‘That’s right. I was almost completely broke when I got here; I pulled out of my previous squat without waiting to pack. So I had to get a gig right away in order to eat. And I nailed that, all right, and then the deal with the Greens. But since then’ – his voice trailed off for a minute, and when he resumed he seemed to feel sorry for himself again – ‘since then I been through some very hard times. And I feel totally worn down ever since I got in that freaking accident.’ He did look tired, suddenly, and cold; he slid down in the bed and pulled the cover up around his ears.
‘I understand that,’ Sarah said. ‘Just stick with it for a few more minutes. You’ve been doing a great job of telling the truth here, DeShawn. If you can keep it up a little longer I’ll have enough to put away these people who keep trying to murder you, won’t that be good?’ That was condescending bullshit, she would later admit to herself. So maybe it was her fault, what happened next. But the change came so suddenly and silently that she didn’t realize until too late that DeShawn had lost his enthusiasm for telling the truth.
Or for much of anything else, she saw with dismay – he was beginning to look like a TV ad for one of those night-time cold cures. Tears ran freely down his cheeks and his nose was running again too; he pulled two tissues out of the box and went to work mopping. When he surfaced, he said, ‘Listen, you know I’m really pretty sick. So I need to rest now and we can talk some more later on.’
‘OK. Listen, just give me the names of the people you dealt with here, so I can—’
‘I told you, they called themselves The Greens. God, I’m getting feverish.’
‘Come on, DeShawn, you don’t make deals with a whole gang, you must have had one or two guys you dealt with who had names. Just give me one name and I’ll leave you alone till tomorrow.’
‘Why do we have to do it all in one day?’ His voice went shrill, he sounded like an ailing child. Face flushed, he wailed, ‘I’m hot and cold and I’m getting a sore throat.’
Then Etienne was back at the bedside, along with another attendant who had a stethoscope hanging around his shoulders. He put the device in his ears and listened to DeShawn’s heaving chest.
Etienne glowered at her, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and made little shooing motions. Sarah got out of her chair and stood in a space in the aisle between DeShawn’s row of beds and the next. It was crowded and awkward; she felt blamed but could see no chance or reason to defend herself. She put a card firmly in Etienne’s hand and said, ‘Call my cell when your shift ends.’
She turned and made her way between the rows of beds to the door that led out to the exit. As she reached the door it opened but no one came through, so she walked through the opening and found Bogey standing on the other side, holding the door.
‘Oh,’ she said sharply, ‘what are you doing here?’ Already discomfited by the way DeShawn’s health problems – or his exaggeration of them – had squeezed her out of their conversation, now to find Bogey where she least expected him felt annoying and wrong.
‘I came to find you,’ he said. ‘I called the office and they said you’d be here.’
‘Interviewing DeShawn Williams. The man who was supposed to be driving the van that got shot up.’
‘Oh, yes. But he got hurt in traffic, was that it? How’s he doing now?’
‘Well, I thought he was doing quite well, but he appears to be having a setback just now. He seems very unstable, but – he’s got a lot of injuries to heal, so I guess it’s not surprising. What did you come to tell me? You didn’t need to do that, by the way, you could have texted and saved yourself a trip.’
‘Well, I know, but I thought what I found about the area might change the way you think about the case, so maybe I should show you.’
‘Oh? Well, let’s see, what time is it?’ She felt as if this day of male histrionics had been very long already.
‘Two-thirty,’ Bogey said. ‘Want to take a look at it now?’
‘Sure, still plenty of time. Is your car outside? So’s mine – meet me at the exit closest to town, or wait, let’s rendezvous at the light on Grant Road and Silverbell, OK?’
After the cool in the ward, the heat in the prison parking lot felt like an assault. She had parked under the shade of a young desert willow some distance from the entrance, but the sun had shifted while she was inside and now her car stood in the open, giving off waves of reflected sunlight. She cursed herself for her choice of parking spots as she walked what felt like a mile across the blistering asphalt. Once inside the oven heat of her car, she started the motor, rolled down the windows and adjusted the A/C to blow some of the heat out. After a minute she closed up, turned the vent to blow air directly into her face and leaned back in the seat, taking deep breaths. When she was back to cool and calm, she pulled onto the highway.
THIRTEEN
Monday afternoon
Bogey was pulled up close to the metal pole that held the Grant/Silverbell sign. There was not much room in the intersection, so Sarah rolled down her window and called, ‘Let’s move up to the Goret Road intersection, there’s more room there.’ She pulled out ahead of him and parked in the pull-out at Goret Road, facing east with a view of the golf course. When he pulled in beside her she got out and transferred to his passenger seat.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘show me what you’ve got.’
He plunked a thick, spiralbound book of sectional maps in her lap and said, ‘Let’s look at the map first and then drive it.’ He had the page turned to the area they were sitting in. ‘This book is five years old so Fairweather Farms doesn’t show on this map, but I marked it with a Post-it dot.’
‘I see it. You’ve got it just about right – the place is just about halfway between Camino Del Cerro and Sweetwater, on the right of the highway as we’re facing it now.’
‘Yes,’ Bogey said. ‘There are a few more buildings in the vicinity than when this was drawn, but the streets are the same. And as we drive northwest from here, the city is to your right. All turns to the left lead to open desert, with occasional clusters of housing. I know you know this from your days on patrol, but—’
‘That’s all right, you’re showing me what you’ve learned about this incident. And actually, the half year I was assigned to this section of town I was on the night shift, so mostly all I saw was streetlights, bar signs and fast food places.’
‘There’s a lot more than that to see out here. Let’s drive down the highway now and I’ll show you what I mean.’ He looked around and then pulled onto the highway. Traffic was light on Silverbell compared to the steady stream on Interstate 10, though they both followed the same route along the northwest edge of town, on either side of the dry bed of the Santa Cruz River. With few cars to worry about, Bogey drove slower than the posted speed limit so Sarah could look at both sides of the road.
‘Looking forward,’ he said, ‘there are three stop lights on this section of the road – Sweetwater, Camino Del Cerro and Sunset. But the three patrol cars that answered the call for help at Fairweather Farms that day all came out on Camino Del Cerro, turned left on Silverbell and approached the senior living place at high speed.
‘They all remember the incident clearly and their accounts agree. Tom Newsom drove car thirty-five and he told me it was his first call to this new place and he wasn’t familiar with the entrance. They could all hear gunfire as they approached, and then yelling and more shots. So they had their sirens going and were ready for a fight but the way that road dips and turns, they really couldn’t be sure what was going on until they were right on top of it.
‘The other two cars agree; their destination was a sharp left turn off the highway as it rounded a bend. There were a lot of bushes on either side and they were going so fast they missed it. Tom was in front, and when he saw the gate flash past he called the other two cars and said he was past it and would come back. But he was just too late; the other two cars came blazing past it also, so they all had to risk their necks making instant u-eys on that narrow two-lane
.
‘But as it turned out that was not such bad luck, because as they all came roaring back north on Silverbell, the shooters who had been following the Fairweather Farms van got scared by the sirens and drove back out on the road, just ahead of the police, and took off north like scared rabbits.
‘Tom was in the rear by then and he told the other two, “Go get ’em and I’ll check out this farm here.” None of them knew yet what kind of establishment they were heading for. He stopped at Fairweather Farms and I think you’ve heard from the employees there how he and his colleague helped them get the passenger off the van.
‘Cars twelve and forty-eight followed the shooters back to Camino Del Cerro. Here’s where it gets interesting: those two cars had the Dodge pickup in sight all the way to the light on Camino Del Cerro. They were all going flat out and they were gaining on the Dodge.
‘But the driver of the pickup didn’t give a damn for traffic signals, of course, and when he turned right and ran the red light at Camino Del Cerro, he caught the front bumper of a Kia that was exiting off Camino Del Cerro onto Silverbell, and knocked him into the middle of the intersection.
