Desert Cut (4 page)
Upon returning to the kitchen, I asked Selma about her African vacation, but she seemed disinclined to talk about it, saying only, “Even ranchers like a change of scene every now and then.” Then she steered the conversation around to Geronimo and the Apaches again, regaling me with more tales of bloody raids and even bloodier reprisals. “Did you know Geronimo was considered fairly peaceful until his wife and children were murdered by Mexican troops while he was away conducting peace talks?”
I nodded. Warren had discovered that relatively unknown piece of history while researching his documentary.
“That’s what turned him, I think, because after that, he couldn’t get enough blood,” she said. “He and his band began slaughtering every settler they ran across. Even here. If you walk south along the river, and you should because it’s gorgeous this time of year, you’ll see the remains of a burned-out farmstead and six graves. The Johnston family. Geronimo himself massacred every last one of them, including the baby. The other settlers vowed to avenge them. Wyatt Earp even rode up from Tombstone to join the search party but didn’t have any luck. Two months later he—Earp, that is—shot up the Clantons down at the OK Corral.”
Through the kitchen window I saw the Dragoons rising into a crisp sky. They looked so peaceful. “A lot of history in the area.”
“Yeah, and most of it violent.”
After several more stories about Apache and Anglo ferocity, Selma must have noticed my flagging interest, because she offered to walk me over to my quarters. I smiled with relief.
The guest house sat to the east of the main building, far from the ranch hands’ quarters but close enough to the river that I heard water rushing against rocks. The small cottage was no more elegant than the house, but that only added to its charm. A hand-made quilt lay across the bed, a rag rug covered the scarred oak floor, and a big armoire—as scarred as if it had lain out the yard for a century or two—stood against a whitewashed wall. There were no guns or other implements of destruction here, just photographs of various Apaches, including one of Geronimo standing in a garden, proudly holding a big watermelon. Beside him stood a woman and a child.
Geronimo the family man. Geronimo the gardener.
Apaches weren’t the only stars of the photo display. I also saw a picture of a uniformed Bill Avery accepting a plaque from a smug-faced man.
“You keep a picture of your ex-boyfriend?” With me, when a relationship was over, it was over. Well, usually. I talked to Dusty, one of my own exes, from time to time.
Selma laughed. “You’ll notice it’s not in my living room. But my guests like it, probably because that Smokey-and-Stetson outfit of Bill’s makes him look like their idea of an Old West sheriff. That’s Lee Casey next to him, Los Perdidos’ richest man. He owns Apache Chemical, the big insecticide plant on the edge of town. He talked Bill into being Guest of Honor at the company’s annual banquet.”
Tujin Rafik’s father had worked at the plant, I remembered. And hadn’t I seen Lee Casey’s name on the bronze plaque at the hospital? When I studied the photograph more closely, I noticed that the sheriff’s body language resembled a virgin trying hard not to let her horny date get too close.
Selma’s next words affirmed my observation. “Lee’s not one of Bill’s favorite people, but the picture was taken soon after the election, while he was currying favor with county movers and shakers. Lee’s turned out to be a real pain in the butt for him, always expecting special favors, like making his speeding tickets go away. Not that Bill ever complies.”
“Why would a chemical plant want a sheriff as guest of honor at a company banquet?”
“Right after 9/11, Bill rode herd on the White Power types around here who were making life miserable for the immigrants, and suggested strongly that they vamoose. Most of the outright thugs did leave, the guys who’d been convicted for assault at one time or another. Because of his actions then, reasonable people—and for all his faults I include Lee among them—believe Bill kept a bad situation from getting worse.”
I remained confused. “I still don’t see why the sheriff’s efforts would be cause for celebration at Apache Chemical.”
“Because half the chemists and engineers on staff up there are from points east.
Way
east. Indians—the New Delhi kind, not the Apache kind—plus a bunch of folks from Africa and the Middle East. The company recruited them because they have all the brains and education of our own college grads, but work for half the money and under worse conditions.”
Life had never been easy for immigrants, but that didn’t make it right. “What about OSHA?” The Occupational Safety and Health Administration tried to keep the workplace safe, but it did have blind spots, especially where immigrants, legal or illegal, were concerned.
“OSHA does what it can, but there’s a lot of ground to cover out here, lots of new plants springing up in the desert, industries that cities like Scottsdale don’t want in their own backyards because of the pollution factor. Maybe I shouldn’t paint such a bleak picture. Apache Chemical is pretty safe as these kinds of plants go, and hasn’t been hit with many citations. Oh. Come to think of it, there was a bad accident a couple of years back, when one of the immigrants, an African, lost his hand.”
