Phoenix is the newest and oldest of cities. The canals that carry its water past new skyscrapers and freeways are built on the waterworks of ancient Indians. When their civilization vanished, all that was left were their canals and the name a later tribe gave the canal builders: Hohokam, “the vanished ones.” But the past is never past. We are living in their city. It is all connected.
The Hohokam came to the Salt River Valley about the same time Charlemagne was forging a new Europe out of the chaos of Rome’s fall. In this isolated place, the Indians discovered one of the great fertile river valleys on earth. A thousand years later, a few Anglo settlers found it, too. They restored the Hohokam canals and built new ones. And with water, the Valley grew the vegetables and citrus and cotton that made families like the McConnicos wealthy. Everything is connected.
I hoped I had hold of a connection that might lead us to who had murdered Rebecca Stokes. It didn’t seem like brain surgery. But I wasn’t going to doubt my worth to Peralta right now. I needed that thousand-dollar fee. And God knows, I’d watched lots of my former colleagues in the ivory tower parlay the obvious into prestigious fellowships and acclaimed books. Anyway, I was intrigued by this murder. Some of the cases Peralta sent my way were as boring as an accounting exam. This one was different. This was a real mystery. I could almost feel the safe, cool desert night Rebecca stepped into from the train; feel the sinister chill that her disappearance cast over a small city.
Cops are conditioned to disbelieve almost everything they are told, but Opal Harvey’s story was making more and more sense. I went back downtown, spent the afternoon reading old homicide records. Sure enough, there was a loose string of body dumps in the desert in the late 1950s and early 1960s that were never solved. Five young women, strangled and sexually assaulted, naked except for their bras, purses nearby with IDs and money, the killers never found. Two of the bodies were discovered east of town, near Superstition Mountain, and the others, including Rebecca, were found in the desolate Harquahala Desert, west of the White Tank Mountains. Most of the cases seemed to have languished in the Phoenix PD’s Criminal Investigation Bureau under a detective named Harrison Wolfe, who disappeared in the early 1970s.
The idea of serial killers didn’t enter the popular imagination until the late 1970s, but there were earlier examples of madmen who killed again and again such as the Boston Strangler. Yet there was nothing, on paper at least, that indicated the investigating officers were tying the cases together. And yet the victims were all young, single, middle-class working women with fair hair-two redheads and three blondes. I thought about what Opal Harvey had said about the city’s powerful citizens being terrified that the killings would hurt economic growth. History was full of stranger motivations behind cover-ups.
The contents of the reports were only a start, though. I was beginning to realize how incomplete, and sometimes misleading, police reports could be. I spent Monday night and Tuesday morning trying to find other people involved in the Stokes case. Forty-plus years can erase a lot of lives. I got another break when I tracked down a retired Phoenix cop whose name had appeared on the initial report of Rebecca’s disappearance.
John Rogers was an enormous man, a Navajo, who was squeezed into a wheelchair in the lobby of a middling nursing home on the west side. His grip was very strong and his gaze very direct.
“You look too damned smart to be a deputy,” he said. “When I was on the job, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was a joke. Bunch of fat boys running the jail.”
I showed him my ID, but he waved it away.
“Hell, I’d see you even if you weren’t a cop,” he said. “First visit I’ve had in four years. My family, shit. My son’s a lawyer in L.A., and my daughter’s in detox somewhere. I guess they don’t want to smell the shit and piss here. You married?”
I shook my head.
“You’re lucky.”
I told him why I was there, watching my story register in the ruin of cracks that encased his old eyes. A Phoenix cop to the end, he wanted to know why MCSO was investigating, and I reminded him that the bodies had been found in the county.
He closed his eyes for a moment and then said, “I took that missing person’s report. From her uncle, the governor. He was a very worried man. The girl was supposed to have come home on the Golden State Limited the night before. She never went into work the next day.”
I heard a woman’s voice wailing off down a corridor.
“They found her about two weeks later,” he went on, cocking his massive head. “A Public Service crew, as I remember it. Then they turned it over to the detectives, and that was that.”
“If that was that, why do you remember it?”
“Oh, an old man’s memory,” he said. “She seemed so pretty, from her pictures. And back in those days, things like that hardly ever happened. It just stayed with me.”
“Did you feel any pressure from the governor’s office to keep the case quiet?”
“We were told by our sergeant not to say a word about it. The newspapers never said she was old man McConnico’s niece.”
I asked him if he remembered any other cases like it, and his face changed a bit, collapsed a little on itself.
“There were some others around that time.”
“The Creeper?” I ventured.
