Desert Noir (9781615952236) (15 page)

What did she think I was going to find? A crudely drawn map of the Western Heart Gallery, complete with instructions on how to inflict the most damage on a woman's body? But I took the keys anyway. If nothing else, the house might reveal more clues to Clarice's nature. It was a prime directive of any homicide investigation—know the victim and you'll know the killer. The past few days had already proved how little I'd known about the woman I'd considered a friend.

Her hand trembling again, Serena wrote down the address, handed it to me and said, “Please be careful while you're in there. I don't want you to get hurt. I remember Clarice complaining that one of the support beams in the dining room was sagging. That dust storm we had about a month ago blew off some of the roof tiles and I'm afraid the rain last night just made matters worse. My brother said he'll get everything fixed as soon as he has time but… Well, he's taking her death hard.” 

I thanked her and put the keys and address in my carryall. I didn't want to ask the next question but I did anyway. “Do you think it's possible that your father could have…?” I couldn't finish.

“Killed Clarice?”

Serena looked out onto the desert again. Her sweater fell away from her shoulders, allowing me another view of the needle tracks in her pipe stem arms. “Miss Jones, I believe my father is capable of anything.”

After my interview with Serena Hyath-Allesandro, I needed something to take my mind off dysfunctional families, so I continued north another few miles to the town of Carefree, then turned east on the Carefree Highway until I came to the gravel road which led to the Happy Trails Dude Ranch. Dusty never minded my dropping by. Neither did his boss, Slim Papadopolus, who looked up from the Appaloosa he was shoeing to give me a friendly wave as I drove through the gates.

“You need to be selling that Jeep to me, Lena,” he called. “I sure do like that pretty color.” 

“You and Barbie,” I said back, braking carefully beside him so as not to spook the horse.

“That Barbie, she's a fine-looking gal.” Slim, whose Athens-born parents had named him Odysseus, smiled up at me. “Almost as fine as you.” 

I tipped an imaginary hat. “Thank you, kind sir. You get any storm damage out here?” 

He put the horse's hoof down, patted its spotted rump, then stood up and stretched so hard I could hear his bones pop. With his thin, dark face, and startling gray eyes separated by a classic Grecian nose, Slim was a handsome man—as long as you preferred men no more than five feet, three inches tall. Not an unusual height for an ex-jockey.

“Not much storm damage at all, just a few shingles off the roofs, that sort of thing. We've been busy all morning nailing them back on.”

I looked around. Fewer guests than usual strolled the grounds, which probably meant the rest of them were out on a trail ride somewhere. Several ranch hands were still perched on top of the main house, hammering nails into errant shingles, while below them, a few overdressed guests lolled on the veranda in rocking chairs, sipping martinis and chatting. Horses milled aimlessly in the three corrals, dogs chased each other around the water trough, while over behind the stables, a flock of chickens and two Canadian geese scratched for worms. It all looked as peaceful as a new Eden, but few of the dudes would ever know how much work and money it took to maintain that rough-hewn serenity. To keep the place going, Dusty and the other ranch hands worked a sixty-hour week and got paid for forty. Not that any of them ever complained. They'd rather be overworked and underpaid on the ranch than underworked and overpaid in the city.

“Dusty out on the trail?” I asked Slim.

He nodded. “Yep. You're welcome to saddle up and join him, just as long as you promise not to get all kissy-face in front of the guests.” 

Slim Papadopolus was no fool. He'd long ago figured out that Dusty's good looks were one of the main reasons so many of the female tourists returned to the ranch year after year. He didn't want any of them to know Dusty had a regular girlfriend, if that's what I could call myself. I promised to keep my horny hands off his head wrangler, then parked the Jeep in the shade of a mesquite. With growing anticipation, I strolled over to the corral. Lady, the sleek bay mare I usually rode, was still there, so I threw a halter on her, then led her over to the tack room. She enjoyed the quick brushing I gave her and patiently tolerated the intrusion of the hoof pick as I scraped a pebble from between her near front hoof and its iron shoe. Horsekeeping details finished, I eased a clean blanket and a saddle onto her, cinched her snugly, then slid a snaffle bit into her soft, moist mouth.

