Arizona Dreams (David Mapstone Mystery 4)

She shook her head. “If he did, he got away with it, David.”

I let out a breath, too loudly. “He confesses this in the letter?”

“That’s all the letter is about,” she said. “It’s very matter of fact. I would rather have learned that he had a mistress or that I had been adopted…”

“Why would he write it down?”

Her hair had come loose again. She swept it back and said, “I think he finally wanted me to know. After he’d been diagnosed, and knew he didn’t have long. He knew I’d take charge, and I’d find it. But the crime—if it happened—was in 1966.”

“Was your father the kind of man who would kill somebody?”

“I thought he was when he found my boyfriend in bed with me when I was seventeen,” she said. “And I mean that. He had a bad temper. And he’d had to have been tough to make it in Cleveland. But, no, nothing like that.”

“Who was this man he killed?”

“It doesn’t say. Now, don’t dismiss me. I know what you’re thinking. He only refers to him as ‘Z.’ He writes that he felt he had no choice, but nobody would have believed him. But there’s so little to it—just a few sentences. No sense of really why this happened, what drove him to do it. There are so many questions.”

“Dana,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear this. I know it’s got to be a shock, coming on top of losing your father. And I’m honored you’d look me up. But I don’t really see how I can be any help.”

“This is what you do, David,” she said, her eyes bright. “Crime and history. I remember you said that every historian’s dream is to discover a letter in an attic.”

“I think I probably said something like a letter from Abe Lincoln or George Washington…”

“Well, it’s not that,” she said primly. “But I need to know if my father really did kill a man.”

I tried to watch her closely, but instead I felt the largeness of the room around us. My eyes drifted to the Republic on my desk, with headlines about continuing drought, a twenty-car pileup on Interstate 10 and a six-year-old boy found chained by his parents in a box. So much trouble in my city. I said, “Do you really want to know? Sometimes it’s better not to know everything.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I have to know. Wouldn’t you want to know if your father was a murderer?” She pushed the envelope at me. I didn’t touch it. She said, “Anyway, that’s not all. The other thing he writes is where we can find the body.”

I felt relief. “Then it’s clear. If you really fear that this is possible, you’ve got to go to the police back in Ohio.”

She shook her head violently, unleashing a small cascade of hair. “No, David. I came to the right police. The man is buried right here in Arizona.”

5

A few days later, I checked out a Ford Crown Vic from the sheriff’s motor pool. Lately I’d been riding the bus in anticipation of Phoenix finally finishing the light-rail line on Central; when that happened, I could take the train the mile-and-a-half between the house and my office in the old courthouse. With this well-used piece of county property, I drove west and left the city. I tried to leave the city, but it kept spreading out. The cotton and alfalfa fields that stood when I was a kid had long since been covered with subdivisions. Now many of them, once new safe suburbia, had become slums. The little farm towns had turned into cities, densely packed red tile rooftops stretching to the horizon. Farther out, the remnants of farms sat like an unwanted tenant as the shopping strips, car dealerships and houses encroached. Signs hawked new developments from a dozen builders. A billboard half the size of a football field and as well constructed as a city hall promised yet another project, the words standing out in ten-foot gossamer, “Arizona Dreams.”

Where Interstate 10 curved around the booming suburb of Goodyear, the horizon opened up. The White Tank Mountains spread out in front of me, a vast purplish expanse slathered with the distinctive pale rocks that give them their odd name. The mountains, which I usually saw as a smudge to the west, suddenly looked majestic and wild. Behind them, the sky was an electric blue, ornamented with similarly bright fluffy white clouds. It was a scene increasingly rare in my town, with its dirty air. But the land I passed through was not empty. The sun glinted off the rooftops. Elsewhere, every empty parcel of land had a sign that proclaimed “available.”

As traffic lightened up, I let myself hear Lindsey’s voice in my head. She had awakened me at three that morning to hear the rain. It was a rare and lovely sound in the thirsty land. I slipped out from the covers to watch the drops fall with increasing force on the dark street outside. Then I came back to bed and she had warmed me. Then our hands conjured their usual magic, but later, as she lay panting, sprawled atop me, I knew her mind was someplace else.

After she had tucked her toes under my legs, as was her custom, I ventured, “Are you okay?” She just pressed her head against my shoulder and said nothing. The rain had settled into a gentle brushing sound on the roof. I listened for a while, then whispered, “Is it Robin?” But again, she had been silent, and she became so still that I thought she was asleep. I just held her, feeling her heart beat against mine.

“I spent so many years trying to escape it, Dave.” She spoke in a whisper, as if she didn’t want the room to hear. “Why is Robin here? Why was she on our street?”

I just listened and stroked her soft hair. Knowing that Lindsey had a tough childhood didn’t help me understand her reaction to this mystery sister. I knew other things might have been on her mind, too. She was indeed the valuable one in the family, as Peralta noted. Lately she had helped bust a money-laundering operation working through a small bank in North Scottsdale. But there was nothing small about the players. The feds claimed the money was part of a complicated financing scheme involving Mexican drug lords, the Asian sex-trade, and Middle Eastern terrorists. It reminded me of the eighteenth century trade triangle of slaves, rum, and molasses. It worried Lindsey. Robin worried Lindsey. For that matter, there was an unsolved murder just down the street. There was a lot to worry us all. But it didn’t seem like the right time to ask her for anything more. I could feel her tears on my skin. And then I felt her breathing smooth out, and pretty soon I was asleep, too.

Now I was so far west that the mountains had shifted. The White Tanks were to the east, and south of them the Sierra Estrella piled up massively, an unfamiliar view. Due south was a low ridge of bumpy tears in the horizon; the Gila Bend Mountains, I think. When I came off the interstate, the city was gone. After a mile of driving on a two-lane road, even the scruffy trailers and junkyards of the desert rats had been replaced by chaparral and brittlebush and empty country. The bones of an old gas station passed my window. The freeway didn’t exist when Dana’s father allegedly killed “Z” and buried him. The way into the desert would have been longer and more tortuous, but the directions were clear enough.

Stashing bodies in the desert was nothing new—this Harquahala Desert had been the dumping ground for a serial killer a few years back. Lindsey had finally stopped him. That had been when we were first getting together. This desert had memories, secrets. And yet another one, courtesy of a dead man’s letter. I still had it locked in my desk drawer. It was one page of inexpensive white paper. The writing was in blue ink, in a jaggedy script. But it was legible, and, as she had said, it was matter-of-fact:

Dear Dana,

If you’ve found this letter and opened it, then I’m gone. I’m sorry to give you another shock. But it has to come out. I killed Z in March 1966. I had to. You have to know he left me no choice. I took his body out to the property west of Tonopah and buried him. It wasn’t a proper burial. Just rocks.

There was one sentence in a different tone. At the botto

m of the page. It read: