Valley of Shadows

by Cooper, Steven

  Suddenly, Gus’s vision resonates. “So you built tunnels?” Mills asks.

  “It seemed that way. They were really just hallways with low ceilings. But you know, when you excavate, it does sort of look like a drug trafficking operation.”

  Preston says, “It seems kind of sinister when you put it that way, but did you actually have any idea what you were building?”

  David sits there blinking, his mouth closed. He tilts his head the way people often do when they’re perplexed. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “Based on the design of the space, based on the plans you were following, did you have a sense of what the space would be used for?” Lightbulb. It’s all over the contractor’s face. “Oh! I see! Right, well, I don’t really know for sure. But it seemed to me like underground storage space. For supplies, maybe. Or tables and chairs for big functions. I mean, most churches have to put that stuff somewhere.”

  “Can you remember how the rooms were divided?” Mills asks him. “How many rooms? How they varied in size?”

  David rubs his chin, shakes his head slowly, thoughtfully, “Oh, God. This goes back a while. I can’t be sure. I never really gave it much thought until the reporter called me out of the blue. But, let’s say, maybe six to ten rooms. One really big room with several smaller ones surrounding it. Like maybe an office plan. With workers in the middle and managers in private rooms all around them. Something like that.” “I can’t think of many offices that are completely underground,” Preston says.

  David leans forward, now, rests his arms at the edge of his desk. “I realize that, Detective, but I was just trying to describe the space, which is what you asked me to do . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Preston says. “You’re right. We know it probably wasn’t used as an office. But do you have any idea of its intended use? Did you ever ask? Did anyone ever mention during the course of construction what the use might be? Either the contractors or the church people?” “I can’t really remember. Except storage. I don’t think I reached that conclusion on my own. Someone must have said something about storage.” The guy takes a deep breath.

  “We’re exhausting you,” Mills says. “We’re sorry. Our work is exhaustive.”

  David shakes his head. “No. No, it’s fine. I’m just not sure what the construction, itself, has to do with anything.”

  “Ah,” Mills says. “I get it. This all seems very broad to you. Indulge us. The construction is important, because if we have to, let’s say, search the place, it helps to have an insider who can help us understand all the nooks and crannies, if I may borrow a stupid phrase from an English muffin.”

  David laughs. “Oh, right. A search. Of course. Maybe you should give me a little more time to really focus on my memories. I might be able to remember more details of the floor plan if you give me a few days to think about it.”

  “We’re not saying a search is imminent, and you must not even discuss that possibility outside of this trailer,” Preston cautions him. “But yes, focus. See what you can remember. If and when we need your assistance, we’ll let you know.”

  “In the meantime,” Mills begins, “it’s time to talk more specifically about Aaliyah Jones and Viveca Canning.”

  The guy looks at his watch. Mills realizes David Patrick has a building to build, twenty-two tightly squeezed units. But Mills’s clock is ticking too. Instead of Mickey Mouse on the face of his watch, it’s a scowling Jake Woods.

  “Do you have a few more minutes?” Mills asks him.

  “I think so.”

  “Just tell me if Aaliyah Jones ever saw the so-called underground of the church,” Mills says.

  David’s shoulders pop up. “I doubt it. But I can’t say for sure. Not to my knowledge.”

  “Viveca Canning?” Preston asks.

  “Yep.”

  “Yep, what?” Mills asks him.

  “Yeah. She saw the underground space,” David replies. “Aaliyah introduced us. Viveca paid me to show her what was down there.”

  “How much?” Preston asks.

  “Is that really relevant?” the guy asks back.

  “We can decide that once we have all the facts, David,” Mills answers.

  “Fifteen hundred dollars. I felt really weird taking the money, but she insisted.”

  A plane whizzes overhead into Sky Harbor.

  “If you showed her the underground, why are you so sketchy about the details?” Mills asks him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When did this meeting with Viveca take place, David?” Mills asks.

  “About a month ago, maybe a month and a half.”

