I should have gone to see Peralta Wednesday morning. Instead, I called his secretary to put off our meeting. She said he had been called to a meeting with the county supervisors and was in a very bad mood. “So it’s probably just as well,” she said. Just as well: She didn’t know the half of it.
The morning paper had news of a gunfight between rival gangs in Maryvale, which once upon a time not so long ago was a neighborhood synonymous with suburban safety and blandness. And there was the obituary of the veteran TV anchorman who had read the evening news when I was growing up. My grandparents would let me watch the ten o’clock news, and this man with a blond pompadour and black plastic glasses had been a figure of reassurance, a bookend on the days. He had been retired for years, of course. But I had been away. Little by little, everything in my past in this city was passing.
I tried to act normal. I went over to Phoenix College and lectured to my students in the survey course on the origins of the Civil War. Faces-hot, eager, bored, distracted. Most of the younger students were hearing this for the first time, so rotten is the teaching of history in high schools. Once, that would have motivated me or depressed me, but that day I just wanted to get through it. Slavery, states’ rights, the passing of the compromisers from the scene. “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.” I kept seeing the faces of Rebecca Stokes and Phaedra Riding. I am the keeper of murdered souls.
All I had wanted was a summer at home to get my bearings and some easy work from Mike Peralta. Instead, I was in the middle of-what? Three unsolved murders. Two warnings to quit looking into something. Thoughts of Lindsey-too many thoughts. Too many questions. You wouldn’t think anxiety and paranoia would grow so much in a city of endless sunny days, tanned goddesses, and opulent resorts. You would be wrong. It was a concrete desert and this was high summer.
I went to a gun shop and bought two sets of speed loaders for the Python and three boxes of rounds heavy enough to drop a gorilla. I wore extra-extra-large shirts, attempting, with little success, to conceal the bulk of the gun on my hip. So I just started clipping my star on my belt all the time and carrying openly.
I finished cleaning up the mess at home. After work, Lindsey came over and we drank Bloody Marys and listened to Billy Strayhorn and Charlie Parker CDs. It would have seemed reassuring if I hadn’t felt the constant heavy tug of the Colt Python on my belt. Lindsey carried a baby Glock 9-mm automatic in her purse, nine rounds compactly held in the magazine, “ready to rock ’n’ roll,” as she put it.
That night, we sat out in the garden and defied the heat, listening to the cicadas and the city noise. We swapped life stories. I learned that she was a another Virgo, born twenty-seven years before-“on Labor Day,” she deadpanned.
She was an Air Force brat. She came to the Valley when she was three, when her dad was stationed at Williams Air Force Base. Her middle name was Faith. “Hey, it was the seventies,” she said.
After high school, she tried college but was bored. “No offense,” she said. Hell, I’d been bored with it, too. So she enlisted and went into the Air Police. After four years, she knew she hated being told what to do, so she came home and tried college again. “Still boring.” She went to work for the Sheriff’s Office. That was five years ago. She’d been fooling with computers since she was fourteen. No training, but, she said, “I know how computers think.” There was an unhappy love affair with a lawyer named John. She lived in Sunnyslope with a cat.
She stretched her legs out onto my lap and I massaged her feet, nice feet with long, athletic ankles and delicate toes. I told her more about my life.
I gave her the short version: I am a Phoenix native born at Good Samaritan Hospital. An only child. My parents were killed in a plane crash. Little kids play that “orphan game” when they get mad at their folks. But it was real for me. My mom’s parents raised me. Grandfather was a dentist, named Philip-I carried that as my middle name. Grandmother sold real estate; her name was Ella. It was a good childhood. In college, I thought I’d be a lawyer and save the world. But I didn’t like the idea of defending bad guys, and I didn’t want to stay in school forever. So I got my B.A. and went to the Sheriff’s Academy. When I knew I didn’t want to be a cop, I went back to college part-time, studied history, and grew to love it. So I got my Ph.D. and, in those ironies life springs on us, stayed in school, teaching in Ohio and California. Got married. Got divorced. No kids. It all sounded neater than it was.
When I was done, she asked, “Why are you attracted to emotionally unavailable women?”
