Or not. We had been on Strawberry Death’s to-do list that night.
Lindsey’s rings went into a sock, which I rolled up with its mate and dropped back in the sock drawer. I slid a couple of books off the shelves and put them into my briefcase with the MacBook Air. Then I put a light jacket on to conceal my big Colt revolver and headed up to the hospital.
There it was so quiet and deserted that I was able to find a space in the two-block-long parking garage close to the skywalk entrance. I checked out the concrete expanse carefully but no killer was hiding in wait. I walked through the automatic doors and headed toward the massive complex of buildings. The skywalk was empty and Tom Petty’s voice was coming over the speakers, singing about learning to fly without wings.
Sharon had nothing new to tell me. This time it was my turn to shoo her off to get rest. She said I looked exhausted.
Two new Phoenix Police officers were outside the ICU. I checked them out long enough that they started giving me the cop eye. This caused them to take extra time looking at my driver’s license-no need to bring my badge into it-before I was buzzed into the unit.
It was almost ten and I was given a lecture about visiting hours, but they took pity on me and allowed me inside Lindsey’s room.
I sat by her high-tech bed and held her limp hand, reading Billy Collins poems aloud. He was her favorite poet. IV bags were changed. A nurse looked at me indulgently, as if to say, She can’t hear you. I knew that she could and kept reading.
After my ten minutes were up, I sat down in the waiting room with the file in the chair beside me.
It was still there when I woke up.
The wall clock showed five after three and I was momentarily disoriented and frightened. The room was empty. No one passed in the halls.
I picked up the file folder, snapped off the rubber band that held it together, and began to read. Pretty soon I was making notes.
Seeing my old handwriting in the cramped boxes of the original incident report made me think of that David Mapstone. Doing the calculations, I seemed impossibly young. I was juggling being a deputy with working on my master’s degree.
I had taken my own apartment at the edge of the lush Arcadia district and had left Grandmother alone in the house on Cypress. She understood a young man’s desire to be on his own. At that time, when the state was determined to ram the freeway through the old neighborhoods, they were in decline. More than once, I found a homeless person sleeping on Grandmother’s lawn.
I drove a ten-year-old Firebird that I was inordinately proud of. I should have kept it-I would have owned a classic. My girlfriend was named Deb. She’s a history professor at Cornell now. I thought Heineken was a sophisticated beer and I knew too little of jazz. The bad recession of 1981 was still lingering.
The service weapon I carried as a deputy was the same one as today, the Colt Python.357 magnum with a four-inch barrel. It wasn’t regulation but the supervisors let it fly. They knew I wanted the stopping-power of the big gun, something the.38 didn’t have. If a hopped-up criminal came at you, the.38 would eventually kill him. But he might keep coming and kill you, too. The.357 magnum would knock him down. I was a believer in stopping-power.
A month before, Peralta had become the youngest captain in the history of the Sheriff’s Office, an obvious comer. He kept pressuring me to stay in the Sheriff’s Office, not become an academic. Sharon had completed her Ph.D. in psychology. They had two young daughters. We had become social friends and would eat Mexican food he cooked every Wednesday night.
The nasty recession of the early 1980s was still hanging on. The metropolitan area was two-and-a-half million people lighter than today.
I was different from the other graduate students. For someone my age, I had a real job that mattered, one with adult responsibilities, one with duties that carried consequence. On the other hand, most of the other deputies held me in some suspicion. A college degree was rarer then in law enforcement, much less somebody who wanted to be a history professor. It made for an ongoing tension, this living two lives.
That July day, the midnight-to-eight shift was slow. The schedules worked for me so I could go to class and handle my slave-labor grad-student teaching load during the day. Who needed sleep at that age?
I was on patrol far from the city, west past mile after mile of farms and into the desert that framed the White Tank Mountains. I was there because Caterpillar, which ran a desert proving ground up the side of one steep rise, had been hit by a series of burglaries.
The area was popular with high-school keggers and the occasional body drop, whether done by the mob or freelance killers working for money or trying to conceal the consequences of their murderous passion. They assumed we wouldn’t find a body out here. We nearly always did.
Otherwise, it was the desert: silent, incomprehensible, teeming with wildlife at night while on the surface, to the untrained eye, a creation of brute simplicity where saguaros that could live for centuries looked at you as nothing more than a passing trifle.
At 6:07 a.m., with the angry summer sun already thirty degrees above the horizon, I found a car sitting off a dirt road a mile from Caterpillar. It was a faded green 1967 Dodge Monaco with Arizona plates and no one visible inside. I pulled behind and radioed in my location-ten-twenty-and the tag number. When the dispatcher told me it wasn’t stolen, I stepped out and checked the vehicle.
It was empty and unlocked. Inside, I found no weapons or drugs. The keys were in the ignition and when I turned them to bring up the alternator, the dashboard showed me a full tank of gasoline. The tires were worn retreads.
The trunk held a spare tire, jack, and a large first-aid kit, nothing more. It was neat and had been recently vacuumed.
I thought about backing away and waiting, in case these were burglars. But the break-ins at the proving ground always involved cars pulling right up to the fence. Recreational hikers this far from town were rare in those days. I pocketed the keys and decided to check the area on foot.
The monsoon season hadn’t started yet, so the chalky soil was hard-packed and didn’t show tracks well. But I spotted some light foot treads leading out into the desert. From the cruiser, I slung a canteen over my shoulder and put on my Stetson to shield me from the sun. I followed the footprints.
They disappeared as the land became rocky. I took a chance and went straight, finding them again thirty feet away on sandier soil. I was hardly an expert tracker. In this case, I was lucky.
Maybe twenty minutes later, as the land dipped in a graceful slope, I saw him face down and maybe five feet away from a large stand of cholla. He had dark-brown hair and wore yellow running shoes. When the direction of the breeze changed, I knew he was very dead.
What a great way to end the shift-with a stinker.
I pulled out the heavy portable radio on my belt, a new innovation, and called for the medical examiner and detectives.
As a uniformed deputy, my job was pretty simple. Secure the scene. That was easy, given that we were in the middle of nowhere. Today the area is overrun with houses, including the fancy subdivision of Verrado. Back then, it was silent emptiness.
My other memories were few. Because of the incident, I had to get a friend to cover for me in teaching my undergraduates that day and I made good overtime from the county.
As I read on, I learned more about my stinker.
His name was Tom Frazier and he was twenty years old, an emergency medical technician for Associated Ambulance and completely alone in the world. His mother had died of a heart attack three months earlier. He had no brothers or sisters and his parents had apparently divorced years before.
Aside from his work colleagues, who spoke well of him, he seemed to have no friends. He had no girlfriend. In those days, no detective would ask about a boyfriend unless it was a vice investigation.