‘The Dodge grazed two other cars approaching from the east. The situation had the potential for serious injury, so car twelve, Henderson, stayed to sort out the traffic problems and car forty-eight, driven by Jack Bertram, got back on the chase. But the mess at the stoplight had cost him a couple of minutes, and in that time the Dodge with its load of shooters disappeared.
‘Bertram assumed the Dodge had made it across this weird interstice where Camino Del Cerro goes over the railroad and turns into Ruthrauff’ – he was driving it as he spoke – ‘and once on Ruthrauff the shooters had about a dozen options every minute for where to turn and get lost.’
‘That’s right,’ Sarah said, ‘this section of Ruthrauff is all small streets lined with small businesses. To pass the time, one of those dismal nights driving patrol in this part of town, my colleagues and I tried to count the number of privately-owned businesses on this street between the railroad tracks and the Tucson Mall. I think we came up with 158.’
‘Of course it’s turned a couple of corners and become Wetmore Road by then.’
‘Yes. And every little side street leading off Ruthrauff has more of the same. And yes, somewhere in here, without trying anything drastic like hiding the lug nuts in with the table silver, it might be possible somebody’s got a small chop shop tucked in behind a hamburger joint. I hate to think how many search warrants it would take to find it.’
‘Agreed. Let’s go back out to Silverbell now.’
‘Ah,’ Sarah said. ‘The next idea?’
‘Yes. Hang on, now, here comes the bump over the tracks.’
But then he didn’t go on out to Silverbell. As soon as he got over the tracks, he turned sharp left and darted under a small sign that read Christopher Columbus Regional Park. They drove under low-hanging bushes into a narrow lane that led onto a large paved parking area. He parked against a concrete bumper that looked out across a softball diamond in a grassy pasture-like area.
‘Ah, yes,’ Sarah said. ‘I haven’t been in here in a long time. Isn’t it pretty?’
‘This part is. Some of the rest of this park is pretty run down. You can get through this little gap in the fence here and follow the track out to the rest of the park. You have to know what you’re looking for to get much fun out of this section, but farther down – it’s almost all weeds and mesquite – there are a lot of leftover ideas buried in the underbrush.
‘Nature’s taking some of it back now,’ he said. ‘Look at the hawks.’ They watched a pair of red-tail hawks soar over a spot in the dusty green foliage between them and the highway. Something must be dead or dying out there in the mesquite.
‘I guess it depends on what funding’s available as time goes by. There used to be a sweet little lake, I remember, with picnic tables and benches. And reeds around it, and a lot of frogs. I wonder if the frogs have survived. Oh, and there was a nice grassy dog run. I had a dog once and I used to bring him here on my days off and watch him go mad with joy, rolling around in the turf with his friends.’
‘Sounds nice. I didn’t have time to find everything, but I saw one hiking trail and a railroad trestle. Not sure if those two go together.’
‘Probably not. A lot of it is buried in weeds now but there are still some good birding spots. And down there where the park ends there’s a fishing pond and a golf course – did you find all that?
‘Yes. Looking forward to trying some of it out.’
‘The amazing thing about this recreation area is that it’s surrounded on all sides by fast traffic, but once you’re in here it’s quiet. And secret, sort of. You can drive by it on Silverbell for years – I did – and never guess at all the fun stuff that’s in here, in this small space between two highways. All you can see from the road is bushes.’
‘Sure would make a fine place to hide a Dodge pickup for a while,’ Bogey said.
‘Yes, it would.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s almost four o’clock and I’ve never had a coffee break. Or lunch, come to think of it. Let’s go back out there on Ruthrauff and find a fast-food place so we can snack while we talk about this.’
In a cool booth, Sarah yearned briefly over an all-day breakfast menu but decided not to ruin her appetite for dinner and settled for pie. When it came, she downed it fast with two cups of coffee. While she ate, she listened. ‘Go ahead,’ she told Bogey, ‘tell me where you think the pickup went.’
