Camelback Falls (David Mapstone Mystery 2)

“This is crazy, Sheriff,” he shouted. “What are you doing? Where the hell are you?”

“I’ll contact you again,” I said. “Find out about the gunshot reports. And find out if there’s a Deputy Stevens in communications.”

Kimbrough was talking, but I carefully set the receiver back into the cold metal cradle of the pay phone.

He was a long way off. I was on the other side of the time zone, the other side of the mountains. I stood up from the cramped airport phone corral and looked out the huge plateglass of the airport terminal. The towers of downtown Denver glittered gold and silver in the distance, backed by the Front Range of the Rockies. The mountains were a shock to the plains, a great wall of purple rising up out of the land, filling the horizon. Fingers of winter mist reaching down the dark canyons toward the city. It must be hard to be an atheist here.

I found a seat and tried to distract myself with Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War. It’s a brilliant thesis of counterfactual history: What if Britain had stayed out of World War I? We would have had a European Union eight decades early, no world wars, and Britain would still be a world power. I was too tired to wrestle down its flaws. So I allowed myself a bit of envy. My ambition had been to write books such as this. Instead, I was the acting sheriff, running out of time. I thought about Lindsey, my constant preoccupation. “I’m not an intellectual, Dave,” she had told me. And it was true, in a healthy way. I became close to physically ill over such profanity as post-structuralism and political correctness. Lindsey stayed above those hedgerows, despite her fine mind and incisive ability to detect and cut through bullshit. It was my good fortune that she wanted to spend her life with me.

“History Shamus.” Lindsey appeared, carrying bagels and coffee, a mocha for me. “I’d let you give me a backrub but I’d fall asleep right here.”

It was Sunday morning, and the airport was subdued. Or maybe it was the sleepless haze I was moving in. I heard flight announcements, but nobody seemed in a hurry. I let the mocha burn my tongue. The coldness evident out the huge windows made me shiver involuntarily.

“You OK?” she said, running her hand up and down my back. I nodded and sipped more scalding liquid.

“Her name is Beth Proudfoot now,” Lindsey said.

“Marybeth?”

“She legally changed it in 1989. Unknown if she got Proudfoot from marriage or the phone book.” Lindsey lapsed into a cop monotone. “She moved to Denver in 1982. She received a Colorado driver’s license in 1983. She applied for a passport in 1989, after her probation lapsed. She visited France and Italy.”

“Jeez,” I said. “I’m never going to try to hide from you.”

She bunched up her mouth in the sexy way that drove me crazy. “You’d better not hide. But when somebody has been through the criminal justice system, it’s easier to find them. All I need is that Social Security number, and all databases are mine.”

She beamed, unguarded. She looked luminous, in a gray sweater and jeans the color of the cold sky out our airplane window. If she was exhausted it didn’t show. I thought about the soft, warm touch of the bottoms of her feet against the small of my back, about that gasp she made when she was close to coming. I wished we were in Denver on vacation, like normal people. I’d love her up in a Jacuzzi overlooking the mountains. But I didn’t ski. I had a sheriff’s star in my pocket.

“Well,” I said, “Let’s go get reacquainted with Beth Proudfoot.”

Chapter Twenty-three

The airport seemed halfway to Kansas, it was so far from downtown Denver. When I spent a happy summer here years ago teaching twentieth century American history at the University of Denver, the city’s airport had been Stapleton International, a five-minute drive from downtown. Now it took five minutes just to get from the car rental garage to Interstate 70.

It was definitely not summer in Denver. Inside our cramped, ugly rental Chevy, the heater struggled against the 10-degree High Plains blast. Lindsey and I both wore sweaters and leather jackets, an unheard-of combination for Phoenix in January, but barely adequate for Denver. As we hit the freeway and sped west, Lindsey asked me if I’d ever been in an orgy. That was easy. I told the truth and said no. Then she asked if I’d ever wanted to be in one. And I could be a guy and still be truthful to the woman I loved. I said, “Not now.” Maybe I’m too clever.

“I’m not sharing you,” Lindsey said decisively. “Do you think Marybeth-I’d better start calling her Beth-was a willing participant?”

I didn’t answer right away, because I was really thinking: Should I ask Lindsey if she’s ever been in an orgy? I tamped down my primal male insecurities, which could be concealed underneath my urbane academic bullshit exterior. I said, “Why not?”

She was driving, and didn’t turn her head as she talked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Jonathan Ledger looks so creepy in that photo. So damned self-satisfied.” She whipped to the fast lane to avoid the sudden braking of a minivan. “The girl looks…”

“Coerced?”

“Oh, no,” Lindsey said. “She looks more lucid than some of the others. Nixon looks bombed out of his mind. But she has this look that’s very cold, very nonsensual. And yet very much aware. Way adult for, what was she, eighteen?”

“I guess the prosecutors thought she looked innocent enough, if they let her skip out on a cop killing with just probation.”

I remembered the terrified young woman with the cheerleader looks, begging me not to shoot her and Leo as they crawled out of the backseat that night in Guadalupe.

“That smells like daddy’s money,” Lindsey said. “But how does she go from sucking off Jonathan Ledger in a Kodak moment to being in the middle of a gunfight between two prison escapees and the Sheriff’s Office? I know one of the escapees was Leo’s cousin, but Leo’s not in any of those photos. There’s no connection between Leo and Camelback Falls.”

Denver suddenly embraced us with warehouse rooftops and a massive traffic jam. I said, “Hell, how did she get to Camelback Falls from her safe little upper-class life as a Tulsa teenager?”

The trail to Beth Proudfoot led us into the old neighborhood north of the Denver Country Club and the booming Cherry Creek shopping district. Mamie Eisenhower grew up in the neighborhood, which still boasted neat bungalows built before the First World War. They had been gentrified into the half-million-dollar range by Denver’s ascent into the New Economy. Unlike Phoenix, the landscape here was a winter palette of bare, black tree limbs, livened by the occasional evergreen. No snow was on the ground, but the gutters were full of brown leaves and everything had the stiff countenance of winter. Denver and Phoenix had different histories, too. Denver was a city when Phoenix was still a dusty farm village. Now Phoenix had long since outgrown Denver, but Denver still had more of the feel of a city. I liked it.

“There.” Lindsey spotted the numbers on the porch of a small but lovingly restored cottage, framed by cedars. She pulled past the house and parked. “That’s the most recent address we have. Should we make a courtesy call to the Denver Police?”

“We should,” I said. “But I don’t particularly want anyone to know we’re here.”