Desert Kill |
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William Morrow, 1994 ISBN 10-688-12641-3; hardcover, 270 pp.
Piatkus edition |
a novel, by Philip Gerard
Day One."Take a ride with me, nephew," detective Paul Pope said, leaning against the doorjamb of the seminar room. "Right now?" Roy Pope said as his students filed out. He hadn't seen Uncle Paul in weeks. Paul had missed his and Eileen's third anniversary barbecue the previous Saturday without even a phone call. Now he'd shown up here and he was all business. Roy stuffed his notes into a leather bookbag. "Yes, now. This can't wait." "Let me cancel my office hours." They walked down the hall to Roy's office, left the bookbag, and used the outdoor concrete staircase at the end of the corridor. The sere desert breeze was a relief from the over-refrigerated building. It was midmorning, April, but the temperature was already over a hundred degrees. Roy could feel the heat through the soles of his desert boots. Paul's white Thunderbird was parked at the curb across the avenue on College Street. Lieutenant Paul Pope was chief of the homicide bureau, Arizona Department of Public Safety. Never wore a uniform except at funerals. Drove his own T-bird, in which he had installed a short-wave radio. "I need a car has room for my belly," he always said. He wore light blue slacks and a gray golf shirt and a two-inch .38 clipped to his belt. Paul cranked the air-conditioning to high and in a few minutes they were on the freeway and had crossed the dry Salt River bed into Phoenix proper. Twenty minutes more in traffic and Paul swung the car onto Grand Avenue, an industrial corridor that cut slantwise across the metropolitan area, and followed the railroad tracks for a dozen long blocks. The traffic was a jam of flatbed tractor trailers and material haulers grinding gears across complicated intersections. Paul drove without talking, The air conditioner made a racket. "You're going to tell me what this is all about, sooner or later," Roy said, looking out the window. "Oh, I imagine so." Paul lit a Pall Mall off the dashboard lighter and smoked it hard, holding it tight in his lips. Sixty-two years old, his crewcut gone gray. He'd threatened to retire from the cops twice already, but he'd always come back. He was entitled to a disability pension for a beating he'd taken fifteen years earlier, but he'd talked the department out of it. Now in three more years he'd get his gold watch, whether he wanted it or not. Paul smoked a minute. slowed the car and turned into a factory yard. "Now pay attention here. I'm going to show you a body. You're going to have to look at it. Can you do that?" Roy sat up straight. "Me? Why?" "Son, there's only one reason anybody ever asks you to look at a body. Can you do it?" "Sure, I can do that." Roy's stomach turned sour. Behind the whitewashed cinderblock walls of the factory, along the railroad tracks, teams of uniformed police were searching the area in a carefully laid grid. On a second track was parked a string of Union Pacific boxcars, doors opened. The coroner's wagon was backed up to the tracks. A TV news action-cam was already rolling tape. They got out and walked past the news crew, ignoring shouted questions. Then Roy saw the body, covered by a blanket, lying across the tracks. Two men bent over the body, one with a camera-- the police photographer, Frank Stein. The other cops called him Frankenstein because he seemed to enjoy his macabre work. "Got what you need, Frank?" "Got some beauties. Take a look later." He winked. The detective without the camera, Wade Billings, lifted the blanket and Roy examined the face, bruised and dirty-- brown eyes, open. Delicate nose. Skin white as a fishbelly. Hair dark and long and matted. The body was dressed in a cutaway sequined cowgirl outfit. The head was nearly severed from the slender neck. The hands were black. "Know her?" Roy stared. He had seen that outfit before, a club downtown where one of his students worked. He felt a cold thrill in his stomach. He took a deep breath. "Working clothes," Paul said. "The Club Rodeo on Van Buren. Her handbag was with the body." Still Roy said nothing. A uniformed officer approached Paul and handed him a book. Roy recognized it. "The anthology of short stories? How--" Paul licked his finger and opened the book to the flyleaf. "Her name," he said quietly. "Cynthia Callison. Your name is in here, too." Roy did not speak and he could not take his eyes off the body, the cuts, the black hands. "Must be rough, I know, one of your own students. Just say the word-- we can't find any family. We need an eyewitness i.d. for the report." Roy turned to Paul. "It's not her." The TV crew tried to shove in closer but a squad of uniforms moved them back. Another TV news van was already setting up. "What? Come on, I know it's a shock--" "It's not Cindy Callison." Okay." Paul sighed. "Whatever you say. Wade, Frank? Let's get her out of