Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

“Jesus,” I said, and sat up. Gretchen just watched me. She was wearing one of my white dress shirts and nothing else. I looked back longingly at her, slipped on my robe and limped out into the house. Peralta’s bed was made and he was nowhere to be seen. Out the window was an unmarked police unit. Something bad.

“Quit screwing around,” came a voice through the little grille in the heavy wood door. The voice went to the body of Sheriff’s Detective Patrick Blair.

“What the hell, Mapstone?” he said. “I’ve been pounding on the door for fifteen minutes.”

“What’s going on?” I demanded, suddenly wide awake. I was instantly worried about Lindsey, so worried that I momentarily forgot who had been in my bed last night. Then I felt immediately guilty.

“Can I come in?”

“The house is a pit,” I said. “What do you need, Blair?”

He was as tall as me, and several light years more handsome. Just about thirty, he had luxurious black hair, merry Irish blue eyes, a perfect central casting face, a robust body. He had on a denim shirt, chinos and a Glock in a cross-draw holster, but he still looked like he just stepped out of a fashion magazine.

“What do I need?” he demanded. “What did you have going with Max Yarnell?”

I opened the door, suddenly angry. “Quit giving me the cop fuck-around,” I said. “I was doing that when you were in grade school. Give me some straight talk.” It brought out all the adolescent jerk in me, but it worked. His gorgeous face registered surprise and he said simply, “Max Yarnell has been murdered.”

We drove out to Scottsdale in silence, Blair at the wheel of a department Ford Crown Victoria, and me sitting in the passenger seat cloaked in a feeling of oppressive strangeness. Sometime after Max Yarnell had called me at the courthouse last night, he

had been killed. Blair didn’t know the details; he had simply been sent by Peralta to fetch me. And Blair was the guy who was seeing Lindsey every day. Jealousy is the most irrational and destructive of emotions, and I let it take a run through my mind all the way out to Max Yarnell’s gated canyon living. Lindsey and Patrick Blair. Lindsey who didn’t return my calls anymore. So this was why.

But almost as a backbeat was my memory of Gretchen from last night. When I had met her at the door, we had fallen hungrily into each other’s arms with the telepathy of lonely people. Every centimeter on my body had been electrified as her mouth explored my lips, my ears and my neck, and then her hands had worked their way around me. I had kissed her greedily, wrestling her tongue gently with mine, stroking that miraculously lovely reddish brown hair. I had felt so lucky that she wanted me.

Gretchen Goodheart. She was very different in bed than I would have imagined. I loved aggressive women, but she had surprised me. The kind of gentle foreplay that Lindsey craved had just made Gretchen more demanding. We shouldn’t make comparisons among lovers, but we all do, don’t we? Lindsey had that little oscillating move when we made love in the missionary position—it was the most amazing sensation and when she started it, I could never last long. Gretchen—Gretchen had her own moves, but they were all so different. I learned quickly that Gretchen’s favorite position was from behind. There’s no polite, romantic way to put it. This was pure fucking, as she had clenched the sheets and screamed into the pillow and pushed back to me for more. Gretchen was a screamer. I had trusted the thick walls of the house for our privacy. I hoped she’d still be at home when I got back.

The deliciousness of the memory lost some of its taste as we pulled up into the desert cul de sac, past half a dozen sheriff’s cruisers, Scottsdale Police units and unmarked Crown Vics. A TV van pulled in after us and started setting up. Blair shifted into park and said, “You’re Lindsey’s friend, right?”

“That’s right,” I said, mindful of any ironic inflection in either of our voices. We slipped our badges onto our belts and walked through the gate.

The house was long and low, hugging the side of a hill with lots of glass and modern adobe. From one side, the McDowells towered above. From the other, the city fell off through an arroyo, the view going all the way to the Estrellas, which today were cloaked in yellow-brown smog.

I walked through the double doors into the home and Peralta met me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Just watching your ass,” he said. “Yarnell’s house is in a little piece of county land. So technically, it’s our case, although we’ll cooperate with Scottsdale. I want every constituent served, even the dead ones.”

I followed him into a large room where evidence technicians were taking still and video photographs. The room was sparsely but expensively furnished with the kind of modern pieces you see in decorating articles in the New York Times Magazine. One wall was entirely glass, facing toward the city. The light show must be breathtaking. Then there was an airy chrome and wood desk, and beside that I could see a man’s head on the floor.

I didn’t understand what had happened until I walked carefully to the other side of the desk. Yarnell was on his back and a milky-colored stake was jutting out of the mashed bones and tissue where his breastbone used to be. There wasn’t much blood dirtying up the spotless hardwood floor. His eyes stared up with the peculiar glaze of the dead.

“God,” I said in spite of myself.

“It’s petrified wood,” Peralta said. “Looks like it came from over there.” He indicated a minimalist bookshelf off to the left. “A good Arizona kind of murder.”

“Somebody must have been strong as hell,” I said.

“This thing looks pretty heavy, so all you’d need is gravity,” said an evidence technician named Hernandez. “Especially after you cracked him on the jaw. Look at this.” He knelt and ran a gloved finger over the bottom of Yarnell’s face, which was discolored but not quite bruised. “Somebody hit him good,” Hernandez said. “You’d see a hell of a strawberry if he still had a heart beating.”

“Maybe he was a vampire,” said a uniform and everybody laughed.

“That’s enough,” Peralta said. He caught me by the shoulder and steered me out on the broad stone terrace.

“Tell me why your phone number is on the note pad on the dead man’s desk.”

“He called me last night and said he wanted to talk. He sounded like he’d had a few too many.”

“What did he want to talk about?”