Desert Noir (9781615952236) (30 page)

There was a gasp around the table, then giggles. Blushing, Agnezia looked over at me. “I guess He has already answered the prayer.” 

Umberto smiled at his wife and asked, “Now that we know Tina is safe, do we drop her from the list?” 

Agnezia shook her head. “No,
mi corazon.
I think our Tina still needs our prayers.” 

By the look she gave me, I felt that Agnezia had somehow heard my thoughts as I'd sat on the rock, staring out to sea. But I'd be damned if I ever admitted to them. “I'm fine,” I said, looking her straight in the eyes. “Just fine.” 

In all my life, I'd never seen a woman's eyes grow so loving yet at the same time, so sad.

I decided to consider Agnezia my mother, and let the real one remain in the past.

I never wanted to look in
that
woman's eyes.

“So do I call you Tina now?” Kryzinski asked.

I was sitting in his office filling out the police report about the Papago Park shooter, even though Kryzinski and I both knew that the chances of finding him were slim to zip. Or at least slim until we I.D.'d Clarice's murderer.

It was Saturday. Dusty and I had stayed another day in Rocky Point, getting to know Agnezia's family, walking on the silver beach, making love on clean, white sheets. But now Dusty had returned to the ranch, and I was trying my best to continue my life as if I didn't know what I knew, as if what I'd discovered hadn't half killed me.

“Lena will do fine, thanks.” Why should I feel loyalty to a name given to me by an attempted murderer?

Kryzinski shifted in his seat. I couldn't tell if he was as uncomfortable with the expression on my face as Jimmy had been, or if it was just his silly suit. Today he was wearing a shiny blue Western suit with cream-colored piping, and ostrich-skin boots.

He looked at me warily, as if unsure whether I'd cry, scream, collapse, or heave his computer through the window. “Ah, have you read the paper yet this morning?” 

I shook my head. I'd been too busy convincing Jimmy that I was fine, thank you, just fine.

“Then you need to hear about Alison Garwood,” he said.

“What about her?” I was still struggling with the incident report. Even during my own days on the force, I had hated filling out police reports. Too many lines of tiny print, too many pages, too much attention to detail. A misquote now, a faulty recollection committed to paper, and perps walked.

“Kobe put her in the hospital.”

I jerked my head up. “What?”

Kryzinski nodded. “You remember she was pregnant? Well, not anymore. He beat her so bad this time that she miscarried. She's also got her jaw wired together and a couple of cracked ribs. Her left eye socket? The creepoid shattered it. She's gonna have to go a few rounds with the plastic surgeon this time.” 

The pencil snapped in my hand and I let it fall to the floor. It wasn't that I was surprised. I wasn't. Once a man begins to batter, he's started down a road from which there is no turning back. The violence escalates until slaps turn into punches, bites become knife attacks, thrown ashtrays become bullets. Yet such was the denial on the part of the victims that they pretended they couldn't see the increasing savagery of the attacks. Chances were good that Alison was right now lying in her hospital bed, wondering whether to call a cab to take her back home or to have Jay come and get her.

Then something Kryzinski said jogged a memory. 

“Did you say she had a shattered eye socket?” I remembered Clarice's face, the shattered eye socket, and it occurred to me—could Jay have set up Gus Baylor? Was he smarter than any of us had given him credit for? Was Clarice's murder simply one more case of domestic violence after all?

“Yeah, a shattered eye socket. The left one.” Kryzinski's eyes met mine. He was thinking what I was thinking.

I leaned over, picked up the broken pencil, and held out my hand for a new one. Within ten minutes I'd finished filling out the incident report and Kryzinski told me he'd find some sucker, probably the young patrolman I'd met a few days earlier, to type it up for him. Then I'd need to sign it.

“Yeah, yeah. Call me and let me know when you want me to come back down. Um, what hospital is Alison in?” 

He looked at me hard. “Scottsdale Memorial. You sure
you're
okay?” 

I threw him a bright, lying smile and left.

Alison looked even worse than I expected. Her face was swollen the size of a Phoenix Suns basketball and just about the same color. Purple and orange bruises obscured the skin to the point where she could have been any race, any sex. Her very humanity had been stripped, leaving her reduced to nothing more than a throbbing vessel of pain.

We had a lot in common, Alison and I.

I sat down on the chair beside her, knowing better than to ask her how she felt. “I know you can't talk, Alison, so I'm going to tell you what I need to tell you and then I'll leave. If you go back home, he's going to kill you, just as he might have already killed someone else. Men like Jay don't change. He may cry, he may beg you not to leave him, but once you give in and stay, he'll have learned that no matter how hard he beats you, you'll always forgive him. Save your life, Alison. Leave him now.” 

A tear slipped out of the purple slit that remained of her right eye. The left was invisible, hidden under layers of bandages. She tried to say something, but with her wired jaw the words emerged as gibberish.

Her grief took me out of my own so for a while, I sat there with her in silence. Eventually, I patted her hand and placed a card on her nightstand. “This is for My Sister's Place. It's a woman's shelter, and all you need to do is call them, and they'll take you to a safe place where Jay can't find you.” 

