Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“I can’t believe she’s dead.” He shook his head. “She was such a sweet, gentle soul. Who would have killed her?”

“You tell me.”

He stared at his hands. It was quiet enough that I could hear the hiss of the misters overhead. Off on Camelback Road, the traffic gave off a low roar.

“She came to me after school was over and asked if she could stay for a few weeks. I said sure.”

“When was this?”

“June. Around the end of the month.” He paused.

“She was scared, man,” he said. “She was running from something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at me. “You’ve got to believe me. I really don’t know. When Phaedra didn’t want to talk about something, she could send you to Siberia, you know? But she was real emphatic about me not telling anybody she was staying with me.”

He took a draw on the iced mocha. “Phaedra was a very passionate, very unhappy person,” he said. “Some people are just born disaffected. That was Phaedra. She was so damned deep, it was scary. And there was so much about her that was so wonderful-God, when she played her cello for me.” He shook his head. “But there was so much she wouldn’t talk about.”

“Did you guys do drugs?”

“Shit no! You think I’m crazy? Yeah, I did a little ecstasy and pot when I was in high school. But not now. And you couldn’t even talk to Phaedra about drugs. She’d go nuts.”

So why was she involved with a drug pilot? I thought.

I asked, “How long did she stay?”

“Almost a month. It was really nice to have her there. She left two weeks ago. She made a phone call one day and said she needed to meet somebody. She didn’t come back.”

“You weren’t worried?”

“I was worried,” he said. “But she said it would be okay, when she went out that night. Anyway, I always figured she would just up and leave me one day. I got the sense that was the way she operated with men, you know? I didn’t know anything was wrong.”

“What about her car?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t have a car. That was one of the things that was odd about her. She was always on foot. She said she had to lend her car to her sister.”

I thanked him, a little too curtly, and left a business card. I said other deputies would be in touch.

He stared at me hard, like a young man challenged over his woman. And then his face changed, reddened, fell apart. I thought of the word shattered and where it must have come from, when the pain gets so great that it shatters. He cried like a little boy.

“The night before she left, she said she wanted to run away.” He sobbed. “She asked me to go with her. I should have done it.…”

I let him cry. I put a hand on his shoulder and felt a deep emptiness in my middle.

Chapter Twenty-two

The next morning, I was standing in the little rotunda of the Arizona capitol, under the restored copper dome, waiting for Brent McConnico. The capitol was modest and charming, the best effort of a frontier state that probably had fifty-thousand people and not much money when it entered the union in 1912. It compared favorably with the “new” building attached to it, a monument to 1970s architectural ugliness.

The night before, I’d typed up what I had learned so far about Phaedra. Soon I would have to take it in to Peralta. But I wasn’t ready yet. Something made me want to talk to Susan Knightly before Peralta’s detectives descended on the case.

Behind me was a hubbub of voices as people spilled out of a conference room. Brent McConnico was walking slowly down the corridor, deep in conversation with another man, his arm around the man’s shoulders. He smiled toward me and raised a finger: Just a moment. Then he broke away and strode over, extending his hand.

“David,” he said. “So good of you to work around my schedule. I have just about fifteen minutes; then I’m in appropriations hearing hell for the rest of the day.”

He led me up a wide flight of stairs and into a deserted alcove overlooking the rotunda. “That was once the governor’s office,” he said pointing, “before they moved it into that monstrosity behind us.”

“I remember coming up here with my Cub Scout troop,” I said. “I think Paul Fannin was governor then.”