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“What year?” I demanded.
“Nineteen eighty-five.”
“Where did class meet?”
“The room? I don’t know. Somewhere in Upham Hall.”
I watched her carefully, but she stared straight ahead, avoiding my glare. She added, “I had quite a crush on you.”
“You’re still lying.”
“I didn’t lie!” she said, her voice rising. She scolded me as if I were one of her kids running the television too loud. “You found a body, didn’t you? Right where the note said.”
“The man in the desert was killed by your father?”
“That’s what the note said!”
I explained that Harry Bell’s body had only been in the desert a few weeks, not since the mid-1960s. I wondered if I would be so patient if her husband weren’t a county supervisor. She stared so hard at the windshield her eyes might have popped out and made a run for it. Then she started sniffling and tears beat her eyes to the exit.
“Try again,” I said.
“Bastard!”
“You had a crush on me, remember?”
We sat in silence, the only sound being the quiet purr of the engine and the air conditioning. Outside, the temperature was climbing above a hundred. Soon it would be hot enough to make all the new transplants wonder what the hell they were thinking when they decided to move here. Inside, I was uneasy. The more I had thought about Dana and Tom Earley—“stewed about it,” as Lindsey would say—the more I worried that I was being used to embarrass the sheriff. It made sense: this persistent critic of the Sheriff’s Office, and me in particular, had sent his wife to concoct a historic case. Then Mapstone would waste sheriff’s resources digging up a man who had died of natural causes and only wanted to be buried on his own land. Why the hell was I sitting here? I should have been alerting Peralta. But if this was the game, why hadn’t the trap been sprung back in February when we discovered the body?
My misgivings were interrupted by the sound of sobs. Dana was bent forward with her face in her hands.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “It’s my fault.”
“What is your fault?” I asked.
“This,” she said. “Misleading you. There was no real letter from my father. He’s alive and living in Gold Canyon. I needed help. I didn’t know where to turn.”
I kept quiet.
“Back in the late eighties, my husband was a partner with two vile little men, Harry and Louis Bell. Tom was just building his real-estate business, and the Bells owned some land in Tempe. We developed a little shopping center. There was lots of savings and loan money then, so everybody was doing something.”
As her tears subsided, she talked straight-ahead and business-like. Gone was the elliptical ditziness that she had shown in my office, whether it was an act or not.
“The Bells swindled us,” she continued. “It was a complicated case, so I won’t bore you with the details. We took them to court, and won. But they filed for bankruptcy, and we never got a dime.”
I settled back in my seat and said nothing. Across the parking lot, business had slowed down. The men milled about like a meaningless picket line. The combination of heat and exhaust fumes in the air gave them an insubstantial, ghostly look.
“Well,” she went on, “about two years ago, I started getting phone calls. It was a man, he didn’t give his name, He always called when Tom was gone. He said he had information that we had broken the law on the shopping center investment, and he asked for money to keep quiet about it.”
“Who was this?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I always thought it must be Harry Bell. Tom was very successful and well-known by then. So Harry was going to get revenge for being forced into bankruptcy.”
“Why not go to the police?”
Dana stared straight ahead. She kept running her finger along her seat belt shoulder strap like a barber sharpening a straight razor.
I said, “So Bell had something on you and your husband.”
“Look, it was a long time ago,” she said. Now her hand clutched the shoulder strap. “This man said he could prove that Tom had defrauded his partners and the RTC in the shopping center deal. Well, those were the Bell brothers. He claimed he had documents. He said he would go to the media.”
