Cactus Heart (David Mapstone Mystery 5)

“If

the techs are about done, it should be fine. I would leave your hat. Clearance is pretty low in there.”

I pushed open a door and flashed my star at an evidence technician, a platinum-haired butterball in a dark blue jumpsuit who called me “honey” three times in three sentences. Her partner was a large black woman. I don’t know how the two got into the smallest of those passages. They were clearing out. I could lock up. I signed a form with name and badge number.

“I’ll tell you this, honey,” she said. “You got enough bones for two skeletons. I have been doing this for twenty-five years and I know it before the medical examiner even gets into it. And they looked like children’s bones.”

I asked her for copies of the crime-scene photos, including a snap of the pocket watch with the Yarnell brand. She promised to send them over in the morning.

Gretchen and I stepped into the big room as I narrated the events of Monday night. A couple of bare bulbs in the ceiling gave a murky view of the cartons, pallets, and nameless junk that lay scattered around. Crime-scene tape was draped across the opening to the freight elevator shaft, and two feet of a ladder extended above the floor.

“No way would I have come in here,” Gretchen said.

“I have aggressive friends.”

We started down the ladder. “And they are? Your friends.”

“Mike Peralta, he’s chief deputy now but once upon a time we were partners. It’s a long story. And Lindsey Adams. She’s a deputy, really a computer specialist. We met a few months ago on another case.”

“You like her.”

I was at the bottom and helped Gretchen step off onto the broken concrete. The dusty smell of the first floor changed to something more moist and earthy. “How can you tell that?”

“The way you say her name.” She smiled and the dimples came back.

“Watch your head.” We went down the narrow steps into the passage. My cop’s black, three-cell flashlight provided the only illumination, and the corridor felt even more claustrophobic than Monday night.

“Look at this.” I ran my hand against the rough wall. “How old the brickwork seems. Doesn’t even seem part of the warehouse building.”

“It’s probably not,” Gretchen said. The dark corridor didn’t echo. It swallowed up sound, making words stand out starkly for a moment before they disappeared.

She went on, “When they cleared the buildings for Patriots Square back in the 1970s, they found this little underground city of tunnels and chambers.”

“I remember,” I said. “There were old saloons and brothels and opium dens.”

“They dated from the 1880s, when there was no air conditioning and it was cooler underground. And as the town grew, the new buildings were just built on top of the old basements, then they were gradually sealed off and forgotten.”

I let out a breath, just to remind myself I could. The passage was amazingly close. People were smaller a hundred years ago.

We followed it down one direction, maybe fifteen feet, where it made a hard turn into a larger room, another step down. Here, the brick was mingled with what looked like adobe and the floor was dirt. Ancient wooden citrus crates were stacked precariously in one corner; I could make out the words “Arizona Pride” on one label and an illustration of a Gibson Girl-like redhead holding out a bounteous tray of oranges and grapefruits. Spider webs were everywhere, so we didn’t venture far. There didn’t appear to be any other way out.

Gretchen followed me as we tracked back the way we came, then turned again and followed the passage to where the skeletons were found. Now it was just a hole in the wall: bones, fabric, bricks, dirt—everything had been photographed, diagrammed and hauled away for more tests. The crime lab could do things today we didn’t even dream of when I went through the academy in the mid-1970s.

“This is where they were found?” Gretchen asked.

It jarred me a little, this reminder that those bones were a “they.” They once had eyes that saw and cried. They had parents, and a grandfather, who grieved for them. I nodded and played the flashlight around in the little compartment inside the wall. The space inside was maybe a foot deep and three feet wide and high, no larger. It really looked like a careless bit of workmanship: the far wall inside appeared to be dirt. Whoever built the basement didn’t extend the brick all the way into the hard soil.

“Andrew and Woodrow Yarnell,” Gretchen said softly. “They were four years old when they were kidnapped. Taken from their grandfather’s house. Never found alive again. And all this time, they were right here.”

The light bounced heavily off the brick. Winston Churchill did brick masonry to relax, but I didn’t know beans about it. The bricks in this wall looked a little newer than the ones down the passage. Maybe. The mortar was crumbling. It would make sense: Jack Talbott walled them in and re-laid the bricks hastily.

“Do you think they were alive when he put them in there?” Gretchen asked.

“It’s hard to know.” I hesitated telling more to a civilian. Talbott had been found with the twins’ pajamas. So maybe they were murdered immediately and the ransom demand was a ploy. That was almost a comforting scenario, considering the scraps of rope and leather that had been found. Those might mean the little boys had been tied up and walled in while still alive, without even a blanket against the cold desert night underground. I kept it to myself.

I tried to stand upright and almost knocked myself in the head. “The other thing I can’t get out of my head is this pocket watch we found. Why would it be there?”

“Well, wristwatches didn’t come into widespread use until after World War I,” Gretchen said. “So there were probably lots of pocket watches still in use in 1941.”