Desert Lost (9781615952229) (8 page)

The halogen lights illuminated the Kachina almost too well, and enough security cameras were stationed around the yard that I had to plan my route accordingly. In my earlier walk-through, I'd discovered that one area in the back of my locker had a blind spot, and that's where I planned to set up my own seeing-eye. The Kachina cameras would pick me up leaving my unit, see nothing for around forty-five seconds, then pick me up again as I emerged from the blind spot on my way to the ladies restroom. I'd need to work fast, but I was familiar enough with my equipment that hurry-up presented no problem.

The oleanders against the fence did their job well. Well enough, in fact, that it was necessary to trim away several branches to provide a sight line for my camera. After a quick peek inside the dark yard on the other side, I clipped the tiny lens to an oleander stalk, framed it with leaves, and repeated the same process for the mike. That accomplished, I trotted back into Kachina camera range, and strolled leisurely toward the john.

So far, so good.

Once back in my storage locker, with its metallic shutters rolled closed, I settled myself on the chaise lounge and clicked on the camera and backup recorder.

The monitor revealed that the house in back of Ten Spot Construction, your basic rectangular ranch-style, didn't appear large enough to serve as the usual polygamy dormitory. On closer inspection, I saw an extension at the rear that didn't match the rest of the house's architecture. I guesstimated that the addition brought the house's square footage up to around thirty-two-hundred square feet, still small for a polygamist enclave, but with enough space to house several wives and some of their children if they didn't mind being crowded. Not that they had any say in the matter. Toys littered the rest of the yard: a tricycle with missing spokes; a couple of plastic pails and shovels leaned against a sandbox; and near a swing set, a tattered Teddy bear. Most of the children would probably have remained in Second Zion. Not a happy situation for either the children or their mothers, but Prophet Shupe had never been known to consider the feelings of his followers, especially those of women and children. His brother Ezra cared even less.

Little happened at first. For a long time, the voice-activated recorder merely caught the plaintive yowls of a lovesick cat and the rumble of another Kachina renter's truck as it rolled along several lanes over, but the polygamy compound remained silent. Then, shortly after midnight, the monitor caught movement at the front of the house. A door opening, closing. Heavy feet crossing floorboards. At the sound of a cough, the recorder clicked on, conducting a deep voice into my earphones.

“…thought that would work.”

I studied the man's image, reduced to a blue-gray ghost on the screen. Short and stocky; not Ezra.

“Sounds good to me.” Taller and thinner, but also not Ezra.

“You still drivin' back up tomorrow?”

“Well, you know how it is when the Prophet needs you. I'm proud to be called. I think…”

The door opened again and a voice hissed out, “Ain't your business to think. Shut your mouths and get back in here before somebody hears you.”

Ezra.

The other two men did as they were told, and the compound fell silent again. Obviously, the Prophet brother's kept a tight rein on his men. However, the toys in the yard proved that the children were allowed outside. Women would undoubtedly be out there with them, supervising.

And women tended to talk, even when they weren't supposed to.

***

Although I monitored the compound all night, nothing else happened. The men stayed in the house, as did the women.

When the indigo sky faded to gray, the Kachina renters began trickling in. By the time the sun was full up, so was the facility. Heavily-loaded rent-a-trucks trundled down the narrow lanes; shutters rolled up with metallic grumbles. In front of a unit close to mine, a man shouted “Easy, easy, don't let ‘er drop!” but the answer to his good advice was a loud crash and a string of curses, both from the first man and his hapless pal. The potter arrived, whistling “Norwegian Wood,” but when she cranked up her wheel, she dropped the Beatles for more Vivaldi.

Then Ten Spot Construction opened, and the sounds of heavy equipment being loaded onto truck trailers eclipsed even the Kachina's racket.

Directional mike or no, all that ambient noise interfered with the sound recording of the house next door, but I kept taping anyway, aware that the construction equipment would eventually vacate the yard and put me back in business. What the camera was capturing now, though, was interesting in itself. A man I didn't recognize led four jeans-clad boys—the youngest, barely twelve; the oldest, a weedy-looking teen—out of the house toward Ten Spot. Once they'd walked off-screen, I sat back and thought.

