Concrete Desert Page 5

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Are you sure she hasn’t killed herself?”

  I shook my head.

  “Young women can get into a lot of trouble at that age,” she said.

  “Sharon thinks you need somebody in your life,” Peralta said.

  “Mike!” she said. Then: “Are you seeing anyone?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve only been back in town a couple of months. I’m not really looking.”

  “Not carrying a torch for Patty?”

  “No,” I said a little too emphatically. “She’s been through several lovers since me. Now she’s with a twenty-two-year-old tennis pro.”

  “Well, none of my business,” Sharon said. “You need some time. Everybody does after what you’ve been through. But you’re very different from most people, David. I can’t help my matchmaker impulses.”

  “Thanks, Sharon.”

  “And we both hope you’ll stay in Phoenix. This is your home. This is where your roots and friends are, and as we get older, those things get more important.”

  I believed that, but my relationship with Phoenix was complicated. Being back in town seemed like the most natural thing in the world. There were new freeways and neighborhoods. The water conservation policies had converted many lawns to desert landscaping. But it was still my city. Camelback and Squaw Peak and the South Mountains again became my dramatic compass as I drove the predictable grid of streets. The nights had the old familiar quality of dry, open spaces. I felt safe and centered here—a feeling that surprised me, given how burned-out I’d been when I left Phoenix years ago.

  But the city had also become so big and dangerous. There was the heat and lack of rain, which I would always hate. And there was the job situation. Despite being an alumnus, I didn’t receive a warm homecoming from Arizona State University, which said in a curt letter that it had a hiring freeze on, and even if it hadn’t, my published articles as a historian had been “lackluster” and all hiring had to be done under the goal of “greater diversity.” I only hoped I could find a new job before my savings ran out.

  “But for now, he needs work,” Peralta said, reading my mind. “So what did the cops forty years ago miss about Rebecca Stokes?”

  Sharon started to object to work talk, but she stopped when I said, “They missed a serial killer.”

  Peralta sat silently, wreathed in bluish cigar smoke, letting me lay it all out. I told them about Opal Harvey, the Creeper, John Rogers. One by one, I detailed the four other homicides of young women and their similarity to the Stokes case. Sharon’s large coffee-colored eyes never left me.

  Finally, after a long silence, Peralta let out a huge sigh and said, “Jesus.”

  He refilled our glasses with cognac. “It’s not airtight that these are related, but it’s pretty compelling. Especially for the little town Phoenix was in those days. I’d never heard of any of these other cases.”

  “I didn’t find any newspaper accounts of the others,” I said. “But they probably didn’t have Rebecca’s family connections.”

  Peralta asked, “How come the cops back then didn’t make this connection?”

  “That’s the big question,” I said. “The lead detective on Stokes was a man named Harrison Wolfe, and I can’t find him, can’t even find a record of his death. He might know. Opal Harvey thought the powers that be didn’t want to attract the negative publicity.”

  “Never underestimate the amount of ass-covering cops can do,” Peralta said. “Harrison Wolfe. I’ve heard of him. He was very old school. When I went to the Academy, there were still stories about Harrison Wolfe.”

  “Such as?” Sharon asked.

  “Oh, racist, sexist, politically incorrect stuff, honey.” Peralta smiled.

  “So you like him,” Sharon teased.

  Peralta went on. “He was a hard-ass. There was a story that was still making the rounds when I was a rookie in the early seventies about how years before this cop came on some bad guys down at the Southern Pacific yards one night, caught them breaking into a boxcar, but they had him surrounded and had their guns on him. The son of a bitch pulled his own gun—drew against the drop—and killed two of them, wounded the two others. His name was Harrison Wolfe.”

  “Sounds like a whackadoo to me,” she said. “Clinically speaking, of course.”

  “So what else have you found?” Peralta asked.

  “There was some newspaper coverage of Rebecca’s disappearance, but there was not a word—that I could find, anyway—to indicate she was the governor’s niece. But everybody seemed to know it anyway. That small-town thing again.”

