Desert Wind

by Betty Webb

  DI-CASE:4109/Stallworth. Elizabeth and Douglas Stallworth had hired us to track down their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Jennifer. When last seen, Jennifer was part of the inner circle surrounding a New Age minister who fleeced his flock out of millions. Upon his release from prison, his shorn flock welcomed him back with open arms.

  Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, but stupidity isn’t quite as wonderful, especially when the combination of the two made it possible for victims to be re-victimized. Although aware that her parents had lost more than two hundred thousand dollars to Father Felon, Jennifer signed over to him the deed to the Paradise Valley condo her parents had given her, along with the title to her new BMW 335i convertible. When I pointed out to the Stallworths that Jennifer was an adult and thus enjoyed the legal right to ruin her life, they had not been happy. After much discussion, I’d given in to their pleas to keep an eye out for her, but so far, she and Father Felon remained off the grid.

  I scrolled down to DI-CASE:3867/Bryce. For the past two years, Richard Bryce IV had been searching for his third wife, Chrissie, who had run off with her stepson—fifteen-year-old Richard Bryce V. The trail had grown stale, but the cops and I were still looking.

  Then there was DI-CASE:4218/Haggerty. Stephen Haggerty, owner of Haggerty and Sons Jewelers, had loaned a boatload of diamonds to adorn the spindly limbs of five socialites for their appearance at the Helping Hearts Charity Ball. The next morning, their chauffeur was found at Sky Harbor International Airport, passed out across the front seat of their rented limo, his blood filled with orange juice and Rohypnol. The phony socialites were gone, along with the diamonds. Rumor had it that they were now working Florida, but so far, I’d found nothing concrete.

  After an hour spent going through other open cases and making a few phone calls, I found nothing that called for my immediate attention. None of the cases involved violence, just the usual frustration and heartbreak. I was halfway tempted to shut down the office and drive to the gym when the phone rang. The caller identified herself as Amy Flanagan, the new Human Resources Supervisor at Genesis Cable. She sounded tense.

  “Ms. Jones, Beth over at Southwest MicroSystems—she’s a friend of mine —recommended Desert Investigations to me. Here’s my problem. Genesis has a new contract for the West Valley, so we have to bring some new hires aboard, and quick, too. I have thirty job applications sitting on my desk right now. Five of them are for high level positions, so you see that, uh…”

  I helped her out of her discomfort. “You need them checked fast and you need them checked deep, right?”

  She expelled her breath. “Exactly.”

  Problem was, although I could play around with Google and Dogpile, I didn’t have Jimmy’s more advanced computer skills. With the realization that we were probably losing a new client for good, I apologized and offered Jean Begay’s phone number. Flanagan thanked me and hung up, leaving me glaring at Jimmy’s empty chair.

  Irresponsible rat!

  Then I caught myself.

  Being a foundling, I had no known living relatives, and because intimacy had always been difficult for me, I also had few friends. The old saw counseled, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” but Jimmy’s friendship had taught me the flaw in that philosophy. Whenever I began tipping over into the shadow side of life, his steadiness always brought me back. He would say at such times: Love your friends, forget your enemies. Yet here I was, angry at the most decent man I’d ever known over something as insignificant as one lost client.

  Another thing Jimmy had taught me: When anger blooms, search for the seed. Knowledge being prequel to understanding, I placed a call to Michael Sisiwan, Jimmy’s uncle. If anyone knew Jimmy’s whereabouts, Michael did.

  “Pima Paint and Collision,” Michael Sisiwan chirped into the phone. “You wreck ’em, we fix ’em.”

  I forced myself to sound casual. “It’s Lena, Michael. Jimmy wasn’t in the office when I came in but he left me a message saying something about being out of reach for a couple of weeks. At least that’s what I think the message said. You know how landlines are. Talk to somebody in China and the connection’s so clear it sounds like you’re talking to someone across the street, but try to get a message from someone who lives down the road and all you get is static. If my guess is right and he is out of town, out of curiosity, where’d he go?”

  Unlike me, Pimas never lie, but they can evade. Trying to get information from one could be like navigating a minefield of politeness.

  “Jimmy? Sorry, Lena, but that man does not give me every detail of his schedule.”

  “Understood. I’m simply asking if you know where he is.”

  “Hmmm. Do I know where the man is.” A statement, not a question. Michael knew and wasn’t going to tell me.

  “Michael, I’m getting worried. Jimmy has never disappeared like this before, so stop playing games.”

  Another long pause. A laid-back tribe, Pimas like the subtleties of conversation, the slow dance around the word room. But because of his collision business, Michael was used to dealing with anxiety-ridden white folks, and a little directness had rubbed off.

  “Since you put it like that, if Jimmy wanted you to know where he was and what he was doing, he would have told you. I am very sorry, but…Oh, look. Here comes a messed-up Ranchero. Think I will mosey over there and check the damage. Always liked Rancheros. Prettiest thing Detroit ever produced—a car that looks like a pickup. Or a pickup that looks like a car. This one is turquoise, too, my favorite color, not that other colors are not nice. Red. Yellow. Even gray, which is under-appreciated, seeing how it is the color of rain clouds, which in the desert is always good news. You think the fellow might be interested in selling that pretty thing?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “You take care now, Lena.”

  Click.

  Shut down for the second time, I sat there and thought for a while, but the more I thought, the more uneasy I became. Jimmy had always taken the financial success of Desert Investigations as seriously as I did. He was hyper-dependable. In the past, whenever something necessitated an abrupt leave of absence on his part, he had always contacted me first. On the two occasions he couldn’t reach me—I was sometimes called out of town, too—he’d left detailed messages on both my cell and my landline. One week last spring he hadn’t made it to the office at all, but his phone message informed me he’d been called to testify in federal court about a disputed Indian water rights claim. The winter before, he received a last-minute offer from a friend to go dog-sledding through the Alaskan tundra, but before he said yes, he wanted to check in with me. After I told him he was nuts if he didn’t go, he detailed the route they would take, adding that he’d carry along both his cell and his laptop. Yet now, he’d shrouded his whereabouts in mystery.

  Looking back, I realized I’d sensed the wrongness of things before I’d walked downstairs to an empty office. Maybe even three nights earlier.

  The nightmares began on Friday night, with my usual flight through a dark forest, determined men not far behind, blinding flashes of gunfire, screams…Three nights in a row, a new record, even for me. Once I’d woken up murmuring Jimmy’s name.

  Scientists say you can’t see into the future, and to that, I say baloney. Oh, you might not be able to “see” it like you can see pictures on a television screen, but you can often sense it. Warnings ripple through time like the strings of a harp, their vibrations audible to any attuned listener. Label this ability “precognition” or “sixth sense,” the terminology didn’t matter. What did matter is that all weekend long I’d known that something was amiss. Wherever Jimmy was, whomever he was with, he needed me.

  After shutting down my computer, I locked up the office and headed out to my Jeep. Telephones and computers are all very well, but when it comes to investigation, there’s nothing like boots on the ground. I fired up the engine and peeled out of the parking lot.

  One of the more interesting facts about Old Town Scottsdale is that despite its a
rt-and-nightlife-friendly reputation, it abuts the western edge of the Salt River Pima/Maricopa Indian Reservation. Now that Casino Arizona had brought some much-needed income to the tribe, my drive east on McDowell Road took me past a flurry of new homes and Pima-run businesses. Indian poverty, at least in this area of the state, was becoming eradicated. Unlike the white folks who subdivided their portion of the Sonoran Desert with look-alike houses and look-alike yards, the Pimas left the desert alone to do its wild thing. Their widely spaced new homes, most of them clean-lined stucco ranches, sat surrounded by unmanicured creosote bushes, mesquite trees, and stately saguaro cacti. The Indians hadn’t decimated the wildlife, either. You could still see families of javelina and wild-eyed coyotes slipping through the wide spaces between the houses.

  When it comes to living in harmony with Nature, we could learn a few things from the Pima. But of course, we won’t.

  Within minutes I had turned off McDowell onto the dirt road that led to Jimmy’s trailer. The busy cross-reservation highway lay only a few hundred yards behind me, but his Airstream was located within a grove of ancient mesquite with limbs so heavy they scraped the ground. No one would see what I was about to do.