“Let's go find Dusty, Lady,” I said as we set off out of the yard and into the rugged Tonto National Forest. Lady waggled her ears back and forth, giving every indication of understanding.

I've always talked to horses. There's something about being on a horse's broad back which is akin to lying stretched out on a psychiatrist's couch, only cheaper. Safer, too, if you've heard some of the stories I've heard about psychiatrists. Over the years, I've told a whole herd of four-legged shrinks about my various foster homes, those tough first months on the police force, my search for my mother, and most recently, my concern that I cared more for Dusty than I thought wise. The horses didn't find my fear of emotional entanglements peculiar at all. They never talked back, never judged. They just plodded along peacefully, flicking their ears.

After I got through telling Lady about the Kobe investigation, I finally fell silent, content to listen to Lady's fluttery snorts and the peep-peep-peep of cactus wrens. This was the Sonoran Desert at its most enjoyable, after a rain, when the air was clear and sharp, and many of its citizens splashed happily in shallow puddles. As we reached the place where the trail forked, I drew gently on Lady's reins and she halted. Because of the danger of flash floods, I figured Dusty would steer clear of the gully bottoms, so Lady and I took the fork that led along the ridge of hills to the north.

As we climbed in elevation, the desert spread out below like a sage-colored carpet. Because horses have such a strong scent, my presence went undetected by the top-knotted Gambel's quail that scuttled across the road in front of us, but not by the pair of coyote in the underbrush who matched us stride for stride, all the while throwing us slanty-eyed looks of suspicion.

The coyotes continued to pace us until we reached the ruins of the Hohokam village overlooking the valley. Then they threw us a final look and trotted up a narrow wildlife trail towards the village. Perhaps Earth Doctor was calling them, perhaps not. When I looked up past the ruins, I saw several buzzards spiraling down from the sky. Something was dead up here and coyotes were nothing if not scavengers. They enjoyed a tasty, desert-warmed corpse as much as did their fine-feathered friends.

The body was probably that of an animal, but on the odd chance it was human (the desert, after all, was the preferred dumping ground for all kinds of killers, human and otherwise), I touched my heels to Lady's flank and we moved briskly up the hillside to the ruins. The Hohokam had built carefully, and the small, eight-hundred-year-old village remained mostly intact. Most of the rock walls stood upright, still winning their battle with the elements. The roofs, however, probably constructed of limbs and grass, had long ago collapsed.

Not wanting to risk bumping into the remaining walls, I dismounted just outside the village and dropped Lady's reins to the ground. As with most Western horses, she'd been taught to ground-tie, and I knew she'd remain there until I found the source of the vulture's feast.

Listening for the mutterings of the old gods, I followed the old walkway between the buildings, twisting and turning in the shadows. But Earth Doctor was silent, perhaps still sulking in his cave beneath the asphalt of Papago Park. His nemesis, Elder Brother, said nothing either. The ruins were inhabited only by memory and the flute-like notes of the wind.

When I emerged from the ghostly corridors and into the light, I found myself on the edge of a steep embankment looking over the north side of the valley. On a ledge below me the vultures were gathered around the remains of some large animal—an antelope or a deer, I hoped. But so many of the broad-winged birds were ripping at its flesh that I couldn't identify the species. Finally, though, the two coyotes reached the carcass and began snapping and lunging until most of the birds were driven away. Before they bent to their own feast, I managed to identify four spindly legs ending in black hooves.

No lost child, then. No missing Alzheimer's patient.

Sighing with relief—I was sick of finding dead bodies—I left the desert to its own and returned to my horse.

The rest of the ride was so enjoyable that I almost forgot the original reason I'd traveled out here, but eventually, as Lady and I loped along the top of a small butte, I spotted a long line of horses snaking up the side of the next hill. I eased Lady back down to a trot, then, settling my feet into the stirrups and rising in the saddle to spare her back, extended her gait so that we covered the ground more quickly than most horses could at a lope.