  “Suspects?”

  “I’m working with Records to pull up a list of likelies for you: Felony convictions involving breaking and entering, assault, rape and/or murder in the Southwest during those approximate years.”

  “But the killings just stopped?” Sharon asked.

  “As far as I can tell,” I said. “In 1962, a flight attendant named Gloria Johnson disappeared, then turned up a few days later under the same circumstances. Then nothing, at least for the next several years.”

  “Sometimes they just stop,” Peralta said. “Green River stopped, or died or was killed, or maybe arrested for something else. Serial killers aren’t nearly as neat and methodical as in the movies. And there are more unsolved murders than the cops would ever like to admit.” He thought for a moment and then said, “I wish this Harquahala bastard would die.”

  ***

  I drove home in a contented buzz through light late-night traffic on Squaw Peak Parkway. But I had retrieved my old holster for the .357 Python and now both sat ominously in the Blazer’s glove compartment. I wasn’t ready to start packing all the time—it was hard to conceal a weapon in this heat—but I wanted it nearby. I kept wondering who wanted me to back off investigating Phaedra’s disappearance. And why. One thing that was clear now was that Julie’s apprehensions were correct. Her little sister was into something bad.

  At home an hour later, I was on-line, plugged into MCSO Central Records and running Phaedra and her old boyfriends through the National Crime Information Center, when there was a knock at the office door. I jumped at the sound. Then I unholstered the heavy revolver and stepped to the side of the door to look out. Too dark. Damn burned-out light.

  “Who’s there?” I said. It was 2:13 A.M.

  “Julie. It’s Julie.”

  I set the pistol on a table and opened the door.

  Julie Riding stepped in quickly and wrapped her arms around me. She was trembling. I closed the door and locked it.

  “I’m really scared,” she said, and for a long time, she stayed in my arms, shaking from time to time as if she was cold. I watched my unattended PowerBook put itself to sleep, and the only light in the room was Grandfather’s green-shaded banker’s lamp, which had fascinated me when I was a little boy.

  “What is it, Julie?”

  “I really need a drink, David.”

  I steered her over to the leather couch and poured us both scotch. Julie had changed her hair again. It was straighter, parted at the center, and closer to her natural shade of light brown/blond. Her eyes glistened. When I sat next to her, she said, “I think someone is following me.”

  My eyes automatically sought out the reassurance of the Python on the table.

  “Did someone follow you here tonight?”

  She shook her head. “I took a really roundabout route.”

  “Where’s your daughter?”

  “With her dad. We have joint custody, and Mindy’s with him all month.” She sighed. “That’s not true. He has custody. She sees me every other weekend. Don’t ask, David. That’s what happens when you get in a court battle with a fucking lawyer.” She pushed her hair back.

  I asked her why she thought someone was following her.

  “I noticed him when I came here the other night. A man sitting in a black Mustang convertible. It’s strange enough to see somebody sitting in a car on a residential s
treet late at night. Something about him really gave me the creeps, but I put it out of my mind, you know? Then I saw him again when I left work yesterday. He was just sitting in the parking lot for hotel employees. Tonight, I went out with some girlfriends, and afterward, when I was walking to my car, I turned around and he was walking behind me, maybe half a block back. Just walking behind me. He was small, but really muscled up. And when I pulled out, that black Mustang was right behind me.” She swallowed her drink. “I lost him on the freeway.”

  “How do you know the man in the parking lot was the same man who was sitting out here the other night?”

  “It was him,” Julie said. “He had scary eyes. The first time I saw him in the car, I was so curious that I looked in at him, and he looked right back at me. And he had on a leather jacket both times I saw him. Lots of shiny silver zippers.”

  “In this heat?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Julie, was Phaedra into anything you haven’t told me about?”

  “No,” she said. “You think this is about Phaedra?”

  “I don’t know. The other night somebody put a gun to my head and told me to back off. He didn’t mention Phaedra, but I can’t imagine he meant a forty-year-old case I’m working on for Peralta. And he was waiting for me when I got home, so obviously he knew where I lived.”

