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“We found those near the edge of the pool. Old clothes inside. No wallet or ID. No logos on the clothes. But there’s a meal voucher for Shelter Services.”
“Name?”
He shook his head.
“But the badge was sewn inside his jacket?”
Pham nodded. “He was wearing the jacket, too.”
Just the thought of it made me instantly hotter. I edged toward the dust-caked wall of the house, trying to at least catch as much shade as the small roof overhang would allow. The sliding glass door stood open and hot air drifted out. I thought, Turn on the damned air-conditioning and let’s go inside.
I said, “How do we know he’s not some undocumented alien who fell in the pool and drowned, or he died here and the coyotes threw him in the pool?”
Pham said, “Next-door neighbor, a Mrs. Morales, said this old homeless Anglo had been out in the alley a couple of days ago. She’d never seen him before. She didn’t talk to him. But she says he had some plastic shopping bags, and white whiskers.”
The sky had lost all color. It was bleached white. The air felt under pressure. I looked around the yard. It was a hell of a place to die. Sun-blasted dirt. Back fence faded and broken. The house looking like it had been abandoned years ago. I tried to imagine the happy suburban memories, tried and failed.
“So what do you guys think?” Pham asked, his hands on his hips.
Kate Vare had been silent through all this. She suddenly said, “We just don’t know enough to know yet. I don’t work with guesses. Let’s trace the badge number.” She looked at me like a small dog that had intimidated a cat. Then they all looked at me expectantly.
“I don’t know much,” I said. “There was one FBI agent killed in the line of duty in Arizona. It happened in 1948, and the case was never solved. The agent’s name was John Pilgrim.”
“Go on,” Pham said.
“That’s all I know,” I said. “So is that Pilgrim’s badge?”
“Yeah,” Pham said. “The badge was never found in 1948. That fact was withheld from the public report. I’m just learning all this in the past half hour.” He studied me. “We hoped you could be a help.”
“Well, that’s what I know,” I said, starting for the street. “If you don’t mind, I just got back from a trip, and I’d really like to go home and change.”
Markowitz put a gentle, heavy hand on my shoulder. Pham said, “I can understand, Dr. Mapstone. But we asked Sheriff Peralta for you to be assigned to this case. You have some skills we might need. So don’t leave us quite yet.” He turned to Kate Vare. “You don’t mind a team that includes Dr. Mapstone, do you, Sergeant Vare?”
She was all smiles for the head fed, a talent called “managing up” that I had never mastered. She said, “We’re always happy to have David.”
That was when the air force arrived. A yellow helicopter swept in over the trees and did a pivot maybe a thousand feet above the backyard, swinging around to view us. It had the markings of a TV network. The heat seemed to push the engine sound downward until it was as prevalent as the smell of the body.
“Goddamned TV stations,” Markowitz said over the din. “Must be a slow news day, if they come out for a stinker in a Maryvale pool.”
The first chopper took up station to the northeast, and in a few seconds another one appeared. Kate tried to hold her
hair in place from the wind blast, but soon this craft moved off a bit and hovered to the southwest. When I was able to see past the glare to make out the network logo on the second chopper’s door, I saw two more helicopters. We were bracketed for the evening news, looking like idiots staring up into the sky. The whap-whap roar of the rotors assaulted our ears. Then I noticed a commotion over toward the side gate. The uniforms parted, the helicopters seemed to shimmy downward, and a giant in a tan suit and white Stetson strode into the backyard. Mike Peralta.
His physical presence washed into the space like a concussion wave. In my mind’s eye, for just a moment, it was 1977 and academy instructor Peralta was stepping onto a gym mat to show me how to dominate and control a resisting suspect. I was eighteen, with an idealistic urge to be a cop, and my ears rang for a week after he slammed me onto the inch-thick fiber that separated my head from a full-blown concussion. “Dominate and control” were his words, classic cop speak. But his tree-trunk frame, impassive dark gaze, and confident wide-legged stance made any threat a promise. With his record of combat in Vietnam and heroics on the streets of Phoenix, he scared the hell out of the cadets.
He could still intimidate. But in the years he climbed the cop bureaucracy, years I was gone from law enforcement and from Phoenix, he had learned some polish and politics. He’d learned to smile. The media, hungry for charisma, had taken to him. People I respected said he’d be governor someday. I still wasn’t sure he was comfortable with any of it. I knew him in the way ex-partners know each other, but I couldn’t tell you where the old Peralta ended and the new one began. He was a complicated man who denied it.
Pham shook his hand. Markowitz and Kate Vare got nods. He ignored me.
Pham said. “Sheriff, I was just telling Dr. Mapstone how much we need his expertise on this case.”
“I’m sure he’s grateful for the opportunity,” Peralta said, doffing his Stetson. “So is this connected to the John Pilgrim murder?”
I stared at Peralta. “It looks that way,” Pham said.
We trailed Peralta and Pham on another once-over. I wondered how the victim got into the pool. Nothing was obvious, such as bloodstains on the concrete. Peralta walked over to the body, handed me his hat, slipped on some gloves, and felt around the man’s face. Then the corpse’s hands were in his giant paws, being minutely examined.
“A prior suicide attempt…,” Peralta said. “See the scars on his wrists.” Everybody nodded, but it was the first time they noticed the small, whitish rivulets under the skin. “But they’re damned small.”