That didn’t sound “pretty safe” to me. “Why wasn’t the plant closed down?”
“If OSHA closed plants every time there was an accident, there would be no industry in America today. They just fined the company, the guy received Workers Comp, and Casey gave him a payoff. Since then, conditions up there have changed for the better, partially because Casey’s been more careful, but also because some people around town started paying more attention to what was going on up there.”
That sounded promising. “Who in particular?”
“A group of community activists, mainly retired legal types, social workers, store owners, even a rancher or two. Not me. I stay out of politics. Horse manure’s cleaner.”
With that, Selma helped me unload my luggage from the Jeep, and we returned to the main house where we spent the rest of the evening in friendly chat over coffee so thick it could have fueled a Stealth Bomber. By the time she excused herself to attend to some paperwork, I knew enough about Los Perdidos to add some perspective to my investigation.
Best of all, she had confirmed information Jimmy had provided me with that morning.
The names of the town’s two convicted child molesters.
“When the Iraqi girl went missing, Floyd Polk and Duane Tucker were the first people my predecessor questioned,” Sheriff Avery said, sliding the men’s mug shots across his desk. He wasn’t happy talking to me, but once I convinced him that I’d paid my guest cottage tab two weeks in advance and wasn’t going anywhere until the case was solved, he relented.
Somewhat, anyway. The hostility in his eyes remained.
Avery’s office displayed no I’m-A-Big-Shot certificates on the pine-paneled walls, just a large studio-posed photograph of him with three blond children who had his eyes, and one tiny brunette who appeared partially Hispanic but had his firm mouth. The fruits of different wives? I knew from my own years on the Scottsdale Police Force that due to the tension of the job, cops had trouble staying married. Things appeared no different here in the boonies.
I studied the mug shots. Polk, who appeared to be around seventy, squinted at the camera through his one good eye while the other, cataract white, walled out to the side. Tucker was younger and looked fairly normal, except for the puckered scar on his forehead. It resembled my own.
“Considering that Polk’s been in and out of prison all his life, he’s pretty healthy,” the sheriff continued, tapping his finger on the old man’s picture. “At least healthy enough to snatch a kid. He’s a serial child molester, but thanks to our so-called justice system, his longest stretch was only eleven years, and that for the rape of a nine-year-old. Nice, huh?” Avery made a disgusted sound. “His parents died while he was in prison, left him their place, so he moved back here once he was released. The house isn’t much more than a shack, really, right up against the Dragoons and secluded as hell. Anything might go on out there. He was a prime suspect when Tujin Rafik disappeared, too, but nothing came of it.”
Tujin. The girl with the sad eyes. “You sure you asked him the right questions?”
He turned surly again. “How’s this for a question: why don’t you go home?”
I could have kicked myself for endangering our truce. “Sorry, that didn’t come out right. For reasons I’d rather not explain, I feel personally involved in this case.”
At this, Avery moved the papers on his desk, uncovering a folder labeled,
JONES, LENA
. Spilling from it were xeroxed copies of two old newspaper articles, both dated thirty years earlier. One asked the public to help identify a four-year-old girl found on a Phoenix city street, because the bullet that had almost killed her left her with amnesia. The other was a copy of the article reporting my knife attack against the foster father who’d raped me when I was nine.
“Not the world’s greatest childhood, I see,” he murmured, his voice turned gentle. “You ever regain your memory?”
I shook my head. “Just fleeting visions.”
My father dying in a forest clearing. A white bus carrying me away. My mother aiming her pistol at my head.
He opened the folder and stared at the article. When he looked up, his hard eyes had softened. “Let’s try this again, Ms. Jones. If you stop being a smart ass, I’ll stop being a prick. Bargain?”
“Bargain.”
“Truce, then. Friday afternoon, as soon as the judge faxed me the search warrant, we went out and tossed Polk’s place but he came up clean. The guy’s either real smart, which I doubt, or he’s innocent. Of this particular crime, anyway.”
Now that sentencing standards against serial child molesters had become more rigorous, Polk might have killed his latest victim to make sure she couldn’t testify against him. “What about Duane Tucker?”
Avery grimaced. “Ah, yes. Duane Gerald Tucker, one of Los Perdidos’ most notorious imports. Born in Cheval Blanc, Louisiana, moved to our fair city with his mother when he was twelve. Began having run-ins with the law right away, mainly shoplifting and a few school fights. There was some problematical stuff early on with girls, too, but nothing serious until he was caught having what he called ‘consensual sex’ with a thirteen-year-old. At the time he was fifteen. The county attorney piled on a few other charges and the court shipped him off to juvie until he turned eighteen.”
