High Country Nocturne (David Mapstone Mystery 8)

The nasty recession of the early 1980s was still hanging on. The metropolitan area was two-and-a-half million people lighter than today.

I was different from the other graduate students. For someone my age, I had a real job that mattered, one with adult responsibilities, one with duties that carried consequence. On the other hand, most of the other deputies held me in some suspicion. A college degree was rarer then in law enforcement, much less somebody who wanted to be a history professor. It made for an ongoing tension, this living two lives.

That July day, the midnight-to-eight shift was slow. The schedules worked for me so I could go to class and handle my slave-labor grad-student teaching load during the day. Who needed sleep at that age?

I was on patrol far from the city, west past mile after mile of farms and into the desert that framed the White Tank Mountains. I was there because Caterpillar, which ran a desert proving ground up the side of one steep rise, had been hit by a series of burglaries.

The area was popular with high-school keggers and the occasional body drop, whether done by the mob or freelance killers working for money or trying to conceal the consequences of their murderous passion. They assumed we wouldn’t find a body out here. We nearly always did.

Otherwise, it was the desert: silent, incomprehensible, teeming with wildlife at night while on the surface, to the untrained eye, a creation of brute simplicity where saguaros that could live for centuries looked at you as nothing more than a passing trifle.

At 6:07 a.m., with the angry summer sun already thirty degrees above the horizon, I found a car sitting off a dirt road a mile from Caterpillar. It was a faded green 1967 Dodge Monaco with Arizona plates and no one visible inside. I pulled behind and radioed in my location—ten-twenty—and the tag number. When the dispatcher told me it wasn’t stolen, I stepped out and checked the vehicle.

It was empty and unlocked. Inside, I found no weapons or drugs. The keys were in the ignition and when I turned them to bring up the alternator, the dashboard showed me a full tank of gasoline. The tires were worn retreads.

The trunk held a spare tire, jack, and a large first-aid kit, nothing more. It was neat and had been recently vacuumed.

I thought about backing away and waiting, in case these were burglars. But the break-ins at the proving ground always involved cars pulling right up to the fence. Recreational hikers this far from town were rare in those days. I pocketed the keys and decided to check the area on foot.

The monsoon season hadn’t started yet, so the chalky soil was hard-packed and didn’t show tracks well. But I spotted some light foot treads leading out into the desert. From the cruiser, I slung a canteen over my shoulder and put on my Stetson to shield me from the sun. I followed the footprints.

They disappeared as the land became rocky. I took a chance and went straight, finding them again thirty feet away on sandier soil. I was hardly an expert tracker. In this case, I was lucky.

Maybe twenty minutes later, as the land dipped in a graceful slope, I saw him face down and maybe five feet away from a large stand of cholla. He had dark-brown hair and wore yellow running shoes. When the direction of the breeze changed, I knew he was very dead.

What a great way to end the shift—with a stinker.

I pulled out the heavy portable radio on my belt, a new innovation, and called for the medical examiner and detectives.

As a uniformed deputy, my job was pretty simple. Secure the scene. That was easy, given that we were in the middle of nowhere. Today the area is overrun with houses, including the fancy subdivision of Verrado. Back then, it was silent emptiness.

My other memories were few. Because of the incident, I had to get a friend to cover for me in teaching my undergraduates that day and I made good overtime from the county.

As I read on, I learned more about my stinker.

His name was Tom Frazier and he was twenty years old, an emergency medical technician for Associated Ambulance and completely alone in the world. His mother had died of a heart attack three months earlier. He had no brothers or sisters and his parents had apparently divorced years before.

Aside from his work colleagues, who spoke well of him, he seemed to have no friends. He had no girlfriend. In those days, no detective would ask about a boyfriend unless it was a vice investigation.

If the file ever contained a photo of Tom Frazier, it was gone. All that remained were shots of the scene and the autopsy.

The detective wrote that Frazier was saving money for college and his bank account held five thousand dollars. But that, aside from the old Dodge, made up his assets. He rented an apartment, not far from where I lived at the time, was up-to-date on his rent.

The last person to see him alive, at least according to the reports, was his ambulance partner at the end of their shift. When he didn’t report for duty twenty-four hours later, the Associated supervisor called his home but the phone went unanswered. No answering machine, much less today’s cell phones.

The medical examiner estimated he had been out there for a little more than thirty hours. In high summer, that was plenty of time for the sun and heat to do its damage to the corpse.

This meant he drove out into the desert and then walked away from his car in darkness. The car was in running order.

He didn’t walk back toward the city, which was curious. The land sloped up toward the mountains there giving a nice view of Phoenix to the east. He could have seen the city lights in the distance.

Instead, he walked south for more than a mile. Nowadays that would be heading toward Interstate 10. Then, only farm roads and a two-lane highway lay in that direction and miles away.

Two weeks later the toxicology findings came in and the detective stopped his efforts to find out about Tom Frazier and why he had left his car and walked into the wilderness with no water.

I read the three-page tox report, marveling at how primitive it was compared with today. But it was modern enough make the cause of death definitive: a heroin overdose.

The case was closed as a probable suicide.