Concrete Desert (David Mapstone Mystery 1)

“But you found her. And she couldn’t be allowed to live, knowing what she knew.”

There was an odd brightness in her eyes. “I had to have the money. I didn’t have any chances left. You don’t understand. With the money, I could have a life; I could get Mindy back.”

“And buy more cocaine.”

She let out some breath.

“So where did I come in?”

“You?” She sounded disoriented.

“You came to me, remember? You asked me to look into Phaedra’s disappearance? Then you cried when I told you I’d done all I could do. So I jumped into it, up to my eyeballs.”

“You always had a ‘white knight’ fantasy,” she said. “I knew you couldn’t resist.”

“So you had it planned from the start. When Phaedra ran, you hoped I could help you find her. And that I could also be your cover. Your old boyfriend, who worked with the Sheriff’s Office, could muck around and draw attention away from the person who really killed Phaedra. And then I was the perfect alibi: I was the one who saw you cry at the Phoenician when I told you about Phaedra. I was the one who defended you in front of Peralta and the detectives.”

She lit a cigarette. “You give me too much credit, David. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.”

“I imagine your sister was scared, too.”

She was silent for a long moment. Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. “I never meant for her to get hurt.”

“Oh, cut the shit, Julie,” I said sharply. “Turn it off. I’ve wised up about you, finally. I know about your cocaine habit. I know you had Phaedra’s car. I know you were with her the night before she was found murdered. It was all a lie: that you hadn’t seen her for weeks, that you didn’t know why she’d disappeared. And everything about us was a lie, too.”

“You never knew me,” she said, crying now. “You never knew how awful it was growing up. How my mother never gave me-”

I cut her off. “This isn’t about you anymore, Julie. This is about Phaedra’s murder.”

She looked at me oddly. “What are you talking about?”

I grabbed her and shook her hard. “I’m talking about your little sister, Phaedra. She had red hair and played the cello and was afraid to fall in love. Somebody raped her and strangled her and left her in the desert, trying to make it look like a copycat killing, a link to a 1950s murder. Why, Julie? Why?”

Julie dropped the cigarette, grabbed my arms, and dug her nails into them. She looked at me with something wild in her eyes and crumpled slowly to the floor, shaking, hyperventilating. She wailed, “Nooooooooooo. Noooooooooooooooo. Nooooooooooo.”

I pulled her up off the floor, a limp doll. “Stop the acting, Julie. We’re going to Phoenix.”

The voice behind me said, “She’s not acting.”

I turned and was looking at Greg Townsend.

“And of course nobody’s going to Phoenix.”

He had a pistol in his right hand, pointed at my chest.

Chapter Thirty-three

“She has these breaks,” Greg Townsend said. Julie was on the floor, grasping my trouser leg, sobbing uncontrollably. “I don’t know if the drugs do this to her or if it’s more.” He was damned chatty for a man who had a pistol trained on me.

“I’ll have that gun,” he said, indicating the Python. He took a step toward me, thought better of getting too close, and backed up a step. “Put it on the floor.”

About five feet separated me from Townsend and the small black automatic he was holding. And that became my world, a small, hard place to live.

“The gun!” he said sharply.

“I don’t think so,” I said. Old training is supposed to kick in at such times. I don’t know if that was what happened. I just remembered Peralta’s first axiom: “Never give up your gun.”

“Are you out of your mind?”