Concrete Desert

Chapter Eight

Time does strange things in the Arizona summer. It was late July now, and the only reality was the sun. Two weeks had passed, but I knew it only from scanning the date on each morning’s newspaper. Otherwise, time had become meaningless in the yearly struggle of Phoenicians against the heat. Maybe a year had gone by. Maybe a day.

This was the mean season, when the weather seemed to bring out the worst in everybody. Day after day of 110 degrees or better left people exhausted, impatient, and sometimes violent. The newspaper seemed to carry more three-paragraph briefs about murders. A new mother battering her crying baby’s head against the refrigerator only made it to the local section. The front page told about power outages on the fringes of the city, leaving thousands of people without air conditioning. Another story warned of an increase in greens fees for golfers. The price for living in paradise.

I spent most of my time tying up loose ends on the Stokes case, and I felt pretty good about it. Lindsey Adams, my new pal in Records, had come up with a list of seventeen likely suspects that met our search parameters. She was the master of databases. Her fingers flew across the computer keyboard as her delicate mouth, dark with a black-red lipstick, pursed in thought. Her tossed-off comments-“he was wetting his noodle” being a favorite-made this more fun than most research.

As we listened to Lindsey’s collection of seventies music-a strange hobby, she admitted-we looked at the potential suspects in detail, narrowing our list to four. They were bad men: killers, rapists, predators from a time that we forget had predators. Each was in the safe, small Valley of the Sun when Rebecca Stokes disappeared. One in particular had gotten out of the Arizona State Prison just three months before her murder; he had been serving a sentence for assaulting a woman outside her home in Tucson. And he ended up in the Valley: Prison records showed he had taken a job on parole, working as a laborer. The same man, Eddie Evans, died in a knife fight down in the Deuce five years later-a couple of years after the last of the unsolved murders of young women.

I delivered it all to Peralta in a report complete with photos, color graphics, and maps. It wouldn’t hold up in court, but it didn’t have to. All of the potential suspects were dead, as were the local bigs who hadn’t wanted publicity about the unsolved murders of young women. Whatever embarrassment the case might once have caused was long past. But we knew more now about the murders of five human beings, and who might have been behind them. And that meant a thousand dollars to me from the county. It wasn’t exactly history, and it wasn’t exactly police work. “It’s consulting,” Lindsey, the postmodern woman, said.

Peralta called a 9:00 A.M. press conference to announce that the Sheriff’s Office had new information on a notorious forty-year-old murder case. He was in his element with the lights and cameras, wearing his crisply pressed dress uniform with the three stars on the collars, and his badge, which was polished to a high shine.

It was a remarkable piece of theater, with slides, charts, and press kits for the reporters. A TV crew from Unsolved Mysteries flew in to be there. Frankly, I was surprised the sheriff let him do it alone-given the sheriff’s penchant for hogging the media spotlight. But I didn’t really know the tensions or alliances that marked the sheriff’s relationship with his chief deputy. Peralta introduced me, and the next morning I found myself on the Republic’s front page, in a sidebar headlined HISTORY PROFESSOR CRACKS OLD CASES. That made me a little uncomfortable, since we hadn’t exactly “cracked” a case. And I remember catching the date of the newspaper: July 23-it had been exactly a month since Phaedra had disappeared. But these were momentary misgivings. Lindsey even sent me a Disco Inferno CD as a reminder of how listening to it had inspired us, or so she said. All in all, I was feeling good about myself. Too good.

A little before noon on Friday, the phone rang.

“Deputy Mapstone?”

It was a fine, radio-quality voice.

“This is Brent McConnico. I was wondering if I could buy you lunch and thank you for the work you did on my cousin’s case?”

I was a little taken aback. I had seen Brent McConnico’s classically handsome face on TV many times since I’d gotten back to town. He was the young majority leader of the state senate, a favorite of Republican politicos and the scion of one of the state’s oldest political families. But I had never met him or spoken to him before.

“Well, you don’t owe me any thanks, Mr. McConnico,” I said.

“Oh, please call me Brent,” he said. “My father was Mr. McConnico.” Without even a pause, he went on. “How about the Pointe at Tapatio Cliffs? Really stunning view of the city. Say Monday?”

“Sure,” I said. “Brent.”

I hung up and called Julie at work, but her voice mail answered and I hung up. I hadn’t talked to her since the night we ended up in each other’s arms. I didn’t know what to say to her about us, if there was an “us.” And I didn’t have anything fresh to report about Phaedra. No young woman. No blue Nissan Sentra. Neither the computer nor phone calls to the numbers in her address book had yielded any information. I was stuck.

***

The Pointe at Tapatio Cliffs is a resort hotel perched in the Phoenix Mountain Preserve in the north part of the city. I walked past the spotless tennis courts, deserted in the midday heat, and made my way into the main restaurant and the blessed air-conditioning. I was wearing my best suit, navy blue with a thin pinstripe, and a Frank Sinatra tie that had been Patty’s last Christmas gift to me. I looked good, but this wasn’t the weather for suits. I sat for twenty minutes in the dim coolness near the hostess’s stand before Brent McConnico strode briskly in, spotted me, and held out his hand.

“You’re taller than you seemed on TV,” he said.

He had a firm grip, and his light blue eyes gazed at me with an easy directness. “Well, anybody would look smaller compared to Mike Peralta,” I said.

“Yes, dear Mike,” he said. “He’ll probably be governor someday.”

McConnico was shorter than I, maybe a little under six feet. But he obviously worked out, his body neatly turned out in a gray sack suit. He had politician’s hair, perfectly blow-dried. Light brown, it fell just over his ears. He turned me toward the restaurant, where the breathtakingly beautiful blond hostess greeted him by name and breezily led us to “his usual” table. He ordered a club soda. I ordered a Bombay Sapphire martini. Before us, as promised, was a stunning view of the city, looking toward downtown and the South Mountains.

