Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

“David Mapstone.” I could see Heather starting back in the room, but she picked up on my eyes and came in slowly, quietly, behind us.

“Jack Talbott worked for Mr. Yarnell. Jack wanted to open his own garage someday.” She raised her head again, as if inhaling the memories. She paused. “Mr. Yarnell took kindly to him. Mr. Yarnell was a kind man.”

She licked her mouth with a huge gray tongue. “Do you believe in love at first sight, David Mapstone, sheriff’s deputy? Do young people still believe in that?”

I shrugged not-so-wisely. “I’ve seen it happen.”

“Never met a girl in stir who didn’t believe,” Frances Richie said. It was strange to hear a woman who looked like a grandmother use a word like stir so casually. But she was nobody’s grandmother.

“Why did Jack take the twins?” I was so damned clever. Just toss in the hard question after the softballs.

“Jack.” It was the only thing she said. She rubbed her eyes.

I repeated the question and she stared at the wall.

“Did you know he was kidnapping Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell?”

Her heavy head seemed to slip down a bit. Then she started to snore and for a long moment I thought she was gone. Then she raised her head and met my eyes, and her gaze was suddenly intense.

“I had a hat with that dress, David Mapstone,” she said, sounding the syllables of my name like they were a strange, lost language. Her eyes were bright with tears. “It was the prettiest thing I ever owned. A little, blue felt slouch fedora, but for a girl. Like in the movies. I felt like a movie star. The jail matron in Phoenix took it.”

Chapter Eleven

As I flew back at eighty miles-per-hour across the waterless expanse, it sank in how little Frances Richie had really told me. I had conversed with living history. But I had learned about a twenty-four-year-old’s beloved hat, not about the most notorious kidnapping in Arizona. Then the old woman was asleep again. I gave a list of questions to Heather Amis, and she grudgingly agreed to ask them.

It didn’t feel as if a millennium was coming to an end, but the year 2000 was only six weeks away. I didn’t have much to show for it. It was an arbitrary piece of calendar, to be sure: the year 2000, A.D., Anno Domini, the Year of the Lord. Or, for historians, the more inclusive C.E., for “common era.” Still, it felt amazing and strange to be alive to see this arbitrary turning of the calendar. As the homely sprawl of Mesa flew by the car windows, I thought about what was happening in the world at 1000 C.E.: the Middle Ages in Europe, and widespread fear of the end of the world. Leif Erickson supposedly discovered America. Beowulf was written. In what would become Phoe

nix, the Hohokam civilization was thriving. I was deadly in any trivia match.

Back in the city, I spent what was left of the afternoon showing photos of the pocket watch to jewelers. One shot showed the watch open: the hands were frozen at eleven-fifty. The owner of an antique jewelry shop in downtown Scottsdale identified it as a Waltham, Model Ninety-Two, eighteen size with twenty-one jewels.

“It’s a beauty.” He looked at the photos with a magnifying glass. “Railroad quality. Solid gold hunting case, and I would assume that’s fourteen-karat gold. Double-sling porcelain dial. Very nice.”

“Is it rare?”

“Waltham made a lot of watches. In fact, they were the first company to mass produce watches in America, did you know that? But they also made some exquisite watches, too. The Ninety-Two, it’s not a terribly rare watch, but it’s not that common, either, especially with the gold case. I’d bet fewer than a thousand of that model were made. Looks like yours is in very fine condition.”

“When was it made?”

“Around 1892. Model Ninety-Two, get it?”

I asked him if the serial number could be traced. He wasn’t optimistic. “The company went out of business in the fifties,” he said. “I could tell you more if you brought it in.”

Sure, I thought, I’d be happy to bring in, when Lt. Hawkins lets me check it out from the evidence room. When hell froze over. But I knew this much: The watch found with the twins’ bodies was not just a workingman’s brass watch, not something likely left behind by Jack Talbott. Yet there was nothing in the reports about a missing watch from the Yarnell house. The watch was never mentioned at all.

I drove downtown with the top down on the BMW. The day had turned cooler with a line of high clouds from the west, and it was hard to imagine that one hundred ten degrees or the raw sun of July were even possible. By the time I reached the courthouse, the streets were jammed with office workers heading out to the suburbs, out to one of those new cul-de-sac developments carved out of saguaro cactus forests. The days were definitely getting shorter, even in the Valley of the Sun. I could tell it by the dusky texture of the light in my office, which just a month before had been filled with sun at this time of day. Now, not yet five-thirty, the room felt faded and tired. Or maybe it was just me. I walked to the substantial old desk, set my notes down and sat myself, feeling the weight of all the violence and loss. I wished Lindsey didn’t have to work tonight.

The old jail had been located on the floor above me, the jail where Jack Talbott would have stayed during his trial. Ugly legends surrounded the place, and one day I had toured the cells with Carl. They still possessed a shadowy smell of captivity. For a minute, I just listened to the old-building sounds, waiting for a ghost to appear and explain everything. And that’s when I realized I wasn’t alone in the room. Sitting elegantly in a straight back chair ten feet away from me, staring out the window and picking a piece of lint off his cuffed pants leg, was Bobby Hamid.

“I hope I didn’t startle you, Dr. Mapstone.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” I said, too damned obviously startled. I wished I hadn’t left my Colt Python at home.

“Forgive me,” he said. His accent was vaguely of the British public schools. “I came here looking for you, and the security guard, a very nice fellow named Carl, let me in to wait.” It was just screwy enough to be true. “I made the assumption that you would not walk in the door and start shooting, like our friend, Chief Peralta.”

I looked around the room, as if anything there could be of interest to Bobby Hamid. Sixty-year-old murder cases, books on Arizona history, aging police logs and reports, empty Starbucks cups. My laptop was where I had left it this morning.

“You have balls the size of Tucson,” I said.