  Unless you’re a professional thief, picking locks isn’t all that easy, but I’ve learned from the pros. Once inside, I paused a moment to get my bearings, feeling the hot, still air of the trailer sucking the breath right out of my lungs. Ever eco-conscious, Jimmy had turned off the air-conditioner before he’d left town. Not wanting to fry, I fumbled for the switch and flipped it back on. After a few moments, I could breathe again.

  Once my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I gave a brief glance around. I’d been here before, but was amazed anew at Jimmy’s unique style of decorating, so different than that of our bland office. The carpet was a deep burnt orange, the same color as the sandstone mesas that surrounded the reservation. Pima-patterned pillows were scattered artfully across a brown leather sofa. A hand-made coffee table comprised of saguaro cactus spines studded with tiny bits of turquoise held up two Hopi kachinas; they looked like they were about to leap into battle. But it was Jimmy’s cabinetry I admired most. The oak cabinets above the kitchen sink were covered with paintings of Pima gods: Earth Doctor, the father-god who had created the world; Elder Brother, who after defeating Earth Doctor in battle, had sent him into hiding in a labyrinth beneath the desert; and Spider Woman, who’d tried in vain to make peace between the two. Jimmy’s factory-built Airstream had become a holy place, and I hoped his gods would forgive my intrusion.

  Knowing my partner’s habits, I went straight to the telephone stand, another piece of furniture-as-art. The only thing on top was a blank notepad, with a pencil next to it.

  Resorting to one of the oldest tricks of the trade, I rubbed the top sheet with the soft-leaded pencil, and little by little, block letters began to appear. 928-555-7535. Below that, 928-555-7400. Telephone numbers with a far northwest Arizona area code, the double-zero number probably a business. All I had to do was call, but that created a slight problem. If I used Jimmy’s phone and he answered, caller I.D. would show I’d broken into his trailer. If I used one of my own phones, there was a good chance he wouldn’t pick up.

  Fortunately, there was another way to gain the needed information. After stuffing the sheet of paper into my carry-all, I headed out.

  ***

  As soon as I arrived back at the office, I turned my computer on again and logged onto the reverse phone directory. The 535 number turned out to be the reservations office at Sunset Trails Guest Ranch. The name looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. The next number startled me: the Walapai County Jail.

  I stared at the screen for a while, thinking.

  Guest ranch. Jail.

  Jail. Guest ranch.

  Bingo.

  Ted Olmstead, Jimmy’s adoptive brother, was assistant manager at Sunset Trails Guest Ranch, which was owned by Hank Olmstead, their father. A full blooded Paiute and the older member of Olmstead’s large adoptive brood, Ted had been visiting the Pima Rez several months earlier for an Inter-Tribal pow-wow when Jimmy introduced us. Less than a week later, Ted’s wife Kimama had been shot to death, but to my knowledge, her killer had never been identified. Although the husband is usually the first suspect in such cases, Ted had never fallen under suspicion. At the time his wife was shot, he’d been more than an hour’s drive away, leading twenty-five dudes on a long trail ride.

  But now, had there been new developments in the case that necessitated Jimmy’s presence?

  Hoping for an answer, I ran WALAPAI COUNTY JAIL+ THEODORE OLMSTEAD through Google. The first item that popped up was from the Saturday issue of the Walapai Flats Journal-Gazette.

  WALAPAI FLATS, ARIZONA—Friday night, sheriff’s deputies picked up Theodore Olmstead and are holding him as a material witness on suspicion of having information about the shooting death of Ike Donohue, a resident of Sunset Canyon Lakes. Donohue’s body was found by tourists at Sunset Point early Friday morning. His car was parked nearby.

  According to witnesses, Olmstead, the assistant manager of Sunset Trails Guest Ranch, was involved in an altercation Thursday with Donohue at a service station in Walapai Flats, where both had stopped for gas.

  “Mr. Donohue said something to the Indian, like, ‘I’m sorry, but I got to the pump first,’ and the next thing you know, he was on the ground,” said Mia Tosches, of Sunset Canyon Lakes. “He must have got hit pretty hard, poor guy.”

