“She wanted to move on,” he said. “I was holding her back.”
I let it be. I said, “Why don’t you let Blair and Snyder look into this.”
“I can see the headline,” Peralta said. “SHERIFF INVESTIGATES POWERFUL POLITICIAN WHO IS CRITIC OF DEPARTMENT.”
“So let me quietly look into it,” I said.
“No.”
“Give me a few days.”
He repeated, “No.”
I was tired and angry, and I was rapidly pushing through the boundaries that even old partners respect. “Damn you,” I said. “That young man back there was abandoned by everybody in the world. When he fell off a roof while he was working for his father, his dad cut him loose. God, I hate what Arizona has become. And now he can’t expect justice from the Maricopa County sheriff.” I finished and bit my lip and stared out at a mass that I believed was Fourth of July Peak. It was now the Fourth of July, three in the morning. Peralta just grunted.
He asked, “What ever happened to the little girl who was kidnapped?”
“What? Oh, Olive Oatman? She was eventually rescued. She lived into her sixties.”
“How could wagon trains have come through here? It’s so barren and dry.”
“They followed the Gila River and there were a few wells along the way. It was very difficult. Stop changing the subject.”
Peralta started walking back toward the scene. “Get back to the book, Mapstone. It’ll be good for you.”
“What if I do other things on my own time?” I asked. “Check out some names. You don’t need to know anything. I’m just the crazy professor, working on his own.”
“No,” he snarled. “And I mean goddamned no!”
I let him stalk ahead. He got about ten feet and stopped, just standing there, his back toward me, his broad shoulders rigid with tension. Out into the night he said, “It might take a few days to sort everything out here. I’d say four days. You know how this damned bureaucracy works.”
He turned back to me and said, “Take Lindsey with you.” Then he walked on. A few more steps, and I heard, “And don’t be stupid.” All in all, I took that as permission from the sheriff.
Then he walked into the floodlights, and I followed to bum a ride back to the city. It was Independence Day, after all.
27
The next day, Tuesday, Lindsey and I gassed up her Prelude at the county pumps downtown and drove to north Scottsdale. The alternative was to prowl the streets looking for an open gas station, then sit in line for an hour. That was what most people were doing. The morning’s newspaper said it would be several days before the pipeline could be repaired. Until then, trucks were bringing in some gas from Tucson. People were learning that Phoenix was the nation’s fifth largest city in population only; it didn’t have a refinery, or very convenient mass transit.
Even with the shortages, traffic was heavy and tense, in the high summer way, and the air was filthy. Heat and tailpipe exhaust radiated up from the wide streets as we drove and I filled Lindsey in on the case. As usual, she asked the right questions, some I hadn’t thought about. At stoplights, when my eyes could stray from the road, I watched her, trying out my new eyes, the ones Robin had implanted while she was drunkenly wrapped around me. Maybe Robin had lied about Blair going to Washington, but what about Lindsey being a teenage mother? If it were true, it wouldn’t change anything in how I adored her. Even though the woman who claimed she trusted me with everything hadn’t trusted me with the biggest event of her life. To Robin, it was a sign Lindsey still wanted her bad boy, the father, and I was only a temporary safe harbor. None of it might be true, but those new eyes still scratched and irritated. In an hour, we reached the Scottsdale Airpark and the offices of the Arizona Dreams development.
The airpark had been the trendy corporate address for several years. Top executives could fly in and own a house in the McDowell Mountains, but otherwise keep Phoenix at arms’ length. Employees were priced out of Scottsdale, so they were forced to commute from miles away, from places like Chandler and Surprise and Glendale. The result was to make the low-density, rich paradise of Scottsdale into a sieve for the worst traffic jams in the Valley. It helped cook the smog that obscured the purple-gray undulations of the McDowells off to the northeast. The buildings weren’t much to look at, either: just dull, off-the-shelf two- and three-story tilt-up jobs found in every office park in America. They were surrounded by sidewalks that went nowhere and rock landscaping that radiated the morning heat like a convection oven. Nobody seemed to care, as more buildings went up every year.
We walked past a security guard reading a comic book—he looked about thirty—to a building directory listing nothing but builders, mortgage companies, land advisers, and Arizona Dreams LLC. Things kept coming back to this housing development. Dana Earley was the voice in their ubiquitous radio ads. I could almost recite by rote their promise of a return to real neighborhoods and genuine small-town living. Then the brochure found in the belly of the old school bus, secreted away with papers that Louis Bell might have given Davey Crockett for safekeeping. Papers so sensitive that somebody was willing to kill to find them. And the business card of Shelley Baker. We were coming without making an appointment. The building air was frigid, and felt good on my superheated skin. Lindsey, wearing a dark paisley skirt and white top, looked as fresh as morning in a place where the surface temperatures could reach one hundred forty degrees.
The company’s suite was not nearly so lax about security. The entry doors led you to a reception desk with standard-issue pleasant young woman. But off to the side was a waist-high partition, behind which sat a pair of serious-looking and well conditioned young men. Think Army Special Forces. They scowled at me. They even scowled at Lindsey. But they lost interest when we showed our badges and asked to see Ms. Baker. While we waited, there was the scale model to keep us busy. It took up a table that looked the size of our bedroom and was protecte
d by a Plexiglas shell. Inside were hundreds of tiny houses on curvy streets, golf courses, hiking trails, and desert preserve. The legend said Arizona Dreams would be one of the largest master-planned communities in the state’s history. At build-out, in 2020, it was to have 40,000 houses. I tried to imagine why Louis Bell, desert rat who lived in a trailer, would want anything to do with it. The project would go west of the White Tank Mountains, a mountain range away from the Salt River Valley. But it would still be miles east of the Bell property.
Just then a tall woman in a red suit came out and introduced herself as Shelley.
“Expecting trouble?” Lindsey nodded toward the muscle cubicle.
“Oh,” Shelley Baker said, “there have been threats from environmentalists.”
I figured there were about three environmentalists in Arizona, and they had contractor’s licenses. But I took her word for it as she led us past an inner door and down a hallway of offices to a conference room. Out the windows were the slopes of the McDowell Mountains. Running up to them were some of the priciest houses in town. I remembered going out there to target shoot as a teenager, when it had all been virgin desert. Now there was probably a kid who was doing the same thing in the empty desert west of the White Tank Mountains, and someday, when it’s chock-a-block with tract houses, he might remember.
Baker was talking. “This isn’t really the Arizona Dreams sales office. We will open that next month, along with several models.” We sat and she faced us. “But that’s not why you’re here.”