Dry Heat (2 page)
The rubber bag held a misshapen fat man. But the bones of his face, with their narrow planes and prominent juts, seemed to go with a man of average, even lean, build. The sun had done its relentless job bloating, burning, breaking down the remains. Even a few days in this heat were enough to do it. I searched the sore-ridden face, darkened by the pooling of blood. It was an old face with wrinkles around the mouth. He had spiky yellow-white whiskers, like the weeds in the yard, maybe a week’s growth of beard that would grow no more. The pupils were blown out black, the tear ducts large. Parts of his face had a hint of fair skin. A mole was still distinct on the crease running below his right cheek. The smell was god-awful, rotting human flesh. I fought my gag reflex and breathed through my mouth.
Pham handed me a pair of gloves, but I didn’t put them on. What I knew about forensics I had mostly learned as a young deputy on the street years ago. When I got my Ph.D. in history, emphasis on America from 1900 to 1940, I thought it was my ticket away from dead bodies. Funny how things turned out.
I asked, “How do we know he’s homeless?”
Markowitz pointed to a raggedy backpack and two white plastic shopping bags on the ground nearby. An evidence technician was starting to separate and inventory their contents. Another technician used a digital camera to record each piece of evidence.
“We found those near the edge of the pool. Old clothes inside. No wallet or ID. No logos on the clothes. But there’s a meal voucher for Shelter Services.”
“Name?”
He shook his head.
“But the badge was sewn inside his jacket?”
Pham nodded. “He was wearing the jacket, too.”
Just the thought of it made me instantly hotter. I edged toward the dust-caked wall of the house, trying to at least catch as much shade as the small roof overhang would allow. The sliding glass door stood open and hot air drifted out. I thought, Turn on the damned air-conditioning and let’s go inside.
I said, “How do we know he’s not some undocumented alien who fell in the pool and drowned, or he died here and the coyotes threw him in the pool?”
Pham said, “Next-door neighbor, a Mrs. Morales, said this old homeless Anglo had been out in the alley a couple of days ago. She’d never seen him before. She didn’t talk to him. But she says he had some plastic shopping bags, and white whiskers.”
The sky had lost all color. It was bleached white. The air felt under pressure. I looked around the yard. It was a hell of a place to die. Sun-blasted dirt. Back fence faded and broken. The house looking like it had been abandoned years ago. I tried to imagine the happy suburban memories, tried and failed.
“So what do you guys think?” Pham asked, his hands on his hips.
Kate Vare had been silent through all this. She suddenly said, “We just don’t know enough to know yet. I don’t work with guesses. Let’s trace the badge number.” She looked at me like a small dog that had intimidated a cat. Then they all looked at me expectantly.
“I don’t know much,” I said. “There was one FBI agent killed in the line of duty in Arizona. It happened in 1948, and the case was never solved. The agent’s name was John Pilgrim.”
“Go on,” Pham said.
“That’s all I know,” I said. “So is that Pilgrim’s badge?”
“Yeah,” Pham said. “The badge was never found in 1948. That fact was withheld from the public report. I’m just learning all this in the past half hour.” He studied me. “We hoped you could be a help.”
“Well, that’s what I know,” I said, starting for the street. “If you don’t mind, I just got back from a trip, and I’d really like to go home and change.”
Markowitz put a gentle, heavy hand on my shoulder. Pham said, “I can understand, Dr. Mapstone. But we asked Sheriff Peralta for you to be assigned to this case. You have some skills we might need. So don’t leave us quite yet.” He turned to Kate Vare. “You don’t mind a team that includes Dr. Mapstone, do you, Sergeant Vare?”
She was all smiles for the head fed, a talent called “managing up” that I had never mastered. She said, “We’re always happy to have David.”
That was when the air force arrived. A yellow helicopter swept in over the trees and did a pivot maybe a thousand feet above the backyard, swinging around to view us. It had the markings of a TV network. The heat seemed to push the engine sound downward until it was as prevalent as the smell of the body.
“Goddamned TV stations,” Markowitz said over the din. “Must be a slow news day, if they come out for a stinker in a Maryvale pool.”