“How old is Duane now?” The face that peered at me from the photograph was so lacking in character that he might have been anywhere from his early twenties to his late thirties.
“Twenty-three but still a bad boy. He’s suspected in a few recent break-ins, but we haven’t been able to pin anything down. It’s just a matter of time. Talk about your basic bad seed.”
“Meaning?”
“His father, the illustrious Gerald Tucker, was executed in Louisiana a couple years ago for murder following a rape.”
I sucked in my breath. Sex offenders frequently practiced on their own kids, who in turn, sometimes took up the practice themselves. “Was the victim a child?”
“Convenience store clerk. Gerald carjacked her, took her out to the bayou, did his freak thing, then carved her up. Duane was almost eight at the time. After Daddy took up residence on Death Row, his mom, Joleene, started seeing some guy who moved them out here, where he had family. Couple years later, the guy took off, stranding them. Not that it made any difference to Joleene, because she’s been on Welfare all her life. What with the government’s money and her turning a trick every now and then, they get by.”
I stared at Duane’s picture, thinking about bad childhoods and what they could do to a child. “Tell me, was he in or out of juvie when Tujin Rafik disappeared?”
A faint smile. “Now there’s a good question. He’d been released a month earlier, and yes, we questioned him and came up with nada, just like we did the other day.”
I touched the mark on Duane’s forehead. “How did he get that scar?”
For a brief moment the sheriff gazed at my own scar, a visible record of the bullet that had condemned me to fourteen years’ worth of foster homes. Then he looked away, as if embarrassed to be caught staring. “His father beat him, his mother never interfered.”
Usually it took two people to turn a child’s life into a living hell: a violent man and a weak woman. Or, as in my own case, terrified children screaming somewhere in the distance, my mother carrying me silently through the dark woods. The rest? It was probably just as well my memory was a blank.
“Does Duane have a long history of violent outbursts? That’s a not-uncommon side effect of brain injuries.” I’d had some trouble along those lines, myself.
He nodded. “We always know when our boy’s out drinking. Miracles begin to happen, like chairs flying through barroom windows.”
Brain injuries and booze, a bad mix. Another reason I didn’t drink.
After some pleading, the sheriff gave me both men’s addresses, if you called the map to Polk’s desert shack an address. Its location, less than five miles from where Precious Doe had been dumped, gave me pause. Duane lived in a Los Perdidos trailer park close to the center of town.
“Don’t bother going by Duane’s place yet,” Avery volunteered. “He’s working on a yard maintenance crew and won’t be home until sundown. Joleene, if she’s not off drinking somewhere, won’t tell you squat. Polk’s ‘retired,’ and is home all day. A real gentleman of leisure.”
Returning the mug shots to their respective folders, he asked, “Is there anything else?”
“I’d like to see Precious Doe’s autopsy report.”
Some of his earlier hostility returned. “Forget it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t need my nightmares.”
I could have told him I had nightmares of my own, but didn’t bother. Recognizing that his cooperation was at an end, I said good-bye.
***
An hour later, after wrestling the Jeep over several miles of rutted dirt road and a bottom-scraping dry wash, I spotted Polk’s shack hidden behind two sickly mesquite trees. The tar-papered walls listed to one side and rust spotted the tin roof. Trash blown about in the hard wind funneled down from the Dragoon Mountains littered the front “yard,” which was nothing more than bare desert heaped with filled garbage bags. In the rear, near a faded pickup truck, stood a line of jerry-built cages housing rabbits. The drying skins tacked to the side of the shack told me they weren’t pets.
Polk met me at the door, a huge butcher knife pointed toward me. “You get.” He didn’t really need the knife for protection because the odor emanating from his body could have killed the average pro wrestler.
I copied the conciliatory smile I’d used with such success on the sheriff. “Mr. Polk? I just wanted to ask you some questions.”
“You and the rest of them fools in Los Perdidos. All’s you need to know, bitch, is that I didn’t touch no kid. Now get the hell out of here before I shove this knife up your ass.” His right eye looked straight at me, his left at the ground. His face appeared closer to ninety than seventy, but muscle roped his chicken-thin arms. Some strength there, at least enough to overpower a small child.
In situations like this, being a P.I. instead of a cop comes in handy, because unlike cops, P.I.’s needn’t stick to the truth. Ignoring the knife, I said, “You have it all wrong, sir. I think you’re being railroaded and I’m offering my help.”
The blade lowered an inch. An eye, the good one, twitched. “You one of them social workers? Or the press? ‘Cause if you’re a reporter, I’m carvin’ you up right now.” The knife lifted again.
