Cactus Heart Page 7

  I felt a flush spreading into my cheeks, hoped the dark of the office concealed it.

  Bobby said, “You are an intelligent man, David, not merely a prisoner of books and ideas like most intellectuals. Sometimes things are not as they seem. It would be worth your time to reconsider your assumptions about me, about many things.”

  He stood up and bowed slightly. “Dr. Mapstone, it is always a pleasure. Do have a happy Thanksgiving.”

  I wanted to have a smart-ass comeback but all I could think of was getting him out of the office.

  “By the way, someone left you a present.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I followed his gaze over to the court table I had set up for the Yarnell case.

  “What the…”

  It was a doll. An ordinary baby doll, maybe a foot tall, with a big head and a silly smile. It had a little blue bow tie and blue overalls. And a little sheriff’s star. It made my skin crawl.

  “Are you mind-fucking me, Bobby?”

  “Oh, the English language is wonderful, isn’t it?” he smiled, perfect teeth looking predatory in the half light. “Farsi has many wonderful words and sayings, but not like this. ‘Mind fuck.’ No, Dr. Mapstone, I am not mind-fucking you. This doll was sitting on your doorstep when I came in. No card attached. I merely brought it inside. It is from a friend with a peculiar sense of humor, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I have never liked dolls,” Bobby said. “Those dead eyes.”

  Then he was gone, his footsteps echoing like gunshots down the hall.

  Chapter Twelve

  The worst sound in the world is a ringing telephone after midnight.

  “Dave.”

  Lindsey. “Are you all right?”

  “Did you read the fourteenth Canto without me?” she asked. We’d been reading Dante to each other, a little bit at a time in bed. I said, “I’d rather wait for you.”

  “That’s why you’re my History Shamus.”

  A minute passed by with nothing but the electronic buzz of the phone line.

  “Are you okay, Lindsey?”

  “I guess I’m not.”

  I sat up in bed, awake with worry, the house silent and dark around me.

  I waited for her. She said, “So how was your day?”

  Something bad. Lindsey is the most direct person I’ve ever known. When her conversation turns elliptical, it is a bad sign.

  “I tried to call you,” I said. “I figured you were tied up.”

  “Tell me about your day, Dave.”

  I imagined the bit of frost that came into her dark blue eyes when there was only one path she was prepared to take.

  “I found Frances Richie, the woman arrested with Jack Talbott in the kidnapping? She’s still alive. Still in prison.”

  I could hear her faintly breathing. Steady, shallow.

  “She didn’t have much to say. She remembered a slouch fedora that was taken from her by a jail matron after the arrest. I want to know how the bodies got in that wall, and she remembers the hat.”

  “Do you remember what you wore the first time we ever made love?”

  “I remember more what you were wearing,” I said. “And then not wearing.”

  “You wore chinos and a light blue shirt,” she said softly, “and you looked impossibly preppy. But I knew inside you were a bad boy.”

  I felt myself smile against the cool plastic of the phone.

  I waited a moment, hearing the line buzz emptily, and went on. “I learned that the building where the skeletons were found is owned by the Yarnell family.” Thanks, Bobby. “I also tried to find out something about the pocket watch you noticed.” I paused. “I guess it’s all a fool’s errand. When the DNA profile comes back, we’ll know for sure. PPD is testing the DNA found on the skeletons against a sample from the surviving brothers. Then the case can be closed. I’m just trying to keep Peralta off my back.”

  “Why is El Jefe so freaked out by me?”

  “Oh, he’s that way with everybody. Even his wife.”

  “Well, she doesn’t like me, either,” Lindsey said. “But that I can understand. It’s that thing with older women who are insecure about their husbands.”

  “Dr. Sharon? The highest functioning woman in Phoenix?”

  “Trust me,” Lindsey said. “I know.”

  She had distracted me just enough that I launched into a story about Mike and Sharon from years ago, when he was just a deputy and she was a mousy housewife. It was a funny story. An illuminating one.

  “Dave.”

  I stopped talking.