  “Since you showed her the underground fairly recently, why are you still relying on your memories from the construction phase?”

  David waves his hands in the air. “No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t physically show it to her. I couldn’t go in the cathedral with her,” he explains. “She said they wouldn’t let nonmembers in beyond a certain point. So I waited outside. But I told her how to get there.”

  “How do you get there?” Preston asks.

  “It’s weird,” he says. “You get there from, like, this elevator thing in the stadium. It’s in the middle of the stage, and it goes down two floors. First, to the main floor, and then to the underground.”

  “From the stage?” Mills asks.

  “Yep.”

  It’s the hydraulic lift that elevates Gleason Norwood to stage level. Mills is sure of it.

  “Was she carrying a key?” Mills asks.

  “I’m not sure. She had a big pocketbook.”

  Mills’s phone buzzes. It’s a text message from Lt. Chang in Scottsdale.

  “Do you need a key to access the underground area after you get off the elevator?” Preston asks.

  “I think so,” David says. “We installed doors. I imagine they had locks, but I don’t remember.”

  “What happens when you get off the elevator?” Mills asks.

  “You just end up in a long hallway with a low ceiling,” he says. “And, yes, I think it leads to a door. But it’s a while before you hit the door, ’cause it’s a really long hallway.”

  “How long was Viveca in there?” Mills asks him.

  “Twenty or twenty-five minutes, I guess,” he replies. “But I was just waiting in the parking lot. I didn’t time her, you know . . .”

  Preston shifts in his chair, goes avuncular again, this time all posture; he folds an arm across his stomach, bends the other so his chin can rest inside his hand. And nods. So Uncle Ken. “We know you didn’t time her, David. That wouldn’t be our expectation. But what did she tell you when she came out? We’d expect you to remember that.” “Right,” he says. “I do. She was totally freaked out. She came out shaking.”

  Mills sits up. “What did she say?”

  “That’s the thing—she didn’t say much.”

  “Aw, come on, man, she had to have said something,” Mills insists. “I know. I know. But this was very recent. So I remember it exactly how I’m telling you. She came out of that place like she had seen a ghost or something. I thought she was going to have a heart attack.” “And that was it? Did she drive off and never see you again?” Preston asks.

  The guy nods. “Yeah. She paid me,” he says. “And then she walked over to her car. I got out and followed her and asked her if she was okay to drive, ’cause, you know, she didn’t look okay. I even asked what happened in there, and she just kept shaking her head and saying she couldn’t talk about it, and I was getting freaked out just because she was freaked out. She said someday Aaliyah Jones would expose the whole truth. And that was it. She got in her car and drove away. There was not a whole lot more I could do after that.”

  Mills rises from the chair. Preston follows. “Thank you, David,” Mills says. “You’ve been a tremendous help. It might not feel that way, but you have.” He hands the contractor his card. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

  David Patrick wa
lks the detectives back to their car. The outside greets them with a glaring sun. Handshakes all around. “Good luck with Magic Creek,” Mills tells the man.

  “Oh, that’s just some stupid name the developer came up with.”

  Mills laughs. He figured as much.

  They’re only in the car for about thirty seconds when Preston says, “We have to get into that basement.”

  Mills nods, but doesn’t reward Uncle Obvious with an obvious affirmation.

  With a ball of lead in his stomach and butterflies in his chest, displaced from his stomach by the lead, Mills dials his son. And immediately understands his fret as pointless. You can fret, fret, fret, and fret, and then get voice mail. He gets voice mail. Doesn’t leave a message. He can’t qualify the anticlimactic sensation; it’s just there, relief and protracted dread. He tosses his phone on his desk and that seems to be the cue for his landline to ring.

  “Mills.”

  “Hey, Alex? It’s Liv Chang. From Scottsdale PD.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry. I got your text . . .”

  “No prob. Got a sec?”

  “Or more . . .”

  “We have an ID on that license plate from the Carmichael and Finn break-in,” she says. “Not an easy task. We had to do enhancements of the enhancements to read the tag and get the right make and model. Sorry it took so long.”

