Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” I said.

“The Bible,” he said, and smiled.

I thought, Shakespeare, you dolt. I said, “But I guess I don’t channel.”

“You should. You have quite an aura about you. It would allow you to break free of all the repressiveness of Western civilization and Christianity, which, thank God, nobody believes in anymore.”

“Yeah. The Sedona vortex is certainly more plausible than the Trinity.” He didn’t smile. “Phaedra,” I coaxed.

“She didn’t like to climb. Heights scared her. She read books. Lots of history. You might have liked her.”

He was needling me, but I let him. There was something wrong with Greg Townsend, but I couldn’t tell if it was that vague misfit neurosis that seems to migrate west or if it was something more, something to do with Phaedra.

“I had a place down in the Valley,” he said. “So we started dating down there. It got serious, and we moved in together. Then we moved up here full-time.”

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Townsend?”

“I’m a trust baby, Deputy.”

“Must be nice.”

“Yes, it allows me to do the things I love. I climb at least a dozen fourteeners every year; I fly my own plane; I travel. And I can attract women like Phaedra Riding, to put a fine point on it.”

He smiled a smile of perfect white teeth.

“Did you care about her?”

“Sure,” he said. “We had a lot of fun.”

“I can see you’re broken up with worry about her disappearing,” I said.

He looked hard at me for a long moment. The veins and tendons in his fine neck rippled minutely. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you don’t seem too concerned.”

He just stared and gave a little sigh. “I don’t have to justify myself to you,” he said. “She’s an adult, and one with her own mind, let me assure you. She liked being on her own. I have no reason to believe she won’t turn up.”

> “Did Phaedra have a drug problem?”

“Fuck you!” he said, rising and stalking to the end of the room. He walked over to a bar set into the wall and clinked some ice into a glass. It seemed out of character; I expected him to be swilling Evian. “I really didn’t have to let you in here, and I don’t have to let you pry into my life.”

I stayed seated. “Well, that’s true, sir,” I said. “So I can call the Sedona sheriff’s substation and get a search warrant and really fuck up your afternoon. To put a fine point on it.”

He downed his drink. I said, “Or we can keep having a friendly conversation.”

“She hated drugs,” he said quietly, staring out the window again.

I drove back to Phoenix in the full heat of the day, the sun burning into the Blazer despite the air-conditioning being on high. My sunglasses were pressed tightly against my face. I missed San Diego. I missed the Spanish stucco house a block from the Pacific in Ocean Beach. I missed the familiarity of lecture classes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and office hours Wednesday afternoons, and lunch with Patty in Mission Valley, where the air was cool and salty-smelling.

Here, I had a missing woman who had a taste for rich men, couldn’t keep a job, and played the personal ads. She had red hair and a blue Nissan Sentra, and I didn’t have a clue where to find her. Who would have thought it would be easier to solve a four-decades-old murder case than to find my old girlfriend’s missing sister?

I didn’t know what to think about Greg Townsend, aside from my visceral dislike of him. He was like so many middle-aged men you meet in the West, grown-up boys who have left behind the privileged Ivy League backgrounds, but not the perks. Men who try to fill up what is missing inside them with mountain biking, rock climbing, and New Age philosophy. They populated the resorts and the tennis ranches, looking like they’ve stepped out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad in Esquire magazine. They have a finely tuned sense of ironic scorn, but it’s impossible to say if they ever feel anything real. And what Townsend felt about Phaedra, I couldn’t say.

There was a screeching in the console, and I remembered the cellular phone Peralta had given me last week. I pulled it out and activated it.

“Mapstone.” It was Peralta. “Where the hell have you been? What’s your ten-twenty?”

Nobody had spoken radio code to me for fifteen years. “I’m just south of Black Canyon City on I-Seventeen.”