“Yes, yes! Lisa showed up outside my house, screaming at me. The cops were watching me, of course, and they arrested her. They told me she had a pistol in her car, the same caliber as the one that was used on me. Right now they’re calling her a ‘person of interest,’ whatever that means. I guess they have to run tests.”
Why wasn’t I happy for him? Another neat bow was being tied around the case, and all my fears about a link to the kidnapping were just so much paranoia. So what if the same kind of doll that had been delivered to my office door was also found in Max Yarnell’s house, with the charming addition of bloody doll hands? Calm down, Mapstone. Get in the holiday spirit. So I told him it was great news. Then I was about to tell him that Jack Talbott couldn’t have been at the hacienda the night of the kidnapping, but he was in a hurry.
“Let’s catch up after the first of the year, Mapstone. I’ll call you.”
My next call was to Gretchen. I told her I had to work for the next few nights. Believe me, I didn’t want it that way. But the Yarnell kidnapping was still unsolved. In my mind, it was more unsolved than it had been when I fell into the freight elevator in the dark a month before.
I finally had to settle down to the hundred small disciplines that separate the historian from the cop. We live in a state of incomplete and contradictory knowledge. It’s what keeps historians arguing and publishing. That wasn’t much comfort now, because I lacked the scholar’s critical distance from this piece of history. But I would try. And if I were lucky, I would live with a little less uncertainty. I discussed my theories with no one.
I needed the comfort of research, informed by technique and imagination. I wanted evidence. I wanted contrary evidence even more. Reconstruction. What happened? Interpretation. Why? Pattern and bias. What was I missing? It was solitary work.
I mined archives scattered across the city: the state archives, the library at Arizona State University, the Arizona Room at the Phoenix Public Library, the state historical society, the Arizona Historical Foundation. I returned to the old files of the Phoenix Police, and added data from the county assessor and recorder. I spent half a day at the state vital statistics department. I tore apart ten boxes of court transcripts that had been boxed up longer than I had been alive. Dusty pages and decaying volumes. Each one said, “I was there”…“I have something to tell you.”
I sat in on the monthly breakfast held by some retired Phoenix cops at Bill Johnson’s Big Apple, and each one had an opinion about the case. Unfortunately, none had firsthand knowledge of it. I pored over maps and blueprints of the warehouse district, old plans from the city water department, and a survey of the area by the Salt River Project. At the Phoenix Police Museum, amid the display of a real police motorcycle and a mockup of the city jail in frontier times, the curator showed me Joe Fisher’s memoirs. He let me borrow a desk and I settled in to read it.
It was a hardcover book, but it looked self-published. My Years on the Phoenix Force, by Joe Fisher. Using the skimming technique familiar to any former graduate student, I leafed through. It was badly written, although, hell, throw in some statistics and you could probably get it published in a professional history journal today. Fisher wrote about his role in the 1931 case of Winnie Ruth Judd, the trunk murderess. There he was again helping the Tucson cops arrest John Dillinger and his gang in 1934. If the writing hadn’t been so dry, I would have been tempted to linger. I knew that Fisher had been repeatedly decorated for bravery. He brought the most modern techniques to the force. And he had amazing success in coaxing confessions. Unfortunately the book seemed to offer no insights on these things, and I didn’t have the time. I moved forward, looking for the Yarnell kidnapping.
It wasn’t there. No index, damn. I went back through, but it still wasn’t there, and the book was nothing if not chronological. One of the most famous cases of his career, and he didn’t write about it. The book ended with a murder in 1943, and a typewritten insert in the back gave Fisher’s bio, including the fact that he had died in 1947.
I gave the book back to the curator, explained my dilemma, bought a museum membership, and lingered over a photo of the detective bureau, circa 1940. Fisher was identified, a short man in a fedora and suit with a broad, forgettable face. He didn’t look like a tough guy at all.
I spoke to him under my breath. “What the hell were you up to?”
“Deputy,” the curator called out and I walked over.
“I have one other idea for you,” he said.
37
“What do you mean Frances is dead?”
“She had a stroke the afternoon after your visit, Deputy.” Heather Amis’ voice was raw as sunstroke. “She slipped into a coma, and she died last night.”
It was Thursday morning and I was back at my office in the old courthouse, and suddenly the cavernous room felt claustrophobic. My travel plans for that day were evaporating.
“So now she’s finally free. Fifty-seven years she spent in here. I just can’t believe the cruelty. This poor, poor woman. And please spare me your speech about the rights of the victims.”
“I wasn’t going to make a speech. What happened to her sounds rotten.”
“You have no idea.”
I felt all my theories crashing into the wall of silence that developed on the phone. Finally, I asked, “Did you get a chance to ask her any of the questions I left for you?”
“No. You got her to talk more than I had ever seen. And she never said another word before she had the stroke.”
“Do you know about the crime?”
“I learned everything I could,” she said. “I also went back in her medical records.”
“I’ve learned a few things.” I shouldn’t have been discussing the case with a civilian, but how could my luck get any worse? “I learned that Jack Talbott couldn’t have been there the night of the kidnapping.”
Heather gasped, and I told her more.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “So old Hayden Yarnell must have suspected his son Hayden Jr. had done it. My God, that explains everything.”
“I can’t go that far,” I said. “I don’t know Talbott’s involvement. He was found with some of the ransom money in Nogales and the boys’ pajamas. That would still sway a jury today.”
“But Frances!” she nearly yelled. “My God, Frances was just caught up in this.”
“Maybe. She was an accessory. She went to Nogales with Talbott. Why?”
“I don’t know!” Heather’s voice was taut with frustration. “But I believed in her! It’s not like she had any family or even a lawyer. Nobody was fighting for her. And don’t think I’m a pushover, David. I know every inmate says she’s innocent. I think Frances really was.”
“Did she ever say so?”
“No. But have you found anything new that implicates her?”
I had to grant her that I had not. But if Frances had explained her innocence at the trial, told how she was caught up in something with which she had nothing to do, it was on pages of lost court transcripts. That was possible, but the newspaper accounts had no mention of it. She also never took the stand.
Heather started talking even before I was finished. “Maybe she was covering up for someone!”
“But then to not talk for all those years in prison? Why? Why still be covering up in the sixties, even the nineties, for God’s sake.”
“You’re dealing with the Yarnell family. Anything is possible when money and power are involved.”
“So why didn’t they have her killed, or have her released and buy her off?” I said. “Her silence was an act of her power, when you think about it. She made this choice. Most of the ransom money was never recovered. Maybe Frances knew where it was hidden, and she thought she would get out someday and retrieve it. That’s a powerful motive to keep silence.”