Desert Redemption

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Desert Redemption Page 11

by Betty Webb


  “Like finding missing goddaughters?”

  “The police are working the case.”

  “The Scottsdale PD is because Juliana’s got juice, but if Kyle’s birth mother is right, those kids are headed to Nogales, where the authorities are eyeball-deep in drug runners and God-knows-what all. I should be there helping, not poking along enjoying the scenery.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you can’t do everything?”

  “Every single day. But I can try.”

  With that, I wheeled Adila around and headed back. We had already covered ten miles of desert, and by the time we made it to the trailer, the accumulated twenty miles should be enough to satisfy the horses for a while. Other good news? Tomorrow was a Sunday, which meant no office hours. That should have made me happy, but it didn’t. Downtime can be dangerous time for me, because when I have nothing to do, my mind acts up. It always wants to take me on a forced march down Memory Lane, where monsters dwelled.

  When we walked into the Airstream, the landline was ringing. The screen said WOLF RAMIREZ, so I picked it up and hit the speaker button. Wolf had unexpectedly good news: he was bringing over a team of Pima teens to help with the house-raising.

  “I know you two have a lot going on, what with your goddaughter running off and the Chelsea thing for Harold. So I told some kids I’ve been mentoring about your situation, and they’ve volunteered to help lighten your load.”

  Before I could say it wasn’t necessary, Jimmy thanked the tribal elder and said we’d be waiting with gallons of iced tea and snacks.

  “Why’d you do that?” I asked when he hung up. “We’re doing fine by ourselves.”

  “It’s the Pima Way. Better get used to it.”

  “But not everything needs to be a group effort!”

  “Pretend we’re Amish and we’re building a barn.” His smile made me smile, too.

  Jimmy was only half joking. After so many years of operating solo, of solving my own problems and shouldering my own sorrows, I was having trouble viewing life as a shared experience. Yet, as Jimmy kept repeating, sharing was the Pima Way, especially when it came to building houses on the Rez.

  Ten minutes later Wolf drove up with a truckbed full of raven-haired Pima teens, all eager to get to work. Because diabetes on the Rez had left so many kids parentless, mentoring was a much-needed stopgap. Pima farmers mentored, Pima carpenters mentored, electricians mentored, plumbers mentored, and in some cases, Pima doctors, attorneys, and teachers mentored. Such guidance by successful adults had done a lot to deflect the drug and alcohol problems that had derailed so many young lives. I knew I shouldn’t be nervous about letting Wolf’s team work on the house, but I wasn’t Amish. I was a go-it-aloner who was already having trouble living with another person for the first time since age eighteen, when I’d aged out of Child Protective Services’ oversight. In our last meeting, my social worker had warned me I might have trouble adjusting to a “normal” lifestyle, and I’d pooh-poohed her. A mistake.

  Unsettled at the thought of watching others work on a house I would live in—and my own carpentry skills being haphazard at best—I did the one thing I was truly qualified to do: Saturday notwithstanding, I climbed into my Jeep and drove to Desert Investigations.

  At eight on Saturday morning, the Arts District is fairly dead. Because the nightlife in Old Town Scottsdale is fierce on Fridays, tourists tend to stay in bed for a while, nursing their hangovers. Well, to be honest, the same goes for some shopkeepers, too, especially the art gallery crowd. With everything being so quiet, I was able to get a lot done. I spent the first couple of hours catching up on bookkeeping, rejoicing that so many of our clients paid their bills without having to be hassled. Among them was Marie Gorsky, the soon-to-be ex-wife of Roger the Runaway. Pleased, I called her.

  “My attorney’s already drawn up the divorce papers,” she said, “but you know what I’ve been thinking?”

  I felt a moment of alarm. “Don’t tell me you want him back, not after he walked out on you like he did.”

  “I’m not that foolish. Besides, I’ve got Glen now, and he’s twice the man…” She cleared her throat. “Whatever. This whole thing with that goofy Kanati group, it’s driving me crazy trying to figure out why he’d leave me for something like that. Roger was never the religious type. When we first married I tried to get him to go to church with me, and he absolutely refused. Seems he had a bad experience with religion when he was younger, so I just let sleeping dogs lie and attended church myself. Now, all of a sudden, he’s attending Native American church services when he doesn’t have a drop of Indian blood? That makes no sense.”

