Desert Rage: A Lena Jones Mystery (9 page)

“Thus the foster thing.”

“Seemed like the perfect answer. Extra money, and kids running around again. You don’t know how quiet an empty house can be.”

I thought back to my apartment over Desert Investigations, the lonely nights there. But I said, “You’re right, I don’t.”

“You get used to a certain level of noise,” she continued, her hurried speech slowing, warming. “And you get used to doing things for other people, not for yourself. Hey, I know I look like hell, but I’m okay with it. The babies keep me off the streets, right? If I had my way, Drake and Emilie would still be living here and attending ASU, letting me fuss over them, but no, Drake was determined to be an aerospace engineer and just had to go to Cal Tech. Emilie’s at Julliard.”

“She’s a musician?”

“Cello.” Fiona’s wry expression didn’t hide the pride in her eyes. “You have any idea how much a decent cello costs?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “You’re looking at ten thousand for starters, and they go up from there. God help us if she gets a job with a symphony orchestra. We’d have to take out a second mortgage on the house. A third, I mean. Already have a second.” She brightened. “Maybe she’ll get a job with the Phoenix Symphony. Then she could move back home, save us some money.”

She looked into the living room, where the twins’ babbling had stopped. “Uh oh. When it gets quiet, that’s when you have to worry. Excuse me while I go check.”

Fiona was gone long enough for me to reflect on some of my own foster mothers. Madeline topped the list of the good ones, with Mrs. Giblin close behind. Some women seemed to be born maternal, whether they could give birth or not. Whereas others…The act of giving birth was no guarantee of decency. If it had been, the twins wouldn’t be covered with scars.

Fiona finally returned, smelling like shit. Literally. “They’ve found a new game,” she grumbled, as she wetted down a towel in the sink. “Look, can we wrap this up for now? I need to spot-clean the carpet.”

“One more question.” The one I’d purposely put off until last. “Did Kyle shoplift?”

She didn’t turn around. “What makes you ask that?”

“The Cuisinart Elite IV sitting in his aunt’s kitchen.”

Her answer was so soft I had to ask her to repeat it. “We give him an allowance,” she finally said.

“That model can run to six hundred dollars.”

She dropped the towel into the sink and turned to face me. “Oh, all right. Yes, Kyle used to shoplift, but he hasn’t done that in a long time.”

“The Cuisinart looked brand new to me.”

“Appearances can be deceiving.” She bent down and began hauling out bottles and cans of various cleaning solutions. “Not that I haven’t enjoyed our little chat, but I’ve really got to spot-clean that carpet before the stains set.” She straightened back up and blew a stray hair out of her face. “Now, if you don’t mind…”

We were at an impasse, but fortunately I was able to talk her into seeing me again tomorrow at three, the twins’ nap time. By then she would have either come up with a better cover story for Kyle’s supposedly former bad habits, or tell the truth. I hoped it would be the latter.

“You’ve given me a clear sense of Kyle,” I said, as she hustled me through the reeking living room. “Maybe tomorrow we can talk more about his relationship with Ali.”

Opening the front door, she said, “Sure, but long story short, they were a real-life Romeo and Juliet couple.” For a moment, fear flickered across her face. “And you know how that turned out.”

As the door closed behind me, I recalled how the play ended.

With a double suicide.

Not wanting to wait until I got back to Desert Investigations, I drove down to the end of the block and parked under a shady eucalyptus. After making certain she wasn’t peeking out her window, I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and slashed through the duct tape with the penknife I kept in my carryall.

Unwrapped the notes inside. Most were the usual moony teenage professions of love. Except for the last one.

It read…

I HATE MY PARENTS. I WISH SOMEBODY WOULD JUST KILL THEM. MAYBE YOU????

XOXOXO

LUV LUV LUV YOU MADLY

ALI

Chapter Seven

The next morning I learned that the Camerons’ former maid, Eldora Morales, already had a new job. Once she returned from her vacation with her family in Mexico, Margie Newberry, the Camerons’ next door neighbor, called around on her behalf, finally securing her a position with a family in Paradise Valley, an even more upscale community west of Scottsdale. Armetta Zielsdorf, her new employer, had graciously given her permission to speak to me, even though it meant Mrs. Zielsdorf would have to prepare lunch for herself, her four children, and three visiting friends. Judging from the burnt smells emanating from the kitchen, Mrs. Zielsdorf wasn’t much of a cook.

Driven out of the house by the stench, Eldora and I sat on the back patio, overlooking Camelback Mountain and the one hundred foot-high rock formation called the Praying Monk. The day’s heat hadn’t climbed to its peak yet, and an updraft from the canyon below kept the temperature bearable. Over glasses of iced tea, Eldora told me her story.

After being widowed, she came north—legally, she stressed—to find a job so she could send money home to her children and her mother and father, who were caring for them. Several stints as a hotel maid later, she wound up with the Camerons, where she stayed for twelve years, until their deaths. According to her, the Camerons had been the perfect employers and both children were utterly delightful.

“Even Ali?”

