He sighed, leaned back in his big chair, and really saw me for the first time. I was wearing a loose white cotton shirt and chinos-“goddamned J. Crew preppy shit,” Peralta had called it.
“Put on your ID card,” he ordered. “It’s policy. You may be ashamed of being here, but you’re a sworn deputy like every other swinging dick on Madison Street, and we all have to wear our ID cards.” I pulled it out and clipped it on my shirt. “Deputy Sheriff,” it said, and there I was in a picture, looking not too different from the way I did on my old faculty identification card, with one difference-my beard was gone. The picture would show you I have large, gentle brown eyes and wavy dark hair that women sometimes like, and roundish, undefined facial bones that they don’t.
The picture wouldn’t show you that I’m a little over six foot one-short in the NBA-and I have the broad shoulders and wide stride that helped me cool off tough guys when I was a cop.
“So what do you want?” Peralta demanded.
I told him about Phaedra Riding as he swung his chair back and forth in a slow arc. It was maddening if you didn’t know him, but it was just Peralta. “You pull the incident report?”
I slid it across the desk, and he studied it.
“Julie Riding,” he mumbled. “Where do I know that name? Hey, this is Julie, your Julie,” he said, brightening. “I mean she’s the complainant-it’s her sister. Jeez.”
“That’s what I thought when she showed up at my door last night.”
“I ran into her a couple of weeks ago, and she asked about you,” Peralta said. “She’s still a fox. I never understood how you lucked into that.”
“She left me, as I recall.”
Peralta grunted and went back to the report. I looked around his office; the walls always held some new award or photograph. Peralta with Goldwater. Peralta on horseback with the sheriff. Peralta in SWAT uniform during the killings at the Buddhist temple years before. Peralta in a tux with the business muckety-mucks of the Phoenix 40. Peralta with the Suns at the Western Conference Championships.
“Weird name,” he said finally. “How do you say it?”
“Feed-ra or Fade-ra,” I said, pronouncing it. “Like Phoenix.”
“Weird,” he said. “Sounds like some made-up hippie bullshit name.”
“Phaedra was the daughter of Minos,” I started to explain but his eyes immediately glazed. “Greek mythology…” God, I had been out of the cop world too long.
“Sounds like a head case to me,” he said finally. “Artsy-fartsy little rich girl head case. She’ll turn up. Probably schtupping some new guy.”
“No Jane Does who fit this description turn up lately?” I asked.
“You’re a deputy sheriff,” he said. “Go do some police work. You remember how? Or did all those years trying to pick up college trim ruin your brain?”
“Fuck you,” I said. It was our repartee, harmless for now. “I’m a part-time contract employee, a researcher, and if I get some information on old murder cases, it’s all gravy to you and the sheriff. You know if I go to Missing Persons, I’ll get a whole different reception than if you call the commanding officer and make an inquiry.”
Peralta sighed and picked up the phone. “Dominguez? Peralta. Remember my old partner Dave Mapstone? Yeah, the professor. He’s back in town, working for us part-time. He’s interested in nine nine-two oh one three four five, Phaedra Riding? Ph, yeah, like Phoenix. Anything new? What’d we do?…Yeah, yeah, I know you’ve got people pulled in to work the Harquahala thing.…Okay.”
He turned to me. “They don’t know shit. You know how these missing persons cases go. She’s an adult. No evidence of a crime. We have no reason to suspect foul play. Does Julie suspect foul play?” I shook my head. “What about her car?”
“Blue Nissan,” I said. “I checked the impound lists, the hot sheets, nothing.”
“So it sits,” Peralta said. “She’ll turn up.”
“So you don’t mind if I do some checking?”
“Not as long as you do your work for me first. And you don’t get in some jurisdictional cluster fuck with Phoenix PD. What? You trying to score some points with Julie, rekindle the flame?”
“We’ve both moved on,” I said, standing up to leave. “I’m just helping an old friend.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, crumpling the diet Coke can and tossing it through a Phoenix Suns basketball hoop into the trash can. “Sharon is on my back to have you over for dinner, y’know.”
“I will,” I said. Mike and his wife had invited me over a month ago.
“Then make it this Friday,” he said, and turned his head toward his paperwork. I started out.
“You know who she’s related to?”
I stopped and turned back to him. “Phaedra?”
“No, no, Stokes, Rebecca Stokes. She was the niece of John Henry McConnico.”
“The former governor?” I said. He nodded. “So that would have made her-what, a first cousin to Brent McConnico?”
“The majority leader of the Arizona Senate,” Peralta said. “He’s seen as the next governor.”
Peralta was always working the angles.
Chapter Three
I crossed Jefferson Street against the light and made my way through Cesar Chavez Plaza, deserted in the early-afternoon heat. It was one of those big sky-beautiful days in Phoenix, when the bare desert mountains in every direction were sharply defined by the intense light of the unencumbered sun. That same sun felt like a radiation gun on every exposed pore-the temperature was supposed to top 105 degrees today. A lone ragpicker started to hit me up for money but did a quick retreat when he saw my Sheriff’s Office ID. I took the thing off and stuffed it into my pocket.
When I was twenty years old, that ID card and gold star had been my most prized possessions. They represented the law, the public trust-that was what Peralta said the first day I met him. It took four hard years to get it through my head that law enforcement wasn’t for me. And yet, here I was. I could call this part-time, temporary, research, whatever. But I was carrying a badge again-and working for Mike Peralta.
The millions of dollars in computers at the main Sheriff’s Administration Building were little help with a forty-year-old murder case, so I headed over to the old City Hall-County Courthouse, where forgotten records were stored in the attic. When Rebecca Stokes was murdered, this five-story burnt-brown building was where justice was dispensed in Maricopa County. When Rebecca Stokes was murdered, Eisenhower was president, trains still arrived at Union Station, and a small police force rarely had to deal with homicide.
Carl, the security guard, had spent thirty-five years with the Arizona Highway Patrol. But his perfect posture and fluffy, snow-white mustache reminded me of a retired British army officer. He spent fifteen minutes talking about how an arsonist was at work in his neighborhood, and how the easterners and Californians were ruining Phoenix. He showed me an article that said Phoenix was growing so fast that an acre of desert every hour was being swallowed up by the city. It was written by an old friend of mine, Lorie Pope at the Republic. The city had changed, gotten bigger, dirtier, and more dangerous. I didn’t know whom to blame. Then Carl went away and left me alone in the musty, high-ceilinged clutter.
Sometimes, I feel like I’ve spent half my life in libraries, but this place was something else again. Historians dream of coming across old diaries from the Civil War in some attic, and this was my attic of treasures: fifty or sixty years of records from the city and county. I doubted if ten people even knew they were up here. It was like an overgrown vacant lot that, instead of being littered with old tires and washing machines, had accumulated decades of cast-off files as the old building went from its original use as a combined city-county building to being Phoenix Police Headquarters to finally housing a mishmash of government offices. There was no order to any of the hundreds of dusty cartons, rusty green and gray file cabinets, and rotting ledgers. But after a few trips, I had begun to find a few caches I might need someday.