Camelback Falls (12 page)
Kimbrough answered his phone on the third ring. A child was crying in the background, plates were banging, Sunday morning chaos. But after he recognized my voice, I heard a door close and the background noise went away.
“Where the hell are you, Sheriff? Are you OK?”
I just listened for a minute, trying to get a reading on his voice. What did he know? What was he hiding? I was no good at that kind of thing. What I did know was something about Sunday morning chaos. This Sunday morning, I hadn’t slept in twenty-seven hours. I knew—I’d counted them. My body ached with cold exhaustion, that peculiar feeling of being disconnected from real life, floating in a sea of disembodied pains and fatigue. I was just tired enough that every fear seemed magnified, and every certainty seemed at risk.
“I’m OK,” I said.
“PD found your car downtown,” he said. “It looked like it fell out of a parking garage, fifty feet to the street. Tell me you weren’t there, and that this was some car theft gone wrong.”
“Actually, we were there. I got a call to meet you there.”
“What?” His voice jacked up a half octave. “I never…”
“I got a call on my cell phone from the communications center. They said you left a message to meet you on the fourth floor of the Crown Plaza parking garage, at nine
P.M.
last night. The message said it was urgent that we meet.”
“Who told you this?” he demanded. “I never left any message like that.”
“Somebody named Deputy Stevens. It sounded authentic. The caller-ID on my cell phone showed a prefix at sheriff’s headquarters, just like it was the communications center.”
I heard him exhale a long, apprehensive blast of air.
I went on. “When we got there, the garage was deserted. But it was only a minute before two guys drove up in a white Crown Vic. They tried to ram us, and we would have been in the car when it hit the street if we hadn’t jumped out and run for our lives.”
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed, sounding surprised as hell. “Why would you go up there alone?”
“I had Lindsey.”
“Did she kill anybody with that H&K she checked out from the armory?”
“No,” I said. “But I got one of the guys in the foot. Check the ERs for reports of ‘accidental’ gunshots involving white males last night. Anyway, why would I need backup? The message supposedly came from you. I couldn’t reach you on your cell phone or home phone to check it out in advance.”
“Yeah, well, we had a sick kid last night. I had it turned off,” he said. He sounded sheepish. It sounded genuine. “So where are you now? Why didn’t you wait around for backup?”
I waited at least a minute, listening to the microwave stations buzz, thinking. Finally, “The two guys in the Crown Vic looked like cops. I guess I don’t feel safe in my own department right now.”
“I’ve always believed we had rogue cops involved…” he started.
“Up to two days ago you thought it was Leo O’Keefe,” I challenged him.
“OK, OK,” he said. “Tell me where you are. I’ll send a team of handpicked detectives to guard you.”
I ignored him. “How’s Peralta?” I asked.
My stomach tightened when he hesitated. He said, “Not good. There’s fluid in his right lung. They’re worried about pneumonia. He’s not responding to antibiotics. I just got back from the hospital.”
“There’s got to be something that can be done,” I said.
“There’s something else you should know, Sheriff,” he said. “We got back the ballistics report on Nixon. He was murdered with a nine-millimeter pistol.”
“So?”
“I asked Mrs. Peralta’s permission to test Sheriff Peralta’s service weapon.”
I almost made an angry bite through my lip. “Did you get a warrant, Captain?”
“I didn’t need one,” he said simply.
“Even the sheriff is entitled to due process,” I snarled. Underneath, I thought about the other pistol in Peralta’s desk drawer. Had it been fired? What did I really know? Who did I really trust? Lisa Cardiff was talking in my ear. She wouldn’t shut up. Peralta’s friend Dean Nixon. What the hell was that? I never knew they were friends.
Kimbrough went on. “We also got the report on the bullets fired at Peralta, and at you the other night at Kenilworth. They are both fifty-caliber rounds, fired by the same weapon. That’s heavy-duty sniper stuff. It looks like a hand-load, the shooter going for more power. Lucky for Peralta, the extra powder in the round may have caused the bullet to fragment before it hit him.”
“I don’t know how lucky he is,” I said quietly. My leg muscles burned from exhaustion. But I couldn’t sleep.
“Sheriff,” Kimbrough said. “Let’s talk in person.”
“Not now,” I said. “I’m going to take a couple of days off, just to have some time to myself.”
“This is crazy, Sheriff,” he shouted. “What are you doing? Where the hell are you?”
“I’ll contact you again,” I said. “Find out about the gunshot reports. And find out if there’s a Deputy Stevens in communications.”
