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“I’m intrigued,” she said. “Okay. Come by the newsroom around eleven-forty-five, and then we’ll go somewhere.”
I needed the comfort of books, so I drove over to the public library and took the glass elevator up to the Arizona Collection. The building-popularly dubbed the “copper toaster” because of its abstract design-was nearly new, with an atrium pool that you would walk into if you weren’t careful and a stunning view of the skyscrapers of the central corridor-as if you were suspended above the year-round green of palm trees and oleanders and the concrete and glass monuments that marched north and south between the mountains.
An indulgent librarian pulled me the papers of John Henry McConnico, twelfth governor of Arizona, as well as a couple of Ph.D. dissertations on microfiche from the U of A on the McConnico years in Arizona. I popped open the PowerBook and set up some files: names, chronology, family history, things to check later. I picked through the dusty books and started making notes. And then I asked for something else: a small history of the Phoenix Police Department, written in 1965 by a former professor of mine. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but perhaps something would get me moving again on Rebecca Stokes-or maybe give me the inspiration to start writing another history book I couldn’t finish.
A little after 8:00 P.M., I pulled into the vast parking lot of Metrocenter, Jim Morrison on the radio singing “L.A. Woman.” City at night. Arizona doesn’t go on daylight saving time, partly out of libertarian cussedness and partly
because if it did, the sun would still be out at 10:00 P.M., a source of misery nobody on the political spectrum wanted to contemplate. So the sun was gone, but the heat remained god-awful. The mall was something like the biggest in the world when it opened, on the outskirts of Phoenix, in the mid-1970s. Most people back then couldn’t figure why they built it so far out. But now, of course, the Metrocenter was deep inside the city and even starting to show its age. I found a parking spot within a hundred yards of the entrance to the food court and walked slowly toward the doors, watching cars and people.
Inside, it was cool, bright, and crowded. Phoenix nearly invented the indoor shopping mall and had elevated it to something like a lifestyle. So here on a Thursday night, away from the empty sidewalks and parks, was humanity’s ocean, retail-style. I wound my way through the food court, past families with twofer prams and saw teenage girl mall rats, full grown on the outside, wearing the briefest short-shorts and deep in conversation with one another. I found refuge in Ruby Tuesday, and waited by the bar.
At 8:45, a woman in black jeans and a linen shirt leaned on the rail beside me.
“I’m sorry for the cloak-and-dagger routine,” she said. “But I think you’ll agree it’s justified.”
It was Susan Knightly. She looked very different from the well-coiffed Susan I had first met. Her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair was concealed under a black Nikon ball cap. We went to a back booth of the bar. I could imagine the calls Peralta would get for me being in a bar with my badge hanging from my belt. I ordered a martini anyway. She ordered a chardonnay.
“You know about Phaedra?” I asked. She nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”
“I assumed you were busy,” she said. “Let me get right to the point, Dr. Mapstone, or is it Deputy Mapstone?”
“How about David?”
“David.” She gave a small smile. “I don’t trust the police in this matter. I don’t really know why I am trusting you, but I guess I’ve got to trust someone, or else go on living this way.”
“Why don’t you trust the police?”
“Phaedra told me not to,” she said.
“When did she tell you this?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago.”
Susan looked at me straight on with those green eyes. Her face was a scrimshaw of freckles and soft laugh lines.
“Phaedra wasn’t kidnapped,” she said. “She was on the run.”
I felt another kick in the stomach.
“I am getting so tired of being lied to.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Susan said. “I promised her. God, I wanted to go to the police every day, but Phaedra made me swear I wouldn’t. And the more that happened, the more I got paranoid.”
“So when you found me in her apartment…”
“I was getting her some clothes.”
“I might have been able to help her.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Susan said in a low, desolate voice, and her eyes filled with tears.
She looked around the room-tan young men and women clustered close to the bar, lost in an unintelligible jabber-and leaned close to me. “One night in June, it was the twentieth, I got home and got a call from Phaedra. She said someone was trying to kill her, and that she couldn’t work for me anymore. That was all she would tell me then. But she called back in a couple of days, and I made her let me give her some clothes and money.
“That’s where I got her apartment key, so I could get her some clothes, look after her stuff. Although, God knows, I realize in retrospect that it was foolish of me to go to her apartment. At the time, I guess we figured they were looking for her, and that nobody would think anything about me going to the apartment complex.”
“You better hope they’re able to discriminate between their red-heads,” I said. “Who is ‘they,’ by the way?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Susan said. “It was a dope deal gone wrong. Phaedra’s boyfriend was a pilot who did dope runs from Mexico. He just decided to take a shipment, I guess. Rip off his client. Phaedra got caught in the middle of it.”
