The first time I ate a plate of Sharon Peralta’s trademark chicken enchiladas was fifteen years ago. I had worked my last shift as a deputy sheriff; I was a freshly minted Ph.D. in history, with a new job at a midwestern college; I was anticipating living away from hot, dry Phoenix for the first time in my life, and I ate way too much. Now, Friday night, I was still hurting from the ignominious ass-kicking of two nights before, and our conversation about life, work, and Phoenix was nonstop. But I still managed to polish off four of those wonderful enchiladas. I helped clear the table while Sharon and Mike fussed; then Mike steered me into the study for cigars and cognac.
The Peraltas had an airy new house in far north Phoenix, situated just below some of the low, bare mountains that once sat nameless and secluded well outside the city limits. While most of the house reflected Sharon’s careful touch, the study was cluttered with western furniture, a couple of knockoff Remington sculptures, three walls of books, more photos and awards, and a very large oak gun cabinet. This was Mike’s room. He went to his humidor, extracted two large dark brown cigars, and gave me one.
“Anniversario Padron,” he said, cutting it for me. “Make sure you light it evenly. Let the smoke waft across your palate.”
Sharon, wearing blue jeans and a white cotton short-sleeved blouse, her long black hair pulled over one shoulder, sat opposite us with a glass of white wine. “If I haven’t left him over this cigar habit, I guess we’re together for life,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“You know you love this, honey,” Mike Peralta said, puffing and rolling the cigar as he lit it.
“I think it has interesting Freudian undertones,” she said, sniffing.
Mike and Sharon had been childhood sweethearts. By the time I met Mike, they had been married nearly five years. Now they had two grown kids and managed to make a good life for themselves. God knows, it couldn’t have been easy living with Mike, and I knew they came close to breaking up while Mike and I were partners years ago-but somehow they had made it.
If Mike had barely changed, Sharon had become nearly unrecognizable from the person I knew fifteen years ago. Then, she was a pudgy, shy social worker who was fighting her husband about continuing her schooling. I guess she won, because she went on to get her doctorate in psychology, go into private practice, write a popular book on eating disorders, and, for the past two years, host a radio psychologist show on a local station. Dr. Sharon was a minor celebrity now, poised, polished, and aerobicized. Another thing that struck me was how Sharon had a calming influence on Mike. His coiled anger seemed subdued that night, his mood almost playful.
I sat back on the brown leather sofa, dragged on the cigar, and felt peaceful. My ribs still hurt like hell, though. I hadn’t told Peralta about the encounter in the carport. I couldn’t say exactly why. I guess I felt stupid for being so careless. Not only was Peralta a kind of big-brother figure to me, but he was my old self-defense instructor. I couldn’t bear to admit to him that I had been on the losing end of a fight.
I’d come to in the carport maybe half an hour after I’d passed out, with a big tomcat licking my face and purring at me. I was covered in sweat and my head felt like I had been through a week-long binge of drinking bad whiskey. I pulled myself into the house, locked up behind me, and thought about what had happened and why. I wasn’t as scared as I was surprised, and then angry, and then embarrassed. Working the streets for four years as a patrol deputy, I had seen plenty of violent situations, especially the family fights where the cops are target number one, and I had learned to take care of myself. But it was clear that years of the soft, safe life of academia had settled into me far more than I wanted to admit.
As to the why: I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t imagine my work on the Stokes case mattering to anyone. I doubted it was some Marxist historian trying to settle an intellectual score with me; they had gotten me kicked off the faculty already. So it had to involve Phaedra. I hadn’t been prepared to draw a conclusion Wednesday night, and I still wasn’t. I’d called Julie Riding the next morning to see if she was okay, but she was distracted with work and we didn’t talk long. I didn’t tell her about the attack, either.
“So when are you going to bring me Stokes, signed, sealed, and delivered?” Peralta asked.
“Soon,” I said. “Tell me why you tossed this case my way?”
“No,” Sharon interjected. “No more work talk. I am sick to death of work talk.”
“You do shrink talk,” Peralta protested through a plume of cigar smoke.
“Not tonight, my love,” she said. “We’re going to talk about David.”
I shifted uncomfortably and nursed the cognac.
“Mike tells me Julie Riding has come back into your life,” Sharon said. I nodded and told her about the search for Phaedra.
“What’s Julie like now? What’s she doing?”
“Everybody changes,” I said. “She’s not the same woman I knew twenty years ago.”
“I bet she’s gotten old and ugly,” Peralta said.
“You are so low,” Sharon said, then turned back to me. “I don’t know if I should say this. I never thought Julie was right for you, David. Too immature, too insecure. You two were so different. You gave a lot more than you got.”
“That was a long time ago, Sharon. I have no illusions about Julie. I just told her I’d help her find her little sister, Phaedra.”
“That’s a pretty name,” Sharon said.
“Ahhh.” Mike puffed. “She’s just run off with some boyfriend, or to get a tattoo or some Doc Martens, or whatever the hell it is they do now. Probably has a ring in her nose.”
“Not from the pictures I saw,” I said.