  Julie was silent for several minutes, sitting on the couch with her legs tucked underneath her. I refilled her glass and sipped at mine. I was listening to the house and the street, but everything sounded normal. Then I heard the sound of Julie holding back sobs. I put my hand on hers, and she leaned over to me and hugged me tightly.

  “I’ve made so many mistakes with my life,” she cried, digging her nails into me. “I can’t bear to lose her, too. You’ve got to help me find her.”

  “I am, Julie. I will.”

  She cupped my face in her hands and started kissing me. It was not a bad feeling. In fact, it was a damned nice feeling. Her mouth was warm and wet. Her tongue darted in my mouth.

  “Baby, help me. Help your Julie,” she whispered in between kisses. That was the way she had said things of great urgency and intimacy years before, punctuated by “your Julie.”

  “It’s okay.” I reluctantly turned my face away. “I’m going to find her.”

  Julie was pressed full against me now, both of us sideways on the sofa. I felt her nipples harden under the thin fabric of her blouse. I was tired and a little tight and not thinking clearly. When she turned her face expectantly up to mine again, I kissed her hungrily and our mouths and our hands spent a long time getting to know each other again.

  Oscar Wilde said the only thing to do with history is to rewrite it, and I suppose that’s what we might have done that night. I might have rewritten our lives together—as if that first brave flush of love could somehow have been sheltered long enough from the world and our own restless personalities to take root and grow. So that the young woman who was Julie twenty years before had given me her wondrous youth and beauty, free of the damage of the years, had given me her body and spirit and our children. And I would have given her in return everything I had to give. Julie was trying to rewrite a history known only to her. Maybe it was a history that allowed her peace from her private demons. Maybe it found Phaedra alive and safe. Maybe it was a happy ending for all of us.

  I was starting to recall Julie’s lovemaking with delicious clarity—the way she would always arch her back just a bit, the way she would take my face in her hands as she kissed me—when something made me stop. I gently pushed away from her on the couch.

  “I can’t do this yet,” I said. She looked flushed and angry.

  I don’t know why I didn’t take her to bed that night. The search for Phaedra wasn’t a real investigation yet, just an old friend making some checks. So it wasn’t an ethical problem, really, especially since I hadn’t slept with a woman for more months than I cared to admit. But something in Julie, or something in me, made me pull back.

  “I have to go now,” she said, and wheeled around and ran out the door.

  Chapter Eight

  Time does strange things in the Arizona summer. It was late July now, and the only reality was the sun. Two weeks had passed, but I knew it only from scanning the date on each morning’s newspaper. Otherwise, time had become meaningless in the yearly struggle of Phoenicians against the heat. Maybe a year had gone by. Maybe a day.

  This was the mean season, when the weather seemed to bring out the worst in everybody. Day after day of 110 degrees or better left people exhausted, impatient, and sometimes violent. The newspaper seemed to carry more three-paragraph briefs about murders. A new mother battering her crying baby’s head against the refrigerator only made it to the local section. The front page told about power outages on the fringes of the city, leaving thousands of people without air conditioning. Another story warned of an increase in greens fees for golfers. The price for living in paradise.

  I spent most of my time tying up loose ends on the Stokes case, and I felt pretty good about it. Lindsey Adams, my new pal in Records, had come up with a list of seventeen likely suspects that met our search parameters. She was the master of databases. Her fingers flew across the computer keyboard as her delicate mouth, dark with a black-red lipstick, pursed in thought. Her tossed-off comments—“he was wetting his noodle” being a favorite—made this more fun than most research.

