Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

“No!”

“We have a cold-case squad.”

“Seriously?”

“We don’t need your help.”

“I’m crushed.”

“We don’t want your help.”

“So call Chief Wilson and tell him that.”

He sighed heavily from somewhere south of his lungs and went back to staring at his papers. He didn’t like eye contact. “My orders are to cooperate. I follow my orders. This is just a job. Not a crusade.” He signed a document and looked at me again, briefly.

“And this is your lucky day,” he went on, “because I have way more homicides than I have detectives. We have three thousand open-unsolved cases, and they’re from five and ten years ago, with living loved ones who care about what happened. I sure as hell don’t have time for my guys to be mucking around with some bones from sixty years ago. So if you stay out of the way and write your little report, we’ll get along fine.”

“Yessir,” I said. “Out of the way, little report, get along fine.”

He looked up and his eyes narrowed down to slits. A pillbox face ready to resist invaders.

“Look, what do you need to get this over with as fast as possible?”

I told him: access to records, somebody to push through the testing of the crime scene and the skeletons, and time to interview the Yarnell family.

He leaned back and expelled a breath. “You’re talking about one of the most prominent families in the state. What do you need to talk to them about?”

“You know, we talk to family members in murder investigations. At least at the sheriff’s office we do.”

He shook his head and his voice became whiny. “Jesus. It’s virtually a closed case. We just need to tie up loose ends. There’s no mystery here. We don’t need to make waves or piss people off.”

“I can be quite charming,” I said. “Look how I’m winning you over.”

He rubbed his neck. “You will wear your MCSO identification in the building at all times. There’s no smoking in here. No using our office supplies. You will gather evidence and take no action—none—without informing me first.”

He smoothed the papers before him. “No cowboy tactics, no Peralta shoot-em-ups. This is a nine-to-five job, a professional, civil service job. I’m taking my kid to soccer practice tonight, right on time. I expect that from everyone on this floor.” He added: “We’ll get the lab work moving ahead.”

I rose and started to leave.

“You’re an outsider times two, Mapstone,” Hawkins said. “You’re not a Phoenix officer. And you’re not really even a deputy. You’re some kind of professor. Outsiders don’t do well in this department.”

“There goes my self-esteem,” I said, and left him staring at his desktop.

Chapter Five

The cases were so old the files were kept in the city records warehouse over on Jefferson Street. At least, that’s what I hoped. I drove over, checked in with another civil servant at another desk, and, after some searching, went to work. I slipped the CD

of Ellington’s Carnegie Hall concert in my Walkman and spent the afternoon picking through records.

The physical memory of the case was located in dusty folders inside a single cardboard file box: papers that had once been the center of somebody’s work, but now sat dusty and neglected. Lindsey was a master of search engines, databases, spreadsheets and the Internet. But most records older than ten years were still on paper, microfiche and microfilm, and research was done the way I had learned it in college. Suited me fine. There was something almost mystical about the tactile search through old records for historical truth—the idea of touching the same piece of paper that was touched by the man or woman who lived the event. But, as Peralta said, maybe I was just strange.

The files were a mess, out of chronological order or their proper folder. It looked as if they had been tossed haphazardly into the box years ago and forgotten. The dust attested to that. I was sneezing and wishing I had taken a Sudafed. So I spent more than an hour sniffling, sneezing, and sorting the files into some kind of order. I separated them into piles: handwritten call logs from uniforms, typewritten accounts from the detectives, photostats of FBI forms, crumbling newspaper articles, fragments of court transcripts, a booking record with fading blue fingerprints, the judge’s execution order and black-and-white photos. Then I organized the reports chronologically—those with dates, at least. Ellington’s orchestra went smartly from “Take the A Train” through “Stardust” and “Ring Dem Bells.” The concert had been recorded in 1943, two years after the Yarnell kidnapping.

This was not like the case files of a modern police agency. There were no pre-printed incident reports for the beat cops to fill in, or any lab or forensics reports. Trace evidence beyond a detective’s sense of smell would have been a science fiction dream. I looked in vain for a chronology of the victims before the kidnapping. Even for a crime from 1941, this one seemed to have generated little paperwork, much less the kind of files that would go with what one newspaper labeled it: “Arizona’s Crime of the Century.” But my brief time back at the sheriff’s office had taught me how case files became misplaced, lost, and picked apart as time went on. The files were obviously incomplete. I made a note to check for files at the county courts and in historical archives. Then I got down to reading what I had.

On December 4, 1941, a radio car was called to the home of Hayden Yarnell. The officers were told that a kidnapping had occurred and they immediately summoned detectives. Yarnell’s twin grandsons, Woodrow and Andrew, had gone missing the previous Thursday, Thanksgiving. They were four years old and wearing matching cowboy outfits, but there was no mention of a pocket watch.

I skimmed through a detective’s report typed on a machine with a crooked r key, looking for a reason why it had taken the family so long to call police. The boys’ father, Morgan Yarnell, said he had put the twins to bed Thanksgiving night around eight o’clock. When his wife checked on them after midnight, they were gone. The grounds of the Yarnell house were searched, as were the adjoining citrus groves. At seven the next morning, Friday, November 28, Morgan Yarnell received a phone call from a man who claimed he had taken the boys. He demanded a hundred thousand dollars, deposited in a locker in Union Station. Morgan Yarnell complied, but the boys were never returned.