Rising Phoenix (51 page)

Beamon waved at two approaching policemen and ducked into the backseat of his car. He pulled out newly purchased bright red goose-down parka and slipped it on.

At the party celebrating his promotion and transfer to Arizona—and after no less than eight bourbons—he had donned all of his winter clothes at once and performed an elaborate strip tease on his friends dining room table. His wool overcoat had been the first article to be thrown into the cheering crowd. In retrospect probably not such a great idea.

“Can we help you, sir?” one of the two troopers said, taking a sip from a Styrofoam cup. His next breath came out like thick steam.

“Maybe.” Beamon held up his right arm, displaying a large yellow price tag hanging from the sleeve of his new jacket. “Either of you guys have some scissors?”

The cop with the coffee pointed back down the half-mile long driveway. “Sir, this is a police matter. I suggest you get back in your car …”

“Mark!”

Chet Michaels danced through a tangle of police line tape as he jogged down the steps of the house. “It’s okay, guys. This is my boss.”

The two cops mumbled an apology and started back toward their squad car.

“Sorry to drag you away from your golf game, Mark, but I thought you’d want to see this.”

At twenty-five, Chet Michaels had come into the Bureau as one of its youngest agents—an honor he’d earned by graduating from college at nineteen and passing his CPA test on the first try. By all reports, he’d
also been one hell of an athlete—a wrestler—but it was a tough mental image to conjuring up. The combination of his bright red hair and the bumper crop of freckles across the bridge of his nose made him look about as threatening as a cantaloupe.

Beamon took off his plaid golf cap and was going to toss it back into the car, but thought better of it. The sun had dropped behind the mountains and the stars were starting to appear in the deep blue of the sky. It was going to be another cold one.

“Believe me when I tell you that this is the bright spot in my day, Chet.” Beamon said, motioning toward the house and letting the young agent lead.

A yellow rope cordoned off the steps climbing to the front door, forcing them to skirt around through a deep snow bank. Beamon was still wearing his white golf spikes—great for traction but a little weak in the warmth department.

“Don’t think you’re gonna get much in the way of footprints, Chet,” Beamon observed, trying unsuccessfully to stay in the depressions made by the feet of the people that had gone before him. “It hasn’t snowed for a couple of days and it looks like a football team’s run up and down these steps ten times

“You’re probably right, but we thought we’d bring in some people to look at it anyway.”

Beamon shrugged and stepped through the front door of the house. It wasn’t much warmer inside than out, so he tucked the price tag into his sleeve and watched Michaels cross the entryway at a slow run and disappear through a set of hand carved double doors to the left.

All that energy,
Beamon thought, shaking his head. He tried to remember the excitement that had gripped him on his first big case, but the feeling was gone. He could recall the details like it was yesterday, filed away in his mind for future reference, but the emotional charge of being twenty-odd years old and out to save the world had shorted out a long time ago.

Beamon reached into the collar of his sweater and pulled out a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. They fogged up instantly, so he let them dangle from his hand as he looked around the entryway.

The walls consisted of large logs, probably almost a foot and a half in diameter. They’d been haphazardly stained a deep, natural brown, giving them a worn look that complimented the flagstone floor. An elk antler chandelier provided the soft light from above that was periodically overpowered by camera flashes emanating from the next room.

Beamon walked across a bright Navajo rug and stopped in front of a small antique table. It was covered with pictures in every size and shape conceivable, each with a simple frame of either gold or silver.

His glasses still hadn’t quite cleared, so he hung them around his neck and bent forward, bringing his nose to within a few inches of the photos.

It looked like sort of a family history. The pictures in back were all faded black and whites; their subjects uniformly dressed in well-starched suits or dresses with petticoats, and all staring out of the photo with the same stern expression.

Beamon took a step back and jumped forward in
recent work. “We assume that these are the remains of Eric and Patricia Davis. The maid that found them IDed them from their build and clothes. Obviously, she can’t be a hundred percent sure, though.”

Beamon nodded, letting his eyes linger for a moment on the shattered head loosely connected to the body of a plump woman in a thick off-white sweater. He crouched down, careful not to dip the end of his new coat in the puddle of curdling blood at his feet.