  “I’ve been there, done that many times. No problem. Who’s your driver?”

  “The owner of the vehicle is a Ralph Waters, thirty-two, lives in South Scottsdale.”

  “You find any connection between Mr. Waters and the Cannings?”

  “Only that he wanted to break into their vault,” she says. “Other than that, no. We’re headed over now to execute a search warrant, probably to make an arrest. Meet us there, if you’d like.”

  Mills looks at his watch. 2:41. He tells the detective he can be there shortly after three.

  “No rush,” she tells him. “I think we’ll be there a while.”

  She gives him the address.

  He sends Powell a text

  Powell replies

 

 

 

 

  He hates “k.”

  After a quick but powerful whizz, Mills is in the driver’s seat, Powell shotgun. The house in South Scottsdale is one of those rectangles on a slab, a 60s-style ranch with zero curb appeal and a driveway laden with so many cracks it looks like a concrete jigsaw puzzle. They meander an obstacle course of Scottsdale cruisers and enter the home. It’s a clusterfuck of cops. They find Lt. Liv Chang questioning her suspect at a kitchen table that, for reasons unknown to Mills, is sitting toward the back of the house in the formal living room. Kind of deformalizes the room.

  “So, how is it that you have no connection to Mrs. Canning but you happened to know where she stores her art?” Chang is asking the suspect.

  Ralph Waters is wearing a white t-shirt and, from what Mills can see under the table, grey cargo shorts. Ralph Waters must like to gamble. Poker or blackjack, Mills assumes. That would explain the heart, the spade, the club, and the diamond tattooed up his forearm.

  He placed a bad bet on the Carmichael and Finn Gallery, to be sure. “I told you I was just helping out a friend.”

  “But so far your friend doesn’t seem to have a name,” Chang says. Then, noticing Mills and Powell, she makes the introductions. “Detective Mills and Detective Powell are investigating the murder of Viveca Canning.”

  Waters stiffens. He sits up from his languid position, eyes Mills and Powell nervously, as if the two have already framed him for the crime. “I certainly had nothing to do with that,” he says, the emphasis on “I,” which Mills knows is highly significant.

  “I was just about to have him taken in for more questioning,” Chang says to Mills. “Glad you could swing by. He’s been Mirandized.” Mills looks at Ralph Waters and says, “Since you’re suspected of trying to break into her vault, you’re a person of interest to us.”

  “Great,” the guy says. He sounds yawny, as if he’d been woken from his three o’clock nap.

  “You’re facing some serious charges, you realize,” Chang says. “I’m thinking you’ll do better with the county attorney if you cooperate. But that’s up to you . . .”

  “Don’t I get my own lawyer?” Waters grumbles.

  “That’s up to you too,” Chang replies. “But we asked you if you wanted a lawyer present a few minutes ago, and I think your exact words were, ‘I got nothing to hide.’ You’re free to change your mind.” The guy pushes at the chair and slides it away from the table. The chair scrapes the tile floor and makes a screeching sound that could pierce an eardrum or curdle blood. Mills can now see Waters’s handcuffed wrists resting in his lap. “Going somewhere?” Mills asks him.

  The guy makes a spitting sound. “I just need more space,” he says. “If you’re a guy who needs more space,” Chang says, “you won’t be all that comfortable in the county jail. You have a lawyer?”

  Waters shakes his head. “No.”

  “I’m going to ask you one more time. Want us to get you one?” Waters shrugs.

  “That’s not an answer,” Chang says. “And you’re trying my patience.”

  Waters studies the floor, and Chang yields to the introspection in much the way Mills would; pieces of the truth often emerge during these interludes, usually starters like, “I can tell you this,” or “You should be talking to . . .”

