I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but whatever it was would begin to fill in some of the pieces about Rebecca Stokes. My ex-wife, Patty, told me that every woman has her secrets. My time in law enforcement had taught me that every case contains threads that nobody has the time or inclination to pull. I would be satisfied to find just one of them.
Peralta had some of the finest evidence technicians and detectives in the country to help him with a state-of-the art homicide investigation. I was here to “think outside the box,” as he put it-he read too many business magazines. So I spent an hour reading the case file. Then I opened my old Mac PowerBook and began to make some notes.
What did I know? A twenty-one-year-old woman gets off a train at midnight and takes a cab home. Then she disappears and turns up dead. The file Peralta had given me said the body was in fairly good shape when it was found by a power-line crew. But the forensic techniques of 1959 were fairly primitive. The autopsy report had disappeared, but I did have a letter from the medical examiner, saying Rebecca died of strangulation, and noting that some residual bruises around the genitals and the presence of semen indicated sexual assault. She was naked except for a bra, and there were no fibers or hairs found on the body, nothing but the dust and burrs from the desert. No tire tracks, either.
The obvious suspect was the cabdriver. But the report and the attached news clippings said he was a decorated Phoenix cop who was working a second job driving a taxi. He voluntarily took a polygraph and passed. And that was it. No suspects were ever even questioned in the case.
Rebecca was what was called in the fifties a “career girl,” well liked by her coworkers, no steady boyfriend. She’d come to Arizona to study at the state college-now Arizona State University-and took a job as a secretary in the law office of Larkin, Reading and Page. Now I also knew she was the niece of the governor-something the police reports and newspapers had omitted.
I found a carton with old radio logs from the late 1950s and paged through them. I wanted to know what else was going on in Phoenix when Stokes disappeared. An hour later, I didn’t have much more than an appreciation for what a difference a mere four decades can make. The Phoenix of 1959 was less than a quarter of the size it is today-in many ways, it was just an overgrown farm town, although the postwar growth was at full throttle-and the police calls reflected it. It was a city with clear demarcations between “good” and “bad” parts of town. There were fights and disturbances in the Deuce-the old skid row, leveled years later to make room for the Civic Plaza and America West Arena-and the poor Mexican-American neighborhoods, where I’m sure the police administered their own rough justice. But around Rebecca Stokes’s apartment near the Phoenix Country Club on Thomas Road, life had seemed almost surreally safe. I thought of my own neighborhood at that time, neat and dull, where the night held only the fragrance of citrus blossoms and the sound of train whistles.
One thing did catch my eye. A week before Rebecca Stokes disappeared, PPD responded to a prowler call from a house two blocks away from her apartment. It wasn’t much, but I needed a place to start. I made note of the officer’s names. Maybe they were still alive, which was probably more than I could hope for the detective who had led the Stokes investigation.
I replaced the radio logs and crossed the room to a shelf containing old city directories and phone books. The 1959 city directory was missing, but I found 1960 and turned to the section that showed residents by address. I made note of the families and individuals living along her block and the street immediately to the south. All the lives, reduced to lines on old sheets of paper. I also checked the listings for the railroad, just to see if they listed a station agent or anybody in charge at Union Station, but I came up with nothing. But it gave me another idea, and I went back to the logs. Sure enough, a handful of police calls to Union Station yielded a complainant’s name, J. T. Smith of the Southern Pacific.
I asked Carl if I could borrow his telephone and phone book. It was all a long shot, but I was motivated and wanted to have something to show Peralta, whose impatience was legendary. I checked the names from the city directory against the new phone book, a fool’s errand in a city of transients. Sure enough, name after name led me nowhere. Forty years was ample time to die, move, or remarry. I made note of a J. T. Smith in Sun City, but odds were he wasn’t my railroad man. Of all the leads it had to be a “Smith,” I muttered to myself. Then I hit one: There was still a George Harvey listed on Twelfth Street, just around the corner from Rebecca Stokes’s old apartment.
***
The area around the old North Phoenix High School had been one of the nicest in town back in the fifties. Now it was part of miles of declining east side neighborhoods marked by the stately palm trees of better times and the hieroglyphic gang graffiti of now. But the Harvey address belonged to a pleasant prewar home surrounded by lush oleanders and flowers. After the third knock, a small woman with uncombed white hair and a purple housedress pulled open the door and peered out at me. The house seemed totally dark behind her. I showed her my star and MCSO identification. She placed a wandlike object against her throat and invited me inside in a mechanical voice. “You don’t have a cigarette, do you, honey?” She walked ahead of me into a sitting room. “Ruined my larynx, but I can’t quit. I bum ’em from neighbors, and my granddaughter takes ’em away. Why the hell is it worth living? I always told George he’d survive me because he didn’t smoke. But this is God’s revenge. Been without my George for ten years now.” She sounded like the voice of a computer from an old sci-fi movie.
I told her I didn’t smoke, and she sighed, waving me to a dusty overstuffed sofa.
“I’m looking into a very old homicide case,” I began.
“It’s that girl,” she said matter-of-factly. “Rebecca.”
“What makes you say that?” I fell automatically into cop mode.
She blinked at me. “Well, it is, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”
“That’s true, Mrs. Harvey. I’m just a little surprised you would know that.”
“I have a better memory than anyone you’ll ever meet, honey. Anyway, I knew they’d never let it rest.”
I asked her what she meant.
She looked around the dim room and then looked back at me. “A lot of people thought it was the Creeper that got her,” intoned the metallic monotone. I wanted to laugh, but a chill ran up the back of my neck.
“The what?”
“That’s what they called him. ‘The Creeper.’ All that summer, he was out there. At first, the cops didn’t want to believe it. Then when they couldn’t solve Rebecca’s killing, and the other killings happened, they didn’t want to talk about it, because they never could catch him. My God, George bought a gun. We never left the doors unlocked after that summer.”
She saw my expression, and her watery eyes brightened.
“My God, honey, didn’t they tell you about him?”
“There was nothing in any of the reports-” I began.
“Oh hell,” she interrupted. “When is anything important written down? They didn’t want to write it down because they didn’t want to believe it. And if the papers started writing about Jack the Ripper in the desert, it might hurt tourism and discourage all the people coming here from back east-that was George’s theory. ‘Keep Arizona green: Bring money.’”