Desert Cut (2 page)
“You some kind of Sherlock Holmes?”
“Kind of.” I took my Private Investigator’s I.D. out of my pocket and flashed it at him.
“Lena Jones, girl detective. Ha! You working this case?”
Case. His choice of words told me I was on the right track. “I’m not sure yet, which is why I need to know cause of death.”
He picked up his beer, chugged it, then opened a new one. Halfway through that, he belched, then chugged some more. Just as I was about to take away the other bottles, he said in a voice as low as mine, “She bled out. The assistant to the medical examiner’s my nephew. He told his ex-wife, who told my sister, who told me and anyone else who would listen.”
“Bled out from what?”
A subtle chorus of sounds from the bar, as if several drinkers had shifted on their bar stools at the same time. Apparently our voices weren’t low enough.
My informant started to speak, stopped, then started again. “Ah, hell. The kid got cut up by some kind of sex killer. My sister said it was bad, real bad. Everybody’s scared their kid’s going to be next. Now, thanks for all the beer, but I need another one. I’m not drunk enough yet.”
I fetched him a fresh Molson’s and headed toward the door, where Warren waited, his Coke abandoned on the barroom table.
Some kind of sex killer.
Killed, mutilated, dumped like garbage in the barren waste of the Dragoon Mountains.
Sheriff Avery was wrong.
Whoever had done it didn’t give a damn about her.
Monday morning, after seeing Warren off to the relative safety of Beverly Hills, where only spouses sliced and diced each other, I sat in my Scottsdale office attempting to work away my grief.
For a while, the phones cooperated, conveying tales of one betrayed relationship after another. Desert Investigations is always happy to check out potential mates to make certain they aren’t stalkers, serial killers, or mere garden-variety frauds, but we seldom take divorce cases. The bitterness that arises during a marriage’s end stage between two people who once loved each other is not uplifting.
I stared through the big picture window as a caller confided his suspicion that his twenty-two-years-younger wife was having an affair with her personal trainer. Outside on Main Street, the sun shone down on a herd of tourists roaming from one art gallery to another. Some wore sandals and Bermuda shorts, others, East Coast wool. The shorts crowd displayed goose bumps (it was little more than seventy degrees out there), the wool crowd sweated. Only we residents ever got Scottsdale weather right.
“She says she received those marks on her neck from the Nautilus machine but I know a hickey when I see one,” the caller continued in an irritating whine.
I tore my eyes away from a woman too old to be wearing the hot pants she so proudly sported, and stared at the phone. “Hickey, did you say?”
“Haven’t you been listening?”
Not really, since I had heard it all before. “Mr. Gustafson, Desert Investigations doesn’t handle divorce cases.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to divorce her. I just want to know.”
“Then you need a marriage counselor, not a detective.” I gave him the name of a therapist I worked with, and over his protests, hung up.
By ten, with the tide of unfaithfulness about to drown me, I begged my partner for help. “Would you take some of these calls? There’s a run on cheaters today.”
Jimmy Sisiwan, a Pima Indian who lived on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Reservation at the eastern edge of Scottsdale, glanced up from his computer where he was running pre-employment checks for Southwest MicroSystems. The curved tribal tatoo on his forehead glistened against his mahogany skin. “Sorry, but I have my own problems over here. Looks like the front-runner for Marketing Director might have a history of domestic abuse.”
Might have
, which meant Jimmy wasn’t certain yet. “Why would that matter to MicroSystems? They’re in business to make money, and money doesn’t have a conscience. At least, not the last time I checked.”
He gave me a confident smile. “Their new vice president in charge of security is a woman. Divorced. She’s taken out an order of protection against her ex.”
It didn’t amaze me that powerful women sometimes married creepy men, but Jimmy’s naiveté did. Regardless of their own marital woes, women could be just as hard-nosed in business as the opposite sex, which meant that the applicant might get the job even if he regularly beat his wife to a pulp.
Deciding to let voice mail take my calls for a while, I picked up the morning newspaper. After sifting through front-page stories about marketplace suicide bombings in the Middle East, I thumbed to the Local section were the news wasn’t much better: a drive-by shooting near Phoenix Children’s Hospital, jewelry store robbery in Peoria, and the discovery of a drop house in north Scottsdale crammed with thirty-four undocumented aliens, three of them dead. Then, on the second-to-last page of the section, a headline over a young girl’s photograph asked:
DO YOU KNOW ME?
Those very words had once appeared over a picture of me at age four, and no one had ever responded. Today, instead of my own face, I saw the child from the Dragoons. The photographer had been kind. She no longer looked dead, just sleeping.
