Kissing Arizona (2 page)

After Artie left she'd walked the alley with them, making notes as they explained how they'd followed their electronic tracking toys in here, looking for their hidden treasure. They tried briefly to impress her with statistics, telling her how many more than five hundred caches each of them had logged, all over the country. They gave up on that brag when they saw that her look of disbelief contained no admiration.

‘Just show me what you did,' she said, and they all raised their GPS units and showed her the arrow on the face, and the digital printout of distance.

‘When all our units were reading eight or ten feet we stopped and looked around,' Phil said, ‘and right away we all said, “Up there on that rubble heap.” You get a feel for these sites after a while. We could see it was the best hiding place around.'

‘But couldn't you smell this box before you found it?'

‘Sure,' Huffie said, ‘and I said, “Oh, damn, there must be something dead right close to it.” So we were kind of careful how we pulled off that trash.'

‘But soon as we got it uncovered,' Dick said, ‘we could tell the smell was coming from the box.' He had his back to it, trying not to look at it any more.

And she believed them when they said it was still exactly where they had found it. A three-foot square tub of cement and body parts was obviously very heavy, and was not going to be easy to pull down across old splintered boards and broken glass. A ball-and-socket joint and the top portion of what looked like a humerus protruded a couple of inches above the top of the cement that filled the plastic tub right to the brim. Any flesh that had hung on the bones had been eaten or weathered away, but a few strands of hard brown tissue clung to the undersides. The stench of death was still quite strong and added to the creepiness of the alley, where decay seemed to be attacking the buildings themselves.

Phil's voice wobbled a little when he asked her, ‘You think that's a human in the cement?'

‘A body anyway. Or parts of one,' Sarah said. ‘The box looks too small for a whole grown-up, but that bone's too big for a child.' She felt relief in her chest when she said that, and saw the feeling echoed in their faces. She was also glad to be able to add, ‘But I'm no expert, so I called a crime scene unit. They'll be here shortly. In the meantime will you just go through this one more time with me? What exactly did you touch?'

She made notes of everything they said, then made them promise to call the crime lab and make a date to be fingerprinted, a prospect that clearly pleased them. When she thought they'd covered everything, just as she was getting ready to send them on their way, Dick suddenly said, ‘Now would you like to hear about the cache?'

‘What? You went ahead and . . . you said you didn't touch . . .'

‘It wasn't right by the box,' Phil said hastily. ‘We all watch CSI, we knew we weren't supposed to go near that any more. We didn't even intend to look for the cache, but then . . .'

‘Dick walked a few feet along the bottom of the rubble heap and said, “Doesn't that pile of rocks right there look kind of . . . arranged?” and we both said he was right,' Huffie added, pointing. ‘You want to see it?'

They showed her where to stand, a dozen feet or so from the box. She said, ‘I still can't see it.'

‘I know,' Huffie said proudly. ‘It's a pretty good hide. But if you move this rock and this one . . .'

‘I still don't see anything.'

They all made little satisfied sounds, like, ‘Heh, heh,' and then Dick reached and picked a small dark box out of the rubble heap, saying, ‘Yeah, it's a pretty good match.'

‘And when we saw it,' Phil said, ‘we all had the same thought, that maybe it would be helpful if we opened it up and told you what it said.'

‘Oh? Why? What does it say?'

‘Well, here, we'll show you.' He opened the flat metal box and scrolled it out. ‘See, the log always says how long the cache has been in place, and when it was last found.'

Huffie pointed a careful finger. ‘This one was placed here the first of last October, see? Four months, two weeks and two days ago, to be precise.' His face showed her how much pleasure he took in being precise.

‘Yeah, and it's been found more than thirty times,' Dick said, ‘but for some reason, not so much lately. The last time anybody signed for this cache, before today, was February fourteenth. Three days ago.'

‘So probably this box of cement got dumped here since then.'

‘Unless somebody with a bad cold was geocaching on the fourteenth,' Phil said.

