Desert Cut (6 page)
“Did you know the Rafik family?” I asked Martha Green, after paying for the copies I’d made in the microfilm room. Since Los Perdidos only had two libraries, the Geronimo and the smaller Cochise, there was a chance she had at least met the missing girl.
She continued to shelve books. “I ran into them every now and then at Safeway, but we weren’t exactly friendly. They were reclusive, very Old World, and I never saw the girl out on her own.”
I knew what she meant. In Phoenix, where there was a sizeable community of newly-arrived folks from Middle Eastern countries, a few had trouble blending in. Unlike the European immigrants who entered the U.S. over the past few centuries and were eager to dive into the melting pot, some Muslims, concerned about what they saw as Americans’ lax morals, were loathe to do so.
The upside was that their children tended to be better behaved than most kids. You never heard about roving gangs of Muslim toughs painting graffiti on fences or participating in drive-by shootings. The downside was that some traditionally-oriented Muslims made no effort to enter into the chaotic raucousness of American life. After the events of 9/11, their refusal had brought about increasing government scrutiny, which in turn, made the traditionals withdraw even further.
But Tujin had disappeared
before
9/11. Remembering her father’s seeming fluency in English in the earlier article, I asked the librarian, “Did you ever hear Tujin talk?”
She gave me a baffled look. “What a strange question. She came in here with her mother and father once, asking if I would help her find a book for some class assignment. There was nothing wrong with her voice, if that’s what you mean.”
Had Tujin’s father lied to Sheriff Avery? “Then you had no trouble understanding her.”
“Of course not. She didn’t even have an accent. Her mother was a different story. The poor woman couldn’t speak a word of English but the father was fairly fluent. Say, what’s this all about?”
“Just a discrepancy I’m trying to clear up. By the way, I’m curious as to why this is the first I’ve heard that a child’s been missing from this area for several years? Why didn’t the state media cover it more thoroughly? If she’d disappeared right after 9/11, I could understand, but it happened months earlier.”
A bitter laugh. “See the color of Tujin’s skin?”
I studied the girl’s photograph again. She was dark. Very dark.
Martha explained, “The local media’s about the only coverage Tujin received, because the same day, a blond-haired, blue-eyed ten-year-old went missing in Maine. The media, even the Arizona media, were all over
that
girl’s case.” Her mouth twisted. “Not that color had anything to do with it, of course.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Missing blondes of whatever age received the most press. Something else puzzled me. “None of these articles mentioned anything about brothers or sisters.”
She slid another book onto the shelf, “I hear she was an only child.”
Recently, I’d worked a case in Phoenix, a hate crime against a Muslim Circle K clerk, and had noticed that Muslims enjoyed large families. “Isn’t that unusual, for a Muslim girl to be an only child?”
“Oh, yes. Family is very important to those folks, but Tujin was a Kurd. I’m not certain she was Muslim.”
“The newspaper said she was Iraqi.”
The librarian in her emerged. “The Kurds are from northern Iraq, but a lot of them left after Saddam tried to wipe them out. Remember his mustard gas attack against one of their villages? Genocide rears its ugly head again. You would think that after Hitler, the world would have learned better, but apparently not.”
She shook her head, as if trying to clear it of demons. “Anyway, as I was saying about Tujin being an only child, I think her mother had health issues and couldn’t have any more children. She sure didn’t look healthy. When she was here with Tujin that day, I saw her wince a couple of times, like she was in pain.”
Had there been violence in the Rafik household? “Did you mention that to the sheriff?”
“In retrospect, maybe I should have.” She shelved the last book and stood up with a groan. “My back isn’t what it used to be. Tell you what, you want to talk to someone who actually knew Tujin, let me set you up with Peggy Binder. She was one of Tujin’s teachers.”
Stuffing the microfilm printouts into my carry-all, I said, “I’d appreciate that. She might be able to give me the names of Tujin’s friends, or those of any adults she might have been acquainted with.”
She gave me a thoughtful look. “I’ve read that most victims know their killers. Is that right?”
I nodded.
Her dark eyes clouded over. “That just makes it worse.”
