoors and busy on a weekday. Sitting still, watching birds at the feeders on a Friday, made her antsy instead of relaxed. Maybe I’ll read through all my notes again, she decided, and opened her laptop.
‘Hi there!’ The jolly male voice sounded so close it made her jump. She couldn’t see him, at first; the borders of their big back yard were thickly filled with tall trees, cottonwoods and white birches, with desert willows filling in the space below. She finally spied him, standing just at the south edge of the lot, framed by leaves and smiling broadly. He was a barrel-shaped man with stumpy legs below his knee-length shorts. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses and had a lot of curly brown hair. She couldn’t tell his age – usually one of the first things she guessed about a newcomer.
‘Hello,’ she said – a tepid hello, since she didn’t know who he was and wasn’t feeling sociable. ‘Should I know you? You live around here?’
‘I’m your neighbor,’ he said, nodding, smiling, and then pointing behind himself, ‘back there.’
‘I see.’ I think I’m beginning to. This must be the weatherman.
Nodding as if they’d just agreed to something important, he said, ‘Isn’t this a nice day?’ His lisp was very severe and there was something else, a kind of childish naivete.
‘Indeed it is.’ A speech impediment is not the weatherman’s only problem, is it?
‘Stanley?’
The call came from behind the clump of Texas Ranger bushes that marked the lower edge of Sarah’s yard. A woman’s voice, not strong. Not angry, either, just a little anxious, as if she’d been searching for him.
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