The first chopper took up station to the northeast, and in a few seconds another one appeared. Kate tried to hold her hair in place from the wind blast, but soon this craft moved off a bit and hovered to the southwest. When I was able to see past the glare to make out the network logo on the second chopper’s door, I saw two more helicopters. We were bracketed for the evening news, looking like idiots staring up into the sky. The whap-whap roar of the rotors assaulted our ears. Then I noticed a commotion over toward the side gate. The uniforms parted, the helicopters seemed to shimmy downward, and a giant in a tan suit and white Stetson strode into the backyard. Mike Peralta.
His physical presence washed into the space like a concussion wave. In my mind’s eye, for just a moment, it was 1977 and academy instructor Peralta was stepping onto a gym mat to show me how to dominate and control a resisting suspect. I was eighteen, with an idealistic urge to be a cop, and my ears rang for a week after he slammed me onto the inch-thick fiber that separated my head from a full-blown concussion. “Dominate and control” were his words, classic cop speak. But his tree-trunk frame, impassive dark gaze, and confident wide-legged stance made any threat a promise. With his record of combat in Vietnam and heroics on the streets of Phoenix, he scared the hell out of the cadets.
He could still intimidate. But in the years he climbed the cop bureaucracy, years I was gone from law enforcement and from Phoenix, he had learned some polish and politics. He’d learned to smile. The media, hungry for charisma, had taken to him. People I respected said he’d be governor someday. I still wasn’t sure he was comfortable with any of it. I knew him in the way ex-partners know each other, but I couldn’t tell you where the old Peralta ended and the new one began. He was a complicated man who denied it.
Pham shook his hand. Markowitz and Kate Vare got nods. He ignored me.
Pham said. “Sheriff, I was just telling Dr. Mapstone how much we need his expertise on this case.”
“I’m sure he’s grateful for the opportunity,” Peralta said, doffing his Stetson. “So is this connected to the John Pilgrim murder?”
I stared at Peralta. “It looks that way,” Pham said.
We trailed Peralta and Pham on another once-over. I wondered how the victim got into the pool. Nothing was obvious, such as bloodstains on the concrete. Peralta walked over to the body, handed me his hat, slipped on some gloves, and felt around the man’s face. Then the corpse’s hands were in his giant paws, being minutely examined.
“A prior suicide attempt…,” Peralta said. “See the scars on his wrists.” Everybody nodded, but it was the first time they noticed the small, whitish rivulets under the skin. “But they’re damned small.”
“Maybe a small suicide attempt?” Markowitz said.
“Long time ago,” Peralta said, unsmiling, sliding the arms back into the body bag.
Peralta studied the FBI badge intently, holding it up to the sun. I retold the story of John Pilgrim, the only FBI agent to be murdered in Arizona, an unsolved crime. Markowitz offered a briefing on what little the neighbors could tell. Peralta was complimentary. Peralta was grateful. Jurisdictional niceties must be observed. He slipped off the latex gloves and took back his Stetson.
He put a meaty hand on Pham’s shoulder. “So tell us what you have in mind, Eric?”
“A cross-jurisdictional, multidisciplinary task force,” he said, “Dr. Mapstone, Sgt. Vare, some of our people, of course. They say alliances are the way to get things done in the New Economy.”
This was not the G-man talk I expected. Peralta said, “And you can push some of the costs onto us local peace officers.” He smiled.
Pham smiled. “Well, Sheriff, it’s no secret that we’re stretched with the war on terrorism. I know you folks are, too. That’s why I thought we could be more effective together. This may be connected to the murder of an FBI agent, so we’re definitely serious players. But we need your help.”
Peralta’s handsome features changed subtly. “I’ve got my problems, too. The state fiscal crisis keeps running downhill to the county. We’re humping it just to keep shifts covered. Got a major war between the Hell’s Angels and the Mongols. My jail system is over capacity…”
“Of course, of course.”
“But,” Peralta sighed, “we’re always happy to help. Mapstone will be assigned to this for as long as it takes.” He shook hands again and swept out, this time with his arm around me. Past the gate, he said, “He’s the nicest damned fed I’ve ever met.”
I said, “How the hell do you know about John Pilgrim?”