“And where has Phaedra gone?” Sharon asked.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Are you sure she hasn’t killed herself?”
I shook my head.
“Young women can get into a lot of trouble at that age,” she said.
“Sharon thinks you need somebody in your life,” Peralta said.
“Mike!” she said. Then: “Are you seeing anyone?”
I shook my head. “I’ve only been back in town a couple of months. I’m not really looking.”
“Not carrying a torch for Patty?”
“No,” I said a little too emphatically. “She’s been through several lovers since me. Now she’s with a twenty-two-year-old tennis pro.”
“Well, none of my business,” Sharon said. “You need some time. Everybody does after what you’ve been through. But you’re very different from most people, David. I can’t help my matchmaker impulses.”
“Thanks, Sharon.”
“And we both hope you’ll stay in Phoenix. This is your home. This is where your roots and friends are, and as we get older, those things get more important.”
I believed that, but my relationship with Phoenix was complicated. Being back in town seemed like the most natural thing in the world. There were new freeways and neighborhoods. The water conservation policies had converted many lawns to desert landscaping. But it was still my city. Camelback and Squaw Peak and the South Mountains again became my dramatic compass as I drove the predictable grid of streets. The nights had the old familiar quality of dry, open spaces. I felt safe and centered here-a feeling that surprised me, given how burned-out I’d been when I left Phoenix years ago.
But the city had also become so big and dangerous. There was the heat and lack of rain, which I would always hate. And there was the job situation. Despite being an alumnus, I didn’t receive a warm homecoming from Arizona State University, which said in a curt letter that it had a hiring freeze on, and even if it hadn’t, my published articles as a historian had been “lackluster” and all hiring had to be done under the goal of “greater diversity.” I only hoped I could find a new job before my savings ran out.
“But for now, he needs work,” Peralta said, reading my mind. “So what did the cops forty years ago miss about Rebecca Stokes?”
Sharon started to object to work talk, but she stopped when I said, “They missed a serial killer.”
Peralta sat silently, wreathed in bluish cigar smoke, letting me lay it all out. I told them about Opal Harvey, the Creeper, John Rogers. One by one, I detailed the four other homicides of young women and their similarity to the Stokes case. Sharon’s large coffee-colored eyes never left me.
Finally, after a long silence, Peralta let out a huge sigh and said, “Jesus.”
He refilled our glasses with cognac. “It’s not airtight that these are related, but it’s pretty compelling. Especially for the little town Phoenix was in those days. I’d never heard of any of these other cases.”
“I didn’t find any newspaper accounts of the others,” I said. “But they probably didn’t have Rebecca’s family connections.”
Peralta asked, “How come the cops back then didn’t make this connection?”
“That’s the big question,” I said. “The lead detective on Stokes was a man named Harrison Wolfe, and I can’t find him, can’t even find a record of his death. He might know. Opal Harvey thought the powers that be didn’t want to attract the negative publicity.”
“Never underestimate the amount of ass-covering cops can do,” Peralta said. “Harrison Wolfe. I’ve heard of him. He was very old school. When I went to the Academy, there were still stories about Harrison Wolfe.”
“Such as?” Sharon asked.
“Oh, racist, sexist, politically incorrect stuff, honey.” Peralta smiled.
“So you like him,” Sharon teased.
Peralta went on. “He was a hard-ass. There was a story that was still making the rounds when I was a rookie in the early seventies about how years before this cop came on some bad guys down at the Southern Pacific yards one night, caught them breaking into a boxcar, but they had him surrounded and had their guns on him. The son of a bitch pulled his own gun-drew against the drop-and killed two of them, wounded the two others. His name was Harrison Wolfe.”
“Sounds like a whackadoo to me,” she said. “Clinically speaking, of course.”
“So what else have you found?” Peralta asked.
“There was some newspaper coverage of Rebecca’s disappearance, but there was not a word-that I could find, anyway-to indicate she was the governor’s niece. But everybody seemed to know it anyway. That small-town thing again.”
“Suspects?”
“I’m working with Records to pull up a list of likelies for you: Felony convictions involving breaking and entering, assault, rape and/or murder in the Southwest during those approximate years.”
“But the killings just stopped?” Sharon asked.
“As far as I can tell,” I said. “In 1962, a flight attendant named Gloria Johnson disappeared, then turned up a few days later under the same circumstances. Then nothing, at least for the next several years.”
“Sometimes they just stop,” Peralta said. “Green River stopped, or died or was killed, or maybe arrested for something else. Serial killers aren’t nearly as neat and methodical as in the movies. And there are more unsolved murders than the cops would ever like to admit.” He thought for a moment and then said, “I wish this Harquahala bastard would die.”
I drove home in a contented buzz through light late-night traffic on Squaw Peak Parkway. But I had retrieved my old holster for the.357 Python and now both sat ominously in the Blazer’s glove compartment. I wasn’t ready to start packing all the time-it was hard to conceal a weapon in this heat-but I wanted it nearby. I kept wondering who wanted me to back off investigating Phaedra’s disappearance. And why. One thing that was clear now was that Julie’s apprehensions were correct. Her little sister was into something bad.