  A second witness disputes Tosches’ story.

  “Donohue just slipped on an oil spill and made a big fuss about it,” said Earl Two Horses, owner of the service station. “Ted didn’t touch him.”

  A source who didn’t want his name released said there had been bad blood between Olmstead and Donohue ever since Olmstead’s wife, Dr. Kimama Olmstead, 36, a local veterinarian known for her political activism, was killed in a drive-by shooting this past May. Her murder remains unsolved, but the source said that Olmstead blamed Donohue for creating the hostile environment that led to her death.

  “Mr. Olmstead has not yet been charged with any crime,” said Walapai County Sheriff Wiley Alcott. “He is merely being detained to prevent a failure of justice. Comments he made after Mr. Donohue’s body was found led our detectives to believe that Mr. Olmstead might have some knowledge as to the perpetrator or perpetrators of the crime. I would also like to point out that Mr. Olmstead, having relatives and friends on various Indian reservations throughout the U.S., presents a serious flight risk.”

  Ike Donohue, the press spokesman for the Black Basin Uranium Mine, which is due to open next week, was formerly in charge of public relations at Cook & Creighton Tobacco, located in Durham, North Carolina. He leaves behind a wife, two sons, a daughter, and four grandchildren, all residents of North Carolina, where he lived before his retirement five years ago.

  It is not yet known if Theodore Olmstead has obtained counsel.

  Illustrating the article was a head shot of Donohue, a handsome, thin-faced man in his early sixties. His smile was movie-star-broad but didn’t reach his eyes.

  Jimmy being Jimmy, he’d ridden to his brother’s rescue. Again, this brought up the obvious question: why hadn’t he wanted me working with him? Despite my partner’s considerable computer skills, I knew more about the ins and outs of criminal investigation than he did. Ted’s situation called for an experienced detective, not a desk jockey.

  That “material witness” thing worried me, too. Since 9/11, it had become easier for law enforcement officials to hold someone indefinitely without filing charges. All the authorities needed was to hint to a sympathetic judge that pubic safety might be at risk, and the judge would comply. In this case, the victim being employed as the spokesman for a nearby uranium mine made a good argument. Given the ongoing oil crisis, the country’s nuclear power plants needed all the enriched uranium they could get. Hell, Ted was lucky he hadn’t been sent to Gitmo.

  Further piquing my c
uriosity was the mention of Ted’s wife being a political activist. That was news to me, but when I Googled her name, she popped up in more than six thousand hits. Reading through the more reliable sites, I discovered that she and the group she headed—Victims of Uranium Mining (V.U.M.)—had raised legal hell over the proposed opening of the Black Basin Uranium Mine outside Walapai Flats, less than twenty miles from the Grand Canyon. V.U.M. pointed out that Roger Tosches, the mine’s owner, had at one time operated the Moccasin Peak Uranium Mine, located on the Navajo Reservation. Scores of Navajo miners had died of lung and kidney cancer, V.U.M. said, caused by the ingestion of the mine’s radioactive dust. But the damage hadn’t ended there. Moccasin Peaks’ mine tailings—leftover rocks from which the uranium had been extracted—continued to pollute the reservation. According to V.U.M., the Navajos were suffering from highly increased rates of various cancers due to not only working in the mine, but because of the poisonous tailings, which contained radioactive material and high amounts of arsenic.

  The same poisoning would happen to the nearby Grand Canyon, V.U.M. warned. Did Americans want one of the world’s most magnificent places turned into a radiation hot spot?

  An opposing press release—most probably penned by public relations flak Ike Donohue—had disputed V.U.M.’s claims, saying that the Black Basin would meet all federal safety standards. Ignoring the problems at the Moccasin Peak Mine, the release added that the new mine would provide jobs for approximately four hundred and fifty workers.

  More curious now, I Googled Donohue and discovered in press conference after press conference, he had repeated that the Black Basin and its planned waste disposal methods were well within Federal guidelines. Ecofriendly, too, kind to the birds and bees and green leafy trees. Donohue never once addressed V.U.M.s concerns that the new mine would be operated by the same man who had so despoiled the Navajo community.