“Okay.”
“I need very much to talk to you. There are some important things you don’t know.”
“Are you-”
“Be careful, Dr. Mapstone. If you know what I mean.”
I did. “How should we proceed?” I asked.
“Go to the place where you get your messages when you’re working,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”
I had to think about it for a minute, but then I remembered that I had a mailbox in the Social Sciences Department at Phoenix College. I drove back up Nineteenth Avenue and got there between classes. In the box, aside from two weeks’ worth of mindless administrative drivel, I found an envelope with my name on it, and inside that a folded sheet of stationery with the message: “Metrocenter. Ruby Tuesday, 8:30 tonight.”
I tucked it in my pocket and wondered why Susan Knightly wanted to talk to me.
Back at home, the answering machine was empty. I picked up the phone and called Lorie Pope at the Republic. It had only been about two years since we’d spoken.
“Lorie, it’s David Mapstone.”
“David,” she said. “My God, what a surprise. I read about you and was going to call.”
“I guess I should ask if you’re on deadline?”
“No,” she said. “But thanks for asking.”
“Remember when I helped you with that Latin American history paper senior year?”
“You saved my life, David. Of course I remember.”
“Well, I’m callin’ in favors. How about lunch tomorrow?”
“I’m intrigued,” she said. “Okay. Come by the newsroom around eleven-forty-five, and then we’ll go somewhere.”
I needed the comfort of books, so I drove over to the public library and took the glass elevator up to the Arizona Collection. The building-popularly dubbed the “copper toaster” because of its abstract design-was nearly new, with an atrium pool that you would walk into if you weren’t careful and a stunning view of the skyscrapers of the central corridor-as if you were suspended above the year-round green of palm trees and oleanders and the concrete and glass monuments that marched north and south between the mountains.
An indulgent librarian pulled me the papers of John Henry McConnico, twelfth governor of Arizona, as well as a couple of Ph.D. dissertations on microfiche from the U of A on the McConnico years in Arizona. I popped open the PowerBook and set up some files: names, chronology, family history, things to check later. I picked through the dusty books and started making notes. And then I asked for something else: a small history of the Phoenix Police Department, written in 1965 by a former professor of mine. I didn’t really know what I was looking for, but perhaps something would get me moving again on Rebecca Stokes-or maybe give me the inspiration to start writing another history book I couldn’t finish.
A little after 8:00 P.M., I pulled into the vast parking lot of Metrocenter, Jim Morrison on the radio singing “L.A. Woman.” City at night. Arizona doesn’t go on daylight saving time, partly out of libertarian cussedness and partly because if it did, the sun would still be out at 10:00 P.M., a source of misery nobody on the political spectrum wanted to contemplate. So the sun was gone, but the heat remained god-awful. The mall was something like the biggest in the world when it opened, on the outskirts of Phoenix, in the mid-1970s. Most people back then couldn’t figure why they built it so far out. But now, of course, the Metrocenter was deep inside the city and even starting to show its age. I found a parking spot within a hundred yards of the entrance to the food court and walked slowly toward the doors, watching cars and people.
Inside, it was cool, bright, and crowded. Phoenix nearly invented the indoor shopping mall and had elevated it to something like a lifestyle. So here on a Thursday night, away from the empty sidewalks and parks, was humanity’s ocean, retail-style. I wound my way through the food court, past families with twofer prams and saw teenage girl mall rats, full grown on the outside, wearing the briefest short-shorts and deep in conversation with one another. I found refuge in Ruby Tuesday, and waited by the bar.
At 8:45, a woman in black jeans and a linen shirt leaned on the rail beside me.
“I’m sorry for the cloak-and-dagger routine,” she said. “But I think you’ll agree it’s justified.”
It was Susan Knightly. She looked very different from the well-coiffed Susan I had first met. Her shoulder-length strawberry blond hair was concealed under a black Nikon ball cap. We went to a back booth of the bar. I could imagine the calls Peralta would get for me being in a bar with my badge hanging from my belt. I ordered a martini anyway. She ordered a chardonnay.
“You know about Phaedra?” I asked. She nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”
“I assumed you were busy,” she said. “Let me get right to the point, Dr. Mapstone, or is it Deputy Mapstone?”
“How about David?”
“David.” She gave a small smile. “I don’t trust the police in this matter. I don’t really know why I am trusting you, but I guess I’ve got to trust someone, or else go on living this way.”
“Why don’t you trust the police?”
“Phaedra told me not to,” she said.
“When did she tell you this?” I asked.
“Two weeks ago.”
Susan looked at me straight on with those green eyes. Her face was a scrimshaw of freckles and soft laugh lines.
“Phaedra wasn’t kidnapped,” she said. “She was on the run.”
I felt another kick in the stomach.
“I am getting so tired of being lied to.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Susan said. “I promised her. God, I wanted to go to the police every day, but Phaedra made me swear I wouldn’t. And the more that happened, the more I got paranoid.”
“So when you found me in her apartment…”
“I was getting her some clothes.”
“I might have been able to help her.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” Susan said in a low, desolate voice, and her eyes filled with tears.
She looked around the room-tan young men and women clustered close to the bar, lost in an unintelligible jabber-and leaned close to me. “One night in June, it was the twentieth, I got home and got a call from Phaedra. She said someone was trying to kill her, and that she couldn’t work for me anymore. That was all she would tell me then. But she called back in a couple of days, and I made her let me give her some clothes and money.
“That’s where I got her apartment key, so I could get her some clothes, look after her stuff. Although, God knows, I realize in retrospect that it was foolish of me to go to her apartment. At the time, I guess we figured they were looking for her, and that nobody would think anything about me going to the apartment complex.”
“You better hope they’re able to discriminate between their red-heads,” I said. “Who is ‘they,’ by the way?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Susan said. “It was a dope deal gone wrong. Phaedra’s boyfriend was a pilot who did dope runs from Mexico. He just decided to take a shipment, I guess. Rip off his client. Phaedra got caught in the middle of it.”
“Bobby Hamid?” I asked.
“I didn’t hear that name.”
“Who, then?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said she overheard things she wasn’t supposed to hear, so they wanted to kill her. She was afraid to tell me too much. She did say they had paid off DEA and the cops, and that if she went to the police, she was as good as dead.”
“So she hid out for a month?”
Susan nodded. “She crashed with friends here and there. She never wanted to stay anywhere long; she felt she might be endangering her friends. Sometimes she was afraid she was being followed.”
“What about her sister or her mother?”
“I don’t know.” Susan shook her head. “She said she didn’t know whom to trust. She didn’t want to talk about her sister. It always upset her.”
“And you believed her?”
“I’ve been followed,” Susan said. “I had my studio broken into last week, but nothing was taken. Probably two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cameras, computers, and equipment-and nothing taken. Just files rifled, that kind of thing. A couple of threatening phone calls, said I needed to mind my own business.”