Desert Remains

by Steven Cooper

  “What?” she asks.

  “You’re too much,” he tells her, returning to the table.

  The music really does provide conversation. The winds talks to the horns, and the reeds play a losing game to the percussion. And there is no spoken word. Just wallows and crescendos and the occasional munch of a crouton. And yet Gus suddenly hears an unfolding of events. He is very sure that the gas receipt from Lindsey Drake’s car will show that she stopped at Circle K on the way to Camelback. He is also convinced that she asked somebody at the gas station for directions. Maybe the clerk inside the store, maybe someone filling up nearby her. He isn’t sure, but he really feels that somehow those directions got Lindsey Drake in trouble. A manic flutist. So much for GPS. So much for the kindness of strangers. A bang of the drums. He feels a rush in his heart for the woman who never saw what was coming. And then he sees the crude artwork in the caves, and he knows it will happen again. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. He learned a long time ago that this ability to sense things doesn’t mean he can control things. All he can do, when the full picture comes together, is report it. The violins sound like they’re weeping. He feels a lump in his throat and brings the wineglass to his mouth and sips.

  When they’re finished eating, and he’s clearing the dishes, he tells Beatrice about the events he’s intuited. “Maybe nothing,” he says.

  “Or something. Probably something. You must stay tuned in, Gus.”

  Beatrice is beaming, a radiance that goes deep beneath the skin. She is glowing, really. Gus cannot sense why. Then he can.

  “Beatrice, did you meet a man today?”

  She hoots with laughter. “Indeed, I did. Very good, my boy. You are wide open and listening. Don’t you be chiding yourself for misplacing your murders when you can still pick up on the other vibes out there. I’m impressed.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Max.”

  “Well, good for you,” he says. “And where did you meet him?”

  “At the deli at Safeway.”

  “I’ve never seen you eat lunch meat,” Gus says. “You’re just not the type.”

  “I ordered cheese.”

  “You’re lactose intolerant.”

  She waves her hand. “Oh, whatever, Gus. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. I was actually in produce, thank you very much, and I felt a very strong force pulling me to the deli. And there he was.”

  “I wish that would happen to me.”

  She grabs his chin. “It will.”

  “Does this Max have a last name?”

  “I assume so,” she says with a laugh. “But I don’t know it. I gave him my number. Hopefully he’ll call.”

  “He will,” Gus says emphatically.

  “So you really do sense something?”

  “I do,” Gus replies. “I’m not feeling his last name, though. I’m thinking maybe Irish. Or Jewish.”

  Judaism was going to be Gus’s next stop after he left the Catholic Church. But he got stuck somewhere on the road between atheism and Buddhism—a place where you create your own Zen if God doesn’t show up.

  “Mind if we drift over to the couches?” Beatrice asks. “This chair is beginning to hurt my ass.”

  Gus grabs the bottle of wine and meets her at the couches. He stretches out on the long part of the “L”; she sits on the short end with her feet resting on the coffee table. The windows are open, and the night is breezy and fragrant. Gus lowers the music and thinks he hears the low howling of coyotes in the distance, which isn’t typical, but they do come, the coyotes, displaced from their habitats, wandering from one shrinking swath of desert to another.

  “I need your help again,” Beatrice tells him.

  Gus adjusts a pillow behind his back. “Anything. . . .”

  “Friday night. Charla McGregor. Tucson.”

  “Charla ‘Channeling with Charla’ McGregor?”

  “Yes. Do you mind taking the drive?”

  “I’d love to.”

  Later that night, Gus is in bed and he thinks he’s dreaming, but he’s not. Not entirely. He’s in the overture to sleep, the orchestra swaying him like a hammock, and he sees his client Gary Potter standing over a body. Potter growls, then screeches, then laughs insanely. Gus hears the cries of a woman. She tries mightily to crawl away from her death. But Gary Potter pulls her by the ankles. And then everything goes dark. Gus bolts up in bed. He can’t see. He lunges for the light. Seventy-five watts of confusion. And he remembers Potter’s tattoos, the symbols on his legs. He understands, suddenly, that Potter is coming to confess.

