Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“Not necessarily,” Peralta said. “Where is Julie?”

I sat down in front of the desk and shrugged. “We checked her apartment, her ex-husband. Nothing so far.”

“Has she called you again?”

“Not for a few days, not since the last call I told you about.”

“She’ll call,” Peralta said. This was the cool, shrewd Peralta. All the anger from the day before was gone. I wondered if he even remembered it.

“Do you really believe Julie is involved in this?”

“You believe it, too,” he said simply. “I don’t know exactly how. But she knows a hell of a lot more than she’s told us so far.”

“I can’t believe Julie would murder her own sister.”

Peralta exhaled heavily. “My mother and her oldest sister didn’t speak for thirty years. I can believe it. But she sure as hell didn’t rape Phaedra. If Julie’s involved, someone else is, too. A guy.”

He stood up and put on his Stetson. “We’re raiding a militia training ground up by Saguaro Lake. Want to come? You haven’t been shot at in at least two days.”

I reached across his desk, opened his humidor, and took a couple of cigars. “No thanks. I’ve got work to do.”

Chapter Thirty

The vast west side of Phoenix has none of the glamour of Scottsdale and Paradise Valley. It lacks even the natural beauty of Camelback and the other mountains to the east. It’s as flat as Nebraska. Not too may years ago, it was just miles and miles of fields: cotton, lettuce, cabbage, alfalfa. Open irrigation ditches shaded by cottonwood trees ran on either side of two-lane farm roads, marking every mile like a precise checkerboard. Only Grand Avenue sliced crosswise through the checkerboard, heading northwest through a little railroad town called Glendale, where Mexican men in straw hats ic

ed the refrigerator cars to carry Arizona produce east.

Now, it’s all houses and strip shopping and malls. The ditches and cottonwoods are gone, and the former farm roads can’t be widened fast enough: six lanes, eight lanes. Glendale is a city in its own right-population 200,000-and the tiny farm hamlets like Peoria, Youngtown and El Mirage are full-blown suburbs. And Sun City, with its lazy, curving wide streets and golf courses and neat desert-landscaped haciendas baking in the sun.

When the first Sun City subdivisions were cut into the lettuce fields in the early 1960s, someone asked Grandmother if she would be moving out there. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to live around all those old people.” But tens of thousands of other folks weren’t like Grandmother-especially retirees from Cleveland and Rochester and Detroit who couldn’t bear the thought of another brutal winter-and now Sun City has a settled, almost crowded look that would have seemed impossible thirty years ago.

But “the active lifestyle” was still for sale here: Golf carts piddled up and down the spotless streets. Every few blocks held some kind of activity center, promising summer painting classes, swimming lessons, and, for the adventurous, martial arts and rock climbing. A couple of hardy souls were speed walking in the 110-degree broiler, past a sign discreetly promoting the Sun City Symphony’s summer season. A Sheriff’s Office patrol car sped past me, going in the opposite direction: maybe to a heart attack, maybe to a murder.

Dr. Sharon was on the radio-her show was addictive-lecturing some tremulous-voiced bag of emotions about “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” “Stop that!” she commanded in that voice that had attitude but somehow never made anybody mad. I thought, Shoulda known something was wrong with Julie; woulda worked harder to find Phaedra if I’d known she was in trouble; coulda seen the Stokes case would lead to trouble. Stop that, I said to myself. I turned off Del Webb Boulevard at 105th Avenue and parked in front of the single-story home of Avis Riding, Julie’s mother.

I knocked four times on the aluminum screen door before I heard a little dog barking and sensed someone looking out through the peephole of the main door. I held up my ID card. More barking. Then: “Please go away. I’ve answered questions until I just can’t talk anymore.”

“Mrs. Riding, it’s David Mapstone.”

The dog started in again. I momentarily considered shooting the.357 Python through the door at dog level just to get some peace.

“Julie and I dated when we were at ASU.”

“I remember you.” She was there suddenly, the door opening quickly. She was smaller than I recalled, with hair the color of winter straw. She was wearing a white top and light blue shorts, and her skin was that leathery brown that comes from too many years in the Arizona sun. She regarded me with puffy eyes.

“I thought you were some kind of a teacher now.”

“I’m working with the Sheriff’s Office again,” I said over the barking. “I’m very sorry to bother you at a time like this, but it’s important.”

“Wait.” She carried the little dog away, and I heard a door shut somewhere in the back of the house. She came back and invited me in. While she led me into a living room drowning in the smell of potpourri and wet dog, I went through the essentials, saying how sorry I was about Phaedra, how Julie had come to me, asking me to help find her sister, and how I now needed to find Julie.

“Do you have children?” she asked in a voice that sounded like it hurt even to speak.

I told her I didn’t.

“Then you’ll never know,” she said. “You’ll never know what it’s like to lose your child, to outlive your child.” My eyes went to a large high school graduation photo of Phaedra on the wall.

Mrs. Riding avoided it, staring out into the backyard, a sunny, narrow space with a neat Bermuda grass lawn and low hedges.