A construction company.

Of course
.

Besides the usual welfare checks, construction companies were major sources of revenue for polygamists. The workers were drafted from the compounds and paid in a “script” redeemable only at polygamist-run stores. The actual salaries, tax write-offs, and profits were funneled to Prophet Hiram Shupe, who was rumored to hold several off-shore accounts. Rosella had told me that the boys seldom complained because they assumed that the combination of their free labor and welfare checks would ultimately earn them several young, pretty wives. Their dreams of glory seldom came true.

They became Arizona's Lost Boys.

Yet there were always younger, more gullible boys ready to step in and take their place on the construction gangs. The kids just didn't know any better.

Despite my outrage, I smiled.

Gotcha.

These minor children were living in Scottsdale now. And it was Thursday. Eight-fifteen in the morning. Spring break was over, so why weren't they in school, instead of flaunting Child Labor laws? I would not only show the video to Scottsdale PD and the Child Welfare people, but to school officials, too. Truancy was a crime. The polygamists would claim their boys were being home-schooled, but it would be up to them to prove it, and my evidence of the boys being led off to work instead of study would go a long way toward refuting those claims.

Triumphant, I ambled over to the restroom to freshen up.

When I returned to my unit, the monitor was displaying some interesting stuff. The lanky man I'd seen the night before exited the house escorted by his chunkier buddy and climbed into a pickup truck. Mr. Chunky leaned though the cab's window and said something I couldn't quite catch, then went back inside.

After the truck disappeared off-screen, I kept a steady eye on the house. The residents were probably having breakfast—this thought made me reach for the bag of Dunkin' Donuts Chocolate Sprinkles and the thermos of coffee I'd brought along—but unless I was mistaken, the women would soon bring the younger children outside to play. Kids needed their exercise.

At nine-thirty, my red-eyed patience was rewarded. The front door of the house opened and a swarm of children spewed forth, followed by two of the women I'd seen at Frugal Foods. I studied the children carefully, looking not only for evidence of abuse—polygamists were enthusiastic about corporal punishment—but also to see how many of them were of school age. Besides a grouping of toddlers, I saw several boys and girls, ages ranging from around five to ten. More fuel for my truancy fire.

A few minutes later, the door to the house opened again and Opal/Top Dog stepped onto the porch. She looked angry, and through my earphones, I could hear her speak sharply to one of the women.

“Darnelle! I need you in the house!”

Although Opal's voice came clearly through my mike, Darnelle didn't seem to hear, or at least pretended not to. I couldn't be certain, because when she bent her rangy form to pick up a toddler who'd fallen and scraped his knee, her chestnut-colored hair came loose from its braid and fell around her face, hiding her expression.

“There, there, little love,” she murmured, clear as a bell. God bless directional mikes.

“Darnelle!” Opal stepped into the yard and strode toward the younger woman. “I've had about enough of this.”

Again, Darnelle pretended not to hear.

Her ruse didn't work. As she clasped the boy to her breast, Opal jerked her around by the sleeve and gave her a hard slap across the face. Startled, Darnelle dropped the child, who then began to howl even louder.

Although his nose had begun to bleed, Opal ignored him, and tugged Darnelle toward the house. After one last, plaintive back look at him, Darnelle gave up her struggles and went with the older woman into the house. Fortunately, the small blonde who remained outside rushed toward the child and began to comfort him.

The fact that the camera had recorded the entire event—Opal's thoughtless disregard for the safety of a child and her casual cruelty toward Darnelle—didn't make me less angry. I tried to calm myself with the realization that Scottsdale PD, Child Protective Services, and the Scottsdale school system, would now have more than enough to begin an inquiry.

It didn't work.

My teeth were clenched in rage when I packed up and left.

Chapter Eleven

Next morning, after dropping off copies of my recordings to Vic Falcone at Scottsdale PD and a friendly CPS social worker, I called the Scottsdale School District and told them what I'd observed: approximately a dozen school-aged children, none of whom appeared to be attending school.