  As we listened to Lindsey’s collection of seventies music—a strange hobby, she admitted—we looked at the potential suspects in detail, narrowing our list to four. They were bad men: killers, rapists, predators from a time that we forget had predators. Each was in the safe, small Valley of the Sun when Rebecca Stokes disappeared. One in particular had gotten out of the Arizona State Prison just three months before her murder; he had been serving a sentence for assaulting a woman outside her home in Tucson. And he ended up in the Valley: Prison records showed he had taken a job on parole, working as a laborer. The same man, Eddie Evans, died in a knife fight down in the Deuce five years later—a couple of years after the last of the unsolved murders of young women.

  I delivered it all to Peralta in a report complete with photos, color graphics, and maps. It wouldn’t hold up in court, but it didn’t have to. All of the potential suspects were dead, as were the local bigs who hadn’t wanted publicity about the unsolved murders of young women. Whatever embarrassment the case might once have caused was long past. But we knew more now about the murders of five human beings, and who might have been behind them. And that meant a thousand dollars to me from the county. It wasn’t exactly history, and it wasn’t exactly police work. “It’s consulting,” Lindsey, the postmodern woman, said.

  Peralta called a 9:00 A.M. press conference to announce that the Sheriff’s Office had new information on a notorious forty-year-old murder case. He was in his element with the lights and cameras, wearing his crisply pressed dress uniform with the three stars on the collars, and his badge, which was polished to a high shine.

  It was a remarkable piece of theater, with slides, charts, and press kits for the reporters. A TV crew from Unsolved Mysteries flew in to be there. Frankly, I was surprised the sheriff let him do it alone—given the sheriff’s penchant for hogging the media spotlight. But I didn’t really know the tensions or alliances that marked the sheriff’s relationship with his chief deputy. Peralta introduced me, and the next morning I found myself on the Republic’s front page, in a sidebar headlined HISTORY PROFESSOR CRACKS OLD CASES. That made me a little uncomfortable, since we hadn’t exactly “cracked” a case. And I remember catching the date of the newspaper: July 23—it had been exactly a month since Phaedra had disappeared. But these were momentary misgivings. Lindsey even sent me a Disco Inferno CD as a reminder of how listening to it had inspired us, or so she said. All in all, I was feeling good about myself. Too good.

  A little before noon on Friday, the phone rang.

  “Deputy Mapstone?”

  It was a fine, radio-qu
ality voice.

  “This is Brent McConnico. I was wondering if I could buy you lunch and thank you for the work you did on my cousin’s case?”

  I was a little taken aback. I had seen Brent McConnico’s classically handsome face on TV many times since I’d gotten back to town. He was the young majority leader of the state senate, a favorite of Republican politicos and the scion of one of the state’s oldest political families. But I had never met him or spoken to him before.

  “Well, you don’t owe me any thanks, Mr. McConnico,” I said.

  “Oh, please call me Brent,” he said. “My father was Mr. McConnico.” Without even a pause, he went on. “How about the Pointe at Tapatio Cliffs? Really stunning view of the city. Say Monday?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Brent.”

  I hung up and called Julie at work, but her voice mail answered and I hung up. I hadn’t talked to her since the night we ended up in each other’s arms. I didn’t know what to say to her about us, if there was an “us.” And I didn’t have anything fresh to report about Phaedra. No young woman. No blue Nissan Sentra. Neither the computer nor phone calls to the numbers in her address book had yielded any information. I was stuck.

  ***

  The Pointe at Tapatio Cliffs is a resort hotel perched in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve in the north part of the city. I walked past the spotless tennis courts, deserted in the midday heat, and made my way into the main restaurant and the blessed air-conditioning. I was wearing my best suit, navy blue with a thin pinstripe, and a Frank Sinatra tie that had been Patty’s last Christmas gift to me. I looked good, but this wasn’t the weather for suits. I sat for twenty minutes in the dim coolness near the hostess’s stand before Brent McConnico strode briskly in, spotted me, and held out his hand.

  “You’re taller than you seemed on TV,” he said.

  He had a firm grip, and his light blue eyes gazed at me with an easy directness. “Well, anybody would look smaller compared to Mike Peralta,” I said.

  “Yes, dear Mike,” he said. “He’ll probably be governor someday.”