Valley of Shadows

by Steven Cooper

  Preston says, “Right. He was legally in the vault that day. But we have no evidence he was there later that night during the break-in. Unless his prints show up on the explosives.”

  “I think we can safely assume there were gloves involved with the explosives,” Powell tells them. “Scottsdale tells me all they could recover was one print.”

  “What about surveillance video?” Mills asks.

  “One camera was down,” she replies.

  “Down? Are you kidding me?” Mills groans.

  “Yes. Down. Sabotaged. But there was another camera, and Scottsdale says that once they enhance the video, they’ll probably be able to make out a few plates in the alley behind the gallery.”

  Mills nods. “Good,” he says.

  “I also texted you about Aaliyah Jones,” she says, as if he needs a reminder, which he doesn’t.

  “The floor’s still yours,” Mills tells her.

  “The last ping from her phone was picked up around one-thirty Wednesday morning at 44th Street and Thomas. I got the registration for the car and asked the precinct over there to search the area. About an hour ago, they found a vehicle with the exact description and tag parked at an abandoned rental car lot on Thomas, just west of 44th.” “Where’s it now?” Mills asks.

  “I asked them to get it on a flatbed over to impound.”

  “Let the lab know,” he tells her. “I want it processed like we would any other crime scene.”

  Preston says he’s checked all the area hospitals. “Nothing there.” “I’ll get with our friends in Missing and Unidentified,” Mills says. “We need her description and her photo out there, across as many agencies as possible. And I think we’re going to have to enlist the media . . .” “You sound ecstatic about that,” Powell says.

  “I’m not, but we got to get this out there. I’ll hit up Grady and he can push something out tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  “What about her own TV station?” Preston asks.

  Mills cups the air. “What about them? There’s no saying how much, if any, they’re sharing with the other media in town,” he explains. “Might be a good idea for me to drop by her station tomorrow.”

  Myers yawns operatically and says, “Excuse me. Sorry.”

  And Mills says, “Are we keeping you up, Morty?”

  Myers shakes his head.

  “Good,” Mills tells him. “Because it’s time for columns.” He turns to the whiteboard and creates two columns, one with the header “Viveca,” the other with the header “Aaliyah.”

  “What the hell does that name even mean?” Myers grumbles. He’s been grumbling a lot since he’s been on a low-carb diet. It’s not surprising given the reddish hue of his neck that he’d be grumbling about a name that sounds more exotic than, say, Ann.

  “Google it, Morty,” Mills barks. “But for now, let’s list what we know about the two women.”

  The lists look like this:

  Viveca Aaliyah

  Dead Missing

  Mother of two Family life unclear

  Socialite/Philanthropist Reporter, Channel 4

  Art Collector Investigating Church of Angels

  Church of Angels Rising Member/ Rising

  Board of Directors Church of Angels Rising Member

  Planning to leave Phoenix Church of Angels Rising Member

  with preacher’s wife Vehicle recovered

  Changing will

  The Key

  “For all we know,” Mills says, “Viveca was Aaliyah’s prime source about the church.”

  Powell shakes her head. “Didn’t she tell you that Viveca declined to comment?”

  Mills nods. “Yeah. That’s what she said. But reporters are rarely inclined to reveal their sources and even less inclined to divulge what sources tell them . . .”

  “Even to solve a murder?” Powell asks.

  “Even to solve a murder,” Preston affirms. “Trust me, they have their own set of rules.”

  Powell harrumphs and folds her arms across her chest.

  “Let’s say Viveca wasn’t the primary source for Aaliyah’s story,” Mills surmises. “But maybe she supplied her with a list of other sources. A way to get the truth out without being the one to tell it . . .”

  He looks around the room. Nobody reacts. He sees ambivalence in Powell’s eyes. Introspection in Preston’s. Images of Twinkies in Myers’s. Then Preston mumbles something as he comes back to life. “OK,” he says, “if Viveca was at all involved with the reporter’s investigation, it’s possible the church had her killed to shut down the whole thing.”

