Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

I didn’t know if he was trying out a stump speech on me or if he was really speaking from the heart. Considering what had happened to his cousin, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I got back home just before the long afternoon rush hour started to clot the Valley’s streets and freeways. The phone was ringing when I walked in the door; on the other end was a man who said he was Greg Townsend.

Phaedra’s lover.

“I, uh, I’m a friend of Phaedra Riding, and I’ve been trying to find her, and her sister would only tell me that I had to talk to you.” He had a well-modulated frat boy’s voice.

“When did you last see Phaedra, Mr. Townsend?”

“It would have been in the spring. April, I guess.”

“And you haven’t seen or spoken to her since then?”

“No,” he said. “She needed her space. I wanted to give her that. But we agreed that we’d talk again by the end of June-only she never called.”

I tried to decide if I believed him. I told him that a missing person’s report had been filed on Phaedra.

“Isn’t it unusual for the police to investigate these things unless they suspect foul play?” That struck me as an odd response to being told that his girlfriend had disappeared, but I let it pass.

“Julie and I are old friends. I’m checking into this as a favor to her.”

“Well, I hope you’ll let me know if I can help in any way,” he said. “I’ll give you my phone number; it’s a Sedona number.”

My gut told me I needed to do more to shake something, anything, loose.

“Actually, I’d like to stop by and see you in the next few days, if you can spare a little time?”

“Well,” he said. “Is anything wrong? What’s going on?”

“I really don’t know more than what I’ve already told you, Mr. Townsend. But if you two were close, you might be able to give me some information that would be helpful. Her family is very concerned.”

“Well, sure. Come up tomorrow. Can you be here by nine A.M.?” And then he gave me the address.

Chapter Nine

Early the next morning, I grabbed a bagel and diet Coke and got on the road to Sedona. I’ve spent my life in coffee-swilling professions, but I’ve never caught that addiction. Patty, whose bone-jolting French roast I would brew every morning when we lived together, said I was missing one of life’s most sublime pleasures. Maybe it will be like golf: something I’ll take up at that ever-receding point in my life called “older.” Bagels were something I had discovered, and even if you couldn’t find a “real” bagel in Phoenix, I munched contentedly on one as I headed the Blazer north on Black Canyon Freeway, Interstate 17.

Sharon Peralta was on the radio, always “Dr. Sharon” to her listeners (why hadn’t I gotten my Ph.D. in psychology?), giving brisk advice to a man who didn’t know how to keep his career and meet his obligations to his seven children; a woman who didn’t understand why her lovers kept leaving her; and another woman who had seduced her brother-in-law. Dr. Sharon handled every caller deftly. She was funny. She was sexy. She had the answers. She was promoting her newsletter and her new book. Hard to believe it was the mousy Sharon Peralta I first met twenty years ago.

It was a good summer day for a drive, provided you were headed in the right direction. In the southbound lanes, the traffic headed toward downtown was a gridlocked disaster. I drove for miles through the new city sprawl, ever spreading-an acre an hour-out into the desert floor and around stark, barren mountains that once stood in splendid isolation. After passing Carefree Highway, the interstate started to climb. Over the next hundred miles, it would vault nearly six thousand feet into the Arizona high country and Flagstaff. My destination was not quite that far, but no matter how many times I drove this route, I was struck by the dramatic changes in the land.

You can drive all the way from the Mississippi River to Denver without encountering more than the undulating sameness of the plains. In the West, the country changes from pines to deserts and mountains to flatlands with amazing suddenness. So the flat cactus-covered desert gave way to sage- and chaparral-covered slopes, ravines and crevices, all pushing upward toward the high peaks to the north. In a few minutes, the massive blue emptiness of the Bradshaw Mountains appeared off my left. This had been mining country a hundred years before, with lots of abandoned shafts to stick a body in. I felt an involuntary uneasiness and checked the mirrors, checked the.357 in the glove compartment.

In about an hour, I took the highway that splits off north into Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona. Another ten miles and the country changed again from the three-thousand-foot high desert to a landscape from another planet, an idealized Mars of exalted red-stone buttes rising above scrub pines and intricate, blown-apart rock formations, all encased by a gigantic, endless cobalt sky. Here was the next Santa F

e or Taos. Sedona, which had not been much more than an isolated artists’ colony when my grandparents would bring me up here as a little boy, had become as rich and exclusive an oasis as you can find in the country. There was now a traffic light below Cathedral Rock and expensive houses sprinkled into the foothills. It all made me vaguely sad.

I stopped at a convenience store where a sign told me Sedona was the home of the annual Jazz on the Rocks Festival, and also that it was at the center of four “vortexes” that provide mysterious, healing energy. I had a vague recollection of a “harmonic convergence” of New Agers here a few years before, when I was still in San Diego and Patty’s wicked wit insulated me from inanities. I asked about the address Townsend had given me, and the clerk pointed me down the highway to a turnoff.

The Blazer’s odometer turned over 2.4 miles as the asphalt road turned to red gravel and finally to dirt, climbing up into Bear Hollow, a narrow upland canyon overlooking Sedona. Greg Townsend’s place was completely concealed in pines and rocks, a modern adobe with the kind of rustic look that can only be had for a lot of money. I parked inside a gate, just behind a silver Porsche 911 turbo. I wondered about strapping on the Python, then decided against it and stepped out onto the pinecones and rocky ground.

“You don’t look like a cop,” came a disembodied voice from a distance. Then, coming closer, he said, “You look more like a college professor.”

Greg Townsend stepped out from behind a boulder and extended his hand. He was tall and lanky, my height, but skinnier, with a full head of graying hair, wire-frame glasses, khaki shorts, and hiking boots. His skin was a golden tan, darker than the color of his shorts. He regarded me with an easy nonchalance in his blue eyes. I pulled out my badge case with my left hand-the nongun hand-and showed it to him.

“I read about you in the Republic,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

“Nothing to be impressed about,” I replied, looking him over and imagining him as Phaedra’s lover. I didn’t like him.