Concrete Desert

Chapter Thirty-one

I reached Sedona a little after 3:00 P.M., and was able to throttle back the air-conditioning, being more than three thousand feet above the desert floor that holds Phoenix. Every few miles were signs warning about the high fire danger-the biggest reminder being the plume of smoke on the northwest edge of the Verde Valley, which the radio said was part of the wildfires that had consumed a million acres of forests in the West this summer. A million acres of fire. A million dollars in the trunk of Phaedra’s car.

I had lunch at a Mexican place on the Tlaquepaque, the town square near Oak Creek. I fortified myself with two Negra Modelos, a beer that tastes incredibly sublime when consumed with a plate of enchiladas in a dark, cool, adobe-protected space. Then I walked over to the Coconino County Sheriff’s Substation and asked for Deputy Allison Taylor. She was about my age, with light brown hair the style and texture of Lauren Hutton’s and a very large Magnum on her hip.

“David Mapstone of the MCSO,” she said, extending a tanned, slender hand. “I’m impressed.”

“Oh, no.”

“You’ve made it respectable to be a deputy sheriff and be intelligent.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“I studied premed at Wake Forest,” she said, leading me back to a squad room cluttered with desks, paperwork, and a large, ancient fax machine. “Then I made my first trip west and decided I didn’t want to be a doctor after all.”

“Life plays those funny tricks on us,” I said.

“And I take it you don’t want to teach college anymore?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I love writing and teaching. I just can’t get a job.”

“Marry a millionaire, that’s my advice.”

“Tried it. Didn’t work.”

She made an exaggerated O with her mouth. I liked her.

“So you want the Townsend case,” she said, fishing in a file cabinet.

“We think it might be tied to another homicide down in the Valley.”

“What a big ugly city down there,” she said. “L.A. two. ’Course, I’m a small-town girl.” She handed over a sheaf of papers and photographs.

“Not too many cases like that around here,” Allison said. “We have a permanent population in Oak Creek Canyon of about fifteen thousand. But with three million visitors a year, we get our share of crime and nuttiness. Hell, with four vortexes-to channel New Age Vibes-we get more than our share of nuttiness.”

“Any leads?”

“Seems execution-style,” she said. “Very ugly, though. This asshole made him put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and then pulled the trigger. What a mess.” My own mouth ached. “We hear you guys tied him into drug trafficking?”

I told her about the DEA report and Bobby Hamid.

“Well, there’s certainly an appetite for cocaine up here,” she said. “Wherever the beautiful people congregate, there’s that. What’s the saying? Cocaine is God’s way of letting you know you have too much money.”

We laughed, and I asked if she’d ever run across Townsend.

“No,” she said. “That’s a very exclusive part of the canyon. And very remote.”

“So the neighbors didn’t hear or see anything?”

She shook her head. “People with money like you find here don’t want embarrassing police investigations interrupting their lives. We’re supposed to keep the traffic manageable, drag off the worst fruitcakes, and keep burglars away from the art galleries. They don’t want to entertain the notion that their nice neighbor might have been a dirtbag. And we’re a small department, with not many people or much money. If you guys can help, go to it.”

“Autopsy?” I asked, leafing through the report.

“Still tied up in Phoenix,” she said. “It takes longer and longer to get reports back now that there are more and more exotic tests to perform.”

I sat down to read.

“You know,” she said, “there’s a lot about this case that’s screwy. He had a very expensive alarm system out there, and it was fully engaged when the first deputy arrived after the murder.”

Forty-five minutes later, I was on the winding road up into the red rocks, through firs and ponderosa pines, up to Greg Townsend’s million-dollar house. It wasn’t a day very different from the first time I was here. This time, I found the place deserted, with a Sheriff’s Department NO TRESPASSING seal on the door. I used the keys given me by Allison Taylor to disengage the alarm and let myself in.

The house was still immaculate and spectacular, but there’s something about a place that has been violated by murder: a smell real or imagined, brutal memories in the walls, uneasy ghosts. Lindsey had offered to take the day off and come up with me, and I found myself wishing she were here. I picked up the phone and called down to Phoenix, getting her voice mail. I left a message and remembered how she’d felt in bed just hours earlier.

Although it’s commonplace today to read nothing more than the TV screen, it still jarred me to see no books. But it went with the expensively austere theme of the decorator. I looked over the photos on his shelves and noted once again that there were no photos of him and Phaedra. There were pictures of him with other women, kayaking, on the beach, rock climbing, in the cockpit of a small airplane. I had definitely lived too sedentary a life.

The master bedroom had been stripped of furniture, but the walls were still stained with blood-lots of it. I stepped inside. The bed must have faced the door. He would have seen his assailant coming, if he had been awake, if he had been expecting trouble. It was so quiet, I jumped when the phone began to ring. When no answering machine picked up, I lifted the receiver and placed it to my ear. Whoever was on the other end hung up, saying nothing.

Townsend had been very neat, precise. So, too, had his murderer. Nothing was out of place in the office. Even the stunning Navajo rug that dominated the room was hung with obsessive care on the wall. I sat at his desk, tried not to let the view of Oak Creek Canyon distract me, and went through the drawers. Bills, blank stationery, a checkbook, some computer disks that I fed into the IBM clone nearby, which yielded holistic healing techniques, FAA flight-plan regulations, some computer games, maps of the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks in Colorado. I was not finding that “I am a drug dealer” file. Then I reached under the computer table and felt a slender journal taped to the underside. Life was getting interesting.

It was full of columns of numbers and letters, a code of some kind. Pages and pages of it in a simple binder, noted in a precise hand in black ink, always black ink. Maybe it had something to do with Sedona’s psychic voltage. Or maybe it tracked drug shipments and payments for Bobby Hamid. I took it with me and walked back to the Blazer.

I walked around the grounds, hoping for footprints, shotgun shells, Baggies of dope, signed confessions. I wasn’t proud at this stage. The place was so remote, clinging as it did to the side of the mountain, it was easy to see why no one would have seen anything. Through the pines, I could see little but hillside, while at my back was the blue of the canyon sky. It was a fabulous place, a “babe lair,” as my male students would have said, a place sure to have impressed a young woman who was attracted to the quirky, the beautiful, and the expensive.

In a clearing, someone had laid out a medicine wheel in the red dirt. Some Indian tribes used them for their spiritual powers, but they had been co-opted by the New Agers. This one was probably fake, but it did make me look in a certain direction. Something glinted at me from an outcropping about fifty yards above, up the mountainside. I negotiated some boulders and climbed, pulling myself up on fir branches, crossing a fallen aspen trunk. The rocks and soil were the color of the sunset and covered with pine needles. My legs were feeling the angle of the climb by the time I pulled myself up on the ledge and found a door.

A door. And a cabin. There was an adobe wall maybe twenty feet across, set neatly into the rock. The cabin was obviously fairly new and had a commanding view of Greg Townsend’s house and the canyon and forest reaching below and off to the horizon. Yet from even a few feet below, it was nearly invisible. I was preparing to show my star and knock on the door, when it opened and there stood Julie.

“David, I hoped you wouldn’t come up here.”