Eldora avoided looking at me by turning slightly so that she faced the Praying Monk. He perched so tenuously on the face of the mountain that it looked like he was about to tumble down to the street below. “Miss Ali a nice girl. Not kill her parents.”

“Look at me, Eldora.”

She turned back, but her eyes still wouldn’t meet mine. Somewhere in her fifties, Eldora’s hair was long, streaked with gray, and braided into one long plait down her back. Her short-nailed fingers fluttered nervously on the table’s surface.

“Nice girl. Very nice.”

Eldora wasn’t in denial about Ali and any misbehavior problems the girl might have had; her hesitancy came from the fact that maids who tell tales soon found themselves out of a job. The trick here would be to ease her past that concern.

“The Zielsdorfs seem like nice people, too,” I said. “It was understanding of them to give you this time off. Especially at lunchtime, when they have company.”

“Nice people. Very understanding. Miss Armetta driving me to funeral, too.” Her dark brown eyes flickered back to the Praying Monk.

“That is nice. Is your room here nice?”

“Very nice. Very pretty.”

“Do you have a television set, like at the Camerons’?”

“Big TV. Very nice.”

Time to shift back to the subject. “Was little Alec Cameron nice?”

Her lower lip trembled. “Sweet boy. Very nice.”

“So Ali and Alec were both nice children.”

She nodded furiously. ‘Oh, yes, yes.”

“Neither of them ever gave you any trouble?”

“Mister Alec was a good boy. Smart, too. Wanted to be astronaut.” The tremble increased. She had loved Alec.

“How about Ali?”

The tremble stopped. “Nice girl. No trouble.”

Judging from her reaction, Alec had been the easier child. No big surprise there since Ali was fourteen, and subject to all the hormonal craziness that arrived with puberty.

“Did you ever see Ali hit her mother or father? Or Alec?”

Alarmed, she looked straight at me. “Miss Ali never hit anyone!”

“But there was some trouble, right?”

A pause, then a hesitant nod. “Over boy. Miss Alexandra wanted her not see boy so much. Said she was too young to be serious like that.”

I wondered if Alexandra had suspected the duo’s runaway plans. “Was there a fight? I mean, an argument?”

A hawk called out somewhere down in the canyon. Another answered back. Looking out from this vantage point, we could have been in the wilderness, but the steady sound of traffic on the street on the other side of the house gave the lie to that. We were in the middle of the city.

“Eldora? Was there an argument over that boy? Kyle?”

She looked back at the Praying Monk, as if pleading for him to save her, but he remained silent.

“Tell me, Eldora. I’m going to stay here until you do.” I hated bullying her, but Ali was my client, not Eldora.

The edge in my voice must have reached her because her thin shoulders slumped. She was getting tired of lying. Returning her gaze to me, she said, “Maybe Miss Ali yelled some. Girls do. That all. No fighting. No hitting. Just yelling.”

“How about Dr. Cameron? Did he yell at Ali when they talked about Kyle?”

A faint smile. “No. Dr. Cameron not care what she do. So no yelling.”

“Really?”

“Dr. Cameron not care what anybody do. Just so long they don’t scratch his pretty cars.”

My next question was a shot in the dark, but sometimes shots found their target. “Eldora, do you know who killed the Camerons?”

Her mouth began trembling again, then her hands, her shoulders. Then her attempt to control her emotions failed utterly. With tears streaking her cheeks, she lifted her face to the sky and wailed, “If I know who, I not wait for cops, I kill them myself!”

***

I spent the rest of the day at Desert Investigations digging through the case file again, studying the crime scene photos, rereading the detectives’ interviews, double-checking the autopsy report on the victims. Alexandra and Alec had died of massive blunt trauma, Dr. Cameron by gunshot. No semen had been found in or on Alexandra, and there was no sign of vaginal bruising; she hadn’t been raped. The stippling around Dr. Cameron’s wound showed that the gun had been fired approximately three inches from his head, a
coup de grace,
much like a hunter puts a wounded animal out of its misery.

During the autopsies, the M.E. found all three victims had small portions of partially digested almond chicken, moo goo gai pan, rice, and egg rolls in their stomachs. Based on those findings, and the fact that when the police arrived at 6:12 p.m., rigor mortis had already begun in the Camerons’ eyelids, necks, and jaws, the M.E. estimated their times of death as between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. The time was further narrowed by the statement of the delivery boy from the Chinese restaurant, who said he dropped off a takeout order to a still-living Alexandra Cameron a few minutes before noon. The Camerons managed to get small portions of the takeout into their stomachs before they were bound with duct tape and slowly tortured to death, which gave a more realistic timeline of death to somewhere between noon and three p.m. After flipping through more pages, I found a note saying that Ali and Kyle had arrived at the vet’s with the badly injured Misty at 3:02 p.m., as shown by the camera in his reception room. Given that the vet’s office was an approximate thirty-minute drive from the Cameron house, I condensed the timeline of the murders to between noon and 2:30.