“I know history and stuff, Mapstone. You keep teaching me, remember.”
“Despite your best efforts,” I said. We walked past TV cameras and TV questions, which Peralta ignored. He motioned to a uniform, who corralled a handful of TV reporters in the side yard. Peralta was already striding to the street.
“Sheriff Peralta with his media coterie,” I said, making a gesture to take in the reporters, the helicopters, the world.
“What the hell is a coterie? You sound like my wife the Famous Shrink.”
“Wait.” I caught him at the curb. “What the hell good am I supposed to do in an investigation that should be the feds’ business?”
“Why are you in such a foul mood?” he asked mildly. “You got to get out of this place for a few days. I thought you liked Portland.”
I was about to say something I’d probably regret, but he was talking to the neighbors in a patois of Spanish and English. They crowded around him as if he were a star. An ice cream vendor pushed his cart up the street, and the children abandoned Peralta for the sweet stuff.
In a few moments, he took my arm again and led me down the sidewalk, but not far enough to find shade. A huge river of sweat was running down my back. He looked as cool as a November morning.
“You look miserable, Mapstone,” he said.
“How the hell do you stay so cool? It’s a hundred degrees on the first of April.”
“It’s a dry heat,” he said.
I said, “Hell is a dry heat.”
Peralta glanced back toward the house. “All those reporters are going to be disappointed. To them, it will just be a story about a homeless man who died in a green pool.”
“The badge?”
Peralta shook his head. “Pham doesn’t want to release that information yet.”
“But,” I said, “a homeless man doesn’t fall in a pool without the Maricopa County sheriff noticing.”
A carload of young men drove slowly up the street, slowing more as they passed us. It was a Cadillac Escalade, big as a starship, and emitting enormous pulses of sound. It made my heart beat funny. The noise almost concealed a few hissed profanities concerning our parentage and relationship to swine. Peralta ignored it, except for a subtle gesture—he slid his hand around his waist, pulling back his suit coat just enough that they could see the large .40-caliber Glock semiautomatic in a shoulder rig. They couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. Tough young stupid guys with nearly shaved heads. Just past us, they kicked in the hydraulics and the Escalade hopped along, slowly thrusting itself into the asphalt and coming back up. We could hear the sonic thuds long after the car made a languid turn and exited the neighborhood.
“Aren’t you curious about how an FBI badge missing for more than a half century turned up on a homeless guy in a swimming pool in Maryvale?” he demanded, his voice freed of the constraints of public attention.
“Sure, but ‘cross-jurisdictional’ is another word for cluster fuck.”
One side of his mouth started to smile. He said, “Not always. Look at Lindsey’s big score.”
“So I heard,” I said, missing her even more.
“One of the biggest credit card fraud operations, taken down by her work with a federal task force.”
“I read about it on the plane. The
New York Times
carried the story.”
Peralta’s large black eyes fluttered. I could see his publicity meter running. That was the most obvious reason to get me involved in this case: good press meant more resources from the citizens of Maricopa County. “Anyway,” he said, “the feds are in trouble since 9/11. They’ve had to shift over to preventing terrorism. They really could use our help.”
“When did you get generous?”
“Be a good soldier, Mapstone. Your bride cut the nuts off the most profitable worldwide operation of the Russian mafia. You should be proud. It should motivate you to outdo her.”
“We’re not in competition. She’s a lot smarter than me.”
“Don’t play games, Mapstone. No fucking April Fool’s.” I could sense his mood withdrawing into a darker basement. “This is a serious investigation. The feds need an independent third party to investigate this. And I want the sheriff’s office to come out looking good.”
“Sure,” I said, gratefully feeling a hot breeze interrupt the blazing stagnant atmosphere. “And everything will be dandy and collegial with Kate Vare.”
“You just have to know how to handle her.”
“She can’t be ‘handled,’” I said sarcastically. “Why the hell does she hate me?”
Peralta paused. We’d reached an intersection maybe two hundred yards from the drama at the orange-striped ranch house. The street was completely empty. “Because,” he said, “you’re the enemy.”
I started to speak but a wall of dust slapped me in the face, stinging my eyes.