  “Linda died today.”

  Her mother.

  It took about fifteen minutes to drive through the deserted streets to Lindsey’s apartment in Sunnyslope, an eclectic neighborhood strewn across the high ground rising up to North Mountain. I had a leather jacket over a sweatshirt and jeans: It was colder outside, a definite chill from the High Country. I was wide awake.

  She had about a dozen candles burning in the book-filled apartment and music on the CD player from a band that I had learned from her was called Pavement. I’ve lost enough people in my life, hell, I started with losses even before I was out of diapers. So it’s second nature to know there are no words that really give comfort and many that can make things worse. I’d be worthless as a writer of sympathy cards. So I just made her a martini, dry with Bombay Sapphire, and held her, slowly stroking her soft, straight hair. She didn’t cry.

  Then we ended up making love on the hardwood floor in front of her sofa. Clothes halfway off, her miniskirt bunched up around her waist, her heavy black shoes still on and cutting into my back. It didn’t seem right, appropriate, whatever. But I lost myself in it. She came with an angry, anguished screaming, clinging so tightly to me I thought my neck would snap. But I let her hang on, and she did for a long, long time. She says I am a “dark, sensual creature.” But that’s really a description of her.

  We’d been together for only five months. She was my ally on that first case last summer, when I was newly back in Phoenix, a year out of the divorce with Patty and still feeling my way back into the cop world. Lindsey was the one holding my hand when I woke up in a hospital with a bullet hole in my shoulder. We read books to each other, made love with an athletic joy, and shared a rebellious sensibility that verged on the misanthropic. But she was also an unfolding mystery and I liked that.

  She wanted me to teach her history and we shared a love of literature. But she drew the line at jazz. Her musical tastes tended toward indy rock, a campy love of 1970s disco and even some rap. So we carried on an uneasy truce across a green line of music and love. Neither of us had spoken that word yet, “love.” We hadn’t had the conversations that once were a given at certain points in what our age calls “relationships”: the “where are we going?” talk, the “what do you mean to me?” talk, the “forever” talk.

  That was fine with me. Maybe it was a naive hope that if we didn’t abandon the mystery of early courtship we wouldn’t lose its passion. Maybe some of it was our age difference, but not the way people would think. Most of it was the knowledge that comes after you realize that love doesn’t last forever, that lovers move on, parents grow old, children die. That we live in a time of disconnection and abandonment. Maybe people in her generation seemed to come to that knowledge sooner. I didn’t know.

  “She killed herself.”

  I stroked her hair and said quietly, “Oh, baby.”

  “She used a gun.”

  I had never met her mother. Another of the rituals of courtship we never consummated. I knew her parents were divorced. Her father had been killed in Vietnam when she was a baby and her mother became a hippy—she was a true child of recent history. Lindsey and her mother weren’t close. I could remember no visits or phone calls, just a passing reference to her mother living somewhere in the suburbs, Chandler, I think.

  I felt her swallow hard. “Women usually use pills,” Lindsey said.

 
; Then, in a different voice, “Tell me about your case, History Shamus. What did we find down there under that warehouse?”

  “Lindsey, tell me about your mother.”

  I could feel her tense a little, then let it go.

  “Oh, Dave.” She sighed. “God, I wish I hadn’t given up smoking.” She drummed her fingers on my calf. “I hardly knew her.”

  She flashed the blue eyes at me. “She heard voices. It scared me when I was little. I didn’t know what it was all about. She took us from place to place. I used to see the different men she’d bring home, and she’d moan and screech behind the bedroom door. I thought they were hurting her. And she’d go into rages. She’d just walk away for days at a time. It was years before she got help, and she didn’t always take her drugs. The legal ones, I mean. She did really well with the illegal kind. My upbringing wasn’t Leave It to Beaver.”

  I just listened. She stroked my leg with a light, detached touch, making my leg hair stand up straight.