  Gus tosses and turns. His night is a twisted wreckage of sheets and blankets, so fitful that even Ivy moans to register her complaints. In the morning he stumbles through the fog to fetch the paper from the front door. The headline:

  COP’S SON PLEADS NOT GUILTY IN DRUG CASE; PROSECUTOR DROPS MOST CHARGES

  He shrugs. He doesn’t really know what this means for Trevor Mills, but he thinks the headline still spells bad news for the boy’s father.

  15

  Gus Parker spent most of the morning working the ultrasound and watching happy couples say hello to their blobs of life. He tried hard to detach, to not think about his useless sperm, to not think about the futility of his fertility, or the woman, whomever she is, who is supposed to be in his life forgiving him his backfires, loving him anyway, loving him wholly, to not think about the beautiful children he might have adopted and their beautiful smiles and their perfect teeth and their gleaming eyes and the way they’d love him, too. He tries to avoid the ultrasound altogether, but when he can’t he tries to detach.

  “Is that his you-know-what?” the patient asked, a big smile birthing on her face.

  “I think it is,” her husband replied with manly affirmation.

  Gus was happy to move into MRI for the last two hours before lunch.

  That’s where he meets Clark Smith. Ankle injury.

  Clark’s a big guy, not fat, but boxy and muscular, about thirty, with boyish features.

  “How did you hurt yourself?”

  “Soccer. Ever play?”

  “Uh, no. I was a beach bum.”

  “Cool.”

  That’s where he also meets Rosemary Nichols, a pleasant fifty-year-old with shoulder issues. It begins with her voice. When Gus greets her she speaks musically. “Well, hellooooooo,” she sings, her words climbing the scales.

  “You’re in a lot of pain?” Gus asks.

  She says, “Terrible,” as if she speaks in italics. “But people are getting really sick of hearing me complain, and I can’t say I blame them,” she adds.

  “Ms. Nichols, people don’t generally understand the depth of anybody’s pain but their own,” Gus tells her. “That’s human nature.”

  She smiles. “Thank you for saying that. I bet you hear a lot of moaning and groaning in this job.”

  Rosemary Nichols is heavy-breasted and heavy-bottomed; everything in between is rather compact. “If people can’t express their pain here, where else can they express it?” Gus says.

  “You are such a kind man,” she tells him.

  He shows her to the dressing room and then, once she’s wrapped up in her robe, to the table. It is only now, when she’s in a generic robe like everyone else who files past him on any given day, that he sees her beauty. It emerges like the quiet salutation of namaste. Despite the voluptuous, curvy shape of her body, Gus sees her stretching long, wide, gracefully, bringing hands to heart. “You do yoga, don’t you?”

  “Oh my gosh! How could you tell?”

  “I’m just getting a vibe. That’s all.”

  “Crazy,” she says with a throaty laugh. “I love my yoga classes.”

  She lays back and rests her head on the pillow.

  “Where does it hurt the most?” he asks her. “The left or the right?”

  “On both sides. And my neck. It’s awful in my neck.”

  Gus taps her arm. “Well, I’ll be looking at the w
hole area, Ms. Nichols. Now you lay still for me, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  The procedure takes about twenty-five minutes. Gus is in and out checking on his patient, reminding her to lie still, and then he’s telling Rosemary Nichols that she can get dressed. She leans on him as she shimmies off the table. Gus smiles as the patient turns away and disappears into the dressing room. It’s a disk issue in the cervical region; the disk is pinching a nerve. That’s not something he can actually see on the study himself, but it’s something he is sure of. What he can see on the study are the ghostly bones of the human body.