It didn't take us long to reach them. Before we drew up to the last horse in line, I reined Lady in, not wanting to spook any of the dudes' horses. Then I squeezed my knees gently so that we passed first the wrangler bringing up the rear, then the long line of dudes. Dusty was, as usual, the leader of the pack, and when we drew even with him, he gave me a congratulatory grin.

“Hunted me down again, huh?”

“Yep. Throw down your six-gun and surrender, varmint. I'm a-takin' ya in.” 

He laughed, then motioned to the dudes in back of him. “I'd love to talk, but…” 

“Say no more.” I wheeled Lady around and we found a gap in the line. We eased in there and for the rest of the ride, pretended that we didn't know Dusty from Adam.

I'd reached them almost at the turnaround point, so within an hour we were back at Happy Trails. As I had hoped, the pièce de résistance of the day was an outdoor barbecue dinner, complete with wine or, in my case, Diet Coke. After stuffing ourselves, we sat around the campfire under a star-spangled sky, singing corny cowboy songs which—truth be told—sounded pretty good right then.

As we sang, I tried not to notice the expensive-looking redhead who attached herself to Dusty like a long-separated Siamese twin. Once though, Dusty caught me staring at her and grinned.

After the singing stopped, Slim recited some cowboy poetry about gunslingers and unruly ponies, poems he once told me he had written in the jockey's dressing room at Sarasota and Hollywood Park. As usual, Slim had attracted his own fan club. This time, it looked like he was about to get lucky with a brunette at least a foot taller than he.

But hey, Slim wasn't prejudiced.

The party ended with glasses of champagne for everyone but me, and the sleepy dudes trooped back to the main house.

Dusty looked like he wanted to tell me something, but the redhead had attached herself to him like a tick.

Not that it bothered me at all. Nope. Not at all.

I just left Dusty to deal with the bitch and ground the Jeep's gears all the way back to Scottsdale.

 

Before Desert Investigations opened the next morning, I scurried out to Barnes & Noble and picked up a beautifully illustrated book on the history of the Pima Indians. It was waiting for Jimmy when he arrived at the office carrying a bouquet of yellow roses in a cut glass vase.

“You were so excited about Cliffie's flowers I thought maybe yellow roses were your favorites,” he mumbled, depositing them on my desk.

We managed wobbly smiles at each other, then started work.

I'm not always very good at this friendship thing. Friendship is a skill most people learn as children, playing with the kids next door or during recess at school. But I'd never been able to stay in one foster home long enough to make friends before moving on to the next, and after a few gut-wrenching moves, I simply stopped trying. Yes, a lot of those moves were my fault. Like a lot of foster home kids, I'd developed behavior problems. Foster parents tended to get excited when they discovered that their foster child slept with a knife under her pillow, not to mention the family-wide hysteria when the artist's husband found the little .22 pistol I'd liberated from her closet.

Such discoveries always necessitated a move, leaving fragile new friendships behind. And after a while, most of us “difficult” foster kids simply stopped trying. Now that no one could make me pack my luggage without my consent, though, I cultivated—however clumsily—every offer of friendship that came my way. Thus, the odd packet of gift coffee for Clarice. Thus, books for Jimmy.

And judging from the roses on my desk, Jimmy had his own friendship issues to deal with. After all, calling me a “knee-jerk liberal” hadn't been
that
bad an insult.

I've been called worse.

I was halfway through my morning paper (child-biting coyotes still on the loose, no more Grand Canyon deaths, no more moldering corpses found on the rez, just an armed robbery at Bank One by a guy wearing a gorilla mask) when the phone rang. I picked it up and answered in what I hoped was my best new-client-impressing voice. “Desert Investigations.” 

“Hi, good lookin'.” Crap. It was Dusty.

It seemed that no sooner had I solved one relationship problem than another reared its ugly head. “What do you want?” 

“We need to talk. You blew out of here pretty fast last night.” 

“I was tired.” Was it my imagination, or were Jimmy's ears growing longer? One certainly appeared to be stretching itself in my direction.

“Lena, I just want to explain…”

“There's nothing to explain.”

A long silence at the other end. I could hear him breathing, a horse squealing in the background—at least I hoped it was a horse. Then, “You don't have to be so touchy.”