Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“I suspect she didn’t really realize what she was into even at the end,” I went on. “She was gentle and trusting and too eccentric.”

“You were always such a sentimental sap,” Julie said. “Phaedra was a little moralizing bitch sometimes, but she knew the color of money.”

“Even if it was money that belonged to Bobby Hamid?”

“I don’t know who it really belonged to, but it’s mine now,” she said. “I earned it. More money than you can imagine.”

“So that’s what you meant about us being in grave danger?”

Julie was silent.

“What about Phaedra? Did she realize she was in danger?”

“You don’t want to go there, David.”

“Oh, but I do. I am there.”

She sighed and looked at me like some pathetic being. “No money, no life. It’s that simple.”

“So Greg decided to rip off his employer?”

“Not Greg,” Julie said. “Give me more credit than that.”

I arched an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life working, watching the beautiful life go on all around me.” Her voice rose. “Jesus! All I had to do was walk around to see everything I couldn’t have. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be broke in Phoenix?”

“So a million dollars in cocaine money was the ticket? You just thought you’d stay in town and everything would be fine?”

“That was the plan,” she said.

“The plan where Greg Townsend and Phaedra took the fall? And Julie is left with the money?” I felt an overpowering revulsion.

“Nobody’s innocent. Everybody got what they wanted.”

“Really?” I said. “Everyone I talked to said Phaedra hated drugs. So what did she get?”

“She got stupid. She got in the way.”

“She was your sister.”

Julie clenched and unclenched her hands, but she was silent.

“So Phaedra didn’t know about the drugs or the money?”

“Not at first,” Julie said.

“But she overheard.”

Julie said, “All she had to do was be her weird, ethereal self. Always missing half the world right in front of her nose. That’s all she had to do. And nothing would have happened.”

“But it didn’t work out that way. Phaedra heard about ripping off Bobby Hamid, taking his money and failing to deliver the product. She got scared and she ran. She stayed on the run for over a month. Were you really afraid she’d narc on you?”

“There’s more to it than that,” Julie said.

“So eventually, you found her. You found her, and you told her something that persuaded her to meet you, and then to follow you away from a public place. The next thing you know, she’s dead in the desert.”

“I didn’t hurt her,” Julie said, her left eye twitching. “I couldn’t.”