  He clicks through the pictures, making sure they’re accurately labeled, and something catches his attention. As he is scanning from one screen to the next, he notices an anomaly in the image. He zooms in, then zooms out halfway. A shadow obscures the left shoulder. He eyes it suspiciously. Although Gus Parker is not a doctor, he knows the shadow is not a tumor. Perhaps she moved during the procedure. He inspects another image. Again, it is stained by a shadow, like a blob of ink, this time over the cervical region. How could he have been so careless? He continues clicking through all the shots hastily, nervous that he botched the entire procedure. Some of them are intact, but most of the cervical shots are obscured. And suddenly, he knows why. There, on the last screen in the series, is not a shadow, not a blob of ink, but a distinct image of a rope around Rosemary Nichol’s neck.

  He feels a bubble of panic in his chest. His breath escapes him, and he can feel his eyes bulging. He looks at the rope and studies its coils, its knots and its fibers. It fits noose-like around the victim’s neck, and yet Gus does not sense that Rosemary Nichols is a victim. He gets no image of her, precisely. He didn’t get that kind of vibe in her presence. But he wonders. He wonders if she’ll be next. Gus knows this is a sign, but the harder he concentrates on the meaning the more abstract the image becomes. He shuffles madly through the screens again, almost mangling the keyboard in his hands.

  “Easy there,” says another tech who passes by in the hallway.

  “Wait,” Gus tells him. “I need you for a second.”

  “What’s up?” It’s the tech, the randy guy in the lab coat, who loves to date patients, the policies be damned.

  Gus points to the images on the monitor.

  “You screw up, Parker?”

  “No,” Gus says. “Well I don’t know. You tell me. What do you see here?”

  The tech narrows his eyes and cups his chin in one hand. He smells like an overdose of Armani. “I see two shoulders and a neck. That’s what I see. The contrast ain’t the greatest. But it’s okay.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, dude, we don’t do the diagnosing, you know. . . .”

  “No, I mean do you see any obstructions on the images? Anything that looks unusual?”

  “Nope. Just disks,” he says. “Why don’t you get out to the courtyard for a minute? The light in here must be messing with your eyes.”

  “Yeah. That’s it,” he tells the tech, and the serial dater wanders off.

  But that’s not it.

  The images are fine, and Gus is relieved. But there was a rope around that neck, and in his own bones, as though he is imaging himself, Gus Parker knows that the killer is not scared of the cops, of the media attention, of anything. Gus knows that the killer is stalking his next victim. So, when Alex Mills calls and asks to meet for lunch, Gus doesn’t hesitate.

  The morning hadn’t started well for Alex Mills. He had been summoned to the sergeant’s office. Timothy Chase was sitting opposite the sergeant when Mills walked in. Mills studied the room soberly, then smiled knowingly.

  “Glad to see the news about your son,” the sergeant told him. “Bet you’re relieved to get that off your plate.”

  “Thrilled.”

  “What do you think it’ll take to get the other charges dropped?” the sergeant asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Mills replied absently.

  “I bet you do,” his boss sneered.

  “I suspect that we’re not really here to talk about my son.”

  “Have a seat, Alex,” the sergeant said.

  Mills isn’t psychic, but he knew what was coming next. He sat beside Chase.

  “Morning, Alex,” the other detective said with a boomingly cheerful voice.

  “So the FBI has offered to step in,” the sergeant told them.

  “Offered?” Mills asked.

  Woods smiled. “Suggested, recommended . . .”

  “And you told them what?”

  “Well, that’s what I called in Chase for. After all, he’s an FBI dropout.”

  Chase cleared his throat.

  The sergeant laughed. “Actually, I’m able to use Chase to keep the bureau out of our hair for now. They may want in if bodies start to turn up outside the city.”

  “They don’t want us as the lead agency?” Mills asked.

  “They didn’t. Until I played the Chase card. They were very friendly about it, as usual. They seemed satisfied when I told them Chase was on the case.”

  “And taking over as case agent?” Mills asked. It was almost as if, from the day Chase landed at the Phoenix PD, there was a certain deference that was expected from Mills—unspoken but implied—and it stoked a burn in him that he couldn’t quite douse.

  “What? Absolutely not,” the sergeant barked.

  “Then what are we doing here?” Mills demanded to know.