this sun." Roy felt his breakfast pushing at the back of his gorge: the girl had been cut in half at the waist. Her torso, bloused in a gold lamé halter under a white vinyl vest, lay on the roadbed. Between the ties, her bare legs twisted out of a white vinyl skirt. One white boot had come off and a crushed white hat lay nearby. There was little blood. He stood with his hands on his knees, expecting to vomit, but the nausea passed. He breathed, consciously, counting off seconds. Finally, he said, "Run over by a train?" Paul lit up another Pall Mall as the coroner's people taped paper bags over her hands, then lifted the two portions of the body onto the stretcher. As they did so, the head came loose and rolled off. One of them retrieved it, then they lifted the three parts of the body into the wagon and drove off. "Nope, don't think so. Not enough blood. Too neat. Happened somewheres else." Roy struggled to control his breathing. Of all of them, why did it have to be Cindy Callison who was mixed up in this? "Plus," Paul went on with professional detachment, "I checked the schedule with the yard boss downtown. Nothing's been through on this track since five-twenty-two last night, a switcher engine. And she wasn't here then. They're guessing she was dumped this morning." Roy felt his ears buzzing. The odor of creosote and oil stifled him-- he could not draw a clear breath. "Can we go somewhere else and do this?" Paul nodded. "Of course. I was forgetting myself." Again they ran the media gauntlet. Paul held up a hand and ducked his head as if to ward off blows. If the TV people were onto it this fast, it was going to be hard to get any peace. To work a case right, you needed a little quiet space to think, to figure. They got back in the T-bird and headed downtown. "I'll be wanting a statement from you, you understand." "Why? It's not her." "Well it sure as hell is somebody, and she's wearing the Callison girl's clothes." "There must be other--" "She never showed up for work last night. So says the bartender at the Club Rodeo." "Jesus." Roy was trying to think-- should he tell his uncle about him and Cindy? He wanted to, Eventually, Paul got to the bottom of everything. But he couldn't make the words come out. And it couldn't have anything to do with this. Paul stubbed out his Pall Mall in the overflowing ashtray and coughed. He was smoking way too much these days. The job. "I wanted you to find out from me first. It's a hell of a thing to find out on the six o'clock news." "But that doesn't necessarily mean--" "Roy. Think about it. " Roy felt a fluttering in his chest. "You mean, he's got her." Paul nodded to the windshield. "May as well face it. You saw the girl on the tracks." "Just say it, Uncle Paul." "We have to figure she's no longer among the living." Roy got control over his voice. "You figure whatever the hell you want." "If there's something you want to tell me," Paul said quietly, and waited. Roy stared at the traffic. There were so godamned many cars in this city. You never saw anybody on foot, except back across the river in Tempe at the University. He almost brought himself to speak, but Paul was already talking again. "You can help me here. We'll pull the Callison girl's driver's license picture out of the file, but the faster we get the description on the radio, the better the chances." "Five foot six or seven, tanned. Dark eyes, brown, I think. Black hair, she wore it long." Roy saw her in his mind's eye standing in the doorway of his office, hip cocked, sassy, comfortable with her body, like a woman about to enter a bedroom. Paul scribbled it all down in a notebook. "That's it? Was she good-looking?" "Sure-- she's pretty." "A little, or a lot? Come on-- help me out here." "She was gorgeous. Is. Like a model." "Lots of makeup?" "No, not like that." He pictured her two days earlier, the last day he'd seen her in class. "Very natural. Very clean." "Any disfigurements, any scars?" "Now how the hell would I know that?" Paul let it be for awhile. Then he said, "She was taking only one course, yours. I checked." He stared at Roy a second as if waiting for him to admit something. "Oh, I get it. What do you want me to say?" "Whatever needs to be said here. This is a murder investigation. Your private life has suddenly become my business." "Look, Uncle Paul-- Eileen and I are doing just great." He and his wife were having their problems, but they were seeing a counselor. It had nothing to do with this. "Fine. No need to get your back up. I had to ask." "Not all us professors sleep with our students." "Glad to hear it. Then you can help me. I am clueless as to the habits of university coeds." Paul had married a coed, Linda. His first and only love. How many years ago? He stopped himself from thinking about it. No use to dwell on that now-- the way she died had nearly destroyed him. He'd been all these years getting over it. "They don't call them coeds anymore." Roy was no longer