  “Only if we’re looking for direct cause and effect,” Mills reminds them. “But it’s possible we have two parallel cases. Maybe the motive to kill Viveca had something to do with the church but not necessarily something she told Aaliyah Jones.”

  “Well that brings us back to square zero,” Myers growls.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Mills says. “I want you to keep searching Viveca’s emails. I want to see every one that went back and forth between her and the reporter. And I want to see every email that passed between Viveca and Francesca Norwood.”

  Mills describes his visit with the preacher’s wife at the Desert Charm. He shares what she disclosed about her pending separation from the preacher and her plans to relocate with Viveca Canning to French Polynesia. “I think the biggest news flash to come out of the meeting was this: Francesca told us that Viveca was leaving the church to reconnect with her daughter. That’s a big deal. But Ms. Norwood was cagey about everything else, and perhaps not fully forthcoming,” he tells the squad. “There has to be more we can find out in their digital footprint.”

  “I’m on it,” Myers says. Anything digital and the man froths at the mouth. His geekiness about cyber forensics has probably kept him securely employed in Homicide. “We can tell Mrs. Canning thought she was deleting all her emails, but it’s been fairly easy to recover them.” Something doesn’t feel right. Mills sees shadows. He doesn’t understand shadows, how they form, how they drift, whom they hide. But he knows they’re no different than nagging doubts, only darker; they creep instead of nag. The creep rises like a migraine, closes in like a vise. His doubt resides in the Church of Angels Rising. Would Norwood’s organization be so brazen as to conspire to kill? The church would have to be desperate to do something so reckless. What’s confusing about the shadows is that sometimes they reveal just a glimpse of the obvious—yes, the church is in on it—while sowing insidious doubt at the same time. Like an abuser. This is the classic domestic call. And, as usual, it comes down to the wife and her bruises, the visible ones and the ones killing her from within.

  As if he’s reading Mills’s mind, Preston says, “I don’t care what Francesca Norwood tells you about the agreed separation. She was fleeing her husband. Or the church. Probably both.”

  “I’m guessing Norwood paid her a lot of money to shut her up,” Mills says. “I’m sure she signed a nondisclosure. She has dirt on the church.”

  “Of course she has dirt on the church,” Powell says. “She is the church.”

  Powell’s not wrong. Mills turns again to the board. He creates a third column. It looks like this:

  Church of Angels Rising

  Gleason Norwood

  Francesca Norwood

  Gabriel Norwood (excommunicated)

  Viveca Canning (dead)

  Husband (dead)

  Bennett Canning

  Jillian Canning (excommunicated)

  Sources for Aaliyah Jones story

  Mills draws the lines of certitude from one column to another. As these lines often do, they form a web.

  29

  Gus spent most of last night in his office with Francesca Norwood’s cloth napkin. You would hardly know it had been used but for the imprint of her burgundy lips against the white fabric. He draped it over his hands. He listened to it at one ear, then the other. He brought it to his nose and smelled it (fresh, bleachy, crisp, and clean). Taking a deep whiff,
he felt a faint stirring of vertigo. He attempted to steady himself in his chair by grasping the armrests. But it was too late. He was spinning. Madly spinning. His hands and feet, arms and legs, like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a perfect circle spinning through the universe. Gus tried to steer the thing, but he could not steer. He tried to flap his arms and fly away, but he could not fly. This felt more like a dream than a vision, more like vapor than a vibe. But as he came skidding to a stop at the opening of a dark tunnel, he realized, of course, he had been here before, at this same spot in the universe. It was a recurring vision, not a dream. The dark tunnel had been forbidding and ominous; there was no way to know how long to the other side, what lay between the openings, how thick the darkness, how dangerous the path, and how tangled the footing. There was no way to know if it was a trap. But as he stepped closer to the opening, here, as he approached with caution, each step more resolved than the one before, he arrived at the truth; this had never been his tunnel. It did not belong to him. He had assumed since the first sight it was his. But it wasn’t. It was hers. Glowing red, now, from one end to the other, the walls amber, this tunnel belongs to Francesca Norwood.

