“I answered a couple of ads in San Diego a few years ago. I can’t say I met anybody like Phaedra, at least if her photos don’t lie.”
“Oh my God, she looked much better in person,” Townsend said. “She was the kind of woman who, when you saw her walk past or in an elevator, could make your whole day if she gave you a smile.
“I’ve known a woman or two like that,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anyone who was vibrating as high as Phaedra. She was channeling unbelievable things…” He stopped and looked at me. “But I guess you don’t believe in such things, do you, Professor Mapstone?”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” I said.
“The Bible,” he said, and smiled.
I thought, Shakespeare, you dolt. I said, “But I guess I don’t channel.”
“You should. You have quite an aura about you. It would allow you to break free of all the repressiveness of Western civilization and Christianity, which, thank God, nobody believes in anymore.”
“Yeah. The Sedona vortex is certainly more plausible than the Trinity.” He didn’t smile. “Phaedra,” I coaxed.
“She didn’t like to climb. Heights scared her. She read books. Lots of history. You might have liked her.”
He was needling me, but I let him. There was something wrong with Greg Townsend, but I couldn’t tell if it was that vague misfit neurosis that seems to migrate west or if it was something more, something to do with Phaedra.
“I had a place down in the Valley,” he said. “So we started dating down there. It got serious, and we moved in together. Then we moved up here full-time.”
“What do you do for a living, Mr. Townsend?”
“I’m a trust baby, Deputy.”
“Must be nice.”
“Yes, it allows me to do the things I love. I climb at least a dozen fourteeners every year; I fly my own plane; I travel. And I can attract women like Phaedra Riding, to put a fine point on it.”
He smiled a smile of perfect white teeth.
“Did you care about her?”
“Sure,” he said. “We had a lot of fun.”
“I can see you’re broken up with worry about her disappearing,” I said.
He looked hard at me for a long moment. The veins and tendons in his fine neck rippled minutely. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you don’t seem too concerned.”
He just stared and gave a little sigh. “I don’t have to justify myself to you,” he said. “She’s an adult, and one with her own mind, let me assure you. She liked being on her own. I have no reason to believe she won’t turn up.”
“Did Phaedra have a drug problem?”
“Fuck you!” he said, rising and stalking to the end of the room. He walked over to a bar set into the wall and clinked some ice into a glass. It seemed out of character; I expected him to be swilling Evian. “I really didn’t have to let you in here, and I don’t have to let you pry into my life.”
I stayed seated. “Well, that’s true, sir,” I said. “So I can call the Sedona sheriff’s substation and get a search warrant and really fuck up your afternoon. To put a fine point on it.”
He downed his drink. I said, “Or we can keep having a friendly conversation.”
“She hated drugs,” he said quietly, staring out the window again.
I drove back to Phoenix in the full heat of the day, the sun burning into the Blazer despite the air-conditioning being on high. My sunglasses were pressed tightly against my face. I missed San Diego. I missed the Spanish stucco house a block from the Pacific in Ocean Beach. I missed the familiarity of lecture classes Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and office hours Wednesday afternoons, and lunch with Patty in Mission Valley, where the air was cool and salty-smelling.
Here, I had a missing woman who had a taste for rich men, couldn’t keep a job, and played the personal ads. She had red hair and a blue Nissan Sentra, and I didn’t have a clue where to find her. Who would have thought it would be easier to solve a four-decades-old murder case than to find my old girlfriend’s missing sister?
I didn’t know what to think about Greg Townsend, aside from my visceral dislike of him. He was like so many middle-aged men you meet in the West, grown-up boys who have left behind the privileged Ivy League backgrounds, but not the perks. Men who try to fill up what is missing inside them with mountain biking, rock climbing, and New Age philosophy. They populated the resorts and the tennis ranches, looking like they’ve stepped out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad in Esquire magazine. They have a finely tuned sense of ironic scorn, but it’s impossible to say if they ever feel anything real. And what Townsend felt about Phaedra, I couldn’t say.
There was a screeching in the console, and I remembered the cellular phone Peralta had given me last week. I pulled it out and activated it.
“Mapstone.” It was Peralta. “Where the hell have you been? What’s your ten-twenty?”
Nobody had spoken radio code to me for fifteen years. “I’m just south of Black Canyon City on I-Seventeen.”
“Get on I-Ten,” he commanded. “Head out past the White Tanks to Tonopah, then follow the dirt road three miles.” I told him to slow down, then grabbed a pad and wrote it down.
“What’s up?” I asked. But somehow I already knew.
“We found your girl,” Peralta said, his voice cutting in and out. “Phaedra, like Phoenix.”
I knew what he meant. But he said it anyway.
“Body dump.”
Chapter Ten
It is more than a hundred miles from the edge of the Valley’s civilizing sprawl to the Colorado River and the border of California. Today, Interstate 10 runs through it like a straightedge, connecting Los Angeles with its ambitious New West offspring, Phoenix. But on both sides of the freeway is some of the most desolate territory on the planet. The La Posa Plain, the Ranegras Plain, the Kofa Wilderness. The abandoned bed of a long-lost inland sea. Bounded on both sides by bare, ragged mountains with names like Eagletail Peak, Signal Mountain, and Fourth of July Butte. Until the mid-1970s, even travelers between Phoenix and L.A. avoided these badlands. The railroad ran south and west, through Yuma, or north and west through Wickenburg. The old highway took an out-of-the-way route north, for otherwise there would have been no towns and no water for travelers. And even now, with all our mastery of nature, with all of Phoenix’s seemingly invincible growth, the Harquahala Desert is a forbidding place.
I drove for an hour on freeways, first south into the city and then west into the sun. I slowed down to let a dust devil twist across the interstate, knowing these whirlwinds were capable of overturning tractor-trailer rigs. At the little hamlet of Tonopah, I got onto surface streets and then dirt roads as the last subdivisions gave way to scattered ranch houses and then trailers and finally nothing but chaparral and cactus amid the endless cracked blond dirt of the desert. I played the CD Lindsey had given me and then I sat in silence. A sheet of sweat would not evaporate from my skin.
I tried not to think, but of course I did. By the time I’d left the Sheriff’s Office years ago, I had built the necessary nonchalance about finding dead bodies. But it hadn’t always been that way. There was the night I was a twenty-year-old rookie serving a warrant with Peralta to an old hotel in the Deuce and finding a forgotten dead man instead. Peralta called it a “stinker.” I stumbled back down the stairs and onto the street, vomiting my dinner onto the hot sidewalk. For years, I had been ashamed of that, but at least it was human.
There were dusty sheriff’s cruisers on both sides of the trail. I parked behind the last one, adjusted my sunglasses, and stepped out into the heat. It was like walking into an oven set on high, under a brilliant blue sky, with a cactus wren cooing off in the distance.
“You Mapstone?” a young deputy asked. I said I was and showed my ID. She nodded and led me off into the desert. We walked maybe a quarter of a mile, over soil hard and ancient, down a wash and back up into a thicket of mesquite and cholla, which was now roped off with crime-scene tape that looked weirdly out of place here. Tall uniformed men in sunglasses milled around. I pulled out my badge and hung it on my belt, feeling strangely at home.