“I hope she’s not in trouble,” he said as I turned to go.
I walked out into the hot evening and finally had the “Oh shit!” moment I had been working up to for several days, since Julie first disappeared. I realized that, divorced from my sentimental feelings about her, I didn’t know Julie Riding very well at all. She’d told me she had joint custody of her daughter, but in reality, she had lost custody. She’d told me cocaine was in her past, but now I knew it was part of her present. She’d told me she hadn’t seen her sister for a month before Phaedra turned up murdered, but a witness had just placed Julie with Phaedra the night before the body was found. I had argued with Peralta to protect Julie-because I know her-but it occurred to me with sudden, awful clarity that I didn’t know her, not really. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Oh shit.
Noah wasn’t home, so I headed back to my house empty-handed. I was already out of sorts when the phone rang a little after 10:00 P.M.
“I didn’t know if I should just leave you alone or not,” said Lindsey.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have called.” It was a cliche. And there was an edge in my voice.
“No,” she said. “No reason for you to worry about that. But I heard about what happened last night.…”
“I’m okay. It was over pretty quickly.”
“I know,” she said, and the line was silent. Over the airconditioning, I could actually hear a train whistle from down at the Santa Fe yards.
“Oh, Lindsey,” I began. I thought, How I wish you were in my arms on this lonely, desolate night. Silence again.
“I think I may have found something you’ll be interested in,” she said finally, her voice different. “Something relating to Rebecca Stokes.”
“That’s great, Lindsey. What have you got?”
“Come by on Monday and I’ll show you.”
“Okay. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Dave. Get some rest.”
I started to call her right back, but the phone rang.
“Lindsey?”
“You’ve replaced me already, my love?”
I sat up uneasily. “Where are you, Julie?”
“I’m around, David. I can’t tell you right now. Soon we’ll be together.”
“Julie, we need to talk,” I said.
“I suppose Peralta is threatening to arrest me.”
“I don’t really know,” I said sharply. “I’d rather know why you met Phaedra down at a coffee place on Mill Avenue the night before she was found dead.”
“David, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen Phaedra for almost two months.”
“Why this game, Julie? Who are you running from?”
“Maybe the same man as you, judging from the story in the Republic this morning.” She was in the state at least, if she’d read the story today in the newspaper.
Julie said, “Haven’t you thought about what I said to you, David? I’m really in love with you.”
I said nothing. The line buzzed emptily.
“Don’t you think we could try to make something happen here?” she said. “I mean, finally make something go right in our lives?”
“Does the name Bobby Hamid mean anything to you?”
“No, David. You don’t understand. In time, I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Why can’t you tell me now, Julie?”
“I just can’t.” The line went dead.
I slammed the phone down and cursed the walls.
Chapter Twenty-one
“Rebecca Stokes was pregnant when she was murdered.”
“What are you talking about?” I was standing in Lindsey’s cubicle in the Central Records Division. I sat down. She was all in black: black T-shirt, black jeans, black boots. Even her lipstick was dark.
I’d spent a restless weekend, correcting papers and mulling over what I knew and didn’t know. Then early Monday morning, I’d headed downtown to see Lindsey.
“There was an autopsy,” she said, visibly pleased with herself. “The record was preserved.”
“How? There was nothing like that in the case file. I assumed the autopsy report had been lost.”
“You have to think outside the box, Dave.” She adjusted her oval glasses, punched up several menus on her computer screen, and pointed.
“This was a research project in 1985 at the University of Arizona Medical School. A history of forensic pathology in Arizona in the 1950s, gleaned from autopsy records. And lo and behold, the autopsy of Rebecca Marie Stokes.”
“You are amazing.”
“It’s all in the fingers.” She opened a file, and we read silently together.
“‘A fetus, approximately eight weeks old, found in the womb,’” she read.
“Jesus Christ.” I sat back.
“She was pregnant, Dave. That changes everything.”
“Motive.”
“Exactly. Killed by somebody she knew, like Harrison Wolfe said.”
“So the lover was married and got his girlfriend, Rebecca, pregnant,” I said.
“She refuses to have a back-alley abortion. He refuses to leave his wife,” Lindsey said. “They argue. They fight. He kills her.”
“If that’s the real scenario,” I said.
“You know it is, Dave,” Lindsey put her hands on my knees, smiling widely. “She was a single middle-class woman living in 1959, and she was pregnant,” Lindsey went on. “We know from Opal Harvey that she had a lover and he was a mystery man.”
“So then,” I said, “the question becomes, who was he?”
I scrolled through the autopsy report, Lindsey leaning on my shoulder. It went into some detail about the crushing of the cricoid in her neck. The forensic serology report showed she’d had semen in her vagina.
“What about your friend Brent McConnico? Would he know who her lover was?” Lindsey asked.
“I doubt it,” I said. “He was just a kid at the time. I guess it’s worth asking, although I’m sure it won’t make his day.” I looked back at Lindsey. She was somewhere else.
“Do you think there’s good and evil?” she said at last.
“I do,” I said. “It’s not very fashionable, I guess. The Holocaust and the gulag taught us there is radical evil.”
“But is there good?”
“Of course,” I said. “The soldiers who defeated the Nazis and liberated the death camps were good. A historian named Robert Conquest documented the millions of deaths in the Soviet Union, when most Western experts wanted to look the other way. I call that good.” I stroked her wrist. “We’re the good guys, aren’t we?”
Lindsey looked at me with something like fondness. “I used to think, people don’t even think these thoughts I do.…But you do.”
I almost leaned over and kissed her. I said, “You are my hero, Lindsey. This really changes everything. Even if it blows my theory of a serial killer all to hell.”
“There was a serial killer, Dave. He probably just wasn’t involved in the Stokes murder.”
“Right,” I said. I felt awkward and silly. “You want to do something this week? Maybe see a movie?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
***
Back at home, I placed a call to Brent McConnico, left a message with his secretary, and settled into the big leather chair with a large Bloody Mary and my notes and files from the library. Phaedra was still in the center of my mind, but Lindsey’s find on the Stokes case had fired me up. I was still going to earn my thousand dollars from Peralta, and even do some honest scholarship to boot.
Going through the notes I’d made on Governor McConnico, I was struck by how the murder of his niece could be seen as a turning point in his career. He was only about fifty when she disappeared, and he was seen as a rising star in the Democratic party. Newspapers of the time talked about him seeking the Senate in 1958. Instead, McConnico retired and went into corporate law with his longtime adviser, Sam Larkin. It seemed an odd turn, even if, as Brent McConnico had said, they never felt safe after Rebecca was killed. Indeed, newspapers and historical accounts didn’t make the connection between Stokes and McConnico at all. Something else I didn’t realize: Governor McConnico had died by his own hand in 1968.