“Hope they get that scene secured,” Peralta said, rubbing his heavy jaw. “We’re gonna get a helluva storm.”
The dust storm rolled in from the west. I drove east, home to central Phoenix, trying to outrun it. Behind me hulked the dust cloud: rising ten thousand feet and stretching across the horizon, looking like diluted chocolate. The White Tank and Estrella mountains were swallowed up and disappeared. Flags at car dealers and distribution warehouses stood straight out. Bits of the desert slapped against the windshield. Even though it was four in the afternoon, streetlights were coming on. Any small clue left in the yard in Maryvale was now in the atmospheres, traveling east in the hot, particle-drunk wind.
I was driving a 1968 Olds 442 convertible, “borrowed” from the impound lot by Peralta and lent to me after a previous case involved the destruction of my beloved BMW. A drug dealer had been good enough to restore the car, painting it a discreet bright yellow, and the big engine wasn’t as sweet as the big air conditioner. “You’ll like driving a piece of history,” said Peralta, who enjoyed making me uncomfortable. So I was encased in what seemed like a football field of General Motors steel, the dearest dream of any kid being shipped off to Vietnam in the summer of Sgt. Pepper and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Now it was in the new millennium, an ancient machine surging across the hot concrete. I was socialized enough by my years as a college professor to be almost ashamed to like a car that was so big, so wasteful, so laden with the baggage of American excess. Lindsey approved, however, reminding me of the difference between a porcupine and a BMW—“With a BMW, the pricks are on the inside.”
After I got to the Papago Freeway it was a straight shot home, the ragtop flapping violently in the wind. But by the time I crested the Stack, the big freeway interchange on the northwest side of downtown, the skyscrapers and mountains that should have been ahead of me had vanished. The horizon closed in, turning from milky to brown. Slowing below sixty, putting some space between me and the sea of red taillights ahead, I felt the big car getting strafed by brush and garbage blown into the freeway. I slowed just in time to avoid an SUV that crossed two lanes and plunged into the tunnel under Hance Park doing maybe ninety. When I took the exit to Seventh Avenue, my hands relaxed enough to make me realize how tightly I had been gripping the wheel. Seventh took me the half a mile to Cypress Street, to the 1924 Monterey Revival house in the Willo Historic District, where the lights blazed welcome through the dusty murk of the street.
We left a trail of clothes from the front door to the bedroom. Not a long distance: up a step, through an arch, down the hallway. Our bedroom faced the street on the first floor, and you could look out the window and see the front door. We made love face-to-face while, on the CD player, Charlie Parker enchanted the saxophone and the wind jangled the Soleri bell outside. Then, after I made Bombay Sapphire martinis and she slipped on one of my starched white dress shirts, we lay on the big rumpled bed, legs entangled, and we talked.
“I’m sorry you had to go alone,” she said, running her hand light and slow across my chest. Lindsey draped a fine, long leg across my thigh, her five-foot-eight-inch length neatly fitting my six-two. The twilight made her fair skin seem to glow. Her dark hair was, as always, worn in a simple cut parted in the middle and falling to brush the tops of her shoulders. Her eyes were their familiar incandescent dark blue.
I had gone alone to Portland, to say good-bye to a dying friend. His name was Dan Milton—my mind was still getting used to the past tense in referring to him. Once upon a time, he had been one of my professors. He was the one who made me think I could make a mark in the world as a historian. Now he was dead, and up to the moment I was in Lindsey’s arms I had been besieged by all manner of devils bearing regret, guilt, and mortal fears. I said, “I wish I could have been here for you.” I sipped the martini, feeling the cold liquid turn hot as it went down my throat. “I worry.”
“I worry about you, Dave. Mine was just work.”
I stroked her hair. “But did you get Mr. Big?”
Lindsey’s full lips opened into a smile. “Meester Beeg!” She shot off a string of Russian sentences, her face animated and lovely.
“Come again?”
“In time, Dave.” She ran a hand up my thigh. “I said, ‘Mr. Big’s name is Yuri, and nobody has ever seen him. We don’t even have a photo. He’s very mysterious.’ Unfortunately we got everybody but Yuri. Maybe I just said ‘surface-to-air missile’ instead of ‘mysterious.’ That’s what happens when you learn Russian in the Air Force.”