Confident that I'd blown enough whistles, I called Warren to see if we couldn't snag that flight to L.A. together, but he didn't pick up. Was he already in the air with his cell turned off? Or was he simply declining to answer? For a brief moment I thought about driving over to the Paradise Valley house, then decided against it.

I didn't bother to pack, just drove to Sky Harbor, less than a half-hour away. Once I'd parked the Jeep in the Short Term lot, I hurried across six lanes of taxies to Terminal Four, where the Southwest counter was located.

“Has Warren Quinn boarded yet?” I asked the ticket seller, a young woman with hair almost as blond as mine, but a lot less natural.

“Sorry, I can't give out that kind of information.”

“We were going to fly to L.A. together…” I began, then noticed her eyes narrow. Of course. Thanks to the new anti-terrorism rules, who was taking what flight to where was no longer a matter of casual conversation. We were all looked upon as terrorists these days until we could prove we weren't.

Giving up, I bought my ticket, grabbed my boarding pass, and hurried up to the Departure Lounge. No Warren. He wasn't in Starbucks, either, or at CinnABon. I even looked for him in the bar, although he'd been in AA for ten years. Not finding him anywhere, I returned to the relative quiet of the Departure Lounge, where I tried his cell again. No answer. This time I left a long message about love and fear. I was still talking when the loudspeaker announced that my flight was about to board.

“Call me, please. We can still grab that lunch in L.A. With the twins.” I thought about adding that I loved him, but considering the way we'd parted the evening before, decided that might come across as manipulative.

***

The late afternoon sun blazed a gaudy trail through the yellow-brown sky when I pulled my rental car into Angel's Beverly Hills driveway. The Black Monk, a huge ex-wrestler known for his shaved-at-the-top hairstyle and black monk's habit he'd substituted for a robe as his wrestling persona, met me at the door, dwarfing Maria, Angel's long-time housekeeper.

“You see that shithead Nevitt anywhere as you drove up?” His voice was surprisingly soft for a man so big.

“Sorry. And I looked.”

The Black Monk grunted. “Too bad. I was hoping to have a word with him. Well, come on in. Angel's out by the pool.”

“With the girls?”

Maria, standing at the big man's side, shook her head. The Nevitt problem must had taken a toll on her, too, because her face was more deeply lined than I remembered, her once-glossy black hair now streaked with white. “Mister Warren came by an hour ago and picked them up to take them to Arizona. Miss Angel, she's pretty upset about having to say goodbye to her babies.”

So Warren hadn't waited for me. Somehow I wasn't surprised.

Maria retired to the kitchen as I followed the Black Monk through Angel's cream-on-cream living room, and out the sliding glass doors to the patio. The scent of chlorine and citrus trees did battle with the smoggy air as a waterfall tinkled itself into a large pool so irregularly shaped that it could pass for natural. Angel, gorgeous as ever with her long blond hair and flawless skin, sat at an umbrella table, staring into the pool. She wore sunglasses, but not, I suspected, because the sun was out. She clutched a tissue in one hand, a drink, probably lemonade, in the other. She never touched the hard stuff.

“Hi, Lena.” A sniff. “It was kind of you to come to my rescue so quickly. Was your flight okay? I know how much you hate to fly. If you want to take the train back, I can get you a First Class ticket on the Sunset Limited.”

Hollywood types have a reputation for being egotistical and self-obsessed. Perhaps that was true when it came to their careers, but where interpersonal relations went, I'd found most to be thoughtful, caring people. Like Angel. Like Warren. Sometimes beauty was more than skin deep; it went all the way through.

“The flight was fine, but I'll take a rain check on that Sunset Limited ticket.” I took a chair across from her, while the Black Monk disappeared through the glass doors, probably to his apartment over the garage. “So Dean Orval Nevitt's on the loose again?”

Angel slid her sunglasses down to dab at her eyes. The whites around her blue irises were almost the same color as her manicured red nails. Eyes dabbed, she slipped the sunglasses back on. “Yes, but I don't understand it. Before, his letters were more pathetic than anything. I showed them to you the last time you were here. Remember all those little flowers and animals he drew around the edges? And the hearts? Lots and lots of hearts. Now…” She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “How could such a lost soul turn so mean?”

