Concrete Desert (7 page)
I am running through my neighborhood in the eternal twilight of dreams. All the houses are familiar but darkened, and I can’t run fast enough to catch up with Phaedra. She has always just been there before I arrive. And she is in danger. I know this. And I run into my house, thinking I will find Mother and Dad and Grandma and Grandfather, and there is so much I need to tell them now, now that I’m a forty-year-old man.
But the house is empty except for the twilight, the loneliest part of the day, the lonely Sunday night of the clock. But then I know I’m not alone, and I see someone, and I know we are in danger. And I fire the Python and watch as the bullet moves too slowly, too slowly, and falls to the floor.
And then I am in bed, my legs entangled in Phaedra’s legs, exhausted from lovemaking. She laughs when she makes love. She runs that red hair across my chest. The neighbors keep pounding, pounding on the wall, but we laugh and don’t care.
The door. I sat up and pulled away from Julie, who was still out. I looked back again. Julie Riding in my bed. Last night had really happened. I pulled on a robe and walked to the front of the house. Peralta was at the door. The clock on the wall said 2:15—in the afternoon.
“Goddamn it, I’ve been banging on the door for fifteen minutes,” Peralta said, walking past me. “You never used to be a heavy sleeper.”
“Good morning to you, too.” God, my head hurt.
“It was a shitty morning, and now it’s a shitty afternoon. You have any coffee? Oh, shit, do you still not drink coffee?”
He was wearing a dark blue suit and a crisp white shirt, a grim expression on his face. I offered to make some coffee.
“I will.” It was Julie. She appeared in the hallway, wearing my ASU T-shirt.
“Julie.” Peralta waved a little wave. He seemed uncharacteristically awkward.
“Hello, Mike. Just like old times, isn’t it?” She ran a hand through her tangled brown-blond hair and padded into the kitchen. Peralta arched an eyebrow at me and nodded toward the living room.
“Where were you yesterday morning when I called you on the cell phone?” Peralta sat heavily into the sofa.
“I went up to Sedona to see Phaedra’s old boyfriend. I thought he might have a clue as to where she was.”
“And what made you do that?”
“What’s going on, Mike?” I began, but his look caught me short. “He called me the night before.”
Peralta sighed heavily. “Greg Townsend was found dead this morning.”
“What?”
“You heard me, David. Murdered. His cleaning lady found him this morning in the bedroom at his place in Sedona. He’d apparently been tortured with a raw electrical chord before he was given the business end of a twelve gauge. The Coconino County deputies found your name and phone number written on a pad on his desk. And naturally, they wanted to know what a Maricopa County deputy had been doing on their turf.”
I sat carefully in the leather easy chair. I told Peralta what Townsend had told me.
“Goddamn it, David, I told you to stay out of this case!” He was headed to the blowup point, which I didn’t want to see.
“It wasn’t anything but a missing persons case when I talked to Townsend, and you gave me permission to look into that. Remember?”
Julie walked in with coffee for Peralta and herself and a diet Coke for me. I patted her hand.
“Julie, sit.” It was Peralta. “I’m really sorry about your sister. But I have to ask you this. Where were you yesterday before David brought you downtown?”
“Is this an interrogation, Mike?” She tossed her hair a bit and sat opposite me. Her eyes were red and puffy.
Peralta sipped the coffee. “Good coffee,” he said, then: “It can be if you want. Should I read you your rights?”
“Wait a minute, Mike,” I said. “I picked her up at the Phoenician, where she works.”
I turned to Julie and said, “Greg Townsend was found murdered.” Peralta shot me a dirty look.
“I didn’t kill him, Mike, if that’s what you’re asking,” Julie said. “Not that I hadn’t thought about it, the way he treated Phaedra.”
“Julie! Jesus.”
Peralta said, “I think you should come downtown with me and talk to us about this.”
“Are you arresting me, Mike? Is that easier than looking for the son of a bitch who murdered my sister?”
He finished the coffee and stood. “David will be happy to drive you down when you two, uh, finish here.”
***
I was supposed to lecture at Phoenix College that afternoon. Instead, I canceled class to take Julie back to Madison Street. Not that I had taken any time to prepare the lecture. Not that I had made much progress on anything. I was no closer to selling the house than I had been two months ago. I was no closer to getting a new job. What I had accomplished was to land in this strange little drama with characters out of my past—my old partner, my old girlfriend. And the drama had a body count that was rising.
