I poured myself some orange juice and put some salmon spread on a bagel. My stomach hurt.
“There’s just one problem,” I said. “Yesterday’s prime suspect, Leo O’Keefe.”
“He’s probably involved somehow,” Kimbrough said. “Maybe O’Keefe is the tie-in at this Camelback Falls thing. But in the real world, we have to go for the quickest path that’s going to break a case. Who has the bigger motive for murder here, some convict or some dirty cops who could lose everything if their past comes out?”
My anger boiled back up again. “One of them shot at me. So I am presumed dirty, too? How the hell did they even know I was going out at three in the morning to meet O’Keefe?”
Kimbrough said, “You do keep public company with Bobby Hamid.”
“Oh, Jesus!”
“Didn’t you have dinner at Durant’s with Hamid?”
I held out my hands. “Put the cuffs on me. You got me, copper.”
Kimbrough slapped the tabletop. “Damn it, Sheriff. How do you explain Peralta’s badge number in that book?”
“I can’t,” I shouted. “Yet. How can you believe this man, who we have both worked with for years, is dirty? Not only that, but that he is in so deep that he’s willing to order a murder? Then the other dirty cops could shoot him in retaliation?”
Kimbrough silently studied the table. “I don’t know what I believe,” he said. “I’m just telling you what the feds are talking themselves into.”
“You sounded like a believer.”
“I don’t know who to trust,” he said. “The whole department is just crazy with talk and paranoia about this logbook. You saw it yourself with Abernathy. How the hell did he find out? None of it makes any damned sense. I wish O’Keefe would contact you again.”
“That’s not likely with your guys always on my tail,” I said.
“What?”
Lindsey said, “White Crown Vic. It’s been tailing us for a couple of days. We assumed it was you or Phoenix PD.”
Kimbrough fell suddenly silent, studying his hands. “David,” he finally said. “We haven’t had any units following you. The most we’ve done is ask for extra PD patrols past the house here. Phoenix detectives don’t even have Crown Vics now. They make ’em drive Chevy Cavaliers.” He sighed. “Jesus Christ, what is going on?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “The next damned time you see that car, I want you to call backup. It may be the feds, or it may be connected to whoever took a shot at you the other night. Call for help.”
I nodded and tried to eat. The bagel was warm and flavorful, but my insides felt cold and vulnerable. I instinctively stepped away from the kitchen window.
“Shit,” Lindsey said. “If it’s not the good guys following us…”
“There’s something else,” Kimbrough said, tapping the folder he had placed on the kitchen table. He traced invisible horizontal lines on the top of the folder. “Look, it takes a lot to make me blush, get it? But we found this stuff with all the trash and wine bottles inside Nixon’s trailer. It’s pretty heavy duty.”
I took the orange juice and pulled up a chair. Kimbrough pushed the folder at me. “I figured since you knew Nixon way back when, maybe this might mean something.”
I opened the cover and a half dozen color photos were inside, eight-and-a-half by eleven, lots of skin. Kimbrough was right. The images were extremely explicit. Full frontal nudity and penetration were just the beginning. Check your imaginations at the door for all will be revealed.
“Tryouts for the gymnastics team?” Lindsey said, looking over my shoulder.
It was an orgy. The top photo showed several couples in various copulatory positions. I hadn’t been a porn aficionado since we had the secret stack of Penthouse at the substation when I was a twenty-year-old deputy. Spectator sports were not my thing. But these photos stood out as, well, real. They had none of the retouched bodies and professional lighting of sex industry images. The people looked average, the moments carried the edge and flaws of the spontaneous.
The scene wasn’t some sleazy motel room with a pizza-colored bedspread and velvet Elvis on the walls, either. Take out the writhing bodies and the room could have been in Architectural Digest. White marble stairs and levels flowed out of a roomy conversation pit, which contained expensive-looking sectional sofas and spare, modern tables. African sculptures, with stone erections to match the flesh ones of the orgy, stood on one set of shelves. A large abstract painting, hot colors and geometry, dominated one wall, and another wall was all glass. The real eye-catcher, though, was what looked like an indoor waterfall, cascading down from a second level into a pond in the center of the room. But this, too, was not quite a “done” room-you could see the reefers, pills, and cocaine scattered around various tables.
The second photo stopped me. It centered on a man with Mark Spitz hair, naked except for dirty white socks. He was upright, on his knees, connected doggy-style to a curvy brunette who had matted hair and wore a black merry widow. Her face was buried in a cushion. The man had turned his head to face the cameraman, giving a goofy-drunk grin and looking so young I didn’t recognize him at first.
“That’s Nixon,” I said.
“Holy shit,” Kimbrough said. “So much for stereotypes about the relative physical endowments of white men.”
“That’s how he got his nickname,” I said. “He was very popular with women.”
“Oh, please,” Lindsey said. “Men with giant cocks are bad lovers. They think they don’t have to do anything else but show up.”
How did she know that? A tremor of insecurity swept through me. But turning back to the picture, I felt the same dizzy, intrusive feeling as when we talked to Lisa the night before. We weren’t meant to see these photos. They were Dean’s trophies, from when he was virile and desirable and the world existed in a happy teacup of youth and promise.
I set it face-down. The next photos showed a pretty young girl fellating an older man. He sat Buddha-like on an Eames chair with the girl on her knees. His skin was leathery brown, but he had an old man’s spidery stretch lines around his stomach. They were in the same room, but closer to the waterfall, the spray sluicing off white marble behind the two lovers. A display of red, black, and orange pills was splayed across a nearby tabletop. Next to that was a hand mirror with neat lines of what might have been baking soda, but wasn’t.
The girl was truly beautiful, with a heart-shaped face, flaxen hair parted in the middle, and an exquisite young body, lightly tanned. She looked languidly at the camera.
Something kicked my memory. I knew her.
“What?” Lindsey said.
“That’s Marybeth,” I said. “Marybeth Watson. The girl who was with Leo that night in Guadalupe. She was his girlfriend.”
“Not when this picture was taken,” Lindsey said. “You know who this is with her?”
I studied the man’s face. He wasn’t looking right at the camera. Something about his wispy white rim of hair contrasted with dramatic black eyebrows looked familiar. But I had to shake my head.
“That,” said Lindsey, “is Jonathan Ledger, the author of The Sex Instructions.”
I sat back in the chair and pointed at the photos. “So this must be Camelback Falls.”
Chapter Eighteen
Draw me a map of the human heart. Show me the roads in and out. Where does Eros take the turnoff from love, darkness from passion? Destiny, fate. Nixon, Peralta, and me, we were all just cops together. Men with easily pierced skin and breakable bones. Men with hearts. But all along we were connected by invisible strands that ran to right now: Nixon dead, Peralta in a coma, Mapstone the sheriff. Badge numbers in the logbook. Photographs on my breakfast table.
Draw me a map of the human heart. The back roads of jealousy and rage. It is no coincidence that cops get killed during family fights. At the point of conjugal connection the mask of civilization is always shaky, our mastery of nature most personally at risk. Love and lust are dangerous things, and every civilization tries to control them, whether through ancient commandments or the latest dating code on campus. Nature is always ready to slip the leash, go mad again. We Phoenicians should know this most of all, living in our artificial city with the desert seemingly subdued for our pleasure and recreation. But beneath us are the ruins of the Hohokam city that preceded us. They were men with hearts, too, who dug the canals, unlocked the rich soil, vanished. The desert is really in control, merely biding its time.