Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

John Rogers was an enormous man, a Navajo, who was squeezed into a wheelchair in the lobby of a middling nursing home on the west side. His grip was very strong and his gaze very direct.

“You look too damned smart to be a deputy,” he said. “When I was on the job, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was a joke. Bunch of fat boys running the jail.”

I showed him my ID, but he waved it away.

“Hell, I’d see you even if you weren’t a cop,” he said. “First visit I’ve had in four years. My family, shit. My son’s a lawyer in L.A., and my daughter’s in detox somewhere. I guess they don’t want to smell the shit and piss here. You married?”

I shook my head.

“You’re lucky.”

I told him why I was there, watching my story register in the ruin of cracks that encased his old eyes. A Phoenix cop to the end, he wanted to know why MCSO was investigating, and I reminded him that the bodies had been found in the county.

He closed his eyes for a moment and then said, “I took that missing person’s report. From her uncle, the governor. He was a very worried man. The girl was supposed to have come home on the Golden State Limited the night before. She never went into work the next day.”

I heard a woman’s voice wailing off down a corridor.

“They found her about two weeks later,” he went on, cocking his massive head. “A Public Service crew, as I remember it. Then they turned it over to the detectives, and that was that.”

“If that was that, why do you remember it?”

“Oh, an old man’s memory,” he said. “She seemed so pretty, from her pictures. And back in those days, things like that hardly ever happened. It just stayed with me.”

“Did you feel any pressure from the governor’s office to keep the case quiet?”

“We were told by our sergeant not to say a word about it. The newspapers never said she was old man McConnico’s niece.”

I asked him if he remembered any other cases like it, and his face changed a bit, collapsed a little on itself.

“There were some others around that time.”

“The Creeper?” I ventured.

“Whatever,” John Rogers said. “I know that’s what some cops were talking about. Shit, I was just a patrolman. Only Indian on the force. First Indian on the force.”

I listed the other four body drops and asked why the detectives hadn’t linked the cases.

“Who the hell knows?” he rasped, angry now. “Who knows why detectives do anything? No offense.”

“None taken,” I said. “Did you respond to any Creeper calls?”

“Not that I know of. But there were always prowlers, and some might have been him, if there was a Creeper. Nobody really knew.”

“What did you think?”

He looked at me for a long moment. “What did I think? Let me tell you something. When that second girl was killed-Leslie was her name, I think-they found a Mexican who worked for the family gardener, and they thought they had their man. He’d been looking at her through the window at night; we knew that. Took him up to the fourth floor and beat him with saps for an hour, and he was ready to confess to anything. That’s how it was done then. The dicks thought they had solved that one, so how could the cases be linked?”

“So why isn’t that in the reports?”

“Because they beat him to death. Internal bleeding, didn’t show up at first. He died in the city jail overnight. They put him in a pauper’s grave, and that was that.”

***

Tuesday night, I stayed home to write an update for Peralta. I also needed to go over my lecture notes for the American history survey I was teaching at Phoenix College-another few bucks for my dwindling bank account. And I wanted to rewire the back porch light. So I got comfort food-chilies rellenos from Ramiro’s-settled behind Grandfather’s old desk in the study off the living room, and booted up the PowerBook. That’s when the doorbell rang.

Once again, Julie Riding was on my doorstep. This time, she wore a light blue denim shirt and blue jeans. Her hair was pulled back, and she looked startlingly like the Julie I had known twenty years before.

“I know I’m bothering you,” she said. I said something polite and invited her in.