Desert Cut (12 page)
I swore eternal silence.
“Precious Doe bled to death, you know that much?”
I nodded.
“No sperm present.”
Thanks to television programs like
CSI
, killers had learned how not only how to clean up a crime scene, but how to keep from dirtying it in the first place. That’s why condoms were now commonplace during rape.
“Interesting. Anything else?” I waited, convinced more was on its way.
Herschel took a deeper drink of his coffee, then said, “Her killer hacked off all her external sexual organs.”
“
What?!
”
“All of them. Everything. He
amputated
her! Then, if that wasn’t enough, the sonofabitch stitched her up like he was trying to stop the bleeding or something. Stitched the vagina closed, too,
after
he stuck some kinda narrow tubing up in there. Stitched her up with thick black thread, the kind you’d used to fix torn upholstery. Nice touch, huh? Probably, he was just getting himself more kicks. And you wanna know the worst part? The poor thing was still alive when he did it.”
Somehow I managed to ask the next question. “Were the amputations made with something like a scalpel? Perhaps by someone with medical knowledge?”
“Didn’t you hear me? I said
hacked,
lady!
Hacked
! A real butcher job. You know what I hope?”
He took a deep breath. “I hope the perv who did that to her gets caught by some little girl’s daddy.”
After leaving Herschel Berklee’s house, I sat in my Jeep for a few minutes staring at nothing in particular. Cars purred along the street as the first commuters arrived home from work. Somewhere a dog barked, more in excitement than threat.
When I had calmed down as much as possible, I reached into my carry-all and pulled out the photograph of Precious Doe. Her delicate face gave no hint of the torment she had endured. Instead, she looked as serene as the angel she’d become.
Only slightly comforted by the thought that the child was long past her sufferings, I headed back to the
Cochise County Observer.
There I found Bernice Broussard once again manning the receptionist’s desk as she marked up the morning newspaper with a red pen.
“Tell me the truth,” I said. “You don’t really have a receptionist.”
“Not anymore, I don’t,” she grumped. “That ‘sick’ business? Turns out she went on a shopping trip in Nogales with her boyfriend, so I told her to find another job. Not because she wanted to shop—hell, all she had to do was ask—but I can’t stand being lied to. Enough about my employee problems. What do you want this time?”
Without going into the specifics, I asked if there had been any reports of animal mutilations in the area during the past few years. She was no dummy and immediately guessed what I was getting at.
“Mutilations? Like what happened to Precious Doe?” Gold rings twinkled as she clenched her fists. “Christ, no. This isn’t Texas. Or New York.”
“How about missing pets?”
She shook her head. “Nope.” Then her face changed. “Wait, let me rephrase that. We lose a few cats and small dogs to coyotes every year, but that’s normal when the desert’s your backyard.”
In the West, people tend to attribute the loss of pets to raids by neighboring wildlife and discounted the possibility that something more sinister could be on the loose. I knew that serial killers often began with animals. “Has the number of lost pets increased lately?”
“We’re not dumb down here, Ms. Jones. If somebody in town was having that kind of serious trouble, we’d know it.”
I pointed at the marked-up newspaper. The headline read:
NO LEADS IN PRECIOUS DOE CASE
. THE SUBHEAD WAS,
AZIZA STILL MISSING
. A separate article discussed Nicole Hall’s disappearance. “You don’t call that ‘serious trouble’?”
“You know what I meant. I’ve already told you we don’t keep our back issues here, so if you want to run the numbers on missing pets, go back to the library. Now let me do some work, all right? Apparently, I’ve hired a copy editor who doesn’t know the difference between
they’re
and
their
.”
I took her advice and drove over to the library, but even with Martha Green’s help, didn’t find what I needed. Yes, over the past few years there had been missing pets aplenty in Los Perdidos, but just as many pets were recovered as lost forever. The big dogs, German shepherds, mastiffs, and Irish wolf hounds, almost always returned home in one piece. Only the toy breeds and cats stayed gone, probably serving as some four-legged predator’s dinner.
That avenue of investigation effectively closed, I turned on my police scanner to keep me company and aimed the Jeep west toward Sierra Vista and the safe house Raymundo Mendoza told me about. It took longer to get out of town than I would have expected. With the shift at the insecticide plant ending, the main drag was clogged by battered cars filled with dark faces, the blue-black of Somalis, and the lighter hues of Middle Easterners and Hispanics. First the Irish did America’s dirty work, then the Italians, then the Puerto Ricans. Now it was everyone else’s turn.
The newer cars were driven by Anglos: management. Some things never change.
After twenty minutes of driving across the desert into a pink-streaked sky, I arrived in Sierra Vista. The city of forty thousand-plus was the home of Fort Huachuca, Arizona’s largest military instillation. Founded in 1877 as a product of the Apache Wars, the original fort had been erected to block the Apaches’ traditional escape route to Mexico. Now the U. S. Army Intelligence Center and School had taken up residence, and God only knew what those folks were up to.