  The noise of the search warrant, meanwhile, fills the house: the opening and closing of doors, cabinets, and drawers, a swarm of footsteps, the snap of rubber gloves. Uniforms everywhere. Serious voices. It would intimidate the fuck out of me, Mills thinks. For him, it’s always about empathy, at least to the extent of knowing where the suspect’s head is at. He knows so many hardened, crusty cops who bristle at the idea of empathy, who equate it with sympathy, and that’s why few of them can make it as detectives. He likes the way Chang works too. He sees something in her, a steely intelligence that transcends her job; he guesses she’s smart about the whole world.

  “All I’m gonna say is this,” Waters begins. “I don’t know Mrs. Canning. I never knew Mrs. Canning. I don’t know nothing about her art. Except I know she’s really rich. I’m not going to answer any questions about her murder. But I’ll tell you what I did that night at the gallery.”

  Chang checks that her recorder is still rolling.

  A cop ducks his head in. “We’ve got drugs,” he says.

  “Aw, shit,” cries Ralph Waters. “Really?”

  The cop nods. Chang closes her eyes for a second and shakes her head. Everyone sort of defers to her frustration. “OK. One thing at a time. If there are additional charges, we’ll deal with those later,” she says. “What kind of drugs?”

  “So far pot and some pills,” the cop says.

  “How much pot?” Chang asks.

  “I don’t know,” the cop groans. “It’s a lot, but it’s not like I’ve weighed it, Lieutenant.”

  “Keep me posted,” she says, as a means to dismiss her colleague. She turns back to Waters who sits there pouting, an aging slacker in a shitload of trouble. “You were saying, Ralph?”

  He pushes his screeching chair back to the table so he can rest his elbows there and cradle his stubbly chin in his hands. “I was saying that we used my car. You obviously know that. And that we were supposed to blow open a vault in the gallery. With very low grade explosives.”

  The emphasis on “low grade” nearly prompts a burst of laughter from Mills, as if somehow the weakness of the explosives minimizes the crime. Powell snorts aloud and Mills nudges her.

  “But there was a guard on duty and he clearly saw my face,” Waters continues. “So there’s no denying that, right? But then we heard all the sirens and we fucking hightailed it . . .”

  “What was in the vault?
” Chang asks.

  “I don’t know,” the guy says. “We never got in.”

  “What was supposed to be in the vault?” Chang repeats.

  “I just told you, I don’t know. My friend wanted to get something out of there. He said it was important.”

  “But he didn’t tell you what it was?” Again, Chang.

  “No.”

  “You guys took off in your car. Then where did you go?” Mills asks. “I dropped him off at the AJ’s near Thompson Peak. In the parking lot.”

  “And what? He walked home?” Chang asks.

  “No. He got in his car and drove off. I don’t know where he went.” Mills looks at Chang, tries to transmit a kind of holding pattern in his eyes, just enough of a moment to make the suspect squirm. It seems to work, the silence. The eyeballing. The way Mills makes a tsking sound with his tongue until it almost becomes a song.

  And then, “What was in it for you?” Mills asks. “Why do something so colossally stupid and dangerous for a friend?”

  The guy doesn’t say a word.

  “Huh?” Mills persists.

  “Do I have to answer him?” Waters asks Chang.

  Chang leans in. “He’s investigating the murder of Viveca Canning, as I’ve already made clear. You tried to break into her gallery vault. So, he has interest in the case, and yes, he has a right to question you . . .”

  “And, yes,” Mills interjects, “you have the right to have an attorney present. We can re-Mirandize you if you’d like.”

  Waters looks at Mills, then at Chang, then back to Mills, as if the two detectives are playing at Wimbledon. “I owed my friend money . . .” “For?” Chang asks.

  “What do you think?” he says. “Drugs.”

  “Nice,” Powell whispers. But everybody hears her.

  “So, you owed this guy money for drugs and, what, he was going to forgive you the debt if you helped him break into a vault?” Mills asks.

  Waters looks down, probes the floor again, shakes his head at his own stupidity and says, “Yeah.”

  Chang leans in again. “Look, I can’t make any promises, Ralph, but I’m thinking the county attorney might consider dropping or reducing the drug charges if you cooperate. Assuming we find enough drugs today to charge you . . .”