  “Actually, I’m not sure Kanati is a religious group. When I was out there it came across as more of a New Age-type thing, but with better food.”

  “What do you mean, ‘better food?”

  “The group originated in France, so…” I spread my hands.

  She chuckled. “Roger always did have a big appetite. Um, I’d been thinking about driving up to talk to him, find out what was so lacking in our marriage that he chose them over me. But when I mentioned my idea to Glen, he had a fit. Maybe he’s afraid that seeing Roger might rekindle the flame, or the Kanati people might suck me in, too. I don’t want to make the same mistake twice, but to avoid that, I need to find out where I went wrong in the first place. I’m sure you can understand.”

  I did. Many of my own past relationships had gone south—Dusty, Warren, and several others—but unlike Marie Gorsky, I’d never tried to find out why. I’d just chalked it all up to Life with a capital L.

  “Are you asking me to do what I think you’re asking?”

  “I need to know why Roger left me, Lena.”

  By noon herds of tourists were streaming along Main Street and I’d finished the bookkeeping. I’d also checked in with Juliana to find out if Ali and Kyle had been spotted, and received the expected negative answer. After a quick visit to Micky D’s for a quarter-pounder, I made one more call, this time to Detective Sylvie Perrins, who professed herself undelighted to hear from me.

  “You must think I have nothing better to do than talk to you.”

  “But I can’t get through the day without hearing the lilting sound of your voice. One thing, then I’ll let you get back to doing what you’re doing. That dead woman by the office park. She get ID’d yet?”

  “You mean Unicorn Woman? We hoped the artist’s rendering would spark some public interest but it hasn’t yet.”

  “No calls at all?”

  “Plenty of calls, but turns out nobody’s looking for a blonde with a unicorn tattoo on her ass. Hey, Lena, you have any ink?”

  “Nope.”

  “Me neither. I’ve thought about it, though. Maybe a pretty Glock, or my own name and D.O.B., just in case. Don’t want my scraggly, unidentified ass to end up in the White Tanks.”

  A gravel lot near the White Tank Mountains on Phoenix’s far west side was where unidentified and unclaimed bodies were buried by a team of volunteers from the city jail. No one wanted to end up there, but unless someone identified Unicorn Woman, that’s where she was headed. Same with Reservation Woman. When I wasn’t busy, I kept seeing her filmy eyes, her matchstick arms stretched out as if attached to a cross. After all the dead people I’d seen in my life—most of them by the time I was five years old—I didn’t know why these two women haunted me so, but they did.

  “You have any new info from the Medical Examiner’s office on Unicorn Woman’s cause of death?” I asked Sylvie. “Or Reservation Woman’s?”

  “Not yet. Well, this has been boring. You need to step up your game, Lena.”

  Dial tone.

  I had a contact at the Medical Examiner’s office, so I put in a call to Pete Ventarro, but wound up on that other morgue, voice mail, which didn’t surprise me. After a booze-and-drug-fueled Friday night, the Maricopa County Forensic Sc
ience Center would be overflowing with shot, stabbed, strangled, and mangled bodies needing a pathologist’s kind attentions. I left Pete a message, stating that if at all possible, I needed to view a couple of bodies.

  Putting the body ID situation on hold momentarily, I made a quick trip up to Marie Gorsky’s house to collect some papers. After stashing them in my tote, I stopped at a gas station and fueled up the Jeep so I wouldn’t run out of gas on the way to Kanati. Just as I was pulling away from the pump, Pete Ventarro returned my call. As much as I hate yakking on the phone while driving, I made an exception in his case.

  “Hola, Lena. Sorry, but us being a secure facility and all, you can’t view anyone’s body, but I do have a photo of what’s left of 18-3271’s face, the one everyone’s calling Unicorn Woman,” he said. “I’ve also got a picture of the ink on her butt, and of both her hands. She’s got a ring, plain silver band on her right forefinger, and a gold band on her left, so there’s probably a spouse out there somewhere. If you want the pic, meet me in the parking garage in thirty.”

