Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

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 sh

e 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-quality 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.