I did find one other thing interesting. Tests found fibers from both Alexandra’s and Alec’s clothing on the back of Dr. Cameron’s sports shirt and slacks, leading me to believe that despite his seeming lack of warmth, he tried to protect his family from the killer. Or killers. Gun or no gun, I wasn’t convinced the damage I saw had been carried out by one person.

“How you doing over there?” Jimmy asked, turning away from his computer, where he had been busily working all day. “You’ve been pretty quiet.”

“Just a little light reading.”

Before I could cover them up, he glanced at the photographs laid out on my desk. “I don’t know how you can look at that stuff.”

“Just part of the job. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Right.”

“Tell you what, though. After all this sitting around and reading, I need to loosen up, so I think I’ll go to the gym.”

“Which one?”

For the past few years I’ve been a member of L.A. Fitness, but a couple of months ago I’d also been going to Scottsdale Fight Pro. The gym was only two blocks from Desert Investigations and offered, besides the usual workout machines and free weights, a wide choice of martial arts classes that included various styles of cage fighting, as well as other hand-to-hand combat techniques. Since my days with Scottsdale PD I’d been a practitioner of karate and jiu jitsu, but due to an ass-whopping I had been given during a recent case, I’d begun classes in Krav Maga, an Israeli armed forces discipline. Well, maybe “discipline” is the wrong word to use, considering that head-butting and eye-gouging are a big part of Krav. The point of Krav is, when you are shorter and lighter than your opponent, you need some sort of edge to deal with an attack, prevent the perp from hitting you again, then quickly neutralize him. Firearms work well, too, but lethal force isn’t always called for. And then there are those cases when, for one reason or another, you’re not armed.

“Fight Pro,” I told Jimmy, in answer to his question.

Being an L.A. Fitness fan himself, he frowned. “No accounting for taste.”

“No, there isn’t.” I repacked the case file box, ran it upstairs to my apartment, and grabbed my gym bag. I’d probably go through the file again tonight, but for now, I needed to get physical.

A wall of heat hit me when I ran down the stairs and stepped outside. The thermostat on the outside of Cactus Kitty’s, a new pseudo-cowboy bar across the street from Desert Investigations, informed me that the late afternoon temperature was one hundred and eighteen. Oh, joy. It was too hot for even the ever-present tourists, and Main Street was pretty much deserted. Maybe they were all huddled in the bar, since its sign proudly advertised ICE COLD BEER AND AIR-CONDITIONING. Despite the heat, I began to walk to the gym. The two-block distance wasn’t going to kill me. Besides, since Fight Pro had started resurfacing its parking lot, parking had become a problem, and chances were good that I wouldn’t be able to find a spot anyway.

It soon became apparent I’d made the right decision. Fight Pro’s lot was a mess. Several cars were circling the lot again and again, hoping that since their last pass, a space might have opened up. Wishing them luck, I hurried inside where the frigid air-conditioning immediately dried off my sweat.

Because of the mess outside, few of the other usual gym rats were there, just several people trying to outdo each other with free weights, so I had my pick of the equipment. After a brief warm-up on the treadmill, I cranked up the speed, pounding out one mile in ten minutes, forty-three seconds. Satisfied, I slacked off to a leisurely jog for another two miles, then stepped off the treadmill. Since there were no Krav Maga classes scheduled today, I walked over to the free weights area. I’m no competition bodybuilder like some of the women who frequent Fight Pro, but I am strong for my size, and can squat a hundred and forty-five on a regular basis. I was a bit off today—probably due to the heat—but I still managed a hundred and thirty. Then it was off to the bench press, where I redeemed myself by lifting one-sixty. Arms sore, I headed back to the treadmills, and finished my workout by running another three miles.

Before heading to the showers, I noted that one more regular had come in, a weirdly overdeveloped woman who seldom talked to anyone. Around thirty, at least six foot two, and a bad peroxide blonde, she was more or less normal from the waist up—normal for serious weight trainers, that is. But most of her workouts were dedicated to increasing the size of her massive thighs, each of which already appeared larger than her shoulder width. She was now so grotesquely disproportioned that the other gym rats had taken to calling her Monster Woman.

Right now, Monster Woman was in the grunt corner, doing squats with weights that drew admiring looks from everyone. From where I stood, I couldn’t see the markings on her weights, but from the size and number of them, it looked like she was hefting upwards of three hundred pounds. Surely that couldn’t be right?

Then again, maybe it was. A couple of months earlier, I had discussed her with Elena Muinsiere, another ex-cop involved in Krav Maga. A bodybuilder herself, although a sane one, she told me that during a rare conversation, Monster Woman bragged that her biceps measured eighteen inches, her quads forty-two. Each.

“A clear case of testosterone abuse,” Muinsiere had said. “It’s messed her head all up. Talk about ’roid rage! I’m no wimp, Lena, but I keep as far away from her as possible, and I suggest you do the same.”

I’d taken Muinsiere’s advice, so today I made a large detour around Monster Woman while heading to the showers. Whatever drama was being played out in the woman’s head, I didn’t want to become a part of it.