‘Have to be the worst sinus infection ever, right? Look, I need to keep this log book for a while. I don't need the whole cache, but I suppose it should all stay together, shouldn't it?' Sarah stuffed the little notebook back in the box and clipped it shut. ‘Is there a way for me to notify the owner that his site is . . . uh . . .'

‘Muggled,' Phil said.

‘Oh, yeah? That's what you call it?' They all nodded happily and she laughed. ‘You guys do have fun, don't you? Listen, I don't want a stream of gawkers down here, what can we do about that?'

‘I know Aces High,' Huffie said. ‘The owner of this cache. I could phone him up and ask him to archive it and not talk about it.'

‘Archived means it's out of order?'

‘Yup.'

‘That would be good,' Sarah said, ‘but do you really think there's a chance he can resist talking about it?'

‘It does seem like kind of a stretch, doesn't it? Should I tell him to get in touch with you?'

‘Do that, will you? And email me his phone number. Then if he doesn't call me I'll call
him
and describe how unpleasant police investigators can get if you cross them.'

She smiled into the white-bearded face of Huffie the Horrible, and he smiled back and said, ‘Bet you're good at that.'

Dick said, ‘Can we log it?'

‘No,' Sarah said. ‘Later.'

They all looked at each other. Phil shrugged.

‘Just as well,' he said. ‘I mean, think about it. It's the best thing we've ever had to put in a comment box, and the detective says we can't even mention it.'

‘You be good guys and help me now,' Sarah said, ‘and when this is over I'll see you get a commendation and a pip of a story for the comment box.'

‘All
right
,' Naughty Dick said. He put his elbow against Phil's shoulder and tapped on his fist. ‘Hear that, Punxy? We're gonna be heroes.'

‘About damn time,' Phil said.

Now they were gone, and Sarah was waiting for the crime scene unit to finish up. Watching the numbers on her watch scroll past noon, she washed her energy bar down with one careful sip of water and slid her seat back. There were no rest rooms within easy driving distance of the corner of Seventeenth and Park. She was counting on the sweat she'd lost walking the alley with Team Low Gears to keep her bladder empty enough to last till the ME's van arrived.

Meantime she had nothing to do but think, and no reason not to think about the crime scene report she'd left on her computer. She put her head back and closed her eyes. Traffic faded to white noise as her mind went back to Monday, when she'd first seen Tom and Nicole Cooper in front of their dead parents' house.

When the summons to a homicide scene called her out of the shower that morning just after six, Sarah woke Denny and told her she was on her own for getting to school. No big sweat, because they always did a checklist of clothes and school supplies the night before, in case of a work call like this. The upside of taking in a previously neglected kid like Denny Lynch was that she knew how to get her own breakfast and board the bus on time.

The crime scene was in Colonia Solana, a residential area that bordered on Reid Park. Built in the fifties, the neighborhood featured sprawling brick ramblers on one-acre lots with huge trees. The Cooper house was typical, hand-split shakes over red brick with a great deal of white-painted woodwork, three carports filled with a big SUV, a crossover and a sleek red Porsche convertible. Neighborhood streets were curving, and punctuated with speed bumps to keep traffic slow. The sweeping curve in front of the house was lined with TPD vehicles by the time she arrived, so she parked by the curb across the street.

The officer guarding the crime scene checked her in, held up the tape that crossed the sparsely-graveled yard and told her to go around to the back door. ‘And stay on the gravel, please, we're trying to keep everybody off the brick sidewalk and away from the front door.' She picked her way around huge clumps of overgrown agave and prickly pear to the back door, where she put on booties and gloved up.

A uniform she didn't know told her, ‘Press down hard on the latch, it's not locked but it opens hard.'

She entered a recently remodeled kitchen. Top-of-the-line stainless-steel fixtures and granite countertops, an island with a butcher-block top, all looked barely used. She crossed into a dining room filled with older furniture, a mahogany table and sideboard. Delaney was standing in the middle of a long dim living room with two detectives, Jason Peete and Leo Tobin. The room had a big picture window across the front, but it was double-draped with white sheers and lined chintz drapes. The sparse light in the room came from end-table lamps with small bulbs.