angry. Uncle Paul had always been his favorite uncle. He was angry at himself. Eventually, he knew, he'd tell Paul everything. "The registrar gave us a class list, but I want faces." "Tell me when. I'll line them up." "Next class meeting. Somebody knows something-- that's the first rule." "I hardly knew her," Roy said. Which was strictly true. Roy had seen her in the parking lot on campus, weeks ago, after the seminar. She wore her street clothes, but he could tell she was going to work. She had that look of purpose, of time running out. He stood by his jeep and watched her fumble with her car key. She had trouble with the lock-- he almost started over to give her a hand. Instead, he just watched-- her back was to him. Her sleek black hair fell softly across the back of a cream silk blouse. As she leaned over to unlock the car, the weight of her breasts pushed out the blouse. She wore loose-fitting stone-washed jeans, all the more enticing because of the drape of denim between her flexed buttocks and her calves. He and Eileen had been having trouble, and seeing her like that he had an impulse to step quietly behind her, reach around and cup her breasts, then draw her warm and lovely body into his own. A stupid, dangerous fantasy. He knew that. Yet he looked hard and for as long as he could. It took her forever to open the car door. He watched her step in with one elegant leg, then the other. What would it be like to sit beside her, to stroke that soft denim, to feel her move under his hands? He was feeling horny and reckless, unconnected to anything else. Just before she drove off, she happened to turn his way and, recognizing him, waved. He lifted a hand in reply. "Did she hang around campus much?" "She was what we call a 'nontraditional' student-- older than usual, part-time. You know." Roy's throat felt scratchy and raw. "Twenty-eight, single." "Right." They were into the stop-and-go of downtown traffic. The heat radiated of the asphalt in waves. Outside the rolled-up windows of the big car, the motors and horns seemed faraway. "Ever see her at the club?" "What are you trying to say?" He'd gone there, but it had no bearing on this. It couldn't. Paul would misunderstand for sure. He'd have to figure out how to tell it. "Don't lie to your uncle, Roy." Roy stared out the window, remembering how she had looked the second time he saw her in the parking lot. He'd finished late and was walking to his car when he spotted her. She turned away suddenly, and Roy felt as if he'd caught her at something naughty. "Once I saw her wearing the boots and all-- going to work, I guess. I never went to the club." He realized he'd just told his first out-and-out lie. Paul nodded, giving nothing away. You never knew what was in his mind, while he listened. That's what made him a good cop. "She was an A-student, hardly ever missed class. She even came by the office last week." "What did you talk about?" "Class work. It was only a couple of minutes." Paul nodded. "Good. Start remembering stuff like that." "What were the bags for?" "Bags?" "On the hands. Paper bags." "Oh, trace evidence. Blood or skin under the fingernails, soil on the palms, like that. Paper doesn't screw up the chemistry like plastic does. Maybe we'll get lucky and find out who the hell she was. The fingerprints were burned off." Roy tried to take it all in. "What you said about the train. You're sure?" "Right. Some goddamned lunatic cut the poor girl in half himself." After he gave a brief official statement, Roy walked with Paul to the back door of the stationhouse. The place was a mob scene of cops and reporters. The hot TV lights burned every shabby corner of the briefing room. To Roy it looked like an overexposure, a surreal version of a police station. Paul pushed his way through into the parking garage. "Going to be a noisy investigation," he said shaking his head. To Paul, every distraction was "noise." He hated noise. A wiry detective appeared at Paul's elbow. "Gino can give you a lift back. He's going that way. I've got to start the process here." "Fine," Roy said. The detective looked bored. Roy had seen him around the cop shop once or twice before on visits to Paul. Gino was mid-thirties but looked younger. Dark but beardless, wearing a lightweight suit without a tie. He always seemed pulled together, unlike Wade Billings and the other sloppy detectives. "Hope it's no trouble," Roy said to Gino. "No prob. Get me out of this madhouse." Paul and Roy waited until Gino brought his unmarked blue Ford around. "Stick close," Paul said. "If she's alive, we'll find her." "Right." Paul looked at him steadily out of his gray eyes. "This hasn't hit you yet, so take it easy. If you need to call, call." "Right." "Thattaboy." Paul squeezed his shoulder, as he used to do when Roy was a kid. "And Roy? Always tell your Uncle Paul the truth." He slapped him on the back, a little too hard.
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