Sympathy for the devil. “Better show me those letters.”

“Otto's getting them.”

By the time I remembered that the Black Monk's real name was Otto Beasley, and that he was a graduate of the University of Nebraska, not the Spanish Inquisition, he was walking toward us with one of those portable accordion files. His battered face, a souvenir of too many gone-awry spinning heel kicks in the wrestling ring, twitched like he'd smelled something bad.

“Two hundred-something Nevitt masterpieces in here, filed in reverse chronological order,” he announced, plopping the box down on the table. “Color copies, of course. We gave the police the originals. So whataya want to see, Early Nevitt or Late Nevitt?”

“When he started threatening her.”

As Angel looked determinedly at the pool, not the accordion file, Otto thumbed through the file, then handed me a letter. The outside of the envelope appeared the same as the stalker's usual attempts at art, with a clumsily-crayoned butterfly hovering over a daisy. Below the butterfly was a shaggy blur that might have been a groundhog, looking ready to pounce.

Otto cleared his throat. “When we opened the envelope, a dead butterfly fell out.”

“Maybe it was alive when he put it in,” I offered. “You know how muddled Nevitt's brain is. He could have thought it would live through the mailing process, and when Angel opened it up, the butterfly would fly out to wow her. If he's off his meds, that's the kind of boneheaded thing he might dream up.”

Angel turned her gaze away from the pool, but only to look at me. “Read the letter.”

I unfolded it.

ANGEL, YOU ARE MY BUTER FLY BUT YOU FLIT FROM FLOUR TO FLOUR. STOP THIS NOW OR EXPEERIENCE MY RATH, JUST LIK THIS STOOPID BUTER FLY DID.

XOXOXO

YUR LUVING HUZBEN, DEAN.

At least he could still spell his name. “Let me see the one that came yesterday.”

Otto handed me another, the same type of envelope, the same block printing, the same Beverly Hills post mark. No cute drawings on this one, though. “It came this morning. Beverly Hills PD's already been by and scooped up the original. The postal inspectors are involved again, too.”

This letter was more succinct than the previous one.

I WARRNED YOU, BITCH. NOW YULL PAY.

“Any enclosures?”

Angel flicked her eyes toward the letter. “Otto says no.”

“You didn't see for yourself?”

“He won't let me open them any more.”

Otto cleared his throat again. “They make her too upset. I'm afraid she'll get to the point where she won't be able to work.”

This didn't jibe with the Angel I knew. Dean Orval Nevitt's letters and attempted visits had always bothered her—as did all the other head cases who believed they had a personal relationship with her—but when it came to taping her television series, she was the consummate professional. One season, against her doctor's explicit orders, she'd even continued to work after being diagnosed with pneumonia.

Which made me wonder. “Does the production company know about the threats?”

Angel shook her head. “Stuart's too protective of the talent. If he got wind of this, he'd post so many guards around the set none of us would be able to move. Otto's enough for me.” She smiled up at him. To my amusement, the big man blushed.

Last season, Stuart Jenks had replaced Hamilton Speerstra as head producer of
Desert Eagle
. Jenks had proven to be more reasonable than Speerstra, but also less creative. At least he'd understood the improbability of the pale-haired, blue-eyed Angel playing a Cherokee private eye operating out of Phoenix, and had ordered his writers to insert a flashback storyline about an Anglo father. That segment, I knew, was due to be taped as soon as the writers' strike was over.

“When do you think you might get back to work?” I asked Angel.

She gave me a blank stare. “Does it matter?”

“It would get you away from this house. Give us time to track our boy down. After that…”

Well, after that, who knew? If the law worked the way the law was supposed to work, Nevitt would be carted off to the hospital again, the twins could fly back from Arizona, and taping could commence uninterrupted by a phalanx of bodyguards.

Just the Black Monk.