Having known and trusted a murderer or two myself, I agreed. No one wants to think that the person they invite to dinner is capable of horrific crimes. We prefer the representatives of evil to arrive as strangers.
A glance at my watch revealed why I had been tempted by the ugly cookies in the microfilm room. I’d worked through both breakfast and lunch. After thanking Martha for her help, I headed for the nearest fast food drive-through.
Since the Jeep is a stick shift I never eat while driving, so I gobbled down my Big Mac in the parking lot. The McDonald’s sat at the top of a hill, and unlike most fast food restaurants, actually had a view. As I ate, I looked down along the length of Los Perdidos’ main street. In the city center, saloons and adobe-housed businesses comprised the usual Western mix-up before the southern end of town degenerated into car lots and railroad tracks.
For all its ungainly growth, Los Perdidos had yet to birth a real mall. No movie houses, no game arcades or bowling alleys, just a few strip malls containing Blockbusters, mom & pop restaurants, and nondescript businesses. I wondered what the local teens did for fun. Stayed home and read
Moby Dick?
To the east a series of ticky-tacky housing tracts and a small apartment complex sprawled across the desert. In the foothills rising toward Geronimo’s rugged peaks, Apache Chemical pumped white vapor from its smokestacks into the azure sky. Located conveniently nearby, as if purposely built there to treat the victims of industrial accidents, sat Los Perdidos General Hospital, its steel-and-glass facade gleaming in the sun.
After finishing my Big Mac, I wiped dribbles of Secret Sauce off my fingers with a skimpy napkin and headed to the hospital to deliver the toys purchased at Wal-Mart.
This time I bypassed the receptionist and took the elevator straight to Pediatrics, where I handed the toys to a nurse. As she thanked me, a speaker set high on the wall announced that Dr. Nelson Lanphear was needed for a consult in Radiology. I recognized the name as that of the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on Precious Doe.
Radiology was on the second floor, where a helpful orderly identified Lanphear for me. The doctor, a beefy man with a bald head, stood quietly in the hallway while a younger doctor stabbed his forefinger at a clipboard. From what I could hear, the younger doctor disagreed with the older man’s diagnosis.
Lanphear waited patiently, then when the other man wound down, said, “Oh, yes, that’s what I thought, too, at first. But then I noticed…” He saw me listening and lowered his voice. After a minute, the younger doctor took his clipboard and moved off, pacified.
Lanphear approached, a frown on his face. “If you’re looking for the nurses’ station, it’s that way.” He gestured toward the elevators.
Although the chances of getting him to share the results of the dead child’s autopsy were zero, I made the effort, but the minute the words “Precious Doe” emerged, he shut me down. “Anything you need to know about the autopsy, Sheriff Avery will tell you.”
There seemed no point in telling him that the sheriff had already declined to share information. “If you change your mind, here’s my card.”
“Good day, Ms. Jones.” Refusing my card, he stalked down the hall, not before I had seen a muscle twitch underneath his eye. Either he had a bad case of nerves, which seemed unlikely given his patience with the younger doctor, or something about the child’s autopsy bothered him.
Before leaving the hospital, I rode the elevator up to Pediatrics, where I was gratified to see several children already cuddling their new stuffed toys. “How many kids are usually in here?” I asked a passing nurse.
“Anywhere from five to twenty,” she replied, before moving on. “Right now, there’s six. When summer comes and school’s out, the accidents increase. As well as other things.”
By “other things,” I knew what she meant. Most parents control their tempers, some don’t. In case there was a sudden increase in broken arms, I returned to Wal-Mart and filled my shopping cart with any toy that did not seem sexist or foolish. Then I headed to the hospital again and handed the shopping bags over to the same nurse.
What now? Duane Tucker would not arrive home from work for another couple of hours, so after reaching the parking lot, I used part of the lag time to check my voice mail. Angelique Grey had called twice, not a good sign. Her persistence probably meant trouble on the set of
Desert Eagle.
The fact that Angel was Warren’s ex-wife no longer fazed me. They had both moved on emotionally: her, to another actor; him, to a string of actresses, then me. Working with Angel had its challenges, though. She tended to be overly dramatic, which I found tiring. But business is business, so I hit the redial button.