“Whatever,” John Rogers said. “I know that’s what some cops were talking about. Shit, I was just a patrolman. Only Indian on the force. First Indian on the force.”
I listed the other four body drops and asked why the detectives hadn’t linked the cases.
“Who the hell knows?” he rasped, angry now. “Who knows why detectives do anything? No offense.”
“None taken,” I said. “Did you respond to any Creeper calls?”
“Not that I know of. But there were always prowlers, and some might have been him, if there was a Creeper. Nobody really knew.”
“What did you think?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “What did I think? Let me tell you something. When that second girl was killed-Leslie was her name, I think-they found a Mexican who worked for the family gardener, and they thought they had their man. He’d been looking at her through the window at night; we knew that. Took him up to the fourth floor and beat him with saps for an hour, and he was ready to confess to anything. That’s how it was done then. The dicks thought they had solved that one, so how could the cases be linked?”
“So why isn’t that in the reports?”
“Because they beat him to death. Internal bleeding, didn’t show up at first. He died in the city jail overnight. They put him in a pauper’s grave, and that was that.”
***
Tuesday night, I stayed home to write an update for Peralta. I also needed to go over my lecture notes for the American history survey I was teaching at Phoenix College-another few bucks for my dwindling bank account. And I wanted to rewire the back porch light. So I got comfort food-chilies rellenos from Ramiro’s-settled behind Grandfather’s old desk in the study off the living room, and booted up the PowerBook. That’s when the doorbell rang.
Once again, Julie Riding was on my doorstep. This time, she wore a light blue denim shirt and blue jeans. Her hair was pulled back, and she looked startlingly like the Julie I had known twenty years before.
“I know I’m bothering you,” she said. I said something polite and invited her in.
Back in the facing chairs, I told Julie what I had found out about her sister, which wasn’t much. Her eyes were dreamy, unfocused, and she seemed drunk.
“I brought you something,” she said, handing over an envelope. “It has some of Phaedra’s things. Photos, an address book. That kind of thing.”
In my mind, I was still back in the fifties-with young John Rogers and Opal Harvey and Rebecca Stokes-and the dissonance of being pulled back made me a little cross.
“Julie, I can’t search for Phaedra,” I said. “I’m barely making a living. I said I’d make some inquiries, and I did. No Jane Does who match her description in the postmortem lab. No body drops…”
When I looked up, Julie’s face had reddened and she was crying. I instantly felt terrible.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to-”
“Goddamn you,” she said, sniffling. “You are still angry with me after twenty years.”
I poured us both a McClelland’s. She lighted a smoke.
“Do you know what happened after I left you?” she said.
I made no response.
“I went to San Diego for a week with Chet, whom you were so threatened by.…”
“Yeah, he was a wealthy heart surgeon, and I was a college student and part-time deputy making ten thousand dollars a year,” I said.
“And after a week, he told me he was going back to his wife. So I came back to Phoenix and started waiting tables.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Julie ignored me. “You thought I had this great life because of my looks.”
I started to protest, but she cut me off. “Yes, you did,” she said. “But it wasn’t a great life. I was so young, and I was just…just…overwhelmed by it all. All these men, all of them after me. I know you think it would be wonderful to be so desired, but it wasn’t that way. You’ll never know how lonely it is when somebody just wants to fuck you. I was just too young to know any better.”
I don’t know why I asked this, but it just came out: “Did you ever care about me?”
“Oh, David,” she said in a voice I had heard so many times before. “That’s history.”
She drank the scotch. “I was so fucked up then. Nobody should have wanted me.”
“I did,” I ventured.
“You didn’t know me,” she said. Fair enough, I thought.
“We had a very unhappy home life,” she went on. “I moved out when I was sixteen just to get away. I tried to keep you away from that. I was afraid if you knew, really knew about me, you’d just hate me.”
“I would never have hated you. All those years, I wondered about you.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, her voice a mix of anger and irony. “Do you really want to know? All those years I spent in dead-end jobs, a pretty ornament on some guy’s arm. I got into cocaine, and God, I loved it.”
She stubbed out the cigarette and drank the last of her scotch. “There was always some asshole, thinking with his cock, who would buy it for me. Before he left me. Then I married a lawyer; God, what a mistake. He controlled me with coke and beat the shit out of me when I mouthed off to him. It was hell, but it was really hard to give up, too. Does that make any sense to you? I loved the money and the beautiful people and the feeling that the drugs gave me.”
I walked to her chair, put my hand on her shoulder, and she came into my arms. I held her a long time while she cried silently, angrily.
“I’m a mess, David,” she said finally. “Everything I touch turns bad.”