Concrete Desert

Chapter Two

Maricopa County Chief Deputy Mike Peralta, all six feet six inches and 250 pounds of him, bulled his way through the corridor, trailing reporters like a contrail behind a big jet. “No,” he was saying. “You’ll have to talk to the sheriff.…He’ll issue a statement.…He’ll be available for interviews.” Half a dozen voices made demands that he ignored.

“Mapstone.” He zeroed in on me, and, wrapping a massive arm around my shoulders, turned me around and pushed me through the private side door into his office suite. I could feel the 9-mm Glock semiautomatic in the shoulder rig under his suit.

“Goddamn media jackals,” he said distastefully.

“When have you ever met publicity you didn’t like?” I said.

He looked at me sourly. “All they want to talk about is the chain gang or the tent jail or the latest goat fuck with some politician, and the sheriff’s the one who speaks for the department on that.”

“That’s what happens when you work for ‘America’s toughest sheriff.’”

Peralta ignored me, dropped into his big desk chair, leaned back, and settled his feet on an otherwise-immaculate desktop. He wore a tan summer suit atop nicely tooled black lizard boots. When it suited his mood, he also wore an expensive Stetson. His face was a bit broader and darker than when I’d first met him, but otherwise, he had hardly aged in the twenty years I’d known him.

He pointed toward a thick folder on the table behind me. He didn’t offer a chair. I sat anyway and hefted the folder onto my lap.

“You’ll like this one,” he said, rubbing an imaginary beard. “Rebecca Stokes. Twenty-one years old, comes home on the train, takes a taxi to her apartment, pays the driver, and is never seen alive again.”

“I’ve heard of this one. My grandparents talked about it when I was growing up.”

“It was 1959,” he said. The year I was born. “She turned up in the desert two weeks later, body dump. That was the strange thing about those old murders in Phoenix: No matter where they got dumped in the desert-and this was a small town surrounded by hundreds of miles of nothing-somebody always found them.

“Anyway, see what you can give me on it by the time I have the regular press briefing this Thursday.” He popped a can of diet Coke and took a deep swig.

“You’re enjoying this too damned much,” I said.

“What? It took you three days to turn up the new evidence that nailed the Samuels case. Fifteen-year-old case and it takes you three days.”

“That was lucky-connect the dots.”

“That was a week’s worth of headlines for the department.” Peralta smiled. “And a nice thousand bucks for you. You know the drill-dig up something I can use and you get paid as a private contractor, and you act as a volunteer posse deputy. If I can’t get you back into the department one way, I can try another way.”

“I’m grateful for the work, Mike, but it’s all temporary,” I said. “I don’t even know if I’m going to stay in Phoenix.”

“Forget that college shit,” Peralta said. “No way they’re going to give tenure to a middle-aged white male former cop-who’s from Barry Goldwater’s home state no less.”

“I’m not middle-aged. And actually, the tenure committee said I was ‘unwilling to abandon my Western intellectual outlook’ and become more sensitive to ‘nonlinearity.’”

“Fuck me blind and call me Susie,” Peralta said. “I knew you’d never fit in with those Commies. Teaching rich kids to hate their country, God, and their parents.”

“I’m teaching still,” I said halfheartedly.

“One course in American history for some morons and blue-hairs at the junior college,” he snorted. “Hell, maybe I’ll sign up. Let you teach me something.”

“That would be a first,” I said.

The phone rang and he grabbed it harshly, saying “Peralta” before the receiver reached his head. It was his habit, strange to listen to when you were calling. His heavy brow darkened by several degrees-I had seen his mood shift this suddenly many times when Peralta and I were partners years before, and it never ceased to make me uneasy. “Yeah.…Shit.…” I heard his end of the conversation. “Bullshit!..That’s the county supervisors’ problem, not ours.…Goddamned right-they made the mess, not us. Bullshit, we’re buying the Jimmys. Do it.” He slammed the phone back into its cradle.

“I’ve got six prostitutes dead over the past three months.” He thumped a set of files on his desk. “I’ve got half the Lake Pleasant substation called in sick next shift. Fucking titty-bar owner Bobby Hamid’s one step ahead of a court order. Crips terrorizing the white folks in Litchfield Park. A million-dollar burglary out in Cave Creek-and what do I get to deal with? The goddamned departmental budget. The goddamned county supervisors! Seventh-largest county in the United States, and they run it like some little town in Alabama.”

The first time I ever saw Mike Peralta, he was teaching martial arts at the Sheriff’s Academy, and I was a twenty-year-old cadet. I wanted to save the world with a badge. But I also thought I was pretty damned smart, with my new B.A. degree in history. He took me down so hard, my head rang for two days. Soon after, he was the five-year veteran who broke me in as a rookie when we were patrolling the no-man’s-land between Scottsdale and Tempe. We worked apart for two years while he was trying out jail administration and I was getting my master’s degree. Then we partnered again in the east county as it became clear I was going to be a teacher, not a cop. Now here he was in the big office, the number-two guy in the department. I wish I could truthfully say I knew him.

