Arizona Dreams (David Mapstone Mystery 4)

One of the first lessons I learned as a patrol deputy was that family fights are among the most lethal situations for the cops. Killing was more likely when the family members were cops. So I let the silent chill hang in the car. Neither Lindsey nor Robin spoke. I had never been with Robin where she was silent for so long. After a while, a fight, provided some catharsis came at the end, would have come as a relief. The only fight was one we saw at the Circle K gas pumps on McDowell and Seventh Avenue, two middle-aged women going at each other with fists in the gas line. Maybe they were sisters, too. Lindsey called 911.

“I want to see this property,” Lindsey finally said, to me. “Let’s drive out into the desert.”

We stopped at Cypress Street to change clothes and load drinking water, then we drove back down Fifth Avenue to the Papago Freeway. In addition to a fuel shortage and gas lines, Phoenix had earned a smog alert that morning. The air was so dirty we couldn’t even make out the White Tank or Estrella mountains until we were miles west of downtown. Even then, the scene couldn’t have been more different from my memory of the clear, wild mountain range that day in February when I had gone to check out the body report given to me by Dana Earley. Now the White Tanks were reduced to a fuzzy brown apparition squatting against the dirty horizon. But it didn’t seem to deter the homebuyers. Acres of rooftops had been added since I had last driven out this far. More “available” signs peppered the landscape. Fewer farm fields survived. After the Buckeye exits the subdivisions fell away and we were enveloped by the desert in high summer. Without our technological amulets of air-conditioned car and cell phones, we would have been frighteningly vulnerable.

Quitting Tonopah, I again took the exit at 335th Avenue. It still wasn’t much of an avenue, and soon we were traveling over a graded dirt road. We rolled over the basin of the Harquahala Desert, surrounded by scrub and low cactus, and, at a distance, mountains. We were insignificant actors in this arena bounded by eternal spectators. Every mountain told its own fantastic story. I was no geologist, so I let my imagination play on the paintbrush strokes of light and dark, purple, dun, black, and gray. I watched the whorls, slopes, uplifts and ledges, the spectacular leaps and fortress walls. Other mountains were plain, giant dirt hills and subtle, brooding slopes covered with scrub. Ages and ages: God’s canvas unprofaned by subdivisions and man. Against it we moved, just three people, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, trying to solve a murder. At least I hoped we all three shared that goal.

The Bell property looked much the same. Suddenly the desert was lush again, with towering saguaros, demonstrative ocotillos, standoffish yucca, barrel cactuses fat and content, and my old nemesis the cholla. Thick palo verdes marked the wash that was hidden in the deep cut just outside our view to the east. To the north, the land lifted in a steady slope from the road, headed toward the fez-shaped butte and the sharp-featured mountains beyond. When we all stepped out of the car and closed the doors it was as silent as deep space. But here the star of the solar system was close, and the heat threatened to overwhelm every other sense. Lindsey put on a floppy hat. Robin and I settled for sunglasses. I walked them up to the old gate, then down the rutted path to Harry Bell’s cairn, explaining again what had happened that first day. The rocks had been neatly replaced over the grave, and as we got closer I noticed something else. A headstone, made of a shape and rock to fit in with its surroundings, stood at the western end of the cairn. Harry Truman Bell, was carved there, along with his years of birth and death. Then the words: He loved this land.

“Where did that come from?” Robin spoke for the first time.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Unless Louie paid for it before he died.”

“Why did Dana want to bring you out here?” Lindsey asked softly, more to herself. “There’s nothing here. It’s miles from anywhere. Why did she want you to come out here, where two guys would attack you?”

“Could she have known that?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Lindsey said.

“They were supposed to be guarding another property, where they grazed cattle in the spring and some contractor had been doing illegal dumping.”

“I know that’s the story,” Lindsey said. “It just seems too convenient, getting you out here, beating you. Maybe they meant to do more than that.”

“Look at that depression in the ground over there,” Robin said, pointing to an indentation in the slope. “That’s a sinkhole. It might mean there’s a cave. I did some caving with an old boyfriend…”

Lindsey turned away with an angry swing of her waist, and I knew what she was thinking. What could you believe about Robin?

Just then we heard a high distant roar, and two black diamonds darted through a canyon that cut its way between the northern mountain range. They were trailing brown exhaust: fighter jets from Luke Air Force Base. Then they banked, climbed, and shot across the desert heading south. The Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range was that direction. Before silence settled on the desert, I noticed that Lindsey had left us. She was walking up the slope toward the butte.

Robin touched my arm.

“David, please don’t hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” I said. “I don’t trust you.”

“You felt something for me that night, David, I know you did.” Her face was insistent under a sheen of perspiration.

“I didn’t feel anything,” I said. “Speaking of fakes, your boyfriend Edward was one, right?”

She stared at the ground. “I couldn’t tell you I’d been seeing Alan. Lindsey would have freaked. ‘Glad to see you after all these years, Sis, and by the way the corpse you just found was my boyfriend.’ Alan had been after me to move in with him. Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t.”

“And the black eye you had the night you showed up on our doorstep?”

“A little stage makeup I got at Bert Easley’s.” She took my hand, but I pulled away. “Oh, David. I had to have a story. I was scared. Can you believe me?”

“How the hell should I know?” My stomach was tied in the kind of knot that would baffle an Eagle Scout. “I just hope you’re not a murderer.”

“I didn’t kill Alan,” she said matter-of-factly. “But I know somebody was trying to hurt him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A couple of weeks before he was killed, Alan started getting phone calls in the middle of the night. He’d get out of bed and go in the other room and talk. At first I was really pissed, because I thought he was juggling me with his other girlfriends. The second time it happened, I went to the bedroom door and listened. Alan kept telling somebody no, a

nd how what they were asking was impossible, he wouldn’t do it. ‘Quit threatening me.’ I heard him say that at least twice, and then he said he would go to the police if this person didn’t leave him alone.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“No,” she said. She turned away from the sun, which was now far in the western sky. I moved to face her.