“I didn’t see it that way at the time. I saw brilliant, creative women who had suffered and wanted so desperately to be loved.”
“Maybe I’m emotionally unavailable,” Lindsey said.
I said, “Maybe I am, too.”
I got back from class a little after 2:00 P.M. Thursday and the phone was ringing. I expected it might be the Realtor I had called about listing the house, but it was a woman’s voice.
“We’ve met,” she said. “We met in an apartment a couple of weeks ago. But please don’t say my name.”
“Okay.”
“I need very much to talk to you. There are some important things you don’t know.”
“Are you-”
“Be careful, Dr. Mapstone. If you know what I mean.”
I did. “How should we proceed?” I asked.
“Go to the place where you get your messages when you’re working,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”
I had to think about it for a minute, but then I remembered that I had a mailbox in the Social Sciences Department at Phoenix College. I drove back up Nineteenth Avenue and got there between classes. In the box, aside from two weeks’ worth of mindless administrative drivel, I found an envelope with my name on it, and inside that a folded sheet of stationery with the message: “Metrocenter. Ruby Tuesday, 8:30 tonight.”
I tucked it in my pocket and wondered why Susan Knightly wanted to talk to me.
Back at home, the answering machine was empty. I picked up the phone and called Lorie Pope at the Republic. It had only been about two years since we’d spoken.
“Lorie, it’s David Mapstone.”
“David,” she said. “My God, what a surprise. I read about you and was going to call.”
“I guess I should ask if you’re on deadline?”
“No,” she said. “But thanks for asking.”
“Remember when I helped you with that Latin American history paper senior year?”
“You saved my life, David. Of course I remember.”
“Well, I’m callin’ in favors. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m intrigued,” she said. “Okay. Come by the newsroom around eleven-forty-five, and then we’ll go somewhere.”
I needed the comfort of books, so I drove over to the public library and took the glass elevator up to the Arizona Collection. The building-popularly dubbed the “copper toaster” because of its abstract design-was nearly new, with an atrium pool that you would walk into if you weren’t careful and a stunning view of the skyscrapers of the central corridor-as if you were suspended above the year-round green of palm trees and oleanders and the concrete and glass monuments that marched north and south between the mountains.
An indulgent librarian pulled me the papers of John Henry McConnico, twelfth governor of Arizona, as well as a couple of Ph.D. dissertations on microfiche from the U of A on the McConnico years in Arizona. I popped open the PowerBook and set up some files: names, chronology, family history, things to check later. I picked through the dusty books and started making notes. And then I asked for something else: a small history of the Phoenix Police Department, written in 1965 by a former professor of mine. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but perhaps something would get me moving again on Rebecca Stokes-or maybe give me the inspiration to start writing another history book I couldn’t finish.
A little after 8:00 P.M., I pulled into the vast parking lot of Metrocenter, Jim Morrison on the radio singing “L.A. Woman.” City at night. Arizona doesn’t go on daylight saving time, partly out of libertarian cussedness and partly because if it did, the sun would still be out at 10:00 P.M., a source of misery nobody on the political spectrum wanted to contemplate. So the sun was gone, but the heat remained god-awful. The mall was something like the biggest in the world when it opened, on the outskirts of Phoenix, in the mid-1970s. Most people back then couldn’t figure why they built it so far out. But now, of course, the Metrocenter was deep inside the city and even starting to show its age. I found a parking spot within a hundred yards of the entrance to the food court and walked slowly toward the doors, watching cars and people.
Inside, it was cool, bright, and crowded. Phoenix nearly invented the indoor shopping mall and had elevated it to something like a lifestyle. So here on a Thursday night, away from the empty sidewalks and parks, was humanity’s ocean, retail-style. I wound my way through the food court, past families with twofer prams and saw teenage girl mall rats, full grown on the outside, wearing the briefest short-shorts and deep in conversation with one another. I found refuge in Ruby Tuesday, and waited by the bar.
At 8:45, a woman in black jeans and a linen shirt leaned on the rail beside me.
“I’m sorry for the cloak-and-dagger routine,” she said. “But I think you’ll agree it’s justified.”
