Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“Get on I-Ten,” he commanded. “Head out past the White Tanks to Tonopah, then follow the dirt road three miles.” I told him to slow down, then grabbed a pad and wrote it down.

“What’s up?” I asked. But somehow I already knew.

“We found your girl,” Peralta said, his voice cutting in and out. “Phaedra, like Phoenix.”

I knew what he meant. But he said it anyway.

“Body dump.”

Chapter Ten

It is more than a hundred miles from the edge of the Valley’s civilizing sprawl to the Colorado River and the border of California. Today, Interstate 10 runs through it like a straightedge, connecting Los Angeles with its ambitious New West offspring, Phoenix. But on both sides of the freeway is some of the most desolate territory on the planet. The La Posa Plain, the Ranegras Plain, the Kofa Wilderness. The abandoned bed of a long-lost inland sea. Bounded on both sides by bare, ragged mountains with names like Eagletail Peak, Signal Mountain, and Fourth of July Butte. Until the mid-1970s, even travelers between Phoenix and L.A. avoided these badlands. The railroad ran south and west, through Yuma, or north and west through Wickenburg. The old highway took an out-of-the-way route north, for otherwise there would have been no towns and no water for travelers. And even now, with all our mastery of nature, with all of Phoenix’s seemingly invincible growth, the Harquahala Desert is a forbidding place.

I drove for an hour on freeways, first south into the city and then west into the sun. I slowed down to let a dust devil twist across the interstate, knowing these whirlwinds were capable of overturning tractor-trailer rigs. At the little hamlet of Tonopah, I got onto surface streets and then dirt roads as the last subdivisions gave way to scattered ranch houses and then trailers and finally nothing but chaparral and cactus amid the endless cracked blond dirt of the desert. I played the CD Lindsey had given me and then I sat in silence. A sheet of sweat would not evaporate from my skin.

I tried not to think, but of course I did. By the time I’d left the Sheriff’s Office years ago, I had built the necessary nonchalance about finding dead bodies. But it hadn’t always been that way. There was the night I was a twenty-year-old rookie serving a warrant with Peralta to an old hotel in the Deuce and finding a forgotten dead man instead. Peralta called it a “stinker.” I stumbled back down the stairs and onto the street, vomiting my dinner onto the hot sidewalk. For years, I had been ashamed of that, but at least it was human.

There were dusty sheriff’s cruisers on both sides of the trail. I parked behind the last one, adjusted my sunglasses, and stepped out into the heat. It was like walking into an oven set on high, under a brilliant blue sky, with a cactus wren cooing off in the distance.

“You Mapstone?” a young deputy asked. I said I was and showed my ID. She nodded and led me off into the desert. We walked maybe a quarter of a mile, over soil hard and ancient, down a wash and back up into a thicket of mesquite and cholla, which was now roped off with crime-scene tape that looked weirdly out of place here. Tall uniformed men in sunglasses milled around. I pulled out my badge and hung it on my belt, feeling strangely at home.

“She hasn’t been here long,” Peralta said. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the logo MSCO CHAIN GANG-one of the sheriff’s marketing coups-his Glock 9-mm pistol restraining his belly. He led me under the tape. We were careful to walk single file in case other footprints might be found around the scene.

“What do you mean?” I said. “She disappeared a month ago.”

“Look,” he said. Suddenly, we were there, beside a small bluff, under a creosote bush, pulling back a plastic blanket, looking at a pale, red-haired young woman.

Peralta read my mind. “Nobody looks that good if they’ve been in the desert six days, much less six weeks. I think she was dumped in the last few hours.”

I asked, “Who found her?” but I was hardly listening when Peralta said, “Anonymous call to the nine-one-one operator.” I was looking at Phaedra. Her eyes were still staring, dead now, at whoever had killed her and brought her here. I did not know her. And yet I did.

“David.” Peralta was next to me. “You okay?”

I nodded.

He pulled down the plastic sheet. “Looks like strangulation of some kind. Note the marks on the neck-may be consistent with a utility cord or some kind of climbing rope. Only wearing a bra when she was found. Her purse had ID and fifty dollars inside. Sexual abuse not determined. Crime lab is on the way from Phoenix.”

“What about her hands?” I said. “Check under her nails.”

“Thank you, professor,” Peralta said, annoyed.

I stood a bit uncertainly and stared off at a mountain in the distance, a redoubt for the apocalypse if you could only get water to it. “It’s like Stokes,” I said.

“Huh?” Peralta said.

“The bra. Only wearing a bra. Strangled. They’ll find she was raped, too. Like Rebecca Stokes and Leslie Reeves and Ginger Brocato and Betty Moran and Gloria Johnson. It’s the same way those homicides were done.”

Peralta pulled me aside, pulled off his sunglasses. His brown eyes were rimmed with red cracks. “This is now and this is another Harquahala murder,” he said.

I felt like he’d kicked me in the stomach.

“What are you saying?” I said. “The Harquahala murders have been prostitutes, dumped in the desert. This isn’t that.”

He only looked at me. I grabbed his shoulder.

“This isn’t that, Mike. This is Phaedra Riding.”

“You don’t know who Phaedra was,” Peralta said. “You didn’t know her secrets. From what you told me, she sounded like a flake.” It was too hot for long sentences.