“Yes, one of your adventures. Sgt. Lindsey Faith Adams, USAF.”
“My adventures pale beside yours, my worldly lover,” she said. “Besides, it’s Lindsey Faith Mapstone now. Detective Sgt. Lindsey Faith Mapstone.”
It was indeed, but it was a strange, exhilarating sound: Lindsey Faith Mapstone. We were still newlyweds. So I allowed myself the husband’s prerogative of listening to his wife’s dulcet alto, a voice that so soothed me. She talked about her big case. Most of the technology went over my head, the extensible markup language, secret sharers, buried code, and identity masking software that the good guys used to get the bad guys. I just want a computer to do what I want. Lindsey is way ahead of me. That’s why she was picked for the task force that spent a year tracking some superstars of international crime. They had hacked into every major credit card network, stealing identities, draining cash, reselling stolen credit card numbers. They had even discovered a way to steal information off smart cards. Tracks led to Russia, Malaysia, and Gilbert, Arizona, a quiet suburb outside Phoenix.
“The mistake we were making was to think these guys were in a place, using a computer,” she said. “They were, of course, but the real crime was happening on the networks, out in cyberspace. They could operate from a phone booth, from a moving car. So we fought fire with fire.”
“I bet that was your idea,” I said.
“I helped,” she said, sipping her martini, then replacing it on the bedside table. “I infiltrated their network. I mean, I found them out there, in the Visa system, and I followed them home, so to speak. Not only was I able to get into their computers, but I set up a dummy network around them. Every time they logged on, wherever they were, I could hack their computers. Pretty soon, they thought they were stealing real credit card numbers, but they were really in this dummy network.” The big smile, the amazing mouth. “Yeah, I guess I did good. And I got lucky—they got careless, just like street scumbags get careless.”
“So how’d you get them?”
“You won’t even believe it, Dave. Once we got into their computers, we could get into every file. So it wasn’t hard to figure out the real identities. One guy, we got him when he logged onto AOL to check his personal e-mail. So two days ago, police in three countries carried out simultaneous raids. A dozen were arrested. I felt like sending a virus that would pop up on their screens just before the cops kicked the door in, and it would say, ‘You’re busted!’ I didn’t, sad to say. Anyway, all that came to a head while you were in Portland, love. And I never had to leave the study in there”—she nodded toward the other end of the house—“except to sit through excruciating meetings with the FBI.”
“Did you meet a guy named Pham?”
“Eric Pham? No, he’s the SAC.” Special agent in charge. “I just dealt with his minions. Minions in search of Meester Beeg.” She had a nice laugh. I told her about my encounter with Pham, the homeless man in the swimming pool, and the long-missing FBI badge.
“I think El Jefe is a prick for making you work the minute you get back, especially after what you’ve been through. He lost his father last year. He ought to have a little more emotional intelligence.”
It was true. Judge Peralta’s death had barely registered on him, on the outside at least. It was just the way he was.
“I always loved the judge,” Lindsey said. “So courtly, so old school. You’d think Mike would be more of a sensitive guy considering his wife is such a big time psychologist.”
“I knew them when he was just a deputy, and she was just a scared housewife.”
“You are an old guy, Dave.” She tickled me, and I nearly upset what was left of my drink.
“Yeah, kid, I remember you on my very first case back at the sheriff’s office. Seems like only yesterday. I said, ‘Who is this babe in the miniskirt and the nose stud.’”
“I saved your ass, Dave.”
“True enough.”
She snuggled against me. “You saved me back,” she said.
“Anyway,” Lindsey said conspiratorially. “Dr. Sharon living in San Francisco, what does that mean for the sheriff’s marriage?”
I shrugged. “They have their own thing, and it’s survived for thirty years or so. I think her radio syndicator wanted her in San Francisco. And the daughters live in the Bay Area. I still can’t imagine Mike and Sharon as grandparents. But Sharon says she’s just commuting there during the week.” I listened to the wind, stroked her soft hair. “Do you regret we didn’t go to San Francisco?”
She said, “Sometimes.” Before the dot-com bubble blew up, Lindsey had what seemed like a stack of offers from companies in the Bay Area.