It didn’t look like their faces had been damaged by the bullet impacts, but the dried blood and brain tissue clinging to their skin had subtly distorted their features. Beamon wouldn’t swear to the fact that they were the couple in the picture, but it was probably a pretty good guess.

“Mr. Davis was forty-four years old, Mrs. Davis was forty,” Michaels started, reading off a small pad of paper he had pulled from his pocket. “Apparently Mr. Davis owned a number of car dealerships.”

“Biggest dealer in Arizona,” Beamon said.

“Excuse me?”

“Someone told me he was the biggest dealer in Arizona. I met him at a party a couple of weeks ago. Briefly.” Beamon stood and carefully stepped over the puddle of blood at his feet. The plastic spikes on the bottom of his golf shoes that had served him so well in the snow were proving to be a little treacherous on the polished oak floor.

He crouched down again and examined the scene from a slightly different angle.

The Mrs. looked like she’d gotten it in the back of
time. He picked up the eight by ten photo on the edge of the table and brought it up close to his face.

He recognized the man in the tan sweater as Eric Davis. They’d met briefly at a cocktail party a few weeks ago. Beamon didn’t remember meeting the tall, heavyset women standing at his side but guessed that she was his wife.

Beamon’s eyes wandered down to the girl sitting in the leaves in front of the couple. Her blond hair was the product of a calculatedly obvious dye job, contrasting the dark, uneven tan of an athlete. There was a slight glint on her left nostril that Beamon guessed was a nose ring.

She was a pretty little thing, probably sixteen or seventeen—though that was really just a wild guess. By design, he really hadn’t spent much time around children.

“Mark, I keep losing you. They’re in here!” Michaels said, reappearing suddenly in the doorway to the living room.

“All right, all right,” Beamon said, putting the picture back on the table. He turned toward the young agent. “Lead on. I’ll stay with you this time. Promise.”

He followed Michaels into a large, roughly octagonal room surrounded by windows that must have been fifteen feet high. The ceiling rose and disappeared into shadow at the top of an enormous log pillar that, until tonight, would have been the focal point of the room. Beamon shoved his hands in the pockets of his parka and looked down at the new focal point.

Michaels stood next to the two bodies with the proud expression of a sculptor showing off his most
the head. The blood had pooled and dried, leaving something that looked like a large scab over her hair. Beamon couldn’t see if there was an exit wound because of the body’s position.

Eric Davis’s body was a little more perplexing. Based on its condition and the pattern of the splattered blood, it looked like he’d taken his bullet right under the chin. Beamon pointed to the broken window. “Did the bullet break that window? It looks like it should have gone straight up.”

“Oh, I think it did. Looks like a piece of Mr. Davis’s skull broke the window.”

“Lovely,” Beamon said, standing up and shoving another piece of gum in his mouth. “What about the girl?”

“Jennifer Davis is fifteen years old. Blonde. Tall—about five-eight or nine. According to one of the neighbors we talked to, she was competing in a bike race near Phoenix yesterday afternoon. They—the neighbors—were down there watching the race and went out to dinner with them afterward. The Davises would have returned here around ten o’clock.”

Beamon flopped down on the sofa and stuffed a fourth stick of gum in his mouth. “So what happened here, Chet?” he slurred.

The young agent looked confident. He’d obviously learned enough about Beamon in their month working together to know the question was coming and to prepare an answer.

“They were waiting for them.”

“Who?”

“The perpetrators.”

“Why?”

“The garage door’s still open and the Davis’s car is outside. I figure it this way. The perpetrators get dropped off by an accomplice who takes the car they came in and drives around the neighborhood.”

“Why doesn’t he just park it?” Beamon broke in.

“The Davises would have been suspicious if there was a strange car in their driveway. And you can’t park on the street ’cause of the snow.”

Beamon raised his eyebrows and rocked his head back and forth in a calculated effort to make the young agent nervous. Michaels was probably right but he needed to learn to defend his positions. Besides, what was the fun of being king if you couldn’t torture your subjects occasionally?

