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.
Chapter Nine
Early the next morning, I grabbed a bagel and diet Coke and got on the road to Sedona. I’ve spent my life in coffee-swilling professions, but I’ve never caught that addiction. Patty, whose bone-jolting French roast I would brew every morning when we lived together, said I was missing one of life’s most sublime pleasures. Maybe it will be like golf: something I’ll take up at that ever-receding point in my life called “older.” Bagels were something I had discovered, and even if you couldn’t find a “real” bagel in Phoenix, I munched contentedly on one as I headed the Blazer north on Black Canyon Freeway, Interstate 17.
Sharon Peralta was on the radio, always “Dr. Sharon” to her listeners (why hadn’t I gotten my Ph.D. in psychology?), giving brisk advice to a man who didn’t know how to keep his career and meet his obligations to his seven children; a woman who didn’t understand why her lovers kept leaving her; and another woman who had seduced her brother-in-law. Dr. Sharon handled every caller deftly. She was funny. She was sexy. She had the answers. She was promoting her newsletter and her new book. Hard to believe it was the mousy Sharon Peralta I first met twenty years ago.
It was a good summer day for a drive, provided you were headed in the right direction. In the southbound lanes, the traffic headed toward downtown was a gridlocked disaster. I drove for miles through the new city sprawl, ever spreading-an acre an hour-out into the desert floor and around stark, barren mountains that once stood in splendid isolation. After passing Carefree Highway, the interstate started to climb. Over the next hundred miles, it would vault nearly six thousand feet into the Arizona high country and Flagstaff. My destination was not quite that far, but no matter how many times I drove this route, I was struck by the dramatic changes in the land.
You can drive all the way from the Mississippi River to Denver without encountering more than the undulating sameness of the plains. In the West, the country changes from pines to deserts and mountains to flatlands with amazing suddenness. So the flat cactus-covered desert gave way to sage- and chaparral-covered slopes, ravines and crevices, all pushing upward toward the high peaks to the north. In a few minutes, the massive blue emptiness of the Bradshaw Mountains appeared off my left. This had been mining country a hundred years before, with lots of
