Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“That’s true, Mrs. Harvey. I’m just a little surprised you would know that.”

“I have a better memory than anyone you’ll ever meet, honey. Anyway, I knew they’d never let it rest.”

I asked her what she meant.

She looked around the dim room and then looked back at me. “A lot of people thought it was the Creeper that got her,” intoned the metallic monotone. I wanted to laugh, but a chill ran up the back of my neck.

“The what?”

“That’s what they called him. ‘The Creeper.’ All that summer, he was out there. At first, the cops didn’t want to believe it. Then when they couldn’t solve Rebecca’s killing, and the other killings happened, they didn’t want to talk about it, because they never could catch him. My God, George bought a gun. We never left the doors unlocked after that summer.”

She saw my expression, and her watery eyes brightened.

“My God, honey, didn’t they tell you about him?”

“There was nothing in any of the reports-” I began.

“Oh hell,” she interrupted. “When is anything important written down? They didn’t want to write it down because they didn’t want to believe it. And if the papers started writing about Jack the Ripper in the desert, it might hurt tourism and discourage all the people coming here from back east-that was George’s theory. ‘Keep Arizona green: Bring money.’”

“How did you know about this guy?”

“Everybody knew,” she said, digging around the cushions of the sofa and finally coming up with a smoke. “People talked about it. Women alone at night talked about being followed. A woman over by Third and Cypress was attacked when she got out of her car one night. But her husband came out, and the Creeper ran.”

It was about a block from my house.

She lit her cigarette, smiled angelically, and went on. “Another time, a woman woke up, and he was standing over her. For some reason, he didn’t do anything. About a week after that, a girl was raped and beaten at Encanto Park. It went on all summer. Then poor Rebecca.”

“Did you know her?”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Harvey said, drawing hungrily on the cigarette. “I used to take her cookies on Sunday nights. She would run errands for me. She always seemed so alone. I mean, her uncle was the governor and all-they did tell you that, right?” I nodded. “But she seemed lonely. Not all that many girls were working then, and Rebecca seemed like such a sensitive soul. She loved poetry. Her favorite was T. S. Eliot, as I recall.”

“How long before she disappeared did you see her?”

“We took her to the train, when she went back east. We wanted to pick her up, but I guess she didn’t want to impose. She so wanted to be independent.” Then she added, “To get away from that damned family of hers.”

“You mentioned other killings?”

“He got a taste for it after Rebecca,” said the mechanical voice. “Every eight or nine months, a girl would turn up in the desert. This went on, oh, another three years. The police never admitted they were connected, but we knew. And they never got him.”

I asked her if people knew who the Creeper was.

“I always thought the cops knew who it was, but if you’re here asking me, maybe they didn’t. Who knows? That was when Phoenix changed. It wasn’t a little town anymore. People were coming in from everywhere. Some stayed only a few years and moved on. There were the ones who came to work construction. There wer

e the farmworkers. There were the snowbirds. Who knows?”

Chapter Four

Phoenix is the newest and oldest of cities. The canals that carry its water past new skyscrapers and freeways are built on the waterworks of ancient Indians. When their civilization vanished, all that was left were their canals and the name a later tribe gave the canal builders: Hohokam, “the vanished ones.” But the past is never past. We are living in their city. It is all connected.

The Hohokam came to the Salt River Valley about the same time Charlemagne was forging a new Europe out of the chaos of Rome’s fall. In this isolated place, the Indians discovered one of the great fertile river valleys on earth. A thousand years later, a few Anglo settlers found it, too. They restored the Hohokam canals and built new ones. And with water, the Valley grew the vegetables and citrus and cotton that made families like the McConnicos wealthy. Everything is connected.

I hoped I had hold of a connection that might lead us to who had murdered Rebecca Stokes. It didn’t seem like brain surgery. But I wasn’t going to doubt my worth to Peralta right now. I needed that thousand-dollar fee. And God knows, I’d watched lots of my former colleagues in the ivory tower parlay the obvious into prestigious fellowships and acclaimed books. Anyway, I was intrigued by this murder. Some of the cases Peralta sent my way were as boring as an accounting exam. This one was different. This was a real mystery. I could almost feel the safe, cool desert night Rebecca stepped into from the train; feel the sinister chill that her disappearance cast over a small city.

Cops are conditioned to disbelieve almost everything they are told, but Opal Harvey’s story was making more and more sense. I went back downtown, spent the afternoon reading old homicide records. Sure enough, there was a loose string of body dumps in the desert in the late 1950s and early 1960s that were never solved. Five young women, strangled and sexually assaulted, naked except for their bras, purses nearby with IDs and money, the killers never found. Two of the bodies were discovered east of town, near Superstition Mountain, and the others, including Rebecca, were found in the desolate Harquahala Desert, west of the White Tank Mountains. Most of the cases seemed to have languished in the Phoenix PD’s Criminal Investigation Bureau under a detective named Harrison Wolfe, who disappeared in the early 1970s.

The idea of serial killers didn’t enter the popular imagination until the late 1970s, but there were earlier examples of madmen who killed again and again such as the Boston Strangler. Yet there was nothing, on paper at least, that indicated the investigating officers were tying the cases together. And yet the victims were all young, single, middle-class working women with fair hair-two redheads and three blondes. I thought about what Opal Harvey had said about the city’s powerful citizens being terrified that the killings would hurt economic growth. History was full of stranger motivations behind cover-ups.

The contents of the reports were only a start, though. I was beginning to realize how incomplete, and sometimes misleading, police reports could be. I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning trying to find other people involved in the Stokes case. Forty-plus years can erase a lot of lives. I got another break when I tracked down a retired Phoenix cop whose name had appeared on the initial report of Rebecca’s disappearance.