***

Dean Orval Nevitt's last known address before being committed to the state mental hospital had been a two-story Section Eight apartment building in South Pasadena, where the landlady, a hard-looking middle-aged woman wearing too much makeup, informed me that she'd seen nothing of him for months.

“He got sent away. Loony, you know.” With her forefinger, she made a circular motion around her temple. “I rented out his apartment to someone else. I'll say this for him, he always paid his rent on time, unlike some tenants I could mention.” While adding that last part, she stuck her head out the door and glared at an obese man of about thirty trying to make it up the staircase. He ignored her and kept on going, pulling himself along via the rickety handrail.

“Did you hear that, Freddy?” she yelled.

“You'll have it by the end of the week,” he answered, pausing halfway up the flight. The bubbly sound of his breathing signaled serious pulmonary problems.

“If I don't get it, you'll be out, Section Eight or no Section Eight. And if you don't clean up that pigsty, the Health Department's going to close down this whole place and we'll all be out on our ears.”

The man said nothing, just took another bubbly breath and continued up the stairs. When he'd let himself into his apartment, the landlady said, “Him and Nevitt, they were buddies, as much as a loony like Nevitt could have buddies. Maybe he can tell you something he didn't have time to tell the cops, they blew out of his place so fast.”

“The police were here?”

“The other day. Nevitt was real hot for that TV star, Angelique what's-her-name, believed he was married to her or some nonsense like that. What a laugh. No woman would bother with a goofball like him, let alone a TV star. Although you can tell those big boobs aren't real.”

Actually, Angel's boobs were every bit as real as mine, just more spectacular. But I let the error slide. “By ‘goofball,' do you mean the stalking?”

“That, too. I meant the other stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Ever see him?”

“Just pictures.”

Her maroon-lipsticked mouth twisted into a superior sneer. “Then you saw that big red blotch on his cheek and his funny-looking mouth. Plus, he was all the time walking around mumbling to himself, not that you could understand a thing he said, with that weird mouth and all. Gave me the creeps, it did.”

“The red mark is called a port wine stain, and his ‘funny-looking mouth,' as you phrase it, was caused by an only partially-corrected cleft palate. So, yes, I can see why you had difficulty understanding him.” Not that it would have helped if she could have; in addition to Nevitt's obvious physical challenges, he was a diagnosed schizophrenic who, when off his meds, hallucinated almost constantly. It was a miracle he could even get through the day, let alone stalk Angel.

The sneer never left the landlady's garish face. “Whatever. Anyway, I can't tell you any more than I told the cops. You want more, go talk to Fat Freddy.”

With that, this paragon of political incorrectness shut the door.

At first Freddy—the label on his mailbox listed him as Fredrick Andrews—wouldn't open his door, but after several minutes of knocking and calling his proper name, he relented and squeaked the door back an inch. “What?” He'd left the chain on.

An aroma of rotting garbage, unwashed human flesh, and ripe cat box wafted through the opening. No wonder the cops hadn't stayed long.

“Mr. Andrews, I need to ask you a few questions about Dean Orval Nevitt.” When he started to close the door, I added, “The quicker you answer me, the quicker I'll go away. Otherwise, I'll just stay out here, knocking and yelling. I warn you, I've got a lot of patience.”

He thought about that for a moment, then unhooked the chain and opened the door. The smell intensified. Steeling myself, I walked through.

Freddy was a hoarder, one of those people who can't throw anything away no matter how useless or fetid. Newspapers stacked higher than my head lined the walls, blocking the one window and throwing the room into an early twilight. In front of the newspapers, empty cans of generic brand cat food and chili tumbled out of black plastic garbage bags filled to overflowing. Flies buzzed, cockroaches scurried. I couldn't tell where Freddy slept, because I couldn't see a bed. For that matter, I couldn't see the cat. Maybe it had died and was buried under the rubble.

“Ask your questions and get out,” Fred mumbled. An acrid, unwashed odor emanated from him, competing with the heady perfume of the apartment.

I stepped back and breathed through my mouth, like I'd been trained to do at crime scenes where the victim had been dead for several days. “Do you know where Dean Nevitt might be living now?”