“Okay, Chet. Go on.”

His body language had its intended effect and Michaels started to sound a little hesitant. “Uh, yeah. So, anyway, they—the Davises—come in through the garage and are ambushed in the kitchen.”

“I see.” Beamon stood up and walked through the open French doors that led to the kitchen. There was a light haze of fingerprint dust in the air and a man in a dark suit was hunched over the sink, working furiously with a soft brush.

Beamon pointed to a picture lying in a halo of glass on the floor, then rapped on the kitchen table, which had been pushed haphazardly against the wall. A broken dish lay at the base of the refrigerator.

“I’d say the hypothesis that the Davises met our friends in here is a reasonable one,” Beamon agreed.

Michaels picked up where he had left off, looking
relieved. “Okay, so they all reconvene to the living room, where the perpetrators line Mr. and Mrs. Davis up against the wall and execute them. Then they called their accomplice on their cell phone and have him pick them up.”

Beamon peeked through the pantry/mudroom and out through the open door to the garage. “What if it was a car they recognized? Someone they knew?”

“Excuse me?”

“The Davises pull up and someone they know is in their driveway. They all chat while Jennifer takes her bike off the top of the car and then one of them pulls a gun. They come in through the garage, into the kitchen and Mr. Davis make a grab for the gun. There’s a struggle that he ultimately loses. They drag them into the living room and shoot them.”

The young agent’s face fell and he stared at his shoes. “I guess that’s possible …”

“How ’bout this?” Beamon continued. “Mr. and Mrs. Davis come inside while Jennifer takes her bike off the car. She’s too young to drive, so she can’t pull the car in, and her mom and pop aren’t anxious to go back out in the cold, so they put it off for a while. In the meantime, our perpetrators just drive up and knock on the front door.”

Michaels looked up from his shoes. “But then why would the struggle have taken place in the kitchen? It’s not between the front door and the living room.”

“Maybe they were being forced to prepare omelets against their will.” Beamon broke into a smile and backhanded Michaels in the chest. “You’re theory’s best, Bud. You just shouldn’t be so damn sure about it.
Keep an open mind.” Beamon paused “But not so open your brain falls out, right?”

The bright beam of headlights washed through the windows of the living room prompting Michaels to lean through the kitchen door. “That must be the coroner.”

Beamon nodded. “Go ahead and give him the tour. Oh, one more thing. Get someone to walk around the outside of the house with a flashlight and look for footprints. This could be nothing more than a botched robbery attempt, and if the little girl was an athlete she might have made a break for the woods. She’ll freeze her ass off if she’s out there lost.”

The huge wad of gum in Beamon’s mouth was starting to make his jaw ache and he could feel that the smell of the bodies was about to break through his makeshift spearmint barrier. Time for plan B.

He stepped over the print guy, who had sunk from the counter to the lower cabinets, and pushed hard on the door at the back of the kitchen. It scraped against the snow and ice on the deck, stopping dead after moving about a foot. Beamon looked dejectedly at the small gap, then down at his bulging waistline. It wouldn’t be easy, but then, what in his life ever was? He grabbed the edge of the counter and the doorjamb and forced himself through the opening.

It was a beautiful spot. Large pines filtered the starlight, giving the clean white snow an ethereal glow. There was no wind and the muffled sounds of the investigation that managed to filter through the broken window in the living room were almost completely swallowed up by the forest.

Beamon retrieved a bag of tobacco and papers from his jacket and began rolling a cigarette. The cold numbed his fingertips, making the process even more arduous than normal.

“What are you doing?”

Beamon jumped, dropping the half-rolled cigarette in the snow and almost losing his balance. Steadying himself against the house, he looked in the direction of the voice.

Less than ten feet away, a small Hispanic woman, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, sat in a lawn chair. She leaned forward and pulled her knees closer to her chest. “What were you doing there. Aren’t you a policeman?”

He looked down at himself and chuckled. With the green and red pants and the new parka, he must look like a giant Christmas ornament rolling a joint. “My doctor told me I have to give up cigarettes, so I started rolling my own. It’s such a pain, I smoke half as much.”