‘Well, that’s the trouble – there’s too many good options. Ruthrauff is a conspiracy-lover’s dream – on the map, anyway. All those little side streets? You want to stay all year and walk every one. In reality a lot of them are grubby and not at all romantic. Tire shops, paint stores, fake nail studios … no zither music. A ton of fast food places.’
‘Do any of them look like chop shops?’
‘No. But there are dozens that could be, in the back. Or underneath, or with the addition of a little piece of land they maybe own out in the desert.’
‘You think it’s possible somebody’s got a little chop shop tucked in behind the walk-in cooler in a burger joint? That’s very tantalizing – I almost want it to be true. But also a little crazy, I think. Wouldn’t people notice the traffic?’
‘Not if you stagger the hours. Hot cars mostly move at night, don’t they?’ He had a distracted, hard-working expression, as if it was up to him to figure out how to make it work. ‘But I agree with what you seem to be thinking, that it’s a lot easier to imagine the shooters darting into the park while the patrolmen were snarled in the traffic jam at the intersection. There’s no place in the park to dispose of the pickup, but you could certainly hide it till it was convenient to haul it away.
‘I know you told me to figure out how the pickup could disappear so fast, and I can certainly see how it could. But as for finding it – I think we’ve got so many possibilities we’re kind of bogged down. Am I wrong? Do you see a way to sort this out?’
‘No. I think that pickup got away from us by wrecking an innocent bystander at the light, and we’ll only find the Dodge if they’re stupid enough to bring it out and commit another crime with it. I’m not holding my breath waiting for that.’
‘So I’m sorry I failed in my mission—’
‘You haven’t. I asked you to explore one possibility. You did and now I can cross that one off my list.’
‘Do you really have a list?’
‘Sure. I always do when I’m the primary on a case. I can’t possibly remember all the details.’
‘But we all add stuff into the case report every day—’
‘Well, yes, we do. But before a detail ever makes it into the case report, it often spends a long time being a thorn in a detective’s side.’
‘A what?’
‘A nagging little nothing. A piddling snag. For instance, at Fairweather Farms, why is Amanda so hostile to me? She seems to get along fine with e
verybody else. It’s just a small thing that may mean nothing – she’s got a grudge about women in law enforcement maybe. But Letitia says she doesn’t, so until I figure out why she doesn’t want to talk to me, Amanda’s attitude is on my list.’
‘Wow. I’ll have to think about that one. You know I’m glad to have this chance to work with you while I’m getting started – the guys all say you’re the best one to ask while I’m learning the ropes. You know they call you Detective Do-Right?’
She waved him off. ‘Don’t pay any attention to that nonsense. The brotherhood likes to needle me because I’m a fussbudget about details.’
‘Still, I hope you won’t get tired of questions. I know I have a lot to learn.’
‘I suppose,’ Sarah said, picking her words carefully, ‘there are some drawbacks to getting boosted into homicide so fast.’
‘Everybody seems to think I’ve got an uncle with influence or something,’ Bogey said, adopting the behavior she’d noticed whenever he suspected people were thinking about his rank. ‘Honestly, Sarah, I just got the rating because I made that one lucky arrest.’
‘I wouldn’t write it off as lucky,’ she said, ‘bringing in five guys by yourself. Did I read the wrong report? The one I saw said they were all armed and dangerous.’
‘They were all armed. I’m not persuaded they were very dangerous.’ He did the shrug again, the one that suggested he should apologize for breathing nice clean air meant for somebody more deserving.
‘Whatever else we do together,’ Sarah said, ‘I’m determined I’ll get you to stop apologizing for getting promoted. A job in homicide is God knows not a nifty gift with a bow on it, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, either.’
‘Yeah, well …’ He did his other evasion trick, looking at his watch and patting his pockets.
‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘if I assure you your pockets are safe in here, why don’t you just relax and tell me how you did it? Maybe that will set your mind at ease about the reward.’
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