It was Susan Knightly. She looked very different from the well-coiffed Susan I had first met. Her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair was concealed under a black Nikon ball cap. We went to a back booth of the bar. I could imagine the calls Peralta would get for me being in a bar with my badge hanging from my belt. I ordered a martini anyway. She ordered a chardonnay.
“You know about Phaedra?” I asked. She nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”
“I assumed you were busy,” she said. “Let me get right to the point, Dr. Mapstone, or is it Deputy Mapstone?”
“How about David?”
“David.” She gave a small smile. “I don’t trust the police in this matter. I don’t really know why I am trusting you, but I guess I’ve got to trust someone, or else go on living this way.”
“Why don’t you trust the police?”
“Phaedra told me not to,” she said.
“When did she tell you this?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago.”
Susan looked at me straight on with those green eyes. Her face was a scrimshaw of freckles and soft laugh lines.
“Phaedra wasn’t kidnapped,” she said. “She was on the run.”
I felt another kick in the stomach.
“I am getting so tired of being lied to.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Susan said. “I promised her. God, I wanted to go to the police every day, but Phaedra made me swear I wouldn’t. And the more that happened, the more I got paranoid.”
“So when you found me in her apartment…”
“I was getting her some clothes.”
“I might have been able to help her.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Susan said in a low, desolate voice, and her eyes filled with tears.
She looked around the room-tan young men and women clustered close to the bar, lost in an unintelligible jabber-and leaned close to me. “One night in June, it was the twentieth, I got home and got a call from Phaedra. She said someone was trying to kill her, and that she couldn’t work for me anymore. That was all she would tell me then. But she called back in a couple of days, and I made her let me give her some clothes and money.
“That’s where I got her apartment key, so I could get her some clothes, look after her stuff. Although, God knows, I realize in retrospect that it was foolish of me to go to her apartment. At the time, I guess we figured they were looking for her, and that nobody would think anything about me going to the apartment complex.”
“You better hope they’re able to discriminate between their red-heads,” I said. “Who is ‘they,’ by the way?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Susan said. “It was a dope deal gone wrong. Phaedra’s boyfriend was a pilot who did dope runs from Mexico. He just decided to take a shipment, I guess. Rip off his client. Phaedra got caught in the middle of it.”
“Bobby Hamid?” I asked.
“I didn’t hear that name.”
“Who, then?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said she overheard things she wasn’t supposed to hear, so they wanted to kill her. She was afraid to tell me too much. She did say they had paid off DEA and the cops, and that if she went to the police, she was as good as dead.”
“So she hid out for a month?”
Susan nodded. “She crashed with friends here and there. She never wanted to stay anywhere long; she felt she might be endangering her friends. Sometimes she was afraid she was being followed.”
“What about her sister or her mother?”
“I don’t know.” Susan shook her head. “She said she didn’t know whom to trust. She didn’t want to talk about her sister. It always upset her.”
“And you believed her?”
“I’ve been followed,” Susan said. “I had my studio broken into last week, but nothing was taken. Probably two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cameras, computers, and equipment-and nothing taken. Just files rifled, that kind of thing. A couple of threatening phone calls, said I needed to mind my own business.”
“So what happened to Phaedra? Whoever was after her just caught up?”
“I don’t know.” She silently drummed slender freckled fingers on the bar. “The last time I talked to Phaedra was a week ago Monday. There was something she wasn’t telling me. She was very agitated. I offered to give her a thousand dollars so she could get out of the state, and she agreed. We were going to meet the next night, here. But she never showed up. Then I read about it in the Republic two days later.”
I asked her if she would go downtown and give a statement. I guaranteed she would be safe.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and rose to go.
“Susan.” I stood. “If you’re in danger, let me help you.”
She looked back at me and adjusted the ball cap. “I’m good at taking care of myself, David. I’m not sure I’m ready to trust anybody else just yet. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
I followed her out of the tavern into the brightness of the mall atrium. The kids were mostly gone, replaced by couples and clusters of young women in black miniskirts and men in tight jeans coming and going from the movie theater. Susan looked around the crowd, then walked over to the railing and surveyed the lower levels of the mall. Turning back to me, she said, “You have brothers and sisters, David?”
