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4
The uniformed cops in the entry hall had already made room for the big man in the tan suit. His thick hair was combed straight back from a wide forehead and the years had turned it from black to charcoal. His face: carve it into a mountainside. You had to know how to watch his eyes and mouth to see what was really going on inside him. Now he walked into the room with his deliberate tread. His dark eyes ignored mine, taking in the scene even as his head barely moved. Robin stood beside him, her hand on his arm. Two of her could have fit inside him.
“Is this him?” Peralta spoke with uncommon gentleness. Robin nodded.
“What’s that, Miss Bryson? I need a positive identification.” Kate Vare took Robin by the arm and led her close to the body, waving an outstretched arm as if she were showing off a new car. “Was this the man you had been seeing?”
Robin wrapped her arms tightly across her sweatshirt, pushing up her breasts. Vare kept hold of her. “Yes.” Her eyes were wide and wet. “It’s Jax.”
“How do you know?”
“We were lovers.” Robin’s skin grew pale.
“Accomplices, maybe?” Vare held her close to the corpse.
Robin shook her head adamantly. “You don’t know anything.”
Vare released her grip. “Now I want these civilians outside.”
Peralta held up a hand. “Robin can sit in my car. Mapstone is still a deputy sheriff.”
Vare’s face dropped in dismay.
“I haven’t put through his papers yet.” He reached in his suit-coat pocket, produced my sheriff’s office identification card, then pinned it onto my shirt like a shabby medal. Peralta said, “I think we’ll both see what you’ve got.”
“Well, Mapstone’s history won’t do any good here,” Vare sulked. Peralta might have been the outgoing sheriff, but he was still close friends with the police chief, so she was stuck with us.
“La Fam?”
“Looks that way,” Vare answered.
Peralta grunted. I stood back, trying to keep up.
He produced a set of latex gloves and snapped them on, then stood over the kitchen island like a surgeon examining the work of a demented colleague.
“So did you track the package?” He already knew what had happened. It had only been twenty-four hours since I had last seen him, but somehow it seemed longer. I couldn’t tell whether I was glad to see him here or not. Considering Kate Vare was the lead investigator, I decided I was delighted.
Vare spoke reluctantly, pausing to give me the cop eye. “It was sent from the FedEx Office store on Central, uptown, you know, the old Kinko’s. Fake name and address of the sender. We’re going to interview the employee who saw the sender later this morning.”
Peralta nodded and went back to the corpse.
I heard one young uniform whisper to another: “Jax in the Box. May I take your order?” Another: “It gives a whole new meaning to giving head.”
Peralta’s voice overrode them. “They tortured him with the drill…” He pointed to the dark craters on his legs and the top of one hand, then he stepped lightly in a counter-clockwise circle, his eyes scanning, his head momentarily shielded by his back and broad shoulders. “Slit open his scrotum. That was probably late in the game.”
He turned back to the rest of us and pointed. “See his left hand? That’s from being dipped in boiling water repeatedly. Make sure crime scene gets that shot.”
Vare just had to stand there and take it. Her tight frame was almost humming with tension. I wondered if the black pants suit would burst into flames. I loved it. She said, “Yes, Sheriff.”
Emerson said there is no history, only biography. If that’s true, Mike Peralta encapsulated much of what was worth knowing about the best of law enforcement in Phoenix, not to mention more of my life than I cared to dwell on at that moment. I’d first met him when he was a trainer at the academy, then he had broken me in as my first partner.
We remained friends for the years I lived away from Phoenix, teaching in Ohio and San Diego. He never stopped saying that it was a mistake for me to be anything but a cop, and when I came home after my first marriage broke up he gave me a job. A pile of old cases—clean them up, he said. So I did, using the historian’s techniques married to my cop knowledge. It became a full-time job, working the crimes that ran from the 1960s all the way back to statehood. I didn’t fool myself: It had been good publicity for the sheriff to have an egghead on staff. I also solved some major cases. The old ID card hung familiarly from my pocket.
“La Fam,” I said. “I didn’t think they had a big presence here.”
I heard the naiveté in my voice even before I finished the sentence. La Familia was one of the most notorious gangs in Mexico and Southern California. Its signature execution was beheading. I cleared my throat. “But it wouldn’t be surprising to see them expanding with all the destabilization caused by the recession.”
Peralta’s eyes fixed on me. They said, shut up. I looked down at the blood spatter on the floor. Gangs were nothing new to Phoenix. Contrary to the local feel-good spin, Phoenix had been a Mafia hangout for decades. Some old cops told me that it had more mobsters per capita than New York City in the 1950s. It was close to the mob’s operations in Vegas, close to the border, easy to be anonymous. They hung out at places like the Blue Grotto, the Clown’s Den, Durant’s, Rocky’s Hideaway, and the Ivanhoe. Old Phoenix h