  “Be right there, Pete. Muchas gracias. And what…?”

  He hung up before I could ask him about Reservation Woman.

  Twenty-eight minutes later I pulled into the Forensic Science Center’s underground parking lot on West Jefferson. Pete had no business showing me the photos, but Desert Investigations had once helped his mother out of a bad spot with an ex-husband, and he owed me.

  I knew the Medical Examiner had already fingerprinted Unicorn Woman—I couldn’t bring myself to use the county’s corpse-numbering system—and obtained dental and full body X-rays, plus taken a DNA sample, and entered everything into the CODIS national database. Same with Reservation Woman. The two women had made their premiere appearance on the ME’s website, but in Unicorn Woman’s case, the decision had been made to use an artist’s sketch instead of her disturbing photograph. There had been no hits on her yet, which meant that a pauper’s burial in the White Tanks Mountains could be the ultimate fate of both women.

  As soon as I pulled into a parking space in the underground garage, Pete appeared at my door, grasping a manila folder. “Be careful who you show these to, and for God’s sake don’t mention my name. My job may be grim, but it pays the rent.”

  I nodded agreement. “I appreciate it.”

  He gave me a quick wave, then disappeared behind a panel van.

  Underground garage lighting not being optimum for viewing photographs, I drove out into the daylight and kept driving until I found a half-empty lot behind a florist shop. I removed the photos from the envelope.

  Unicorn Woman hadn’t been as fortunate as Reservation Woman. The former had lain under that mesquite tree near the business park for at least two days, and animals had visited. Both eyes were gone from her too-gaunt face, along with most of her nose and lips. But the close-up showed me two things the artist’s sketch hadn’t. Unicorn Woman’s bright, daisy-blond hair had black roots. In a different close-up, the red smear that crossed the cuticle on her left forefinger wasn’t dried blood, but a vivid alizarin crimson. Oil paint.

  Putting off my trip to Kanati, I headed back to Scottsdale, where I found Sharona Gavalan talking to a customer when I entered her art gallery. I bided my time studying Megan Unruh’s mainly black-and-gray paintings of carnage. Walking from painting to painting, I counted a dislocated jaw here, a broken ankle there, and on one canvas, a screaming face. When I reached the painting of the severed hand, I saw a splash of the same alizarin crimson I’d seen on Unicorn Woman’s forefinger.

  Sharona’s customer finally left with a framed Unruh sketch tucked under his arm. Happy to have made a sale, she smiled her way over to me. “So nice to see you again, Lena. What’s up?”

  “Did Megan wear any jewelry?”

  She shook her head. “Like most artists, she preferred to keep her hands free, but I remember seeing her wearing a silver ring once. Not some fancy Navajo silverwork, just a plain band that wouldn’t bother her while she was working.”

  “Did she get married recently, kept it on the down-low?”

  “Not her.” There was an edge to her voice I couldn’t quite identify, but I let it pass.

  “Do you know if she had any tattoos?”

  Her frown deepened. “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Let’s just say I may have a lead on her whereabouts.”

  The frown morphed into a slight smile. “A unicorn. One day she came in here all excited and flashed it at me. Said she got it at that tattoo parlor down the street. Scottsdale Ink.”

  “Where?”

  “I just told you. Scottsdale Ink.”

  “I meant on her body.”

  “Oh. On her ass.”

  Thanking Sharona for her help, I took the Medical Examiner’s photograph to Nils Quaid, one of the artists Megan shared studio space with. I asked him to do a pastel drawing of the face, making it rounder, with eyes and nose intact, and with brunette hair, instead of bright daisy yellow.

  After one brief look at the photograph, a single tear slid down his cheek. Artists had excellent facial recognition skills.

  “You’re certain?” I asked.

  “Let me show you.”

  Ten minutes later, Nils had produced a non-maimed version of the face in the photograph. As a finishing touch, he put warm brown eyes into the empty sockets.

  There could be no mistake.

  Mysterious wedding band notwithstanding, Unicorn Woman was Megan Unruh.

