New River Blues (4 page)

‘More on the stairs,' Menendez said. ‘I'll get Roy.' The photographer planted numbered tags as they went down the broad staircase and along the hall like children on an Easter-egg hunt – seven candies by the time they reached the front step.

‘And a pile over by the fountain, look,' Sarah said. ‘Oh, and I bet that's the dish they belong in. Isn't that odd?'

‘Is it? I don't know much about candy dishes.' Menendez bent over it, a blown-glass bonbon dish with a fluted edge and a handle pulled up out of the middle, all fashioned in one fiery shaping by a skillful hand.

‘I don't mean the dish, I mean the candy. A shooter with a sweet tooth?'

‘It is a little different,' Menendez said, ‘but hey, this is police work.' They followed Roy as he went back and took the pictures, then bagged the bowl and candy and went down to the little room off the foyer to write evidence tags.

They were standing at the little table under the ceiling light, Menendez writing a tag for the candy and Sarah squinting at Lopez' notes about witnesses, when an argument erupted in the hall above them. It cut through the bustle in the house, a young voice, female, talking loud as she thumped along the hall. Aroused but not frightened, she was angrily challenging the male voice telling her she was not allowed in the house.

‘Allowed my ass,' the voice insisted, ‘I live here! Mother, where are you?'

Ray and Sarah looked at each other, dropped what they were holding, and ran to help.

The commotion reached the far end of the hall as they got to the top of the stairs. A girl shouted again, ‘Mother?' and an officer's voice insisted she must not go any further. At the door to the master bedroom she called once more, ‘Mo—' and then her voice was quenched like a doused candle as she saw the horror on the bed. She stood transfixed, her back rigid, for two electric seconds before she began to scream.

Delaney was breaking off his phone call, walking toward the door shaking his head, saying, ‘I told you not to let anybody—' and the officer behind her, Quarles, fresh on duty for what now promised to be a terrible day, protesting, ‘She got in the house somehow, what do you want me to do, shoot her?'

Sarah ran past Quarles and wrapped her arms around the caterwauling girl. The ranch skills of her upbringing came back to her in response to the quivering body hot against her chest. Instinctively, she talked soft nonsense while she patted and stroked, soothing with hands and voice as she would any frightened animal.

‘Sshh, sshh, sshh, OK now, over here, that's right, just come with me.' She eased the hysterical girl away from the horror on the bed, walked her back into the hall. Menendez was there, ready to help, looking a question. Sarah met his eyes and pointed one finger. He leaned and opened a door to one of the other bedrooms in the hall, then came and wrapped his bulk around Sarah and the still-screaming girl. Together they eased her into the clean, quiet room and closed the door.

The next half-hour was very hard work – ‘One of those times we earn our pay,' Menendez said later. They didn't know her name or anything about her beyond the fact that she seemed to be a daughter who belonged there. Her hysteria lapsed into hiccoughing sobs that transitioned into nausea. Holding her shoulders over the toilet, Sarah muttered, ‘Victim's Services,' and Menendez stepped into the hall to call them. As soon as she stopped retching the girl reached some new level of rage and turned it on Sarah, hitting and kicking. Sarah yelled for help. Menendez and Quarles were in the room with them in seconds, wrapping the screaming girl in a sheet. Even so Sarah got a bloody nose and a torn shirt.

When the girl calmed down enough to ask them to take off the restraints, Sarah asked her name. That seemed to shock her again. She must have lived a life in which everybody around her knew who she was. Suddenly apologetic, she pulled a wallet out of the pocket of her shorts and showed them a driver's license made out to Patricia Henderson.

‘We've got the whole place staked out,' Quarles said. ‘How'd you get in here?'

‘Same way I always do, through the hedge and in the side door to the kitchen.' She was a student at the university, she said, she had an eight o'clock class. ‘But yesterday was my birthday, I was at a sleepover with my buds.' She'd come home early to shower and change, ‘and to ask Mom if I could have . . .' Then the realization hit her that there was now no one to ask, and she gave way to a fresh burst of weeping. All the fight went out of her, she was going limp even before Victim's Services got there with offers of a quiet place to rest, a counselor to talk to, a mild tranquilizer.