He sighed, leaned back in his big chair, and really saw me for the first time. I was wearing a loose white cotton shirt and chinos-“goddamned J. Crew preppy shit,” Peralta had called it.

“Put on your ID card,” he ordered. “It’s policy. You may be ashamed of being here, but you’re a sworn deputy like every other swinging dick on Madison Street, and we all have to wear our ID cards.” I pulled it out and clipped it on my shirt. “Deputy Sheriff,” it said, and there I was in a picture, looking not too different from the way I did on my old faculty identification card, with one difference-my beard was gone. The picture would show you I have large, gentle brown eyes and wavy dark hair that women sometimes like, and roundish, undefined facial bones that they don’t.

The picture wouldn’t show you that I’m a little over six foot one-short in the NBA-and I have the broad shoulders and wide stride that helped me cool off tough guys when I was a cop.

“So what do you want?” Peralta demanded.

I told him about Phaedra Riding as he swung his chair back and forth in a slow arc. It was maddening if you didn’t know him, but it was just Peralta. “You pull the incident report?”

I slid it across the desk, and he studied it.

“Julie Riding,” he mumbled. “Where do I know that name? Hey, this is Julie, your Julie,” he said, brightening. “I mean she’s the complainant-it’s her sister. Jeez.”

“That’s what I thought when she showed up at my door last night.”

“I ran into her a couple of weeks ago, and she asked about you,” Peralta said. “She’s still a fox. I never understood how you lucked into that.”

“She left me, as I recall.”

Peralta grunted and went back to the report. I looked around his office; the walls always held some new award or photograph. Peralta with Goldwater. Peralta on horseback with the sheriff. Peralta in SWAT uniform during the killings at the Buddhist temple years before. Peralta in a tux with the business muckety-mucks of the Phoenix 40. Peralta with the Suns at the Western Conference Championships.

“Weird name,” he said finally. “How do you say it?”

“Feed-ra or Fade-ra,” I said, pronouncing it. “Like Phoenix.”

“Weird,” he said. “Sounds like some made-up hippie bullshit name.”

“Phaedra was the daughter of Minos,” I started to explain but his eyes immediately glazed. “Greek mythology…” God, I had been out of the cop world too long.

“Sounds like a head case to me,” he said finally. “Artsy-fartsy little rich girl head case. She’ll turn up. Probably schtupping some new guy.”

“No Jane Does who fit this description turn up lately?” I asked.

“You’re a deputy sheriff,” he said. “Go do some police work. You remember how? Or did all those years trying to pick up college trim ruin your brain?”

“Fuck you,” I said. It was our repartee, harmless for now. “I’m a part-time contract employee, a researcher, and if I get some information on old murder cases, it’s all gravy to you and the sheriff. You know if I go to Missing Persons, I’ll get a whole different reception than if you call the commanding officer and make an inquiry.”

Peralta sighed and picked up the phone. “Dominguez? Peralta. Remember my old partner Dave Mapstone? Yeah, the professor. He’s back in town, working for us part-time. He’s interested in nine nine-two oh one three four five, Phaedra Riding? Ph, yeah, like Phoenix. Anything new? What’d we do?…Yeah, yeah, I know you’ve got people pulled in to work the Harquahala thing.…Okay.”

He turned to me. “They don’t know shit. You know how these missing persons cases go. She’s an adult. No evidence of a crime. We have no reason to suspect foul play. Does Julie suspect foul play?” I shook my head. “What about her car?”

“Blue Nissan,” I said. “I checked the impound lists, the hot sheets, nothing.”

“So it sits,” Peralta said. “She’ll turn up.”

“So you don’t mind if I do some checking?”

“Not as long as you do your work for me first. And you don’t get in some jurisdictional cluster fuck with Phoenix PD. What? You trying to score some points with Julie, rekindle the flame?”

“We’ve both moved on,” I said, standing up to leave. “I’m just helping an old friend.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, crumpling the diet Coke can and tossing it through a Phoenix Suns basketball hoop into the trash can. “Sharon is on my back to have you over for dinner, y’know.”

“I will,” I said. Mike and his wife had invited me over a month ago.

“Then make it this Friday,” he said, and turned his head toward his paperwork. I started out.

“You know who she’s related to?”

I stopped and turned back to him. “Phaedra?”

“No, no, Stokes, Rebecca Stokes. She was the niece of John Henry McConnico.”

“The former governor?” I said. He nodded. “So that would have made her-what, a first cousin to Brent McConnico?”

“The majority leader of the Arizona Senate,” Peralta said. “He’s seen as the next governor.”

Peralta was always working the angles.