“I would have gone with you,” I said.
“Damn right you would have,” she said. “But I wanted to do something that mattered. It’s never been about money. And this is your home, Dave. I know how much that means to you.”
“Sometimes I wish it weren’t,” I said, thinking about the premature hundred-degree day on April first. Suddenly, I lost the high that Lindsey and sex and Bombay Sapphire had conjured in me.
Dan Milton disdained Phoenix as a barbarous place, all subdivisions and automobiles. It was one of the reasons why I disliked him when we first met. I had barely been away from Arizona when I went to the Midwest for my Ph.D. work. A protégé of Arthur Link, Milton had been an enfant terrible in the 1960s, engaging in violent intellectual jousts with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and legendary party binges with Robert Conquest. By the time I came to study with him, he was one of the most distinguished scholars of Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive era, widely published, cherished, and still controversial.
He was hard on his students. To study with Dan Milton was to live in the library—this was before personal computers—learning what he called “real research methods…not the candy-ass lazy shit you learned scamming your master’s degrees at state colleges.” He was a native Texan and reveled in being a profane scholar. He had a weakness for guns and fine Kentucky bourbons. He affected to be uninterested in my youthful detour to become a deputy sheriff. To him, scholarship, done right, meaning Dan Milton’s way, was heroic.
Out in the house, I heard Billy Bragg’s “California Stars” on the stereo. I let the guitars and wanderlust harmonica stoke my melancholy. I was now approaching the age that Milton was when I arrived on his doorstep as a twentysomething Ph.D. candidate. It made me feel strange, caught in time’s riptide and unable to see the shore.
He was hard on his students because the ones who made it were his great legacy. They went on to become noted professors, cutting-edge scholars, influential authors, in-demand advisers to secretaries of state, and national security aides—and me, I came back home to Phoenix and took a job at the sheriff’s office again.
I read to Dan Milton as he lay dying from stomach cancer. He had long ago moved to Portland, a wonderfully civilized city for a man who prized civilization. Writing a pair of bestsellers—one book won the Parkman Prize—had supplemented his family money, so the high cost of living was no object. His condo overlooked downtown and the river, Mount Hood in the far distance. Its rooms were occupied by books, modernist paintings, and a young woman with honey-colored hair named Kathleen. Milton always had a Kathleen or a Heather or a Pamela, intellectual young women who ran through his life, each for a few years, and amused him. He favored Smith graduates. He was as much auteur as scholar.
Finally, a hospital bed was added. And a part-time nurse. He dismissed the entreaties of his grown children to go to a nursing home.
I visited almost every day, and read to him from Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography,
Master of the Senate.
Milton was often groggy and sometimes in terrible pain, but he had lost nothing of his incisive mind. He made me see the book in new ways, made me see Caro’s shortcomings as well as triumph, even as I watched my professor slide into darkness.
“He never forgave me for leaving teaching, for not making something of myself as a scholar,” I said aloud. “He never said so, but I know…”
Lindsey laid her head on my chest, letting her dark hair sweep against my skin. I went on, “Milton wants me to take a lecturer job at Portland State.” I corrected myself, “Wanted me. He talked to the dean and recommended me. It’s a two-year appointment, in American history. It’s some kind of interdisciplinary deal with the criminal justice program. Milton said it was tailor-made for me, and the class load is light enough to do research and writing, too.”
“Do you want to do that?” Lindsey asked, not facing me.
“I don’t know,” I said, looking into the murk of the ceiling, listening to the wind. “All the politics and political correctness drove me nuts before. But I didn’t have you before. Oh, it’s probably silly to even consider it. You wouldn’t like the rain…”
“Oh, History Shamus,” Lindsey stroked my head. “You’re tired. You’re grieving.” She held me close, and her body heat was a wonderful force field against a cold world.
Finally, she said, “You can do anything you want, Dave. Even as an old guy.”
She smiled at me, and sipped the last of her drink. “I know what will cheer you up. I got takeout at the Fry Bread House. Let’s eat Indian tacos, drink cerveza, and screw all night.” She sat astride me, and my body quickly responded.
“I’ll make some history with you, Professor.”