Delaney looked across the other two detectives and said, ‘Ah, Sarah, good, you're just in time. You can go along with Jason and Leo, see the bodies first. It's through that door there and down the hall. Leo's going to be primary and Jason's got the scene. Come back here and see me as soon as you're done over there, Sarah, will you?' Not waiting for an answer, he began punching numbers into his phone.

Leo and Jason left his side and walked toward the door into the hall, where they turned and waited for her. Jason was a buffed-up black man who had sported glorious dreadlocks while he worked in an undercover drug unit, then switched to an elegantly sculpted jawline beard and soul patch when he was assigned to a gang squad. Homicide rules said only conventional hair and minimal mustache if any, so Jason had gone overboard as usual and shaved every hair off his head. Now he had a nervous new habit of patting the top of his naked dome.

Tobin was in his late forties, with a retreating hairline and weathered body that he kept in reasonably decent shape by hiking in the mountains. He had a long-standing interest in local history, loved old mining claims and ghost towns, and was everybody's go-to guy for where to find petroglyphs and ancient ruins.

When she caught up with the two men at the door, Sarah, whose summons had not included much information beyond this address and ‘homicide', asked them, ‘Two victims, is that right?'

‘Man and wife, yes. Both here in the hall,' Leo said. He opened the door and they filed in. ‘Shee. Look at this mess.'

The smells were very strong in the enclosed space. Sarah took shallow breaths at first to get acclimated. After a couple of minutes, the intellectual effort to take in other impressions crowded out the discomfort. From then on she breathed normally.

They were in a long hall with doors opening along the left-hand side. The entire right wall was windows shaded by a wide overhang, looking on to a pool and bushes.

The woman's body was nearest, lying on its side facing away. There was a spray of blood up to about four feet on the wall behind her, chunks of bloody tissue stuck to the molding lower down. But most of her blood had soaked the carpet and spread out in a stain all around her.

‘I can't see a wound,' Sarah said. ‘Can you?' Leo was four inches taller.

‘No.'

A crime scene tech, booted and gloved like themselves, was standing in an unsoiled patch of carpet beyond the woman, taking pictures.

Beyond her, the ME crouched over a second body at the end of the hall. Splatters of blood and bloody tissue, rapidly browning, clung to the walls, floor and ceiling in a great wide swathe behind that second body.

‘Ah, Greenberg.' Jason said.

‘Well, The Animal always claims to like a challenge,' Leo said, ‘this ought to suit him fine.' Dr Greenberg owed his nickname to his liking for extreme athletic feats, hundred-mile runs and cross-country bike rides. He was so fit he seemed to vibrate if you got too close.

‘Did Delaney give you a take on this?' Sarah asked them. ‘Who called it in?'

‘Housekeeper,' Leo said. ‘She got hysterical and started to shake shortly after we got here, so Delaney had a uniform take her to Emergency.'

‘The housekeeper lives in? How come she didn't hear the shots?'

‘She doesn't live here. She found the bodies when she came to work.'

‘At six in the morning?'

‘Five thirty – that's when the call was clocked.'

‘What kind of a housekeeper starts work at five thirty?'

‘
I
don't know,' Leo said impatiently. ‘Maybe she'll come back here after she calms down and tell us what kind of a housekeeper she is.'

‘Helluva mess down there,' Jason said, squinting toward the other body. ‘Lot more of him spread around, did you notice?'

‘Shot standing up, looks like. In a hall with no chairs, why not?'

‘But I wonder why their spatter pattern's so different,' Jason said. ‘Like she was leaning over, or . . . what?'

‘Let's see the other side,' Sarah said. ‘Looks like they want us to walk on these pads.' They crossed by the window, in single file, and huddled in a clear spot in the middle of the hall. From over here, it looked as if the woman had been shot in the ear, or just in front of it. A thin line of blood had streaked down her cheek from there, and dripped on to the carpet until it congealed in a short stalactite off her chin.