  He had seen her heading to a door, a heavy door.

  Her path had been paved by a reddish glow.

  And then she asked them to leave her bungalow.

  The dark tunnel that had haunted him is dark no more, is his no more, will likely lead them all to a place where the secret is unearthed.

  He rose from his chair, sweating from head to toe. But it was a good sweat. It was a workout sweat. Every damn muscle was on fire. He stood under the showerhead until he out-drenched the sweat, and he then fell into a dungeon-like sleep. He didn’t remember drying off. All he remembered was sliding between the sheets and pulling the covers over his head, smelling something like fresh linen envelop his body as he slipped away into the thickest night.

  Waking now, a mere four hours later, to an alarm clock piercing through the forest of his sleep, he swats at the day as if the day were a flea. Swatting, it all comes back to him: the visions, the vibes, the vertigo, Da Vinci. He laughs, pulls himself up, and sits at the edge of the bed. He shakes his head, happy to be alive, but woozy from his psychic hangover. Gus steps into drawstring pants and sandals. He shakes the leash and Ivy comes running. She had woken before the alarm and, perhaps annoyed by Gus’s snoring, had gone into the living room to watch the birds from the glass doors. Donning a baseball cap and a pair of shades, Gus leads her outside. He waves to Elsa, the neighbor’s housekeeper, who’s arriving for work. It’s 6:07. He has to be at work at 7:00. He’d like to write down some notes about last night’s psychic activity, but he has no time. Ivy barks happily at her winged companions, and they chirp back at her with their own renditions of camaraderie. For no reason at all, he bends down and squeezes her. And yet that’s all he has to do to understand the reason.

  Later, on the way to work, the morning still pink from the waning dawn, he calls Alex Mills. Reporting for duty. That’s what the call feels like. He’s hoping to report all the psychic activity around Francesca Norwood, but he gets Alex’s voice mail. Gus is about to hang up without leaving a message, but hearing Alex’s voice gives him a tremble. It’s a quick spasm of a vibe, but it tells him something viscerally: the Viveca Canning case is much bigger than Viveca Canning.

  The missing Dali is the ending, not the beginning. Go beneath the surface.

  “It’s Gus. Call me.”

  Mills calls Aaliyah’s boss precisely at 9 a.m. But he’s told the boss begins the morning news meeting at precisely 9 a.m. “Why don’t you call back at 10:15?” the woman suggests. Mills has a better idea. At 10:15 he and Preston roll into the parking lot of KARI-TV, Channel 4, a building with all the charm of a state prison. It sits on Central Avenue near Indian School, nothing more than a box of concrete with a panel of glass windows above the entrance. A cluster of cacti adorns the pathway on one side, while a team of soaring palms adorns the other, all the botany probably a zoning requirement. Mills tells the receptionist that he’s there to see Sam Robatelli.

  “Do you have an appointment?” the woman asks from behind a partition of Plexiglas. She’s sporting a string of pearls and a minor, but noticeable, facial tic.

  “No,” Mills tells her. “Tell him he has visitors from the Phoenix Police Department.”

  For a split second she frowns, peeved, it seems, at the men who arrived without an appointment. “I’ll try to reach him,” she says. “Have a seat.”

  They don’t have a seat. They loiter near the entrance. A television is on in the lobby, the obligatory narcissism of a TV station playing its own programming, but that doesn’t surprise Mills. What else are they going to have droning in the background? At 10:15, the station is running a talk show obviously produced somewhere else and syndicated to the poor souls across the country who are at home watching midmorning TV.

  “You think Robatelli is fleeing out the back door?” Preston asks.

  Mills laughs, but before he has a chance to respond, a door opens from beyond the Plexiglas and out into the lobby steps a short, wiry guy with an eager stride and an extended hand ready to press the flesh and press it heartily. Sam Robatelli has the face of a thirty-year-old and the scalp of a sixty-year-old; that is to say he’s a baby-faced bald man and makes up for it with his manly handshake. “I’m glad you guys showed up,” he says. “We were just debating in the morning meeting whether to contact you.”

