Desert Noir (9781615952236) (37 page)

The next day was hotter.

The sun rose, a malicious red ball that seared my skin. When the car began to heat up, I crawled back into my lean-to, spending the morning splashing cactus juice on my face. But nothing seemed to help. Once, in desperation, I even returned to the oven-like Infiniti and turned on the air-conditioning, but after a few minutes of life-lengthening cool blasts, the battery died.

Now I didn't even have the car horn to summon help.

Firing a few rounds from the gun wouldn't help, because anyone passing near enough to hear it would automatically think someone was out here hunting. Or practicing for a raid on the State Capitol.

As I returned to my lean-to, I didn't even bother looking over towards Evan. There probably wasn't much of him left.

Somehow I survived the morning.

Around noon, I began to feel woozy and as I looked out onto the desert's stark, minimalist beauty, I began to see shapes moving towards me through the wavery heat. I attempted to rise but fell back onto my pallet. No problem. The shapes got closer, closer, until I could see that there were Indians, a band of about six—men and women both—from a tribe I couldn't identify.

They were shorter than the Pima but taller than the Yaqui who lived near Phoenix. And their clothing…

I squinted my eyes as they grew nearer.

The women, burned deep brown by the desert sun, wore only rawhide skirts, leaving their breasts exposed. Like the men, who were clad only in short loincloths, they had painted zig-zag stripes on their bodies in red, yellow and white. Their long, unbound hair waved from their heads like pennants in the hot wind.

Hohokam.

“But you're all dead,” I whispered, as they passed only ten feet from my lean-to. “You've been dead for centuries. You're with Earth Doctor now.” 

They ignored me and continued their silent journey eastward towards the Superstition Mountains.

I allowed myself another sip of cactus juice and sank back onto my pallet, aware that I had started hallucinating—the first step on my own long journey. But would it really be that bad? I'd lived near this desert all my life, listened to its hawks and its wind, breathed in its wildflowers and sage. If I died here, I'd simply become a part of it.

Would that be so bad? To nourish the soil or enter the coyote? There were crueler deaths, more wasteful graves.

That night, dreams came in short snatches, as if my unconscious mind was too weak to sustain them. Earth Doctor, Elder Brother, they all came to visit and offer their advice. The desert was a good and clean place, they said, but it took endurance to live there. I agreed with them and they were sucked up into a whirlwind. When the night was almost over, a red-haired young man with eyes the color of mine leaned over me and caressed my cheek. “There, there, Tina. There, there.” I recognized his tender hands, his sweet smile.

“Daddy,” I whispered.

Like a ghost, he dissolved into the air, but I wasn't alone for long. When dawn broke, a coyote approached with what appeared to be a smile on her bright blond face.

“I know you,” I said. “We met at Papago Park.”

She laughed and bared her long fangs. Then she stuck her nose into the lean-to and bit me on the ankle.

“Ouch!” I complained. “I'm not dead yet, dummy! You're supposed to let me die first.” 

She snarled and bit me again. I tried to go back to sleep, but every time I drifted off, she nipped me again. Finally she took hold of my jeans leg and began to tug, as if she was trying to drag me out into the sun.

“Stop that! It's hot out there!” My voice sounded like a bark.

But the coyote wouldn't leave me alone. She tugged and tugged. And every time I laid my head back down she gnawed on me some more.

She eventually made me so angry that I staggered to my feet, stumbled out of the lean-to, and took a swat at her with the Tom Clancy book.

She yelped, then pointed her muzzle skyward, as if demanding I follow her gaze.

I did. That's when I saw the plane.

The coyote grinned in triumph, then trotted off in the same direction the Hohokam had taken.

Finally roused from my stupor, I shuffled over to the Infiniti. With my last bit of strength, I grabbed the rearview mirror I'd pried off during my first day on the desert. As I stood there looking upwards, the blue-and-orange Cessna floated across the horizon, looking to my sun-dazzled eyes mighty like an angel. Capturing the sun in the Infiniti's mirror, I began to signal.

The Cessna floated on, oblivious.

Although I'd thought I was too dehydrated to cry, tears trickled down my cheeks.

“Pray for me, Agnezia!”
I shouted.

I signaled again.

And the Cessna waggled its wings.

 

I was a hero once more.

During my two-day hospital stay, the papers made me a celebrity, and I could already see new business rolling in for Desert Investigations. The headline on the
Scottsdale Journal
blared, SCOTTSDALE DETECTIVE SOLVES MURDER OF SOCIALITE, SURVIVES THREE DAYS IN DESERT! The only thing that annoyed me was the picture they had chosen. It was an old one from my Violent Crimes Unit days, which in itself was okay, but they had retouched it and my scar had vanished. I guess they thought they were being kind.

The story left out plenty, too. The reporter wrote only that Evan's body had been recovered by the Search and Rescue team radioed by the Cessna's pilot. He didn't mention how little of Evan remained, or the noisy protest the coyotes had set up as the Search and Rescue team dragged Evan's body away. Most of the Hyath family scandal had been expunged from the article, too, perhaps out of fear of a lawsuit. The story did note, however, that Clarice had filed a civil action against her father only to drop it mere days before her death. Other than my near-beatification, most of the article was about Clarice. Gus Baylor had been reduced to a mere afterthought, which I thought was fitting.

I also appreciated that the reporter took pains to point out the culpability of the proposed zoning change in Clarice's murder, and I hoped the Zoning Commission might have second thoughts. Knowing Scottsdale as I did, though, I doubted it. The Hacienda Palms Golf Course was history.