The safe house existed in a much lower-tech world, ten miles beyond Sierra Vista, nestled among the low foothills of the Whetstone Mountains. The sign on the gate announced
FLYING HORSE RANCH
. IN THE ROSY GLOW OF SUNSET, A HERD OF WHITE-FACED CATTLE GRAZED BEHIND THE BARBED WIRE FENCE. MORE ALARMING WAS THE POSTING,
PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING—THIS MEANS YOU
!
After turning off the police scanner to save power, I jumped out, unlatched the gate, and turned into a dirt lane.
I didn’t get far.
Before I had driven a hundred yards, a pickup truck topped a low rise and rushed down the road toward me. As it neared, I saw a thin man in the truck bed, holding a rifle. When the truck rumbled to a stop, he drew down on me. “Can’t you read?”
A woman. The setting sun at her back cast her face in shadow, but from her voice, she was no kid. Guns have a wonderful way of reminding you of your manners, so I raised my hands. “Yes, ma’am, I can read. But I’m looking for someone, and…”
“Get off our land,” she ordered.
Forcing my hands not to tremble, I tried again. “Is Nicole Hall here, ma’am?”
The rifle didn’t waiver, neither did her voice. “Like hell you can read, and you obviously don’t understand English, either. I
said
get off our land.” The sunlight glanced along the rifle barrel aimed straight at my chest.
If the woman shot me, no one other than a few cows would hear, so the smart thing to do would be to follow orders, but that wouldn’t help me find out about Nicole. Ignoring the dryness in my mouth, I said, “Ma’am, if you would just help me find her? I’m a private detective from Scottsdale—
not
hired by the Halls, by the way—and I won’t tell her parents if she’s here.”
The truck’s driver stuck his head out of the cab window. “What’s your name?” Like the woman, he didn’t sound young.
“Lena Jones. Want to see my I.D.?”
Instead of answering, the man called to the gun-toting woman, “Get down here for a minute.”
She did, and the two of them held a low conversation. After a couple of nods, the woman, the rifle balanced along one arm and braced against her shoulder, walked toward me. She stretched out her hand. “Hand it over, but move slow.”
Now that she stood along side my Jeep and the sun was no longer at her back, I saw a woman of about sixty, with dark brown hair, brown eyes, and the lined face of a long-time desert-dweller. When I reached toward my carry-all on the passenger’s seat, she brought the rifle up again. “
Don’t.
” I recognized the stance; she was ready to fire. Who the hell was this woman? A retired Marine?
“Ma’am, that’s where I carry my I.D.”
“Throw the bag on the ground.”
I’d seen more expression on rocks, so I did as she said, although I wasn’t happy about it. The noise my carry-all made when it landed alerted her that it held more than makeup.
“Now back up.”
I did.
Keeping her stern gaze on me, she picked up the carry-all and walked backwards to the man in the truck. He took it without a word, then rooted around until he found my .38.
“I’m a Glock man, myself,” he muttered, placing the gun on the seat next to him. Then he took out my billfold and flipped through the plastic photo folders until he found my State of Arizona P.I. card. After comparing my face to the picture, he said to the woman, “As they say at Disneyland, it’s a small world after all.”
The two held a brief consultation I couldn’t hear. The man stuck his head out of the window again. “You’re the detective who helped that little girl escape the polygamy compound, aren’t you?”
That case, which involved the forced marriage of a thirteen-year-old girl to an elderly polygamist who already had several “wives,” had earned me all kinds of publicity, some of it even positive. After ushering the girl to a save haven, I had turned over all the information I’d uncovered on the polygamy compound—forced child marriages, rampant molestation, and tens of millions of dollars in welfare fraud—to the Arizona attorney general. Prosecutions were ongoing. So were the death threats against me.
Since these people ran a safe house for runaway teens, I figured the chances of their being polygamists were zilch to zero. “Yep, that’s me,” I called to the man.
The woman shifted her stance slightly, and the rifle barrel lowered almost a whole inch. “Who told you about us?” she asked.
“Raymundo Mendoza.”
A grunt from the truck. The woman shifted the rifle all the way down, then climbed into the pickup’s bed, motioning for me to follow them. Since they had my carry-all and .38, there was little other choice. After a brief drive through increasingly bumpy ground, with the Jeep eating the pickup’s dust, we arrived at a ranch complex tucked behind a grove of ancient mesquite. Off to the right, a windmill creaked, a generator hummed, and a satellite dish tilted up to a sky now turned scarlet. Chickens pecked in the yard, and from the barn, a cow lowed. I figured the outbuildings contained enough provisions to keep the ranch’s humans fed for a year.