Kimbrough was talking, but I carefully set the receiver back into the cold metal cradle of the pay phone.
He was a long way off. I was on the other side of the time zone, the other side of the mountains. I stood up from the cramped airport phone corral and looked out the huge plateglass of the airport terminal. The towers of downtown Denver glittered gold and silver in the distance, backed by the Front Range of the Rockies. The mountains were a shock to the plains, a great wall of purple rising up out of the land, filling the horizon. Fingers of winter mist reaching down the dark canyons toward the city. It must be hard to be an atheist here.
I found a seat and tried to distract myself with Niall Ferguson’s
The Pity of War
. It’s a brilliant thesis of counterfactual history: What if Britain had stayed out of World War I? We would have had a European Union eight decades early, no world wars, and Britain would still be a world power. I was too tired to wrestle down its flaws. So I allowed myself a bit of envy. My ambition had been to write books such as this. Instead, I was the acting sheriff, running out of time. I thought about Lindsey, my constant preoccupation. “I’m not an intellectual, Dave,” she had told me. And it was true, in a healthy way. I became close to physically ill over such profanity as post-structuralism and political correctness. Lindsey stayed above those hedgerows, despite her fine mind and incisive ability to detect and cut through bullshit. It was my good fortune that she wanted to spend her life with me.
“History Shamus.” Lindsey appeared, carrying bagels and coffee, a mocha for me. “I’d let you give me a backrub but I’d fall asleep right here.”
It was Sunday morning, and the airport was subdued. Or maybe it was the sleepless haze I was moving in. I heard flight announcements, but nobody seemed in a hurry. I let the mocha burn my tongue. The coldness evident out the huge windows made me shiver involuntarily.
“You OK?” she said, running her hand up and down my back. I nodded and sipped more scalding liquid.
“Her name is Beth Proudfoot now,” Lindsey said.
“Marybeth?”
“She legally changed it in 1989. Unknown if she got Proudfoot from marriage or the phone book.” Lindsey lapsed into a cop monotone. “She moved to Denver in 1982. She received a Colorado driver’s license in 1983. She applied for a passport in 1989, after her probation lapsed. She visited France and Italy.”
“Jeez,” I said. “I’m never going to try to hide from you.”
She bunched up her mouth in the sexy way that drove me crazy. “You’d better not hide. But when somebody has been through the criminal justice system, it’s easier to find them. All I need is that Social Security number, and all databases are mine.”
She beamed, unguarded. She looked luminous, in a gray sweater and jeans the color of the cold sky out our airplane window. If she was exhausted it didn’t show. I thought about the soft, warm touch of the bottoms of her feet against the small of my back, about that gasp she made when she was close to coming. I wished we were in Denver on vacation, like normal people. I’d love her up in a Jacuzzi overlooking the mountains. But I didn’t ski. I had a sheriff’s star in my pocket.
“Well,” I said, “Let’s go get reacquainted with Beth Proudfoot.”
The airport seemed halfway to Kansas, it was so far from downtown Denver. When I spent a happy summer here years ago teaching twentieth century American history at the University of Denver, the city’s airport had been Stapleton International, a five-minute drive from downtown. Now it took five minutes just to get from the car rental garage to Interstate 70.
It was definitely not summer in Denver. Inside our cramped, ugly rental Chevy, the heater struggled against the 10-degree High Plains blast. Lindsey and I both wore sweaters and leather jackets, an unheard-of combination for Phoenix in January, but barely adequate for Denver. As we hit the freeway and sped west, Lindsey asked me if I’d ever been in an orgy. That was easy. I told the truth and said no. Then she asked if I’d ever wanted to be in one. And I could be a guy and still be truthful to the woman I loved. I said, “Not now.” Maybe I’m too clever.
“I’m not sharing you,” Lindsey said decisively. “Do you think Marybeth—I’d better start calling her Beth—was a willing participant?”
I didn’t answer right away, because I was really thinking:
Should I ask Lindsey if she’s ever been in an orgy
? I tamped down my primal male insecurities, which could be concealed underneath my urbane academic bullshit exterior. I said, “Why not?”
She was driving, and didn’t turn her head as she talked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Jonathan Ledger looks so creepy in that photo. So damned self-satisfied.” She whipped to the fast lane to avoid the sudden braking of a minivan. “The girl looks…”
“Coerced?”
“Oh, no,” Lindsey said. “She looks more lucid than some of the others. Nixon looks bombed out of his mind. But she has this look that’s very cold, very nonsensual. And yet very much aware. Way adult for, what was she, eighteen?”
