Eddie would do it.” He held up a hand. “Don’t go asking for the report. Nobody ever wrote down the way Eddie mutilated and tortured those girls before he killed them. He was a monster.”
“So Eddie wasn’t the Creeper? Or the Creeper didn’t kill Stokes, either?”
“Eddie may have been the Creeper,” Wolfe said. “I think he was. But neither one killed Rebecca.
“You see”-he polished off the food and wiped his face roughly with a napkin-“the worst thing an investigator can do is confuse his instincts with his prejudices. You work a hundred murder cases and they’re all the same. So you’re tempted to think murder one hundred and one is the same, too. That’s where you screw up. Because there’re a million reasons why people end up dead. A million secrets behind those dead eyes. And nothing keeps secrets better than the desert.
“No.” He shook his head. “Rebecca Stokes was killed by somebody she knew.”
I drove with no destination, just to be moving. Out to the Squaw Peak Parkway and north toward the mountains in the clot of rush-hour traffic. I called Peralta on the cellular phone, but his secretary said he had gone to a Mounted Posse awards dinner. I tried Julie at my house and at her home, but there was no answer. Lindsey’s voice answered her phone, but it was only her answering machine. I didn’t leave a message.
Harry Truman said the only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know. Harrison Wolfe had lived some of that history. And I was drowning in what I didn’t know. I didn’t know who had killed Rebecca Stokes. I didn’t know who had killed Phaedra Riding or where she had been for the month since she disappeared. I didn’t know why Phaedra’s killer would want to copy what he thought was the MO of the Stokes case. I didn’t know why Greg Townsend was dead or how that was related to Phaedra. And I didn’t know the secrets that the desert was hiding from me.
Chapter Fourteen
The phone rang at 1:45 the next morning. It was Julie.
“David,” she said. “Do you know I really love you? I’ve always loved you.”
“I-”
“You are so kind, David. You turned into such a fine man. I never doubted it. I just haven’t had much experience with men like you in my life.” She laughed unhappily.
“Where are you, Julie?”
“I have to go away, my love. Please don’t ask questions. I think we’re in great danger. I have to do this, David.”
There was something in her voice-a peculiar trill.
“Do what, Julie?”
“David, please don’t ask right now. We’re in danger.”
I asked her why we were in danger.
“Phaedra’s dead.” Her voice went up a notch. “Greg is dead. I can’t talk now.”
“Julie, Peralta is not going to like this. You could be a material witness in a capital murder case.”
“Fuck him.” She laughed. “I’ll be in touch.”
The line went dead.
I replaced the receiver as if it were a live bomb. My heart was beating hard. The dread of the early-morning phone call. I walked through the darkened house and checked the doors and windows. I tried to laugh aloud about the Creeper-what a silly, melodramatic name-but the house swallowed up the sound. Outside, the street was silent and deserted. Back in bed, the sheets smelled of Julie. Maybe around 5:00 A.M., I fell asleep.
I got downtown around 4:00 P.M. Peralta was on the phone when I reached his office, but he waved me in. I scanned the
His jaw clenched and unclenched as I told him about Julie.
“I’m going to get a warrant.” He snatched up the phone.
“Mike, she was at work. It would have been a neat trick if she could have driven to Sedona, murdered Townsend-with a twelve-gauge shotgun, no less-and gotten back to work, but I don’t see it.”
He twirled the receiver in his massive hands. “Did you check?”
“No,” I said. “I thought I was off the case, or ‘never on it,’ as you put it.”
“Check,” he said. Then, into the receiver: “Melinda, I want you to find Judge Garcia-I know he flew to Crested Butte to gamble this weekend-and draw up a warrant for him to sign on Julie Riding.” He gave her the file number so she could find Julie’s address and Social Security number. “If you don’t hear from me in the next two hours, get the warrant signed and BOLO her. Murder one.”
“Mike, I’ve been sleeping with her,” I said.
“I know.”
“That could lead to a mistrial.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Check. You’re a sworn sheriff’s deputy, whatever fucked-up personal history you have.”
“And you like to fuck with people.”
He barely-barely-cracked a smile.
“Do I get paid for doing this?” I asked.
“You get reimbursed with my goodwill,” Peralta said. “And considering everything that’s happened, you’re probably going to need it.”
“I talked to Harrison Wolfe yesterday.”
Peralta sat up straight. “Wolfe?”
I told him what I knew. He listened through two caffeine-free diet Cokes and then pinched the bridge of his nose. “God, I need a drink and a cigar,” he said.
We concealed our badges and ID cards and walked over to Tom’s Tavern, which for half a century had been the meeting place of Arizona’s political elite. I didn’t even know it still existed. When we walked in, I was sweating nonstop. Peralta was immaculate in his cream-colored suit, bola tie, and summer Stetson. We made our way to the back through the cool semidarkness as Peralta worked the room: a congressman here, a superior court judge there. There was a caricature of him on a wall of famous people, riding a horse, aiming a six-gun. I was happy to be nobody. When we were settled, Peralta had a Kentucky premium bourbon on the rocks and I had a martini. He clipped and lighted a Churchill, luxuriously protected from politically correct conventions out in the broad world.
“This is an amazing place,” Peralta said. “And here I am, just a poor kid from the barrio.”
“Who studied at the Kennedy School at Harvard.”
He took a languid drag on the cigar. “Why does he think she was killed by someone she knew?”
“He said the landlady found Rebecca’s door opened, unlocked, and her luggage inside. He said if she disappeared that night, she would have had to open her door. Who was she likely to do that for? Someone she knew.”
“Or somebody impersonating a cop.”
I looked at him through the smoke and gloom. “Wolfe also said Rebecca’s body didn’t have the mutilations found on the other Creeper killings.”
“That’s thin,” Peralta said.
“I think he’s probably right.”
“Why?” Peralta waved the cigar. “None of this was in the original reports.”
“He said the county attorney took the reports.”
“Oh Jesus,” Peralta said. “Just another old cop trying to settle a score with his bosses.”
“I believe him.”
Peralta just looked at me like I was pathetic.
“Because he was the investigating officer,” I went on. “He was there. Gut feelings count, too.”
“Shit, here I am defending your work against you.”
“I was sloppy, Mike. I moved too quickly on the research. I didn’t do enough to verify what I found was true. It was methodology I wouldn’t have allowed from an undergraduate. Cicero said the first law for a historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth.”