Several girls flitted between the trees in the fading light, their laughter carefree. As we grew closer, I noticed they were all young teens. Even in the dimming light, their resemblance to each other was striking: polygamy runaways, the look-alike products of generations of incest. And that was why so many girls bolted: they were fleeing upcoming “marriages” to uncles and grandfathers who already had a dozen wives.
The pickup pulled to a stop in front of a sprawling ranch house, and the man exited the cab and approached. As old as the woman, his dark hair was thick and wavy, his eyes a deep hazel. The woman jumped down from the truck bed.
“I’m Victor Friedman, Ms. Jones,” the man said, handing my carry-all and handgun back to me. “Annie Oakley over there is my wife Evelyn. Let’s go inside.”
When we entered the house, I found more look-alike girls scattered around a large living room furnished with attractive, if mismatched, sofas and chairs. I didn’t see Nicole among them, but the others were watching CNN on a large-screen television set, where a female senator was making mincemeat of a male senator over proposed legislation to curb presidential powers. Amazement showed on the girls’ faces. Television—news of any kind, actually—was forbidden to women on polygamy compounds. Even more forbidden was the idea of a woman contradicting a man.
“We’ll talk in the den,” Friedman said. “Don’t want to interfere with the girls’ education, what little there’s been of it.”
The couple led me into a book-filled room furnished with a sturdy gun cabinet, a handsome leather sofa, and his-and-her desks, each with its own computer. One was a Mac, the other a PC. Friedman eased himself into a chair in front of the Mac, which was blinking out a green-bannered website called ValueLine. Stocks? Way out here in the boonies? Then I reminded myself that thanks to the Internet, you no longer had to be on Wall Street to run with the bulls.
As Evelyn locked the rifle away in the gun cabinet, Friedman closed down the computer and gestured for me to take a seat. “Let’s hear it, Ms. Jones. If the Halls didn’t hire you, why are you so interested in Nicole?”
I explained the situation, finishing with, “After Precious Doe’s murder and then Aziza Wahab’s disappearance, I’m worried about her. I just want to make sure she’s all right.”
He shook his head. “I hope she is.”
My heart fell. “What do you mean? Isn’t she here?”
“She called us last night from a payphone, very upset, not making much sense,” he said. “You heard that she stayed with us a couple of years ago?”
I nodded and waited for him to continue.
“Nicole was pregnant then. Like so many girls, she panicked, not sure what her parents’ reaction would be, but after a few days with us, she decided to go home and face the music. Judging from what she’d told us about her father, Evelyn and I weren’t all that happy about her decision, but we certainly weren’t going to keep her against her will. After all, she was a minor, and no crime—not one that we saw evidence of, anyway—had been committed against her, so we drove her to her boyfriend’s family’s house and let them take it from there. That was the last we heard from her until last night. This time she wasn’t worried about herself, but about someone else.”
“Did she say who?” I asked, frowning.
“She never gave us a name, just that ‘this person’ was about to be hurt, and she refused to let it happen. She wanted to bring ‘this person’ to us. Then I heard a child talking in the background, so of course I asked her how old ‘this person’ was.”
“And?”
“She said ‘this person’ was a seven-year-old girl.”
Aziza Wahab’s age. I remembered Peggy Binder telling me that Nicole had once been friendly with Shalimar, Aziza’s older sister. Had the two met through her? But what could have happened to make Nicole kidnap the girl—if it really was a kidnapping, something I was no longer certain of.
Before I shared my suspicions, Evelyn jumped in. “Victor told Nicole that if she was really worried about a seven-year-old’s safety, to take her concerns to the authorities. They were the ones who should deal with it, not her.”
He raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “Nicole said there was no point in telling, that nobody would believe her anyway. But she had to make sure no one else died.”
My concern for the two girls catapulted into alarm. “Wait a minute. No one
else
died?” Could she have been referring to Precious Doe? Or Tujin Rafik? Or both?
“I got the impression she was talking about someone else, but maybe I’m wrong,” Friedman said. “Anyway, she started crying, so against my better judgement, I told her to bring the girl on over.”
Evelyn spoke again. “We waited up all night, but Nicole never showed. She didn’t call again, either. Believe me, we’re as worried as you are.”
***
As I drove away from the ranch, my concern over Nicole’s welfare increased. She was only sixteen, yet had somehow allowed herself to become involved in kidnapping, and possibly even murder. The more I tried to figure it out, the more frustrated I became. For some reason, the teenager seemed to believe she was
saving
Aziza, so she obviously had no intent to harm her. Since Nicole had taken the family car, maybe she and Aziza drove to a friend’s house before heading to the Friedmans’. If so, I would find out soon enough, because Victor Friedman had promised to call me the minute the two showed up.