I must have made a noise, because Jimmy turned from his keyboard and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“This girl in the paper. She’s the one I found.”
He rose from his seat and walked over to my desk. Picking up the newspaper, he read aloud, “
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office is asking for the public’s help in identifying a young girl found dead in the Dragoon Mountains last weekend. Dubbed ‘Precious Doe’ by the medical examiner, the child is African-American, between five and seven years old. Wounds on her body suggest she was the victim of a crime. Anyone with information about this girl is urged to contact Sheriff Bill Avery’s office at 520-555-3215.
”
Jimmy lowered the newspaper with a look in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Sure was a pretty little thing, wasn’t she?”
Was
. That horrible past tense. God only knew what a few days in cold storage had done to her.
“I’m sure the sheriff will track her identity down, along with whoever did…Well, did what they did.” His tone wasn’t as confident as his words. We both knew that bodies dumped in the Arizona desert were seldom identified, their killers remaining free to kill again.
When I didn’t respond, he said, “Lena, you shouldn’t take everything so personal.” An orphan himself, he knew all about my childhood, my nightmares.
Before I could remind him that I always took abused children personal, the phone rang. This time I picked it up before the voice mail did. I didn’t care what kind of sad story was on the line, it would be better than the one in my head.
Desert Investigations has been in business ever since a bullet in the hip ended my career with the Scottsdale Police Department. Jimmy, introduced to me by a man whose son I had once freed from prison, joined me as full partner soon afterward. His Internet skills and my television consulting kept us flush enough to accept more pro bono cases than the average investigative agency usually took, but truth be told, we preferred those. Neither of us liked spending our time ferreting out run-of-the-mill liars and cheaters.
The office is relatively decent, as P.I. offices go, mainly because of our downtown Scottsdale location and the expectations of our clientele. None of that old Maltese Falcon grimness here, just coffee-colored walls hung with civic commendations, two tasteful blond desks with a row of matching filing cabinets, and several Western-patterned chairs scattered throughout the reception area. Comfortable and anonymous. When clients visit P.I.s, they’re not shopping for decorating tips.
The day dragged on, broken up only by more paranoid spouses, and a few parents begging me to drug-test their teens. I grew so bored that by the time we closed, even the tourist parade had ceased being entertaining.
“Ready for some cappuccino at Java Joe’s?” I asked, as we locked up. The art galleries were closing, too, expelling tourists onto the sidewalk, where they just stood around, wondering what to do next. Cajun fritters at Sugar Daddy’s? Jose Cuervo at the Rusty Spur?
Jimmy didn’t answer right away, but when he did, he sounded uncomfortable. “Ah, cappuccino sounds great, Lena, but I need to rush home and shower. I have an, um, appointment, kind of, tonight.” A hint of pink began to spread across his cheeks, which was in itself strange, since Indians almost never blushed.
Such embarrassment could only mean one thing; my partner had a date. “Is she anyone I know?”
His eyes shifted away, something else that seemed strange, because he was usually the most open of men. “I doubt it.”
Jimmy’s love life tended to be as disastrous as mine. Among his former girlfriends were a convicted felon who’d sold him a stolen Rolex; a refugee from an upstate polygamy compound who tried to make a white man out of him; a bartender who drank more Tecate than she served. The list goes on. Always a sucker for a sob story, he had been used and abused by the supposedly weaker sex ever since we’d known each other.
As we stood on the sidewalk, tourists swarmed around us, every now and then one of them throwing Jimmy an expression of alarm. Like most Pimas, he was a big man, and his tribal tattoo made him appear fierce. Ignoring the tourists, I framed my next question cautiously. “You’ve known her for a while?”
A sheepish smile. “Isn’t that what dates are for, to get to know someone?” This from a man whose job was dragging skeletons out of closets.
The worry-wart in me refused to let it go. Faking a conversational tone, I asked, “Where’d you meet her?”
“What, you’re my mother, now? I already have two. Had, anyway.”
Jimmy’s biological mother, a full-blooded Pima, died of the tribal scourge of diabetes when he was a baby. Several years later, his father died of the same disease. His white Mormon adoptive parents lived in Utah, but they had kept in close touch since Jimmy had returned to the reservation to reclaim his cultural roots. The Mormons had raised him to be polite, even when dealing with snoops like me.
He sighed. “I’m sorry if I sounded rude, Lena. I know you care, but I’m a big boy and can take care of myself. Just to set your mind at rest, I met her at last week’s pow-wow.”
I relaxed. Most members of the tribe had their act together, so his big heart might have lucked out this time. “She’s Pima?”
“Anglo, but she came with a Pima friend. We danced. We talked. We made a date. Okay?”