She almost took the whole package. Sarah saw her actually lean toward the pill, longing for some relief from this horror. But at the last second she roused her powerful personality and said, ‘No, wait!' Her clear blue eyes met Sarah's, suddenly wide open with a wild hope. ‘You're not sure – are you? They might not be . . .' She was standing in an instant, vibrating with energy.

‘Patricia,' Sarah said, ‘I can't let you go back in that room. We'll have them identified, probably in hours. Certainly by tomorrow.'

‘Listen . . . cop lady—'

Sarah pointed to her badge. ‘Detective.' But the girl was so young, and that was probably her mother on the bed. ‘Sarah.'

‘Sarah, if it was your parents would you be willing to wait?'

‘No. But see,' Sarah kept her voice calm, ‘there's a protocol at crime scenes, we always do the—'

‘
Protocol?
' She was going up in smoke again, her voice like brazen trumpets. ‘My parents' bedroom is full of dead people and I'm supposed to care about fucking protocol? For Jesus Christ's sake, what kind of a—'

‘Hold on, hold on, calm
down
now.' Sarah began stroking and soothing again. ‘Just
wait
a minute and I'll see what I can do.' The woman from Victim's Services was shaking her head.

Delaney shook his harder. ‘She should never have gotten up here,' he said. ‘What are you thinking? We can't have this crime scene mucked up any more than it already is.'

Sarah said, ‘Boss, however she got in, she's here now and she needs to know.' He put on his stubborn face, shook his head some more, till Sarah repeated Patricia Henderson's question, ‘If it was your parents, would you want to wait?'

‘Oh, hell,' Delaney said, ‘no, of course not. OK, make it quick, the ME's on his way.'

Sarah found a clean sheet and got Gloria to help her lay it gently over the ruined faces. A daughter would be able to identify chest and arms, surely. They pulled up a sheet to cover the victims' lower nakedness.

Even so she began to doubt herself when it was time to bring the girl in. ‘You have to promise not to touch anything and you can stop any time,' she said at the door. ‘And listen, if you start screaming again the sergeant will throw us both out.' Delaney stood in the middle of the room with his face like a rock.

But Patricia had herself firmly in hand now. She didn't falter till she got near the bed. Then she focused on her mother's hands and reached out toward them involuntarily, making little mewling sounds. ‘Oh, Mummer, look at that, my sweet Mummerdummer, oh no no no—'

Sarah held her on one side, Menendez on the other. Sarah said softly, ‘Patricia. You're sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure.' She turned impatiently and a few tears flew off her face on to Sarah's, warm little drops that felt shockingly intimate. ‘Those are her rings, the way she always wears them, see? All the diamonds on her left hand, the pearl cluster on the right index finger and the emerald on the pinkie . . . and her third finger's crooked, see? She's always had those little freckles on the tops of her arms, doesn't she have pretty arms? Oh my sweet crazy Mother,' she was sobbing again, ‘you silly nut, what kind of a mess did you get yourself into this time?'

She wiped tears off her face, sniffling, struggling for self-control. Her voice breaking, she told Sarah, ‘She doesn't have a mean bone in her body, you know that? I mean I know she's a space case and lately she's been going looney-tunes over men and parties and so on, but even so . . . who would do a terrible thing like this to a sweet person like my mother?'

Delaney was across the room, shuffling his feet in the carpet, wanting the girl gone. Sarah thought basic decency required letting her have a couple of minutes to grieve. But she was anxiously aware, too, of all the work waiting, the ME probably unloading at the curb right now. So she braced herself to move the girl to the other side of the bed, hoping the lamentations for her father would be shorter.

But Patricia Henderson gave one long, shuddering sigh, wiped her face again and glanced briefly at the body lying next to her mother. She sniffled indifferently and said, ‘Well, and I guess this must be the Flavor of the Week over here, huh? Who is he, do you know?'

Sarah saw Delaney quit punishing the rug and lean forward a little, listening.

‘Patricia,' she said, ‘this man is not your father?'

