I walked over to his little refrigerator and got a diet Coke. I sipped it cautiously. “Mike, answer me this: How many times before did your Harquahala killer call the Communications Center to say where a body could be found?”
“None.”
“Have the others been this close to La Paz County?”
“No, no, goddamn it. But what does that prove? Green River crossed county lines. Ramirez did Orange County and L.A. County-hell, even San Francisco. None of these guys can read a map ’cause they’re too busy talking to Satan or their neighbor’s terrier.”
“And did the MO of the body dump jibe?”
Peralta sighed again.
“It didn’t, did it?”
“We can’t be sure,” Peralta said. “He change
s his routine every time. He’s not as ritualistic as some I’ve seen. Look, David, even if she wasn’t turning tricks, we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet. By your own report, Phaedra answered personal ads, had lots of men in her life. Who knows who she met out there.”
“Come on, Mike! Most people who answer personal ads don’t end up dead. You know this isn’t related. You’re just letting this thing run on bureaucratic momentum. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to group some homicides so when you get your Harquahala killer, you’ll have a higher clearance rate.”
“Okay, hotshot. What’s your theory?”
I sat back down and sipped the cold drink. “I don’t have one yet. But I have a strange feeling about it.”
Peralta looked at me.
“She was meant to be found. Most body dumps, the killer hopes the victim won’t be found. This guy calls nine-one-one and gives directions. And she was meant to be found in a certain way, just like those women forty years ago.”
Peralta threw up his hands. “This shit again.”
“Hear me out,” I said. “So he’s a media junkie. He read about Stokes, saw you and me on TV. Wanted to make a point.”
“What point?” Peralta fairly shouted. “Why would he even know you knew Phaedra from Adam? And how do we know he didn’t grab her weeks before the story broke about the Stokes case?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know yet.”
Two days passed. Julie and I holed up at my house like two hermits in winter. Only we were hiding from the sun and the heat and our own heartbreaks. We made love and held each other. It was both familiar and strange, as if we had always been together and yet we were only touching copies of our sensual selves from long ago. The oleanders and citrus trees protected us from the world for a while.
We talked more. Julie slowly filled in some of the blanks of her life: She married a lawyer named Royce. He beat her up at least once a month. They went to a lot of parties and did a lot of cocaine. They had a daughter. When Julie finally grew sick of the beatings and the husband’s affairs, she sued him for divorce. Royce got custody of the daughter, Mindy, after a protracted fight. “He went to law school with the judge, for God’s sake,” she said. Then a couple of aimless years-“I went kind of crazy when I lost Mindy”-spent with a succession of bad-news lovers. Then some therapy. Now, she was trying to get her life back together, maybe get the court to modify the custody award. And was dealing with the death of her younger sister. There was nothing for me to do but listen.
At night, I slept fitfully, the.357 just under the bed, the outside noises casting sinister echoes. Julie burrowed deep against me, pulling my arm across her body, nesting her feet against my legs. Sometimes I would wake up and hear her sobbing softly, and I would hold her closer.
In the daytime, we wandered off separately for our lonely rituals. I tried to read some, write some, keep my mind distracted. Books had never been a comfort to Julie, so she watched daytime TV and drank alone, until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Then she came and wrapped me up in her arms, trembling and sobbing.
On Saturday, I woke up from a five-fathom-deep sleep and the other side of the bed was empty. The phone was ringing and the clock said five minutes ahead of noon. When I picked it up, the line was silent. And then a deep voice said, “Mapstone. This is Harrison Wolfe. Detective Harrison Wolfe, Phoenix PD, retired. I think we need to have a talk.”
Chapter Thirteen
Palm Lane took me east through monotonous, declining neighborhoods of cinder-block ranch houses and lawns of dying grass. Not a dog, cat, or human ventured into the midsummer heat. Forty years ago, when Phoenix became a city of several hundred thousand nearly overnight, these homes symbolized the American dream. The vets came west to live in endless sunshine and work at places like Motorola and Sperry Rand. Builders like Del Webb and John F. Long would put them in a house for twelve thousand dollars on a VA loan.
Block after block, mile after mile, the subdivisions took over the lettuce fields and citrus groves. Now the speed, volume, and thrift with which the houses had been thrown up was only too apparent. The old owners had long ago moved to newer neighborhoods, leaving thousands of seedy rentals, the homely ghosts of 1950s dreams. Gang graffiti sat everywhere, defiant and ugly. Cars leaked oil into yards once lovingly tended. A Sun Belt slum, crumbling and rusting and dying under the relentless sun. It salted my black mood, made me hate Phoenix all over again and vow to get out as soon as I could.
At Twenty-fourth Street, I turned south and found the little taqueria where Harrison Wolfe had said he would meet me. It sat in an old Circle K building, another soulless cinder-block relic from “old” Phoenix. I parked the Blazer next to half a dozen low-riders. Inside, I was the only Anglo in the place. I ordered a Negra Modelo in Spanish and sat in a corner booth, feeling everyone’s eyes on me.
When the old Anglo walked in, I knew it had to be Wolfe. The machismo in the young Mexican-American men milling around the jukebox just seemed to die, and they sullenly shrank away from him. He was tall, slender, and ramrod-straight, and he was wearing a crisp white shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. As he looked at me, I took in his craggy, sunburned face, his shock of white hair. He must have been a handsome man once, but he had cop’s eyes, narrow and searching. And although he walked stiffly, his movements held the confidence of potential violence. He sat carefully across from me, did not extend his hand or greet me in any way. When he had settled, he fixed blue eyes on me.
“So you’re the great history professor who’s been investigating the Rebecca Stokes case.”
“So you’re the little lady who started the great war,” I could hear Lincoln say as he greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe. I met Wolfe’s eyes, knowing that to have done so years ago would have meant a sudden visit from the sap or the club. Cold blue eyes in a face ruined by age and the sun.