  “It was all properly seventies and absurd,” she laughed low and humorless. Then, in another voice, “I don’t hate her. She was younger than I am now and she had a thing for drugs and booze and bad men. She sure didn’t want to be a mother. It’s just that I couldn’t bring myself to love her, and if that makes me a monster, fuck everybody. Fuck everybody.”

  The room was as fragile as old crystal. I looked around for some reassuring signs of Lindsey as I had known her, realizing that everything had changed somehow. Shelves and shelves of books: fiction, poetry, philosophy, a little history. Photos of Mayan ruins from a trip she made three years ago. Photos of us on the beach in San Diego from earlier this year. Mexican Day of the Dead art, one of her many eccentric enthusiasms. Two personal computers, CD-ROM, printer, scanner and modems on a butcher block suspended on a pair of old filing cabinets. X-Files calendar. A large print of Emily Dickinson. A barrel cactus with a blue ribbon around it. Her big tomcat Pasternak fell against me and purred loudly.

  “The more you know about me, the less you’re going to want to be with me.” She leaned in against me.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “And you’re not a monster, Lindsey.”

  “You wouldn’t know, Dave. You love my legs.” I needed to laugh and we both did. There was a fundamental kindness in Lindsey and she would always let me off the hook.

  “Just hold me,” she said softly. “Don’t try to make any sense of things. Just hold me all night.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  She was gone by the time the alarm went off next morning. For a long minute, I luxuriated in her scent, our scent, embedded in the sheets. Then the memory of last night’s bad news came back and I sat up quickly. There was a Post-It note on the pillow: just the imprint of her lips in dark lipstick. I tucked it fondly in my pocket. Then I showered, fed the cat, locked up and drove downtown.

  If weather really matched our moods, it would have been cold and gray outside. Instead, it was just another beautiful Phoenix day: seventy degrees, fourteen percent humidity, not a cloud in sight. The radio was playing the pop love song of the season—hard to believe I once measured my romances by such things. All the way down Central, I was stuck behind a car with Quebec tags, my first snowbird sighting of the season. The tag was imprinted with Je me souviens—“I remember”—a reference to the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 that ensured British domination of North America. Somebody appreciated history. I remembered Lindsey’s kisses, the softness of her black hair, the sensation of my fingers lightly stroking the downy skin on the small of her back, the sound of her love moans and gasps. I remembered too damned many good-byes in my life.

  Over on the AM, Dr. Sharon was lecturing a caller about people needing to act like adults and take responsibility for their actions. I agreed with her, but I also knew human beings are remembering animals. With memory comes baggage and fear. I didn’t know if any two people could make it for long nowadays, but if they did, somehow they had to find a way to make peace with their individual histories and make a new one together. Then they only needed all the luck available in the world. The romantic philosophy of Deputy David Mapstone—fat lot of good it’s done me. Dr. Sharon signed off with her trademark: “You can do it!”

  I could do it. I had stopped by home for a change of clothes when the phone rang. It was the sheriff’s communications center and a message had been left for me: Mr. Max Yarnell, chairman of Yarneco and brother of the kidnapped twins, would see me at eleven o’clock. I changed clothes again, this time into a suit.

  Yarneco took up the entire 20th floor of the Yarneco Tower on North Central, only a few blocks from my house. The skyscraper had been built for Dial Corp. in the early 1990s, and it resembled a copper-colored deodorant stick, or a vehicle for deep-space travel, or maybe a marital aid—anyway, it was the most dramatic building on the Central Corridor. I liked it.

  When the elevator opened, Hayden Yarnell was waiting for me. He was entombed in an oil painting that took up the better part of a darkly paneled wall in the reception area. Snowy-haired and dressed in a dark suit and stiff Herbert Hoover collar, he gazed out at a future that had seen the Yarnell Land & Cattle Co. evolve into an international concern. His eyes looked black. A gold watch chain dangled tantalizingly from his vest.

  Next to the patriarch was a museum-quality display of the company’s history and present-day structure. This was the age of the dot-com, but somehow Yarneco made piles of money the old-fashioned way. Yarneco owned mines in Arizona and Chile, defense contractors in California and Ohio, and a land development division responsible for huge projects around the Southwest. It was, a panel said, the largest privately held company in the state.