When I turned to the jump on the second page, I saw an article recounting another death.

Finally understanding that the last night in the desert I'd dreamed only of the dead, I turned my face to the pillow and wept.

They let me out of the hospital the next day, saying that it was a miracle I had survived in the shape I had. My arms were so full of floral arrangements that I felt like the Queen of the May, but the object most precious to me I held in my right hand: a thirty-six ounce bottle of chilled Evian.

“God helps those who help themselves,” I muttered as Dusty led me out front, where a pack of reporters and live TV cameras lay in wait.

“That's not what you said when I got to the hospital,” Dusty said, as the media closed in. “I even remember you muttering something about prayer. And ghosts.” 

Ignoring him, I beamed at the reporters, then turned my scarred profile to the cameras.

They pressed in close and a live remote camera stuck itself right in my face. I started talking.

On what I was assured was a live feed, I told the press exactly why Clarice had filed that civil action against her father. I told them that her mother had always known about the molestation but refused to do anything about it because she might lose some money. I recounted almost verbatim the last conversation I'd had with both of the Hyaths and the damning contents of their pre-nupt.

When one of the reporters asked me if I wasn't afraid that the Hyaths would sue me, I shrugged. “After three days surviving in the Arizona desert, it's hard to be afraid of anything else.” 

Then I bid them good day and headed for Dusty's truck.

“Started a little firestorm back there, didn't you?” Dusty said, as he pulled out of the parking lot.

“The Hyaths can afford the fire-fighting equipment,” I answered. Then I noticed that he had already turned down the street that led to my apartment above Desert Investigations, so I put a restraining hand on his arm. There were a couple of stops I wanted to make first, I told him.

He opened his mouth to argue then thought better of it and turned the truck around.

It took us only a few minutes to get to the cemetery. Clarice's grave had already taken on a look of neglect. A solitary bouquet of red roses nestled at the base of the headstone and as I leaned over, I saw that the card read, “From your loving father.” 

Loving?
Perhaps that was the way he'd seen it. Only he and the Devil knew for sure.

I knelt down and carpeted Clarice's grave with my own flowers. My friend's face may have been false, but she'd cared as much for me as she could care for anyone, and for that I owed her roses.

Perhaps some day I would even learn to forgive her.

During my years as a detective with the Violent Crimes Unit, I had learned many ugly things about human behavior, chief among them the fact that evil always arrives with a bellyful of excuses. Those excuses were as false as Clarice's smiles. Yes, she had been sexually abused, emotionally abused, but it still didn't excuse her later behavior. She ruined Dulya Albundo's family, and indirectly, killed Dulya's mother. She had used George Haozous for her own purposes, and when she was through with him, tossed him out with the rest of the garbage. She was even preparing to ruin Cliffie, who had been her friend for years. God knows what damage she would have done to my life if she had lived.

The humiliations Clarice had suffered at the hands of her parents didn't excuse her later behavior; they didn't even explain it. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of children live through years of unimaginable hell, yet grow up to become decent, productive citizens.

Very few of us, and in truth I must include myself on the list of the abused, become killers.

Oh, yes. That too. Clarice was a killer, in intent, if not yet in action. Evan's answer to that final question I had asked him out on the desert had haunted me for days.

“Yes,” he'd told me before he died. “Gus told me all about it.

He thought it was hilarious.”

Clarice had scheduled that meeting with Gus because she had also been in the audience at that infamous fight in Tudor Hills. Like Evan, she'd recognized a killer when she saw one.

And she'd wanted to hire him.

Clarice planned to kill her mother. With Mommy dead, there'd be more money for Daddy and Clarice.

The next grave I visited was more sorrowful. Other mourners joined me in laying armloads of flowers at the foot of the simple wooden cross. There were tears of regret, talk of yet another zoning change. Always alert to a photo op, the mayor was there. As reporters swarmed around her, she proposed a buffer zone to separate the reservation from the city, a buffer zone lined by a high fence, one too high for coyotes to climb.

As I looked down at the freshly dug grave of the blond-faced coyote shot on the way to her den by a gun-toting Scottsdale vigilante, I wept once more. The fool had shot the wrong coyote. That
my
coyote's pups would stay at a wildlife rescue organization until they were old enough to return to the wild only slightly eased my sorrow. I remembered their mother's wild smile as we faced each other across the Papago Buttes, the mark of the desert branded on her face.

She reminded me of me.

I bowed my head and wished her good hunting with Earth Doctor.

Then I turned around and went back to the truck where the man I no longer feared to love waited for me.

From the
Scottsdale Journal
:

SCOTTSDALE
—Jay Kobe, widower of murdered socialite Clarice Kobe, was shot to death last night by his live-in girlfriend, Alison Garwood.

Neighbors reported hearing an altercation, then gunshots. They called 911.

When police arrived they found Garwood holding a gun and standing over Kobe's body. She was bleeding from a beating that Capt. Edgar Kryzinski, head of the Violent Crimes Unit, described as “savage.” 

“I loved him,” Garwood reportedly told police. “But I just couldn't take it any more. Not after he killed our baby.” 

According to hospital sources, Garwood was referring to a miscarriage she'd suffered earlier in the month, alleg-edly caused by another beating.

Garwood is being treated for her injuries at Scottsdale Memorial Hospital. It is not yet known if she will be charged in Kobe's death.

For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:

www.poisonedpenpress.com/betty-web

To receive a free catalog of other Poisoned Pen Press titles, please contact us in one of the following ways: 

Phone: 1-800-421-3976

Facsimile: 1-480-949-1707