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Friday, eight days since George Weed’s body was found and a week after the shooting in Scottsdale, I was in my office on the fourth floor of the old courthouse. I was leaning back in my chair, feet up on the big wooden desk. Downtown sounds were filtering through the expansive, arched windows-this place had been built to last in 1929. I was thinking about Lindsey. Across the room was the black-and-white photo of Carl Hayden, sheriff of Maricopa County a century before. Sheriff Hayden looked back at me across time from beneath his Stetson. The future senator from Arizona had met his wife at Stanford, I recalled. She had never been threatened by the Russian mafia. When a knock came on the pebbled glass, I called out that the door was open, and the security guard stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
His name was Carl, too, and he had been a highway patrolman for thirty years before retiring. But he had a white pencil-thin mustache and an erect bearing that always made me envision him in the uniform of a British army officer at a remote post. After exchanging pleasantries, I was about to ask him what he knew about the John Pilgrim murder, when he said, “This is my last day, Mapstone.”
“You don’t want to be bothered protecting the sheriff’s office histo
rian anymore?” I beckoned him to sit, and he did.
“It’s been fun to know you, Mapstone. But Marcia and I are leaving Phoenix. We’ve got a little piece of land in southern Arizona, about an hour from Tucson. We’ve built a house.”
Sometimes I get stir crazy, alone with my records and my idle thoughts. I was glad for the company, and made obligatory small talk about Carl’s milestone, wishing him well. I’d probably talked to him every day I came into the courthouse over four years, but I never knew he and his wife were thinking of moving.
“It’s this damned place, Mapstone,” he said. “It’s been ruined. Too many people, too many cars. They’ve paved over the citrus groves and the Japanese flower gardens. The whole damned Midwest moved here, but nobody really wants to be here. Nobody knows anybody else, or wants to.” He stared past his hawk nose, through the windows at the hazy shape of the South Mountains. “The heat, the damned smog…”
I wasn’t going to try to defend Phoenix. Everything he said was true. It broke my heart. Carl was about to continue when a mountainous shape appeared beyond the office door, and Peralta burst into the room.
“Sheriff,” Carl said. About to say more, he noticed the foul storm massed over Peralta’s brow and withdrew in silence.
When the door closed, Peralta slapped a cassette on my desk.
“The noon news,” he snarled.
“What?” I pulled my feet off the top of county property and sat up.
“Play it,” he said. “I want you to have the full experience, just like I did when it came on an hour ago.”
I took the cassette, rose warily and slid it into a player attached to a small TV on a nearby bookshelf. TV news logos flashed across the screen.
“What am I watching?”
“Turn it up,” he ordered.
It was the top story. “A dramatic break today in a fifty-six-year-old murder case!” the blond anchor chirped. I felt the subbasement drop out of my stomach. The voice continued, “For details, let’s go to Melissa Sanchez, who is at a special briefing at Phoenix Police Headquarters.” Peralta appropriated my chair and sat back, his meaty hands folded across his chest, his suit coat and tie bunched beneath.
“…Kate Vare, the department’s cold case expert, made the revelations, Megan,” the reporter said. “A cold case expert is someone who works on some of the very toughest crimes, the ones that have been unsolved for years.” I heard Peralta sigh loudly I didn’t want to meet his eyes. I looked at my fine rolling bulletin board, which stood there in all its ridiculousness.
“An FBI badge, missing for fifty-six years, has been recovered by Phoenix Police. Sergeant Vare said this badge was lost when FBI agent John Pilgrim was found shot to death in November of 1948.”
“This is bullshit!” I said. Peralta held up a hand for silence.
“Pilgrim’s badge was found on the body of a homeless man, who died last week from natural causes…”
I mumbled, “They don’t even have the date right.” On the screen, Kate Vare stood before a crowded room of reporters, nodding her head officiously, pointing to a diagram that included a photo of Pilgrim and the reproduction of the badge.
I reached over and shut off the TV.
“This is bullshit,” I repeated. “Grandstanding. I’ve actually got the homeless guy’s name! I’ve got a Social Security number, a date of birth, even an address from 1981.”
“It’s not about the rummy, Mapstone. The rummy died of natural causes. It’s about the goddamned FBI badge!” His voice echoed into the far corners of the high ceiling.
Sheriff Hayden looked on but declined to intervene. “Don’t you know how the media works, Mapstone? We never announced we found the badge. Nobody knows. So now Kate acts like she’s made a breakthrough. And in the mind of the public she has made a breakthrough.”
“Jesus!” I yelled back. “Is this about your petty little who-gets-the-credit game?”
“It’s been a good game for you,” he snapped back. “Why the hell would the sheriff’s office need a historian, a deputy with a wooptieshit Ph.D. in history, if it wasn’t all just a goddamned media effort!”
I sat down, wounded amidships.
Peralta went for more damage. “I’ve supposedly got the smartest cold case guy in the country, and he makes us look like morons. He spends his week playing social worker with all these fucking derelicts, and he comes up with dick.”
