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“So what are you going to do now? Tell Peralta?”
“Are you kidding? He’ll go postal. I don’t need to be reminded again, in his special way, what a complete failure I am. I’m going to quietly turn it over to the detectives. I’m going to call her and have her come in and make a statement, then go back to my book work.”
“Well, call her now. Maybe you can find out who those goons were. Then, I can nurse you with a healthy dinner. Later, I’ll examine your privates, just to make sure they came through your ordeal. It might take some time…”
So after I finished my drink, I retrieved Dana’s phone number from my old black briefcase, and sat in the study to call her. When Lindsey came in, she saw my face.
“What’s wrong, History Shamus?”
“The number she gave me is wrong. It goes to Arturo’s Llantera in Mesa.”
“Maybe she’s a big wheel.”
“Ha-ha. I’m sure that’s the number she gave me. Now I dial it and get a hubcap store. I tried the phone book—no Dana Underwood.”
It made no damned sense, but I was already thinking what Lindsey now said.
“Maybe she didn’t want you to contact her again.”
7
I leaned against the fender of the Crown Vic and watched a county jail inmate walk past with a shovel. Except for the orange jumpsuit, he looked nice enough. Those are the ones who will bash in your brains with the shovel and drive away with your county-issue vehicle. This guy only wanted to use the latrine. He set his shovel on the ground and climbed into the porta-john with all the gravity of an astronaut preparing to leave the moon. The porta-john had a sheriff’s star on it, was painted in sheriff’s office colors, and towed by a sheriff’s cruiser. It went with the chain gang that was five hundred feet away removing the cairn-shaped boulders that might be the grave of a man known only as “Z.”
Once again the lush desert spread out in every direction, with our view drawn to the misshapen butte, the result of a lava flow that was way outside my expertise to discuss. Sweeping up toward the butte, the ground seemed planed smooth, as if carved by some desert glacier that had left behind all manner of geological debris. I kicked the heel of my boot into the soil: too hard to bury anything without heavy equipment or more time and patience with hand implements than murder usually allows. The inmate retrieved his shovel and went back to where the desert floor suddenly collapsed into the hidden arroyo. Coming from that direction was Sheriff’s Detective Patrick Blair.
“Dr. Mapstone,” he said in his annoying sportscaster voice. “I should have known you’d be to blame for this adventure.”
In his mid-thirties, Patrick Blair bore a vague resemblance to any number of dark-haired male movie stars of the moment: Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, Orlando Bloom, Matt Damon. They all ran together for me. He had definitely fallen into the deep end of the gene pool. For several years, he’d been a star of the homicide bureau. He’d worked with Lindsey on the Harquahala Strangler case, one of those cases you’d call notorious. This was when Lindsey and I were dating on and off, and then we were off for a few months. All while she was working with Patrick Blair. This left me with an irrational, childish, but unshakable dislike of the man. Seeing him, my ribs and back began to ache worse. When he got close enough, he held out the letter from Dana’s father, now enclosed in an evidence bag.
“Where did you get this?”
“I told you on the phone, Blair. A woman came to my office, said she was a former student. After her father died, she found this letter. It contained a confession for a murder in 1966 and directions to the body.”
“But you don’t know who the victim is?”
“No.”
“And you don’t know the dead father’s name?”
I shook my head. He was enjoying this too damned much.
“And now you can’t find her.”
“Right,” I said, feeling more foolish. Maybe I should have said nothing, thrown Dana’s letter in the trash, ignored the odd coincidence of getting my ass kicked in the location to which Dana—or whatever her name was—had led me. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do. “What has your chain gang found?”
“They’re just the brute labor, Mapstone,” he said. “We’ve got detectives and evidence technicians standing by if we find anything. Which seems like a hell of a long shot. Lot of county resources being diverted out here…”
“I’m sure they’d call you if you needed to go back to the city for a facial or something.”
He touched his cheek briefly. He said, “You’re an asshole. You find a lot of trouble for an egghead. I was talking to the Phoenix detectives about the murder down in the ’hood, by your house. Ice pick into the brain. That’ll do you.” I fantasized about setting his youthful face on fire and putting it out with an ice pick. He went on. “These guys said the pick had been filed down so it was about three inches, and really sharpened. Just long enough to go through the ear into the brain, stir quickly and remove. That’s cold blooded. Did you know the guy?”
I shook my head.
“He owned some check-cashing outlets,” Blair said. “You ask me, they’re bloodsuckers, taking the money of these poor Mexicans. And some of ’em are used by smugglers to launder money. So there’s your case. He pissed somebody off, and they did him.” Blair made a jab with his right hand into an imaginary head cradled in his left hand. So much for Peralta’s straight eye for the gay crime.
“Sounds like something Bobby Hamid would do,” Blair continued. “If we could ever make a charge stick against him.”
“I thought he’d become a venture capitalist,” I said. “That’s what he says.”
