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“When I didn’t, you sent Adam Perez to my office to kill your husband and me? The body count keeps going up, and you still can’t tie it up.”
“We wanted to be together,” Malkin said, his hands in a pleading posture. “Tom lost his stake in Arizona Dreams. The gambling finally did him in. But it didn’t matter, because Dana would be with me.” He wiped sweat off his forehead. “How much, Deputies? Let’s end this in a businesslike way. How much would it take?”
“Forget it, Jerry,” Dana said. “These two are idealists. That’s why they’re broke. I was sure as hell not going to spend the rest of my life broke, or in debt married to a hypocritical politician. Arizona Dreams is going to change all that…”
“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. My voice was raspy. Saliva refused to come into my mouth, only to evaporate in the hot air. “Why would Adam Perez still be denying he killed Louie Bell and Alan Cordesman? And when I think about it, I agree. Beating and shooting are his style; not an ice pick.” I looked at Dana. “I think that’s more your style.”
She just looked at me like an insolent teenager. “Too bad I can’t get close enough to you, love.” She surveyed me with the shotgun barrel. “It was really easy,” she went on. “With Alan, his girlfriend was gone, and I rang the bell and asked if we could have a drink and talk. One thing led to another—he’d always been attracted to me—and later, when he was asleep, I just did it. Once you do it, it gets easier. So I found Louie in the casino. He wouldn’t talk to me. He just ignored me and started playing the slot. And I came up behind him, and gave him a hug, and held him real close. He only shuddered for a few seconds when I put it in…”
The warehouse was silent except for a drip of water somewhere. It only fed my raging thirst.
“So why didn’t you use an ice pick on your husband?” I asked. “Why trust Perez with the job?”
“For the children,” she said evenly. “He is their father.”
“Do not move!”
The sound made me jump a little, but then I felt salvation. This was a new voice, but I couldn’t see where it came from at first. I kept the Python’s dual sights on the middle of Dana’s bilious orange blouse. Then I saw men in dark uniforms moving into the light. Jared Malkin raised his hands high into the air.
“All over, Dana,” I said. “Don’t be a fool.”
She looked at me with something strange and cruel in her eyes, and then she blinked and lowered the shotgun. Instantly there were half a dozen Phoenix cops on top of her.
I looked at Lindsey. She smiled and indicated the small headset under her hair, and the cord running to her cell phone. “It’s a good thing you’re married to gadget girl,” she said. “Cherchez la femme, right?”
Later, after I had consumed two cold bottles of water and Peralta had arrived, I walked over to the squad car and leaned down to the passenger window. Dana stared at me from behind the prisoner screen, her hair glowing dark red from the adjacent streetlights.
“Why me?” I asked. “Why pretend to be a former student? Why concoct the story about your late father’s note?”
She stared straight ahead, and then said, “You’re a dinosaur, Mapstone. There with your books and your history and your cases that nobody cares about. I heard enough from Tom to know if anything happened to you, nobody would care too much. The idea was to get Louie Bell out there, and make it look like he shot a trespasser, and then saw it was a deputy and killed himself. And we’d buy the land when it was all over.”
“So what went wrong?”
“Bell never showed up. Perez got stuck in traffic on the 101.” She smiled. “You just can’t depend on people nowadays.”
39
“There’s going to be hell to pay,” Peralta said.
No one disagreed. Lindsey, Robin, and I were arrayed around the kitchen on Cypress Street as the sheriff prepared his signature carnitas for dinner. The room smelled of garlic, onions, chili powder, and whatever mysterious ingredients went into his alchemy. Lindsey and I were nursing Beefeater martinis, while Peralta was on his second Gibson. Robin sipped white wine. Sinatra came from the stereo, overruling the sheriff’s preference for country music or the Beach Boys. I half listened to “The Lady Is a Tramp.”
“Hell to pay,?
? Peralta repeated. “When it all shakes out, you’re dealing with the biggest scandal in Arizona since Charlie Keating and the savings and loan blowup. Maybe even worse. We arrested a guy at the Department of Water Resources today. Malkin had paid him half a million dollars and secret shares in Arizona Dreams LLC to falsify the water certificate. We’re looking at other departments in the state and county. How this development got approved is beyond me. Hell, there may be more like this out there. It may take months to find all the limited partnerships where assets were stashed. More cumin, Lindsey.”
“It won’t be the first time speculators tried to dupe innocent Easterners,” I said. “It was common in the nineteenth century to promise land that was fertile and well-watered. People got to the West and found the land they bought was really nothing but desert.”
“I knew you were going to try to teach, professor,” Peralta said.
“I have a captive audience.” I toasted him with my martini. “Tales of the water rustlers.”
“What about Enron?” Robin said. “This was kind of like Enron with land and water, all smoke and mirrors and crooked accounting.”
“It’ll take years to sort it out,” Peralta said. “Arizona Dreams is in bankruptcy court, and the creditors will end up owning land that’s worth a lot less than they thought. Nobody will be building forty thousand houses there.”
“Thank God,” I said. “What about Tom Earley?”
“That’ll come,” Peralta said, sampling loudly from a wooden spoon. “He claims he’s a victim—that Dana lied to him about Arizona Dreams, persuaded him to buy out the Bell brothers. She did all the bad stuff. He wants to testify against her. Give it time. The county attorney will take it to a grand jury. In the meantime, Earley’s resigned. He’s been repudiated by the Republican Party. Everybody who was his buddy last week has a knife out for him now. Suddenly the sheriff’s office is the favorite department of the county supervisors. So I guess we’ll just have to keep you employed, Mapstone. Hell, I’m even going to give you two love birds a vacation in October to take your train trip through the Rockies.”