  “May we talk someplace privately?” Mills asks him.

  “Of course. My office.”

  Robatelli leads them inside the penitentiary to a large chasm of a room that offers even less warmth than the prison walls outside. It could be for the lack of windows or the lack of color or the reluctance of the fifteen or so people sitting at assorted pods to look up from their computers. The news director leads them into his glassed-in office and asks them to sit. “What can I do for you guys?”

  “We want you to know we’re releasing information to the public regarding Aaliyah Jones’s disappearance,” Mills says. “We’re alerting the media today.”

  “Good to know,” the man says. “That’s partly what we were debating this morning, whether we should be putting a story out there before the police says she’s officially missing. But it sounds like it’s OK for us to report something . . .”

  “Correct,” Mills tells him.

  “I don’t suppose you’d want to do an on-camera interview with us, to give us an official statement.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not authorized,” Mills replies. “I’ll put you in touch with Josh Grady, our public information officer. If there will be interviews, he’ll likely be doing them.”

  The man nods his head, but not happily. He’s kind of a corporate version of the reporters Mills sees in the field. They want everything, and they want it on their timeline. They don’t like when they don’t get it.

  “We’re also going to put you in touch with our Missing and Unidentified Persons Detail,” Preston tells the news director. “I think they’ll ask you to file an official report. Be prepared to give as much detail as possible.”

  Robatelli puts both palms on the surface of the desk. There’s a hint of drama when he volleys between Mills’s face and Preston’s. “Level with me,” he says. “Is she in danger?”

  Mills is surprised the guy has to ask. “She could be,” he says.

  “Do you have evidence to suggest she is?” the man persists.

  “Circumstantial,” Mills says. “But that’s off the record.”

  He sighs. “We’re very worried about her. Should we contact her family?”

  “I would have thought you had already done that.”

  The man shakes his head.

  “Yes,” Mills says, “you should do that.”

  “Her colleagues are starting to freak out,” Robatelli tells them.

  “I’m sorry,” Mills says. “We’ll do whatever we can to find her. We did find her car.”

 
“I didn’t know that,” the man says, jolted.

  “The information will be in the news release,” Preston says.

  “We’re going to ask that you don’t report what Aaliyah was working on at the time of her disappearance,” Mills adds.

  “She was working on a few stories,” Robatelli says.

  “Her investigation of the Church of Angels Rising,” Mills advises him.

  “Really? That’s such a great hook,” the boss says.

  “Hook?” Preston asks.

  “You know, a great angle,” Robatelli explains.

  Mills and Preston enter an unspoken agreement to stare the man down. They sit there, Mills with his arms folded across his chest, Preston with his chin resting in a hand. Robatelli shifts in his chair. He looks at his watch. He scratches a temple. Then he shrugs and says, “Well, maybe that’s a little callous.”

  “A little,” Mills says. “Besides you really don’t want to tip off the competition that Aaliyah was investigating the church. You don’t want to broadcast that. Next thing you know all your competitors will be going after a story that could have been yours exclusively.”

  Robatelli nods thoughtfully. “True,” he says.

  The news director excuses himself while he dials a few digits on the phone. “We’re running an Aaliyah story tonight,” he tells somebody. “Be on the lookout for a news release. Start putting together coverage. Hey, on second thought, let’s do a quickie for the noon newscast, before everyone else in the market knows about this . . .”

  The man hangs up. “I apologize,” he says. “I wanted to alert my assignment desk before I wander off to my next meeting.”

  “Is that a hint for us to leave?” Mills asks him.

  Robatelli claps his hands and smacks his lips. “Not exactly. Is there something else?”

  “We’d like to listen to Aaliyah’s voice mails.”

  “Voice mails? I don’t know. I would think that’s something we have to run by our attorneys.”

  “Why?” Preston asks. “We’re trying to find her.”

  The man shakes his head. “Yeah, I get that. But there’s this thing called reporter privilege, and I don’t think we can—”