At home an hour later, I was on-line, plugged into MCSO Central Records and running Phaedra and her old boyfriends through the National Crime Information Center, when there was a knock at the office door. I jumped at the sound. Then I unholstered the heavy revolver and stepped to the side of the door to look out. Too dark. Damn burned-out light.
“Who’s there?” I said. It was 2:13 A.M.
“Julie. It’s Julie.”
I set the pistol on a table and opened the door.
Julie Riding stepped in quickly and wrapped her arms around me. She was trembling. I closed the door and locked it.
“I’m really scared,” she said, and for a long time, she stayed in my arms, shaking from time to time as if she was cold. I watched my unattended PowerBook put itself to sleep, and the only light in the room was Grandfather’s green-shaded banker’s lamp, which had fascinated me when I was a little boy.
“What is it, Julie?”
“I really need a drink, David.”
I steered her over to the leather couch and poured us both scotch. Julie had changed her hair again. It was straighter, parted at the center, and closer to her natural shade of light brown/blond. Her eyes glistened. When I sat next to her, she said, “I think someone is following me.”
My eyes automatically sought out the reassurance of the Python on the table.
“Did someone follow you here tonight?”
She shook her head. “I took a really roundabout route.”
“Where’s your daughter?”
“With her dad. We have joint custody, and Mindy’s with him all month.” She sighed. “That’s not true. He has custody. She sees me every other weekend. Don’t ask, David. That’s what happens when you get in a court battle with a fucking lawyer.” She pushed her hair back.
I asked her why she thought someone was following her.
“I noticed him when I came here the other night. A man sitting in a black Mustang convertible. It’s strange enough to see somebody sitting in a car on a residential street late at night. Something about him really gave me the creeps, but I put it out of my mind, you know? Then I saw him again when I left work yesterday. He was just sitting in the parking lot for hotel employees. Tonight, I went out with some girlfriends, and afterward, when I was walking to my car, I turned around and he was walking behind me, maybe half a block back. Just walking behind me. He was small, but really muscled up. And when I pulled out, that black Mustang was right behind me.” She swallowed her drink. “I lost him on the freeway.”
“How do you know the man in the parking lot was the same man who was sitting out here the other night?”
“It was him,” Julie said. “He had scary eyes. The first time I saw him in the car, I was so curious that I looked in at him, and he looked right back at me. And he had on a leather jacket both times I saw him. Lots of shiny silver zippers.”
“In this heat?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Julie, was Phaedra into anything you haven’t told me about?”
“No,” she said. “You think this is about Phaedra?”
“I don’t know. The other night somebody put a gun to my head and told me to back off. He didn’t mention Phaedra, but I can’t imagine he meant a forty-year-old case I’m working on for Peralta. And he was waiting for me when I got home, so obviously he knew where I lived.”
Julie was silent for several minutes, sitting on the couch with her legs tucked underneath her. I refilled her glass and sipped at mine. I was listening to the house and the street, but everything sounded normal. Then I heard the sound of Julie holding back sobs. I put my hand on hers, and she leaned over to me and hugged me tightly.
“I’ve made so many mistakes with my life,” she cried, digging her nails into me. “I can’t bear to lose her, too. You’ve got to help me find her.”
“I am, Julie. I will.”
She cupped my face in her hands and started kissing me. It was not a bad feeling. In fact, it was a damned nice feeling. Her mouth was warm and wet. Her tongue darted in my mouth.
“Baby, help me. Help your Julie,” she whispered in between kisses. That was the way she had said things of great urgency and intimacy years before, punctuated by “your Julie.”
“It’s okay.” I reluctantly turned my face away. “I’m going to find her.”
Julie was pressed full against me now, both of us sideways on the sofa. I felt her nipples harden under the thin fabric of her blouse. I was tired and a little tight and not thinking clearly. When she turned her face expectantly up to mine again, I kissed her hungrily and our mouths and our hands spent a long time getting to know each other again.
Oscar Wilde said the only thing to do with history is to rewrite it, and I suppose that’s what we might have done that night. I might have rewritten our lives together-as if that first brave flush of love could somehow have been sheltered long enough from the world and our own restless personalities to take root and grow. So that the young woman who was Julie twenty years before had given me her wondrous youth and beauty, free of the damage of the years, had given me her body and spirit and our children. And I would have given her in return everything I had to give. Julie was trying to rewrite a history known only to her. Maybe it was a history that allowed her peace from her private demons. Maybe it found Phaedra alive and safe. Maybe it was a happy ending for all of us.
I was starting to recall Julie’s lovemaking with delicious clarity-the way she would always arch her back just a bit, the way she would take my face in her hands as she kissed me-when something made me stop. I gently pushed away from her on the couch.
“I can’t do this yet,” I said. She looked flushed and angry.
I don’t know why I didn’t take her to bed that night. The search for Phaedra wasn’t a real investigation yet, just an old friend making some checks. So it wasn’t an ethical problem, really, especially since I hadn’t slept with a woman for more months than I cared to admit. But something in Julie, or something in me, made me pull back.
“I have to go now,” she said, and wheeled around and ran out the door.