She must have been holding the phone in her hand, because her answer interrupted its first ring. “Lena, you have to fly out here right away.” Her voice, so melodic in her films, had taken on an edge.
I leaned back in the Jeep’s seat, making myself comfortable for what promised to be a long, stressful conversation. “What’s going on? Did
Desert Eagle
lose one of its sponsors?”
Since being hired on as a script consultant to the TV show, I had learned that sponsors were more important to the networks than sensible plots. My contribution to the series was to make certain the storylines did not become too ridiculous, always an uphill battle. For instance, during the first season, the producers saddled Angel’s character, a half-Cherokee private investigator living in Arizona, with an ex-convict for a partner. The fact that no felon was allowed to have a P.I. license didn’t matter to the show’s producers.
At least not until “Giff” Gifford, the actor cast as the felonious P.I., got caught driving a hundred-and-five miles per hour along Pacific Coast Highway, his glove compartment filled with cocaine. After Giff checked into rehab, his character “died” saving a woman from a cougar attack. The producers had wanted to make it a shark attack, but I managed to dissuade them by explaining that Arizona had been sharkless for several million years.
Given the program’s history, I was not astounded when Angel wailed, “They’re messing with the storyline again, Lena!”
Same old, same old. “Calm down, Angel. Nothing could be worse than Giff and we survived him, didn’t we? How’s he doing, by the way?”
A theatrical groan. “Same as always. Talking Twelve Step, gulping Stoli. But that’s his problem. Our’s is that the producers want to replace him with a kid as a continuing character. One of our new sponsors has a microwave snack line, Cheezy-O’s or something like that, and they want to appeal to the under-twelve demographic.”
“
Under twelve
?” The show was one of television’s darkest crime dramas. Past plots had featured bondage, necrophilia, and once, a graphically-filmed murder by an old Chinese torture called The Death of a Thousand Cuts. “You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, but I am. That’s why I need you here. Speerstra won’t listen to a thing I say.” Hamilton “Ham” Speerstra was
Desert Eagle
’s executive producer, a ferret-faced man with a false smile and avaricious eyes.
“Since the Giff thing,” she continued, “which you warned him about from the beginning, he pays more attention to you than anyone, so can you take the next flight? Spend the night at my place and we’ll corner him first thing tomorrow morning. Once everything’s straightened out, you can fly back. Or stay for a few days and we’ll go shopping.”
I shook my head, then remembering that she couldn’t see it, said, “Sorry. I’m working a murder case in Southern Arizona.” I didn’t add that the way things were going, I might not even make our regular Friday script meeting.
“But they’ll have him in war paint by then!”
An ambulance screamed by on the way to the hospital’s emergency entrance, drowning out her next sentence. When it pulled up to the doors and cut the siren, I said, “Repeat that. It sounded like you said something about war paint, but I probably heard wrong.”
Another theatrical groan. “You heard me right. The new storyline calls for a ten-year-old Indian boy who solves crime by communicating with his long-dead ancestors. If Speerstra gets his way,
Desert Eagle
will take a sharp left turn toward Woo-Woo City.”
I enjoyed my first laugh in days. “A baby shaman is going to be your new partner?”
“It’s not funny, Lena. I’m supposed to be fighting crime, not spirits.”
At her distress, I sobered. “There’s nothing I can do. The case I’m working, it’s a murdered child, possibly two.”
“Oh.” Her tone changed. She might have been an actress, but she was also a mother. “Okay, I’ll try to stall Speerstra, but whatever happens, be here Friday, promise?”
With reluctance, I promised. It was the third mistake I would make that day.
We chatted for a few more minutes about Warren, the twins, the L.A. smog, the decaying freeways, the rising crime rate. She ended the conversation by saying that she was thinking about moving to Scottsdale after the
Desert Eagle
franchise died its natural death. At that pie-in-the-sky pronouncement, I reminded her that Scottsdale now enjoyed all the standard urban problems: smog, terrible traffic, and yes, a skyrocketing crime rate. Scottsdale husbands were killing their wives on a regular basis. The only difference was that Arizonans used guns, not knives.
“Thanks for those bright words of cheer,” she said bitterly, then rang off.