Her face was so damaged that I couldn't tell if she was receptive to what I was saying or not. I hoped for both our sakes that she was. If Jay wound up killing her, as he seemed ready to do, I didn't know how I'd handle it. Since leaving the police force, I'd lost my professional detachment. I wanted to get Jay Kobe in a small, dark room and do to him what he'd done to Alison…

And maybe Clarice.

Saturday or not, the office was open when I got back. Over my protests, Jimmy had decided to skip his weekend plans. He was on the computer again, checking out the history of every single bus that had ever been registered in New Mexico. Unlike me, he was humming with contentment.

He stopped humming when I walked through the door and he saw my face.

“Are you okay?”

Why did the whole world keep asking me that? “I'm fine, dammit, fine!” 

He looked like he was about to say something, then changed his mind and turned back to his computer. I sat down at my desk and pretended to be busy. After a while, Jimmy spun his chair around and asked, “How's that woman? Alison Garwood?” 

“I think she might go back to him.”

Jimmy surprised me by looking angry, something he almost never did. “I had a cousin like that, up in Utah. Every time her husband beat her, she'd pretend it was the only time it had ever happened. Tunnel vision. She'd never look at the big picture, she'd just focus on the most recent beating, like—he wouldn't have done it if she hadn't served the steak medium instead of medium rare.” 

“It was always her fault, right?”

“Yeah. Never his.”

“Did she ever leave him?”

Jimmy was quiet for a moment, then nodded. “In a way. One night he finally beat her to death and her spirit left for good.” 

There was nothing I could say to that.

I'd done all I could to help Alison and now Jimmy was doing all he could to help me. Both of us were failures.

Jimmy returned to his computer and I to the one skill I'd learned in a rather pointless life, piling theory upon theory, fact upon fact, cutting the murderer out of a whole herd of likely suspects. Clarice's Dayrunner in hand, I began making phone calls. The first was to Emily Ruzan, the attorney who was representing her in her civil case against her father. Ruzan wasn't thrilled about speaking to me on the phone, but since her client was dead, she made an exception.

“Clarice dropped the action,” she finally admitted. “Two days before her death.”

The snake I'd thought I left in Mexico was back and slithering up my spine. “Did she say why?” “No.”

“Was there some sort of out-of-court settlement?”

“Not that I'm aware of. And I am, ah,
was,
her attorney. She did, though, set up an appointment to see me on, ah…” 

I heard the sound of papers rustling.

“Here it is. She was due in here on Friday. But, um, she didn't make it.” 

“Friday?”

“Yeah, she was dead by then.”

The snake did the mambo. “Do you have any idea what she wanted to talk to you about?” 

“I'm afraid not. I just assumed it had something to do with her father and the civil action she'd brought against him.” 

“And dropped.”

“That's right. And dropped.”

Ruzan couldn't help me further so I rang off. I sat at my desk for a moment, thinking. Ruzan was a civil attorney, but she handled no divorce work. Besides, Clarice had a divorce lawyer, and she'd seen him the week before she was killed.

I called Lawrence Sallis but he only reiterated what I already knew. The divorce was proceeding apace and there had been no hitches. Clarice wasn't even going to have to pay alimony, because the moment she had poked her battered face into Sallis's office, he'd had hustled her off to a photographer to document the damage Jay had inflicted on her. He'd also personally escorted her to Scottsdale PD where she'd filed a domestic abuse complaint.

“Financially we had Jay by the balls,” Sallis said. “But just between you and me and the lamppost, a lot of these battered women turn out to be a lot more careful about their money than they are of their bodies.” 

I couldn't argue with that. I had one final question. “Do you know what set Jay off that last time, the one that made Clarice leave him?” 

Sallis made a disgusted sound. “Just the usual.”

“And what was ‘the usual'?”

“Money. Jay wanted her to sign off on that contract, she didn't, so he beat the shit out of her. Wrong move, I guess.” 

“What contract?”

“Oh, you know, the development agreement for that golf course she and her family own, the one everyone's so upset about. The Hacienda Palms. Now, I'd love to talk to you some more, but I've got a very high profile and very unhappy client cooling her heels out in the lobby. But call me anytime, especially if you ever need my services.” 

I hung up and stared at the phone.

Have you heard the rumors about the golf course?
Eleanor Hyath had said, and stupid me, I'd put her words down to mere conversation. If I'd thought about it, I'd have known that Eleanor wasn't the type to make “conversation.” And damn the malicious bitch to hell, she'd made me pop for an outrageous lunch at a resort she actually
owned.

I left the other phone calls for later and took off for Scottsdale City Hall where Mildred, a clerk I'd known since my days at the Violent Crimes Unit, had agreed to sneak me into the closed records office. She wouldn't even accept my offer of a bribe, the fact that I had once kept her grandson out of jail being good enough for her. My search didn't take long. The papers had been filed late Friday afternoon and the public hearing was set for next week.

Pre-application for Zoning Change,
it brayed at the top of the form. After flipping through dozens of pages of legalese, I finally found what I thought I'd find. The Van Vechten Trust was listed as the owner of the Hacienda Palms Resort, with Eleanor Van Vechten Hyath, Evan Hyath, Serena Hyath-Allesandro, and Clarice Hyath Kobe as equal principals. At the bottom, where the notarized signatures were affixed, one was missing.