I spent a frustrating hour being interrogated by two young detectives from the Harquahala task force, who wanted to argue over every sentence in my report on Phaedra. One kept reminding me that he had a master’s degree.
They went away, and I logged into the sheriff’s computer and read a fragmentary report from the Coconino County deputies on Greg Townsend, who was now neither vibrating nor channeling. It sounded very ugly. Blood on the walls, literally. And the place was just isolated enough that nobody was likely to have heard a thing. Suspect number one in Phaedra’s murder was dead himself, leaving nothing. Maybe the Harquahala task force would make sense of it. Maybe I could let it all go. Let Julie make another statement, straighten out her whereabouts yesterday. And I could get back to my life.
“Hello, History Shamus.” It was Lindsey. Her black miniskirt was even shorter than usual. She looked me over. “You look like you were out all night. I hope sex was involved.”
I could feel the blood rushing to my face. She gave a me conspiratorial smile. “Way to go, Dave.” I showed her the report from Sedona.
“Shit,” she whispered. “He pissed somebody off. Execution city. Are you involved in this?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “He’s some guy who dated the little sister of an old friend of mine. The little sister turned up dead yesterday.”
“Phaedra,” Lindsey said. I nodded.
“I saw the report come through. Neat name. The daughter of Minos.”
I smiled at her. “Lindsey, you are always full of surprises.”
“I’ve read Racine,” she said with an endearing smugness. “This Phaedra found a world of trouble, too. It’s been assigned to the Harquahala task force.”
I nodded.
“Was she turning tricks?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s one of the Harquahala killings.”
Lindsey looked at me quizzically.
“I know this sounds nuts, Lindsey. But something about this isn’t right. Peralta called me out to the scene yesterday to identify Phaedra’s body. And it was like she had just been murdered.”
“One would think that would be enough,” Lindsey said.
“Her body, the crime scene, they had been”—I searched for the right word—“‘arranged.’ Like serial-killer performance art. It was the same way the bodies were found back in the late 1950s.”
“You’re getting weird on me, Dave.”
“You read the reports. You’ll see it.”
There was a detective standing in the doorway. “Mapstone.” He cocked his head toward the hall. “Chief Peralta wants you.” He turned and walked away.
Lindsey pulled me close to whisper, “I’m glad you’re not one of those knuckle-draggers.” Her dark shoulder-length hair was very soft.
Peralta hunched down in his big chair, head propped on his hands, staring at a can of caffeine-free diet Coke, gnawing his cuticle. He didn’t look at me when I came in.
Then, in a little high-pitched sneer, he said, “‘Oh, gee, Sharon, Julie and I are just friends now.’”
“We are,” I said. “Sometimes things happen between friends, especially during times of stress.” My head was throbbing. I sat down. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“It is my business, since you are a Maricopa County deputy,” Peralta said. “And you’ve really stepped in some shit here. Two bodies in two days. Julie can’t account for her whereabouts when Townsend was killed. And when I come by to ask you about it, she’s climbing out of your goddamned bed. I thought I’d been sent back twenty years in time.”
“It was a case you didn’t give a shit about, Mike. While we’re digging up unfortunate quotes of the past month, I recall a certain chief deputy saying something like ‘Phaedra’s just shacking up with some guy and she’ll turn up.’ Now you’re acting like I somehow created this situation.”
His eyes darkened visibly and I knew I was in for it. But he just sighed and leaned back in his chair. Up came his legs, and his fine lizard-skin boots claimed the desktop.
“I suppose you have a hypothesis?” he asked.
“I thought this belonged to the task force.” I didn’t have a clue.
“It does, for now. But Townsend complicates things. If he was Phaedra’s lover, it’s hard to believe it was just a coincidence. There were thousands of dollars’ worth of art and electronics in his house up there, and it was all left. This was no robbery gone wrong. Maybe big sister decided to give paybacks to little sister’s nasty-boy lover.”
“Wait a minute.” My head was spinning. I vowed never to take another drink as long as I lived. “When was Townsend murdered?”
“Best guess until the lab work comes back is yesterday afternoon. Probably not long after you left.”
“So you’re saying Julie already knew Phaedra was dead, drove at ninety miles an hour to Sedona to ice this guy, turned around and drove at ninety miles an hour to get back to the hotel so she could be there when I told her about finding her sister’s body?”
