The house was still immaculate and spectacular, but there’s something about a place that has been violated by murder: a smell real or imagined, brutal memories in the walls, uneasy ghosts. Lindsey had offered to take the day off and come up with me, and I found myself wishing she were here. I picked up the phone and called down to Phoenix, getting her voice mail. I left a message and remembered how she’d felt in bed just hours earlier.
Although it’s commonplace today to read nothing more than the TV screen, it still jarred me to see no books. But it went with the expensively austere theme of the decorator. I looked over the photos on his shelves and noted once again that there were no photos of him and Phaedra. There were pictures of him with other women, kayaking, on the beach, rock climbing, in the cockpit of a small airplane. I had definitely lived too sedentary a life.
The master bedroom had been stripped of furniture, but the walls were still stained with blood-lots of it. I stepped inside. The bed must have faced the door. He would have seen his assailant coming, if he had been awake, if he had been expecting trouble. It was so quiet, I jumped when the phone began to ring. When no answering machine picked up, I lifted the receiver and placed it to my ear. Whoever was on the other end hung up, saying nothing.
Townsend had been very neat, precise. So, too, had his murderer. Nothing was out of place in the office. Even the stunning Navajo rug that dominated the room was hung with obsessive care on the wall. I sat at his desk, tried not to let the view of Oak Creek Canyon distract me, and went through the drawers. Bills, blank stationery, a checkbook, some computer disks that I fed into the IBM clone nearby, which yielded holistic healing techniques, FAA flight-plan regulations, some computer games, maps of the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in Colorado. I was not finding that “I am a drug dealer” file. Then I reached under the computer table and felt a slender journal taped to the underside. Life was getting interesting.
It was full of columns of numbers and letters, a code of some kind. Pages and pages of it in a simple binder, noted in a precise hand in black ink, always black ink. Maybe it had something to do with Sedona’s psychic voltage. Or maybe it tracked drug shipments and payments for Bobby Hamid. I took it with me and walked back to the Blazer.
I walked around the grounds, hoping for footprints, shotgun shells, Baggies of dope, signed confessions. I wasn’t proud at this stage. The place was so remote, clinging as it did to the side of the mountain, it was easy to see why no one would have seen anything. Through the pines, I could see little but hillside, while at my back was the blue of the canyon sky. It was a fabulous place, a “babe lair,” as my male students would have said, a place sure to have impressed a young woman who was attracted to the quirky, the beautiful, and the expensive.
In a clearing, someone had laid out a medicine wheel in the red dirt. Some Indian tribes used them for their spiritual powers, but they had been co-opted by the New Agers. This one was probably fake, but it did make me look in a certain direction. Something glinted at me from an outcropping about fifty yards above, up the mountainside. I negotiated some boulders and climbed, pulling myself up on fir branches, crossing a fallen aspen trunk. The rocks and soil were the color of the sunset and covered with pine needles. My legs were feeling the angle of the climb by the time I pulled myself up on the ledge and found a door.
A door. And a cabin. There was an adobe wall maybe twenty feet across, set neatly into the rock. The cabin was obviously fairly new and had a commanding view of Greg Townsend’s house and the canyon and forest reaching below and off to the horizon. Yet from even a few feet below, it was nearly invisible. I was preparing to show my star and knock on the door, when it opened and there stood Julie.
“David, I hoped you wouldn’t come up here.”
Chapter Thirty-two
Julie walked back inside the cabin, and I followed her. It was a foolhardy thing to do. But I was feeling foolhardy. Homer tells of how the Greek soldiers before Troy lost their senses and became drunk for war. I suppose it was that way for me, only I was drunk with a kind of flinty curiosity-I had to know; I had to know.
“I keep wondering what you said to Phaedra the night before she died,” I said. “When you met her at the coffee shop on Mill Avenue. What you said that upset her so much.”
Julie twirled a strand of hair and looked out the window.
“You ask too many questions, David.”
“I suspect she didn’t really realize what she was into even at the end,” I went on. “She was gentle and trusting and too eccentric.”
“You were always such a sentimental sap,” Julie said. “Phaedra was a little moralizing bitch sometimes, but she knew the color of money.”
“Even if it was money that belonged to Bobby Hamid?”
“I don’t know who it really belonged to, but it’s mine now,” she said. “I earned it. More money than you can imagine.”
“So that’s what you meant about us being in grave danger?”
Julie was silent.
“What about Phaedra? Did she realize she was in danger?”
“You don’t want to go there, David.”
“Oh, but I do. I am there.”
She sighed and looked at me like some pathetic being. “No money, no life. It’s that simple.”
“So Greg decided to rip off his employer?”
“Not Greg,” Julie said. “Give me more credit than that.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life working, watching the beautiful life go on all around me.” Her voice rose. “Jesus! All I had to do was walk around to see everything I couldn’t have. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be broke in Phoenix?”
“So a million dollars in cocaine money was the ticket? You just thought you’d stay in town and everything would be fine?”
“That was the plan,” she said.
“The plan where Greg Townsend and Phaedra took the fall? And Julie is left with the money?” I felt an overpowering revulsion.
“Nobody’s innocent. Everybody got what they wanted.”
“Really?” I said. “Everyone I talked to said Phaedra hated drugs. So what did she get?”
“She got stupid. She got in the way.”
“She was your sister.”
Julie clenched and unclenched her hands, but she was silent.
“So Phaedra didn’t know about the drugs or the money?”
“Not at first,” Julie said.
“But she overheard.”
Julie said, “All she had to do was be her weird, ethereal self. Always missing half the world right in front of her nose. That’s all she had to do. And nothing would have happened.”
“But it didn’t work out that way. Phaedra heard about ripping off Bobby Hamid, taking his money and failing to deliver the product. She got scared and she ran. She stayed on the run for over a month. Were you really afraid she’d narc on you?”
“There’s more to it than that,” Julie said.
“So eventually, you found her. You found her, and you told her something that persuaded her to meet you, and then to follow you away from a public place. The next thing you know, she’s dead in the desert.”
“I didn’t hurt her,” Julie said, her left eye twitching. “I couldn’t.”
“But you found her. And she couldn’t be allowed to live, knowing what she knew.”
There was an odd brightness in her eyes. “I had to have the money. I didn’t have any chances left. You don’t understand. With the money, I could have a life; I could get Mindy back.”
“And buy more cocaine.”
She let out some breath.
“So where did I come in?”
“You?” She sounded disoriented.
“You came to me, remember? You asked me to look into Phaedra’s disappearance? Then you cried when I told you I’d done all I could do. So I jumped into it, up to my eyeballs.”
“You always had a ‘white knight’ fantasy,” she said. “I knew you couldn’t resist.”