  Chapter Nine

  When I emailed the new sketch and Unicorn Woman’s likely ID to Sylvie Perrins, she immediately called me.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Acting on a hunch, I had an artist friend re-envision it from the sketch you guys released,” I lied.

  “What ‘artist friend’?”

  “There are so many artists in Scottsdale I can’t remember.”

  “Every day in every way I hate you more and more.”

  “The feeling’s mutual, Dahling.”

  In a different tone of voice, she said, “God, I hope you’re right about the ID. I’ve been thinking about that pauper’s cemetery…”

  Concerned that she was about to lose it, I said, “Oh, and before you take that sketch over to Megan’s mother, you need to know she’s a cold-hearted bitch.”

  “Like you, huh?”

  “And you.”

  A laugh. “Let’s not be strangers.”

  “That’ll never happen.”

  As I put my cell away, I felt a certain amount of satisfaction, but it was fleeting. Unicorn Woman may have been identified, but who was Reservation Woman?

  On Saturdays, the I-10 traffic to Ironwood Canyon isn’t heavy, so I arrived at Kanati’s front gate little more than an hour later. Ernie was in his usual spot, lounging under the sun umbrella. When I leaned over to show him my ID, he didn’t bother looking at it.

  “Word’s come down to let you in anytime you feel like dropping by,” he said. “Sorry you missed lunch. They had Coq au Vin, Fondue Savoyarde, and Pear Tarte Tatin. Working here’s gonna get me fat.”

  Considering the extraordinary lunch I’d enjoyed during my first visit, I was sorry I’d missed lunch, too. “Why, Ernie, are you planning on joining Kanati? Becoming a Believer?” I kept it light, not wanting him to be alerted to my ongoing concerns about the place. My job had taught me that whenever something appeared too good to be true, it usually was.

  Ernie chuckled. “I don’t have enough money to join this place. Besides, that New Agey ‘Elevated’ stuff’s not my thing. Phony Indian headbands and plastic beads and all? That shit’s Amateur Night. Pay’s good, though, not to mention the food. So who you looking for this time?”

  When I told him, his laugh took on a mean edge. “Good luck with him. That guy’s a jerk.”

  With those encouraging words, he waved me th
rough the gate.

  Tracking down Roger Gorsky wasn’t difficult once I enlisted the help of Gabrielle Halberd. She informed me that the runaway husband was in the movie set part of the complex, where he spent two hours a week throwing clay pots in the building named Past Times. As we walked along the old movie set’s raised board sidewalk, I passed the elderly man I had noticed during my first trip here. Not only was he the oldest person I’d seen in Kanati, he was also the crankiest. He didn’t even acknowledge my greeting. Maybe the arthritis that kept him doubled over his two canes was hurting him. Then again, maybe something in Kanati had made him unhappy. I made a mental note to have a private talk with him before I left.

  Past Times was divided into two different areas: one for painters and one for potters. Instead of the standard Kanati golf shirts, smocks were the order of the day. Gabrielle and I made our way through a group of people painting watercolors of a flower-stuffed vase, then an even larger group which had confined their artistic urges to charcoal sketches. Since I was used to the more professional products displayed in the Scottsdale galleries, I found myself less than impressed. Maybe Roger Gorsky’s work would be better. After all, he had once been a big-time CEO, which to my way of thinking, proved that he had a drive to succeed at anything he tried. At least that was the theory.

  I discovered the flaw in my theory when Gabrielle and I reached the back of the long room, where I saw five men hunched over potters’ wheels. Unlike everyone else, Roger wore no artist’s smock, just a clay-spattered tee-shirt that proclaimed SPIRITUAL GANGSTA. A few examples of his pottery skills were lined up on the table in front of him, ready to join other creations to be fired in the kiln on the building’s outdoor patio. I saw lopsided pots unusable as flower vases, and mugs guaranteed to leak any liquid poured into them. Looking at his collection of talentless handiwork I wondered how, given Kanati’s French origins, its artistic standards could be so low. None of those pieces deserved firing. The most charitable thing that could be said about Roger Gorsky’s pots was that he was relatively new to the world of creative expression. The least charitable? That he had no talent.

 

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