With that, we said good night and went our separate ways, Jimmy to seek love, and me to my lonely apartment above the office.
At one time my two-room-plus-kitchen-and-bath had been a study in beige, but earlier this year, after deciding to put down some roots of my own, I’d tricked it out in neo-Cowgirl. All that beige-ness was now buried beneath bright Navajo rugs, a saguaro-rib sofa and chair, a red Lone Ranger and Tonto bedspread, and turquoise-shaded lamps with bases shaped like horse heads.
But I’m not a purist. Although it interfered with the ambience, I still kept the “Welcome to the Philippines” toss pillow I’d stolen from one of my foster parents, either the fourth or the fifth. There were so many, I’ve lost track.
After nuking a Ramen noodle dinner, I settled on the sofa and stared at the wall, afraid to turn on the TV and risk hearing the news. Music, perhaps? Some blues by John Lee Hooker or Gatehouse Brown might be nice, but a glance at my CD collection revealed a tall stack of discs gathering dust without benefit of their jewel cases. I would have to clean them first, which meant that my skittery mind might fasten on subjects better left alone.
I wandered over to my book case, but nothing piqued my interest among the shelves of already-read mystery novels sandwiched between well-thumbed volumes of Southwestern history. Deciding a good movie might calm my nerves, I picked up the
Scottsdale Journal
and paged past the news section to Arts & Entertainment. Nothing interested me among the teen slasher flicks or—Scottsdale being Scottsdale—foreign films with subtitles. I hate subtitles.
Next, I tried calling Warren, but his voice mail told me that while he appreciated my call, he wasn’t in right now, but if I left my name and number, he would get back to me as soon as possible. I didn’t. If he was out and about with some Hollywood starlet, it was none of my business, just as what I did with my free time was none of his. Not that I ever did anything. Flying in the face of reason, I was a one-man woman.
Given my restless mood, the idea of hanging around the apartment wasn’t all that attractive, so I went into the bedroom and changed into a pair of sweats. I had promised my orthopedic surgeon to go easy on the pavement pounding for a while, but right now, a re-injured hip seemed preferable to an emotional meltdown. Running settled my mind.
After transferring my .38 into its specially-designed fanny pack, I locked up and bounded down the stairs two at a time. Once on the sidewalk, I faced a decision: head east toward the Green Belt, a miles-long, path-lined arroyo that flooded every monsoon season, or south toward Papago Park, the unlandscaped piece of desert that divided Scottsdale from Phoenix. Opting for the park, I turned right on Scottsdale Road and began cutting my way through the tourists.
The park was nearby, so it didn’t take me long to get there, even after stopping to assist a sunburned couple who, speaking with Brooklyn accents, asked where they might see some Indians. Amused, I gave them directions to Casino Arizona, a mile away. “Indians all over the place,” I told them, “They’ll be happy to show you how the new slots work.” Feeling only slightly guilty, I jogged away.
The centerpiece of Papago Park is the Buttes, rough sandstone mesas erupting from the flat desert floor. Just as I entered the thousand-acre park, the Buttes caught the last rays of the sun and glowed with gaudy flashes of mauve and red. I jogged in place for a while, watching the show. Once the sun slipped behind the Phoenix skyscrapers to the west, the Buttes returned to their usual dull red, so I moved on.
For a while, other runners shared the trail, but they turned onto the wide path that ended at the south parking lot. Fleeing my sense of dis-ease, I took the more isolated path. It was one of my favorite routes, but not without danger, since this unmanicured section of the park served as home to various species of wildlife, none of them friendly. Coyote, javelina, snakes, and scorpions considered the high brush their own turf, so I wasn’t too startled when I passed a sandstone outcropping and flushed an angry javelina from a creosote thicket. Mama Javelina, trailed by four squealing youngsters.
I froze.
Javelina are ferociously protective, quick to fight for their young. Whatever they fought usually lost, because a charge from even a small javelina could knock you off your feet. If you didn’t regain your feet before they charged again, you might lose your intestines to their sharp tusks.
This particular javelina seemed more irritable than most. Maybe she’d had a bad day at the office, maybe Saturn was in her Pisces, or maybe her boyfriend was dating another javelina. Whatever the reason, she lowered her head and moved in front of her brood. When I took a test step back, she snorted and pawed the ground like a Brahma bull.
Then she started to circle.
Since the chances of outrunning Mama Javelina were nil, I froze again. Hardly daring to breathe, I waited while she checked me out. As I stood there the twilight faded, leaving us in growing darkness. And yet she continued to walk around me, grumbling to herself while her oblivious babies rooted for grubs in the nearby sagebrush.