“When our families first came to the Valley, all this was farmland, David,” he said. “It just amazes me every day how much it’s changed. How much it’s changed even from when I was a boy.”

I agreed with him. He’d obviously done a little homework to say that “our families” had been among the pioneers. It’s natural in Phoenix to assume that everyone is from somewhere else. The joke says if you’re here for five years, you’re a native.

“But I know you can tell me much more history than I can tell you.” He smiled. “You went to ASU?”

“I think one semester I had more parking tickets than any student in school history.”

He laughed out loud. “Well, it’s a fine school. I wanted to go there, but my mother insisted that I go back east. Yale. Then Harvard Law. I hated it at first. It all seemed so phony.”

“School matters,” I said. “I wish I had gone back east.”

“It only matters so far,” Brent McConnico said. “Tell me how in the world you went from law enforcement to academia, and now I guess you’re back in police work again.”

I gave him the short version. Years of teaching had given me a good sense of how much to say before people got bored.

“I think my dad knew your family,” he said. “Your grandfather was his dentist for a while, before he retired. I remember he used to have his office just off Central, down by the Heard Museum.”

“Arizona’s a small world, even now,” I said. He hadn’t exactly put me at ease, but he didn’t seem like a total silver spoon, either. I found myself liking him.

“As I said on the phone, I wanted to thank you for what you did to help us understand what might have happened to Rebecca,” he said. “There have been a lot of questions all these years.”

“Did you know her?”

“I don’t have much memory of her,” he said. “I was about six when she disappeared. She was kind to me. What I mainly remember is how it changed things for our family. For about a year, Mother wouldn’t let me or my sisters play outside in the yard. I don’t think there was any danger, but Rebecca’s killing was…well, nothing was ever the same for us. That violence was always with us.

“As for Rebecca, I remember she liked to sit with me and help me play with my little trucks.” He smiled slightly and shook his head. “That made her seem okay to me. But I didn’t really understand what had happened when she disappeared and was murdered. We children weren’t told much. And Mother and Dad never really wanted to talk about it. They felt guilty, I think. She had come here from her family in Chicago, and Dad wanted to look out for her, help her where he could. He and his brother, my uncle James, weren’t especially close. But Dad really cared about Rebecca, I think, as if she had been his daughter rather than his niece. He got her the job at Larkin, Reading and Page.”

“The law firm, right?”

“Yes, she was Sam Larkin’s secretary.”

“The Sam Larkin who was your father’s political ally? I didn’t realize Rebecca was his secretary.”

“They called him ‘the Kingmaker,’” McConnico said. “You have studied your Arizona history.”

“He was a legend.”

“And he deserved that label.” McConnico said.

The waitress brought the drinks and we both sipped in silence. I was a little surprised that Rebecca had worked for Sam Larkin. I imagined his secretary would have been a severe middle-aged keeper of secrets, and young Rebecca a pretty face in the typing pool. But she was the niece of an important ally. I guess it made some sense.

We talked for maybe an hour, through a so-so meal of “south-western cuisine.” He seemed genuinely curious about how I had put together the threads, missed clues, and hunches involving Rebecca’s case. So I gave him the whole drill, from the first trip up to the attic of the old courthouse to my computer work with Lindsey. At the end, his cell phone rang and he had a terse conversation, called for the check, and pulled out his gold card.

“You know, crime is a terrible thing today,” McConnico said, setting down his napkin. “What I hear most from my constituents is that they don’t feel safe. When we were kids, the only real crime to speak of was the Mafia down in Tucson. Today, we can’t keep track of the gangs-Crips, Bloods, that little bastard Bobby Hamid.” His voice was suddenly taut with emotion. “When Rebecca was killed, it was a crime that seemed virtually without precedence in Phoenix. Today, it wouldn’t even warrant mention on the evening news. Look at how those killings out in the Harquahala Desert seem almost routine now.” He shook his head. “My God.”

I didn’t know if he was trying out a stump speech on me or if he was really speaking from the heart. Considering what had happened to his cousin, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I got back home just before the long afternoon rush hour started to clot the Valley’s streets and freeways. The phone was ringing when I walked in the door; on the other end was a man who said he was Greg Townsend.

Phaedra’s lover.

“I, uh, I’m a friend of Phaedra Riding, and I’ve been trying to find her, and her sister would only tell me that I had to talk to you.” He had a well-modulated frat boy’s voice.

“When did you last see Phaedra, Mr. Townsend?”

“It would have been in the spring. April, I guess.”

“And you haven’t seen or spoken to her since then?”

“No,” he said. “She needed her space. I wanted to give her that. But we agreed that we’d talk again by the end of June-only she never called.”

I tried to decide if I believed him. I told him that a missing person’s report had been filed on Phaedra.

“Isn’t it unusual for the police to investigate these things unless they suspect foul play?” That struck me as an odd response to being told that his girlfriend had disappeared, but I let it pass.

“Julie and I are old friends. I’m checking into this as a favor to her.”

“Well, I hope you’ll let me know if I can help in any way,” he said. “I’ll give you my phone number; it’s a Sedona number.”

My gut told me I needed to do more to shake something, anything, loose.

“Actually, I’d like to stop by and see you in the next few days, if you can spare a little time?”

“Well,” he said. “Is anything wrong? What’s going on?”

“I really don’t know more than what I’ve already told you, Mr. Townsend. But if you two were close, you might be able to give me some information that would be helpful. Her family is very concerned.”

“Well, sure. Come up tomorrow. Can you be here by nine A.M.?” And then he gave me the address.