Peralta’s face tightened. “I don’t know what I think,” he said. “Something’s not right about this, David.”
“Have you gotten lab work back on Phaedra?”
Peralta shook his head. “The medical examiner takes his time because he knows this thing is going to be seen by everybody, including the feds. Hell, it only happened half a mile from the La Paz County line, so I’ve got this little-town Buford Pusser busting my chops. And it’s only a matter of time before the
Republic
starts doing more on this serial killer than the isolated stories about the body of a suspected prostitute turning up in the desert.”
My stomach did a little free fall. “What did the evidence technicians find?”
Peralta looked disgusted. “They didn’t find dick.”
“The car? Blue Nissan Sentra?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
I walked over to his little refrigerator and got a diet Coke. I sipped it cautiously. “Mike, answer me this: How many times before did your Harquahala killer call the Communications Center to say where a body could be found?”
“None.”
“Have the others been this close to La Paz County?”
“No, no, goddamn it. But what does that prove? Green River crossed county lines. Ramirez did Orange County and L.A. County—hell, even San Francisco. None of these guys can read a map ’cause they’re too busy talking to Satan or their neighbor’s terrier.”
“And did the MO of the body dump jibe?”
Peralta sighed again.
“It didn’t, did it?”
“We can’t be sure,” Peralta said. “He changes his routine every time. He’s not as ritualistic as some I’ve seen. Look, David, even if she wasn’t turning tricks, we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. By your own report, Phaedra answered personal ads, had lots of men in her life. Who knows who she met out there.”
“Come on, Mike! Most people who answer personal ads don’t end up dead. You know this isn’t related. You’re just letting this thing run on bureaucratic momentum. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to group some homicides so when you get your Harquahala killer, you’ll have a higher clearance rate.”
“Okay, hotshot. What’s your theory?”
I sat back down and sipped the cold drink. “I don’t have one yet. But I have a strange feeling about it.”
Peralta looked at me.
“She was meant to be found. Most body dumps, the killer hopes the victim won’t be found. This guy calls nine-one-one and gives directions. And she was meant to be found in a certain way, just like those women forty years ago.”
Peralta threw up his hands. “This shit again.”
“Hear me out,” I said. “So he’s a media junkie. He read about Stokes, saw you and me on TV. Wanted to make a point.”
“What point?” Peralta fairly shouted. “Why would he even know you knew Phaedra from Adam? And how do we know he didn’t grab her weeks before the story broke about the Stokes case?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know yet.”
***
Two days passed. Julie and I holed up at my house like two hermits in winter. Only we were hiding from the sun and the heat and our own heartbreaks. We made love and held each other. It was both familiar and strange, as if we had always been together and yet we were only touching copies of our sensual selves from long ago. The oleanders and citrus trees protected us from the world for a while.
We talked more. Julie slowly filled in some of the blanks of her life: She married a lawyer named Royce. He beat her up at least once a month. They went to a lot of parties and did a lot of cocaine. They had a daughter. When Julie finally grew sick of the beatings and the husband’s affairs, she sued him for divorce. Royce got custody of the daughter, Mindy, after a protracted fight. “He went to law school with the judge, for God’s sake,” she said. Then a couple of aimless years—“I went kind of crazy when I lost Mindy”—spent with a succession of bad-news lovers. Then some therapy. Now, she was trying to get her life back together, maybe get the court to modify the custody award. And was dealing with the death of her younger sister. There was nothing for me to do but listen.
At night, I slept fitfully, the .357 just under the bed, the outside noises casting sinister echoes. Julie burrowed deep against me, pulling my arm across her body, nesting her feet against my legs. Sometimes I would wake up and hear her sobbing softly, and I would hold her closer.
In the daytime, we wandered off separately for our lonely rituals. I tried to read some, write some, keep my mind distracted. Books had never been a comfort to Julie, so she watched daytime TV and drank alone, until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Then she came and wrapped me up in her arms, trembling and sobbing.
On Saturday, I woke up from a five-fathom-deep sleep and the other side of the bed was empty. The phone was ringing and the clock said five minutes ahead of noon. When I picked it up, the line was silent. And then a deep voice said, “Mapstone. This is Harrison Wolfe. Detective Harrison Wolfe, Phoenix PD, retired. I think we need to have a talk.”