  Before I could read further, I was met by a pleasant-looking young blonde in a very pleasant-looking powder-blue suit with a short skirt. She introduced herself as Megan, Mr. Yarnell’s assistant. He was running late, but I could wait in his private conference room. She led me through another dark-paneled room, where I couldn’t help noticing behind a counter two muscular, short-haired young men in suits with roomy jackets—roomy like Peralta’s, designed to conceal substantial firearms. They looked me over carefully as I followed Megan up a spiral staircase and through two heavy wood doors into the Yarneco inner sanctum.

  The room was dominated by a sleek boardroom table big enough to accommodate a minor-league hockey game. Then there was the Indian art, large, intricately carved kachinas. Luminous Acoma pottery on dark pedestals. Basketwork that looked old enough to be very pricey. And two walls of glass.

  From up here, Phoenix looked like the exotic capital of an imagined land of sun and prosperity. Glittery towers, a sea of green treetops, the mountains bare and rough and purple-black, witnesses to their volcanic heritage. Maybe this was what Coronado was after when he roamed the Southwest in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola. Only he was four hundred years too early. I could easily see my house three blocks away on Cypress.

  I broke out of my reverie when a tall man strode into the room and gave my hand a peremptory but solid handshake. He had his grandfather’s long nose and full head of hair, but his hair was the color of lead and his face was tan and handsomely lined more from sailing the Greek islands and golfing at Pebble Beach than from driving cattle to the High Country. I’d seen this face all my life, among the top donors profiled in the programs of the Phoenix Symphony and Herberger Theater Center, smiling like a desert lord from a decorating article in Phoenix Magazine, discussing a huge new development or copper mine in the business section of the Republic. It was the face of the West’s moneyed establishment. It wasn’t smiling.

  “I’ve already talked to a policeman named Hawkins,” Max Yarnell said. “My brother and I agreed to help with this DNA fingerprinting. So I don’t really know how I can help you.”

  His voice was Toastmasters, with a dash of executive-suite impatience. His athletic frame mirrored it: practiced and toned, but a little coiled, a little tense, packed nicely into a monogrammed French blue dres
s shirt, and a tie with a tight pattern of gold and blue that looked a little like deranged DNA. Maybe I had DNA on the mind. I told him my job for the Sheriff’s Office.

  “I never did well in school,” he said. “And I never lived in the past. Quickest way to waste your life away.”

  “I get that,” I said. “Do you remember anything about the kidnapping?”

  Men who reach the heights of the Yarneco Tower are accustomed to giving quick orders and moving on. Short attention spans are as important as MBAs. And they expect their minions to get the shorthand, take the hint. I pulled out a chair and sat. He really focused on me for the first time, as if a lamp had talked back to him. His eyes were a fierce light blue. “I was five years old when that happened. How much do you remember from when you were five?”

  Quite a lot, actually. But I just sat there silently.

  “Andy and Woodrow were my brothers. We played together. Sometimes they drove me crazy. We fought over who got to sit in the front seat with dad. I’ve tried not to dwell on what happened.”

  “You know we found them in a building that’s owned by Yarneco?”

  He sighed and pulled out a chair, compressing himself into it. “Yarneco owns a lot of property,” he said. “Actually, no, I didn’t know that.”

  “One of the things I’m trying to figure out is how they got into the tunnel in that old building.”

  “Only the man who kidnapped them would know that.”

  “There was never any speculation in the family about what happened?”

  I could see the cords in his neck tighten, but his face and voice stayed calm. “What happened? What happened was that my father and grandfather died within a few years of that awful crime. My brother and I were raised by relatives back East. The family was nearly destroyed.”

  “Do you remember the night your brothers disappeared, Thanksgiving night?”

  “I already told you no. My brother James is older, so maybe he does.” He crossed his arms and bore those light blue eyes into me. “This is just an academic exercise for you.”