  “I’ve called you both in here to tell you we’re fucked. The commander is all over my ass; the chief is all over his ass; the mayor is all over everybody’s ass. If we don’t solve this crime like yesterday we are totally fucked. Right now we’re the lead agency. But we’re on a short leash, guys. A very short leash, getting tugged in all directions. I need a killer. Or we’ll likely let the feds take over. You got that?”

  Mills drew a deep breath. “Yeah, I think so,” he said. “I’m inferring we’re fucked if we don’t make an arrest.”

  “All right, wiseass,” Woods grunted. “Get out of my office and take the psychologist with you.”

  Mills spends the rest of the morning in his office with Timothy Chase. They hash and rehash. Every trail they imagine turns cold, even as Mills feels like the two of them are finally warming to each other.

  “There’s something I don’t get,” Mills says. “Chiseling into rock makes noise.”

  “I suppose you’re right. And?”

  “I don’t think our artist is working during the day.”

  “Artist?”

  “The killer,” Mills says. “Think about it. All that chiseling noise would call attention to itself. Other people on the trails would hear it. The killer would be asking to be caught in the act.”

  “Yeah, but, look at Squaw Peak,” Chase tells him. “No one would have any idea what was going on down in that cave.”

  “Maybe. But think about South Mountain. And think about Camelback. Both more open, obviously, to hikers, to neighbors. I don’t think the killer is doing this during the day.” Chase twists his mouth and says, “He has to be. He’s grabbing these women during the day.”

  “Because?”

  Chase laughs. “Because no one is out on these trails at night, Sherlock.”

  Mills shakes his head. So much for warming to each other. The guy can’t help being a condescending fuck. “The opportunity is during the day,” Mills argues for the sake of arguing. “But the means are at night.”

  “Right,” Chase says. “So, you think the guy is grabbing these women when he has the opportunity, like they’re out hiking, and he sneaks up on them when no one is around; he abducts them and then brings them back to the caves at night to finish the job?”

  “Maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s a guy. I need a profile of the killer. That’s your department.”

  Chase nods. He gets up and pours himself some coffee. “We’re looking at a guy, Alex. Or a very strong woman. The killer is confronting his victims and dragging them
to the caves.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe he just hikes along the trail and approaches these women like, ‘Hey did you see the ancient petroglyphs in the cave back there,’ and they follow him into the cave willingly where he stabs them. A male or female assailant could do that.”

  “That scenario is plausible,” Chase says. “But the brutality of the crime matches a male pattern.”

  “And yet, there’s no sexual element.”

  “Doesn’t have to be,” Chase argues. “But I don’t see female-on-female aggression here. Of course we don’t know yet about Jane Doe at Squaw Peak, but the other victims are all in their late twenties. That’s a prime target for a man in his midthirties to forties. A single guy or a guy who can’t form real relationships with women. He’s in good shape. He fits in well with the hikers. He needs strength to maneuver the victims. He needs agility to handle the murder weapon, the chisel, the body, all at the same time.”

  “Unless he stashes the knife and the chisel in the cave beforehand,” Mills says. “That is, of course, if the murders are actually happening in the cave.”

  “Where else would they be happening?”

  “Well, if the guy is abducting his victims, he could be killing them somewhere else, like at his house, and bringing them back to the caves for a proper burial.”

  Chase shakes his head emphatically. “No, that’s too much trouble. And there’s no evidence that the body was moved in or out of the caves. And how do you think he’d transport his victims back and forth?”

  Mills shrugs. “No, no. You’re right. Forensics pretty much confirm the murders are happening in the caves.”

  “That and all the blood splatter,” Chase reminds him with a patronizing, penetrating stare. The guy is making Mills’s fingertips burn.

  Instead of slugging the forensic psychologist in the eye, Mills stares out the window. The valley is surrounded by mountains. Walls of rock. Jagged peaks. Caves everywhere. Bodies anywhere. “What do think the significance of the carvings is? Is the killer sending us a message?”

  “Maybe,” Chase says. “The way I see it, he’s taking ownership of his work. Like each murder is an accomplishment. I don’t know if he’s sending us a message. But I think he’s sending someone a message.”