“What’s to tell?” She smiled. “Life goes on. I’m divorced. My daughter’s fourteen, and she just made cheerleader. I’m in marketing at the Phoenician resort, and I work all the time.” She made it sound like a neat package.
Finally, she asked, “Do you remember my little sister? Phaedra.”
Now we were down to the “wanting something” part of the evening.
I said I remembered an eight-year-old kid.
Truth was, I barely remembered her sister at all. A skinny kid with red hair who played the cello and had an odd name. She was in the background one night when Julie took me home to meet her parents, and they all had a big fight. Mostly, I remembered her name, Phaedra. Not a popular boomer name.
“She’s twenty-eight now, David,” Julie said. “And she’s missing.”
“Have you been to the cops?” I asked.
“Yeah, they took a report. What does that mean? They told me she was an adult and that unless there was some indication of foul play, there wasn’t much they could do.”
“So what can I do?”
“I know you have friends in the Sheriff’s Office. Even if you’re just a consultant. Maybe you could ask around?” The blue eyes implored. “It’s been two weeks since she was supposed to come over for dinner. I haven’t had a call, nothing. Her apartment hasn’t been slept in.”
“New boyfriend?”
“That’s never made her drop off the face of the earth.”
“What about her job?”
She shook her head. “Phaedra was kind of in between careers. She was working at a photo studio. She had a lot of gifts, but she never did well playing the game at work, you know what I mean?”
As a matter of fact, I did. I asked, “Do you have any reason to suspect something bad has happened to her?”
Julie paused and the tip of her cigarette glowed contemplatively. “This is a very dangerous city, and she’s a pretty young woman. What more do you need?”
I promised to ask some questions around the Sheriff’s Office. Julie smashed out the cigarette, and it was time to leave. I walked her out to her car. The storm had blown through, and the night was dusty, hot, and expectant.
“You’re back in time for the monsoon season,” she said, aiming her key chain at a silver Lexus, which beeped attentively.
“You’re down in the barrio now,” she said.
“I guess. I haven’t lived in this house for a long time.”
“It’s all coming back down here,” she said, starting up the car. “Close-in city living.”
I watched her drive her car to the end of the block and disappear around the corner. I didn’t care about Julie Riding, and I didn’t want to start.
Chapter Two
Maricopa County Chief Deputy Mike Peralta, all six feet six inches and 250 pounds of him, bulled his way through the corridor, trailing reporters like a contrail behind a big jet. “No,” he was saying. “You’ll have to talk to the sheriff.…He’ll issue a statement.…He’ll be available for interviews.” Half a dozen voices made demands that he ignored.
“Mapstone.” He zeroed in on me, and, wrapping a massive arm around my shoulders, turned me around and pushed me through the private side door into his office suite. I could feel the 9-mm Glock semiautomatic in the shoulder rig under his suit.
“Goddamn media jackals,” he said distastefully.
“When have you ever met publicity you didn’t like?” I said.
He looked at me sourly. “All they want to talk about is the chain gang or the tent jail or the latest goat fuck with some politician, and the sheriff’s the one who speaks for the department on that.”
“That’s what happens when you work for ‘America’s toughest sheriff.’”
Peralta ignored me, dropped into his big desk chair, leaned back, and settled his feet on an otherwise-immaculate desktop. He wore a tan summer suit atop nicely tooled black lizard boots. When it suited his mood, he also wore an expensive Stetson. His face was a bit broader and darker than when I’d first met him, but otherwise, he had hardly aged in the twenty years I’d known him.
He pointed toward a thick folder on the table behind me. He didn’t offer a chair. I sat anyway and hefted the folder onto my lap.
“You’ll like this one,” he said, rubbing an imaginary beard. “Rebecca Stokes. Twenty-one years old, comes home on the train, takes a taxi to her apartment, pays the driver, and is never seen alive again.”
“I’ve heard of this one. My grandparents talked about it when I was growing up.”
“It was 1959,” he said. The year I was born. “She turned up in the desert two weeks later, body dump. That was the strange thing about those old murders in Phoenix: No matter where they got dumped in the desert-and this was a small town surrounded by hundreds of miles of nothing-somebody always found them.
“Anyway, see what you can give me on it by the time I have the regular press briefing this Thursday.” He popped a can of diet Coke and took a deep swig.
“You’re enjoying this too damned much,” I said.
“What? It took you three days to turn up the new evidence that nailed the Samuels case. Fifteen-year-old case and it takes you three days.”
“That was lucky-connect the dots.”
“That was a week’s worth of headlines for the department.” Peralta smiled. “And a nice thousand bucks for you. You know the drill-dig up something I can use and you get paid as a private contractor, and you act as a volunteer posse deputy. If I can’t get you back into the department one way, I can try another way.”
“I’m grateful for the work, Mike, but it’s all temporary,” I said. “I don’t even know if I’m going to stay in Phoenix.”
“Forget that college shit,” Peralta said. “No way they’re going to give tenure to a middle-aged white male former cop-who’s from Barry Goldwater’s home state no less.”
“I’m not middle-aged. And actually, the tenure committee said I was ‘unwilling to abandon my Western intellectual outlook’ and become more sensitive to ‘nonlinearity.’”
“Fuck me blind and call me Susie,” Peralta said. “I knew you’d never fit in with those Commies. Teaching rich kids to hate their country, God, and their parents.”
“I’m teaching still,” I said halfheartedly.
“One course in American history for some morons and blue-hairs at the junior college,” he snorted. “Hell, maybe I’ll sign up. Let you teach me something.”
“That would be a first,” I said.
The phone rang and he grabbed it harshly, saying “Peralta” before the receiver reached his head. It was his habit, strange to listen to when you were calling. His heavy brow darkened by several degrees-I had seen his mood shift this suddenly many times when Peralta and I were partners years before, and it never ceased to make me uneasy. “Yeah.…Shit.…” I heard his end of the conversation. “Bullshit!..That’s the county supervisors’ problem, not ours.…Goddamned right-they made the mess, not us. Bullshit, we’re buying the Jimmys. Do it.” He slammed the phone back into its cradle.
“I’ve got six prostitutes dead over the past three months.” He thumped a set of files on his desk. “I’ve got half the Lake Pleasant substation called in sick next shift. Fucking titty-bar owner Bobby Hamid’s one step ahead of a court order. Crips terrorizing the white folks in Litchfield Park. A million-dollar burglary out in Cave Creek-and what do I get to deal with? The goddamned departmental budget. The goddamned county supervisors! Seventh-largest county in the United States, and they run it like some little town in Alabama.”
The first time I ever saw Mike Peralta, he was teaching martial arts at the Sheriff’s Academy, and I was a twenty-year-old cadet. I wanted to save the world with a badge. But I also thought I was pretty damned smart, with my new B.A. degree in history. He took me down so hard, my head rang for two days. Soon after, he was the five-year veteran who broke me in as a rookie when we were patrolling the no-man’s-land between Scottsdale and Tempe. We worked apart for two years while he was trying out jail administration and I was getting my master’s degree. Then we partnered again in the east county as it became clear I was going to be a teacher, not a cop. Now here he was in the big office, the number-two guy in the department. I wish I could truthfully say I knew him.