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John Pilgrim was thirty-eight years old. He had been an FBI agent for twelve years. He hadn’t served in the war. A photo of him showed a rather round-faced man with thin lips and dark hair. An earnest, serious face. A delicate long nose. I posted the photo on the bulletin board. Pilgrim had been born in Lexington, Kentucky, and had a law degree from the University of Kentucky. He would have been one of the new breed of professional, degreed agents around which J. Edgar Hoover built the FBI somewhere in the 1930s. Pilgrim was posted to Phoenix in the spring of 1947.
Pilgrim was found floating in an irrigation canal in the late afternoon of Nov. 10, 1948. A farm worker there to let water into some lettuce fields found the body. I posted a city map on the bulletin board and marked where the body was found: near the present-day intersection of Fifty-first Avenue and Thomas. It was half a mile from where the homeless man would fall into the pool half a century later. What the hell did that mean? The landscape had changed from farms to suburbia to the new melting pot. I made a note to find a ma
p of the old canal system.
I read the narrative of the lead county detective, typed on flimsy paper with a cockeyed “T” key. Pilgrim’s body was wearing a suit and tie. He artfully declined to mention the badge, or the gun, for that matter. The condition of the body made the investigators believe it had floated quite a distance. Pilgrim was last seen alive two days before, November 8, by his partner, Agent Renzetti. Pilgrim told Renzetti he was going to work late that night, running down a lead. The report didn’t mention the nature of the lead.
I paged through the detective’s notebooks, handwriting in blue ink, and set them aside for later. The dust from the old files made me sneeze.
The coroner’s report, a Photostat with white type blaring out of black background, said Pilgrim had one gunshot wound to the heart. He was dead when his body went into the water. The bullet was a.38 caliber. This report was heavily censored, whole paragraphs wiped out like a landscape in a snowstorm. But they hadn’t removed the last page. I held it in my fingers for at least a full minute. I can’t tell you if I was breathing or not. For at the bottom of the coroner’s report was the signature, Philip Mapstone.
My grandfather.
My grandfather had been a dentist, and he had died in 1977. And as to what his signature was doing on a line that said “coroner,” I had not a clue. When I talked to Peralta on Tuesday, he said it probably didn’t mean anything. The old coroner system, which predated the science and professionalism of medical examiners, was very informal, and a coroner’s jury might be led by a lawyer, an ordinary citizen, a medical doctor, even a dentist. Whatever the reason, the Pilgrim case suddenly grew personal. I didn’t like it.
On Tuesday I received a gift. The medical examiner’s office reported that the homeless man had died of apparently natural causes. Kate Vare sent me a suspiciously friendly e-mail that morning, saying she was taking herself off the case. I wasn’t sure she could just do that. She was a cold case expert and this was not just cold but freezing. But I wasn’t going to argue. She was needed on the case of the missing teenage girl. The abduction had several disturbing similarities to cases in the 1980s, and Kate said she would be working on analyzing those links. In the ’80s, two girls in their young teens were taken from their parents’ houses in well-to-do north Phoenix neighborhoods. They were raped and murdered, and the cases were never solved. Now another girl was missing. The media were going berserk. I overcame my mistrust of Kate’s sharp features, and wished her well.
The homeless man had died of natural causes and then some. Although he suffered a massive heart attack before falling into the pool, he was also dying of lung cancer, congestive heart failure, and untreated diabetes. The medical examiner speculated the man had “coded out” on the edge of the pool and tumbled in headfirst. It wasn’t a homicide. It was just very damned strange. And whether he was murdered or not, my case was still alive because of the FBI badge sewn into his jacket. When I briefed Peralta and Eric Pham, they agreed I should continue on the case alone. I reminded Pham that the bureau still owed me access to the Pilgrim records, and he said he’d make another call to his bosses to get me clearance.
For now, the Pilgrim case was mine.
Chapter Nine
That evening, I walked on a sidewalk laid down in 1948. I had walked on it a hundred times, going from my office in the old court-house to the county lot where I parked. But this time I noticed the date chiseled into the concrete block I wondered if Special Agent John Pilgrim had walked this sidewalk when it was new. I thought about the world of John Pilgrim in Phoenix in 1948. Men wore suits, ties, and hats, even when not at work. Women were rare in offices and factories, even though the war had added to their numbers. The diversity we take for granted in any American city and town in the early twenty-first century was not found in Pilgrim’s Phoenix. It was an overwhelmingly Anglo place, with the blacks and Mexicans “kept in their place.” Society was similarly fixed, men worked, women raised children, everyone married, and roles were clear. Authority still meant something, ruling with a combination of respect and fear. For entertainment, people went to movies and listened to radio; only a few well-off families could afford the new televisions. A middle-class family owned one car, not three or four. But the mode of travel preferred by most Americans was still the train, with the new streamliners promising more luxury than ever. And Phoenix-it was little more than a big town, instead of America’s fifth largest city. John Pilgrim’s world, America a mere half century ago, seemed more foreign than some distant historical epoch.
Those were the musings that took me to the parking lot, to the back of the Oldsmobile.
I sensed movement behind me. Even though I had been carrying the Colt Python in a nylon holster on my belt, I felt nauseatingly vulnerable. I’m sure I visibly jumped.
“I’m not going to hurt you, mister.”
“I know,” I said, pride quickly replacing terror. The Russian mafia had not fallen on such hard times that they had sent a bag lady to kill the husband of their nemesis, the brilliant Lindsey Faith Mapstone.
The woman must have been concealed by some of the vans and SUVs nearby. I leaned against the car door and took her in: straight, dirty blond hair; broad, sunburned face; a stocky, medium-height body Throw her in a shower, dress her differently, and put her in a minivan in Chandler, and she might be mistaken for a soccer mom. If you didn’t look too closely. Someone had knocked one of her teeth out. Her tan was raw and uneven. The collar of her T-shirt was filthy.
I don’t have any money,” I said, and started to get in the car.
“I don’t go hitting up cops,” she said. But she didn’t move on. She just stood there, watching me.
She said, “You were looking for Weed.”
I stopped, gently reclosed the door, and faced her.
“They said at the shelter you were looking for Weed,” the woman said. “Two cops, a woman and a man. They said the man was tall and looked like a schoolteacher, and he drove this big yellow Olds 442.”
David Mapstone, the master of concealment.
“You know Weed?” I asked.
She folded her arms tightly around her breasts, causing them to balloon out beneath the faded purple T-shirt. “I hang out with him sometimes.”
“Around here?”
“He liked the deck park,” she said. Margaret Hance Park, which sat above the freeway a mile north of us, and was home to festivals, joggers, sunbathers, and drug dealers. “We’d sit there by the library. I like to read books.”
“Was Weed a nickname?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was just his name. What’s your name?”