“I guess the prosecutors thought she looked innocent enough, if they let her skip out on a cop killing with just probation.”
I remembered the terrified young woman with the cheerleader looks, begging me not to shoot her and Leo as they crawled out of the backseat that night in Guadalupe.
“That smells like daddy’s money,” Lindsey said. “But how does she go from sucking off Jonathan Ledger in a Kodak moment to being in the middle of a gunfight between two prison escapees and the Sheriff’s Office? I know one of the escapees was Leo’s cousin, but Leo’s not in any of those photos. There’s no connection between Leo and Camelback Falls.”
Denver suddenly embraced us with warehouse rooftops and a massive traffic jam. I said, “Hell, how did she get to Camelback Falls from her safe little upper-class life as a Tulsa teenager?”
***
The trail to Beth Proudfoot led us into the old neighborhood north of the Denver Country Club and the booming Cherry Creek shopping district. Mamie Eisenhower grew up in the neighborhood, which still boasted neat bungalows built before the First World War. They had been gentrified into the half-million-dollar range by Denver’s ascent into the New Economy. Unlike Phoenix, the landscape here was a winter palette of bare, black tree limbs, livened by the occasional evergreen. No snow was on the ground, but the gutters were full of brown leaves and everything had the stiff countenance of winter. Denver and Phoenix had different histories, too. Denver was a city when Phoenix was still a dusty farm village. Now Phoenix had long since outgrown Denver, but Denver still had more of the feel of a city. I liked it.
“There.” Lindsey spotted the numbers on the porch of a small but lovingly restored cottage, framed by cedars. She pulled past the house and parked. “That’s the most recent address we have. Should we make a courtesy call to the Denver Police?”
“We should,” I said. “But I don’t particularly want anyone to know we’re here.”
“Agreed,” she said. She reached into the backseat, pulled open her backpack, and retrieved her Glock. She snapped the holster onto the right side of her jeans. Then she slipped an extra magazine into her left pocket. Then she covered it all with her jacket. She said, “Is it better if I check alone while you wait here?”
“You think she remembers me after all these years?” I asked.
“I think you’re unforgettable.”
“Pardon the unprofessional behavior,” I said, leaning over to kiss her. Her lips were warm. “I think I’ll go with you.” I opened the door to the cold street.
Thirty paces up the sidewalk and five knocks on the door, and there she was. The young blond girl from Guadalupe, right down to her tie-dyed top and tight bell-bottoms. I just looked at her, feeling an odd, out-of-place disorientation.
“We’re looking for Beth Proudfoot,” Lindsey said.
The girl cocked her head and fixed a look on us with her fine, wholesome features. She said, “And who the fuck are you?”
“Sheriff’s deputies,” Lindsey said in her hard voice, flashing her badge with a swing that made the girl involuntarily have to follow her hand.
“You got a warrant?”
“Do we need one?” I asked.
The girl gave a heavy sigh and fell into bad posture.
“She’s not here,” she said. “She’s never here.”
“She’s your mom?” Lindsey asked. She received a semi-affirmative shrug.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She mumbled something that sounded like “Paige.” I looked past her into the house. It was fashionably spare, with a few colorful
objets d’art
, large plants, and a Navajo rug. A highly polished string bass sat against one wall, positioned with just the right savoir faire. No books.
“When do you expect your mom to be back?” Lindsey asked.
“How the fuck would I know that?” Paige said, with a heaviness as if we had asked why war is a constant of the human condition.
“You and your mom don’t get along?” I asked. She looked at me with a contempt that only beautiful young women can bestow on the mortal world. She didn’t have to say anything. I was as vanquished as if I were a pimply seventeen-year-old asking for a date. I tried again, “Where does your mom work?”
Paige looked down at the sidewalk. We were at a standstill and I was freezing. Finally, Lindsey handed her a business card. “Let her know we came by. We’ll be back.”
We started down the sidewalk when we heard the girl’s voice again.
“You’re from Phoenix. What’s in Phoenix?”
“Your mom used to live there,” I said. She just stared at us and shook her head, an older person’s shake, sad and knowing, Then she closed the door.
In the car, we ran the heater on high and didn’t speak. Lindsey stared back at the house. I ran the zipper of my leather jacket all the way up and still shivered. “What?” I asked finally.
“She reminds me of me at that age,” Lindsey said, and she unconsciously gave the same shake of the head.