I said I didn’t.
“Hmm.” She thought about that. “Then you wouldn’t appreciate what-”
That second, I heard a woman scream and caught a flash of blue metal out of the corner of my eye. Susan’s eyes grew gigantic and she dropped to the floor as the glass wall behind her blew out. I felt shards of glass in my neck and face as I fell sideways and rolled. People flashed by, yelling and screaming.
I scanned the crowd and saw a muscular man-he couldn’t have been taller than five five-with dark hair, tank top, and a machine gun with a large silencer aimed at me. Julie had talked of a small muscular man following her. I grabbed for the Python as I saw a muzzle flash and heard an odd whack-whack-whack sound. Bullets ricocheted off the polished metal railings. The revolver slid out of its nylon holster, resting heavily in my hand.
“Down!” I said. “Get down!” People stared dumbly at me. “Police officer!” I rose slowly, the gun held in both hands, quickly scanning for the small muscular man. I caught sight of him maybe twenty-five feet away. He looked at me coolly and raised the machine gun. I couldn’t get a shot-too many people. “Get down on the floor, goddamn it!” I shouted, then aimed and pulled back, aimed again, no clean shot. “Down!” He had me. Shit.
But nothing happened.
He cursed and slapped the gun. A jam.
He turned and ran into the mall. I started after him.
“Stay here!” I commanded Susan Knightly, who was still on the floor. To an ashen-faced man crouched against a bench, I said, “Call nine one one.”
“Tell them a plainclothes officer is on the scene and in pursuit of a suspect.” Hopefully, the cops wouldn’t mistakenly shoot me.
“Hey, need some help?” A burly red-faced man showed me a revolver in his belt. I nearly shot him just out of reflex.
“No!” I said. “Put that thing away! Do not follow me!”
I ran after the small man. It was pure adrenaline. Past the atrium and the bars, the mall immediately became deserted. I could hear Peralta from eighteen years ago telling me to calm down, that calmness meant steady judgment-and a good aim. I ran past the glassed and gated stores, watching the guy tear down an escalator. Reaching the top, I proceeded cautiously, waiting for a burst of fire-but he was gone. I padded down the escalator in a crouch, the Python in a two-handed combat grip, my hands only shaking a little. I was alone on the lower level and caught my breath. My cheek was bleeding steadily now from the glass. He could have gone in any of a half dozen directions.
This is nuts, a voice in my head warned. Wait for the cops.
Except that he knew why Susan Knightly and I were targets.
I picked a direction and ran that way, hugging close to a wall, ready to meet my killer around every post or alcove. I went a hundred feet and stopped, listening. I could still hear screaming and shouting from the bar area. Maybe some sirens in the distance. A fan whining somewhere. Empty storefronts and mannequins. A fountain’s rush. My own breathing. A burning in my lungs.
Footsteps.
He bolted suddenly from a doorway, turned down an exit corridor, his steps echoing behind him.
“Deputy sheriff! Stop!” I yelled, close behind him now. “Stop!”
I raised the revolver and lined up the Colt’s twin sights. Right between the shoulder blades: Bye-bye, asshole.
I didn’t take the shot. He banged out the fire exit into the night.
I ran after him and had just reached the exit bar when a voice stopped me from behind.
“Drop your weapon! Drop your weapon! Do not move!”
I heard the chilling sound of a round being chambered in a semiautomatic pistol.
I froze. “I’m a deputy sheriff,” I called, still facing toward the exit door. I let the Python down easy. “The suspect just ran outside here.”
“Mister, I don’t know who the hell you are,” came a scared young voice. “But I want you facedown on the ground, hands spread straight out! Push your weapon away very slowly!”
“Let me show you my ID.”
“Mister, you are five seconds away from eternity.”
A big drop of sweat trickled down my spine. Or maybe it was blood.
I almost started to turn around and yell that the son of a bitch was getting away. But I thought better of it. I got facedown on the cold, dirty mall floor and pushed the Python gently away.