‘My
fa
-ther?' Patricia hissed softly through her front teeth, a sound somewhere between contempt and amusement. ‘This little dweeb with no hair on his arms? Not hardly.' She blew her nose, found a fresh tissue in her pocket, and wiped her face. ‘Look, he's wearing a ring with the set missing, how dumb is that?' Her voice was beginning to sound almost like the strong, confident scrapper who'd come raging up the stairs. ‘My father . . .' Her voice trailed off into a little choke. She swallowed and came back with an entirely different voice, full of irony and stifled rage. ‘My father, if and when he condescends to come home, will be the big guy with arms like a gorilla, and hands . . .' Her voice changed again, a note of pride mixed in with the anger. ‘He's got one short finger that he cut off years ago in a bandsaw. He bandaged it up and went right back to work.' She reached out longingly toward the woman on the bed but dropped her hands before they touched anything. ‘Now I've told you my Mom's favorite story about him.'

THREE

S
outhbound on I-10 at sunrise, Roger Henderson gripped the wheel and got ready to change lanes. Then traffic closed in ahead of him and he saw he had no choice but to stay with the flow in the packed lanes under the 202 Interchange south of Phoenix.
Damn, you can't get up early enough to beat rush hour on this road anymore.

Even as he groused to himself he knew he was blowing a little smoke, to cover the guilt he felt over the whole weekend. He felt wretched about missing yesterday's party at home, and about the too-late phone call that didn't appease his wife. But he couldn't explain – there would be bloody hell if Eloise ever learned the truth about where he'd been.

And now he'd even have to calm down his secretary, who by the time he reached his office would be jumpy from fielding a dozen irritable queries about where her boss was. He dreaded the half-truths he'd have to try to keep track of all morning – damn! Tell one necessary lie and all the truth around it begins to sound fishy.

To take his mind off the demeaning need to make excuses, he rehearsed today's first phone calls. Get Ruth to move the Dahlberg meeting to the afternoon. Ask her to find Dan, remind him the big earth-mover had to be at Quail Run by eleven. Call the railroad to find out what in hell had happened to the last shipment of rebar – shunted off on some siding in New Mexico, probably, but whose computer keystroke was going to locate it?

Call Jennings at the bank, nail down the extension on the Hen-Trax line of credit that he'd seemed so tentative about last Thursday. Maybe call the Rio Nuevo office first, find out if there was any movement at all on Gray Hawk Terrace. His bankers had quit laughing, some months back, at jokes about how long it took to move urban-renewal projects out of committee. The subprime-mortgage crisis had virtually stalled his home-construction projects, so they wanted to see some other revenue streams flowing. Well, who didn't? Damn! They had loved his rapidly growing cash flow during the great years just past. Now they wanted to take a pass on the lean years that always follow booms, but he was trying to hold their feet to the fire, to keep his credit line open till he got something new started up.

It certainly wasn't his fault that plans for Rio Nuevo kept changing. The whole ‘New River' concept had become an ironic joke early on, when it was determined that there wasn't enough water to rehydrate the dry Santa Cruz channel through town. And since the downtown renewal project had been wrongly named to begin with, it probably should have come as no surprise that it went through agonizing bouts of committee meltdown and political grandstanding. Not to mention time-consuming protests from citizen groups alarmed at the passing of the traditional Desert Southwest values everybody agreed were so intrinsic to the Tucson way of life. Roger shared that concern, actually, but felt some ambiguity about whose values they were all talking about – the pioneers who settled the place, or the Spanish who were there before them? How about the tribes that had occupied the valley for unknown centuries before? And the hordes of seniors from up north who were invading the valley now, armed with good green retirement money? It was an interesting debate, but it all took time, and the project was running out of that.

But the planning was done now, the first few projects built had turned out to be very attractive, and if he could just get the committee to confirm that he'd been picked for the Gray Hawk Terrace job, he knew everything else would fall into place. It was down to two of them, everybody else had been eliminated or dropped out during this long design phase. But Ames & Proctor had the resources to hang on, and the big Las Vegas firm had made all the modifications and posted the bond. He still liked his own design better and hoped his being local would tilt the committee his way.