“She hasn’t been here long,” Peralta said. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with the logo MSCO CHAIN GANG-one of the sheriff’s marketing coups-his Glock 9-mm pistol restraining his belly. He led me under the tape. We were careful to walk single file in case other footprints might be found around the scene.
“What do you mean?” I said. “She disappeared a month ago.”
“Look,” he said. Suddenly, we were there, beside a small bluff, under a creosote bush, pulling back a plastic blanket, looking at a pale, red-haired young woman.
Peralta read my mind. “Nobody looks that good if they’ve been in the desert six days, much less six weeks. I think she was dumped in the last few hours.”
I asked, “Who found her?” but I was hardly listening when Peralta said, “Anonymous call to the nine-one-one operator.” I was looking at Phaedra. Her eyes were still staring, dead now, at whoever had killed her and brought her here. I did not know her. And yet I did.
“David.” Peralta was next to me. “You okay?”
I nodded.
He pulled down the plastic sheet. “Looks like strangulation of some kind. Note the marks on the neck-may be consistent with a utility cord or some kind of climbing rope. Only wearing a bra when she was found. Her purse had ID and fifty dollars inside. Sexual abuse not determined. Crime lab is on the way from Phoenix.”
“What about her hands?” I said. “Check under her nails.”
“Thank you, professor,” Peralta said, annoyed.
I stood a bit uncertainly and stared off at a mountain in the distance, a redoubt for the apocalypse if you could only get water to it. “It’s like Stokes,” I said.
“Huh?” Peralta said.
“The bra. Only wearing a bra. Strangled. They’ll find she was raped, too. Like Rebecca Stokes and Leslie Reeves and Ginger Brocato and Betty Moran and Gloria Johnson. It’s the same way those homicides were done.”
Peralta pulled me aside, pulled off his sunglasses. His brown eyes were rimmed with red cracks. “This is now and this is another Harquahala murder,” he said.
I felt like he’d kicked me in the stomach.
“What are you saying?” I said. “The Harquahala murders have been prostitutes, dumped in the desert. This isn’t that.”
He only looked at me. I grabbed his shoulder.
“This isn’t that, Mike. This is Phaedra Riding.”
“You don’t know who Phaedra was,” Peralta said. “You didn’t know her secrets. From what you told me, she sounded like a flake.” It was too hot for long sentences.
“She wasn’t turning tricks.”
“You don’t know. You’re too close to this.”
“I know that much.”
“You need to let the homicide guys handle this now.”
“I was the only one who cared about this case until today.”
He looked down at my hand on his collarbone. I didn’t even realize it was there. I let it fall.
“You are not on the case,” he said. “This is now going to the Harquahala task force.” He pointed to some men in white polo shirts and tan chinos walking the perimeter and looking at me with some hostility. “You stick to the historic cases, partner.”
I walked away from him and knelt down by Phaedra, a rag doll on the dry ground. I tried to make myself look at her as an investigator. I covered her up too gently. Peralta’s hand was on my shoulder.
“If you want to help, you can tell her sister and then drive her downtown to make a statement,” he said. “And I want a report from you on what you know about her.” I stood.
“But that’s it. Otherwise, I want you to stay away from this.”
I appeared in the posh marketing office of the Phoenician covered with sweat, my badge still hanging from my belt. I was wearing the kind of grim expression that caused a graduate assistant a few years ago to call to me “ponderous.” Julie came out to meet me, and I’m sure she knew immediately. But I silently led her out to the opulent lobby.
“You know, Charlie Keating built this place,” she said, talking a little too fast. “That was all while you were away. Then the feds took it over in the S and L crash. Then they sold it to a Saudi sheik.” She waved her arm vaguely. “It’s like a palace. First-class all the way. The finest hotel in Phoenix. Even better than the Biltmore, I think.”
The room felt very large around me. I said, “I have bad news.”
“We’ve won five stars from the Mobil Guide every year, you know,” she went on, smiling. “That’s very hard to do. God, when it comes time every year to announce the rankings, I get so nervous.”
“It’s Phaedra.”
She stopped talking and stared into her lap. She did a double take and her eyes filled with tears, which she anxiously rubbed away. Then she just seemed to collapse in a heap of choked sobs and melting mascara.
“I’m sorry, Julie. We found her body. I am so sorry.”
She was silent, rigid, and she stayed in my arms until my back began to ache from being turned the wrong way, but I didn’t move. Then I drove her downtown in a silence broken only by the strained noise of the Blazer’s air-conditioning on high. First to the morgue, then to the station. While she met with the detectives, I wandered around the building. It was after 5:00 P.M. now, and the place had that feel of weekend institutional abandonment that I remembered from universities. Closed, dark offices. Peralta’s door was closed and locked. Lindsey wasn’t in Records. I left her a note saying hi; I don’t know why. I bought a diet Coke and went back to CID to cool my heels.
How do we arrive at life, real life? Would Dr. Sharon have the answer? For years, I imagined Julie had found a neurosurgeon and was making perfect babies in a house overlooking the Bay in San Francisco, working on her tennis swing and managing the family portfolio. But that didn’t take into account life’s misfires, did it? Like how I was going to be the great writer of popular history, the next Simon Schama or Paul Johnson. Inspire people. Make money, too. Live on a hillside in La Jolla with my beautiful, witty wife and my books and my big thoughts. Live as far away from crime-scene tape and body bags and next-of-kin notification that I could ever get. Like how Phaedra Riding came home to Phoenix to start her whole life over and ended up dead instead. This was real life, straight up.
After about an hour, Julie came out grim-faced and red-eyed. One of the detectives, a guy named Grady, I think, told me they were done with her, and then he closed the door in my face when I started to follow him back inside. It could have pissed me off, but I was concerned about Julie. We walked out in silence. When the elevator reached the first floor, she said, “Please buy me a drink.” I needed one, too.
“That detective kept asking me whether Phaedra had ever been involved in prostitution,” Julie was saying. “He wouldn’t tell me why; he just kept coming back to that. What’s going on, David?” She was more angry than hurt, nervously swirling the ice around in her scotch.
“And Peralta wonders why I don’t want to be a cop again,” I said half to myself. “Phaedra was found in the desert west of the city, where they have found the bodies of several murdered prostitutes over the past eighteen months. Those detectives are part of a task force working on the Harquahala murders.”
“Wait a minute!” Julie nearly shrieked, causing some people at nearby tables to look up. We were at a restaurant in the Arizona Center, a tony commercial office development a few blocks away from the Sheriff’s Administration Building office. Then, in a lower voice, she said, “What are you talking about? Phaedra was not a prostitute!”
“I know that.”
“Then why are you letting them do that?”