I broadened my smile, not that it mattered. Polk liked kids, not women. “Nope, not a reporter. I’m just an advocate, of sorts, a person who wants to hear your side of things. It’s a disgrace when a man who’s already paid his debt to society gets hounded day after day. What is this country coming to?”
He must have liked the idea of himself as victim, because the knife swung all the way down. “I already got me a lawyer, if that’s what you’re after.”
“And a good thing, too. But you also need a friend, someone who cares about what happens to you.”
“You one of them do-gooders in that ‘Nice Neighbor’ bunch?” A gust of wind kicked more dust through the arid air, making him sneeze.
Nice Neighbor? I had no idea what he was talking about, but went with it anyway. “That’s right, Mr. Polk. I am. And I’m confident we can come up with something to exonerate you.”
After taking a moment to consider my offer, he said, “You want some tea? It’s powdered, but I got some good bottled water. No lemon.” A snicker.
Although I would rather drink rattlesnake venom than share tea with him, I enthused, “That sounds just wonderful!”
I waited for him to fetch me a glass, but instead he gestured for me to follow him into the darkness beyond the door. Now I faced a choice: enter a knife-wielding convicted felon’s lair and get information, or stay outside in the blowing dust and get zip. Remembering Precious Doe’s face as she lay in her hastily-dug grave, I stepped inside.
“Don’t trip over nothing,” he said, as he kicked trash out of the way. “I ain’t big on cleaning.”
Once my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I saw that almost every inch of floor space in the one-room shack was piled with old newspapers, empty beer cans, plastic Circle K bags stuffed with rags, and most worrying of all, unopened boxes of Teddy bears and Barbie Dolls.
Bait.
“Sugar or plain?”
Jarred out of my shock, I answered, “Plain, please.” The fewer contaminates, the better. “By the way, I don’t think I introduced myself. Lena Jones is the name.”
As the desert wind moaned against the shack, he handed me a dingy glass filled with undissolved instant tea scum floating on top of muddy water. “Whatever. Have a seat, Miss Nice Neighbor, and tell me what you’re gonna do for me.”
After watching him plop down on a stack of newspapers, I did the same, studiously avoiding looking at the toys. “First off, Mr. Polk, I want you to tell me about yourself. You have an interesting place here, very…” I paused. He wasn’t a stupid man, just a bad one. “…very rustic. I take it you raise your own meat?” I remembered the rabbit pens outside.
“Yeah, why buy what you can get for nothing? I trap them, bring them home and let them get it on. Got myself quite the breeding stock now. Ever had fried rabbit? You might say I’m what them newspapers call a ‘survivalist,’ and proud to be one. It’s the American way.”
Ah. A patriot.
For the next half hour, Polk treated me to a rambling biography, leaving out his prison record and his liking for children. In his sanitized version, he had spent an unblemished life shooting game and trying to grow a vegetable garden in a landscape that really didn’t want him to. He was fishing for compliments, so I duly rendered them.
“You’re a true original, Mr. Polk,” I said, pleased to come up with a comment that wasn’t an outright lie.
He smiled, revealing tea-colored teeth. “That’s what they tell me.”
Outside, the wind increased, making the shack creak alarmingly. Worried that it might fall down around our ears before I was finished, I hurriedly began asking my questions. “Most people admire your type of self-sufficiency, Mr. Polk, so what’s the problem? Why is the sheriff always after you?”
He looked me straight in the eye, a trait perfected by habitual liars. “Beats me.”
“Maybe because that child’s body was found nearby?”
“Don’t know nothing about it.”
It
. Not
her
. Child molesters never saw their victims as human. “Of course you don’t, Mr. Polk. I know an innocent man when I see one. Now, what can I tell the good citizens of Los Perdidos that might set their minds at rest about you?”
“I don’t give a shit about them folks.”
My smile grew more difficult to maintain. “As much as I admire your independence, popular opinion often motivates law enforcement, which is why image is so important. And right about now, yours needs work.” And wasn’t that the truth? “Some good PR, if you will.”
His face lit up. “Ain’t never thought about that! Here.” He reached to the side, grabbed a soiled Teddy bear, and thrust it at me. “Donate this to the hospital, the whatta-you-call it, peedtrics’ wing.”
“Pediatrics?”
“Yeah. Make sure everybody knows it came from me. How’s that for good PR?”
“That should do it.” I picked up the bear by the edge of its ear. God knows what was on there. Having learned as much from the old man as possible, I set my untasted tea on the floor next to a gray heap of something that resembled a dead mouse, and stood up. Was it my imagination, or had the wind grown stronger? It seemed determined to blow the shack right off the desert. Even Nature wanted Polk gone.
