Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

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; Then, in a different voice, “Tell me about your case, History Shamus. What did we find down there under that warehouse?”

“Lindsey, tell me about your mother.”

I could feel her tense a little, then let it go.

“Oh, Dave.” She sighed. “God, I wish I hadn’t given up smoking.” She drummed her fingers on my calf. “I hardly knew her.”

She flashed the blue eyes at me. “She heard voices. It scared me when I was little. I didn’t know what it was all about. She took us from place to place. I used to see the different men she’d bring home, and she’d moan and screech behind the bedroom door. I thought they were hurting her. And she’d go into rages. She’d just walk away for days at a time. It was years before she got help, and she didn’t always take her drugs. The legal ones, I mean. She did really well with the illegal kind. My upbringing wasn’t Leave It to Beaver.”

I just listened. She stroked my leg with a light, detached touch, making my leg hair stand up straight.

“It was all properly seventies and absurd,” she laughed low and humorless. Then, in another voice, “I don’t hate her. She was younger than I am now and she had a thing for drugs and booze and bad men. She sure didn’t want to be a mother. It’s just that I couldn’t bring myself to love her, and if that makes me a monster, fuck everybody. Fuck everybody.”

The room was as fragile as old crystal. I looked around for some reassuring signs of Lindsey as I had known her, realizing that everything had changed somehow. Shelves and shelves of books: fiction, poetry, philosophy, a little history. Photos of Mayan ruins from a trip she made three years ago. Photos of us on the beach in San Diego from earlier this year. Mexican Day of the Dead art, one of her many eccentric enthusiasms. Two personal computers, CD-ROM, printer, scanner and modems on a butcher block suspended on a pair of old filing cabinets. X-Files calendar. A large print of Emily Dickinson. A barrel cactus with a blue ribbon around it. Her big tomcat Pasternak fell against me and purred loudly.

“The more you know about me, the less you’re going to want to be with me.” She leaned in against me.

“That’s not true,” I said. “And you’re not a monster, Lindsey.”

“You wouldn’t know, Dave. You love my legs.” I needed to laugh and we both did. There was a fundamental kindness in Lindsey and she would always let me off the hook.

“Just hold me,” she said softly. “Don’t try to make any sense of things. Just hold me all night.”

Chapter Thirteen

She was gone by the time the alarm went off next morning. For a long minute, I luxuriated in her scent, our scent, embedded in the sheets. Then the memory of last night’s bad news came back and I sat up quickly. There was a Post-It note on the pillow: just the imprint of her lips in dark lipstick. I tucked it fondly in my pocket. Then I showered, fed the cat, locked up and drove downtown.

If weather really matched our moods, it would have been cold and gray outside. Instead, it was just another beautiful Phoenix day: seventy degrees, fourteen percent humidity, not a cloud in sight. The radio was playing the pop love song of the season—hard to believe I once measured my romances by such things. All the way down Central, I was stuck behind a car with Quebec tags, my first snowbird sighting of the season. The tag was imprinted with Je me souviens—“I remember”—a reference to the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 that ensured British domination of North America. Somebody appreciated history. I remembered Lindsey’s kisses, the softness of her black hair, the sensation of my fingers lightly stroking the downy skin on the small of her back, the sound of her love moans and gasps. I remembered too damned many good-byes in my life.

Over on the AM, Dr. Sharon was lecturing a caller about people needing to act like adults and take responsibility for their actions. I agreed with her, but I also knew human beings are remembering animals. With memory comes baggage and fear. I didn’t know if any two people could make it for long nowadays, but if they did, somehow they had to find a way to make peace with their individual histories and make a new one together. Then they only needed all the luck available in the world. The romantic philosophy of Deputy David Mapstone—fat lot of good it’s done me. Dr. Sharon signed off with her trademark: “You can do it!”

I could do it. I had stopped by home for a change of clothes when the phone rang. It was the sheriff’s communications center and a message had been left for me: Mr. Max Yarnell, chairman of Yarneco and brother of the kidnapped twins, would see me at eleven o’clock. I changed clothes again, this time into a suit.

Yarneco took up the entire 20th floor of the Yarneco Tower on North Central, only a few blocks from my house. The skyscraper had been built for Dial Corp. in the early 1990s, and it resembled a copper-colored deodorant stick, or a vehicle for deep-space travel, or maybe a marital aid—anyway, it was the most dramatic building on the Central Corridor. I liked it.

When the elevator opened, Hayden Yarnell was waiting for me. He was entombed in an oil painting that took up the better part of a darkly paneled wall in the reception area. Snowy-haired and dressed in a dark suit and stiff Herbert Hoover collar, he gazed out at a future that had seen the Yarnell Land & Cattle Co. evolve into an international concern. His eyes looked black. A gold watch chain dangled tantalizingly from his vest.

Next to the patriarch was a museum-quality display of the company’s history and present-day structure. This was the age of the dot-com, but somehow Yarneco made piles of money the old-fashioned way. Yarneco owned mines in Arizona and Chile, defense contractors in California and Ohio, and a land development division responsible for huge projects around the Southwest. It was, a panel said, the largest privately held company in the state.

Before I could read further, I was met by a pleasant-looking young blonde in a very pleasant-looking powder-blue suit with a short skirt. She introduced herself as Megan, Mr. Yarnell’s assistant. He was running late, but I could wait in his private conference room. She led me through another dark-paneled room, where I couldn’t help noticing behind a counter two muscular, short-haired young men in suits with roomy jackets—roomy like Peralta’s, designed to conceal substantial firearms. They looked me over carefully as I followed Megan up a spiral staircase and through two heavy wood doors into the Yarneco inner sanctum.

The room was dominated by a sleek boardroom table big enough to accommodate a minor-league hockey game. Then there was the Indian art, large, intricately carved kachinas. Luminous Acoma pottery on dark pedestals. Basketwork that looked old enough to be very pricey. And two walls of glass.

From up here, Phoenix looked like the exotic capital of an imagined land of sun and prosperity. Glittery towers, a sea of green treetops, the mountains bare and rough and purple-black, witnesses to their volcanic heritage. Maybe this was what Coronado was after when he roamed the Southwest in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola. Only he was four hundred years too early. I could easily see my house three blocks away on Cypress.

I broke out of my reverie when a tall man strode into the room and gave my hand a peremptory but solid handshake. He had his grandfather’s long nose and full head of hair, but his hair was the color of lead and his face was tan and handsomely lined more from sailing the Greek islands and golfing at Pebble Beach than from driving cattle to the High Country. I’d seen this face all my life, among the top donors profiled in the programs of the Phoenix Symphony and Herberger Theater Center, smiling like a desert lord from a decorating article in Phoenix Magazine, discussing a huge new development or copper mine in the business section of the Republic. It was the face of the West’s moneyed establishment. It wasn’t smiling.

“I’ve already talked to a policeman named Hawkins,” Max Yarnell said. “My brother and I agreed to help with this DNA fingerprinting. So I don’t really know how I can help you.”

His voice was Toastmasters, with a dash of executive-suite impatience. His athletic frame mirrored it: practiced and toned, but a little coiled, a little tense, packed nicely into a monogrammed French blue dres

s shirt, and a tie with a tight pattern of gold and blue that looked a little like deranged DNA. Maybe I had DNA on the mind. I told him my job for the Sheriff’s Office.

“I never did well in school,” he said. “And I never lived in the past. Quickest way to waste your life away.”

“I get that,” I said. “Do you remember anything about the kidnapping?”